The Last Life (32 page)

"So early?" I asked my mother.

She, distracted, in her housecoat, stood by the sink fingering the fronds of her belt. "Says he has a lot of meetings." She scowled. "Says."

"Then he probably does."

"No doubt."

"Bridge today?" It was a Tuesday, the day on which, in that year, my mother and grandmother joined a third Samaritan and visited the sick Titine, a newly housebound friend of almost sixty with a severe and chronic respiratory ailment, who trembled and wheezed her way through a gallant rubber once a week before rewarding her guests with iced port and her housekeeper's famous cheese straws.

"Naturally. Now hurry up, or you'll be late."

The day was like any other, for me. I was, like my father before me, a rehabilitated student; but unlike him I worked hard, and wanted to go far. My friendships of the year before had eroded without enmity to civil hellos (except for Frédéric, with whom I still chatted, and who sometimes ran me home on the back of his scooter), and I had found myself an earnest set of twins, recently arrived in town, gangly, bespectacled, with whom to linger on the quiet periphery of my school's society. That April day, I traipsed with Aline and Ariane to the library after school—as I did daily; as eighteen months before I had speciously assured my mother I was doing—and sank into the French Revolution until after six. I would like to claim a premonition, a flash of understanding or even an unheeded spasm in my chest; but to do so would be a lie. The day, my day, was unremarkable but for the glimpsed submarine and the recurrence of a flaky rash on the twins' forearms, their unified dermatological protest at the strain of an impending test.

I missed the police car, which had come at five, stealthily, with no sirens, and gone again, with promises to return and fetch my mother. But my grandparents were with her and my brother in the living room, and I knew from the hunch of my grandfather's back, from the ominous quiet as I entered, that something was amiss: something grave. The way they all turned, at my brother's burbled indication, and gaped at me as though I were a phantom; that they hadn't heard my step in the hall, although not one of them was speaking; that nobody had thought to turn on a light, although the inner reaches of the room loomed powdery grey; that my mother tried to call out, and seemed unable to, and darted clumsily to my side, where she attempted (with such curious force—it's the pressure of her arms I remember, their pent will), although I was taller than she, to fold my face to her bosom, to make herself bigger, big enough to fit the occasion.

There were no hysterics. It was the black silence that spoke the moment, the absence of expression. There were no words, no tears, no rage sufficient for this. Besides, we were confused. Had I not, and had my mother not, cursed my father in the preceding months and uttered, more than once, those irretrievable words "I wish you were dead"? You have to be careful what you wish for; my first thought (and again and again, afterwards, and sometimes even now) was that my will had killed him, that it was my fault (and my mother's no less than mine: our fault, like the mother and daughter in Strindberg's
The Father).
Or perhaps it was my grandfather's doing, or even my grandmother's, drowning him in her distilled love, as cold as pickling alcohol. Or shall we blame it, as we could blame everything (and he takes the blame; he couldn't refuse it; and he smiles nonetheless), on Etienne?

What does it tell you—about what we knew without speaking, about who he was and who we were—that not one among us, when informed that Alexandre LaBasse had taken his life (another gun, a different, smaller one; and whence, mystery like the brandy and the pills of years before, had he procured that?) cried "No, it's not possible. Not him!"?

My father had had no early meetings. He had had no meetings at all that day. He had left a memo the night before for Mademoiselle Marceau, who had always colluded in his deceptions, asking her to cancel his lunch with the director of the local tourist board, and reminding her to delegate the interviews of potential restaurant chefs to the catering manager ("She'll do, for the preliminary round," he'd written). Mademoiselle Marceau assumed, as she always did, that "something had come up," meaning some young chippy with a yen to see St. Tropez before the season was in full swing. Like Cerberus, she guarded my father's empty office and deflected inquiries, so that nobody knew he wasn't where he ought to have been. My mother had rung at noontime, only to be told that my father had "stepped out"; and my grandmother, who had stopped by his office in the afternoon with a vase of lilacs from her penthouse garden, was informed that Monsieur LaBasse had been detained longer than expected on the far side of town.

