Father and Mother

Photograph by Kalpesh Lathigra.

The setting: sixties Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, full of rich men’s sons, and their daughters, too. On my mother’s side there were four sisters, just as on my father’s side four brothers, the same madness on each side of the family, because families are always mad. She was the youngest, born in a château. When they met she was living in a large apartment on the rue Bonaparte, with the sister closest in age, the one who’s going to die of alcohol and pills. Overdose or suicide, hard to tell in these cases. The building belonged to her family, to their family, to my family, in the entrance hall there was a marble bust of an ancestral baron and they had cousins on every floor. Her own father, my grandfather, died when she was fourteen, he was also an MP, a government minister even, but he had been dead for a long time. Her mother, my grandmother, lived in the southwest with her dogs, and came to Paris from time to time to see what was happening. There were arguments, tears, scenes. Everyone in that family was violent. Aristocracy makes you crazy. Not because of the inbreeding, but because of faith. Faith that it is possible to be noble. In that family they raised children like they raised horses, to be beautiful. Being beautiful meant lots of different things. The rest was of no importance.

After the bac, after all those years at boarding school with the nuns, she signed up for classes at the Sorbonne, and she was stopped in the street. They offered to take her picture, she posed for magazines, walked in runway shows, became a model, there was something terrifying in her beauty, for everyone, for her as well.

When she comes to pick me up from school, ten or fifteen years later, that is what I see. Among the other mothers, normal and ridiculous, she is taller, thinner, with her big coats and sunglasses. Even the fat unruly spaniel at the end of his leash makes her look only more royal. She could have gone around walking a pig and everyone would find it perfectly normal, even sublime. Everyone makes way for her when she walks down the street, it’s like they feel compelled to bow to her, or to carry the hem of her coat, or to adopt the most sophisticated protocol, like in the empire of China in the first few pages of René Leys. I am amazed they even manage to address her directly, they even sometimes call her tu. She calls everyone tu. She is very warm. Never a snob. Keep it simple, she says to anyone who never manages to be. Proust’s Duchesse de Parme. They all fall under her spell. Everyone. I see it. It grabs hold of them. It’s physical. They are no longer quite themselves. My friends, my friends’ parents, the baker, a bum, it doesn’t matter who, she turns them all to jelly.

When I am with her, I watch things happen, it never fails. The way they desire her. A crazy, respectful desire. You don’t fuck a queen up against a wall. You may think of nothing else, but you don’t touch her. You hope that she will lower herself to your level. That she will lower herself and fuck you. My mother always enjoys it. She parades her sovereign desire throughout the world. To be her child is to be sexual before anything else, because she is. To get hard and to come, to be frustrated and perverse, voyeur and pimp, calm and furious. I am a witness or an accomplice, I watch people fall beneath her gaze, I am the favorite son or daughter, I am the crown prince, tu quoque mi fili, you too, my child? I delight in it I am enraged by it, I am waiting for my hour.

Now, when I look back, I think she was crazy. I’ve thought so for a few years now. Since I started dating women. Since I came to understand that all women are stark raving mad.

