A Good Death (10 page)

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.

“Sam, would you like me to beat you at ping-pong?”

“All right, but after that I’ll demolish you at chess.”

DESPITE THE WINDING DOWN OF THE
YEARS I CAN STILL BEAT WILLIAM AT PING
-
PONG, AND DESPITE THE YEARS HE STILL HAS
ahead of him, he always humiliates me at chess.

But this time the ping-pong game doesn’t fit the pattern. I’m more interested in enjoying myself than in defeating my opponent. This is partly because I know I’m a better player than he is. In other circumstances it would be called having a superiority complex. I miss all my slams, which normally are my specialty. Sam laughs mockingly and tempts me with high lobs that look easy, and which I smash one by one into the net. He plays methodically and defensively, the way I play chess. I continue playing an attacking game, slicing the ball or putting backspin on it or hitting it as hard and, I hope, as decisively as possible. I put my faith in aggressiveness and instinct, on my reflexes, as William does when he plays chess. The chess master who is giving him lessons says that when logic settles into his imagination he’ll be a genius. I fall behind, Sam laughs more and more. I miss another slam, an easy one. Sam stops laughing even though he’s never been a humble winner. He needs one more point to beat me once and for all. Ever since we began pummelling each other every Christmas over this wobbly table in this narrow basement, banging our heads on the water pipes that thread through the rafters, ever since Christmas has existed and Sam has been old enough to hold a racquet, he has been waiting for this moment. His first victory. He sets his racquet on the table.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” he says.

“You only need one more point to beat me.”

“You’re not playing seriously. It doesn’t count. It’s like you’re letting me win.”

“Come on, finish the game!”

I want him to have this first win. A Christmas present he’ll always remember.

“Do you love Grandpa?”

Most of all I don’t want to answer that question. “Come on, it’s your serve.”

“Tell me. Do you love Grandpa?”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

He says it without hesitation. His answer thunders across the table at me like an unreturnable slam. He’s defying me now.

“Serve the ball!”

He serves me a soft, easy one, and I flick it back to his corner. Twenty-twenty. I win a point on my spinning serve. He misses his own. I’ve won.

“Okay, you win, but you haven’t answered my question.”

No, my boy, I haven’t answered the question, because… I offer him another chance to beat me. He declines. He has chosen his field, his sport: truth, a curious game that rarely produces winners. Still, I try to beat him at it.

“So, why do you love him?”

I’m hoping for a surprise attack. My opponent was waiting for a backspin, but what I’ve sent is an overhand topspin that hits the table and takes off like a rocket on a downward curve. He returns with a strong, hard backhand that catches me off balance.

“Because he listens to me and doesn’t judge me.”

Okay, his point. But now it’s my turn. I’m not about to let myself be beaten when the subject is my own father.

“Well, Sam, it’s easy to listen when you can’t talk.”

“He can talk, you just don’t understand him. And you still haven’t answered my question.”

Two-love for him. An upset in the making. In any match there’s a point at which you can recover from a strategic error by stepping back and allowing yourself to lose another point in order to improve your position on the field, or you can stay on the attack, throwing caution and restraint to the wind.

“No, I don’t love him.”

“I understand what you mean.”

Now it’s three-love Sam. Choosing his words carefully, he explains to me that he doesn’t love his mother, either. He likes her well enough, but more as you would like someone you knew well, someone with whom you had something in common, to whom you owed something or someone you could count on. He doesn’t for a moment want me to think he’s passing judgement on his mother, on her quality as a mother.

“I’d rather have parents who were older, who had no other life left than that of their children.”

“Why, so you can be free to do whatever idiotic thing comes into your head?”

“No. Christ, you can be a jerk sometimes. How can I explain it? So that I don’t have to be told that you can’t make a living playing chess because chess players don’t have time to learn things like grammar and trigonometry. Do you know who Bobby Fischer is? Well, do you think Bobby Fischer did his homework? No, he worked on his openings.”

And I learn that my father knows how to play chess quite well. No, I’m not learning that, I am remembering how, when I was four or five years old, he plunked me down in front of a piece of wood with little tin soldiers on it and tried, without the slightest success, to teach me the patient yet cunning advance of the pawns, the sneaky strategy of the knights, and the overwhelming power of the queen. I didn’t understand a thing, and he mated me in two moves, the classic trick of fathers who want to impress their children even as they’re humiliating them. Since I’d already been humiliated a hundred times, I decided to loathe the game and take pleasure in disguise and imagination. By which I mean the puppet plays I put on for my brothers and sisters, and declaiming the poems of Rimbaud at school concerts to parents who were shocked to discover that their children were learning things as ridiculous as “A red, U black…” and what’s this about a boat that has had too much to drink, and Ionesco, whom I understood not at all except that the dialogue in
The Bald Soprano
resembled the rare conversations I’d had with my father.

“Anyway, that’s what I mean. When Grandpa was still talking, he asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said, Bobby Fischer, and the next minute we were playing chess. I beat him easily, but he was happy that he’d at least put up a good fight. Can you imagine it? Your father, who has even more pride than I do, smiling after losing a game of chess? Since then we’ve become friends. With my mother it was hopeless. She sort of understood the pawns, but after that, nothing. I beat her in five moves, and you can take it from me, she wasn’t happy about it. Grandma doesn’t know the first thing about chess, not even who Bobby Fischer is. But she cuts out all the accounts of chess matches in the newspapers. I offered to teach her the basic rules, and Grandpa burst out laughing. He looked at me like I was one of his buddies and I would understand why he laughed. Before a tournament, I come here and explain my tactics and strategies to them. They drink tea and listen without understanding a word I say, but they never interrupt and then they ask me to phone them after each match to tell them how I did. Okay, maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that only old people know how to listen. Maybe it’s because they don’t have much of a life of their own that other people’s lives interest them so much. All parents do, though, is talk.”

“And that’s all they do to make you love them, is listen?”

“No, they talk, too, but only to answer questions. And they don’t answer them the same way. It’s like they take more time than parents do, or teachers. They think about things. Maybe they have to go back over their whole lives before they reply, or like they have so many memories and experiences that they know it’s not easy to give answers. I don’t know where all these words are coming from, because I don’t usually talk like this, but believe me, their answers give us our freedom.”

Answers that don’t say no, that invite reflection. I’m discovering parents, especially a father, I’ve never known.

It’s time we went back upstairs and rejoined the tribe, at least for me. I’ve learned a bit about my nephew, which is enough for me. And Isabelle will be looking for me. My father is probably asleep, and that thought I find comforting.

“William, do you really not love your mother?”

“Yes. No. I love her the way anyone loves their mother. But at my age it’s hard to love. No, I love her, but not like I love my grandparents. When I see them, I always feel like it’s for the last time. Don’t you think that makes it easier to love them? And Grandpa seems so happy when I’m around. That makes it easier to love him, for sure. Mom doesn’t make it easy. And neither do I. I don’t give her a lot of chances. Maybe if I thought Mom was going to die, I’d love her more.”