Diary of the Fall Page 10

  7.

  Perhaps my father thought of it as a kind of exercise for the brain, the equivalent of a crossword, each sentence helping to prolong his memory of things, like taking notes in class which, when you study them later, become everything the teacher said, but I don’t really believe that. That’s no reason to write a book of memoirs, knowing that in the future an illness will prevent you reading it, unless you’ve reached the point my grandfather reached when he wrote his.

  8.

  My father spoke about my grandfather’s death only once, after the fight we had when I was thirteen, but that was enough for me to imagine what it must have been like for him to open that study door when he was fourteen, the moment before he took a step and went over to the desk. I never asked him what was on the desk, papers, pens, or if my grandfather had left a note or taken the trouble to cover the carpet with something or to position himself so that his blood wouldn’t spatter the wall, and if they had to get a decorator in afterward and agree on a price and pretend that the stain had been caused by an accident at a party, someone tripping and spilling their glass of wine, and that no one was hurt or found their life changed for ever.

  9.

  I imagine my father when he was fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, his days divided between school and the shop, the silent suppers with my grandmother, his course in business studies, a few friends, a few girlfriends, and the dance where he met my mother. As he got to know my mother better, I can’t believe that the Sunday morning when my grandfather died didn’t cast a shadow over their relationship. Not just in the way one would expect, the inevitability of that ending when one considers the life my grandfather had known, his memoirs, and forgive me for returning yet again to the subject and mentioning that word Auschwitz yet again, and yet again evoking its meaning, but also as regards their future together.

  10.

  Forgive me if I say again that Auschwitz helps to justify what my grandfather did, if I find it easier to blame Auschwitz than to accept what my grandfather did, if I feel more comfortable continuing to list the horrors of Auschwitz, because I have a sense that everyone’s rather tired of hearing about that, and the number of Auschwitz survivors who ended up exactly like Primo Levi and my grandfather, I once read a long report on the subject, someone in Mexico, someone in Switzerland, in Canada, in South Africa, and in Israel, a brotherhood of ninety-year-old gentlemen who lived alone in a room in some boardinghouse, an epidemic of ninety-year-old gentlemen in a city and in a country and in a world where they knew no one and where no one remembered anything anymore, and forgive me if thinking about this is simpler than indulging in an obvious exercise: imagining that my grandfather didn’t do what he did just because of Primo Levi and those other gentlemen, or because he was like Primo Levi and those other gentlemen, or because he didn’t know how to avoid ending up like them, but for some reason closely bound up with my father.

  11.

  In thirty years’ time it will be almost impossible to find anyone who was imprisoned in Auschwitz.

  12.

  In sixty years’ time it will be very hard to find the son of anyone who was imprisoned in Auschwitz.

  13.

  In three or four generations the name Auschwitz will have about as much importance as the names Majdanek, Sobibor and Belzec have today.

  14.

  Does anyone remember now whether it was eighty or eighty thousand people who died in Majdanek, two hundred or two hundred thousand in Sobibor, five hundred or five hundred thousand in Belzec? Does it make any difference thinking in numerical terms, about the fact that Auschwitz and the other camps modeled on Auschwitz killed nearly six million Jews? Did it matter to my father that not only six million Jews were killed, but twenty million other people, if you include Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, common criminals, prisoners of war, Muslims, atheists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses? Or that it wasn’t in fact just twenty million, but seventy million if you take into account all the other war casualties, the English, Russian, French, Polish, Chinese, American, Greek, Belgian, Spanish, Ukrainian and Swedish, and, yes, even the Japanese, Italians and Germans who died, all of whose deaths were a direct and indirect consequence of the actions of those who built Auschwitz? What did any of that mean to my father? Did it justify the fact that my grandfather did what he did without for a moment considering him or what his life would be like from then on, the burden he would have to carry with him ever after?

  15.

  My father grew up as my grandfather’s son, and I won’t bother repeating the arguments offered by medicine and psychology and culture that prove how harmful such a model can be, the father figure who did what he did, who discarded his son in the way he did, and I imagine how even the simplest of things must have weighed on my father, school and the shop, the silent suppers with my grandmother, his course in business studies, a few friends, a few girlfriends and the dance where he met my mother, the weight of leaving that dance thinking about her, the first time he phoned her and arranged to go to the cinema and picked her up at her house and held her hand and met her family and gradually grew close enough to discuss the possibility of me being born of that union a few years later.

  16.

  I imagine what my father felt when he was at the hospital, when my mother was in labor, if it was any different for him than for any other father, if he had to make a special effort to play the role, put on the words and the gestures, the pretense at commitment and support, the external displays of affection, the external embraces, the external smile, not to mention the fact that he was perhaps thinking about my grandfather and waking each day with the fear that he might repeat what my grandfather had done, and looking at me each day thinking that I might become what he was if he became what my grandfather was.

