The Day I Killed My Father (3 page)

It was only that night that sadness caught up with me — or, rather, that I caught up with sadness, because maybe it was me who was behind it. But it was hard to separate sadness from remorse, and my pain grew because I was unable to do so. Why hadn't I hugged her more? Why hadn't I said anything the last time I saw her? I felt like I was the cause of her cancer. In fact, more than that — that I was the cancer. I pulled away from my aunt, who was trying to hug me, and ran to my mother's bed. I wanted to smell her, like little animals do when they look for their mothers who've gone forever … No, that image didn't just come to me now. I'm faithfully reproducing everything that went through my child-mind. At that moment, I remembered the documentaries about baby animals I liked to watch on TV. I always got teary-eyed when I saw them abandoned. If I could find my mother's smell maybe I'd be able to cry. But the tears didn't come. They never came again. I don't remember the last time I cried. I don't know if it was because I was upset, hurt, or had been told off. All I know is that, after I turned ten and everything changed at home because of my mother's illness, I never shed another tear.

With my face buried in her pillow, tearless, I broke into a cold sweat. Then I felt faint. ‘I feel dizzy, Aunty,' I said. And at the wake, still reeling, I saw my mother's face — wearing that stupid, beatific smile drawn on by those who prepare the dead — for the last time. Reeling, I watched as her coffin was buried and, reeling, I was patted by people I knew and people I didn't. Still reeling, I glared at my father when he said, ‘Now it's just me and you.'

I beg your pardon? Do I still have dizzy spells? Well, in my current state, it's hard to say what I'm feeling. Sometimes I feel as if I'm being swallowed by darkness, while at others it's as if I've lost my individual contours. What do I mean by that? I'll try to explain. Let me see … It's as if the sounds around me were passing through me. They enter through my pores, pass through my body, and carry away what I guess you could call my essence. I feel disoriented, but it's not exactly dizziness or faintness. It's a bit like the feeling described by people who have panic attacks when they find themselves in a crowd. Your body loses its limits, your very substance starts to wane, and it seems like everything is going to melt away, dissolve. To recover, I have to be alone, in complete silence, which isn't easy around here with so many people coming and going from my cell all day long. From my room, I mean.

No, I didn't feel dizzy when I killed my father. Nor did I feel at all faint afterwards. My lawyers said it would have weighed in my favour during the trial; to reinforce what they claimed was a temporary loss of lucidity or some such legal baloney. But I didn't want to lie. At any rate, they managed to do a good job of convincing the different judges along the way that I should be locked up in a place like this rather than a prison. Though I helped quite a lot in that respect, too.

‘Now it's just me and you.' Yes, you're right, these are words that precede duels in films. Except that there was never a component of fiction in our clash. It was the most real thing in my life. Now there's nothing that can be done. And perhaps there's nothing more to say either … I'm tired. My conversations with you every other day wear me out. I think it'd be better if we stopped them … What? That would put you in an awkward situation? Why should I be considerate with you? I don't really know you. I only know your name — your first name. I don't know where you live, if you're married, if you have kids, if you go to a gym, if you suffer for any reason, how much you earn. Nothing. But you know everything about me — or you think you do. But I don't tell you everything. Not even the file you had access to is complete. No, that's also my tragedy: everything about me is known. I'm a man picked to pieces by analyses, descriptions, comments, judgements. There isn't a soul alive with a more transparent background than mine. Actually, if you have a copy of my hefty court records, you don't really need to be here, hearing it all again … Yes, that's true, I must admit. As I retell my story, new details emerge. There's one thing that bothers me, though. In spite of all the visibility that my existence has acquired, a part of me remains invisible, obscure, closed up inside itself. Is this what they refer to as soul — the essence that cannot be unravelled, no matter how closely we scrutinise it?

