A Good Death Read online

  THERE SEEMS not to have been a consensus of opinion on the electoral campaign, so my mother has turned to cooking to restore peace, or at least to make the conversation more orderly, less erratic, something linear that she can follow. Smoked fish. She loves smoked salmon, although it can sometimes be too salty. Trout is drier but less expensive, mackerel has too strong a taste, herring is too rubbery. We listen, nodding from time to time without knowing why, and I ask her if she remembers the eels.

  “Oh, your father loved eel.”

  She puts on her angelic smile, which is both subtle and radiant at the same time, her remembering smile, like the smile of a child looking at a Christmas tree that seems to be lit by magic. She brings up more of her memories. We know most of them. Her close-knit, cultivated family, her heroic father, her legendary grandfather, her cousins who did nothing but read the most erudite of books, the intelligent gardens in which roses were so cleverly arranged they practically grew in the shapes of words. Whenever my mother brings up her family, my father withdraws, sighs deeply, groans. When he can get a word in edgewise he says we all know everything there is to know about her family. It’s almost as though he holds the fact that she has a family against her. His own family has no place in his memories, or in ours. It’s not that he’s ashamed of them, although that’s how it seems. His silence about them is worse, as though they’re not even worth being ashamed of.

  Feigning shyness, my mother asks for a refill of wine, adding that she’s had too much already.

  “What about you?” I ask her. “Do you like eels?”

  “Oh, yes, I love eels, but in those days they weren’t smoked, as they are now. We pan-fried them in wine.”

  Mother, Mother, with your angelic smile, why are you lying to me?

  WE STOP BY the side of the road to eat our sandwiches and drink our cocoa. My father leaves the key in the “on” position so he can listen to the election results on the radio. They’re late coming in. I fall asleep, bored by the announcer’s blah-blah-blah when he has nothing to announce, and tired of the relentless sarcasm from my father about my expertise as an eel fisherman. The same smile on his lips as when he points out a fault or a mistake. The blue-and-white Chrysler is cruising the streets of Montreal when my father wakes me up and announces triumphantly that the little father of the Québécois people has been reelected. The moment has weight, significance, in the history of Quebec society. Now I imagine how many tens or hundreds of thousands of people were at that moment exulting in the success of the Member from Trois-Rivières, like a family exulting in the happiness of the father, which assures the future of the children. I couldn’t care less about any of it. I decidedly did not have a sense of family.

  But I notice my mother’s look of resignation when he deposits his six slimy eels on the kitchen table, as twisted together as a Gorgon. What a horror they are. He hasn’t even said hello to her, although she’s been worried sick because of our late return. He certainly doesn’t notice the disgust and fatigue in her eyes as she looks down on the writhing snakes with blood oozing out of their torn mouths and running across the white top of the formica table.

  “Best to prepare them now while they’re fresh,” he says. “We’ll eat them tomorrow.”

  And he plunks himself in front of the TV to hear the latest news of the elections. My mother tells me to leave my clothes outside my bedroom door because they stink of fish, even though I caught only one. She also says to take a shower or a bath, as though I need to be purified. From the family room, my father shouts out the results and orders a cup of tea. He’s the one who stinks of fish. He loves having physical contact with any animal he kills. Most people, when they take a hook out of a fish’s mouth, hold the fish in one hand, close to the head, or if it’s still wriggling or struggling to get loose, as the eels were, they immobilize them on the bottom of the boat with one foot. Not my father. Even if the fish is already half-dead, he lays it out on his leg or holds it tightly against his chest, as though saying to it: I didn’t just catch you, I own you, I totally control you, you are going to die in my arms. Why is it that some men are so fascinated by violence? Does it prove their own power, or the weakness of the other? What pleasure does a child get from pulling the legs off a frog or torturing a cat? Is it a way of taking one’s place in a world in which one knows nothing about frogs, or cats? Or women, or children?

  “DO YOU remember the eels, Mother?”

