For those of you who don't know (and most of you probably don't), my paternal grandfather shot himself after fighting, for many years, a losing battle with illness and addiction. I had never been that close with my father's side of the family and only have a couple of memories from my youth, and the few days I spent with him at my high school graduation, to remember him by. I was the only grandchild mentioned in the suicide note, as I am the last remaining male Osmundson, charged with carrying on the family name. I find it odd, though, especially because I have long felt estranged from much of my extended family.
While browsing a bookstore on my last trip to France I picked up the recently published "L'homme qui m'amait tout bas", by Eric Fottorino, a writer for Le Monde. It's a memoir written to the author's father, who had killed himself as he fell into old age. The novel, as advertised, dealt with loss and identity, father-son relationships, adoption and north african immigrants in France. I was sold.
Turns out I didn't love the book. There's a lot of good in it, and I'm not sure if my problem is that it is simply too raw, not polished enough (what book so directly focusing on loss wouldn't be, besides perhaps the recent Didion work), or if I object more generally to journalists writing longer prose.
I still feel as though this book has a lot to say to my family, and to my father in particular. Unfortunately, it hasn't been (and I don't think it's likely to be) translated into english. It's not by a big enough name, it has entire chapters devoted to discussion of road bike racing, and deals with identity issues, i.e. arabs in europe, in which few americans take more than a precursory interest. So I decided to translate the fucker as a gift to my father.
I've also decided to post some of it here. We've all experienced loss, and while the book as a whole is not mind blowing, it has some beautiful sentences, even paragraphs, and manages to provoke both thought and emotion. Please keep in mind that this is the first work I'm translating and that it is being done in the matter of a few weeks, and much of what I post here will be largely the first draft in the process. Otherwise, please do enjoy, and feel free to comment (and correct).
JSO
L'HOMME QUI M'AIMAIT TOUT BAS
THE MAN WHO LOVED ME QUIETLY
"It is always the words that were not said that makes the dead so heavy in their caskets"
-Montherlant
CHAPTER 1
The 11th of March, 2008, towards the end of the afternoon, in the North of La Rochelle my father killed himself with an old hunting rifle. He had parked his car in a lot and was sitting in the passenger seat to avoid the steering wheel. He leaned his seat back slightly, spread his legs, and laid the gun the length of his body to put the barrel in his mouth. And then, with one soft movement, the man that we all called the one with the golden hands when he was working as a physical therapist, with his white coat, his olive skin and his million dollar smile, pulled the trigger.
I must ignore what is pushing me to write these lines, and to continue. Everything is, at once, so confused and so clear. My father who had given me so much, starting with his name, chose to end his life so brutally. At the police station with my brothers Francois and Jean, they showed us the empty casing in a plastic bag. A 12mm bullet used for hunting wild boars. Papa didn't want to miss. It seemed so innocent, that small stem of pink plastic, light as a feather. The police told us about an air rifle, an old model, that rarely exists today. We just looked at each other, we had no memory of this rifle. Our aunts and uncles thought about a Buffalo rifle, an arm made in Saint-Etienne that my grandfather gave to my father on his first day of the 6th grade, at the age of 11. I did the math: 1948 in Tunisia, it was a common gift for a boy in the time of cowboys in the desert of el-Djerid with the gazelles and sheep. But no, it wasn't this rifle. It may seem stupid but we were relieved to know that papa didn't do "it" with the Buffalo rifle given by his own father.
The next day in the mail I received a letter. I immediately recognized his hand writing on the envelope. I hadn't yet cried, I was crying much like a cave, only on the inside. It was everywhere in my spirit, he spoke to me, I heard his voice in my ear, he was everywhere because he seemed to be living in me. His letter was tear wrenching, and it had its effect. The dam burst. I hid away to ride it without witnesses. Inside there were letters for Francois and Jean. He asked me to pass them along, and I thought of the expression, carrying the weight of souls. The packaged was addressed to my home, and suddenly my address made me shiver. A calm street. "Rue du Tir".
There was one sentence that ravaged me in this letter, which was unbelievable in its lucidity from a man who had decided to kill himself and, without trembling, wrote to each of his sons and a couple of close friends, in a hand exceptionally airy, as if he wanted that each word could be deciphered without difficulty, without hesitation. It wasn't his normal handwriting, but large letters, leaning up, traced by some one who is breathing deeply and smelling life enter his body at the very instant he decided to live no longer. In total, six letters sent to every corner of France. And curiously, none of them stamped with a time and a place. I chose to ignore the reason for this particular enigma. It may have been only chance, or a deliberate choice to erase any trace, an arrangement with the post man in the village where he knew everyone, where here he had helped repair a leg, there he had relaxed a back, and reset a hand. This immaculate envelope held the mystery of his death, as though he had personally placed in my mailbox his ultimate message, more than 300 miles from the place where he ceased to breathe.
