A Good Death

by Gil Courtemanche

  A strong smell coming from the oven is worrying Sam. It’s burning. I assure him it’s not. It’s just the garlic and the lard and the tomato starting to fuse and percolate. Think of it as the beginning of the perfect cassoulet. Suddenly silence falls on the room. One of the brothers-in-law is saying something. “You all talk at the same time. No one listens to anyone. You behave like children. This is not how I raised you.” He’s reading a message my father has handed him.

  We haven’t forgotten his existence, since his existence has been the centre of our family life as a boil is the focal point of a face, making you forget the look or the smile. But we have forgotten that he can hear us, that he can think, that he is still alive. We’ve been in the presence of an animated dead man, a sort of out-of-order machine that nonetheless continues to emit sounds and move about in a disarticulated manner. And now the dead man has refound his voice and, even more troubling, has gone back to being the little father of the people. He hasn’t changed. He is immutable. From the kitchen I watch him scribbling in his notebook. He writes with an anxious fury. I take in the sudden, jerking movements of the pen, the impatient erasures, the guttural sounds coming from deep in his chest. He rips the sheet from the notebook and gives it to my mother, who has come into the room for it. William says, “It’s ready.” Mother reads: “I am not sick. I am very old. You want to save me from dying. That’s very kind. I want to die the way I want. I’m hungry. Shut up!”

  The family is silent. The two casserole dishes are steaming on the table, along with four platters of oysters, cheese, a salad and a Saint-Honoré cake glistening in the room’s light like a Tower of Babel defying God and all His prescriptions. My mother doesn’t like oysters, I remember now, but she hides a grimace and says, “Good,” as my father knocks them back like petits fours. All the children eat with their heads down, eyeing my father from the corners of their eyes to see what kind of mood he’s in. Canadian Idol is on television, my father’s favourite program; Wilfred, the favourite of grandmothers and nubile young things, is singing. My father scribbles something. “Pavarotti is better,” my mother reads. A proclamation has been released. The conversation turns to opera, which no one likes, but we do like the Three Tenors.

  Sam opens a bottle of old madiran and plays sommelier. My father doesn’t realize that he’s supposed to taste the wine and approve the choice, and we watch the ceremony, intrigued and surprised by it. Sam remains imperturbable, stays in his role, waiting. We have been waiting on my father for three years. We rarely ask his opinion unless it’s in the form of an interrogative affirmation. He has been hospitalized in his own house and cared for by his own creatures. I think he has become accustomed to thinking of himself not as a client but as a beneficiary, obliged to accept the service that is so generously given for his gratification. The beneficiary doesn’t refuse or criticize, he only thanks. Discountenanced, my father looks at his grandson with moist eyes, drinks the dribble of wine and says: “More.” You approve of the wine, sir? says Sam. My father nods, Yes, and says, “More,” and Sam fills his pewter cup almost to overflowing, which evokes from the Banker the comment that there is no need to ruin the Provençal tablecloth she gave Mother for her last anniversary. Sam continues serving, since this is his meal, his gift, which he imagines will be deliciously deadly. He stands stiff as a maître’d in a posh restaurant and places the best pieces of confit and sausage delicately on my father’s plate. My father grabs the bread and spoons himself more beans. The plate is overflowing and my father looks anxiously at my mother, from whom he is used to hearing reprimands about his gourmandizing and his gluttony. She turns to Sam and says, smiling, “Sam, you certainly know how to serve grandfathers, but grandmothers are a little more fragile. I want a bit of everything, but not as much as my husband.” Eyes widen around the table. Grumbling is heard. My father raises his pewter cup and gives a toast that none of us understand. Several of us lift our glasses mechanically. The silence that falls on the cassoulet eaters is broken only by my father’s intestinal rumblings and belches. He eats as though he is expecting to die in the next few minutes. My mother puts a hand on his, the one holding the fork, and asks him if he would like a napkin. Yes, all right, says his head, that is what he seems to want. A napkin, which my mother places in his hand and which he raises to his dripping lips. I watch him, and he doesn’t notice that I am observing him as closely as a doctor observes the symptoms of a patient in the terminal phase of illness. He eats like a man trying to wolf down his life. With a sense of joyous urgency.

