Authors: Michel Laub
My favorite drink used to be whisky. At one time it was vodka. And I went through a lot of different cocktail phases: Bloody Mary, dry Martini, mojito. Over the years, I developed a particular intolerance for champagne. I like beer, but not in large quantities. I was never keen on liqueurs. The same goes for any drink that tastes like syrup, Campari or Underberg for example, or drinks made from aniseed: I have a particular intolerance for anything that tastes of aniseed.
Wine is good. I haven’t drunk Steinhäger in ages. I’m not a fan of straight rum. And I rarely drink
cachaça
. I like cognac. Gin. Bourbon. Pisco. Punch. Sangria. Sake. Tequila. Port wine. Single malt. Hi-fi. Mint julep. Sea breeze. White Russian. B52. Jumping monkey. Alexander. Sex on the beach. Piña colada.
The first sign that you have a drinking problem is the fact that half of your conversations revolve around the subject, and 90 percent of those conversations revolve around the fact that you no longer drink as much as you did, and you can spend years saying that, yes, you did go through a really rough patch but you’ve sorted yourself out now and you go to bed early and you’ve taken up sport, and how dangerous it is to drive around the way you used to do, and you really thought you’d never reach forty if you carried on like that, and you say this in the same tone of voice as those people who always have some tale to tell about an incident in a bathroom or in the gutter or at a birthday party where you astonished everyone by walking through a glass door and emerging with just a tiny cut on your nose, but when you’ve been married three times and are just about to leave your third wife it’s really not that funny anymore.
I woke up with a stiff neck and in broad daylight. It wasn’t until after seven o’clock that I realized I’d spent
the whole night in the park. The envelope containing the results of my father’s tests was still intact, and at a moment like that you don’t think about turning over and sleeping a little longer or getting up and heading for a newspaper stand or a café where you can order a coffee and give instructions on when exactly your toast should be removed from the grill. You don’t think about anything, you just need to carry out those tasks one by one, each bite, each sip, taking care not to burn your tongue, the visit to the toilet to wash your face, the bill paid with your debit card, and two years later I know that the instant I opened my eyes that day things had already changed, it was the first morning I’d woken up with an awareness that I had responsibilities, how my father would spend his days and who would look after him.
My father started writing his memoirs immediately after finding out that he had Alzheimer’s. I never asked him why, not just because I didn’t want to interfere in such a healthy activity for someone in his position, but because, given the way he wrote and what he wrote, its significance was fairly obvious.
I had already noticed her at the beach. I asked her: Doesn’t your family usually holiday in Capão? Where are you staying? Where do you sit on the beach? I enjoy swimming in the sea and in the heated pool too. At the same time, I was waiting for the next piece of music to begin. When it did I would ask her to dance. It was dark in the hall. In the far corner, the organizers had hung a spinning, glittering globe. I knew half the people there. They knew me too, I think. Everyone was looking at me. Men had to wear a tie in those days. There wasn’t a man in the room who wasn’t wearing a tie
.
Perhaps my father thought of it as a kind of exercise for the brain, the equivalent of a crossword, each sentence helping to prolong his memory of things, like taking notes in class which, when you study them later, become everything the teacher said, but I don’t really believe that. That’s no reason to write a book of memoirs, knowing that in the future an illness will prevent you reading it, unless you’ve reached the point my grandfather reached when he wrote his.
My father spoke about my grandfather’s death only once, after the fight we had when I was thirteen, but that was enough for me to imagine what it must have been like for him to open that study door when he was fourteen, the moment before he took a step and went over to the desk. I never asked him what was on the desk, papers, pens, or if my grandfather had left a note or taken the trouble to cover the carpet with something or to position himself so that his blood wouldn’t spatter the wall, and if they had to get a decorator in afterward and agree on a price and pretend that the stain had been caused by an accident at a party, someone tripping and spilling their glass of wine, and that no one was hurt or found their life changed for ever.