  “Oh yes, your father loved them.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh, yes. But I didn’t like cleaning them.”

  “But you did it.”

  “It made your father happy. Luckily he showed me how to do it. He made it look so easy. And the eels were so good.”

  One of the Medicals looks over when I mention eels, which is how conversations develop with us. A word floats between the stacks of plates, cuts through three other conversations and falls into the ear of someone looking for something to talk about.

  “No, he can’t have eels. Too much fat on them. They’re like salmon. Dad cannot eat eels. Sole, maybe, or mullet, but only if they’re grilled or fried in cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oil. And not oil from Greece, either, because you never know where it comes from. I was in Greece one time…”

  Yes, one time, in Greece, when she was so paranoid about being ripped off that she grilled some poor old codger about olive oil for a couple of hours.

  My mother’s no longer listening. She replaces covers on dishes, moves her plate around, nods yes a few times. I try to interrupt the monologue on Greek cuisine, but we’re deep in Santorini, where there are no eels but the blues are divine and the houses are as white in reality as they are on the postcards, and the fried squid, which Dad of course can’t eat, is tender and crisp, like french-fried seafood. When this woman talks about food, you’d never guess she is also a wise, dependable banker. She becomes a frustrated old bat. If she’d been robbed blind in Greece none of us would have minded. A child gives a shout of joy. The adults burst out laughing.

  Our teenage Santa is mooning about the room like a lost soul. The younger children have gone back to their games and the adults to their conversations. He feels peckish and circles the table. There’s no dessert left, he doesn’t like cheese, the salad is wilted. There’s a glass of beer on the table. He isn’t allowed to drink beer but has been drinking it for the past three months with a kind of perplexed pleasure. He takes a mouthful and the bitterness makes him look around for potato chips, which make the absorption of this initiatory liquid less disagreeable.

  “Grandma, do you have any potato chips?”

  My mother pretends not to hear him, but the Banker instantly looks up. She was in the middle of a paean to feta, not just any feta but a certain feta from Thessaloniki that has just the proper sponginess, still milky and at its best after being marinated for hours in extra-virgin olive oil from Kalamata. Perfect with lightly grilled whole-grain pita. Greek bread is too floury. You can’t get real feta in this country, but if you ever do, Mother, hide it from Dad. It’s much too fatty for him.

  “You children,” she says to Sam, “you never think before you speak. Potato chips! Potato chips are not allowed in this house. They’re dangerous for your grandfather. They could kill him.”

  I say not a word. My mother smiles and looks away in embarrassment. William or Sam ignores the Banker, as though she were a bad chess player who’d just advanced a useless pawn. His reply is a carefully thought out, resolute attack. A knight move. No, he says, no, he doesn’t want to kill his grandfather, but his grandfather loves potato chips, and he doesn’t think the little pleasure he derives from a few potatoes and a bit of oil and salt will kill him. My mother looks at him and smiles. Grandpa is dying of old age, he continues, because he is very old. He corrects himself: because he’s older than Grandma. She smiles again, marvelling, obviously, at the mystery of adolescence. For adults, there is no more incomprehensible period in their children’s lives than adolescence.

  Adole
scents are simply older children to whom we grant certain adult liberties so we can avoid confrontations that would remind us of the fact that they are still children. I cannot, for example, imagine a teenager being fascinated by death, that death would be something he or she would dream about, obsess over. But we prematurely confer on them the status of adulthood in order to avoid having to accompany them through their anarchic discovery of life. At least until they do something unusually stupid. Unsure of our own relationship to the real world, we prefer to think that they know everything we do not, which relieves us of the duty of having to teach them anything, explain things to them or forbid them anything. Forbid—a horrible word that no modern parents can use with their children.

  Stalin and my father were true parents. They had all the answers and understood that children must remain children for as long as possible. Submissive, obedient children ease into adolescence for a troubling time, and then slide into adulthood and become good citizens without being aware of it. That’s how adolescence makes men.

