Diary of the Fall (14 page)

The nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places was a concept freely available to my
father. He had more right than anyone to grasp it in order to justify whatever attitude he chose to take during his life: he could have become the worst boss and the worst friend and the worst husband and the worst father because when he was fourteen he came face-to-face with that concept, with my grandfather slumped across the desk, and then there was the fight we had when I decided to change schools and the conversation we had by the barbecue, and the way he reacted to my going to university and my move to São Paulo, my three marriages and the day I told him he had Alzheimer’s, all those things could have been very different, and I wouldn’t be speaking about him now because I would have judged him already, and as was the case with him and my grandfather I would have nothing good to say about him, and as was the case with him and my grandfather I would feel no affection or empathy, and I would never have felt what a son naturally feels about his father without ever having to say or explain anything.

I lived with my mother at the time. She didn’t want to move just because of what happened to my father. I didn’t even think about it then, nor did it occur to me that people
would move when something like that happened. Because all his things were still there. Ten years later I would still sometimes find something of his. A napkin with his monogram on it. A pen. An ashtray
.

If I felt what my father had always felt about my grandfather, I wouldn’t have gone to Porto Alegre when I found out he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t have stopped my mother from falling as she stood swaying at the door to their apartment. I wouldn’t have been welcomed by my father as if he already knew everything too, standing there immaculately combed and shaved, wearing a smart shirt and shoes, two o’clock in the afternoon and there he was ready to go out to lunch or to a meeting still smelling of the shaving lotion he’d put on, and all to receive the news that in less than five years he would be technically dead, and had I understood him as little as he did my grandfather, had I known nothing of the deep pool of grief that lay hidden until the fight we had when I was thirteen and he finally stopped using Nazism as an excuse for my grandfather, for what he really felt about my grandfather — something I only realized many years later and only properly grasped
very recently, when I had access to my father’s memoir — had my relationship with him been ruined in the way his relationship with my grandfather had, I wouldn’t have flown to Porto Alegre to tell him that he had Alzheimer’s and wouldn’t have realized that this would change not only his life, but mine as well.

There are two possible responses to the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places. There is my grandfather’s response, and I think I told my father everything I had to say on that subject when I was thirteen, in the only way I could at that age, and when I think about that fight today and the way my father looked at me during the fight and during our conversation on the day after the fight and the way he behaved subsequently, I realize that he secretly accepted I was right, and had known this for a long time, and that he could have come out with exactly the same words I had used, those I could muster at the time, and until then no one had so bluntly reminded my father that my grandfather had clung to an excuse, made it his alibi, an aura that turned him into a kind of martyr, a saint, despite having ruined
my father’s life by following to the letter the predictions contained in the tons of books and thousands of films and endless hours of discussion about the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places and the inevitable fate met by all those who came in contact with it, even when that nonviability bore a name as symbolic and beyond debate as Auschwitz.

Is it possible to hate an Auschwitz survivor in the way my father did? Is it permissible to feel such pure hatred, without at any moment falling into the temptation of moderating that feeling because of Auschwitz, without feeling guilty for placing one’s own emotions above something like the memory of Auschwitz?

Is it possible that one’s hatred of an Auschwitz survivor could indicate a kind of indifference toward Auschwitz, as if hating the survivor, which can sometimes amount to wishing him ill, meant that you were indifferent to and might even endorse any evil done to him, even if that evil was carried out in Auschwitz?

The second possible response to the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places is my father’s. And if there is a way of summing up what a son feels for his father when he learns that his father is ill, I could simply mention that my father didn’t do what my grandfather did, that he appears never even to have thought about it, and at no point did he give any indication that he had even so much as considered the idea that my birth made no difference, that my childhood meant nothing, that my presence could not keep him from succumbing in the way my grandfather succumbed. If I hadn’t felt that gratitude toward him, which convinced me it was possible for a son to feel such a thing for his father, that it was possible for there to be something good about the relationship between son and father, reason enough still to believe in the relationship between son and father, were it not for that I wouldn’t have told him that he had Alzheimer’s, not after the ultimatum my third wife had just given me.

I met my third wife at a dinner party. There were ten or fifteen of us sitting around a big table. The house
belonged to an advertising executive. Advertising executives still enjoy buying and showing off paintings. I sat down opposite one of those images of polar bears that are supposed to suggest a kind of innocence but with a cosmopolitan touch, and I don’t know whether it was our host’s idea or simply the order in which the guests arrived, because I can’t remember now if I got there early or late, if I was delayed by traffic or a meeting at the end of the day, or if my third wife was delayed because she couldn’t decide what to wear or because of work or because one of her girlfriends rang her up at the last moment, I don’t know if there was some special reason or if it was pure chance that she ended up sitting next to me.

At the time I was drinking every night. I drank in the afternoons too, although not always and without it affecting my work too much. My work is perfectly compatible with heavy drinking, and not just because I get up late and work at home and only need two or three hours of concentrated work per day, enough to deliver two or three articles a week and publish two or three books every ten years, but also because at forty, alcohol still doesn’t seriously affect you: contrary to
what people think, you can continue to age without any of your organs showing any change in any of the tests you arrange to have done, each time scarcely able to believe that you’ve survived unscathed yet again.