This phrase, the one that ravaged me, that opened the floodgate said, "Congratulations Eric, you have finished the path out of the Grand-Parc", an allusion to the housing project where I lived with my mother at the end of the 1960s, in Bordeaux, before he met my mother and before they married, before he adopted me, before he gave his name to me and my mother, this name that I wear like a good luck charm that still smells like the South of Tunisia, oriental pastry, the accent of the villages, the heat and the blue of the sky, the dunes of Tozeur and the honey, something infinitely generous that came into his voice and his gestures when he had decided that words were too much and he preferred to remain silent, present only in a simple and tender gaze towards me, or looking for my complicity with a wink of the eye.
At the time I still called him Michel, but his tribe, his family, called him Michou. He was handsome, muscled but full of softness, naturally tan, a thin and expressive face, a good natured character, quietly sure of himself, of his charm, of his strength. Like a Hollywood actor. I am reminded of a scene of Yves Montand in Cesar et Rosalie, about Sami Frey, "You can tell the man's at ease". And Romy Schneider responded, "That's what you call charm". Mom seemed happy with him. One night he came into my room and told me, while scratching his throat, that, if I wanted, he would be my father and I could call him Papa. I met, at that moment, the magic man that colors my books, the books I can never reread, that I pick up now, searching feverishly for the pages where I described him, once a man selling canned peaches, once an oyster farmer with slashed hands, and finally once, without makeup or fiction, in a book dedicated to "Michel Fottorino, my father." My hands trembled each time that I want to retrace these pages where he is still alive. I am looking for nothing less than proofs of life, proof that he lived, that we were happy together. I realized at that moment the mystical dimension of the written word: characters neither age nor die.
I see in my mind that scene that is in none of my books. Michel and mother have known each other only briefly. One spring night we were walking along the Garonne (a river in the SW of france). We had eaten at an outdoor cafe and now they were walking in front of me, mom had put her arm around Michel's waist, who was holding onto her shoulder. Suddenly I let them move further away until they became tiny points holding onto one another. Their two shadows become no longer two, but one, leaning into the reflection of the river. I extended my arm and held their image in my hand. What I held, in fact, was my future life, my happy life, that felt like it was about to begin; I would soon be nine and I felt as if I were just born. I would soon be named Eric Fottorino, I am a kid from the Grand-Parc, and Michel would come to take me to the football games in his blue Simca, which he parked below our window, and which I looked for every night before falling asleep to be sure that he wasn't leaving, that he was staying there, that he was staying with us.
I arrived in late morning in La Rochelle, and my brothers were waiting. We left for the hospital morgue. In the train I replayed his life, the birth of Francois, the 26 of August like me, but 10 years later, Francois will always remain my birthday present, and Jean, my Christmas present, born the 30 of December 1971, my two brothers never would I consider only counting them by halves.
I was the one who called Mom. He and my mother had lived separately for 25 years. Mom's long scream on the telephone.
One day in Saint-Die-des-Vosges, in 1997, at the international hall of geography, I met by chance Jean Arnautou, whose brother, Jean-Pierre, was a rheumatologist associated with papa when we lived on rue Bazoges in La Rochelle. He knew my parents since the 1970s. We talked about those days with a little sadness because it didn't take a gunshot to break their household. Jean said these words that resonate in me today: Your parents were the most handsome couple in La Rochelle. A useless memory, cruel really, even though I still have a picture of them, in black and white, a beautiful picture, him smiling with all his teeth, with his hair black as a crow, and mother with her milky skin, her rosy cheeks, and her mischievous grin. Their eyes shine They are happy, young. They are alive.
CHAPTER 2
I wonder what he did all day before parking his car late that afternoon. And the day before. And that last night. Nicole, his companion, didn't notice anything odd. He left, like always, after his morning coffee.
Papa, where did you go, whom did you see, and what that particular day? All those days and hours you could have done it before. Did you hesitate, doubt, think of giving it up? But no, you wouldn't have, just the opposite.