  The Banker and her husband are arguing. He reaches for the cassoulet, passing on the basmati rice with rice vinegar dressing and garnished with sprigs of Italian parsley that she has placed in front of them. The Homeopath gets up to fetch the raw vegetables with which she hopes to break up all the trans fats she has unenthusiastically introduced into her bloodstream. Her polite husband does not insist. The Tragedienne bursts out laughing and congratulates her son on his cassoulet, which she says is like manna from heaven. My mother doesn’t hear her. She is eating. My father is not listening. He is elsewhere, in the casserole that is soon going to be empty, and maybe he’ll ask someone to give him some cheese and chocolate mousse. The Banker is finding it intolerable that her husband thinks for one minute that she prefers some regimen to her own father. He thinks she does. The Banker is having trouble breathing. She is trying to swallow her pride and it isn’t going down well. In fact, she’s choking on it. The man with whom she has been living for more than twenty years stands up without looking at her.

  “I’m going to sleep in a hotel. I’ll come and collect my things in the morning.”

  “You can’t do this to me in front of everyone!”

  She doesn’t sound sad, simply irritated. As if by magic her breathing returns to normal. Isabelle tells me to do something. There’s nothing to do, as my mother understands. She continues nibbling at a duck drumstick, unperturbed. My father writes and hands me the notebook. “Is he really going to a hotel?” I think so, yes. He smiles broadly and makes a grab for the bread.

  The Geographer has rounded up his three children, who don’t want to leave before dessert. He loses his temper and roughly grabs the oldest child’s elbow, and the child howls in pain. The Homeopath protests this display of violence. The father bridles at the intrusion into his private domain and advises the Homeopath to confine herself to educating her own two sons, who have already tried to get his oldest to smoke pot. The Homeopath’s two sons protest loudly. My sister is seized with doubt and horror by the thought that she has brought her boys up badly. Her husband says: “Calm down, they’ve been smoking up for a long time.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s no big deal.”

  I don’t know what I’m doing, standing here trying to calm everyone down. The Tragedienne asks Sam if he’s smoking marijuana, too, and is reassured by his declaration that pot and chess don’t go well together.

  Of course they all turn on me. “What’s it to you, you who have always kept your distance, you who don’t believe in the family and always look down your nose at us?” They’re not entirely wrong, but they’re not right, either. I do not look down my nose at them, but I do try to keep my distance. And by having been forced into attending these family gatherings, I’ve learned to love my family. All the same, I refuse to fall for the old family mystique. The family is a fragile construction in which each member looks for a strength he lacks on his own. It’s also a political invention, a kind of political party that couldn’t survive without compromises and falsehoods. They’re right: why am I getting involved? They’re the ones jostling for position in the family party, not me. I gave when I had something to give, took when they had something I needed. I’m not saying I was devoid of affection, quite the contrary. You can’t be this intimate with a group of men and women without loving them a little, perhaps even a lot, because families are so transparent. They strip us naked before our likenesses and our equals.

  My mother raises her voice to explai
n that I’ve secretly been a big help. She exaggerates. I’ve done so little. But since it’s the mother who invents the family, she has to defend its usefulness. And let’s be frank: my mother needs this family to be united. Without that, she would have lived for nothing.

  “You’re all mental cases. You don’t understand a thing. Grandpa and Grandma want to die, and me and my uncle are looking for ways to help them.”

  Sam goes back to his cassoulet. His mother chokes, horrified. Silence drops like a lead balloon. My mother says nothing. My father asks for some bread for his Pont-l’Évêque. The Geographer tells his children to go play in the yard and they say it’s pouring rain. My mother asks for some wine. The Nurse says to Sam’s mother that there must be some misunderstanding, and Sam’s mother looks at Sam, who says, No, there is no misunderstanding. They only have to ask Grandma and Grandpa.