You read that I was writing a book when I killed my father. It's true. I have an unfinished novel on my résumé. I've managed to keep it out of the hands of the law. It does have autobiographical elements, obviously, but nothing about my conflict with my father … You'd like to read it? I don't know … The title?
Future
… What's it about? A guy who's lost, who'd like to make something of himself, and runs into insurmountable obstacles … What do you mean, ‘Is that all?' Don't you think it's enough? My character has philosophical questions, which lead him to choose a certain path. Am I making you curious? I'm afraid you're going to be even more disappointed in me if you read what I wrote. I wouldn't like you to be disappointed in me, you know. I really like your voice, although I don't hear it much … I'm sorry. I don't mean to embarrass you. So, do you really want to read my book? We'll see … But, if I say yes, you'll have to agree to one condition — that you will read my book here, aloud, so I can hear it. It'd be an interesting experience for me to hear my words coming from your mouth … Do you agree to this? I'll consider your request.

–8–

I decided to write a book because I was jam-coloured. That was the underlying reason. Before you ask, I'll explain: when I was seventeen, that was how a literature teacher defined me. Jam-coloured. He considered himself to be a bit of a psychic, and liked to categorise people by colour. This game made him popular among the students — especially the boys, whom he appreciated from afar, as an inmate would, poor thing. He'd stare at a student in the face and, after a few seconds, as if he'd seen their soul, would tell them if they were blue, red, yellow, or green. As far as I know, I was the only one to be defined as jam-coloured. He stared at me a little longer than usual, hesitated, then finally delivered his verdict. I was intrigued, and asked him what jam-coloured actually meant, since jam came in a range of colours. He didn't know how to answer.

Are you laughing? Go ahead … After so many years, it's just funny. But I didn't find it remotely funny at the time. To be honest, I still don't find my teacher's description funny. When you're seventeen, you want, above all, to have clear contours, a well-defined colour. And jam-coloured isn't any real colour; it's nothing. It's somewhere between burgundy and brown, I think … At any rate, my teacher wasn't exactly wrong. I really was colourless, and remained so until I killed my father, when I finally gained a colour.

What colour is a patricide? It took me a long time to answer that question. But I did. A patricide is white, all white — the white of the nothing that once was everything. You don't get it? Let me see … The white of a star that is born, develops, sparks the appearance of a system around it and dies in an explosion that swallows everything around it, and is quickly followed by an incredible concentration of matter that is no longer anything. Just a white spot in space. Colours … Even my nightmares used to be in colour. With time, black and white took over my dreams, colours became memory — and, from memory, they turned into concepts. The concept of red, the concept of green, the concept of yellow. And the concept of white.

Might I also lose these concepts one day?

As I was saying, I decided to write a book because this undefinable jam colour impregnated my existence until I was an adult. It extended into every corner of my life. My jam-coloured existence was almost completely unreal, and I urgently needed to become real — or to belong to a reality, that is, that bore no connection to that of my perpetual war with my father. It's curious that one might turn to fiction to reach reality, but I think that's how it works for some writers or would-be writers — and I ended up becoming just that, a would-be writer. Many years ago, I watched a re-run of an interview with Clarice Lispector [the Brazilian writer who lived from 1925 to 1977]. Have you read Clarice Lispector? What a silly question; of course you've read Clarice … How do I know, if you didn't answer? Something about the way you speak makes me assume so.

She's not my favourite writer, but I was quite taken by her persona. Those almond-shaped eyes that seemed to see an invisible world, her crooked fingers, her strange accent with inflections from the Brazilian north-east and the Ukraine. Clarice, in all her humanity, was an other-worldly creature. Anyway, in this TV re-run, at a certain point she said she wrote so as not to die; it was what kept her alive. And between the end of one book and the beginning of the next, she died. That sense of death, uselessness, lack of horizon, disorientation, was what I was feeling at the time, regardless of the fact that I was dutifully completing each stage of life that a man is supposed to. The end of my university years, finishing my Master's in France, moving into a home of my own, getting married — nothing had jolted me out of this frame of mind. My anxiety was like a noise. Sometimes louder, sometimes quieter, sometimes almost imperceptible, but always there, present. After watching the interview with Clarice, I thought that maybe during the writing of a book I'd be able to put it — my anxiety, I mean — on hold. If it all worked out, I could write books back-to-back, and thereby go on living with some pleasure.