  17.

  I have been the person I am from very early on, and I wonder if it makes any sense to keep mentioning Auschwitz in this story. But if it doesn’t make any sense to blame Auschwitz for what happened to my grandfather and consequently what happened to my father, how can I make a connection between all of that and the fact that I never again spoke to João? Less than a year after we became friends, I was capable of writing him a note about his mother’s death, and of using his mother’s death to avoid having a physical confrontation with him, because having a physical confrontation would be yet another attack on his integrity, a repetition of what I did on his birthday, because in a fight you don’t think so very differently from when you allow someone to fall flat on his back while the other guests are all singing “Happy Birthday,” the intention is the same, the result is the same if all goes to plan, if I managed to hit him during the fight, if in front of the whole of the eighth grade I managed to land a punch on him or knock him down and kick and stamp and spit in his face to the point where he would never get up again.

  18.

  I wrote my last note about the death of João’s mother, and went home and stole the bottle of whisky from the cupboard, and locked myself in my room and sat on the bed, and took a deep breath before taking my first swallow, knowing that I would never again say so much as hello to João. I would walk down the corridors averting my face from his, and for the rest of my life I would never again have a conversation in which I mentioned his name, because that would be a reminder of what I was capable of doing to him not just once but over and over again. How could the impact of that discovery be mitigated or justified by what I had recently learned about Auschwitz? Because even though Auschwitz was considered to be the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, and that includes the millions of people who have died in wars and massacres and under all kinds of regimes, a mere bureaucratic statistical account of the victims who disappeared all that time ago, even my grandfather, and even my father indirectly, not one of those victims was anywhere near as important to me as João was when I was fourteen.

  19.

  It was around then that I started to drink, and I could even list the things I ruined becau
se of that in the years that followed. A job, because I couldn’t wake up early enough. A car, which I wrote off in an accident and in which the guy I was giving a lift to fractured his arm. My first two marriages, which in one way or another ended because of that.

  20.

  My first wife was from Porto Alegre, and we lived in her apartment before I moved to São Paulo. I hadn’t even finished my journalism degree when I received an invitation to work for a magazine. She was a psychologist and had already built up a practice and, right from the start, we knew that it was highly unlikely that she would move to São Paulo, as unlikely as my return to a city where I would soon have no friends and nothing to do, and then it was just a matter of time before I began to rehearse in my head the inevitable conversation, the holiday weekend when I grew tired of hiding the fact that I’d already met the woman who would become my second wife.

  21.

  On that holiday weekend I told her everything, immediately after I woke up, in Porto Alegre. I was due to go back to São Paulo that evening. On holidays we spent the mornings in bed. My first wife used to read the newspaper with me. She thought that because I was a journalist I would enjoy discussing the different sections, the opinion pieces and the classifieds. We used to have lunch at home, she liked cooking, and my flight was nearly always in the late afternoon, because the next day I had to be at work, and at around five o’clock, she would take me to the airport and I always used to imagine what the last time would be like, if she would still give me a lift, if there would be a farewell embrace or kiss, in the lobby or next to the sign for domestic flights, or if I would leave without looking back and take the stairs so as to reach the street more quickly and hail a taxi while she stared at the closed door and the empty apartment and the unmade bed and only then would she shrink into herself and take a deep breath and close her eyes and then somehow subside into an agony that overwhelmed every part of her body.

  22.

  I broke the news to her as objectively as I could, and although I spoke about sadness and sorrow and guilt, what I remember most vividly is a shameful feeling of relief, and of all the things I learned from the years I spent with my first wife, that is, the lessons that a first relationship always teaches you, the first time a woman says she loves you, the first time you accept that and how you deal with it, and how you cope with the endless problems it brings, the way you speak, the way you dress, how selfish, inconsiderate, lying and manipulative you are, how unfaithful, immature and untrustworthy you are, both emotionally and as regards ordinary domestic matters, all of which only compounds the sense of oppression felt by your partner, in short, of all the things I learned in those years when I was ceaselessly accused and judged and condemned by my first wife, for being the way I was and always would be because of my lack of effort and commitment to her, the most important thing is the certainty that I made the right decision on that holiday morning.

  23.

  With my second wife it was quite different, and not only because she was, of course, a different person — the mere fact that she’d been married before and was nearly thirty when I met her and wasn’t a psychologist and therefore didn’t use jargon or tricks in any of the conversations we had in the six years we spent together was already a great advantage — but also because I had changed too: no one emerges unscathed from a breakup, and no one gets married again without having some idea of what he or she is or isn’t prepared to accept. It’s easier to impose limits then, and a tacit or overt agreement is enough for you not to have to hide certain of your habits, like going alone to places frequented by other people on their own, where all you have to do is say hello, all you have to do is come up with an excuse for being there, standing at the bar opposite a mirrored wall full of colored bottles, and then how can you possibly go home that night or the following day, and this continues for months and years, you entering the apartment and looking at your second wife, barely able to believe she can be so understanding.

