cut me to the quick. In a flash I realized the horror. He was actually playing the amateur actor in turn, right under my nose, just before his death. It’s an infection, that acting, that manipulation, that flight. Not only within my family and my writing. In this old people’s home too, with its understandable but strict rules, with its circuitous gossip among the staff, its tacit late-Catholic plot, through which everyone knows that an overdose of morphine is on its way to room 218, and everyone pretends courteously not to know—as if nothing is on its way except the usual procedure, with its poker face and, once more, its little white lies, its we-know-our-own-people, its mercy and its backstabbing, its silent cowardice and its silent compassion. Our massive impotence, face to face with the mystery of this life.
This whole country is acting, this shithole of Europe, and all the people who wallow about in it: it’s a colony of play actors, it hams it up for all it’s worth; not capable of real contact, it hides in the footlights of beautiful semblance and the expensive restaurant bill and the compulsive waffling about the bad weather and the tailbacks and the neighbour’s dog turds, it suffers from overacting in politics and in cycling—but it hasn’t been given a complete script for its true self, still not, neither have I; we are still yokels in overpriced suits with no other retorts than the boorish curse or the charged silence or the red face of shame. And if they are not enough, we quickly improvise a vulgar farce, an evasive dirty joke, a funny accent, a high-pitched voice. Still the inspirers of a medieval farce, The Farce of Even Now. Types, where you expect people.
For just a second—talking to my begetter about his approaching death—I felt irrationally and deeply sad and angry, at him, at everything he stood for, and because next week he would no longer be alive. I don’t know if he noticed, but he gradually became his usual self again, and that was crazy enough. In reply to another serious question from his GP (‘Do you want to be resuscitated, should you have a heart attack?’), he said, ‘Doctor, I wouldn’t bother any more in your place. You know what I am, don’t you? No? I’m buggered.’
After which, disarmingly genuinely, simply the eternal adolescent as always, he started giggling. His shoulders, which had become so much narrower, laughed along with him, he shrugged them in time with his giggling, ‘hu-hu-hu’. Literally, I’m sorry if it sounds daft or looks ugly on the page. ‘Hu-hu-hu.’ With one hand over his pinched pout, as if he had said something naughty that was just beyond a joke. ‘Buggered. Hu, hu, hu.’
An altar boy who farts in the sacristy.
It was his last hit, his hasty prayer to conviviality, his charming, risqué term to reassure those saying farewell by eliciting a bittersweet smile. ‘I’m buggered. Hu-hu-hu.’
To the manager of the home, to the physiotherapist, to the cleaner with a Moroccan name, to the good, pious, ancient nun whose name I have forgotten: ‘I’m buggered. Hu-hu-hu!’
At first he looks at his granddaughter and her mother, who had come from Holland to pay their last respects, with a bunch of flowers in their hands, at a loss for words—he has just momentarily re-emerged from a sea of forgetfulness, and he does not recognize the two of them. He glances at the photo above his bed, at his triumphant Josée, and then back at them and suddenly, elderly charmer, the penny drops: ‘Oh dear! You look good, the two of you. Very good. But you must take those flowers back with you, back home, they’ll only stand here and fade, and who knows for how long it will be. No! You must take them with you. You must!’
And then, as he accepts their farewell kisses, his head raised half out of the surf, his lips pouting in thin air, his already chilled cheek against theirs, he says in a whisper, not unhappily: ‘I’m buggered. Hu-hu-hu. But you look very good, both of you. I’m not. Completely buggered. Hu-hu-hu.’
A fourteen-year-old Buddhist butcher with the giggles and another 144 hours to go.
-
A YEAR BEFORE his death he found, in a corner of the paper that he read from cover to cover every day, with his magnifying glass at the ready—no one was able to persuade him to wear reading glasses, he had enough trouble with his hearing aid and his false teeth—but even while concentrating on reading his paper he still occasionally found time, if necessary at quarter to seven in the morning, to look up at his television screen for the repeat of a favourite soap, or for the fifth summary of a tennis match featuring Justine Henin, his little heroine—when Juju was yet again, after a bloodcurdlingly bad first set, on the point of winning the match after all, as he had thought and known from the start—to ring me up, at high noon or the middle of the night, whether I was in Cape Town, in Hong Kong or in Zwolle, he would call: ‘Quick, quick! Turn your TV on! She’s going to win! She’s going to win!’ After which he threw the phone down, so as not to miss any of the glories of his Petite Justine. The day that she announced she was leaving the professional tennis circuit was a black day; he rang me again, fighting back his tears now: ‘She’s packing it in, she can’t take it any more, all that competition, that stress, just like Eddy Merckx back then, she’s perfectly right, poor thing, but it’s a shame anyway’—a year before his death then, he discovered in his paper the report that I wanted to keep hidden from him.
My mobile rang.
‘What do I read? You’re going to write a book about your mother?’
‘Who says so?’
‘It says so in my paper.’
‘You mustn’t believe everything that’s in the newspapers.’
‘If it’s not going to happen, then why is it in my paper?’
‘That’s how these things work. It all has to be announced a long way in advance.’
‘But that means it’s true?’
‘It’s a plan, Dad. A plan can take years.’
‘It doesn’t say that, in my paper.’
‘Who can tell? I’ve got to write it.’
‘I think it will be very nice, a book about your mother.’
‘How can you know that? I’ve still got to write it.’
‘The very thought! A thick book about your mother.’
‘I’ve still got to write it!’
‘When will you finish it?’
From then on, and we are talking about long before the Hellish Season of the Great Cape Fires, his first sentence as soon as I entered his room in the old people’s home, or in my cousin’s bar-cum-restaurant where he was waiting for me—everywhere he caught sight of me: ‘How’s your book going?’ It was also his first sentence on the telephone, whether I was I in Cape Town, in Hong Kong or in Zwolle.
The first time I was moved. The next five times I burst out laughing. After that I got more and more irritated, more and more desperate, more and more apprehensive about his question, which increasingly assumed the tone of an indictment. ‘How’s your book going?’ The accusation gradually became a serial sentence. The charge was culpable dereliction, the judgment came in four words, fast-track justice: ‘How’s your book going?’
I knew in advance that sentence would be passed again, as inexorably as before, as soon as I was face to face with my mild, temporarily sad torturer, with whom I could not even get angry. Is there such a thing as stage fright in a family context? Before each visit, before each phone call, I was seized by family vertigo, provoked by the rift between his expectations and my nerves, both equally tautly strung.