Obviously I'd already thought about being a writer before watching the interview. But it was important in helping me decide to shake off my state of lethargy. A brainwave? Yes, a brainwave. I was teaching a few classes at a shoddy university, doing the odd translation, proofing the occasional thesis — so I had plenty of spare time to devote to writing a novel. But I always ended up finding a way to put off sitting down at the computer. I still didn't have enough incentive to turn my paralysing anxiety into stimulating anxiety. Money? You know my father was rich. Every month he deposited a handsome sum into my bank account, which increased after I got married, seeing as my wife was what you might call high-maintenance, and my father admired her for it … Yes, being supported by my father was a source of some anxiety. I was just one more whore he paid … Sorry? I said at the beginning that he didn't sleep with prostitutes? That's true. But that's how I felt — like a whore. Like everyone else who orbited around him.

A few months before I saw the interview with Clarice, I started analysis. I admit that therapy also helped a lot in my decision to write. But maybe my analyst thought that my initiative was just a way of working through the neurosis of the … that complex … Why do I avoid talking about the Oedipus complex? Before everything happened, the only reason I didn't mention it was because the name sounded ridiculous to my ears. Perhaps because I'd heard conversations in which people came out with things like ‘My Oedipus is affecting my relationship' or ‘Your Oedipus is stopping you making the right decisions', with embarrassing ease. After I killed my father … Well, let's just say I'm over him in such a way (not in a psychological sense, obviously) that an Oedipus complex alone cannot begin to describe my tragedy. It has become too weak an expression. Actually, have you ever noticed how words and concepts are only accurate when defining what happens to other people, never ourselves? Or is this just the impression of one who considers himself superior to others, better than everyone else, even when misfortune befalls him? Did you know my analyst wrote that my narcissism was so monstrous that in order to differentiate myself from mere mortals, I'd decided to brand my own story with the myth, becoming it myself. It seems quite plausible; even so, after that interpretation I can't help but think of her as a fucking bitch.

–9–

For two years after my mother's death, I went to mass every Sunday. I was taken by an old domestic of ours who thought it was my duty, as an orphan, to pray to God for my mother's soul. The architecture of this church was curious. It was simple outside; imposing inside. It had a main nave and two side aisles. The columns separating them were made of dark marble, with fine Corinthian capitals. The high-altar scenography involved a statue of Jesus on the Cross, with statues of Mary and Mary Magdalene on either side, kneeling, gazing at him. Behind them, a purple curtain, like the ones in opera theatres, provided the backdrop. Above the high altar was a fresco of the Resurrection: Jesus, holding a standard with a cross on it, was levitating over the tomb that had held his body, while Roman soldiers shielded their eyes against the light emanating from the divine spectacle. Next to the high altar was a huge pulpit carved in dark wood, where the priest preached. Opposite it, above the main entrance, was a silver organ, which was only used on special occasions. The side aisles had chapels devoted to different saints, most of whom were Italian, since the church had been financed by Italian immigrants. The altar in the left-hand aisle had a statue of Saint Paul of the Cross, while the right-hand one had a statue of the Virgin Mary.

It was in this church that I had taken my first communion and shat my pants during a school ceremony, the shit seeping through the white knee-highs that were part of my school uniform. Both occasions were branded in my memory, not least for the fact that my father wasn't present at either one. On my first communion, arguing that it was just institutionalised superstition, he spent the day out of town on a friend's farm. My mother was really hurt, but I liked not having him around. I managed to be the centre of attention all day long. As for the school ceremony, I don't remember why he wasn't there. I was relieved he hadn't witnessed my public humiliation — and my mother didn't tell him anything about it, on my insistence … You think she might have told him without me knowing about it? I doubt it. He would have mocked me. If he didn't, it's because he didn't know.