I try to imagine all this, but imagination offers me no solace. He didn't try to call me, and I hadn't made the effort to call him. I didn't feel a thing. I still hear the voice of Natalie, my wife, in my ear, that night. She called. I was standing in a train in the suburbs, in the middle of a bridge. Her voice: Some thing happened to your father. And I said: He's dead. I wasn't a question, already a fact. Natalie couldn't respond before the line was cut as we entered a tunnel, but I understood, I knew. But before, when he committed the irreversible act, no, I didn't feel a thing, I must have been in my office, I'm trying to decide exactly what I had been doing at that moment, but to what end? He was already out of reach, with his cell phone which he never used, which he wouldn't answer, and of which I did not have the number. A jolt in the train car made me lose my balance. I reached for a metal handle. I didn't fall. Nor did I cry.
It was actually a beautiful day, the 11th of March. Did he send the letters that same morning, or the night before? Impossible to know, without the post office stamp to confirm, anything is just faith. And faith in what, this man who didn't believe in anything other than life itself, and who loved life up to the end, without God, but with his own morality, his generosity, his impulsive heart and disdain for the established order, far from bigotry and self-ritousness. And when he made the movement to put the letter in the box did his hand tremble slightly? Did his heart skip a beat? No, he wouldn't have trembled because he was only honoring a meeting he set long ago with himself, an engagement that he kept hidden in the innermost depths of his conscious, when he was a soldier in Algeria, in a French uniform, and he was forced to fire upon his own arab brothers ; or maybe more recently when a stroke left him paralyzed. He had to undertake his own therapy, force his arms to move, using small dumbbells covered in black plastic, bean bags filled with sand lifted slowly, exercise spring pressed against the palm of his hand. He managed to recover like a hurt animal, far from onlookers, at my Aunt and Uncle's house in the back of a garage where no one would pass. One day he said to me that if he couldn't regain his strength . . . In fact he never finished that sentence. I only made a small gesture, one finger against his neck, the finger shaped like a loaded gun. My father couldn't have lived as half a man. Even if he was discreet, hiding from the spot light and trophies, he would never have been able to live as a shadow of his former self. That conversation threw me into a panic, but then was forgotten. It's as if he only healed his right hand to prepare it, one day, to strike the fatal blow. I can hear his associate Jean-Pierre Arnatou : "Your father, there wasn't much he was afraid of. To tell you the truth, I don't think he was afraid of anything at all"
Certainly not death, in any case. His clients clients, usually very old, would watch from behind the curtains of their retirement homes, his healing voice would give them the strength to take a couple of steps towards being the young girls they once were.
You would smile at them, one of them waiting for you at the entrance to the retirement home, sitting in a chair, even if she didn't have an appointment with you. She was waiting so that you could speak a little and she would say, My God, I saw him. You were her god, you who believed in none. I can still hear your laugh when you told about your visit to an old woman who had Alzheimer's. Seeing that you were missing your front teeth she said, "Don't worry, they'll grow back, you teeth!" Your imperfect smile, with the black holes where your teeth were gone.
What thoughts ran through his head once my father no longer held those small bits of paper - letters under 20 grams - which said that when we opened them, it will already be done, that he had made his choice, that he had had this appointment for a while now, don't be sad, signed an old child who never want to grow up or grow old, and who had just committed his last act as a free man, at least it wasn't his first.
Two days before his sister Zoune had spoken with him on the phone. He had a clear voice, and a happy one, he felt like he was in a body 30 years younger since he starting exercising again, riding his bike in the park, hiking in the forest, the long trails and the open fields of Aunis. He still spoke of the young deer that he saw, almost blind, years ago, that he cared for patiently in a fenced in enclosure, until the animal, fully healed, jumped over the fence and returned to the forest. He thinks that he still saw it from time to time, wander past the house, healthy and strong. He spoke of it with a soft pride, as though it were his child.
But his sudden frenzy for sports, his last few months, as though he wanted to die of natural causes. Was this his retirement, pushed back year after year, and suddenly forced by the legal age limit for work, his golden name plate that followed him from rue Frederic-Bentayoux in Bordeaux, rue Bozages in La Rochelle, then here in Ferrieres, rue de la Croix-de-Paille, cross of straw, how fitting for this miscreant in the hands of the savior.
