A Good Death (15 page)

“Is it true you want to kill your father?”

She spoke softly. I sensed no reproach in her voice, but I’d rather be in Rabat than at the corner of Park and Bernard, stopped at a red light in a car that smells of tourtière and doughnuts we’ll probably end up throwing out.

“No, Isabelle, I don’t. It’s more complex than that.”

“Well, that’s what your mother thinks. I just thought I’d warn you.”

Damn. So she does remember.

IN OUR FAMILY, PRESENTS HAVE ALMOST
ALWAYS HAD TO DO WITH EITHER THE TABLE
OR THE KITCHEN. A TRAVELLER (WHO, IN OUR
family, travels to the south of France) brings us a Provençal tablecloth or, if he or she has blown the budget on restaurants, a set of napkins in the same intense yellows and blinding blues, crawling with cicadas. The Buddhists give 100 per cent organic produce: farm-gate lavender honey, a cassis liqueur from plants unsullied by pollution, truffle-flavoured olive oil that some one-eyed rustic in Périgord has been making for the past fifty years. Gifts from the Medicals tend to be sauternes or plum brandies, lightly cooked foie gras, pots of goose confit, vintage Armagnacs. Strange. And to go with the napkins, adherents to both philosophies give hand-turned ceramic serving plates, designer pepper mills, Italian-made salad bowls and spoons, and each year a new kind of container for keeping soft drinks once they’re opened, the one this year being designed to accept those new plastic corks that are popping up everywhere, even from the better vintners, to replace cork, which is becoming rarer and rarer because humanity has drunk too much wine and replanted too few oaks.

Despite the fact that Isabelle has moved into my apartment, it still has something of the old bordello about it. In the room we’re sitting in now there are stacks of records and books in the corners, newspapers lying about, an old defunct candelabra that I rescued from a stage set. It was much worse before she moved in. Eleven months ago she came, having been accustomed to order, harmony, a decor straight out of
Elle
magazine, and she didn’t say a word. Three days later she’d washed all the floors and windows, which I had been neglecting for months. In the reflection of a new lamp on the dark, gleaming floorboards, I rediscovered the beauty that my laziness and indifference had allowed to become a pigsty. Bit by bit but relentlessly, like a cat staking out its territory, she hung a painting here, replaced a table there, put a vase on it that somehow miraculously sprouted flowers, bought plates and glasses, napkins and a duvet, still without saying a word, never asking my opinion or expecting any approval or thanks. Since her taste was impeccable, I, too, said nothing, secretly hoping, lazy bastard that I am, that she would take on the entire apartment, get in bookshelves, get rid of all my chipped and stained furniture, and why not buy me some new clothes while she was at it, my years of bachelorhood having imposed a kind of accidental poverty upon me? All I owned were two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes and a few shirts.

I now feel more and more myself in this apartment, and in these clothes she buys me.

We make an inventory of the gifts over which I gushed and said thank you and bestowed kisses during the family exchange. What does one do with a miniature bottle of rose-petal vinegar? I twist off the tiny cap and sniff the faint mimicry of a flask of perfume sold on the Internet. It smells like vinegar to me. Isabelle agrees. And this decanter, our tenth. Isabelle smiles. It will be our eleventh vase. A bottle of madiran, the celebrated Château Montus de Brumont. Now that’s a gift! From Bernard. Isabelle, who has loosened her hair, produces two teacups, a gift from some unknown amateur, it would appear, of Oriental motifs. The house of Brumont will surely pardon the cultural hybridization.

“So is it true you want to kill your father?”

Her tone hasn’t changed, the volume hasn’t shifted a decibel either way, but that could betray an insistence, the urgency of her need to know. I know Isabelle. I’ll get no sleep tonight unless I give her an answer. The Brumont is nearly black, like blood coagulating in the wound of a bull. Or like my father’s blood, thick and dark, rising ever more slowly to his brain.

I try to explain everything that has been going through my mind throughout the evening, and gradually, as sobriety returns thanks to the madiran, it all comes back to me.

“My father is dying hating himself and hating the world. We are keeping him alive while he is preventing us from living. We’re struggling for our mutual unhappiness. There was a time when we laughed uproariously, as he did, when food fell off his fork and like a child he would say, ‘Oops, dropped it.’ He’d pick it up and try again and smile at our enthusiastic applause when he succeeded in getting it to his mouth. We did everything but cry
Encore!
That was before we or he knew about all those enzymes and whatever other chemicals were working like anarchists’ secateurs in his brain, blindly snipping away at the flowering vines of his neurons. We thought we were watching and taking part in a convalescence that would slide gently towards a normal death, one that would come in its own time, like a season, or a gentle rain that we knew was coming because we’d heard the weather reports. But we are not watching a convalescence; we’re participating in a degeneration, a slow, methodical, implacable wasting away. We wanted to do the right thing, but as George Bush’s inspector said about the weapons of mass destruction, we were wrong. We accept the inevitability of his imminent death, but we aren’t prepared for the ugliness or more particularly the relentlessness of his suffering, or for the consequences it’s having for my mother. We thought my father would die decently, without disturbing anyone, pass away in his sleep, perhaps, which would have been perfect, or else go the way the statistics say he’s supposed to go: have a second stroke, spend a few days in the hospital, we get a phone call early one morning and there’s a funeral where we shed a few tears and tell ourselves we’ve done our duty by him. We thought death would come like a thief in the night. Unfortunately for him, for my mother and to some extent for us, the thief didn’t take his sackful of silver and bugger off; he seems to have liked the place and decided to move in.

