Authors: Michel Laub
After the fight I had with my father when I was thirteen, I was always drunk whenever I attacked someone physically. My third wife was the first to find this out and that was why the main condition she laid down when she issued her ultimatum was that I should stop drinking. This was the day after I kicked the television, during a relatively calm conversation we had, in which she told me that she wouldn’t stay with me if I continued to behave like that, and that she would leave the apartment at once if she saw me in that state just one more time, and I would normally have let things end like that because that’s what I’d always done until I was forty, and I was in no mood to deal with the situation, because it’s painful to look at your wife, her nose, her right eye and her left eye, her mouth and teeth and
her whole face which you could have struck and disfigured if, at the last moment, you hadn’t diverted the blow and punched the mattress instead, missing her by about a centimeter.
Punching the mattress meant that I didn’t have to take her to the hospital or find myself being taken to the police station, but it didn’t stop me falling limply onto the bed unable to say a word, filled by a torpor that was neither sadness nor guilt: there I was beside my third wife, thinking about what I’d been about to do to her, what I’d been doing to others and myself ever since I was fourteen years old, and I don’t know what would have happened if the fight when I kicked the television hadn’t occurred just before I found out that my father had Alzheimer’s and I received my third wife’s ultimatum, her calm voice saying that I wasn’t fit to be the father of a child.
It’s impossible not to connect those two things: my trip to Porto Alegre and my third wife’s calm voice pointing out to me the glaringly obvious. I talked to my father in his study, but my mother was always
there too and her presence helped keep our minds off the subject, because my father was determined not to let her see how shaken he was, as if she were the one who needed to be consoled and treated with the slightly patronizing air of adults trying to explain something difficult to a child, and all it took was for me to mention the word
Alzheimer’s
for my father to take on that role and act as if the matter were of no immediate concern, and initially we discussed only whether he would need to have more tests done or get a second opinion, and that was when I realized that those steps would be taken one at a time.
At first, my father treated the matter as if it were all merely part of the domestic routine, and I even had the impression that he insisted on my mother behaving as if nothing had happened, and made an effort in her presence to maintain his usual habits, and whenever I phoned my mother, she would say he was just the same, still grumbling, still making that annoying chewing noise and listening to the same radio program every morning. It was as if she and I had convinced ourselves that my father was still the same person, as if each phone call were a kind of renewal
of our license to believe that. It became commonplace for him to repeat a question he had asked two minutes before, to overpay the cleaner or the caretaker, to change mood in the middle of a conversation, but the winter’s afternoon when he would surprise my mother still seemed a long way off, an unfamiliar gesture, a word she had never heard him use in over forty years of marriage, a novelty that announced a still faster rate of change, my father losing a little of what we both thought of as unique to him, then one morning he wakes up and can’t remember the name of a city, and the next whether a particular animal flies or swims or crawls, and the day after, the color of his own car and how you use the accelerator and the brake, and suddenly he doesn’t know how many years he’s been married to my mother, and on that winter’s afternoon, while she’s drinking tea and listening distractedly to the wall clock striking five, she realizes that he has no idea who he is or what he’s doing there.
How long will it be before that day arrives? The day when he can no longer feed himself. Or be able to take a bath without help. And no longer know when it’s time to go to the toilet. And he’ll need to be washed
and dressed and sat in an armchair and put to bed and will spend the time muttering to himself. While no one can say with any certainty when that’s going to happen, it may be that for my father the alarm bell has already sounded, and he knows that it’s time to do what needs to be done and say what needs to be said, and I think that’s why he sent me the first attachment containing his memoir.
It was only the first part, twenty or thirty pages of what I imagine he will continue writing until he’s filled, who knows, a hundred, two hundred pages? Or nine hundred, given that the last half will be incomprehensible? I don’t know if that’s what he intends to do, send me another batch every month or two for me to read and perhaps comment on, because he may want me to say something about it, to understand the message it contains, as he understood the message when he read my grandfather’s notebooks, if either of those memoirs can be said to contain a message.
I cried in the street. In a hotel. On a bus. In a bookshop. In the supermarket. In the park. In a spare parts depot.
In a lift. At a gas station. On a viewing point from which you can see the whole city, but where no one could see me. In the shower, sitting on the floor, while the hot water collected all around me
.
I used to cry out of rage and shame, but I didn’t want to waste any more time talking about it. I’d talked a lot already. Or perhaps I hadn’t, but I think you understood. I wanted to consider the matter closed because it isn’t really a subject that interests you greatly. I think you’d rather know more about that other night. The music being played. The musicians all wearing dinner jackets. The room neither very big nor very small, enough I think to hold about one hundred and fifty people
.
Only Jews could be members of that particular club, but there were no Jewish symbols on the walls. I was wearing a tie, and it felt as if everyone in the room wanted to know if I was going to continue talking to her or turn my back. That was my main concern, what do I do now? She was sitting down. I had to bend my head a little so that she could hear me. I couldn’t speak too loudly into her ear. Or too softly. Or stand too far away. Or too close
.