I saw these words, the cross made of straw, the heavy and the light. In the end it's the heavy that won. How it must have felt heavy in your hands, despite your strength, that name plate, Michel Fottorino, Massagist and Physical Therapist, the day you were forced to take it down. How you felt degraded and useless, you who agreed to be paid in meat or eggs - when you were paid at all - or a piece of cheese and the conversation that came with it. I am sure that you would have paid, yourself, for that conversation with those women who, to be honest, offered up bits of their life and pain that came along with their arthritis, their stiffness, with the old age that was fast approaching. I know that in your eyes they were still young and beautiful, they still felt interesting since you gave your time so freely. You would just sit on a chair in the kitchen and listen. Friendship and brotherhood, you could see them a mile away. We could say you were a therapist, dealing in humanity, be it suffering or laughing. I remembered one day, I was a spoiled child and at times cruel, I made fun of the town drunk and you said, "We don't make fun of people's misery." I must have been ten years old and it's stuck in my memory like that nameplate of yours, until you had to take it down. A friend of mine, a cyclist, told me of its absence after riding in front of your house. "His nameplate isn't there anymore," he informed me. You never said a thing.
I wonder what happened to it, that nameplate that I read and reread, as a child healed myself by an adoption, that I read to better learn my own name, two t's, three, o's, this name that I immediately love to hear, to say, to read and to write.
What did you do that last day, those last hours?
A week before we had seen him in our country house near La Rochelle, and he appeared in perfect shape, maybe a little too skinny, the thin face of a distance runner, the stomach of a young man, handsome and fit at over 70 years old, his black hair with only a little white at the temples, and his smile perhaps a little forced, in hindsight. He must have known, that spring night, with summer beginning to approach, he must have already decided. He knew. He felt free as only those who know their destiny can be.
I remember that the next day, while on a walk in the village with my 4 year old Zoe, we stumbled upon a cemetery. As we were walking amongst the graves, my phone rang, it was Edgar Morin who was calling to see if Le Monde could announce, the next day, the obituary of his wife Edwidge, who had died the night before. I tried to comfort him as best I could, standing amongst all those graves who didn't yet contain the shadow of my father. I left the cemetery with a strange malaise, a profound sadness without a precise cause, except for the empty voice of an old man crying for the loss of his wife.
I left La Rochelle and we never spoke again, Papa and me. He left a message on my cell phone to make sure we got safely back to Paris. I forgot to call him back. No time, everything in Paris moves too quickly, I was busy and Papa didn't insist, didn't call again. Was he waiting for my call? Hoping for it? Already another time was ticking on his watch, the little hand counting down, painlessly for now. He killed himself and I didn't feel a thing. Not a quiver. Not a pain in my stomach. Nothing. I think about something that Paul Guimard said once said when asked what he would do if he only had 15 minutes to live. The answer : Throw away my watch. My father had thrown away his watch long ago. He no longer counted the minutes he had left. He had broken the hourglass.
CHAPTER 3
The hospital morgue is a hostile place. On the entrance, printed on the tinted glass is a sign that reads "The sun is our enemy, Please close the door behind you". Did you know, papa, you who so loved the sun, that it was forbidden here, in the space you have chosen as your final resting place. Yes, of course you knew. It's here, a couple months earlier, that you accompanied your best friend, Ribouleau, one of those men who could always make a room laugh, always the head of the descent (less so on a bike than in a restaurant). He was your tennis partner, the person who would always laughed at your jokes, your brother. He spoke, and you listened, you massaged him as well, his back, his legs, especially his bum shoulder. I am sure that he loved listening to your silences, so powerful in a way. In reality, the day of his funeral, you couldn't recognize him. "It just wasn't him", I remember your exact words. In his open casket he looked to you like an old chinese man, small and stunted, this man who was easily over six foot. You said Robouleau didn't even come to his own funeral, he was elsewhere and that body certainly wasn't that of your friend.
We had to look through the car for your identification and papers, impossible ordeal that Jean, my youngest brother, offered to perform. He gave us courage through his precise movements, hand on the glove compartment, avoiding the papers with spots of your blood on the driver's seat. Amongst this disorder we found a funeral card giving the date and time for the services for Jean Ribouleau, your old friend. It was almost like an appointment because in my pocket I held the exact same piece of paper, with your name instead, in the place of the deceased. All this hit me at once, almost comically. To truly kill yourself, you had to take the place of the dead.
But before the morgue and its starched silence, there were these carefully chosen words: "Do you want to see your father?" We looked at each other, suddenly frightened at the idea of seeing his face ; was his face visible, even, or had the shot . . . The man comforted us and informed us that he had been prepared and he could show us. Show us? What was this weird world without sunlight where some one we had never met would show us our father? I wanted to tell this man, we know him, he's our father, I should be showing you to him. But I had to stop myself ; I knew my father alive, and I had never seen him dead.
