Diary of the Fall Read online

  38.

  For my part, I couldn’t explain it either: if it was something she said during that first conversation, if it was her perfume, her clothes, her hair, her hands, the way she held her fork, the way she wiped her mouth before picking up her glass, the way she allowed me to press my knee against hers and how at one point in the evening she looked at me to indicate that she knew I could feel the warmth of her leg, and for a fraction of a second both she and I held our ground instead of averting our gaze or making some ironic, distancing gesture as if that contact were purely accidental, just a fraction of a second, and the person you had been up until then becomes the past, something suddenly clicks, and the supper and the conversation and the days and years that follow become something else, and it was all so quick and delicate and yet unmistakable because in four decades you had never before experienced such a sense of things to come.

  39.

  If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have invited your mother out on a date a few days after that supper. Or courted your mother. Or lived with her under the same roof. Or made an effort to persuade her to take me back each time the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places showed its face in fights like the one when I kicked the television, Auschwitz and a suicide and me almost attacking the one person I’d fallen in love with, Auschwitz and a suicide and me nearly turning my back on the one person I’d fallen in love with, Auschwitz and João and my grandfather and my father and me nearly throwing away what that person was offering me, the sheer luck, the miracle of having met her, and when I say miracle I consider it an equal miracle that despite everything she didn’t simply leave me, that despite everything she’s pregnant, and that despite everything the whole circle will, very shortly, be complete.

  40.

  Having a son means leaving behind you the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places, as if it no longer made any sense to talk about the ways in which it manifests itself in all our lives, and the various ways in which we each try and succeed in freeing ourselves from it. In my case everything can be reduced to the day when I stopped drinking, when I began politely refusing any drinks, when I began politely saying that I don’t drink, not even a glass of wine or a cocktail in the company of friendly, well-intentioned people, because it wouldn’t be good for me, and it’s easier than it seems and I’m not trying to promote abstinence, the reason I’m saying what I think about it now is so that in the future you’ll be able to read this and reach your own conclusions. Because I’m not going to spoil your childhood by going on about it. I’m not going to ruin your life by making everything revolve around that. You’ll be starting from zero and you don’t want to have to carry the weight of all that or anything else other than what you’ll discover for yourself, the house where you’re going to live, the cradle you’re going to sleep in, the first time you feel hunger, thirst, cold, tiredness, loneliness, the gratuitous pain caused by colic or infection, the sense of abandonment one day when everyone’s sleeping, the fear of the dark when you start choking and there’s no one around, the reflux, the sob, the bad dream that never ends, the rumble of thunder, a sound you don’t know and can’t tell where it comes from, the helplessness, agony, horror and despair which, at that moment, are your one reality, but then someone takes care of all those things and normality is restored when you’re fed and given some medicine and have your nappy changed and they put you in the bath, and the water is warm, and there’s the little duck, the bubbles, the toy trumpet, the mirror, the fluffy towel, your mother’s arms and skin, her smell, the touch of her hands as she sits you on my lap, the clothes I put on you, my beard, the sound of my voice, the words I’ll say and which are still incomprehensible, but you look at me and know intuitively what lies behind each and every one of them, what the person there means to you, like my grandfather and my father, my father and me, me here now and the feeling that will accompany you as the years pass, as I begin to forget all the rest, which at this point is neither happy nor sad, good nor bad, true nor false, part of a past that is likewise of no importance compared to what I am and will be, forty years old, with everything still before me, from the day that you’re born.

  Michel Laub was born in Porto Alegre and currently lives in São Paulo, Brazil. He is a writer, a journalist, and the author of five novels. Diary of the Fall is his first to be published in English, and has won the Brasilia Award and the Bravo!/Bradesco Prize. Laub was named one of Granta’s twenty Best Young Brazilian Novelists in 2012.

  Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for more than twenty-five years and has translated novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American writers including Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, Bernardo Atxaga, and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She has won various prizes for her work, including the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and has twice received the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She lives in Leicester, England.