I give him a smile, come up with a couple of appropriate, inane platitudes.
The old woman has stopped crying. She cannot tear her eyes from her husband, she clings to his limp hand like a lifeline. Nothing exists but him.
It’s strange, I almost envy her her pain.
Being alone means not having to worry about anyone.
DURING THE NIGHT, the old man’s condition deteriorates, apparently.
A long whispered conference between the doctor, the anaesthetist and the duty nurse takes place at his bedside in the glow of the night lights. I hear him whimper, hear the rasp of his breathing under the mask.
The cortège goes out into the corridor, I don’t even call after them to close the door.
I am thinking that soon the old woman will have no hand to hold.
I can’t get back to sleep.
Death makes us think of death, by association of ideas I suppose. Other people’s remind us of our own, of those close to us, of the possibility of our own demise. This “possibility” is the only thing of which we can be certain, but we treat it with a certain scepticism, as though there might be some doubt. We live knowing that we are heading towards death. We pretend it’s not there. But all it takes is a road accident, a relative passing away, a phone ringing in the dead of night, a doctor pulling a face as he reads your notes and death, that sleazy old whore, is standing beside you. She lays a hand on your shoulder and sends shudders down your spine.
If young Camille hadn’t fished me out of the Seine, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be dead, simple as that. My heart would have stopped beating, the brain stopped thinking. Everything would have fizzled out like a TV being unplugged. No one much would miss me, given that I have no children and Annie—with complete disregard for the statistics—passed away before me. The only thing I have to leave is my body. And I’d be happy to give that away here and now.
But though I’m open to offers from anyone, people aren’t exactly lining up.
PÉPÉ JEAN took his leave of us one night at the age of ninety-three.
Not counting my hamster, it was my first death.
We found him lying stiff as a capital I, arms by his side, eyes closed, as though he wanted to do half the work for us by adopting the correct position.
His sense of duty and order was with him to the end.
I hesitated a lot about going up to his room. I had no desire to see a corpse, thank you very much. In the end, I went up out of cowardice because I didn’t dare say no to my father. And it was the right decision, because it eased some of my fear of death: pépé just looked like he was asleep, that was all. I’ll admit, he looked a little yellowish, but it had been a while now since his skin had gone the colour of old newspaper.
The man from the undertakers asked my parents what they planned to do with the dearly departed, in terms of coffins, flowers, Mass, and all that.
Pépé was a free-thinker, so we steered clear of the holy water. We cremated him in a private ceremony, family only. Not that we could have done much else given that all his friends had long since gone before him and he had managed to fall out with everyone else in the family as a way of saving himself time and obligations.
After the cremation we headed home with the little fake-marble urn.
My parents wondered whether they should mingle his ashes with those of my grandmother, Gilou, but at the thought of having to move her they had qualms.
Mémé Ginou had spent the past twenty-three years in the garage. Pépé Jean had insisted on keeping her there “so she can watch over me while I’m doing my DIY”, he told us. He hadn’t done any DIY for more than fifteen years, but we left mémé Gilou to rest in peace on the middle shelf between her old Singer sewing machine and her collection of Paris Match.
We gave her some peace. God knows she deserved some.
My father and mother held a meeting in the kitchen, they even asked for my opinion, given that I was the eldest son. I didn’t care much one way or the other, to be honest, but I valued my birthright all the more because it drove my brother hopping mad.
Should we bring mémé Gilou into the sitting room?
Or send pépé Jean to join her out in the garage?
The problem was, if we brought them into the sitting room, where would we put them? On the sideboard, on top of the TV?
And, well, the garage was an unholy mess…
So, a columbarium, then?
“No, they wouldn’t have liked that,” said my father. “They always refused to live in a tower block, so they’d hardly be happy spending all eternity pigeonholed with hundreds of other stiffs.”
I suggested scattering the ashes and my mother said she would feel weird, sprinkling my grandparents like dust from a vacuum cleaner.
In the end, my father decided we would put them in the ornamental wishing well and plant a tree in their memory.
He and my mother went to choose a cypress tree; it withered and died within two months.
HERVÉ AND CLAUDINE came to visit and brought me a few books.
I was spared the presence of my niece Aurélie and of Gaël, her other half. In an attempt to excuse their non-appearance, Hervé muttered:
“Look, thing is… they’re sorry that they can’t be here. They really wanted to come, but Gaël had a seminar in Nice and Aurélie felt she had to go with him.”
If the conference had been in Seine-Saint-Denis, I’m not sure she would have been so devoted.
Hervé went on:
“Léo sends his love, we were chatting last night on MSN.”
Their son Léo is still in Haiti. He was hardly likely to come back specially for the occasion.
My brother and sister-in-law don’t really talk much about Léo, the hippie of the family. At thirty, he still doesn’t have a career path, and it worries them. They are still hoping he will find himself a “proper job”, because voluntary work doesn’t earn a man a living wage.
