Authors: Michel Laub
João couldn’t say anything about the notes, just as I couldn’t say anything about the drawings of Hitler, because he wouldn’t want to talk about his mother in public, just as I wouldn’t talk about my grandfather. It’s easy enough to know this, it’s simply a matter of putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, João seeing the notes for the first time, and on one of the notes,
the gravediggers open up your mother’s coffin every day and screw her skeleton
, I even attempted a drawing showing a raised tombstone, five men dressed in black, four standing and looking down and, inside the grave, a fifth man with the eyes and ears and smile of a devil, and I imagine that João stopped making or commissioning or encouraging whoever it was to produce those drawings of Hitler because of that devil with his legs astride a skeleton, which was all that remained of João’s mother, nothing else, just that drawing on a crumpled sheet of paper from an exercise book, no photograph because João’s father had decided to throw them all away, no story, and her name never spoken
at home, and João’s father who never married again and never had a girlfriend and never again considered having more children because all those things would remind him of those final months, João’s mother in bed and the painkillers that no longer worked, and I could never forget the expression on his face as he told me that story when I was thirteen, João’s father asking me, do you know what it is to feel pain, do you know what it is to spend the whole day screaming in agony, you did what you did to my son and never even thought that there are people who spend months screaming in agony because there isn’t enough morphine in the world to relieve their pain, and it was then that João’s mother took the initiative, a bottle of painkillers too many, an hour too long left alone, a minute too long before João’s father opened the door and spoke to her and realized that something was wrong and then there was nothing more to be done.
There are various stages in any diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. First there’s a straightforward consultation, during which the doctor asks the patient about any memory lapses, if he smokes or drinks, if he’s on medication, if he’s had any serious illnesses or undergone treatment or surgery in recent years. The doctor takes the patient’s pulse, measures his blood pressure, arranges for him to have clinical tests for orientation and language, as well as CT and MRI scans, a dose of thyroid hormones, as well as calcium, phosphorus and vitamin B supplements, he also recommends having PET and SPECT scans, a series of procedures intended to exclude other possible causes of memory lapses, such as stress, dementia, arteriosclerosis, depression or a tumor.
The majority of Alzheimer’s patients are aged eighty or over. My father belongs to the 3 percent or so aged
between sixty and seventy-five, and to the minority whose symptoms were diagnosed at a relatively early stage. At that point, it’s possible to slow the pace of the disease with medication, whose technical function is to inhibit acetylcholinesterase, and by maintaining low levels of glycemia and cholesterol and doing regular exercises for the brain: sudoku, crossword puzzles, asking the patient what he’s just read in the newspaper and what he did or didn’t do that day.
One often hears of patients making travel plans, reestablishing contact with relatives they’ve lost touch with, becoming wiser, more adaptable and more tolerant, and being as kind as possible to as many dear friends as possible. The first thing my father did was to arrange matters so that no one would be left with any nasty surprises later on. He updated me on his financial affairs, what property he owned, how the shops were doing in terms of accounts and share price. He also began keeping a kind of record — which, initially, I thought was just another of his memory exercises — the equivalent of a diary of what he ate for breakfast, how often he went to the toilet, who he
talked to and what that person said, what they were wearing and what time they left.
It would be pointless trying to imagine his reasoning at the time, and although it all seemed a bit morbid, I couldn’t oppose what became my father’s principal distraction: hours spent in his study like my grandfather, a project more or less like my grandfather’s, a memoir of the places my father had been to, the things he’d seen, the people he’d talked to, a selection of the most important facts drawn from more than sixty years of life.
Our family had a house on the beach. It was a big house. Four bedrooms, sitting room, a spacious verandah. A big lawn out front. Most families went to the beach in the morning at around nine o’clock and returned at around one or two o’clock. No one had lunch on the beach. There were no kiosks or people selling popcorn. There was no suntan lotion and the water was much cleaner
.
