A Good Death (14 page)

I WAS SEVEN
or eight. I remember the details as clearly as though I were watching them on film. I’m wearing a black suit, white shirt and green tie. It’s Sunday and we’re coming home from Mass. Mother set the table before we left and put the ham-and-pineapple roast in the oven. As soon as we open the door, the children cry out and Mother says, “Good Lord!” Smoke is pouring out of the kitchen, along with a burnt, acrid smell. When my father comes in he starts swearing, something he rarely does. The house is filled with his shouting and cursing. You stupid woman! There is a loud slap and Mother is knocked to the black-and-white tiled floor. One of the white tiles turns red with blood from her nose. And I try to kill my father. I pick up a butter knife from the table and throw myself at him. Now that I think of it, he probably didn’t see the knife or understand the significance of my act, the hatred and rage that were so foreign to me but now explode like an atomic mushroom cloud that destroys everything in its path. He slaps me, too, and I find myself on the floor beside my mother. Then, saying he’s hungry and he isn’t going to settle for just any old thing, he calmly sits down at the piano. My mother gets up and scolds me. A child should never, never hit his father.

She improvised: rice, tomato juice, ground beef and fried onions. It was the kind of meal we usually ate, no one made a fuss about it or even thought about the incinerated ham. Except my father, who took one bite and got up from the table, saying this wasn’t a Sunday dinner, he was going to the tavern at the corner where he could get something decent to eat. I squeezed my butter knife. For the second time in an hour I wanted to murder my father.

“NO, I’M NOT
like you when you were a kid. I truly want him to die, the sooner the better. I don’t want to watch him bawling when I try to tell him about my life. I don’t tell him much, just about chess, my teachers, girls, little things. I just want to help him end it. We owe him that.”

One thing I can say for certain is that I owe nothing to my father, and Sam owes him even less. We are what we are, especially in this family, with this father who made us parade around like Stalin, keep in step, straight line, forced smiles on our lips, chins high, backs straight, while he made his family propaganda films with his old Kodak movie camera. Neoliberalism has taught us that we don’t owe anything to anyone. There, that’s me pretending to be an intellectual. The individual creates himself. If he’s defective, he’ll fail. If nature has made him a genius, he’ll rule the world. It was two pure individuals, no one’s children, sons of no society, who invented the Mac in a garage that reeked of oil. The celebrities of the week that the tabloids feed on so unimaginatively have faced hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes; they have defied prejudice and overcome hurdles beyond belief, and they have done it alone, because they are head and shoulders above everyone else, have thrust their noses above the sea of mediocrity and triumphed over the ordinary. They can go forward, solitary conquerors (because success condemns one to solitude), who make a better future from which we all benefit. That was what I’ve been trying to explain to this thoughtful teenager. In other words, we owe nothing to the bird whose chirping distracts us from being shot on the field of battle, nor to the wind that refreshes us, nor to the shower that clears our heads after a night of drinking beer. But what a load of crap I’m talking! The very stones owe their existence to the glaciers. I don’t know what I owe my father, but it just might be that I owe him his existence. And even if I am nothing but the negative sum of everything he was, it’s because of him that I met my mother and my brothers and sisters, because of him I set out on the path that led me to Isabelle. I owe him everything.

“Yes, you owe him a lot, as you say,” I tell them.

“It’s not rocket science, you know, and most of all it’s not killing. Grandma and almost everyone else keeps telling us that two things will kill him, fat and emotions. So we give him both. Lots and lots of fat for cholesterol, and dirty films. We come over, we make a big meal…”

“And watch porno flicks with the two of them after dinner! And the next day the same thing!”

Sam laughs. Stuffing a man with forbidden foods and emotions is not a simple matter. Exactly what emotions does my mother mean when she talks about putting my father’s fragile life in danger? We know nothing about his emotions. All we know is how those emotions have been interpreted by his wife, who is our mother and his nurse and his only permanent presence. Why is my mother so insistent about my father’s emotions? Is she sending us a hidden message, is she talking about him when he’s alive the way we talk about the dead, embellishing them, finding qualities they didn’t have and inventing explanations for everything about them that displeased us? Have we been blinded by his authority, his fits of anger and violence? Did we have some secret reason for loving him, known only to her? In any case, why do we need to love someone in order to help him and, in the case of my father, give him this small push into the void accompanied by pleasure and freedom? You don’t need to love someone to help him.

