A Good Death Read online

  “Dad, why are you out of bed? You should go back and lie down.”

  “Dad, why did you put your shirt on over that sweater? It looks terrible. It would go better with your jacket…”

  “Come and sit down, Dad. You look tired.”

  Another child cries out. Heads turn towards the sound. My father goes back into his room. In the kitchen, I try to decide between the bottle of wine and my father, who I know is disappointed. I read a label, but it tells me nothing. I’m thirsty. I’m pretty sure my father is crying. I’m sixty years old, and I’m afraid to see my father cry. He walks silently towards his bed. Did Duplessis ever cry, or Stalin? I won’t go into his room, even though I know I should. I don’t want to see this man cry, this man I do not love and whose fall from grace is so upsetting to me.

  I pour myself a large glass of wine. Lise, one of the Medicals, says jokingly that I must want to die, too, like Dad, who won’t listen to reason. I drink too much, smoke too much, indulge myself with pork and foie gras and all the excesses of the palate, as well as of the night.

  “At least I’ll have a good death,” I say. “I’ll die happy.”

  “Asshole.”

  MY FATHER’S DEAT HIS THE IDEAL MATHEMATICAL SOLUTION TO THE EQUATION WE ARE SO GENEROUSLY AND AWKWARDLY TRYING to solve. It would balance out the fundamental inequality governing the relationships around the table. He is the unknown factor that complicates all our algebraic calculations. How do we restore the equitable relationship between my father, who is expanding, and my mother, who is shrinking as she lives my father’s death? How can we ensure they both live equally happily? Can we invent a sort of game in which no one loses? Our father dies, we cry for a while—not for long, though, because we’ve all been expecting his death, even hoping for it, invoking it, albeit timidly, in some far-off‚ future. Then we move on to the next equation. Our mother. The Medicals can devote themselves to her long survival, and the Buddhists can lead her towards a joyful end. When there is only one variable in the equation, two apparently contradictory approaches are more easily reconciled.

  And so the conclusion is reached. It’s both simple and obvious. For everyone’s good, including his own, my father must die.

  I don’t know if I’m drifting, rudderless, or if I’ve had too much to drink, or whether I really want my father to die. I can’t stand to see him cry, this man who is known to me and is my father. A father humiliated by his illness, crying, is a man stripped of his essential being, no longer a father, simply a man like any other. And, worse, a naked man. Imagine a father, naked and crying. But I would prefer that to what he makes me feel now—anger, rejection, which is to say hatred. But that’s no reason to kill him. I’m splashing around in the wine of my own contradictions.

  As a child I prayed to see him cry, to see him brought low, bent in humiliation as I had been bent under his orders and condemnations, not to mention blows and insults. I would have given anything for him to be normal, like I was, proud or ashamed didn’t matter, but just to show some emotion. If he was proud of me and my success at school, or in the theatre, which fed his own pride, he never said a word to me about it. It’s my mother who tells me now how proudly and approvingly he spoke of me, how he tried to stammer it out to me before his neurons stopped communicating and brutally extinguished his retroactive congratulations. I was his son, of course I would be successful. It was as though long before they discovered DNA and cracked the genome code he’d already worked out his own theory of genetic inheritance, a theory that applied only to success, it seemed, because when my brother was sick he always referred to him, when speaking to my mother, as “your son,” and never came to a play of mine that the critics panned.