He is lying before me but is not alive. If he were alive I would have heard his heart beating and his breath coming in and out of his chest. If he was sleeping he would scratch his neck, then his breathing would become normal again, the air whistling a little as it moves through his nose, broken by a punch in his rough childhood. In the room, silence, not a breath of life. Our breath, broken. I can hardly realize, but yet this is how it is. He no longer smells of his cologne, no longer holds in his thoughts, no longer has his memory of our faces, our voices. Not a single movement beneath his closed eyelids.
I walk out last. In the sunlight my brothers are holding one another, two young men crying and I see them, suddenly, as confused children simply asking why? And I have no answer. In flashes of light I see the same blue sky, the same city of La Rochelle. In watching over them, in the car while our parents went to pick up a couple of things, I knew that I would never be alone as long as they were both there, Francois looking just like Papa, brown skin and football always at his foot, Jean blonde and always in his own head, red cheeks just like mom, huge brotherly smile and a devastating sense of humor. Their resemblance to papa is a mix of evidence and magic. An expression, a tone of voice, a manner of folding one's arms, closing one's eyes, and staying calm. To say two or three words, and to chuckle. It was written on their faces, and a second nature. Papa lives in each fiber of their beings. I remember the beginning, we share a name, those two ts and three o's. And that will last a lifetime, like I became suddenly normal when I took his name along with my beautiful mother.
And I snap back from 40 years ago. I have vertigo. With a shaky step I go to join them. I sense their heaving chests, their tears, and I join the mass that is their bodies. Us there hugging and crying, you could almost imagine that we're footballers who just won a match, but it's sadness, not joy, that is shared between us.
CHAPTER 4
To be or to have.
A game we played when I was a child.
How did it go?
To be, to be no longer. Papa is dead, papa is no longer, Papa doesn't exist, papa killed himself, papa committed suicide, papa put himself out, papa is in heaven (even kids don't buy this one)?
To have. Papa has put an end to his days, papa has shortened his suffering, papa has succumbed to his injuries, papa has perished, papa has disappeared (right before our eyes).
To have, again, or not to have: I don't have my father, i have lost my father (in 1969, Eric Chabrerie became Eric Fottorino, I had gained a father).
The reconciliation, through death, of to have and to be: to have been. My father has been. Time has passed and it has passed quickly. To be, and to have, to be no longer, to have no longer have. A nearly imperceptible slope, and yet so painful. My father is, lives, breathes, my father was. Getting used to this "was", well that still is. To be: with this verb like no other, the past imperfect deserves its name, underlining that what no longer is will never be. It's now impossible to talk about papa in the present tense, while so few hours ago, yesterday only, at this same time, before that telephone call "something has happened..." A father, and past, now nothing but the past tense. What does your father do, where does he live? He does do, he did; he isn't, he was, he does not live, he lived, he's a man yet nothing more than ashes. His hands, I can still feel their touch on my tired muscles? Past. His voice, still in my ear, his rhythm, his way of speaking? Past. His whistle when he sipped on his hot coffee? Past, only past. The sound of his feet on the tiles? Past, past past.
CHAPTER 5
With Nicole and my brothers, we went to an impound on the outskirts of La Rochelle. We had to take care of the car. It was parked in a huge lot bathed in sunlight and it stood amongst wrecks. It was Jean who recognized it. An old, tired BX, the rear end almost dragging on the ground, much like Giko, my father's old mut. In the office, a woman told us which path to take. We didn't want to take the car. We just had to give them the paperwork and it would all be over. So we walked, slowly, towards the car; only Jean could muster determination, and he walked in front. Were we all thinking the same thing, my brothers and me, on that walk from the office to the car, the final resting place of our father? We asked the woman if the car had been cleaned. She said, no. We could only look at one another. In Jean's and Francois' eyes, and certainly in mine, fear, panic and dread' we will see papa's blood.
Who opened the door, and from which side? Already the memories are blurry. I can still see Jean flipping down the ****** looking for papa's ID, avoiding the impossible clutter of the bac seat. At the bottom of a blue grocery bag we find some papers, old journals, three knives -- one for each of you boys, said Francois to break the silence -- some loose change and french francs, and a long stick of polished wood with a whole at the top to pass a leather string, our father used it for his long walks in the countryside. I hadn't seen it in forever, and it seemed like an apt moment to think of forever.
I'm still holding the funeral invitation for your friend Jean between my fingers. Except now it's your turn, and the paper has your name instead.