Right, then, an apparently simple dilemma: a big meal or a sharp blow to the head, or perhaps an assisted suicide, which would require the complicity of the entire family. And we know how family council meetings drag on and on and never end, like parliamentary committees.

My parents keep cases of beer in the basement and for some mysterious reason never put more than two bottles at a time in the refrigerator in the kitchen, even when they are expecting company, which means their children. No one but us ever visits this house. The last regular guest, one of my mother’s cousins, died three years ago. Sam helps himself to a warm beer and brings one for me. He guzzles his as fast as I do mine. I talk to him about the mathematics of gastronomy, and he asks if cholesterol is measured in grams or centimetres. We laugh raucously. We’re drinking joyfully, like old friends talking cozily about hockey, which I love, and school, which he hates, but mostly about my wife-to-be, who is much younger than I and whom Sam, blushing, admits to finding attractive. I ask him a few awkward questions, because I no longer know what an adolescent is and I want to find out. He laughs and assures his uncle, each of us with a beer in hand, that yes, he has sex, and to show he’s serious he takes a condom from his pocket. We give each other high-fives. Our desire to kill my father, or at least to hustle him along to his death, has put us in a kind of conscious dream-like state. It’s like when a voice, a perfect twin of our own, speaks to us just as we are falling asleep, sometimes keeping us awake for hours, making us toss and turn in bed and to curse this voice that is not exactly not our own. Theories and reasons line up like a platoon of soldiers. En masse they are convincing to the most doubting parts of our brains, so much so that in the morning we need to put them into words just to get them out of our heads, down through any passage to the vocal cords, and project them like a sudden spatter of raindrops on the roof for someone, anyone, to hear. Left in the head, words are tremblings, odours, dreads, the construct of dreams or nightmares. But when they surge out through the larynx and into the ears of another, they transform themselves into propositions, proclamations, and suddenly the theatre of the mind is calling up actors. And gestures. There you have it; we are prisoners of our words even if for the moment we prefer to talk about other things.

“May I join your conversation?”

My mother has perfect manners. I don’t believe she’s ever forgotten a single please or thank you in her life. Sometimes, during meals, she raises her hand like a schoolgirl when she wants to say something. She looks at us with a tender smile that would melt the heart of the most ungrateful child. The mythical smile of the mother, these lips that almost make a heart. We could have said no, and she would gently have asked us to forgive the intrusion. It’s not that she lacks will or audacity; on the contrary, she shows respect.

“I don’t wish to pry, but what are you discussing?”

“We were talking about Grandpa’s death, Grandma.”

My mouthful of beer goes down the wrong way, the way designed to take in air rather than liquid, and I choke and splatter my nephew with a fine spray of Boréale Rousse. If looks could kill…

“He’s still in good shape, and besides, he doesn’t want to die. I might go before he does.”

And she gives her tender smile.

“You don’t understand, Grandma. We were talking seriously. We’re not afraid that he’ll die. We want him to. Oh, shit, explain it to her. I don’t know how.”

My mother looks at me, waiting for her eldest child to speak, her smile now like that of La Gioconda. Serious, full of mysteries that thousands of people have lined up behind Japanese tourists in order to interpret. My mother the painting. I contemplate her. I don’t linger over her perfectly coiffed hair, or her golden curls which I’ve never noticed before but which are pretty and discreet, or over her silk blouse, which is no less discreet and yet acknowledges that she values elegance. Mona Lisa, whom I gave up trying to understand after a dozen visits, is smiling at me. Is it a smile of complicity or defiance? Sam and I have just left a world of superficial thought consisting of elaborate scenarios involving the winning of the lottery, a chance encounter with Jennifer Lopez or ways to rid ourselves of my father. What has she guessed of our intentions, however theoretical they may be? Is she an accomplice or a denouncer?