  Why did I bring up Stalin? Because I was living under the dull, daily threat of dictatorship at the same time that Stalin was appearing on television. They had the same smile, my father and “the little father of the Soviet nation.” A snowy, black-and-white image, before televisions could deliver a true black: Stalin stood a head taller than all the other henchmen lined up looking martial and severe in their black homburgs. Stalin smiling under his thick moustache. A warm, engaging, confident smile. Looking out over Red Square with its rows of symmetrical regiments pouring through as though from an assembly line. The little father’s tin soldiers, all walking with the same mechanical, chronometric precision. Stalin making a kind of salute by lightly lifting a hand that could just as easily have crushed a skull. To me it looked as though he were patting the head of every child in the world. I can’t remember my father ever patting my head, or holding my hand, or putting a friendly hand on my shoulder. When the troops had filed past, Stalin turned and went back into his apartment in the Kremlin with his respectful model family. His children waited for a tiny, vague signal that told them it was time to laugh, or play, or run. The same was true for us at the dinner table, or when my father came into a room and interrupted one of our games. All activity stopped as we waited for him to send us to our rooms, or to go about in silence, which meant we could get back to what we were doing.

  One of the Medicals asks me where Dad is. I tell him, a bit sharply, I suppose, but his curiosity exasperates me. It’s merely a kind of clinical interest. Isabelle touches my arm, letting me know that I’ve overstepped the bounds of civility.

  I’m thirsty. I reach for a bottle. Bernard cries out when he sees my arm stretch uncertainly towards his precious vintage wine, and he swears when I tip the bottle over. I laugh sheepishly, as though to excuse myself without admitting that I’ve done anything wrong. I feel like my father. Slight loss of control, no loss of pride.

  “You’re behaving like Dad when he does something stupid.”

  Like Dad? That’s the only comparison I’ve never been able to stand. As I once explained to Mother, my first wife left me because, she said, I was too much like my father. It was partly true, but it was hard for my mother to hear, unfair of me to place such a heavy burden on her shoulders. To tell a wife that your life is ruined because you’re too much like her husband. How stupid could I have been? She said, “You’re exaggerating,” and then all I heard was the empty buzz of the phone line. She’d hung up on me.

  “Yes,” I say. “Like Dad, Bernard, I’m overdoing it as usual…”

  I indulge myself a bit. I like yanking Bernard’s chain once in a while, making him face up to the stupendous absurdity of this life he is so awkwardly attempting to transcribe into equations. I’m old, Bernard, and part of being old is overdoing a few things, just as it is part of being young. Too much ice cream when you’re a child, too much wine sixty years later. What should we do, forbid children to eat ice cream and doting old men to drink wine? Bernard blusters. Lise takes his side, blustering along with him. As far as they’re concerned I’m being irresponsible. If I want to waste my life it’s my business, but it’s too bad for poor Isabelle, who in a few years will find herself wiping wine and grease and gravy off my chin. They don’t say that, exactly, but it’s understood. My mother refuses to be drawn into the discussion.

  “What do you think of the election campaign?” she asks.

  IN 1956, my father was selling cars. We hadn’t climbed a single rung up the social ladder, but we were no longer drinking powdered milk. We had roast beef on Sundays, and my father wore a suit and tie to work every weekday. On Saturdays, however, when he did the shopping, he dressed like a slob. People don’t really change. The living-room furniture was new. It was more comfortable than the old furniture, but we weren’t allowed to sit on it except when we had company. On the walls were reproductions of great works of art I’d never seen before but that matched the colour of the fabric on the sofa and the wall-to-wall carpet. We had a television.

  Except on Saturdays, when he dragged his noisy sandals down the supermarket aisles, we were a respectable family. I went to college, my mother wore pretty hats on Sunday, the flowers and shrubs my father had planted around the house were the envy of all the neighbours, who contented themselves with keeping their l
awns green and nicely trimmed. He knew all that, knew he was envied, that he was accumulating points as if he were in a game, and he didn’t bother trying to hide it. He revelled in his victories and advances, the apple tree that burst into generous bloom every spring, the client who couldn’t afford a car but bought one anyway. He would call our anglophone neighbour over to show him how well his fertilizer was working. The neighbour, a timid man but an environmentalist before it became fashionable, would agree. We all bore witness to his successes, although we didn’t really understand them. He triumphed. At the time I was getting 100 per cent in all my subjects at school; my mother crowed ecstatically but my father never said a word. I was his son, how could I come anywhere but first in class? My only merit, it seemed, was in being his son.