My father has always liked to swim. In the summer, he’d invite me to go for a stroll with him in the late
afternoon. It’s easy to walk on the firm sand, which feels hard and somehow healthy for your feet, toughening them up. We used to count the number of lifeguard posts, ten there and ten back, then have a swim near where our street met the beach, the warm water and your body being carried gently along by the current, you close your eyes and breathe out when the wave passes. You can feel your muscles when you start swimming crawl or breaststroke, my father breathing more loudly than me, it’s very still after a wave has broken and you can see the sand and the light on the lifeguard post opposite the dunes and next to the patch of grass where a thin, weary horse is grazing, my father looks thin and weary too and his wet hair is slick against his head, the skin on his lips puckered, but he’s smiling and says in a clear voice that it’s been a good day and it’s time to go back.
Back at the house, my father has a shower and then I have a shower after him, and when I come out he’s already preparing the fire, and I sit down beside him and that’s when we have our chat by the barbecue: he starts telling me about his technique of heating up
the coals from underneath, like a pyramid in which, in the midst of all that blackness, you can make out a few glowing red spots that gradually multiply. At that point you add more coal and expose the center, which is now the kind of red-hot heat that won’t flare up when any fat drips onto it, and then he starts talking about the car and the road and the unpaved street, about the faulty electricity meter on the wall and the guttering that needs mending, and that’s when he asks about the brothel, and I tell him everything and I can see the expression of relief on his face, the look of trust that instantly defuses all the doubt and anxiety that had been there at the start, because I’d never known my father to talk so much about so many things as on that night.
After I answer his questions about the brothel, my father tells me that it had been pretty much like that in his day too, a lady he never saw again and whose name he couldn’t remember.
My father told me about the women he’d gone out with before he met my mother, one was studying
architecture and another was from a family who lived close by, but he didn’t describe what they looked like, their hair, skin, height, and as far as I know he never spoke to any of them again.
My father told me that this was a special time for me. Then he asked about senior school and if I’d given any thought to what I’d like to study at university, but that I shouldn’t be in a hurry and he would support me in whatever choice I made, and that I should focus on what I really wanted to study and not worry about money or about whether the entrance exam was easy or difficult or about what characters in TV soaps or in the ads had to say.
It’s a good moment to start thinking about these decisions, he said. My father was worried because I would be changing schools for a second time. It was the end of the second semester of the eighth grade, heralding another period of interviews, evaluations and tests. I could have gone to a school run by Marists, Baptists, Buddhists, Jesuits, Pentecostalists or Umbandistas, Mormons or Seventh-Day Adventists, but at that
point my father wasn’t interested in the school’s religious orientation or teaching methods. This time, he wanted to know why I was so keen to change schools yet again. It was easy enough to come up with the excuses he wanted to hear, telling him that the teachers were weak and favored rote learning, that the head teacher was too rigid and that I didn’t really hit it off with my classmates, because this was better than telling him about the notes and the drawings, about João’s mother and my grandfather.
To talk about João’s mother and about my grandfather today is to return to all the references I absorbed over the years, the films, the photographs, the documents, the first time I read
If This Is a Man
and felt there was really nothing more to be said on the subject. I don’t know how many of those who did write about it had read the book, but I doubt that any of those texts contain anything that Primo Levi had not said already. Adorno wrote that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz, Yehuda Amichai wrote that there could be no more theology after Auschwitz, Hannah Arendt wrote that Auschwitz revealed the existence of a particular kind of evil, and then there
are the books by Bruno Bettelheim, Victor Klemperer, Viktor Frankl, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld, Ruth Klüger, Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, Art Spiegelman and so many, many others, but in a way they couldn’t go beyond what Primo Levi says about his companions in the hut, those who stood in the same line, those who shared the same mug, those who set off into the dark night of 1945 where more than twenty thousand people disappeared without trace on the day before the camp was liberated.