I imagine my father when he was fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, his days divided between school and the shop, the silent suppers with my grandmother, his course in business studies, a few friends, a few girlfriends, and the dance where he met my mother. As he got to know my mother better, I can’t believe that the Sunday morning when my grandfather died didn’t
cast a shadow over their relationship. Not just in the way one would expect, the inevitability of that ending when one considers the life my grandfather had known, his memoirs, and forgive me for returning yet again to the subject and mentioning that word
Auschwitz
yet again, and yet again evoking its meaning, but also as regards their future together.
Forgive me if I say again that Auschwitz helps to justify what my grandfather did, if I find it easier to blame Auschwitz than to accept what my grandfather did, if I feel more comfortable continuing to list the horrors of Auschwitz, because I have a sense that everyone’s rather tired of hearing about that, and the number of Auschwitz survivors who ended up exactly like Primo Levi and my grandfather, I once read a long report on the subject, someone in Mexico, someone in Switzerland, in Canada, in South Africa, and in Israel, a brotherhood of ninety-year-old gentlemen who lived alone in a room in some boardinghouse, an epidemic of ninety-year-old gentlemen in a city and in a country and in a world where they knew no one and where no one remembered anything anymore, and forgive
me if thinking about this is simpler than indulging in an obvious exercise: imagining that my grandfather didn’t do what he did just because of Primo Levi and those other gentlemen, or because he was like Primo Levi and those other gentlemen, or because he didn’t know how to avoid ending up like them, but for some reason closely bound up with my father.
In thirty years’ time it will be almost impossible to find anyone who was imprisoned in Auschwitz.
In sixty years’ time it will be very hard to find the son of anyone who was imprisoned in Auschwitz.
In three or four generations the name Auschwitz will have about as much importance as the names Majdanek, Sobibor and Belzec have today.
Does anyone remember now whether it was eighty or eighty thousand people who died in Majdanek,
two hundred or two hundred thousand in Sobibor, five hundred or five hundred thousand in Belzec? Does it make any difference thinking in numerical terms, about the fact that Auschwitz and the other camps modeled on Auschwitz killed nearly six million Jews? Did it matter to my father that not only six million Jews were killed, but twenty million other people, if you include Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, common criminals, prisoners of war, Muslims, atheists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses? Or that it wasn’t in fact just twenty million, but seventy million if you take into account all the other war casualties, the English, Russian, French, Polish, Chinese, American, Greek, Belgian, Spanish, Ukrainian and Swedish, and, yes, even the Japanese, Italians and Germans who died, all of whose deaths were a direct and indirect consequence of the actions of those who built Auschwitz? What did any of that mean to my father? Did it justify the fact that my grandfather did what he did without for a moment considering him or what his life would be like from then on, the burden he would have to carry with him ever after?
My father grew up as my grandfather’s son, and I won’t bother repeating the arguments offered by medicine and psychology and culture that prove how harmful such a model can be, the father figure who did what he did, who discarded his son in the way he did, and I imagine how even the simplest of things must have weighed on my father, school and the shop, the silent suppers with my grandmother, his course in business studies, a few friends, a few girlfriends and the dance where he met my mother, the weight of leaving that dance thinking about her, the first time he phoned her and arranged to go to the cinema and picked her up at her house and held her hand and met her family and gradually grew close enough to discuss the possibility of me being born of that union a few years later.
I imagine what my father felt when he was at the hospital, when my mother was in labor, if it was any different for him than for any other father, if he had to make a special effort to play the role, put on the words and the gestures, the pretense at commitment
and support, the external displays of affection, the external embraces, the external smile, not to mention the fact that he was perhaps thinking about my grandfather and waking each day with the fear that he might repeat what my grandfather had done, and looking at me each day thinking that I might become what he was if he became what my grandfather was.