He left us at around seven thirty; within the hour, according to the coroner, he was dead. From our house, he drove away from town, past the Bellevue gates, and kept going, the window down and the roof open to the warm wind, its chittering like full sails, the sun doubtless reaching, tentacular, to kiss his forehead and the back of his skull. He drove through the morning snarl of the outlying villages, past the rows of greenhouses where the winter flowers are forced. He drove. There was a cassette of Debussy piano music in the tape player, although it was not playing when he was found. I imagine his last ride was smoothed by its undulating ripples, the music that his grandmother so loved.

He pulled onto the narrow track that led out to the pine grove at the third headland from town, a spot where we had picnicked in past years. He had picnicked there, no doubt, on many other occasions, and more recently; it was a lovers' idyll. He shut off the engine, his prized black BMW pointed towards the sea, its nose between two mighty, bleached trunks, its wheels on a soft bed of last year's dried needles. He got out of the car: he walked to the top of the rocks and sat—there was dust on the seat of his trousers when he was examined—watching the swirling water eddy and nip at the boulders below, perhaps even catching its spray on his hands, or on the white exposed flesh between his socks and the cuffs of his worsted wool. He had, in his pocket, a rosary: he took it out, and rolled its beads, the beads of his life's story, catching with his thumbnail the spaces between them, feeling them, trying to stretch those interstices wide enough for a finger to fit; and failing. He did not sit there long (he couldn't have, if the coroner was right); he was not, any longer, in the yawning gap of contemplation. He knew what he was doing. But he wanted his last view to be that of his beloved sea, and the scent in his nostrils to be the sweet, dry fragrance of the pine trees; and he wanted to remember the salt on his cheeks, the way the sea breeze crept under his clothes to tickle his hairy skin.

He returned to the car. He was fastidious, my father: he shut the door behind him. He unlocked the glove compartment, withdrew the gun, locked it again, and replaced the key in the ignition. He glanced once more at the water, heard its whispering and the murmur of the canopy over his head. He caught the faint hum of a motorboat chugging far away, drawing nearer. He checked the rearview, to ensure the grove was empty but for him. His jacket lay neatly folded on the back seat. He did not loosen his tie; he did pull up his socks, so that they would not be bunched up on his corpse's ankles. He took up the gun, a .38: silver, it hovered between him and the vista, between him and his invisible home on the far side of the ocean, directly southward, the home that breathed only in the pluperfect, in the tense where there had been a future. And he pulled the trigger.

But that was later. Over a year later. And it was neither imagined nor possible in the first months of the new decade, early in 1990, when my grandfather was in prison and my father soaring, full of hope and the brief thrill of a real life, in the here and now.

After that day with Lahou, Sami and Jacquot, and the peculiar encounter with my father which I did not at first fully understand, the configuration of my life (of our lives) altered again, like a kaleidoscope turned with the gentle twist of a divine hand. I found myself alone once more, sustained by my correspondence with Thibaud, in which I described nonexistent friends and parties. Thibaud applauded my courage and insisted that I make time in all this gaiety for my schoolwork: he himself, he assured me, did little more than study (more than one person can make up stories: I later learned that from October or so onwards, he had been embroiled in a passionate romance with the Danish au pair who cared for his cousin's children. She was nineteen, an older woman, with hair as fair and fine as strands of silk. Upon hearing which I pictured her scalp teeming with grubby silkworms, busily spinning), and had his heart set on
Sciences Po,
which might take an extra year or two of preparation but was worth it. His own father was a
Potytechntcien,
but Thibaud couldn't abide the sciences, mostly because he couldn't seem to do well in them. All this he confided (and the girlfriend, eventually, but only when he finally revealed that he would not be travelling with his parents in the summer, and so would not see me, because he was headed for Norway and Denmark, and not alone), and encouraged me to raise my eyes beyond the walls around my little life; for which I was, and remain, grateful. Far away in Paris, he held my hand through the months that followed, and although our exchanges were sequinned with lies, they brought me a courage, and a patience, that was true friendship.