The band began to play the next tune, and I immediately asked her to dance. She got up and I didn’t know whether to take her hand or to place my hand on her shoulder. I decided not to touch her at all. Only in the middle of the dance floor, where there were more people, did I place my hands on her waist. First one, then the other. I went to the middle of the room because that seemed the polite thing to do. Then she wouldn’t think I was trying to lead her into some dark corner. That was the first time I felt her body. I leaned closer, and we stayed there, moving in circles around the dance floor. I think that lasted about two minutes. The two of us there. I closed my eyes and preferred not to say anything. The next tune started up. Then the next. I spent four or five dances pressed close to her and saying nothing. I think that was the right thing to do and she must have liked it. That was better than pretending to be someone I wasn’t. I was so full of anger about so many things, so full of shame, but, as I said before, I don’t want to talk about that anymore. There comes a point when you get tired of even thinking about it. No one’s life can be taken up by that alone. Look at my life now, look at what’s happening to me. Is it worth going over and over it? Is it worth suffering because of it? Could I really cry about it all these years later? I prefer to remember other things, me in the
middle of the dance floor with her. I wasn’t nervous anymore. The worst was over. I think the whole story began there. At least the story that’s worth telling. The one I want to talk about in this letter, or this book, however you want to call it. Everything I have to say begins there, with me in a dance hall holding your mother in my arms and saying nothing
.
My grandfather’s memoir can be summed up in the phrase
how the world should be
, and you could almost say that my father’s memoir is along the lines of
how things really were
, and since both are, in a way, complementary texts on the same theme, the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places, with my grandfather immobilized by that and my father managing to move on despite it, and since it’s impossible to talk about the two without taking up a position on the subject, the fact is that, right from the start, this text has been a justification for that position.
A father can’t attack his wife in front of their child. He can’t run the risk of attacking her. He can’t even think about doing anything that might make him run
that risk, a glass, a sip, a drop of drink from a bottle locked in a cupboard inside a room with an iron bolt on the door, even the smell of drink within a radius of a few kilometers around the house and the street and the school and anywhere else frequented by your child until he’s strong enough to suspect that something like that might happen in some family somewhere in the world. I don’t know how things would have turned out if I hadn’t convinced myself of that on the journey to and from Porto Alegre, my third wife’s ultimatum getting mixed up with what happened on that journey, but what other subject has had more written about it than a son faced by his dying father?
I wouldn’t want to tell another of those stories about how being in an extreme situation forces us to reevaluate our whole life, as if the prospect of someone close to us dying made us realize how unimportant everything else is. I wouldn’t want to use that journey to Porto Alegre, the conversations I had with my father after I’d told him about the illness, while I accompanied him when he went to have further tests,
and spent the afternoons with him and cooked with him, and made sure he wasn’t left too much alone, two weeks in Porto Alegre and it was just as it used to be when I was fourteen, and we were on the beach or sitting by the barbecue, and he again asked me about my life, and it became natural again for me to confide in him, and describe to him my third wife’s ultimatum, to tell him about the drinking and the fighting and the aggression, my closest kept secret, all the things I was capable of feeling with my father there, precisely because he was there, the places and people who were dying at the very moment I discovered that I was still capable of feeling those things, the last significant conversation we had before that evolving illness made such confessions pointless, and I wouldn’t want to attribute to those days and to that conversation my decision to have a child, but looking back that’s pretty much how things happened.
The nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places has the advantage of making things less painful and more amusing. It’s easy enough to scoff at the idea that someone might have decided to make his
father and himself a kind of present, for both of them to live those final years differently, a father seeing his son give up drinking, give up destroying himself and others, give up his determination to die without having understood anything. Perhaps my father would be there at every stage, my third wife’s pregnancy, the first positive test, the first visit to the doctor, the first medical checks, the first time you hear the baby’s heartbeat, me telling my father what sex the child was and about my third wife’s health and the last weeks before the birth, her difficulties sleeping, the pains in her legs, her breathlessness, and those days in Porto Alegre were enough for me to see that there could be time for all those things, my father alive and conscious when the waters broke and the contractions began and my wife and I set off together to the hospital, my father holding his grandson afterward, one man and his farewell and one man and his re-beginning, the last time my father will say my name and the first time I will say yours.
My third wife has just found out she’s pregnant, and that’s why I’ve said so little about her, her name, her profession, her likes and dislikes.
You’ll have your whole life to get to know her, and that’s why I’ve said little or nothing about what she means to me, something I’ve known ever since the dinner party where we first met.
We didn’t talk much to begin with. Someone at the table made a disparaging remark about the painting with the polar bears, and I laughed, and maybe she liked my laugh, the sound I make, my shoulders shaking or not and my own remark on the innocent but cosmopolitan tastes of our advertising executive host, a joke that might have been deemed inoffensive or entirely inappropriate in the circumstances, and I don’t know at what point I mentioned that I had recently separated from my wife, if I did so spontaneously or in response to someone else who brought the subject up, or if I did so in a tone of voice that didn’t sound too coarse or indifferent or self-congratulatory given the situation, which called for or should call for a degree of restraint or regret, but she clearly approved of my behavior to some degree because we immediately introduced ourselves and started talking, and from then on chance had nothing to do with it.
For my part, I couldn’t explain it either: if it was something she said during that first conversation, if it was her perfume, her clothes, her hair, her hands, the way she held her fork, the way she wiped her mouth before picking up her glass, the way she allowed me to press my knee against hers and how at one point in the evening she looked at me to indicate that she knew I could feel the warmth of her leg, and for a fraction of a second both she and I held our ground instead of averting our gaze or making some ironic, distancing gesture as if that contact were purely accidental, just a fraction of a second, and the person you had been up until then becomes the past, something suddenly clicks, and the supper and the conversation and the days and years that follow become something else, and it was all so quick and delicate and yet unmistakable because in four decades you had never before experienced such a sense of things to come.