***

Jeans, black loafers or Clarks, blue Oxford shirts; a tie, always; a blazer; a jacket; sometimes a turtleneck; sometimes a leather jacket, never a coat; his cigarettes; his slimness; his pallor; his gray eyes; my father is always elegant. He doesn’t have many clothes, he buys them at the first shop he sees. Elegant without thinking about it, elegant because he doesn’t care. Even now, even old, even in his pajamas, like last summer at the hospital for his tongue cancer, even in the country in his putrid house in a dirty sweater and his supermarket jeans, with his oxygen tank, his pacemaker, his Subutex and his morphine, even with his poverty, filth, aging, and death, my father is elegant. Elegant in not giving a fuck about anything, clothes, money, himself, and everyone else. Never asking any questions, never saying anything. Elegant in never being there. For the past few months if anyone bothered him about anything he’d say Leave me the fuck alone I’m trying to die here. Before, he said nothing, he just took a hit or had some whiskey without looking anywhere in particular. His decline lasted thirty years. Or maybe forty, or fifty, it’s hard to say. For a long time, it was the fire brigade, melodrama, one crisis after another. For the past decade or so hardly anything happened, it was all so slow, like tai chi. He hardly moved from his armchair, looking straight at the TV. To his left, the fireplace, with its mountain of ash, full of burned-out old yogurt pots, ice cream wrappers, medicine, everything he tossed in there. The house was overflowing with broken things and dust, the garden full of weeds and too-heavy branches that always succumbed to their weight, as if his indoor space were spreading outside. It was his obsession with abandonment, impotence as will, that’s why we could never intervene, it was impossible to repair anything, and so to spend time in this house was to spend time with the dust and the cold, the iced-over radiators, the chipped plates, the missing light bulbs, the dead sockets, the busted-up tiles. The Montlouis aesthetic was an aesthetic of the garbage dump, with everything frozen somewhere between sinking and resisting, but it wasn’t clear if the two effects—annihilation and invincibility—would find a synthesis. From time to time, in Paris, those who knew him would ask how he was. They were thinking of the charming guy they hadn’t seen in thirty years. Charming, they said. I didn’t say charming, if I’d said charming I too would have remained at a distance from him. From the void. From the violence of the void. He didn’t say a word about it. There is nothing to be said. These kinds of things are solitary. Kindness surrounds us, it’s peripheral, it supports us. Extreme kindness, even; politeness; tact. These things dwell on the surface of the life he did not inhabit, one he did not care about. I rarely saw my father, I didn’t speak to him very often, I didn’t call him. In any case that’s exactly what he asked for, that we leave one another alone. When you think about it, it’s alright that way. He didn’t tell me anything and I didn’t tell him anything either. I treated him the way he treated everything, I shrugged my shoulders and went on my way.

He is all that remains of my childhood, with his oxygen, his Subutex, and his illness in the falling-down house in Touraine. Luckily that house will not come to me. I will not inherit anything. The two armchairs, the photographs, I relinquish it all to my sister in advance. I don’t speak to her. In a few months perhaps, this whole story will be completely over. That’s why I’m waiting for him to die. It is happening unbearably slowly.

When they met, he was finishing his law degree and starting a career in journalism. He lived in a studio in the rue Grégoire de Tours, above a Greek café called Zorba. His father, my grandfather, the one whose name I bear, had been prime minister. He wrote the constitution. Headed up one ministry after another—defense, finance, justice, foreign affairs, that kind of thing. As a young man my father had his own bedroom in Matignon. He had three brothers, one elder and two younger. He wasn’t interested in his family, or in family stories, or in speeches about the family or France. He was nothing like the rest of them. Sometimes a person is born into a family they don’t resemble at all. He spent his childhood with his nose in a book so he wouldn’t have to see or hear them. He wanted to escape. He wanted to be Kessel, Monfreid, Albert Londres, not Paul Reynaud, not Charles Bovary. His earliest reporting was in Africa, then Asia. Wherever there were wars. Violence and beauty, it’s always the same story. Drugs, too.

He’s a journalist, he travels, he writes books. He talks. The Opium Wars. Speeches at the House of Commons. Chinese dynasties. The opium dens of Toulon. The Second Empire. Dylan. Rimbaud. Malaparte. Malcolm Lowry. Les lauriers sont coupés. Norman Mailer. Painters too. A thousand other things. His gentle voice. He played games with me. I built my worlds with him. My Legos, my forts, my costumes, our stories. We built worlds. My father understood childhood.

Africa and then Asia. Wars. Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Mao’s China. He knows each of these countries, their ancient cultures, their histories, he says that we’re the barbarians. He can talk about it all for hours. He leaves as soon as he can. He is always leaving. My father watches everything with his gray eyes, he talks about the world, about books, but when it comes to himself, he keeps quiet, he gets lost.