“Now when he tries to get up from his chair, equipped though it is with a motor that would lift him up and practically set him down on the floor, some of us turn away and others of us watch in irritation because he refuses to use the damned motor. What an idiot, wanting to stand up without help from a few springs hidden in the cushions. How thoughtless of him, the ingrate. But would we feel the same way about a general who wanted to stand unsupported before his troops even when he’s mortally wounded? And then there’s the pleasure. Because it’s the absence of pleasure or even happiness that’s his worst agony. If only he could complain about an unbearable pain hacking away at his brain or tearing at his insides or torturing his muscles, but no, he doesn’t need sleeping pills or painkillers, he doesn’t suffer any physical pain, there is no drug that could bring him the pleasure of relief. There is only the sharp, shooting pain of the soul, the crippling of awareness, the unspeakable pain. Can we even imagine Stalin’s shame when he dropped that vodka bottle in front of the Central Committee, and got down on the red carpet on his hands and knees to pick it up? And Comrade Khrushchev barely leaning over to offer his arm, and Molotov looking away? We are Dad’s politburo. His powers are abandoning him, and for men like him power is the only pleasure. Tell me, Isabelle, what happiness is there in my father’s life that justifies our prolonging it? Is it perhaps the pleasure of watching others live? Is it like watching a movie?”

“No. How are you going to do it? No, don’t go silent on me. Tell me. What exactly are you planning to do?”

“Not me, actually, Isabelle. Or not only me. There’s Sam. All I do is talk, put thoughts into words, and Sam, who isn’t old enough to shave yet, translates them into actions. That’s more or less what’s happening. Sam and I had come to the same conclusion before we even talked about it and from completely different perspectives. I was thinking about the pleasure of living, and Sam was surely more concerned with the pleasure of dying. Perhaps we can poison him”—I cannot bring myself to say
kill
—“by letting him eat. He can still eat, stuff himself, belch, flush with pleasure after a forbidden slice of Reblochon cheese. When he eats he’s still alive. That’s all there is to it, really. I’d rather he died than went on living.”

Isabelle smiles. She takes my hand and, still smiling, walks me through a rehearsal of my father’s death. “We’ll start with some foie gras,” she says, laughing now, shaking with mirth as I open one of those conserves that are sold in Roissy in boutiques that are no longer duty-free and that charge twice what you’d pay in an ordinary supermarket for a tin of duck-liver mousse spiced with a hint of tru±e. She is speechless with laughter. She signals, gestures, chokes with chuckles mixed with wine, which is astonishing in someone as well brought up as she has been. She points to herself, stabs her chest with her finger. She stamps her feet on the hardwood floor, probably awakening the downstairs neighbour, who will no doubt have something scathing to say about it tomorrow.

“For your father…” She takes a breath. “That was my present for your father.”

We blew our chance to kill him.

IT’S BOXING DAY AND MY FATHER HAS
STARTED GOING TO DAY HOSPITAL. DAY HOSPITAL IS FOR ADULTS WHAT DAY CAMP IS FOR
children. Day camps have been around for a long time. Parents who have to work during school holidays drop their kids off with activity leaders, or hired guards called monitors, and in principle the kids are there to have a good time. They play sports, surf the Internet, eat in cafeterias where they gorge themselves on calories, are taken to swimming pools to work them off, and at the end of the day are picked up by parents exhausted after a day at work. The reunions are always joyful. Day hospital is a more recent phenomenon but is modelled on the same formula. It’s a way for the parent living at home to get a break, to go out and do the shopping without having to worry about what the aged child left in the family home is up to. The aged child can be dropped off at day hospital, ostensibly to get care; he is given tests, asked impertinent questions about the colour of his bowel movements, left to fester in waiting rooms because the system is overused, taken to eat in cafeterias, where he gorges himself on calories, is not taken to swimming pools but speaks to doctors and waits for hospital staff members to herd him more or less gently onto a little bus, which takes him home. The reunions are not always joyful.

When my mother called yesterday, she did not speak with her usual delicacy or nuance. She normally starts by asking me for details of my daily life, tells me what’s on television that day, describes my father’s latest fall, asks after Isabelle and raises the possibility that I might come for a visit, if and when I have the time, no hurry. This time it’s “Come tomorrow afternoon. There’s still some tourtière left and I need to speak to you. No, don’t bring any more wine, there’s plenty here.”

A PRETTY CHILD
of five or six with what looks like a daisy stuck in her curled hair. It’s my mother—I recognize her by her look, soft and sparkling at the same time. She’s smiling at the camera while behind her a gaggle of children are running about in an immense garden. You can see a few adults here and there in the background, men in black suits with ties or cravats around stiff collars. And farther off, almost like shadows, a few women. The garden must be flowing with mischievous laughter and tears and shouts, since that’s what gardens are like on Sundays when a dozen children are playing in them after Mass and before dinner, those two intolerable brackets in the day of a child who knows instinctively that you don’t learn much about life when you’re sitting or kneeling. The men—there are three of them—are paying no attention to the women nor to the swarm of offspring they’ve brought into the world. Your grandfather, my mother says, pointing to the photograph, your great-grandfather, she says to Sam, who gave me a look when I came in that told me I didn’t know what I was in for, and who goes on looking at the dozens of photographs lined up purposefully on the teak table in the living room.