Diary of the Fall

by Michel Laub

  30.

  I’ve always hated planes. I loathe everything to do with flying: the taxi to the airport, the zigzag queues, the trays for any metal objects, the boarding tunnel, the smell of jet fuel. I spend days worrying about that moment when your seat suddenly feels light and when the shaking diminishes as the plane gains altitude, and the continuous futile throb of the engines that always seem to be working at full throttle, and the sandwich and the napkin and the plastic and the gassy drinks, and the clothes worn by the cabin crew, and the conversations about sales figures between executives from provincial cities, and the window and the threads of water that turn into a storm on the eternal night during which you’re on board that box of compressed air, me plunging through space toward the dark empty countryside where not even my teeth will be identifiable, five hundred meters, two hundred meters, at a speed impossible to imagine the instant before you close your eyes in readiness for the impact and the explosion.

  31.

  I arrive at Porto Alegre airport alone. My parents no longer live in the same part of town as when I was fourteen. The streets are all tarmacked, and the city is busier, and the cars are new and the people are different and I know hardly any of the shops and bars and restaurants and pharmacies and buildings that seemed to have sprung up at an unstoppable, predatory rate.

  32.

  I rang the buzzer. The lobby is furnished with rugs and a leather sofa. I hadn’t said I was coming, and my mother was waiting for me when the lift door opened. She’d gone with my father to see the doctor and suspected that the doctor would get in touch with me about the tests if anything was wrong, and why else would I be in Porto Alegre at that hour of the day, the sun in Porto Alegre isn’t the same as when I was fourteen, the air in Porto Alegre isn’t the same, the sound of the cars and the birds and the children playing behind a wall somewhere despite the news I had to give to my father and which was there on my mother’s face the moment she saw me.

  33.

  My mother took a step back and I was afraid she might fall, or was on the verge of fainting, because she realized that this was the final moment before everything else began to collapse, her years at my father’s side, the person she had been at my father’s side, and it’s that kind of reaction I’m talking about, the reaction of someone who really cares about another person, whether that person is their father or their best friend or their first or second or third wife, the way you feel and express yourself regardless of the shouting and the possibility that your third wife is about to leave you, the conversation she and I had after that last early-morning argument, when we finally reached our limit, had gone as far as we were capable of going, the plea from my third wife that marked perhaps the final act of my marriage.

  34.

  The plea, the same one I’d been hearing since I was fourteen, at different times and in the mouths of different people, and there’s no point now describing each of those circumstances because they’re no different from what one would normally expect in such cases, and I would again have to speak of people who had left because they couldn’t bear to witness what I did during those almost three decades, and it’s amazing how you can build a career and write books and get married three times and wake up every morning despite what you have repeatedly done during those almost three decades, my third wife’s plea was, of course, for me to stop drinking.

  35.

  In the long term drink slows down your reflexes, but that wasn’t why my third wife made that plea. People who drink are prone to developing gastritis, stomach ulcers, hepatitis, heart problems and high blood pressure, chronic malnutrition, bipolar disorder, cirrhosis of the liver and generalized organ failure, but that wasn’t why she said she would leave if I didn’t listen to her. My third wife knew my history, and I could have said that I was ill and argued that I wasn’t in control of my actions, and alleged that the reason I was still drinking was because of João and the memory of the last day I spoke to him, me sitting in my room with that bottle of whisky, the first and last time that I wept over what I would become from then on, a solitary, silent weeping, with no sense of pride or relief, I could have alleged whatever I liked, but that wasn’t the problem: it wasn’t simply a matter of choice or willpower, but the condition laid down by my third wife if I was to stay with her, knowing that staying would mean going ahead with the idea of us having a child.

  THE DIARY

  1.

  It’s impossible to read my father’s memoir without seeing in it a reflection of my grandfather’s notebooks. Both men decided to devote their final years to the same kind of project, and it would be absurd to suggest that this was pure coincidence, but in certain very specific ways the tone they adopt is utterly different.

  2.

  Did my father have an objective in writing down his memories, sending me a message he had never managed to convey to me in forty years? Ever since I went to see him in Porto Alegre to give him the news about Alzheimer’s I’ve been wondering if such a thing would even be possible after so much time, or after any amount of time, a few words or a whole book intended to change the way a son feels about his father, something a son knows from the moment he’s born, the judgment he silently makes when he’s still so fragile and entirely dependent on his father’s love, and there’s no point in the father spending the rest of his years trying to redeem himself for being distant or indifferent or for deliberately or accidentally withholding his love, because that first memory is what will have lodged in the son’s mind, whatever age he might be.

  3.

