The Last Life (49 page)

"What was it like?"

"He can't tell us, can he, poor love? But he was pale as spaghetti, and as limp, and the cough just tore through him. Chills one minute, burning up the next. He lost weight, you can see even now. Couldn't muster the energy to eat. You could see in his eyes, he was scared. Plain scared."

"Did Mother stay with him in hospital?"

"She came every day."

"And at night?"

Iris stopped knitting and looked at me. "Two weeks is a long time. You can't easily be sitting up all night in a chair for two weeks, especially if you've got other things on your mind."

"So he was alone."

"Sometimes I stayed. There were always nurses on call."

"But Etienne can't call."

"He's all better now, that's the important thing. We just need to be careful, in the winter."

I'm not sure why it was worse to think of Etienne all alone in the dark in a strange place. In one way or another all of us were, after all. But there seemed to me something particularly rending, particularly true, about my brother's isolation. I wondered whether they had strapped him down, at the wrists and ankles, so he wouldn't dislodge his iy and worried about whether they had left on a night-light, somewhere, even far away, so that he didn't wake up and crane his neck and, seeing nothing—no looming shapes, no shadowed walls—doubt, with a thundering heart, that he had woken at all. But perhaps it was like the time in the elevator: perhaps he did not fear the absolute dark, as I did, but merely floated in it, invisible and free of deformity. I often assumed—I still do; how could I help it?—that we are the same, except that I have voice for our terror and anguish.

But maybe this is wrong: maybe Etienne didn't mind the hospital bed, with its bars he couldn't fall through and its enticing array of sweet-skinned nurses. Perhaps he did not miss my mother when she left, nor my father, nor even me, but was content in his present, whatever that was, so long as he was not in pain. We believe about Etienne the things that we need to. Our vessel, he accepts them all, each projection, each inconsistency: joy, tragedy, history and its loss, nullity, wholeness—and why not? And who can say?

And yet if this is so, if he enfolds and embodies our every need, is it because he is himself without a self? I know this isn't so, although I know so little what a self is, nor for how long, whether a matter of flesh or spirit, of the past, or of dreams—but all these things are incontestably scored along his skin and in his heart. He has lived them all, as I have.

In studying the brain, I learned in college, a Canadian scientist probed his conscious subject's exposed grey matter with tiny needles, here and there, dredging up thereby (but she could give voice to them; the subject was a "she") specific and forgotten days of childhood—an ordinary afternoon in a canoe, upon a June lake; a winter evening at the breath-misted window, eyes on the silhouetted copse at the bottom of the hill, the fire spitting in the grate behind—each brilliant, gemlike, overflowing. Everything was there, each brush of flannel at her father's elbow, each speck of grit on the tongue, each dog-shaped cloud scampering overhead and ripple on the water. All this, each instant, hour, day, we carry; somewhere; as does Etienne, just the same.

And if it is so, that he has room to be himself, in all its particular secrecy, and yet is capacious enough uncomplainingly to shoulder all that we require of him, all need and fear and innocence, everything—as he is the repository of all the very memories trapped, un-salvageably, in the webbings of our own brains (no scientist awaits to jolt mine back to the surface; nor would I necessarily desire it), then what is he? Then Etienne Parfait,
plus-que-parfait,
is not less than me; he is, in his silent wisdom, infinitely more vast.

And still, I hated to think of him alone. That night, the night before Christmas Eve, I lowered its bars and crawled again, as I had used to do, into his narrow bed, where he lay sleeping, so that we might be together, one. I settled his smooth forehead in the hollow of my clavicle, curved his body to the line of my own, stroked his fine hair (my mother kept it almost as long as a girl's; he winced at the sight of scissors) and breathed in time with him. He seemed so light, almost hollow; and safe within his skin, as if he permitted, rather than needed, me there. I did not protect him. If anything, my brother protected me, although I had so long sought to escape him.

I fell asleep with his head tucked under my chin, and woke before dawn, when the first bird called in the trees outside and the earliest shades of day crept blue along the floor. Etienne, in my crook, was hot, his brow damp, his breathing phlegmy and full. He smelled of sweat, a man's, not a boy's, sharp and seamy, and his penis was pressed hard against my leg, like a little limb. I had forgotten that he was no longer a child, had wanted to remember him that way, had wanted him to be one. Aghast, and aghast at my dismay, I slid from beside him, and he moaned, a little, but did not waken. My own bed was too tightly tucked, chilly; but I slept at once, relieved to be alone.