I went to the passenger side, looking in the glove compartment for his papers, and then, just then, did I have the realization that our father killed himself there. I felt the seat, leaned back, almost an entire roll of paper towel placed carefully on the seat. Moving it awkwardly, I felt the weight of this paper, how it must have been drenched. I dropped it suddenly as if it had been electrified. We did the inventory. We didn't want to waste time. We had already seen what there was to see. And in the end we all breathed a little easier. But without his ID, it would be impossible to get rid of the car. We would have to look at Papa's house. To step foot inside. What could possibly prepare us for this step?
I hadn't been inside his house for years. The last time must have been in spring 2001, when I was training for the MidiLibre (a French newspaper)'s annual cycling competition. I had chosen the windy roads of the West Coast, the roads I knew so well from my adolescence, to try to feel at 40 how I felt at 15. Roads that ran along side the ocean, 100 to 150 kilometers of solitary curves, all under the constant rain of the wettest spring in a decade. In my head, the rhythm of my body and heart fed so many happy memories, when my parents still lived together, when we all spent our days together, my brothers and me, under one roof. At nightfall if I had any energy left I would go to Papa's house. He would wait for me in his office, a bottle of almond oil ready on his shelf. He would have me lie down on my stomach, then on my back. My eyes would open, then close. It was still the same metal pull-up bar on his wall, the same medicine balls on the floor. Papa didn't practice modern physical therapy. No baths, no ultrasounds. Nothing but his hands. And he would only work with one person at a time, never two. Those nights in the spring of 2001, it was me, and I could feel the force of my aching muscles, stiff as a board. He closed his fists and drove them into the arches of my feet. My blood flowed back towards the heart, the toxins washed away. He had some sweat on his brow and just above his lip, which shown from below in the light of his single bulb.
One stormy night the power went out in the middle of my massage. He simply lit a candle; his shadow danced on the wall by the motion of the candle light. For me, there was only his voice, soft, and his hands, firm. We brought up old memories, names I had known 20 years before. That year, he studied my legs like one studies maths; as we climbed back in time, never would I have thought that a race would have allowed us both to become young again. A tap on the thigh and the spell was up, the massage was over. Lightly, my feet again touched the ground.
This afternoon he's not home and we are looking for his ID. It seemed like he had burned all his papers, all of the letters he received and had refused to open as long as they had a business' name on them. It didn't come on in old age, his fear of paperwork. In the 1960s, at only 30, in his first office in Bordeaux, he already would refuse to open letters, bills, insurance requests, even checks. Where did his repulsion come from? Little by little Papa began to live on the fringe, avoiding the rules expected by humanity, working with his hands and not giving a bill to anyone. On his table we found the paper on which he had written us two days earlier; only one page remained. On the back of my envelop was my address, rue du Tir. None of us could imagine him writing those letters, in the silence of his empty home. Did he turn on the radio to listen to the football scores, what feelings went through his mind, at that moment, when he was sitting and writing, already in the past tense, about our life with him? Did he seal those letters, so light in his hands, without think that in ours they would feel as heavy as his coffin?
We didn't touch a thing. Jean, in the end, found his wallet, which contained his ID. We looked at his picture without saying a word. I brought with me a picture of Ben and Tac, his dogs from our childhood. I also took a picture of the horse he bought with Nicole a few years earlier, for my youngest daughter. Natalie and I decided that the dogs and the horse would make for good memories of her grandfather.
CHAPTER 6
Often in the evening they are there. Sitting on a bench at the exit to the train station at Maisons-Laffitte. Old Arabs taking in the sun. There are two, sometimes three, side by side, silent, eyes half-closed staring into the strong late-day sun. One of them reminds me of my father. His peaceful air, the smile always drawn across his face. The bronze skin and the half-accusing finger. They are no longer young men. I've never heard their voices, and never have I spoken one word to them. What would I have to say? They look like they might be your brothers, papa? Long, long ago, we were coming back from a long bike ride, your old yellow Lada was camouflaged on the country roads by the dirt and dings we had collected along the way. They were waiting for us at Zoune and Andre's, your sister who always held on so tightly to her Tunisian roots, with help from her famous chicken couscous and mint tea, avoiding cilantro for you, papa, because you said it tasted like cat piss. We were ready for a good meal, maybe polenta, creme anglaise, you were already salivating. And then, almost home, we came across a car in the middle of the road. The owner must have popped into the house just below. We waited a few minutes, and you didn't honk. You ran your hands through your hair, you always loved to scratch your head, and even more when mom would do it for you. You closed your eyes just like the arabs from the train station, and you felt an indescribable well-being that expressed itself only in small grunts.
