Speechless - Tom Lanoye

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become exposed, baking in the fierce African sun, drying up in the hellish Cape Town wind, the feared ‘South-Easterly’, whipped up by the tropical summer heat and the two oceans that enclosed the city, one ice-cold, one lukewarm, the Atlantic and the Indian, making its good name of Cape Doctor a joke. It tortured the corrugated sheets and the swaying palms and made electric cables snap like the anchor lines of a tanker adrift, it screeched louder than the mistral and the sirocco combined and, no longer hindered by fire-fighting helicopters, it fanned fires on four mountains at once, Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain, Lion’s Head and Signal Hill, which together form a basin in which the old, vulnerable part of the city lies.

      I was still sitting on my terrace, no longer with my feet on the balustrade, but staring around me in astonishment and fear in the red-glowing darkness, surrounded by more and more glowing scars, tangible heat, the angry, dense smell of scorching, the stink of sulphur, the demonic laughter of the South-Easterly, the snapping of distant blazing tree trunks. I was more and more hemmed in, like everyone else, like the city itself. Some way further up our street, twelve blocks up, there were fire engines with revolving lights. The inroads of the fire were being combatted there with traditional hoses and the struggle was gradually being lost. Still further up two houses were already ablaze; a little further down the residents were already carrying their furniture into the street and in the distance, across the whole side of Table Mountain, from top to bottom, ran an awful crack, hundreds of metres long, filled with blazing charcoal as if with lava. I couldn’t stop looking; the obscenity of fire is inexorable, terrifying, fascinating.

      It roared and hammered at the same time in my brain: didn’t write, didn’t write. Even here.

      ‘The world is vast, it’s true. / But everywhere the same.’

      -

      ON MY RETURN to the Worn-Out Continent, I finished the play in alexandrines, attended rehearsals and the first night, so, taking the most recent escape route to its end and completing it, I began after all on my song cursing her bitter lot. Indeed I got going industriously and built up a head of steam.

      Then my father died.

      And I faltered again.

      Not because of death in itself. It was sad but also, I don’t hesitate to say it, beautiful. After the horrors that had befallen her, during which he was condemned to be a helpless spectator—the star witness of her slow terror of being excluded for ever from a life that had formed the foundation of his—after that ordeal he was allowed to pass away as he would have wished. Not long after her, for a start.

      And quickly. Two weeks or so, and he was gone.

      And not in the aseptic, deadly hospital where he was supposed to die, but in his familiar room in the old people’s home into which he had moved.

      And without pain, high on morphine, sinking into ever-longer periods of sleep and finally coma, surrounded by his closest family, who took turns watching at his deathbed, staying awake as was proper: with a thermos flask of coffee on the table and a dish of filled rolls, as well as a bottle of Wortegem lemon gin, his favourite aperitif and favourite nightcap, and anyway a welcome reviver during the strange timeless nights, in which someone lies dying who saw you being born, and is now on the point of closing his eyes for ever. His television was on the whole time, from morning till night, as always, babbling more endlessly than an Old Testament woodland stream. The only concession was that the sound could be turned off at the last. In this way my father faded away, while football matches were silently lost and won, world crises were averted and revived in utter silence. They cast their flickering shadows pityingly on him.

      And I was about to forget the most important thing: he was surrounded by all the photos of her that he had brought from their flat. One of them is that photo on the front cover. Just look at it. It won’t be the last time. When I found it during the liquidation at which I acted as arbitrator, it was hidden among a mass of other photos—stuffed together in an old biscuit tin, so that the plain lid was pushed outward by them—and covered in scratches; it was not much bigger than a passport photo. Later, enlarged and framed, it took pride of place, often with a burning tea light in front of it, on his circular drawing-room table, the one with the glass top resting on a wicker base, one of the few items of furniture that had accompanied him from flat to room on his penultimate journey.

      That room had gradually become less his living quarters than a shrine, a sanctuary where there was daily remembrance, and without prayers, prayers to a goddess of many manifestations. There was a photo of her on every cupboard and every side table. Three hung over his bed.

      One of them was a grotesque print, at least for anyone who did not know the context. My mother, at the time long since retired, is depicted as Mae West. One of her favourite manifestations in this local church community consisting of a single worshipper, which compensated for the modesty of its numbers with the power of its devotion. Every morning and every evening he made his modest pilgrimage, shuffling in a circle round his dining table, from cupboard to drawing-room table to bed to cupboard, watching the treacherous wrinkles and flaps in the carpet, in order to wish each of the photographic manifestations an extensive good morning or good night, as the case might be. When he drank his aperitif he raised his glass now to one then to the other, taking care not to favour one of the figures over the others. He loved them all equally.

      Yet he toasted most frequently that one secular saint’s print above his bed, in which his idol wore a festive shiny ultramarine evening dress—Mae West at her finest, including black stiletto heels, a platinum-blonde wig, garish lipstick and false eyelashes the size of butterfly’s wings. In a wheelchair but not yet secured, sitting in it entirely of her own will, actually wheeling around with bravura, from the look on her face not doubting for a moment the success of her statement. It is a souvenir of one of her most treasured roles, in a play about, of all things, old people with dementia. One of her few professional jobs, for the Royal Flemish Theatre, the Brussels municipal theatre that granted my mother a rebirth as one of the women whom she had so admired throughout her life. (‘Just a shame she was so foul-mouthed. [she, with an ugly frown] She went to jail because of it, “Mie Wust” or “My Sausage” as we called her in our young days. Thank God they never called me that. One’s got to be able to laugh at oneself, but Mie Wust? I wouldn’t call that much of a recommendation, not even in a butcher’s shop.’)

      His wife, sparkling above his bed as a Dietrich-like Blue Angel in a continuous screening, flourishing as a well-preserved Hollywood icon, triumphant in a wheelchair, with too much make-up but as yet without a twinge of pain, with a piercing gaze in which there is not yet any bewilderment. On the contrary, she seems ready to burst into a faultless monologue and hold the audience in thrall. That was one of the last images which my father, taking shorter and shorter hazy glimpses of the world from which he was slipping away, absorbed, at each glance himself a little less lucid. A happy drowning man who still occasionally sticks his head up in the middle of a desolate sea, sees that it is good and lets himself slide back underwater, blissfully weakening, reassured, without complaint, satisfied, even smiling: look over there, there she hangs, my Josée. Does she look fantastic or doesn’t she? Alert, protective, radiant.

      Although when we squabbled she could stare at the same nail for a bloody long time. That’s how she was. My Josée.

      Come on now, Dad. Go ahead. We know what you want. Cast a final glance. Raise that tired head one last time. Lift it up one last time from that calm, flat sea of sheets. There’s no need to be embarrassed. If there are people who when they read this want to feel vicarious shame for you, for me, for her—let them skip this page. Let them stop reading completely. They are in the wrong place here. They are not worthy of you.

      Come on now. Just once. Look at that photo which, when you were awake and well, you sang the praises of so often, to nurses, the odd-job-man, the old pious, faithful nun on your floor—what’s her name again?—to all visitors, everyone, more than once and again and again, just as in the shop you told the same joke a hundred times, the same bit of gossip to a different customer each time, and the next day the same. You said in your room, pointing to the place above your bed: ‘Have you in all your life ever seen such beautiful legs? I agree they’re on the short side. But apart from that? And she was already seventy-seven!’

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