When the aged Augustine breathed his last, papery and feverish in his bed in Hippo, at the end of the summer of the year 430, he had not yet seen his earthly home destroyed. But he knew its destruction was imminent: the Vandals were at the gates. Within the year, Hippo was in flames, all that he had found familiar flattened to oblivion. Its library—its stories, Augustine's words—was spared; and in this way, his world, his Roman, Christian Africa, a life's work, would live in the imaginary still.

Camus, too, predeceased his homeland, his French Algeria; but he, too, looked on in horror at its death throes, the murder and torture within, on both sides. And he died, that absurd January afternoon in 1960, twenty-four kilometers out of Sens on the Nationale 5, in that crumpled Facel-Vega, with his words on the pages in his briefcase in the trunk of the car, to be salvaged and passed on.

That they knew their Algerias were dying mattered no more, in the broad continuum, than that they died themselves, men guilty of harm as well as good, who loved societies guilty of more harm than good. Because a country, like the Phoenix, like the soul, survives its conflagrations. But it mattered, surely, that they spoke.

I am American now: it is a life which has, like that of many others, like my father's, or my grandfather's, the appearance of choice. And in time, America becomes a home of a kind, without the crippling, warming embrace of history. I finished school; I enrolled at Columbia University; I followed a path as logical to my classmates, to my dowdy roommate Pat, as Thibaud's path, or Aline's and Ariane's, had been to them. I kept Becky and Rachel in my sights, American cousins leading their unquestioned lives, and strove to emulate their readiness. I slid easily into the tumble of the city, grateful for its indifference. In a gesture of perversity, I studied history, as an undergraduate, the wild idealism of the Founding Fathers, the piling, stone upon recent stone, of a culture notable for its interest not in the past but in the future; a different, an American, way of thinking.

For a time, I shared my bed with a hollow-cheeked graduate student, a Yeshiva rebel with persistent dark circles beneath his eyes, a man obsessed with film theory in zealous abscission from the terrible weight of his own family's history. We talked about ideas, about
suture
and shot-reverse-shot and notions of feminine narrative; we discussed professors and students and the landscape of New York (with the exception of Brooklyn, his birthplace, which smacked, to him, too much of home); we sought out ethnic restaurants and sampled exotic cuisines and talked, pretentiously, about them too. And when the time came that we could digress and postpone no longer, when we ought to have opened the locked cases of our own stories (it is something, surely, that most courting couples undertake from the outset), we balked, both of us, and withdrew, little by little, until our chance encounters in the library or at ill-lit wine-filled gatherings were excruciating, our stiffened exchanges freighted by all we knew we did not know about each other and had not wanted to reveal.

After that, I kept my liaisons brief. I lied. I shed my father's death, my brother, to be sure; but also the twisting paths of my family's history; I hid my private, all-too-real, unseen Algeria. Many times I have told men whose smells commingled with my own among the wilted sheets that the watercolor on the wall was but a trifle from a junk shop in the Village, or a random gift from a long-forgotten friend. I did not—I do not—answer questions; which is not difficult, because most do not ask them. And when pressed, I fabricate, aware as I do of my life's puzzle pieces drifting, mutable in language if not in fact, changing shape in the room around me.

I have been, most often, French; but also French Canadian, or simply American (the Robertsons' home is useful in this regard, as it gives texture to my lies), and upon occasion, Argentinian or Venezuelan, for kicks. I felt particular fondness for the man who listened, wide-eyed, to my description of the pampas, who strolled with me down the avenues of my imaginary Buenos Aires. I had met him in a bar, had spent a long weekend mooning along the shores of the Hudson and folding myself against his narrow, virtually hairless, chest; and, in embarking upon my South American fantasy had decided, after that afternoon, never to clap eyes on him again; which, of course, he could not know. I covered him the more tenderly and fulsomely with my kisses, that he might always recall his Argentinian lover as gentle and expert, and not detect the untraceable fleck of pity in her eyes.

Last August, my grandfather had a stroke. Mademoiselle Marceau discovered him, crumpled at his fine, broad desk, in the middle of the afternoon, his cheeks blue, his livered hands still grasping a sheaf of papers that were damp in the summer heat. The hotel was full to capacity, the pool splashing with a new generation of rambunctious youth, whose parents sipped drinks on the parasol-shaded terrace. My grandmother told me, over the telephone, in a voice that wavered like her body, and as she spoke I was visited by the blinding glare of the Mediterranean sun, by the vast, silvered, twinkling expanse of the sea that had once shaped my whole life.