After a few minutes, my father finally honked, just to let them know some one was there. A man came out of the house and walked decidedly towards the car. I forgot his face and his weight, but I remember that he was tall and pink. But I remember that, with a nasty look at my father who had rolled down his window, he said "If you're in such a rush, why not just go back to where you came from." Papa went black. All of a sudden he had leapt from the car and I was afraid that they would fight. Papa looked over at me and said something softly, words that I couldn't make out. The man rushed towards his car, but once inside took his time before driving off. My father restarted the car. He had gone pale, with only his cheekbones on fire, May in his cheeks and January in his heart, like they say in Fantasio. He didn't unclench his jaw until we reached Zoune's house. He didn't tell anyone about the incident, about that insult that I also felt in all its violence, even before I understood what it really meant: go back to where you came from.
Today I wonder if that's where you have gone. Your ashes must have flown that far. Maybe to Sousse, where you gained the admiration of your younger brother Francis, ten years your junior, when you took your place in your 'deathtrap', the canoe that you drove, naked from the waist up, tanned and strong, that young, carefree 17 year old body, only a few years before you left to fight in Algeria.
It was only as an adult that I understood my father's childhood pain. **** With his family all together, his parents and his five brothers and sisters, they lived in Gafsa, in the south, where my grandfather Marcel had been mayor since Liberation. 30 years in office, he had held the keys to the city since 1940, after having defeated a Germany colony and avoiding subsequent looting. My grand-father had always been the type of man who would ride 200 kilometers on half inflated tires on the roads towards the phosphate mines of Moulares or Redeyef to take a report on a work accident. When his kids were distracted - the boys sleeping too long during their afternoon nap, for example - my grand-father would whip off his belt. As the oldest, my father got the worst. Everyone says that he got the belt more often than deserved.
But overall they were happy there, hunting gazelle and diving from the palm trees into the roman pools, or going to the edge of town, at the foot of the violet mountains, in the great valley of sulfurous waters, where they learned to swim holding onto giant pieces of bark. Today I like to imagine my father there. He's alive and swimming in the blue waters where divers now bring back marvelous sponges and crabs.
One year, teachers from the city, worried about violence in the south, asked to be moved back to Tunis. They were replaced by arab teachers who spoke poor french. When he passed by the school one day, my father notices sentences on the blackboard that were full of mistakes. Just like that, you were living in Sousse, with your paternal grandmother, cut off from your parents, from your brothers and sisters, from your friends, because in Sousse at least teachers could write French properly. You felt abandoned, left under the lazy watch of your grandparents, convinced that your father and mother didn't love you anymore, even believing that you weren't really their son. If you were, they would have never abandoned you like that, far from all your family. This must have been in your mind, papa, when you adopted me. I was exactly the same age as you when you were moved to Sousse, chased out of the hot eden that had been Gafsa. You didn't see your family except for school holidays, when they came to Sousse, and the sea, leaving Gafsa and it's 120*F behind. Your life, temporarily, became normal, you could hear your mother's voice, play with your brothers, watch your mischievously soft sisters, eat again at the family table, laughter without end amidst the smell of jasmine and rose-water. Until they day the left for Gafsa, where everyone got in the car, your father's beautiful Populaire (which he took from the Germans after the war during the time of reparations). They all rushed off, hearts heavy, because you, you had to stay behind.
As he sped off, my grandfather shot from the window a football and you took off, like a puppy, to chase it down. When you got back, out of breath, the car was already on the road. Zoune, Nine, Nicole, Alain, Francis, they all followed you with their eyes from the rear window. You ran after them as fast as you could, you cried, your tears flowing through the road dust on your face, but you were nothing more than a small spot from the back window of the Populaire, still accelerating away.
This image never stopped breaking my heart. I would have liked to been my father's father to have been able to stop that Volkswagen accelerating towards the desert, to have slammed on the breaks so that you, you could have gotten back in, with us.