Bereft, however, of immediate companions, I grew sluggish. I felt as though my body wavered like a beached jellyfish, its limits indistinct, incapable of locomotion. I dragged myself to school and home again; I cried, little salty rivulets, at television advertisements for yoghurt and sunblock. I began reading the newspaper—not the local one, tainted, for me, by its portrayal of my family, but
Le Figaro,
and, sometimes, as an intellectual exercise,
Le Monde
(it was a strain to confront such streams of uninterrupted type), which I perused at my desk during lunchtime and left for the janitor when I went home.

Home: the January afternoon had further sullied that place for me, too. I was learning from my reading that not only Sami but great numbers of the populace found my grandfather's politics heinous; but also, which I felt somehow I had known, that they found our history ghastly too, an insidious pollutant in the aquarium of French honor. France's error made flesh, the
pieds-noirs,
and with them, the
harkis,
were guilty simply for existing. In the national narrative, my father's family was a distasteful emblem, linked, by circumstance, not only to the vicious undeclared war of their homeland, but in dark historical shame to the collaborationists of Vichy and, further back still, to the ugliest excesses of the Dreyfus affair.

St. Augustine and Camus might have been Algeria's most celebrated offspring, but the former colonials' most vocal champion, at that late date, was not Algerian at all, was Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose porcine eyes and thread-thin mouth glowered regularly at the world from the pages of the press. This was the political voice of my grandfather's people—and inevitably, of my father's, too—the bitter grizzling of those who fought for Catholicism and a nostalgic ideal of France, a pure France that would, and did, label me "foreign" for my American mother (my
pied-noir
father, on the other hand, was foreign only to the great majority). My family believed in a country that could want no part of them, would rather they had been gloriously martyred in Algeria, memorialized in a curly arch or two at metropolitan intersections, and conveniently forgotten.

Wary of my father's clan, I tried to ask my mother about it, about what had happened and where my family stood.

"It's so complicated, dear," she said. "And so sad, for all concerned. Most people—like your grandparents, and your father—were just people, just living their lives. They didn't ask to be born into that mess, and they came here to 'turn the page'—that's how your grandfather puts it. They have grievances—just ones, if you ask me—about how they were treated. And they lost their homes. But you can't live in the past; you have to play the hand you're dealt. People are just people, in the end."

"So why do they hate the Arabs? They're just people too."

"Nonsense. They don't hate Arabs. They love Zohra, and Fadéla too, for starters. Besides, it's complicated. I can't begin to understand, or to explain. They are what they are."

"But they don't have to be. We all have choices. We can choose to be different."

"That's your Aunt Eleanor talking. And maybe I used to believe that, too, when I was young. When I came here. But sometimes there isn't a lot of choice in the matter."

"You can't believe that."

"Can you choose not to be sulky? Can you choose to be beautiful, or brilliant? Can Etienne choose to walk?"

"You can choose lots of things. I could choose to be a Buddhist, say—"

"You could."

"Or I could convert to Islam. Or I could be an atheist, and that would be a choice."

"It would have to be something more than a simple choice, sweetheart, or it wouldn't mean anything at all. It would be like a friend I once had who chose the church she was married in simply because she liked the stained glass windows."

"What's your point?"

"We don't choose what we believe, or don't believe. That's my point. And if we do, we're fooling ourselves."

"Well, I don't believe you, then."

"That's up to you. Now help me with this batter, would you? If you can pour the milk in, a drop or two at a time, while I keep stirring..."

Perhaps, then, my mother had no choice over her loss of faith in my father. For years she had turned a blind eye to his tardiness, his occasional lapses from sight. Perhaps Magda, on the verge of departure, whispered something in her ear. Perhaps, once my grandfather was hidden away, my parents both believed, at last, that their real lives were beginning; and behavior which had lurked invisible in the twilight of pretend was suddenly glaringly obvious. Perhaps my giddy father was so careless as to come home with lipstick on his collar, or earrings in his pocket. If she had always believed him before (surely she had chosen to believe?), then something changed. She may have seen him; one of the ladies with whom she socialized may have seen him. It doesn't matter; it wasn't, to her mind, a choice.