I’ve given up explaining to them that Léo doesn’t give a toss about money. He enjoys helping out disaster victims, building houses out of straw like the three little pigs and waiting for the wolf to show up. And he’s in the same boat as they are. Maybe you have to be a little twisted.
On the other hand they’re very proud of their daughter, and even more so of her husband, who is the fulfilment of their wildest dreams. You can’t really blame them. I think if I’d had children, I might take pride in their deplorable choices too.
My nephew-in-law Gaël specializes in team-building, team learning and corporate awaydays. Just the mention of them is depressing.
The guy is a living exemplar of his work: impeccably groomed, impeccably dressed, pragmatic, efficient and surprisingly hollow. He lives in a parallel universe in which he believes what he does is important. A virtual, utterly pointless and yet apparently necessary world echoing with terms that seem obscure to the ordinary mortal: pyramidal, transversal and matrix organizational structures, actionable deliverables, deployment targets, real-world interfacing.
I have nothing to say to him.
Thankfully, it’s entirely mutual.
As for my niece, ever since she shacked up with the team-builder she has managed (without much effort) to give up even the vaguest desire to think for herself. She has transformed herself into “Gaël’s wife”, and has perfectly adopted his way of thinking and speaking, his view of the world, the politics, the fast cars, the flash watches. She has become perfect and purposeless, sleek and decorative. They make a stylish couple, much loved by their banker and blessed by fate. Their one failure is their son Jérémy, who inherited from pépé Jean a contempt for the class system, from my father a fathomless supply of social convictions, and from me (would you credit it?) a practised ease in not giving a shit what other people think. A judicious combination. I’m very fond of the lad.
Having accepted their apologies, ably managing to feign disappointment, we come to the stumbling block. Now that they are here, we will have to talk, something my brother and
I are incapable of doing. On such occasions, I have to admit that my sister-in-law is a great help. She always comes up with little nuggets of news and gossip, allowing us to weather the regulation one-hour visit to the bitter end.
She launches into it:
“The Tureaus send their best, they say get well soon.”
And we’re off! Ever since I got here, the whole world has been telling me “get well soon”, by phone, by email, by post, via third parties. Give it time, they’ll be coming in by carrier pigeon.
“Get well soon”—what a bloody stupid expression.
It makes me feel like everyone is watching with bated breath for me to spring from my bed and do a victory lap of the hospital room. Maybe a triple somersault, a cartwheel or two, would that make them happy?
But I tell Claudine to thank the Tureaus for me. This allows her to keep motoring with no gear change to tell me that the Tureaus are such nice people before she moves on to the Morels, the Gonzálezs, darling Ahmed, Pauline and Jo, neighbours and friends of theirs I haven’t seen for twenty years—at least—but she talks about them as though they are my nearest and dearest.
She pauses to catch her breath. My brother jumps in:
“The Brunets’ son sends his regards. You remember Romain?”
“Oh, he’s such a nice boy,” says Claudine tenderly.
I nod vaguely.
“Oh, yeah.”
Something in the tone of my voice makes it clear that I could not give a flying fuck.
Hervé brusquely looks up and shoots me a stoically reproachful look.
Evidently I’m a complete brute, a thick-skinned old bear.
Everything just glances off my fur without so much as leaving a dent.
I DON’T THINK I’ll ever know what I was doing on that bridge at five in the morning.
Maybe it was the shock, the stress, the pain, maybe it was something else entirely, but part of the mental hard drive was thrown out with the bathwater. That much is obvious. Might as well just move on.
I’ve even given up speculating. Five in the morning is too late to be coming back from a movie, a play, a restaurant, going to visit prostitutes isn’t exactly my sort of thing, I don’t have a dog I need to take out for a piss and, given the season, it’s a little early for a morning stroll.
Nothing to be done. It’s a black hole.
Not only have I completely forgotten that night, but I can’t remember anything in the two or three days before either, maybe more than that. It’s hard to say exactly because I don’t have any markers. Since I retired, some days are very much like other days, which in turn…
I’ve noticed a steady decline in my memories and my calendar of events, these days I have enough windows of opportunity to double-glaze a mansion. But, to quote my friend Hervé, who has a fondness for metaphysical expressions, “Fuck it.”
In fact, curiously, I’ve grown to treasure the sense of mystery.
I like to think that one day I’ll surprise myself, that it will all come flooding back and I’ll slap my forehead and exclaim: “Oh my God! That’s it!” like Lieutenant Columbo five minutes before the end of every episode.
The neurologist seems less optimistic. He assures me that after a serious head injury, most people never manage to recover a memory of the accident.
According to him, the glitch is permanent.
The man’s a glass-half-empty guy, you can tell just by looking at him. He’s forever sighing, constantly trailing off in the middle of a sentence. I’m always afraid he’ll collapse before he gets to the full stop.
Maybe if you spend all day hanging out with crackpots you end up a little cracked yourself. He certainly looks to me like he’s sprung a leak.
I WAKE WITH A START from a comatose nap, eyes glued shut, tongue like a dry piece of cardboard.
