A Good Death Read online

  “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 l
eft 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.

  “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. Un
fortunately 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?”