Speechless. Tom Lanoye
prizes. He’s got more in him than he thinks.’ She said that in my presence as if I were not there. Making no secret of the fact that she must have had a decisive part to play. ‘Like mother, like son.’ That is the essence of all text, certainly when spoken aloud: the most important thing is the subtext.
Sometimes, though, the text and the subtext simply merge. How often she longed quite openly, certainly after the appearance of my first collection of stories, with a photo of my father on the cover, for me to write more about her? But at the same time delicately warning me that it would be better if I produced a grand and positive story, a tome of fitting length, not a malicious memo. Noblesse oblige, after her double life motto, ‘You must not spit in the spring from which you have drunk’ and ‘You’ve got more in you than you think.’
The latter should be taken literally. There is more in you. Yes, in you too. In all of us. Lots more. More and more. ‘Of course you passed your exams with distinction! [she, rolling her eyes] That’s only normal, isn’t it? You could also have done it with the highest distinction. Oh God, a person can’t have everything. See it from the positive side. Now you’ve got something else to look forward to. When are your next tests?’ Does a human being ever become any more than that? The repetition of the same test, in ever-different forms, if need be that of a book. If need be this book. A classic biography which at the same time must have nothing classic about it, which on the contrary must produce something extraordinary. ‘Oh yes! [she, with one hand held triumphantly above her head] Something original! Something spiritual! You have a completely free choice. As long as it’s something that makes everyone say: it surprised us cruelly, but affected us deeply. We’d never thought Lanoye had it in him.’
While not writing I became aware of her ever-growing expectation that was not an expectation but a demand, a claim, a constitutional right, fed by her pretensions as an amateur actress, her lifelong dormant disillusion at being a butcher’s wife against her will and her equally lifelong arsenal of the feminine tyrant, not used to not getting her way.
For oh my God in whom I don’t believe—how perfectly she mastered the palette of domestic extortion! It usually won her respect, sometimes horror, and always obedience, regardless of her choice of weapon, always adapted to the terrain and the position of the family battle. Her armoury was full and the weapons adequately oiled. Little white lie alongside punitive threat. Offended silence alongside a furious torrent of words. Working in a whisper on private sentiment alongside pointing sarcastically at the approaching mockery of the whole neighbourhood and the whole school and the whole country. No role was beneath her, no retort too refined. ‘There’s only one kind of people who are more abominable than those who write bad things about their parents. They are the people who don’t write about their parents. Though they can write.’
Admittedly she never made that last comment. But she could have. She would say it, without compunction, if she were reading over my shoulder now. Correction, she is reading over my shoulder. Has been the whole time. She is even losing patience because there’s been more about balloons and myself than about her.
And, reading over my shoulder, she says in a throwaway tone but loud enough for me to hear—subtle acting it’s called, her forte, both on the boards and in everyday life—although it must not go unrecorded that she excelled equally in ‘giving people a piece of her mind’—so she says, reading over my shoulder, here and now: ‘And meanwhile it’s still all about you, you know. Anyway, lucky that you’re not reading it aloud. Because dear, oh dear … Where on earth do you still get that ugly “a” of yours from? In a small circle of friends I can understand it, people from Sint-Niklaas together. Or in the shop, when you’re chatting with your customers. Good people, most of whom have never read a serious book, and have trouble with a paper. You have to talk to them in patois, or they’ll think you’re putting on airs, and they’ll go to someone else for their meat. But someone like you? On the radio, on TV, on the platform … Have you ever heard yourself? You didn’t get it from me. Okay, if I have to play the maid in a country farce, then I sometimes use dialect. I like it. I can do it. Or for the old mother in The Van Paemel Family, poor dear. There dialect is moving and appropriate. But surely not with you? A writer, who is supposed to set a good example. How on earth did you ever stagger your way to your degree in Germanic philology? No one can understand. Sometimes I can’t myself.’
Let her read over my shoulder as much as she likes, let her make comments into the bargain, even she will have to put up with my first writing a few pages about myself, because I haven’t finished with that—on we go—paralysed nail-biting in my whale, that indecisive fretting on top of my mountain of compelling material. Its weight does not rest under my backside. It weighs on my chest, while I type this and this and this.
Why is it only my stories that will have to replace her, now she herself has gone? Why not those countless other stories of those who knew her? Daughter, sons, grandchildren, all those remaining relatives—an expanding list, an upside-down bread tree of bloodlines? Plus all her friends and protégés, because she had them, by the score—what would a diva of life be without an ample and loyal public in the only true arena, that of reality? What is a matriarch worth without some additional children outside her own family—orphans, rejected scions? Old friends, schoolmates even, for ever loyal, until death do you part?
Whatever I serve up here, in whatever order, or in whatever key, it will remain a noble lie, a splinter of the prism that was her life. Why should my one limited ray of light be worth more than the sum of all the others put together? My version of the fact of her life is perhaps doomed eventually to be the only one remaining, and hence will be all that is truly left of her. But at least, I hope, for a few years, a decade, perhaps two—what is the duration of a book in an age that seems to be turning away from books? But even then: for those few years, that decade, her voice will still sound, her star will shine, only through me. Why? Because I am the only one who spends my days weighing words and arranging sounds?
You can’t call that awareness an injustice, but for a long time it had a dislocating effect. I felt sick with embarrassment and downright rage in advance at the pretension, the polite predation that dares to call itself ‘literature’—that bloodsucking monster that vegetates on the lives of all those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the proximity of anyone who imagines he is a writer, himself included. Nothing is safe, everything is usable, the distortions in his memory, the fabrications from his neighbourhood, the gossip from his paper, and eventually everything seems only to have happened to provide him with excellent material, even the death of his own mother. Anyone who writes is a vulture.
I’m prepared to play the vulture as much as you want, but not here. This? This must not and will not become literature. Not here of all places, I beg you, I beg myself: no, not the same old boxes of tricks again, full of culturally correct curlicues and grace notes, full of approved writer’s affectations alongside artistically justified metaphors. I have gone beyond literature with capital letters. And at the same time, believe me, there aren’t enough capital letters and punctuation, there is a lack of hyperbole to sing the praise of the courage of an eighty-year-old woman who, when she realized what was happening to her, simply wanted to die and, when she no longer realized anything, went on living stubbornly, and went on breathing, to the bitter end. There are simply too few syllables to curse the shame of her decline, her unequal struggle. Her fate, and in her fate that of everyone.
That’s why this must have nothing to do with literature, and at the same time it must be an improvement on the Bible, an immortal poem such as has never been composed. A militant ode, lofty and compelling and merciless, as if for the most fertile and toughest of all summers. And yet, at the same time, adamantly: a dry account, a list of scenes and tableaux, stripped of frippery and pretensions, quite simply ‘life as it is’, imperfect, fragmented and chaotic.
Nothing but capital letters and booming internal rhymes, and at the same time just naked facts. Nothing and everything at the same time, and preferably vomited up in one gush.
So get writing.
Or not.
First I compiled an anthology of my essays and reviews. Reworking them so thoroughly that I might as well have rewritten them entirely. Not a soul noticed the difference. Meanwhile I had anyway been nicely