Speechless. Tom Lanoye
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I HAVE NEVER known anybody so ready for the final chapter as my father. Lucid, almost eager. A week before he died, with him and his GP, and in the presence of a son-in-law and the grandson who was his nurse, I went through the official list of questions which precedes the legitimate assisted dying which my country of origin insists on calling so euphemistically ‘palliative care’. A state governed by the rule of law which has a large number of suicides wants to be sure that new individuals who are dying really want to die. They have to affirm that so often that some people who are dying start feeling guilty about their longing for death. Which is perhaps the intention of some survivors.
I am not going to get worked up over this again. I don’t want to behave sarcastically or despairingly. Death is ultimately most difficult for the survivors. So don’t let me start waffling here about the point or lack of point of such a compulsory questioning of people who are already half dead, inspired by bureaucratic distrust, imposed by religions that have gone to the dogs without a soul and without a future. I am not in a position to lecture anyone about neuroses and strange antics caused by someone else dying. Everyone has their own abnormality. Everyone has their own hereafter. And pity for everyone.
My father definitely did not feel guilty, face to face with his departure. He sounded relieved. Joking like the young rascal of fourteen that he remained all his life, comforting like the reconciler wise beyond his years that he also was, always placating in the background, a slaughterer who wanted to make life easier for everyone else, taking as many burdens as possible on himself, where and whenever he could—even now, dawdling on the threshold of death, his first concern was to avoid the raising of voices and sad scenes. Mad about teasing and being teased, a scallywag of eighty-eight—I really can’t describe him any differently. An eternal rogue who was almost completely bald before he was forty and was constantly struggling with excess weight, since life consists, apart from working and producing children, of wholesome eating, and only fools refuse a good glass, be it beer, wine or old Dutch gin.
Not a father to fight with. Not a patriarch to murder, symbolically or with a real axe.
His mischievous round head of yore had become very emaciated in the space of a few months, and he had to keep tightening his belt, ‘or else my trousers will fall off my bum.’ His metastasized prostate cancer had become bone cancer, affecting and dissolving half his skeleton, spoiling his appetite and his blood with the calcium that was released. That does something to your stomach and to your intestines. Don’t ask me what, I don’t want to know. He was fed liquid and sugar through a drip, a kind of transparent plastic bag hanging on a mobile coat hook. Eating and drinking were no longer possible, almost overnight, whatever he ate or drank he instantly vomited up again into a cardboard vomiting dish—there are people who think up things like that, modern heroes, real heroes, an unbreakable vomiting dish made of calming rough grey cardboard, easy to hold to someone’s mouth because of its shape: a hollow kidney, cut in half, and not cold and condemning like enamel or stainless steel, which would inevitably recall a poisoned chalice.
There were questions on the official list that my father did not answer directly, but rather with a smile and a digging motion of the hand: ‘Dig a hole. Not too much trouble. No waste of money.’ In answer to another question: ‘Give me a jab. Nice and quick. No fuss.’ With a broad grin and a wink.
When I took him cautiously to task and went on seriously asking for a real answer, he looked at me with feigned disappointment, chin on his chest, gazing up with great, bewildered eyes. He even started blinking with those real Bambi eyes of his, grimacing. ‘You’re not going to start messing about, are you? You know what I want. Write it down, lad. And no more messing abart. Or else go straight back to that Antwarp of yours.’ Always those two words, ‘messing abart’ and ‘Antwarp’, spoken with an exaggerated Antwerp accent, with elongated syllables and in a high-pitched voice, almost feminine, or at least childlike.
They 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.
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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