  24.

  The problem with my second marriage wasn’t reaching that agreement, largely because my second wife enjoyed equal freedom, the banal result being that in those six years I must have been with any number of other women, and she must have been with any number of other men, and within those rules it was all done as discreetly and respectfully as possible. The problem with my second marriage was that, despite the absence of quarrels, despite the mutual cooperation and my second wife’s extreme generosity and the degree to which that helped her keep hanging on in the hope that I would change, for the day when I would finally get my act together, the historic day when I wouldn’t simply allow myself to succumb yet again, my clothes and my body exuding alcohol, the thing I insisted on becoming on those occasions, try to get up and talk and keep looking straight ahead, and just once not end the night in the same way, in the same state and proffering the same excuses when you get home, despite all that, I was never in love with her. My second wife knew this. In fact, she always knew, and she stood it for as long as she could until she finally gave up and met someone else and decided to move on, and I never again heard anything more about her.

  25.

  According to the World Health Organization, alcoholism causes physical, spiritual and mental harm. Studies have been made that establish safe limits for consumption, allowing for variables of tolerance and dependency according to gender, weight, race and the cultural context in which the patient lives, but it’s easy enough to see how well someone does or doesn’t fit the model. I read a book once that described depression as the inability to feel affection, and perhaps there’s a similar analogy to be made with drink. Not in an organic, chemical sense, but in the sense that you know exactly what will happen each time you stand leaning at one of those colorful bars, each time you get into a car or enter an apartment or a toilet with a person who, if she’s lucky, will get a smile from you or a whisper or a groan that is a mixture of tiredness and sadness for something that will be over in two minutes, and while I managed to conceal all this from my first wife, because most of the time I was in São Paulo and she was in Porto Alegre, from then on the story changes: my second wife who left me because of that, my third wife who I met because of that, a relationship that, right from the start, circled endlessly around the subject.

  26.

  That’s what I was thinking about when I got the results of my father’s tests. The day I met my third wife. The day I had my first serious conversation with her on the subject. The day I realized that she wasn’t prepared to make any concessions and how, throughout our time together, throughout our marriage, the subject of my drinking was never far away, it was in fact the sole cause of the quarrels, the initial crises, the initial threats, the many occasions on which she spent hours waiting up for me so that we could try and do what we always did throughout that time, the same discussions lasting into the early hours, saying and doing the same things out of weakness or compulsion.

  27.

  My third wife and I had the last of those early-morning discussions a few days before I got the results of my father’s tests. I slept in the park almost by chance really, because I could easily have booked myself into a hotel or even gone home. Given the results of those tests, she would perhaps not have told me off for getting drunk again, but I didn’t want her to see me like that because there comes a point when you feel ashamed of the shame she must feel for you, and when you’re exhausted and in no condition for an encounter that might seal the fate that was always looming on the horizon, going under alone, ending up alone, all you can do is play for time.

  28.

  As arranged with the doctor, I received the results by email, in São Paulo. I opened the document and printed it out. Right from the start, I knew I would have to go to Porto Alegre. I couldn’t give my father the news over the phone, and so before I fell asleep in the park I’d already bought my plane ticket. I’d already spoken to my third wife about the trip, and had already been suitably succinct and grave when I lied to her about the doctor w
anting to see me, saying that he preferred not to go into greater detail until he’d spoken to me in person, and telling her that we would talk when I got back and I could then think about what to do regarding that most recent early-morning argument, assuming I had anything new to say on the subject, and so it was, going through the various procedures at the airport one by one, checking in, waiting, boarding, so it was that this whole long story began to move toward its end.

  29.

  Telling the story of your life from when you were fourteen involves, I repeat, accepting that facts — even gratuitous facts or facts that, due to circumstance, defy all logic — can nevertheless be linked together as cause and effect. As if by talking about João and about the last time we spoke, shortly before the end of eighth grade, I were looking for the origin of what happened on that trip to Porto Alegre, almost three decades later. At fourteen, I sat down on my bed, alone in my room, with a bottle of whisky beside me, my first drink after ceasing to be João’s friend, aware of the pain I had caused my best friend and of the pain he had caused me, and I could easily have said that I never again felt like that. That, in terms of my age, and the importance friendship has for someone of that age, too young to have learned to take an ironic or skeptical view of endings and deaths and the routine that inevitably engulfs all things, in those terms I felt something that I would only begin to feel again when I boarded that plane, after reading the results of my father’s tests, after that last argument with my third wife.