  From the age of fourteen on, my father never stopped feeling what he had always felt about my grandfather, and I imagine that the discovery of the notebooks did little to change that, because while my grandfather’s memoir can be summed up in the phrase the world as it should be, which presupposes an opposite idea: the world as it really is, I’m sure my father knew this long before he read it, that for my grandfather the real world meant Auschwitz, and if Auschwitz is the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, which makes it the greatest tragedy of all centuries, given that the twentieth century is considered the most tragic of all, because never have so many people been bombed, shot, hanged, impaled, drowned, butchered or electrocuted before being burned or buried alive, two million in Cambodia, twenty million in the Soviet Union, seventy million in China, hundreds of millions if one includes Angola, Algeria, Armenia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Chechnya, Chile, the Congo, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tibet, Turkey and Vietnam, an accumulation of corpses, a pile reaching up to the sky, the history of the world as nothing but an accumulation of massacres that lie behind every speech, every gesture, every memory, and if Auschwitz is the tragedy that contains in its essence all those other tragedies, it’s also in a way proof of the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places — in the face of which there is nothing one can do or think, no possible deviation from the path my grandfather followed during those years, the same period in which my father was born and grew up, unable ever to change that certain fate.

  4.

  The nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places was a concept freely available to my father. He had more right than anyone to grasp it in order to justify whatever attitude he chose to take during his life: he could have become the worst boss and the worst friend and the worst husband and the worst father because when he was fourteen he came face-to-face with that concept, with my grandfather slumped across the desk, and then there was the fight we had when I decided to change schools and the conversation we had by the barbecue, and the way he reacted to my going to university and my move to São Paulo, my three marriages and the day I told him he had Alzheimer’s, all those things could have been very different, and I wouldn’t be speaking about him now because I would have ju
dged him already, and as was the case with him and my grandfather I would have nothing good to say about him, and as was the case with him and my grandfather I would feel no affection or empathy, and I would never have felt what a son naturally feels about his father without ever having to say or explain anything.

  5.

  I lived with my mother at the time. She didn’t want to move just because of what happened to my father. I didn’t even think about it then, nor did it occur to me that people would move when something like that happened. Because all his things were still there. Ten years later I would still sometimes find something of his. A napkin with his monogram on it. A pen. An ashtray.

  6.

  If I felt what my father had always felt about my grandfather, I wouldn’t have gone to Porto Alegre when I found out he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t have stopped my mother from falling as she stood swaying at the door to their apartment. I wouldn’t have been welcomed by my father as if he already knew everything too, standing there immaculately combed and shaved, wearing a smart shirt and shoes, two o’clock in the afternoon and there he was ready to go out to lunch or to a meeting still smelling of the shaving lotion he’d put on, and all to receive the news that in less than five years he would be technically dead, and had I understood him as little as he did my grandfather, had I known nothing of the deep pool of grief that lay hidden until the fight we had when I was thirteen and he finally stopped using Nazism as an excuse for my grandfather, for what he really felt about my grandfather — something I only realized many years later and only properly grasped very recently, when I had access to my father’s memoir — had my relationship with him been ruined in the way his relationship with my grandfather had, I wouldn’t have flown to Porto Alegre to tell him that he had Alzheimer’s and wouldn’t have realized that this would change not only his life, but mine as well.

  7.

  There are two possible responses to the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places. There is my grandfather’s response, and I think I told my father everything I had to say on that subject when I was thirteen, in the only way I could at that age, and when I think about that fight today and the way my father looked at me during the fight and during our conversation on the day after the fight and the way he behaved subsequently, I realize that he secretly accepted I was right, and had known this for a long time, and that he could have come out with exactly the same words I had used, those I could muster at the time, and until then no one had so bluntly reminded my father that my grandfather had clung to an excuse, made it his alibi, an aura that turned him into a kind of martyr, a saint, despite having ruined my father’s life by following to the letter the predictions contained in the tons of books and thousands of films and endless hours of discussion about the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places and the inevitable fate met by all those who came in contact with it, even when that nonviability bore a name as symbolic and beyond debate as Auschwitz.

  8.

  Is it possible to hate an Auschwitz survivor in the way my father did? Is it permissible to feel such pure hatred, without at any moment falling into the temptation of moderating that feeling because of Auschwitz, without feeling guilty for placing one’s own emotions above something like the memory of Auschwitz?

  9.

  Is it possible that one’s hatred of an Auschwitz survivor could indicate a kind of indifference toward Auschwitz, as if hating the survivor, which can sometimes amount to wishing him ill, meant that you were indifferent to and might even endorse any evil done to him, even if that evil was carried out in Auschwitz?

  10.

