The Day I Killed My Father (13 page)

Since I was receiving a hefty allowance, I'd rented a flat at a fashionable address on the Left Bank, near the Musée d'Orsay. I attended university in the mornings, and had my afternoons and evenings free. To keep up with the course, all one had to do was read the books on the compulsory reading list, which wasn't too extensive, and that was it. This business of Masters' studies in France is a piece of cake. In my free time, I went to the National Library, where I caught up on French and Russian literature. Their translations of Russian authors are good, except for a few cosmetic interventions to polish up passages that must have been rather dusty.

Once a week, I went out to dinner with my aunt and her husband, who were based in Paris at the time. I'd already been living the good life for about three months when, one winter afternoon, I was approached by the woman who was to become my wife. I was enjoying an essay on Dostoyevsky, when I heard a husky voice — of a promising huskiness — behind me. ‘Such concentration!' I turned around, irritated by my fellow-countrywoman's bad manners. But instead of saying something impertinent, I froze.

I don't know if you got to see a picture of my wife in the newspapers during the sensationalist maelstrom that followed my father's death … No? Well, I'll describe her. It won't be difficult, because she's calendar-girl beautiful. She's tall, with light-brown hair — always cut shoulder-length (I imagine she still wears it like that) — blue-grey eyes, and immaculately white skin. Her body is so perfect that the tiny imperfections a sharp eye may detect here and there only accentuate the harmony of the whole — it is an attribute of beauty to have flaws that, in the context of the whole, only increase the effect of what is beautiful. Her smile, with teeth aligned by orthodontics, is the smile of the middle class, but tempered by a tomboyish air that permeates all of her expressions. Equally delightful is the grace of her movements: the slight sway of her hips as she walks; the gaze that arrives a split-second after she turns to look at someone; and the hands, with long, thin fingers that, when they reach to touch something, move at such a leisurely pace that the world seems to spin more slowly … Obviously, these last attributes only became evident later. But it was as if I had anticipated all of them the moment that I saw her at the library … Love at first sight? Yes. For lack of a less vulgar definition, that will do.

Since I didn't say a thing, dumbstruck as I was, she started talking to me. She told me that she'd had her eye on me for a week. ‘The first time I saw you, you were holding a book by a Brazilian author. That's why I figured that you were …' she explained. She was in the library to research eighteenth-century French cuisine for an essay she had to write for the cooking school she'd been attending for a year. The school was one of the most highly respected in the world, but I guessed that most of the students were rich kids from the Third World who were only there to justify a prolonged stint in Europe. When I put this to her, she protested. She said that when she graduated, she was going to open an ultra-posh restaurant. ‘Ultra-posh' isn't in my vocabulary — it's one of my wife's favourite adjectives. Only after telling me all her plans did she ask me what I did. I said I was studying philosophy; but, as I told her about my life, I got the impression she wasn't all that interested. It's curious that, even after our years of life together, this impression hasn't disappeared.

We left the library and headed for a café in Montmartre, where we stayed until the old waiter who was serving us kicked us out. She chattered non-stop; I listened in absolute ecstasy. She told me almost her entire life story. I'd never been out with a woman like this, nor did I understand why a woman like this would be at all interested in me. In the metro, we exchanged phone numbers. We met again, two days later, at a bistro near my flat. She showed up wearing a very expensive fur coat. I was both impressed and ashamed: I still dressed like a sloppy student. During dinner, she made a delicate reference to my apparel. She said that, although I was a philosopher, concerned with ideas and systems, I should pay more attention to my attire. ‘Not least because your beautiful watch doesn't go with the clothes you wear.' She was referring to an expensive watch my aunt had given me as a graduation present. Then she suggested we go shopping together the following day. Since this was an opportunity to see her again, I agreed with enthusiasm.

After that, I never stopped buying clothes. Until we left Paris (and we lived there together for four years), we renewed our wardrobes twice a year. We spent a fortune on clothes, on eating out at fashionable restaurants, on furniture, and on indoor decorating. She adored my flat (it really was adorable), but said it needed to be revamped. ‘Revamp' is another of her favourite words. Once my flat and I had been revamped, I was introduced to her friends. The group consisted of two Frenchmen, an Italian girl, and an American guy. The first three were also studying cooking. The American was a financier with a large corporation. Since he treated her with more intimacy than was reasonable for friends, she was obliged to confess that they used to be lovers. ‘Don't worry, it's completely over,' she assured me.

