While Leo shouts that Richard is a first-class cheat because he keeps on winning and the others boisterously back him up, Four-Eyes stands, buttons his coat and nods his fucking head at me before leaving.
Richard, who’s sick of all the malarkey about his dumb luck, looks over to the bar and calls out, ‘What’s today’s special?’
According to the waiter, who knows his customers, it’s something light and easily digestible. I raise a hand, order a Duvel to go with it, and hope for the best yet again. Since retiring, I’ve had enough of excessive dinners. My stomach can’t cope and I go for the lighter things on the menu, but I keep getting it wrong and ending up with indigestion from a chicken salad that some twerp in a chef’s hat has drenched in balsamico or some other foreign vinegar. And bam, I’ve fallen for it again. A salmon lasagne. Unbelievable! Surely this is the last thing you’d want to eat between twelve and two? So there I am… burping in the toilet with visions of Four-Eyes every time the strong beer and the so-called light salmon lasagne repeat on me. When I get back from the gents there’s another Duvel on the table. I drink it and then I drink another. With my head spinning and an unsteady hand, I finally say goodbye to my friends, explaining that I still have to go to the butcher’s. ‘The missus wants duck rillettes.’
At home your great-grandmother is still lying on the bedspread with that old, clapped-out body of hers, and still crying. It’s deteriorated into something that’s closer to a soft whimpering and to my not entirely sober ears it sounds almost melodious. In the old days she used to sing along to the operetta music pealing through our modest flat. She was the daughter of a peculiar butcher who had accepted me fairly quickly as a future son-in-law, but could no longer bring himself to trust me once we were actually married. Your great-grandmother had always wanted to be a nightingale of the stage, deploying her lungs in the service of Franz Lehar’s ‘Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiß’ or giving a rendition of something risqué by Offenbach with lots of feathers. But her father had never allowed it. ‘You can make a whore of her yet,’ he snapped at me just a few years after our marriage when the subject came up again over Christmas dinner, where he was tucking into the turkey rissoles daughter-dear had prepared with love, the very first since the wartime shortages. But it turned out to be too late. She already had her arms up to the elbows in suds washing our son’s nappies and shook her head the next day when I suggested she could still go to the conservatory. ‘How would you cope?’ she’d asked and shrugged before I could answer.
I knock on the bedroom door. She’s finally let our cat out of the room and now the creature refuses to budge. I push her out of the way and, holding a plate of toast on which I have painstakingly spread duck rillettes, address the closed door. ‘Come on, you have to eat something.’ The sobbing stops for a moment.
She says, ‘Leave me alone. You have no heart, never have.’ She sounds like someone has forced a wad of fabric into her mouth.
I demand she open the door.
No answer.
‘It can’t go on like this.’
No answer. I hear her sucking in breath for a new round of tears. The cat yowls around my feet, then hooks her claws into my trousers, already angling for the delicatessen on the plate. The all-too-seldom-celebrated poet and once-capable cop just stands there.
‘I’ve got toast with duck rillettes. From the butcher’s on Carnot Straat.’
‘Give it to that filthy cat!’ she shrieks. I clench my fist.
‘I will do if you don’t open this door!’ No answer.
A marriage, dear boy, is an exercise in humiliation till death do us part. What people call ‘living together’ is a many-headed monster. If I strung those moments together, it would look like a cannibal’s trophy. The Hindus understand that too. You should look up their depictions of the goddess Kali some time. She pokes out her red tongue and her blue neck is hung with hollow-eyed skulls that represent the humiliating moments both husband and wife know are best kept private. The only thing that keeps people going is the thought that this union has an unmistakeable purpose: everyone thinks you are part of it. I secretly hated your great-grandmother with a passion, but now I miss her like a typical loner whose life has crumbled away.
‘Here, kitty,’ I say. ‘Mother’s not hungry.’