  The second possible response to the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places is my father’s. And if there is a way of summing up what a son feels for his father when he learns that his father is ill, I could simply mention that my father didn’t do what my grandfather did, that he appears never even to have thought about it, and at no point did he give any indication that he had even so much as considered the idea that my birth made no difference, that my childhood meant nothing, that my presence could not keep him from succumbing in the way my grandfather succumbed. If I hadn’t felt that gratitude toward him, which convinced me it was possible for a son to feel such a thing for his father, that it was possible for there to be something good about the relationship between son and father, reason enough still to believe in the relationship between son and father, were it not for that I wouldn’t have told him that he had Alzheimer’s, not after the ultimatum my third wife had just given me.

  11.

  I met my third wife at a dinner party. There were ten or fifteen of us sitting around a big table. The house belonged to an advertising executive. Advertising executives still enjoy buying and showing off paintings. I sat down opposite one of those images of polar bears that are supposed to suggest a kind of innocence but with a cosmopolitan touch, and I don’t know whether it was our host’s idea or simply the order in which the guests arrived, because I can’t remember now if I got there early or late, if I was delayed by traffic or a meeting at the end of the day, or if my third wife was delayed because she couldn’t decide what to wear or because of work or because one of her girlfriends rang her up at the last moment, I don’t know if there was some special reason or if it was pure chance that she ended up sitting next to me.

  12.

  At the time I was drinking every night. I drank in the afternoons too, although not always and without it affecting my work too much. My work is perfectly compatible with heavy drinking, and not just because I get up late and work at home and only need two or three hours of concentrated work per day, enough to deliver two or three articles a week and publish two or three books every ten years, but also because at forty, alcohol still doesn’t seriously affect you: contrary to what people think, you can continue to age without any of your organs showing any change in any of the tests you arrange to have done, each time scarcely able to believe that you’ve survived unscathed yet again.

  13.

  Before the age of forty, alcohol is more happy than sad. The nights of a drinker are better than those of a nondrinker. The conversations of a drinker are more amusing than those of a nondrinker. People who drink are more attractive than those who don’t. The feeling of going home on a Wednesday morning when it’s already light and looking at the nondrinkers making their way to an office where they’ll spend nearly two-thirds of the day feeling proud of themselves because at least they’re not like you, sitting in a local café drinking a glass of chocolate milk laced with brandy, the nondrinkers sitting in their cars and thinking you’re just a forty-year-old idiot who hasn’t yet realized he’s not eighteen anymore, and it’s because you know that at the end of the day and the month you’ll be exactly like all of them, having paid or not paid your rent, being employed or unemployed, having a marriage, health insurance, a vase of flowers, that, ultimately, it all comes down to the same thing even though you live each minute far more intensely than any of them, that’s why you leave the café and walk unsteadily back to your apartment where you say hi to the caretaker and enter your apartment and feel no shame at all as you fall onto the bed with your shoes still on, until your third wife decides that enough is enough.

  14.

  My real problem with drink isn’t physical exactly. It isn’t material either, in the sense that you can compare the wealth and the work record of someone who drinks with someone who doesn’t. As with everything in this story, it’s a problem that goes back to when I was fourteen, when I changed schools for the second time and, grown weary of swimming against the tide, tried to fit in with the norm: my classmates in the third school also mixed cachaça with cola, they also borrowed the car of whoever’s father happened to be away traveling so that we could visit bars and parties and crowded streets and find some excuse to end the night as we always did, someone else’s girlfriend, someone’s clothes, someone’s appearance or the way someone moved or breathed,
because all you have to do is hold your victim’s gaze and make sure he’s with friends in whose presence he can’t be seen to be backing down, you just have to touch his shoulder, give him a tiny shove, poke him with your finger, so that in the ensuing fifteen minutes of every Friday and Saturday night, for years and years, you can continue to prove that you’re not afraid of anything or anyone.

  15.

  I never took classes in boxing, capoeira or judo. I never did karate or jiu-jitsu. I spent years fighting in the most varied of places and for the most varied of reasons, and I never used any technique other than force mixed with a kind of courage that is almost a desire to get as badly beaten up as your opponent: a sprained wrist after delivering a punch, a cut to your forehead after headbutting someone, the day you have to be taken to hospital and spend the next week telling everyone you were attacked by three older assailants armed with nunchuks and butcher’s knives, and until I received my third wife’s ultimatum I would have been capable of offering the most varied of explanations as to why I’d always behaved like that, as if it were something involuntary, a genetic predisposition or a trauma resulting from everything I’d experienced from fourteen onward, because that kind of reasoning allows you to justify anything, even the worst, the most grotesque of actions, the kind you only confess to at the very end of your argument.