  “ANYWAY, YOU’VE always looked down your nose at Dad and the family. The minute you became known as an actor… So we can do without your lectures, thank you very much…”

  “I’m not lecturing, Bernard, I’m telling you how I feel.”

  Isabelle presses my arm again. In these circumstances she is smarter and more sensitive than I am. I’m a bit like an American. I charge into the fray and worry about the damage later. Isabelle is more African—she hears only what she needs to hear. In contemplating a lake, she knows that the pebble disturbs only the surface of the water, not the lake itself. It sinks without trace into the bottom mud, which is the lake’s memory. And she’s right. I should be more like Mother, who asks again what we all think of the election campaign, and questions me about my last trip to France, casting a worried look in Bernard’s direction, knowing that if there is a silence Bernard will fill it with more talk about our father. Be more like Mother. Beat a dignified retreat. I stand up. Another present is announced. Another baby cries.

  HE’S LYING half-naked on the quilt, having taken off the shirt and his undershirt, unbuttoned his trousers and pulled them down around his knees. He’s breathing heavily. When he sees me come in, he turns his head into his pillow. There’s nothing sadder or more disgusting than an old man lying like an abandoned doll on a bed, all his secret diminishments exposed. Or more pitiful. I don’t know how the jovial Haitian woman who comes in once a week to give him his bath can stand it. Much less how she can wash twenty people like him every week.

  I should undress him and get him into bed so that he’ll be more comfortable. That’s what the filial piety I do not feel would have me do. I have no intention of doing any such thing. I should at least cover him, maybe take off his shoes. I should go through the motions, not for him or the others, but for myself. So that I don’t have to look at his flaccid body, splayed out so hideously on the bed. And what about him? How does even a passive racist like him feel about having those plump black hands washing and rinsing him, squeezing his flesh, running over his body? How does he meet her foreigner’s gaze? What does he think as she washes his ears? How does he hide his sex? Is he completely naked in the bathtub? I can’t even bring myself to imagine it. The bit of nudity I might discern in the shadows not only disturbs me, the whole thing is indecent. His jacket has been tossed onto a chair. I pick it up with the tips of my fingers and cover him with it, careful not to touch his naked body.

  He might go to sleep.

  In the family room the children are comparing their presents and the adults have fallen into my mother’s trap. They’re discussing the electoral campaign. My mother isn’t really following the conversation, but she knows that when we talk about politics we are more likely to argue only about little things. She asks me what my father is doing. I say he’s sleeping. She produces a smile meant to say, No wonder, he’s eaten so much and drunk so much. She feels better knowing that he’s asleep. It distances him.

  “What about you, what do you think about the elections?”

  “Mother, you know I’m not interested in politics.”

  “But you’re an artist, you should be interested in politics. Many artists have spoken up…”

  Yes, I know, Mother. But not me. I have nothing to say because I believe in so few things. She lowers her head to hide her disappointment. She goes up and down the street distributing pamphlets for the Parti Québécois, she never misses a chance to demonstrate against the war in Iraq or some other injustice. To make her feel better, I eat some of the orange mousse.

  VENISE-EN-QUÉBEC IS A VILLAGE ON MISSISQUOI BAY FILLED WITH VACATIONERS WHO CAN’T AFFORD TO GO ANYWHERE ELSE. From here you can see across to the United States and imagine how rich everyone is over there. I’m thirteen, but I know that Venice is a city in Italy with a lot of canals, governed by doges wearing funny cone-shaped hats. In Grolier’s Encyclopedia there is a photograph of the Piazza San Marco, showing the cathedral and pigeons swooping over the heads of visitors. I remember thinking about all the pigeon shit that must have been landing on all those well-dressed visitors. My parents are becoming increasingly worried about me, an adolescent who thinks about bombarding pigeons. But that’s only a passing thought; in fact, I also think about cathedrals and history and the concept of a republic. Which is odd for a kid my age. I detect in my parents a mixture of pride in my academic achievements and dread, especially from my mother, when at supper my father says something I don’t agree with. I think I said that Venice enjoyed a democracy that was far superior to that of Quebec.