Before the age of forty, alcohol is more happy than sad. The nights of a drinker are better than those of a nondrinker. The conversations of a drinker are more amusing than those of a nondrinker. People who drink are more attractive than those who don’t. The feeling of going home on a Wednesday morning when it’s already light and looking at the nondrinkers making their way to an office where they’ll spend nearly two-thirds of the day feeling proud of themselves because at least they’re not like you, sitting in a local café drinking a glass of chocolate milk laced with brandy, the nondrinkers sitting in their cars and thinking you’re just a forty-year-old idiot who hasn’t yet realized he’s not eighteen anymore, and it’s because you know that at the end of the day and the month you’ll be exactly like all of them, having paid or not paid your rent, being employed or unemployed, having a marriage, health insurance, a vase of flowers, that, ultimately, it all comes down to the same thing even though you
live each minute far more intensely than any of them, that’s why you leave the café and walk unsteadily back to your apartment where you say hi to the caretaker and enter your apartment and feel no shame at all as you fall onto the bed with your shoes still on, until your third wife decides that enough is enough.

My real problem with drink isn’t physical exactly. It isn’t material either, in the sense that you can compare the wealth and the work record of someone who drinks with someone who doesn’t. As with everything in this story, it’s a problem that goes back to when I was fourteen, when I changed schools for the second time and, grown weary of swimming against the tide, tried to fit in with the norm: my classmates in the third school also mixed
cachaça
with cola, they also borrowed the car of whoever’s father happened to be away traveling so that we could visit bars and parties and crowded streets and find some excuse to end the night as we always did, someone else’s girlfriend, someone’s clothes, someone’s appearance or the way someone moved or breathed, because all you have to do is hold your victim’s gaze and make sure he’s with friends in whose presence he can’t be seen to
be backing down, you just have to touch his shoulder, give him a tiny shove, poke him with your finger, so that in the ensuing fifteen minutes of every Friday and Saturday night, for years and years, you can continue to prove that you’re not afraid of anything or anyone.

I never took classes in boxing, capoeira or judo. I never did karate or jiu-jitsu. I spent years fighting in the most varied of places and for the most varied of reasons, and I never used any technique other than force mixed with a kind of courage that is almost a desire to get as badly beaten up as your opponent: a sprained wrist after delivering a punch, a cut to your forehead after headbutting someone, the day you have to be taken to hospital and spend the next week telling everyone you were attacked by three older assailants armed with nunchuks and butcher’s knives, and until I received my third wife’s ultimatum I would have been capable of offering the most varied of explanations as to why I’d always behaved like that, as if it were something involuntary, a genetic predisposition or a trauma resulting from everything I’d experienced from fourteen onward, because that kind of reasoning allows you to justify anything, even the worst, the most
grotesque of actions, the kind you only confess to at the very end of your argument.

I could have continued taking that line of defense, and returned to the mantra that begins on the day when I stopped talking to João, as if that day were a rite of passage, the discovery that everyone at some point needs to make, my grandfather standing before the gates of Auschwitz, my father standing before my grandfather sprawled across his desk, and the fact that at the time I thought of those three things as equivalents, Auschwitz for my grandfather and my grandfather’s death for my father and the last note I received from João, Auschwitz and a suicide and a crumpled piece of paper from a notebook, Auschwitz and a suicide and a penciled drawing, just the fact that I once thought of those three things as equivalents could also be seen as further proof of the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places, and I could have spent the rest of my life using that statement as a justification for what I did to other people and to myself in the years that followed, the breakup of my first marriage after which I still couldn’t behave in any other way, the breakup of my second marriage after
which I still couldn’t behave in any other way, my third wife with whom I tested the limits still further, and when I left that café it was like another test, me stumbling home and saying hi to the caretaker and entering the apartment and falling onto the bed with my shoes still on, and then my third wife waking up and confronting me and me looking at her and for the last time giving her my usual response.

My third wife wakes up and asks where I was before I fell onto the bed with my shoes still on. She asks me to explain why on the previous two mornings I had also fallen onto the bed with my shoes still on. She’s tired of asking the same questions and hearing the same answers and us spending the whole night awake because she won’t resign herself to seeing me in that state, nor to hearing my usual answer whenever she brings the subject up, the fact that I don’t want to see what she sees, and don’t want to admit what is as clear as day to her, and it’s then that the tone of this telling-off becomes accusatory, and the volume rises and the anger grows until I can’t stand the hell of spending whole nights like this and I aim a kick at the television, and my third wife leaps up and flings herself on top
of me as if terrified that something really bad is about to happen, and then I grab her by the shoulders and shake her hard and, just as I’ve been doing since I was fourteen years old, I set to: I throw her down on the bed (João, Auschwitz, my grandfather and my father, the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places) and clench my fists (João, Auschwitz, my grandfather and my father, the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places) and look her in the face (João, Auschwitz, my grandfather and my father, the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places) and then I do what I have to do.

After ten years I got used to it. No one talked to me about it anymore. No one took any notice when there was a report on TV about something similar. Over the years I had managed to concentrate on what interested me, the shop, my mother, and one of the things I learned over the years was never to show any weakness
.

My mother never knew that I would sometimes lock myself in my bedroom to cry. No one in the shop knew that I would sometimes, in the middle of the morning, lock
myself in the toilet and stay there for ten minutes or half an hour crying
.

I cried at university. I cried in the car. In the street. I’ve cried at the cinema. In a restaurant. In a football stadium. At the swimming pool while I was swimming and afterward in the changing room while I got dressed
.