We started living together four months after we met — not only out of affinity, but also out of necessity. Her expensive habits, the cooking school, and the exorbitant rent she paid for a flat near the Champs-Élysées had consumed much of the inheritance she'd got from her parents, who'd been killed two years earlier in a plane crash. So I invited her to live with me. I was rewarded with one of the most incredible nights of sex in all my life. She was great in bed. She was uninhibited, and liked to be cursed and have her hair pulled. I was no big deal, but she made me feel fantastic … I beg your pardon? Yes, the idea for the restaurant in
Future
was inspired by my wife's connection with gastronomy. It was she who introduced me to the history of food, and urged me to read a few books on the subject.

Did you know that it was only in the early nineteenth century that books on food lost their pharmaceutical slant and began to concentrate on the palate? The word ‘gastronomy', in fact, first appeared in this era. One of the reasons for this is that the sense of taste was highly associated with the sin of gluttony. In other words, it wasn't a topic that authors could explore without guilt. There were even philosophers who considered the sense of taste, like the sense of smell, inferior, given its enormous subjectivity. According to these same thinkers, sight, touch, and hearing were superior, because they allowed one to perceive nature objectively. As you can see, my character Hemistich subverts this philosophical conception by holding taste superior to all the other senses.

At this point, so you don't get the wrong idea, I should make an observation: my wife introduced me to futility, but also to a kind of culture I didn't know. The culture of surface. I'm not talking about polish, or broader general knowledge. The culture of surface … how can I explain it? The culture of surface is the culture of those who have the intelligence to delve deeper, but are smart enough not to. My wife is well versed in the literary classics, she knows how to tell a good painting from a bad one, she can talk with authority about directors who saw hermeticism as an opportunity to make art out of cinema, but … But she has never allowed herself to be gripped by intellectual anxiety. It's a voluntary act, hers, not a sign of incapacity. It's not about anti-intellectualism, because she knows how important it is to cultivate the spirit, seeing as she always has. By not allowing herself to be gripped by intellectual anxiety, she filters from philosophy and art that which she considers worth applying to life. That, in my opinion, is called wisdom. A certain kind of wisdom. It was what made her, in my eyes, even more desirable.

She did the same with existential anxieties, per se. Take the death of her parents, for example. She didn't like to remember the accident, and didn't talk about them much. When I tried to talk about her family, she'd sidestep the subject, saying how important it was to forget in order to live. She took this lesson from the best philosophical tradition, incidentally. As for my own family problems, she tried to get me to adopt the same approach: forgetting. Her tactic was to attenuate the dramatic colours with which I painted certain events in my life so they would fade away and eventually disappear. It is true that the facts have proved her wrong in my case. But, even so, she's managed to survive it all well. Very well. Thanks to her approach to life.

Coming back to our story in Paris … After I met her, my expenses went up so much that it caught my father's attention. He called one morning when I was still in bed with my wife. I started to shake when I heard his voice, as if I'd been caught committing a crime — the crime of being happy. Without asking if I was OK, without any other formality of the sort, he said straight off that I was spending too much. He wanted to know the reason for such a change in my expenditure. Since I was gagging, my wife took the phone. She introduced herself in a very friendly way — ‘Hi, I'm the spendthrift who's taking you to bankruptcy' — and struck up a conversation in which, as she had done with me at the library, she told him her life story, revealed her plans, and even discussed aspects of her personality. She also described how she looked. I was taken aback by the casual way she was talking to my father. They seemed like old friends. The conversation must have lasted an hour, and ended with laughter. Finally, my father asked to speak to me. ‘Very friendly, your wife. She's worth spending money on. I want to meet her. Send me a photo,' he said, and hung up. ‘Your father can't be the insensitive monster you've made him out to be,' she said, as she took off her clothes to get into the shower.