  This adolescent looks up and says, simply: “I’ll be right back, Aunt Géraldine.”

  A few seconds later he’s back with two bags of chips, one barbecue and the other natural.

  “I’m Grandpa’s potato-chip pusher,” he says. “Whenever I come to see him I bring a few bags. He hides them under his bed.”

  The Banker blanches and appears to be close to having an apoplectic fit. My mother hides a smile. Sam seems pleased by the stir he is making.

  “Take a few deep breaths, Aunt Géraldine.”

  He laughs brightly, as though suddenly liberated from a great weight. She seems to have been robbed of the power of speech, she who with a wave of her hand regularly transfers tens of millions of dollars from Montreal to Zurich to the Grand Caymans to Panama, and back again by e-mail to Luxembourg. She finally rallies her thoughts.

  “You want to kill your grandfather!”

  “No, I love him as much as you do, but I want him to be happy. Shit, you never understand anything. You’re older than he is.”

  The Banker’s brows furrow threateningly and my mother tells Sam that it doesn’t matter, she knew about the chips because under the bed isn’t a particularly clever place to hide them. Sam beams.

  My sister explodes. “You, too, Mother!”

  “Of course, my dear. I know everything that goes on here because I still do all the housework and shopping. Every now and then, when he’s sleeping, I dump half a bag of chips in the garbage. I leave him a few treasures, let him have his little secrets, God knows there won’t be many more of them. And I’m glad that William lied to me in order to make his grandfather happy.”

  Disconcerted, the Banker goes on about having a sense of responsibility, which my mother also appears to lack. Sometimes you have to refrain from making someone happy no matter how hard it is. Why, just two days ago she herself was eating a gargantuan plate of sauerkraut at the Berlin, she couldn’t finish half of it, you really should go there, Mother, and she thought of Dad, who so loves sausages and pig’s knuckles and smoked pork, but not for an instant did she consider bringing the other half home for him. Sometimes you have to protect people from themselves. Santa hesitates, then asks what he should do when Grandpa asks him for potato chips. Say no, of course, replies the Banker. Bring the chips, I tell him. My mother suggests not saying no, but maybe forgetting to bring them a few times.

  The choice he makes now between my mother, my sister and myself will determine the larger chapters of his life later on, the decisions he’ll make and perhaps, when he’s an old man, ask himself why he made them. So much depends on a few bags of chips smuggled to an old man who is taking too long to die. I was always being told what to do, and I constructed my life around defiance. I’m fully aware that wine makes me fuzzy-headed, turns me in on myself, but I’m fond of Sam, and I’m the only gauge I have of what his future will be like. I cannot imagine it being very different from my own. So I think of him as a Santa Claus who no longer hands out Christmas presents, a boy who has kept the toque even though he doesn’t like hats. Three roads have opened before him, each proposed by an adult whom he respects. It’s no small thing for him, this dilemma; he is tossing two dice, Happiness and Death. As adults we talk about death and pleasure with detachment, with a certain distancing, to use a theatrical term, which allows us the freedom to speak in terms of concepts rather than real suffering. Children don’t have that luxury. They live in the concrete, they know only the here and now. Words do not have hidden meanings, they’re as full and round and perfect as billiard balls. To them, words are like fragmentation bombs. They explode in our faces. Sam is discovering that love can kill and cruelty can be kindness, that life is not simply an endless quest for happiness; sometimes you have to live with pain and sorrow, and it may even be that we have a duty to keep people alive who are in agony or despair. Fine, then; he’s not an idiot and he knows that potato chips won’t kill his grandfather. The knowledge reassures him slightly, but not completely.