  Silence. A very long silence.

  “My husband and I don’t want to go on living. For me life has become a trial. For him, it’s more like an obligation. So we’ve told ourselves that we should die happy as quickly as possible rather than go on living because we’re obliged to.”

  Liquid is trickling from my father’s nose and mouth. He looks happy.

  My mother is no longer shrinking.

  “Cassoulet!”

  My mother’s words and my father’s approving grunts do not have the desired effect. The meal ends with a clinking of utensils and Pass the salt, rather than with the usual babbling and outbursts of conversation. The farewell kisses are polite, the See you laters few, despite Mother’s radiant smile and my father’s almost indecent joy.

  IT IS ALMOST APRIL AND THERE ARE DARK RIVULETS RUNNING THROUGH THE SNOW IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE. PATCHES OF LAWN APPEAR here and there, giving off the slightly sour odour of putrefaction that signifies rebirth. Sam and I have continued our project of gastronomical murder, but without much expectation of success. We go to the house once or twice a week, carrying plates of prepared food, and sometimes we stay and cook. Today it’ll be calf’s liver à la Venitienne. But the family is no longer the same. When we celebrate birthdays there is always someone missing, and those who are there complain that the food is too heavy. My father communicates more and more by writing, which leaves less time for the rest of us to talk. He reiterates his moderately racist phobias, tells his bad jokes about homosexuals and artists like me who do nothing useful with our lives. And he has gone back to giving orders, via the written word. In private, one of us says that he was better when he wasn’t so alive, so present. In other words, Stalin’s return hasn’t pleased anyone except my mother.

  The Banker saw her husband again for only thirty minutes. The morning after the dinner, when he came to collect his clothes and left without saying goodbye. He must be sleeping with his secretary, why else would he not answer any of her questions? The Homeopath and her husband aren’t getting along well, either. He’s in favour of euthanasia. The Geographer doesn’t bring his children when he comes, which is seldom. And the Tragedienne is paying for her son’s frankness. Two sisters now hold her responsible for the whole drama. If only your son played sports.

  “You and Sam haven’t asked me a single question since we told you we wanted to die.”

  My mother dips her bread in gravy as thick as melted chocolate. I’m very pleased with this gravy, she says. I think I finally got it right. She laughs, watching my father stuff his face, but I don’t follow up on her first comment, which brings back the anguish I feel every time I think of this pact that I’m not at all certain I have concluded.

  “I have some bad news. My husband passed all his tests yesterday and the doctor says he no longer needs to take them. He’s getting better.”

  Rigid Parkinson’s is characterized by irreversible degeneration. An irregular but constant downward curve. She takes the pen and my father’s notebook and traces a descending line that levels out and then turns upwards. He grunts with pleasure.

  “Since… eating… less… sick.”

  “I told the doctor that since he’s been happier he’s been less sick. The doctor said it’s either a statistical error or else a false remission.”

  Sam, who is more innocent than I am, and therefore more courageous, asks if that means they no longer want to die.

  “No, Sam, dear. We don’t know how we’re going to decide to die, but we’re certain it will be soon. But first my husband and I want to do one thing: go camping again, go on a fishing trip to the Baskatong Reservoir.”

  My father, who was obviously waiting for that phrase, opens his notebook. “And I’ll steal the biggest walleye from you.” He has been rehearsing his response.

  I know it is stupid to remember a stolen walleye after fifty years, a chintzy trophy, a cup no more than twenty centimetres high, an object of surpassing ugliness with a vaguely fish-like, though not walleye-like, shape to it and an inscription engraved on the base: “Thousand Island River, 1950, Molson Walleye Derby.” I’ve never once won first prize in anything, always either an honourable mention or sometimes no mention at all, not even when I thought I ought to have been.