The cat’s going berserk. She yowls as if she’s going to drop a litter any moment and follows me into the kitchen. Oh, by the way, are you a cat lover? If so, it might be better to skip the next bit. I scrape the meat off the toast and dump it on her saucer. She eats it with relish. I ask if it’s tasty. With a sigh, I plonk myself down. The supermarket vouchers my wife has clipped out of the newspaper are on the table. Ammonia: two for the price of one. Spare ribs on special. Free suntan lotion with the purchase of a deckchair. The washing-up on the worktop is from the day before yesterday. Unheard of. A smell of burnt bacon in the kitchen we haven’t renovated since the sixties, despite your grandfather’s complaints. ‘This is so out of date… How can Mum get anything done in here?’ Nothing doing, money’s money and what works works. The cat has hardly finished her saucer full of the most succulent meat you can buy before she’s started begging and butting my leg again. More, more, more. It’s never enough. Don’t, she’s had enough. And yes, she’s sinking her claws into my trousers again. Meow, meow. Then suddenly she’s sitting on her arse and scratching furiously under her chin. They’re back again: fleas. I reach for my ankle where a stubborn fleabite kept me awake just last week. My wife has resumed her blubbering. Soon she’ll have cried her throat raw. I close the door. The cat won’t stop scratching. I take a bucket out from under the sink and fill it with tepid water. I take an unopened jar of full-cream yogurt and slop two big spoonfuls into a small bowl. ‘Here,’ I say, ‘you bloody fleabag.’
The cat can’t believe her luck and throws herself on the yogurt. The bucket is full. I push the spout out of the way, open the bottom drawer of the cupboard where I keep the gardening tools and pull out my gloves. They’ve hardly been used. Gardening is not for me and since the time she put her back out, it hasn’t appealed to your great-grandmother either. Did you ever meet her? No, you can’t have. Anyway, I pull on the gloves and bend over the cat, who doesn’t look up, of course, lapping and slurping as she is. If she could scratch herself while scoffing food, she would. Gripped by the scruff of the neck, she’s scarcely able to move. She growls, claws the air, then suddenly stiffens with her pupils wide. In a single movement I’ve plunged her deep into the bucket of lukewarm water. She thrashes like mad. Both hands push her deeper. The water goes in all directions. I press her down against the bottom as best I can and wait. Air bubbles rise and burst. I feel my old strength, no longer garnished with rage perhaps, but still. And then it’s like the cat swells up. Immediately afterwards she shoots up out of the water like a rocket, hissing and spluttering like crazy. All my squeezing in vain. Sopping wet, hair on end, she hurls herself against the closed kitchen door like a thing possessed, letting out a growl that no longer sounds like a cat’s. Thump! And again. And bang! Once more. I stare at my wet work gloves.
I hear her calling from the bedroom, ‘What is all that?’
Not a sign of sobbing in her voice. My hand on the doorknob. The cat takes a swipe at my ankle, her claw going through my sock. I make a failed attempt to boot her through the room, then finally open the door. The cat shoots under a wardrobe in the hall, still growling and spitting. An avenging demon has been born. ‘Proud of ourselves, are we?’ I hear her meowing viciously, ‘Very proud.’
That same evening I started writing. The heartburn wasn’t going away and I couldn’t get over Four-Eyes and how he’d kept staring at me. I never finished the manuscript and you can tell from the opening sentences how I was feeling at the time:
Listen to me. I am a legion of voices, most of which you detest, few of which I cherish. I am still breathing—of necessity—but all of you, if you knew this story, would begrudge me every breath I take. And that’s something I understand,
because really knowing someone in the long term is not in your nature and I—unfortunately—am nothing but long-term. It has turned me into an avenging angel, anchored in the wrong, cowardly era. For me it’s truth that counts, for you the opposite: living day to day.