  My mother stands up as we clear the table for the third time. In a voice she imagines to be resolute, she advises Santa to do what his instinct tells him to do—act according to his feelings. Poor kid. He doesn’t want that kind of freedom in a world he doesn’t understand, a world of old people and their happiness or their death. He prefers the Banker’s ban, or my own permissiveness. He feels comfortable with either. We represent, for now, the two poles of his life. No. Yes. My mother doesn’t want him to take chips to his grandfather, but she sacrifices this principle, she thinks, to that of making the child happy. Her affection for him has drawn her astray; it makes her grant him the intelligence she thinks he already possesses. Choose, decide, change, evolve—this is the complex, dark rhythm of intelligence whose travelling companion is feeling. Sam sits in my father’s chair to catch his breath, to give himself time to think, as though it’s easier to come to a decision sitting down than standing. My mother goes on about the beauty of youth, its generosity, saying what every real mother says: You thought you were doing the right thing, and that’s what counts.

  But no, that’s not true, William thinks. If doing the right thing means killing him, then he doesn’t want to do the right thing. He doesn’t say that, but that’s the thought that’s tormenting him. What will he retain of those three choices, the ones that determine the book of his life from now on? He’s fourteen, or thirteen, I forget which, and his life is taking on a definite shape. Submission to facts and logic, or the senseless search for happiness, or a sort of self-indulgence that navigates between the two. Those are the unanswerable questions he will ask himself when he leaves here. I’ve been watching him, and I know that like my mother, he has shrunk. His shoulders have become stooped, he looks vaguely around at nothing in particular. He’s on the cusp of old age. What’s important is not the choices he’ll make, but that he knows from now on that every gesture is weighted, and that he must think before he acts. A bag of chips has just launched him from childhood into an age in which games and innocence are not allowed, since they are just a nobler form of ignorance. I look at Isabelle, who’s engaged in a passionate discussion with one of my sisters about fabrics. If she is the incarnation for me of lightness and cheerfulness as much as she is of determination and reflection, it’s because she never, not for one instant, has been pushed further than her age, because she lived all the days of her childhood and was only subtly transmuted into the hours of adolescence, then, when the time was right, to the minutes of adulthood. The further we progress, the faster time passes.

  My nephew gets up. As he passes behind my mother he bends and kisses her tightly curled hair so lightly she doesn’t feel it. He smiles faintly. He walks like an adult towards either the gallows or freedom, straight as an arrow, his head thrown back as though to make it easier for the hangman to slip the noose around his neck, or perhaps to have a better view of the roads opening up before him. His shoulders become even straighter when he reaches the gang of kids playing loudly with
their new toys, fighting over them, and he strides through the piles of wrapping paper, flattened boxes, decorative bows and scattered ribbons. The children are still children. They haven’t yet understood that their grandfather is no longer the grandfather they have known all their lives. Only that he walks more slowly and doesn’t talk so much.

  Santa takes off his toque, which now seems a ridiculous thing to be wearing, and speaks in a low voice. Five or six of the younger children also lower their voices and begin methodically picking up papers and organizing toys, with the long faces of those who have been caught red-handed in an act of criminal thoughtlessness, which in the eyes of adults is the worst crime a child can commit. A bit of order and silence in this joyous chaos and continuous noise is what the new adult seems to have decreed. What did he say that put such a quick end to the celebrations? Grandpa is sick, probably, if he doesn’t sleep he’ll die, be quiet, stop shouting, and Grandma is tired, we have to tidy everything up. The children carry out his orders like a battalion of servants. A few parents notice, including Santa’s mother, who says sharply: “It’s Christmas. Children are allowed to enjoy themselves…”

  Her son looks at her as though she is a war criminal.

  “You want to kill your father?”

  I pour myself more of the wine I’ve already had enough of. Santa’s mother tells him to take a few deep breaths, her attempt at humour. He doesn’t understand her lightness, her devil-may-care attitude. I stand up, a little shakily, under the anxious gaze of Isabelle, who, I sense, takes a motherly interest in my slow progress between the chairs and the children and the piles of paper. When I reach William I pick up the Santa Claus hat that he’s dropped and put it on my head.