  I really wish now that he would give me permission to kill him. I wouldn’t do it for his sake, but I’d do it for mine. And for my mother’s. To kill someone you have to either love them or hate them. I’ve never been able to love him, and now with his illness I can’t hate him. We’re back at square one. Images and shouts crowd around each other. I don’t know if it’s my mother who is crying or me. I remember standing up to Stalin, throwing some object or other at his face, I remember my revolt surprising him so much that he didn’t retaliate, so astonished was he at the rebellion of his people, a rebellion he had not imagined possible. My mother moved to protect me from a blow that never came. She ordered me to go to my room. But it was you I was defending, Mother. Why are you punishing me? From that day on I knew I did not love my father. More than that, from that day on I have not understood my relationship with my mother, who did not stand up for me. I do not understand her resignation, unless it is to be found in those photos, that novel-in-photographs of her life. Freedom, perhaps, revolt, the price of her revolution. The change in her life, the hopes, the reality and finally the silence and the feeling of having dared something, which confers a sense of pride and allows her to at least have memories of heroism. My mother’s story is the story of Cuba. My father, Stalin, Castro, the same battle. Such dreams, so beautiful, and so betrayed. These are the worst memories, the most persistent. How can one rebel against one’s liberators? In fact, I reproach my mother for still loving my father, and I reproach my father for not having loved her more. There it is, the dilemma all children face: to understand why parents, whom we do not love equally, find themselves at the end of their lives, obligatory accomplices to be sure, but lovers nonetheless. And to come to the obligation of loving them ourselves. Yes, to love them, forgetting our whole previous lives. Our parents are not just our mothers and our fathers, they are also human beings, and human beings die. Painful memories are erased.

  I REMEMBER NOW. The oldest rock, the one from the Canadian Shield, which carried within itself all the secrets of the Ice Ages, of climate changes, and Lake Iroquois, where my city, Montreal, is now, where I first heard Bach’s toccatas and ate my first piece of stinking cheese and learned my fastidious lessons about beavers and mushrooms and Nat King Cole, who led me to Brubeck and then to Coltrane. The books he read and that I read after him, in secret. The desire to know everything to be able to talk about everything. The refusal to conform to dress codes and that totally brutal frankness. All of that was simply a way of teaching, ordering, forbidding in my child’s head, obligatory lessons, shameful lessons, perhaps, humiliating, often, but maybe that was how I came to discover the universe, how I became curious and perhaps an artist and also proud and broken, as one of my sisters sometimes scolded me for. I was not born of his violence, but rather from that first rock picked up on a path that led to our being lost. I did not love my father, but I have a father. A
nd I am glad of that.

  I’D FORGOTTEN HOW MONOTONOUS THE HIGHWAY IS NORTH OF SAINT-JOVITE, HOW UGLY THE HUMAN-CONSTRUCTED COUNTRYSIDE can be. My father is grumbling because I’m driving too slowly for him. But my ancient Volvo has never pulled a trailer before, especially one whose axle is probably rusty from not having been used for ten years. My mother sold the car, afraid of being killed at an intersection because my father insisted on driving despite the trembling in his hands and his irregular heartbeat, but she never once considered getting rid of the trailer. It was in this scrap heap that, in the sixties, she discovered the Rocky Mountains and saw the Pacific Ocean from Vancouver. A cross-Canada trip that still makes her eyes light up when she talks about it. And so we have this little trailer, a relic from another age, a gypsy caravan, as though my mother and father belonged to the age of explorers, this trailer that my father saw every day in the garage and which made him feel that maybe one day he’d go on another camping trip. The thing also took them to New Brunswick and Newfoundland. We know nothing about those times except from the photos that show only my mother. We never wondered how they were able to spend so much time together when we assumed they didn’t love each other. My father murmurs “Nominingue,” and my mother explains that that they used to buy bum bread in this village, traditional loaves that my father was so fond of he always stocked up on them when we went fishing in the Baskatong Reservoir. The smell of almost burnt toast suddenly comes to me, along with the perfume of warm spruce needles, and my father’s good mood brought on by thick slices of bread dripping with butter. Sam is tapping on the back of my seat in time to the electro-acoustic music he listens to. There is no longer a bakery in Nominingue. We find some imitation bum bread in Mont-Laurier.