Authors: Michel Laub
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 wanting 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.
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.
I’ve always hated planes. I loathe everything to do with flying: the taxi to the airport, the zigzag queues, the trays for any metal objects, the boarding tunnel, the smell of jet fuel. I spend days worrying about that moment when your seat suddenly feels light and when the shaking diminishes as the plane gains altitude, and the continuous futile throb of the engines that always seem to be working at full throttle, and the sandwich and the napkin and the plastic and the gassy drinks, and the clothes worn by the cabin crew, and the conversations about sales figures between executives from provincial cities, and the window and the threads of water that turn into a storm on the eternal night during which you’re on board that box of compressed air, me plunging through space toward the dark empty countryside where not even my teeth will be identifiable, five hundred meters, two hundred
meters, at a speed impossible to imagine the instant before you close your eyes in readiness for the impact and the explosion.
I arrive at Porto Alegre airport alone. My parents no longer live in the same part of town as when I was fourteen. The streets are all tarmacked, and the city is busier, and the cars are new and the people are different and I know hardly any of the shops and bars and restaurants and pharmacies and buildings that seemed to have sprung up at an unstoppable, predatory rate.
I rang the buzzer. The lobby is furnished with rugs and a leather sofa. I hadn’t said I was coming, and my mother was waiting for me when the lift door opened. She’d gone with my father to see the doctor and suspected that the doctor would get in touch with me about the tests if anything was wrong, and why else would I be in Porto Alegre at that hour of the day, the sun in Porto Alegre isn’t the same as when I was fourteen, the air in Porto Alegre isn’t the same, the sound of the cars and the birds and the children playing behind a wall somewhere despite the news I had to
give to my father and which was there on my mother’s face the moment she saw me.
My mother took a step back and I was afraid she might fall, or was on the verge of fainting, because she realized that this was the final moment before everything else began to collapse, her years at my father’s side, the person she had been at my father’s side, and it’s that kind of reaction I’m talking about, the reaction of someone who really cares about another person, whether that person is their father or their best friend or their first or second or third wife, the way you feel and express yourself regardless of the shouting and the possibility that your third wife is about to leave you, the conversation she and I had after that last early-morning argument, when we finally reached our limit, had gone as far as we were capable of going, the plea from my third wife that marked perhaps the final act of my marriage.
The plea, the same one I’d been hearing since I was fourteen, at different times and in the mouths of different people, and there’s no point now describing
each of those circumstances because they’re no different from what one would normally expect in such cases, and I would again have to speak of people who had left because they couldn’t bear to witness what I did during those almost three decades, and it’s amazing how you can build a career and write books and get married three times and wake up every morning despite what you have repeatedly done during those almost three decades, my third wife’s plea was, of course, for me to stop drinking.
In the long term drink slows down your reflexes, but that wasn’t why my third wife made that plea. People who drink are prone to developing gastritis, stomach ulcers, hepatitis, heart problems and high blood pressure, chronic malnutrition, bipolar disorder, cirrhosis of the liver and generalized organ failure, but that wasn’t why she said she would leave if I didn’t listen to her. My third wife knew my history, and I could have said that I was ill and argued that I wasn’t in control of my actions, and alleged that the reason I was still drinking was because of João and the memory of the last day I spoke to him, me sitting in my room with that bottle of whisky, the first and last time that I wept
over what I would become from then on, a solitary, silent weeping, with no sense of pride or relief, I could have alleged whatever I liked, but that wasn’t the problem: it wasn’t simply a matter of choice or willpower, but the condition laid down by my third wife if I was to stay with her, knowing that staying would mean going ahead with the idea of us having a child.
It’s impossible to read my father’s memoir without seeing in it a reflection of my grandfather’s notebooks. Both men decided to devote their final years to the same kind of project, and it would be absurd to suggest that this was pure coincidence, but in certain very specific ways the tone they adopt is utterly different.
Did my father have an objective in writing down his memories, sending me a message he had never managed to convey to me in forty years? Ever since I went to see him in Porto Alegre to give him the news about Alzheimer’s I’ve been wondering if such a thing would even be possible after so much time, or after any amount of time, a few words or a whole book intended to change the way a son feels about his father, something a son knows from the moment he’s
born, the judgment he silently makes when he’s still so fragile and entirely dependent on his father’s love, and there’s no point in the father spending the rest of his years trying to redeem himself for being distant or indifferent or for deliberately or accidentally withholding his love, because that first memory is what will have lodged in the son’s mind, whatever age he might be.
From the age of fourteen on, my father never stopped feeling what he had always felt about my grandfather, and I imagine that the discovery of the notebooks did little to change that, because while my grandfather’s memoir can be summed up in the phrase
the world as it should be
, which presupposes an opposite idea:
the world as it really is
, I’m sure my father knew this long before he read it, that for my grandfather the real world meant Auschwitz, and if Auschwitz is the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, which makes it the greatest tragedy of all centuries, given that the twentieth century is considered the most tragic of all, because never have so many people been bombed, shot, hanged, impaled, drowned, butchered or electrocuted before being burned or buried alive,
two million in Cambodia, twenty million in the Soviet Union, seventy million in China, hundreds of millions if one includes Angola, Algeria, Armenia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Chechnya, Chile, the Congo, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tibet, Turkey and Vietnam, an accumulation of corpses, a pile reaching up to the sky, the history of the world as nothing but an accumulation of massacres that lie behind every speech, every gesture, every memory, and if Auschwitz is the tragedy that contains in its essence all those other tragedies, it’s also in a way proof of the nonviability of human experience at all times and in all places — in the face of which there is nothing one can do or think, no possible deviation from the path my grandfather followed during those years, the same period in which my father was born and grew up, unable ever to change that certain fate.