It was up to me to inform my mother, the knowledge describing the earth's arc not once but twice, along the mysterious airwaves. She, in her grand villa in Nice, awaiting Paul's return as she once awaited my father's, betrayed no emotion, but sighed, and said, "I suppose Etienne should be taken to see him."

"I'm coming," I said. "I'll take him. I know how it is for you. Don't worry about it. I just thought you'd want to know."

Paul paid for my ticket, but I spent only one night under their roof. I stayed instead with my grandmother, at the Bellevue, in the bed that had been my father's, when he arrived, so long ago, the prodigal without a coffin. My aunt Marie was there, too, in her old room, in her pillowy bulk, leading with her great bosom, fatuously bustling and bossing the hunched Zohra, bullying my grandmother to eat and to sleep. We visited my grandfather's hospital bed together, the four of us, women with so little to say to one another. He could not speak. He lay supine, one lid drooping, the left side of his body a dead weight and the right scrabbling, minutely, painfully, to live. But with his good eye, the same eye, the one that still held himself, he fixed me, as he once had across the ocean of brown carpet, and he knew me, owned me, as he had always; he insisted, the last but one to do so, upon my historical self.

I intended to take Etienne to visit him, but found I could not. My grandmother would not do it of her own accord; my aunt, who did not think my brother wholly human (and never had), considered it a futile and acrobatic undertaking, better avoided. My mother did not emerge from her new life to offer assistance. It was up to me. And as I sat, sweatily grasping Etienne's slender, fronded hand in the dappled garden of his own institution, the stark smell of his room coming off him in waves, as he eyed me, birdlike, from his juddering head and seemed, wetly, patiently, knowingly to smile, I knew I could not bring these two men together (for there was no doubt about it, then: Etienne, too, was a man), each to look upon the other, so alone, and see himself reflected.

I stayed an afternoon with my brother, and talked to him about my life in New York (he seemed—perhaps I willed it—to nod deliberately in his smiling), and fed him, spoonfuls of chocolate pudding that dribbled, mingled with spit, brown along his pale chin. But I declined to bathe him, when the moment came, not wanting or able to see his man's body unclothed, and left him giggling coquettishly at the attendant, stopping only to bury my face in the top of his head and extract, in my nostrils, to the back of my throat, the true smell of him—not of his surroundings, with their sickly masking perfumes, but of him, part of myself, whom I had always known. It was like drawing deep from a spring that you know can sustain you, remote in the mountains, and whose sustenance must last indefinitely, perhaps forever, because the journey is so arduous that you may never be able to make it again, not in your lifetime, nor perhaps in that of the source. The source, after all, like anything else, may dry up.

My grandfather now has his own institution in which to rest. It stands outside Geneva, a stern nineteenth-century mastodon overlooking Lac Leman. My grandmother, ailing herself, has gone to live with her daughter, her less-favored child: the LaBasse family must, after all, stick together. Thierry's father has been appointed the interim manager of the Bellevue, while its sale is negotiated; and it flourishes again, my grandfather's house built on rock.

The century, the millennium, is drawing to a close. Scattered, alone, each of us waits in our corner for the chiming of the hour, for the new leaf, for the next move, for the coffin—we don't know what it will be, but all of us know we are waiting. Soon there will be no one left to tell the stories, no one but me and Etienne.

And yet, they aren't our stories alone. They seep outwards. Hairline seepage, perhaps, but perceptible, if you look closely. To the suicide of Mitterrand's loyal lieutenant Pierre Bérégevoy, for example, in the spring of 1993, in which I picture not the former prime minister of France, but only my father, walking alone along the river outside Nevers, beneath the overhanging grey sky, the burgeoning alleys of trees mourning, in their delicate dance, his imminent demise; and the quiet rush of the brown water, interrupted, for only an instant, by the terrible report of the gun. And to the War Crimes trial, much later, of Maurice Papon, former secretary general of the prefecture of the Gironde, about which I read in the American newspapers. The blurred old man in the photographs, a
pied-noir
like my own kin, his eyes wide, his hair fluttering around his weathered cheeks, his expression at once haughtily defiant and afraid—he is, to me, my grandfather. He is my history, what I am, no matter how I elide or disguise it. He, too, is inescapable, he is part of my story.