The little minx is sitting at the table.
She glances over at me, says “Hey!”, then goes back to surfing the web.
I mutter “leave the laptop”, though it sounds more like lvvee t’lpptopm and sink back into the arms of Morphine.
When I resurface, she is still there, but now she’s sitting on the chair next to the bed.
She is looking at me.
I can smell her supermarket perfume, it’s overwhelming, it jolts me awake.
I grumble:
“What is it that you’re waiting for exactly?”
She gives a vague shrug, then asks:
“What’s your name?”
Caught completely off guard, I say:
“Jean-Pierre.”
She shrugs.
“Sounds pretty lame.”
“Thanks.”
With consummate tact, she tries to make amends.
“Well no, it’s not lame lame… It’s just, like, an old guy’s name, you know?”
“A keen observation. Can I enquire why you posed the question?”
Another silence. Interminable. My blood pressure must be through the roof, my heart is hammering in my head, I feel like I’m about to have a stroke and kick the bucket, this girl is a nightmare, she has a gift for winding me up. Finally, she says:
“Me, I like Brad, or Justin.”
She pronounces it “Djustine”.
Djustine.
Now there’s a surprise.
“Or Britney. For a girl, obviously.”
Obviously. Nice of her to clear that up. She probably assumes that anyone over sixty is brain-dead. I’m trying to think of some way to get rid of her when she gets up and says:
“I gotta go back. The doctor is doing rounds and we have to be there from the gecko.”
“From the get-go.”
“Huh?”
“The phrase is ‘from the get-go’, not ‘from the gecko’…”
She pulls a face.
“No way.”
Impudent little madam.
“Way. Take my word for it.”
“Nuh-uh, I don’t think so. There’s no such animal as a get-go.”
*
Fair enough.
Can’t argue with that.
MY ROOM has become a talking shop.
This morning, it was the little madam with her expertise in zoology. This afternoon, the young cop. Every couple of days he drops in to chew the fat for five minutes. I almost asked him why exactly he visits me, but in the end I thought better of it. I wouldn’t want to set him thinking, because he might change his mind and never come back.
He walks in, comes over and shakes my hand, glances at the book I’m reading, pulls up a chair, sits down. Sometimes he just stands at the end of the bed and leans on the metal bar.
We jest, we philosophize.
We’ve discovered we have a lot in common: old westerns, English comedies, historical novels, the Middle Ages, good food and good wine.
We talk about life, about society, that generic term for animals who gather in groups: ants, hunters, golfers, citizens of a country.
I broach the subject of Camille.
“Have you ever heard of this thing, casual hustling?…”
“Yes, sure. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon among students, but it’s on the rise. Every year we come across a couple more. They’re easy to spot, but what can you do… Mostly, we leave them in peace. As long as they behave themselves and there are no drugs involved…”
“Uh-huh…”
“Anyway, what do you want us to do? Fine them? How would they pay?”
“But you think it’s normal?”
He hesitantly forages in his scrubby beard.
“Uh… prostitution, you mean?”
“No, to have to do things like that just to get an education!”
“Oh, that! If I were to give you a list of all the things I don’t think are normal, Monsieur Favre, we’d be here all day… But no… of course it’s not ‘normal’ at all.”
I’m starting to like this guy.
I tell him that, in my opinion, you can judge a society by the way it treats the young and the old. And I kn
ow what I’m talking about: I don’t have any kids. As for what I can expect in my old age, I’ll be interested to see, but I’m under no illusions. Kids like Camille are not to blame, they’re the victims in all this. They are alarming signs of a more deep-rooted illness. Secondary symptoms. The velvet on the mould that betrays the rot beneath.
Maxime agrees with me, and adds:
“But, at the same time… they could find some other way to earn money…”
“To earn enough to be independent, without missing their lectures?”
“Well, some of them obviously manage, don’t they? They take regular student jobs, babysitting, working at McDonald’s, that kind of thing…”
“Well, actually, according to statistics, students with a regular job are less likely to complete their studies. I’m not showing off my knowledge, I found that out on the Internet last night.”
“Oh, I believe you, I believe you… The whole thing is going to hell in a handcart! Some of them live on the streets these days… They’re students and they’re homeless. So I don’t find it surprising that there are students involved in casual prostitution. Are you surprised?”
Not in the least.
Hope for the best, but expect the worst. Because we seem determined to make it happen.
I WAS TALKING about pépé Jean. He could take up a couple of chapters all by himself.
I’m not going to claim I was grief-stricken when he turned up his toes. But it was like there was an emptiness in the house. Specifically the armchair.
An emptiness, and a silence.
To be honest, I missed the old goat’s bleating, the carping and criticizing all day long. Making my life hell had become pépé’s daily occupation. A reason to open his eyes in the morning. It gave him a purpose. More than that, it was a quest.
Pépé Jean may have prolonged my childhood. And I probably prolonged his life.
Get Well Soon Page 8