  I’m thirteen. This would be 1956. I’m the only kid in our neighbourhood who goes to college.

  I’m not sure why my father invites me to go eel fishing with him. It’s election day. He’s already been to vote for Duplessis, because Duplessis is going to win and is not an intellectual, like Lapalme, who likes France and reads books. Duplessis is for Quebec. I’m a compulsive and opinionated reader myself. I may not understand everything I read, but I read only books from France. Plays, mostly: all of Molière, Racine, Corneille, but I have also discovered Ionesco and such poets as Prévert, Aragon and especially Éluard. I’m definitely not in Duplessis’s and my father’s camp. It’s the only political statement I’ll ever make in my life.

  Lake Champlain is stormy, with a grey sky that promises rain. That doesn’t bother my father, who always defies the elements, as the cliché has it. Quebec’s Venice doesn’t exactly live up to its name. Shacks—which their owners call cottages—covered with asbestos shingles, a few snack bars, tiny houses scattered in the sparse trees like splashes of red and green paint, popular music blaring out from everywhere—in short, a whirlwind of sound and colour and shapes, an ugly, deafening chaos. I think of the Venice in the encyclopedia. My father thinks it’s idiotic of me to be surprised by the lack of similarity between Venise-en-Québec and Venice of Italy. He tells me not to talk so much, I’m scaring the fish.

  I’ve never seen an eel, except in photographs in the encyclopedia. Before we left, my mother said defiantly that there was no way she was going to prepare eels. In our house, my father fishes and my mother cleans the fish and cooks them, obviously, except for trout when we’re on a camping trip. Whether it’s bullheads, with their skins as tough as shoe leather, or perch, which have razor-sharp dorsal fins, or walleyes, with spines sticking up from their backs, my mother wrestles with them while my father reads the newspaper, and later complains when he gets a bone stuck in his teeth.

  Suddenly my line tightens, which is always the beginning of terror for me. This terror apparently delights my father. I remember the stolen walleye. What my father doesn’t understand is that it’s not the fish I’m afraid of, it’s the bawling out, the lecture I get if I don’t set the hook properly and the fish gets away after taking the bait. The ultimate humiliation. He looks at me, smiling like Stalin, as debonair as Duplessis, and begins discussing my line test, or the reel, which I am awkwardly rewinding. His laugh is that of someone tormenting a kitten with a ball of wool—not a warm laugh, but the laugh of a cruel spectator. I feel as though he’s expecting me to fail, as usual, so that he can show me how to improve, he can demonstrate, teach, dominate. I pull a small eel out of the water and leave it flapping on my
line on the bottom of the boat. It twists around like the snake it is, banging against the boat’s hull making what seem to me to be dreadful noises that will scare away all the other fish.

  “Get it off your hook. You’re going to frighten the fish.”

  He’s not laughing now. I grab the slippery thing close to its head and the rest of it wraps itself around my arm. I pull it off with my other hand and it changes arms. I panic. My father sighs, grabs the eel by the tail, swings it in a wide circle and smashes its head against one of the boat’s seats. Satisfied, he rips the hook out of its mouth with a single swift motion. Nothing to it, my boy. You’ll get the hang of it when you’re older. He doesn’t exactly say that, but I can see it in his eyes, in the condescension with which he looks at me. I put my line back in the water without rebaiting the hook. Over the next hour he catches five or six eels, each time showing me how it’s done. Later I think I should have said to him: “Dad, you know that oldest rock, and those pyramids, and your eels, they don’t interest me in the slightest.” But I didn’t say that and I’m glad I didn’t. He wouldn’t have understood that the last thing I wanted was to become a man like him.