I sent my father a photo of my wife. Two weeks later, I received a substantial increase in my allowance. And a message: ‘You've finally done something right.'

–18–

I didn't know what to make of this telephonic rapport between my wife and my father. At times I felt peeved that I'd done something which pleased him (being with a woman he judged friendly and beautiful); at others, I thought I should put an end to our battles — and my wife seemed an excellent candidate to foster this family reunion. But, regardless of my feelings, it seemed strange that they should both inhabit the same planet. Although I was dependent on my father, I'd kept him separate from my life in Paris. Allow me to explain: it was as if my existence was a filing cabinet with many drawers. There was the drawer for the ‘mother' file, which I wish had been much bigger; another for the ‘father' file, which I wish had been smaller; another for the ‘philosophy' file; another for the ‘literature' file; another for the ‘love' file; and so on … Yes, I'd compartmentalised my life more than was desirable, and for this reason the files hadn't yet come into contact with one another … OK, you're right, the ‘mother' and ‘father' files used to be the same … In a way, the fact that my wife and father got along so well in their first contact showed me that life can't be compartmentalised — it is a futile operation. But it didn't please me in the slightest.

It wasn't long before my father decided to visit us in Paris. My wife insisted that we pick him up from the airport. When I saw him coming from the arrival hall, all of my feelings of inferiority came to the fore. No matter how well dressed I was, I'd never be like my father. As I've already mentioned, he was an attractive man. Taller than me, with an athletic build, tanned (and wearing an overcoat that had been custom-made by a tailor in New York), his mien impressed my wife. When she held out her hand to shake his, she narrowed her eyes slightly, as if making sure he really was made of flesh and blood. We dined with him in one of the most expensive restaurants in town, and I kept noticing tiny alterations in her, including sudden blushes. Her eyes shone, for example, when, after checking the wine list, he made some observations about certain years, winemaking regions, and so on.

My father was really a well of ignorance, but he could be quite deceptive about this by choosing topics that lent him an appearance of refinement, not least because he spoke English and French fluently. I was annoyed, of course, that my wife had been impressed by these things. I tried to bring him down a notch, saying how the nouveau riche in our country liked to pose as wine connoisseurs instead of trying not to be so stupid in more important matters. I have to admit, he handled the provocation well. When the wine was served, he made a toast to tolerance, ‘The true sign of intelligence.' My wife laughed, and said that she'd been trying to teach me about wine since we'd met, but I'd refused to learn. ‘As if knowing about wine could make his heavy bourgeois conscience any worse,' she said.

Naturally, I had a jealous fit when we were alone again in our flat. I told my wife that if she found him so delightful and refined, she could go and screw my ‘old man' (I used this expression, which would normally never come out of my mouth, to bring him down). Since she didn't say anything, I added that we were finished. She let her black silk dress fall to the floor, walked over to me, wrapped her arms around my neck, and whispered that she'd merely found my ‘old man' (she knew using the expression would win her points) nice, and that I was only behaving like that because his presence had stirred up my complex. She finished by whispering in my ear, ‘The one sleeping with mummy now is you, my love.' We tumbled into bed, kissing passionately. You can imagine how amazing that night was … No, you can't.

My father stayed in Paris for about twenty days. I managed not to be unpleasant the entire time. After all, it was I who was sleeping with mummy now. This expression had a pacifying effect on me — and my wife never tired of using it every night when we got home after dropping my father off at his hotel. Since it also aroused her, it was one of the most ardent periods in our relationship. So much so, that I didn't much mind letting her and father wander the city without my company. My excuse was that he'd come at a time when I — who was always lackadaisical about my studies — had a lot of essays and reports to write. Busy as I was (or wanted to appear to be), I almost always met them at the restaurant where we'd planned to eat. Of course, I felt jealous when I saw that they'd had a perfect day, visiting an exhibition or shopping in Place Vendôme. It was as if my father was taking the opportunity to steal my delightful day-to-day life with her. But I quickly suppressed my jealousy with the thought that the cost–benefit ratio was excellent: I didn't have to see my father most of the time and, to make up for all the hours she spent with him, my wife exceeded herself in the arts of lovemaking.