Can you sense my arrogant rage? It’s strange for someone like me, who was already at a ripe old age back then, to get the chance to reread something like this years later and recognize how silly it is. Also important: at that stage I still considered myself a great yet misunderstood poet. I felt that what you could call devils, if you like, had grabbed me by the hair and were dragging me back into history after all those years to show me what I now consider the truth: it never ends. It’s also a fact that back then I felt too superior to even imagine that there wouldn’t be any readers for a book like that or realize that I wouldn’t have been able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion anyway. I had to wait more than twenty years to realize finally that my story is only suitable for one person, and that’s you, my great-grandson. Something else—and I know how grotesque this is, as if an aged prostitute is running through her old tricks one last time in the hope of outwitting her wrinkles, but I have to be honest with you and own up to it. I wasn’t planning on publishing that book under the name Wilfried Wils. I feel what little shame I have left rising, but I won’t back out now. I was going to publish the book under the name Angelo, my secret name, which now, unfortunately, in contrast to the old days, when I often used it as a nom de plume, suits these worn-out old bones like lipstick suits a pig.
It was in a wrought-iron bed, my mother had told me, a bed once made by my grandfather, a child’s bed made to pass the time, that I fell ill. I was wasting away. I was five and hope was fading with every hour that let itself be mustered into days that became weeks and finally months. But not a tear ran down my father’s cheeks. He had always known that his son, his only child, would survive him. My mother, less self-assured, convinced that she was and would remain a victim from the cradle to the grave, was already picturing herself walking beside a tiny coffin with a permanently smoking crater in her chest where her heart had been. The doctor—‘Geerschouwers by name,’ my mother said emphatically, as if a name added even more gravity to this inauspicious story, and by the way, ‘long dead, son, stumbled in the street and broke his neck just like that’—well, the doctor had said that the trouble was inside my head. Meningitis. Whereupon years later my father still added ‘but the man-ain’t-rightus’, as if that daft claim possessed a magic to make people laugh the story off. Meningitis. And it was no laughing matter. It was 1925 and I had one foot in the grave. I can’t remember it at all myself, neither the illness nor the period that preceded it. The first thing I do remember, after four months in coma, is looking up at a strange man and a strange woman, and the woman being unable to stop crying because I’d opened my eyes. The man shouted, ‘Wilfried, Wilfried, you’re alive! You’re cured!’ but I didn’t have the faintest who this Wilfried could be. If my head hadn’t hurt so much I would have turned around to see if somebody behind me was answering to that name with a smile. They called Dr Geerschouwers, afraid that my illness had robbed me of my senses, and he explained that things like this did happen. And so this physician introduced me to my father, my mother and myself. ‘Your name is Wilfried, Will-Freed.’ They had to teach me everything all over again. I had to take them at their word. Believe that this funny man was my father and this bleating sheep my mum. I was five. I repeat: it was 1925. And after a while I worked out that it was better to act like I believed everything they told me. But it took more than a year before I automatically looked up at the sound of my twice-given name. Recognizing my mother and father and addressing them as such was easy, but the name Wilfried always chafed at a spot in my head where there already was a name, maybe one I had chosen myself or one that had been whispered to me during my ‘man-ain’t-rightus’ period. Later, during catechism, I began to suspect that an angel had given me my true name: Angelo. That’s what I’m really called. Deep inside I’m Angelo. Maybe this Angelo was really a demon sent to deceive me, but in that respect, he differed little from the two I was forced to call my parents from the age of five, who also forced me to act like I was called Wilfried. No. No. No. Wilfried doesn’t have a story. Angelo does.