To talk about João’s mother and about my grandfather today is to distort the story by imposing on it an entirely phoney logic, rhetoric and rhythm, like trying to impress an audience by leaving the cruelest, most shocking, most violent scenes until last, the ones that arouse the strongest feelings of identification and pity just before the moment of catharsis, and with time and experience and repeated readings of
If This Is a Man
you learn to do that really well and to reproduce those feelings without really suffering, because you exhaust that suffering the first or second or third time you describe the atrocities, using the grave voice you’ve learned to put on when you say that a million
and a half adults arrived at Auschwitz, and started to work and sleep and eat under the camp’s regime, and it’s worth adding that within a few months those adults weighed something like fifty kilos, or forty, or thirty, and that the camp officials took each and every one of those million and a half adults weighing thirty kilos, and escorted each and every one of those million and a half adults weighing thirty kilos, and opened the door of the gas chamber to each and every one of those million and a half adults weighing thirty kilos, and turned the tap that filled the chamber with gas where each and every one of those million and a half adults was waiting, you can repeat this ad nauseam because you’re never going to feel what you felt when you were fourteen, when you came home after writing the last of those notes about João’s mother and receiving the last of the notes containing a drawing of Hitler, and went into your room and sat down on the bed and for the first time had some notion of what it all meant.
I spent the second semester of the eighth grade at home, not seeing a single friend on the weekend, and although my father never said anything I think he
knew about the bottles of whisky in the cupboard: he couldn’t fail to notice the level slowly going down, a little lower on Friday, still lower on Saturday, and sometimes during the week as well, and it would be somewhat ridiculous to say that I was doing this only because of João’s mother and my grandfather, although there’s no denying their influence on my behavior, me sitting on the bed in my room, knowing I would never again write those notes and never again receive one, and that I would never again speak to João and he would never again speak to me, and that in some way this was one effect of what had happened to his mother and to my grandfather.
Family — group of people who share the house with the man and in doing so crown his desire for continuity and a loving, giving relationship, confirming the good luck he has always enjoyed in life. When living with him the other family members take care that their ideas or attitudes are never incompatible with his, this includes the observance of the most rigorous hygiene procedures in the upkeep of the house and in items such as food and clothing, which includes taking care over foodstuffs and the hygienic treatment of clothing using for the purpose products such as
soap and fabric conditioner as well as detergent for the household china and disinfectant for the floor, using a mop and various cloths to remove dust. The family members should also observe the rules of communal living insofar as it affects the man’s personality, respecting him in his moments of strength and weakness and ensuring that his wishes are respected whenever he chooses to remain alone in his study. The family never disturbs him when he is alone in his study. The family must respect his right, which he can exercise on any day and at any hour and without permission or prior warning, to remain for as long as he likes alone in his study
.
My grandfather lost a brother in Auschwitz, and another brother in Auschwitz, and a third brother in Auschwitz, and his father and his mother in Auschwitz, and his girlfriend of the time in Auschwitz, and at least one cousin and one aunt in Auschwitz, and who knows how many friends in Auschwitz, how many neighbors, how many work colleagues, how many people he would have been quite close to had he not been the only one to survive and set off on a boat for Brazil and spend the rest of his life without ever mentioning any of their names.
At fourteen I sat down on the bed with the bottle of whisky I’d taken from the cupboard knowing that my grandfather had never stopped thinking about Auschwitz. My grandfather went out to buy bread and the newspaper: Auschwitz. My grandfather said good morning to my grandmother: Auschwitz. My grandfather shut himself up in his study knowing that my father was on the other side of the door, his son gaining his adult teeth and growing slightly taller, and you could be there with him when he uses a new word and ends a sentence in a different way, and laughs at something you weren’t expecting him to understand at his age, and looks at you and you see his face when he’s eight and ten and fourteen, but you’re not there because time has sped past and you’ve never known a single moment when you did anything but think about all those names, about each and every one of the people who were with you in the train and in the hut and at the work camp and at every moment during the time you spent in Auschwitz, apart from the day when you were freed.