CHAPTER 7
I have too much on my mind, and everything is reminding me of my father. Not a drop of blood is running through my veins. Nothing, and yet everything. If I have any energy left at all, anything wiling me to live, it's my mother who is giving it to me, my mother who had me as a child, so brave at only 17 years, sent away to family in the Alpes to hide her dishonor. My mother, yet still a child herself, whose own mother no longer wanted her since she had been knocked up by a Moroccan jew, the man who knew the pain of not being able to be my father, but that is another story. If I can see any good in the world, it's thanks to Michel who came into my life, and mom's, not long after the world cup where Pele was my hero. Michel, also known as Michou, also known as Papa, preferred Gigi Riva, the Italian, and also the boxers : Cassius Clay, also known as Muhammad Ali ; Bennie Briscoe, the robot from Philadelphia ; Carlos Monzon. The two sports that are the most difficult, in his opinion, the sports that make men men, were boxing and cycling. Michel got his nose broken in a fight when, before returning to his father's socialist ideals, he joined the OAS (French nationalist army that fought against Algerian liberation) to defend the French interests in Algeria. That earned him his deviated septum, and he wasn't proud of its cause. I was a teenager before I realized that Michel had a life before us. He lived with a beautiful Norwegian, blonde and blue eyed, and then married another woman. He hadn't had any children, and it's probably for the best because I would not have liked not being his first son, even if it was second hand.
Papa first put me on a bike after realizing that I was horrible at football, and he had a reputation to maintain in the football club in Bordeaux. He would never let a Fottorino tarnish the glory of the family on a football pitch, that would have been worse than anything, even failing a grade. In the middle of the 1970s, papa and I rode on all the roads in the Charente, the Vendee, the Deux-Sevres, the Aquintaine, the Langes, the Gers, even sometimes in Brittany and the Pyrennes, with my uncles Andre and Pierre, and also with my grandfather when we went to the Southwest, towards the Chalosse. He taught me to battle, to never give up, to grit your teeth, to not give in to self-pity or bad luck or failure or the wind, to not get a big head if, from time to time, I won a race, and to not get down if I was stuck far from the lead pack. On the bike, he taught me to live.
The first time he brought us around his family, mom and I, night had already fallen in their village outside of Dax. His mother was sitting, back straight, on a little wooden chair while Nine, one of papa's sisters, was brushing her hair. I can still hair the sound of the brush softly running through her hair, the woman I would learn to call grandma as naturally as her husband would become grandpa. The walls were covered with paintings she had made. We were surrounded by sculptures and busts, she was always working, starting at 5am, a leather bracelet at her wrist when she was chiseling at rock and stone. She had waited until she had raised her six children before coming to France to put on an exhibition. My future grandfather was a huge man with white teeth who laughed when he ate hot peppers cured in olive oil, as colorful as his wife's paintings. It was there that I discovered couscous, fried shrimp, kaak (bread, kind of like a bagel) shaped and baked by my father, my first memories of the South of Tunisia, the attack which my grandfather miraculously escaped in the summer of 1956, which led to his hasty exile in France. Michel-Michou tied me suddenly to this story, to this large family, that I would feel later while watching Rocco et ses freres, a movie that they all loved and knew by heart. I cannot watch Alain Delon in Rocco without seeing my father, his softness, his beauty, almost animal, brutal, in pictures from his youth, when he was banished, in Sousse, the days of the Buffalo rifle. In time I also knew anise biscuits dipped in orange syrup, huge baskets of dates fresh from the curved branches of the oasis at Tozeur, black olives covered in corse salt, green pistachios from El Guettar. The days when my grandmother would make semolina with date puree, cinnamon, sweet couscous with pomegranate cut in tiny pieces, the smell of the orange tree; even writing this brings me back bits of my father, his face when we sat down to eat, the way he would dip arab flat bread, still warm, in cold olive oil, his silence, awe even, in front of tomato salad, grilled peppers, garlic, and lemon -- the feast of a king.
I had the idea of writing an innovatory of what you loved the most in the world, of placing it all out on the table. There would be everything I mentioned, plus chocolate, honey, jams full of sugar, crepes, very thin, that shake in your hands, rolled like cigarettes and placed by the dozen in front of the TV, a football game on. And always soups, pumpkin, potato, everything that grew white or orange, you would finish the same way, slurped up between the words, "Not bad, the soup." You always ate quickly, without hesitation, half standing by the time your coffee came, only to be thrown down your throat. Sometimes you were in a hurry, almost imperceptible, you threw up your hands with a simple "I've got to run," and you left, stomach full. I ask myself what you ate that last day. Where did you eat lunch? Or did you only have one meal? What kind of appetite can you have before the trip you had already decided to take? As a kid I kept the little bits of tobacco left in the bottom of your packets. I kept them in the golden paper that wrapped each pack. I kept this tobacco for years and offered it to you the day you ran out of cigarettes, told you that you could make one with what I had kept. You smiled, I must have been ten years old. I don't know what ever happened to that treasure. Gone up in smoke, I suppose, that too.