I’m more or less halfway through the moyenne, which is now called secondary school but also translates as average. I am a very average student and the time has come for everyone to see that as an insurmountable problem. My French is useless according to Cyriel Goetschalckx, a teacher who reprimands me with ‘Willlllfrit’ even before I’ve lisped a French sentence to complete ruin. A failing memory makes you jump shamelessly from one thing to the next. It’s all one big movie show and you project your own reminiscences at will. That’s why I can effortlessly convince myself that I sensed how the system works right from the start of the so-called moyenne. Factory and machinery. Cogs that turn. The screw that goes through the teachers’ skulls drills deep into the students’ heads. They sell it as knowledge, but you, my beloved boy, have surely worked out by now that it comes down to acceptance more than anything else. You’re seventeen now, aren’t you? I suspect so, but I’m not sure. The things everyone believes have to be drilled into tender souls as truths. So there I am sitting at my school desk at the Royal Atheneum, like you now, and that’s why I’m telling you this. Maybe you can identify with it. I’m surprised that my fellow students, who act so free in the schoolyard, have no difficulty at all in accepting this so-called learning process. For most of them it goes in automatically and those who can’t keep up are shipped off to trades. There is a blonde boy in my class called Karel who is regularly ridiculed by the teachers because of his parents’ political inclinations. The history teacher in particular can’t resist: ‘Next week we’re going to talk about Germany again, Karel. That will make you happy, won’t it?’ Usually a few idiots laugh along in an attempt to suck up to the teacher. Karel himself remains imperturbable, which I find fascinating. He’s not top of the class, but still gets decent marks. He’s invariably obedient and eager to learn. Never once does he show any signs of feeling humiliated, not even when others laugh in his face because he’s given the correct answer to yet another question. He’ll pop up again later in the story. Anyway, as for myself, I can cope with the material, but I regularly freeze up when I have to reproduce it. I stutter and stammer and of course I get teased for that too. It’s turned into a massive scandal. The last few years I’ve lagged behind and eventually had to repeat a year. I blame it on the declining power of Angelo, the master hypnotist with the inaccessibly poetic heart of a child. Those first years he kept me above the fray and it’s maddening to not know why he’s failing me now, why he can no longer impose his will on others. Could it be that this being inside of me is no longer willing to play the game? That he, even more than Wilfried, understands that the appreciation of others is worthless? The one who calls himself my father reaches for his belt at the sight of my monthly misery, furiously annotated by my teachers: ‘A D for French grammar! An F for folklore! Algebra… it’s a bloody farce!’ He ignores the A-plus for sport. In contrast to the rest, I have no difficulty accepting gymnastics or the gymnastics teacher, who, with a beard like a biblical hero, rules over sweat, the limits of the body and the fear of failure. But that serves a higher purpose, a purpose I keep hidden from everyone else. The body that others always see as awkward is not mine. There is another body inside it, an angel’s body, that needs to be strengthened by training. But that A-plus has no value to my father. French, that’s what matters. A mastery of French would make it possible for me to rise higher and higher on the mechanical wings of acceptance so that I could finally touch down again as a civil servant in the employ of the universally reviled state, made for life, permanently appointed. My father’s belt is figurative, by the way. He never thrashed me, and anyway, a seventeen-year-old is no toddler. As a result his rage immediately collapses into melancholy. He tells me these are difficult times.
It won’t be long before it’s war again. The taxi company where he works as a bookkeeper is on the verge of bankruptcy. The bills are piling up. My mother’s wealthy family have said they can’t keep lending a hand, enough is enough. And to make his suffering complete he has a son no sensible person could be proud of. ‘You’ve had it too easy.’ I can take his anger, but this sighing and groaning, the defeat he accepts without putting up any kind of fight, it’s too much. It makes me suspicious. An outsider would have thought my mother unaffected by her husband’s harping, but I see the red patches on her face, the annoyance. She’s standing at the kitchen door, drying her hands on a tea towel. Her wig looks a little crooked. A year ago a dermatologist recommended she wear her hair short so that the black ointment he’s prescribed, which smells of paraffin oil, can more easily be absorbed by her scalp. She has confided in me that she’s suffering from eczema, but also said it is gradually getting better. She says I needn’t be afraid, she’s still the same person. But the wig stays on her head and is seldom straight because the itch keeps tormenting her, which drives her husband to disgust and despair. When she insists that I immediately drink a glass of warm milk it finally knocks the legs out from under my father’s sad tirade. Everything seems to have been said. For a whole week nothing happens. But just when I’m hoping that my so-called father has convinced himself that he no longer has a son, that he’s given up on me as a lost cause, he informs me that he’s found someone to help me. He’s called Felix Verschaffel and he lives around the corner. Sometimes things just fall into place.
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