I know I’m plastered, not just drunk but frankly and joyously pissed to the gills. That must explain why, despite the thorniness of the situation, I remain sitting on the floor, one hand on the ground to give me a certain stability; why I show no emotion, because my neurons are no longer doing the hundred-metre dash but are slogging through the five-thousand-metre sack race trying to come up with an answer that would be close to the one Mona Lisa wants to hear. And then, because my brain is mush, even while I’m wondering what to say I hear my mouth going on a mile a minute. I babble when I drink, I rant, I’m wicked. Even people who like me and think they know me always describe me with the classic phrase: he didn’t know what he was saying. Such people, though I love them dearly, are wrong. Despite a few guilty exaggerations, when drunk I say only what I think. Wine or beer frees me from all the polite restraints and conventions and salaams that society defines as showing tolerance. We will not tolerate intolerance. But when you’re plastered, you are not by definition an asshole. You are given more latitude with the truth, a little more leeway. “Go on,” says Sam. “Say something.” I’m sorry, Isabelle, and so much the worse for me. I slip out of my daydream and into reality.

“All right, Mother, listen. I think it would be better for him and for everybody if we… helped him pass on as quickly as possible.”

Mother faints. She falls gently back on the bottom stair, without a sound except that of rumpling silk.

I don’t add that it would be all the forbidden food, the wine, the emotions (which ones? I have no idea), the pleasures, what else?—and all that cholesterol, that would be committing the crime. Our role would be more like that of arms dealers, or to put it more diplomatically, facilitators.

Her eyes open, and at the same time she evinces a smile that is no longer Mona Lisa–like but rather one that suggests she has lost her mind, that after the long night’s confusion she can’t remember a thing. I’m grateful, not only for her swift return to consciousness but also for her apparent amnesia. She says there is no need to mention her fainting spell to the others. They have enough to worry about already.

Right. Three thirty in the morning. Sam and I go back to our conversation. Upstairs, the various families are rounding up their gifts, putting them back in their boxes. Two of my sisters are divvying up the tourtières and the pastries, the orange mousse and what’s left of the turkey, as though it all belonged to them. It’s like a soup kitchen run by civil servants, everyone gets an equal portion of everything whether they want it or not. The eyes of the children look like those of children in fairy tales after the Sandman has been and gone. The older ones are impatient to be home. They hug each other absently. Everyone pays lip service to the old rituals. Mother, a little shakier than usual, like a wounded sparrow left out in the winter cold, is smiling and hugging everyone and wishing them well and making encouraging comments. A machine dispensing affection, a little old lady who is stronger than Stalin and all the other dictators put together. Isabelle kisses her. They are great friends, these two. My mother whispers something in her ear, and Isabelle turns and looks at me without smiling, her eyes brimming with questions. I hug Mother and she tells me, as she almost always does, to look after Isabelle, smoke and drink a little less, and come visit her more often. Sam takes my arm as he goes out. He’ll call me tomorrow. When words leave the brain, they need gestures and actors to attach themselves to. Sam’s seem to belong to a play I haven’t seen, though I know how it ends. I sober up. I repeat: words are fragmentation bombs. I sober up even more.

FINALLY, IT’S
snowing. It’s like one of those old Christmas cards, with enough space between the feathery flakes to see the stars in the sky, especially the most brilliant of them (which I think is Venus), which once guided the wise men to the stable. Did they travel on dromedaries or camels with two humps? I can’t remember all the figurines in a crèche anymore. Isabelle drives slowly, humming a tune I don’t recognize, a haunting, nostalgic melody slowly unfurling its inflections like large sails in a warm wind. I place it: it’s a song sung by Fairouz, the Lebanese diva who has so enchanted the Arabs except for certain fundamentalists who prefer their own throaty, venomous sermons. It feels good to let my thoughts stray from their wanted haunts. I try going back to the old Arab Quarter in Rabat and the tajine I ate with my daughter in the chic Hilton restaurant, the time she climbed up on the stage with the belly dancers and danced with them, me not knowing what to do and the other customers laughing and the Moroccan women leading her through a sweet, sensual saraband. I am almost there.