What does it do to you to see all of that, dead bodies, children with enormous bellies, bush hospitals, the smell of blood, of ether, of gangrene, to see barefoot fifteen year old boys armed to the teeth on a deserted road, what does it do to you, the noise the night the anti-aircraft fire in the helicopter. Fear, death. Passport in his pocket. He’s off again. French journalist. War reporter. Death brushes past him, blows on his neck, but she’s more interested in other people. It could happen but it never does.

With him: kebabs in Barbès, the flea market in Saint-Ouen, army-navy surplus stores. Military clothing. I have forage caps, kepis, fatigues. I am extremely well informed about uniforms, armies, ranks. Present arms, attention, at ease. I’ll go to Polytechnique if you want. Or I’ll be Lord Jim. I listen to Bach. I don’t know where I discovered Bach, my parents’ tastes are more modern, but I’m obsessed with Bach.

I enter my mother’s world, but my mother’s world is not the world, it’s her. Everyone does that with her. We watch her, we realize we’ve never seen anyone like her, we let ourselves be drawn in, we tell ourselves that nothing else exists but her. My mother inhales you, she swallows you up. You’re in the belly of the whale. It’s beautiful, it’s hot, it’s spectacular. You don’t want anything different. My father is also like that, with her. He and I are like that, we look at her and try to understand what it is we’re seeing. To be swallowed up by her is so good. Sometimes we can’t bear it, so my father goes off to do some reporting, he goes to China, he disappears. I have asthma, I suffocate, at night most of all. Like Bacon, like Proust. The illness of geniuses. I spend my childhood with an inhaler in my pocket, a little blue dildo next to my thigh, my own little fix.

My mother at this time: an apartment a quiet life a husband a child a spaniel. And sunglasses boots coats and makeup which signal anything but ordinary life. You can’t have a normal life when you have that face, that look. Always made-up. I hardly ever saw my mother without makeup. Very very rarely. Even at the end when she hid her terrible whiskey under her pillow.

Who could ask for a more perfect dealer than a Belgian princess, Fanchon van something or other? She had also been a model. Fanchon wasn’t her real name. Aristocrats nickname each other after horses. When I think of the word bohemian, I think of Fanchon’s apartment, dark and messy, clothes strewn on sofas, pillows, curtains, a theatrical atmosphere. Malte Laurids Brigge via Nan Goldin and Cookie Mueller. We stop in for five minutes after school. It’s two minutes away, a little ways up the rue Saint-Jacques, across from the Musée de la Mer. They ask me to wait in one room, my mother goes off with Fanchon, comes back to get me. My sense of what’s going on is vague, but I have a sense of it all the same, kids are not that dumb. Usually it’s my dad who goes to see Fanchon, he calls, he says, Can I come by, he goes, alone. Usually it’s my dad who takes care of the drugs, he’s been a junkie since he was twenty, that’s what interests him in life. That and my mother. Even after her death. For years and years afterward. Drug addicts are strong, they’re unstoppable, like warriors.

They always fought. Whether or not I was there didn’t change anything. He was the one who hit her, but it seemed to me, nevertheless, that she was the one who wanted violence, who was violence, she brought it out in him, a violence he hadn’t previously known. Without her he was never violent. Never was after her, either. In no other phase of his life, no matter what happened, did I ever see anything more than mild annoyance flare up. I never saw him get angry. Even with the drinking, through the most difficult times, he never raised his voice. Gentle as a lamb. Gandhi. With her he became something else. He had access to something else. Maybe he was looking for her violence, maybe he was happy to find it. That was between them. Like a hit of speed. Layered on top of opium, which made them sleep, and dampened everything. Sometimes the next day she’d have left bruises on his face, a black eye, a split lip, it was like a hangover. They loved each other that way, since forever, since before I was born. It exhausted them. Sometimes she said she would leave him but they never left each other, of course they didn’t.

I loved my father, I loved my mother, like everyone does. So what?

I repeat: So what?

From Name, translated by Lauren Elkin, to be published this month by Semiotext(e).