I have been the person I am from very early on, and I wonder if it makes any sense to keep mentioning Auschwitz in this story. But if it doesn’t make any sense to blame Auschwitz for what happened to my grandfather and consequently what happened to my father, how can I make a connection between all of that and the fact that I never again spoke to João? Less than a year after we became friends, I was capable of writing him a note about his mother’s death, and of using his mother’s death to avoid having a physical confrontation with him, because having a physical confrontation would be yet another attack on his integrity, a repetition of what I did on his birthday, because in a fight you don’t think so very differently from when you allow someone to fall flat on his back
while the other guests are all singing “Happy Birthday,” the intention is the same, the result is the same if all goes to plan, if I managed to hit him during the fight, if in front of the whole of the eighth grade I managed to land a punch on him or knock him down and kick and stamp and spit in his face to the point where he would never get up again.
I wrote my last note about the death of João’s mother, and went home and stole the bottle of whisky from the cupboard, and locked myself in my room and sat on the bed, and took a deep breath before taking my first swallow, knowing that I would never again say so much as hello to João. I would walk down the corridors averting my face from his, and for the rest of my life I would never again have a conversation in which I mentioned his name, because that would be a reminder of what I was capable of doing to him not just once but over and over again. How could the impact of that discovery be mitigated or justified by what I had recently learned about Auschwitz? Because even though Auschwitz was considered to be the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, and that
includes the millions of people who have died in wars and massacres and under all kinds of regimes, a mere bureaucratic statistical account of the victims who disappeared all that time ago, even my grandfather, and even my father indirectly, not one of those victims was anywhere near as important to me as João was when I was fourteen.
It was around then that I started to drink, and I could even list the things I ruined because of that in the years that followed. A job, because I couldn’t wake up early enough. A car, which I wrote off in an accident and in which the guy I was giving a lift to fractured his arm. My first two marriages, which in one way or another ended because of that.
My first wife was from Porto Alegre, and we lived in her apartment before I moved to São Paulo. I hadn’t even finished my journalism degree when I received an invitation to work for a magazine. She was a psychologist and had already built up a practice and, right from the start, we knew that it was highly unlikely
that she would move to São Paulo, as unlikely as my return to a city where I would soon have no friends and nothing to do, and then it was just a matter of time before I began to rehearse in my head the inevitable conversation, the holiday weekend when I grew tired of hiding the fact that I’d already met the woman who would become my second wife.
On that holiday weekend I told her everything, immediately after I woke up, in Porto Alegre. I was due to go back to São Paulo that evening. On holidays we spent the mornings in bed. My first wife used to read the newspaper with me. She thought that because I was a journalist I would enjoy discussing the different sections, the opinion pieces and the classifieds. We used to have lunch at home, she liked cooking, and my flight was nearly always in the late afternoon, because the next day I had to be at work, and at around five o’clock, she would take me to the airport and I always used to imagine what the last time would be like, if she would still give me a lift, if there would be a farewell embrace or kiss, in the lobby or next to the sign for domestic flights, or if I would leave without looking back and
take the stairs so as to reach the street more quickly and hail a taxi while she stared at the closed door and the empty apartment and the unmade bed and only then would she shrink into herself and take a deep breath and close her eyes and then somehow subside into an agony that overwhelmed every part of her body.
I broke the news to her as objectively as I could, and although I spoke about sadness and sorrow and guilt, what I remember most vividly is a shameful feeling of relief, and of all the things I learned from the years I spent with my first wife, that is, the lessons that a first relationship always teaches you, the first time a woman says she loves you, the first time you accept that and how you deal with it, and how you cope with the endless problems it brings, the way you speak, the way you dress, how selfish, inconsiderate, lying and manipulative you are, how unfaithful, immature and untrustworthy you are, both emotionally and as regards ordinary domestic matters, all of which only compounds the sense of oppression felt by your partner, in short, of all the things I learned in those years when I was ceaselessly accused and judged and condemned by my first wife, for being the way I was and always would
be because of my lack of effort and commitment to her, the most important thing is the certainty that I made the right decision on that holiday morning.