Where We Going, Daddy__ Life With Two Sons Unlike Any Other - Jean-Louis Fournier [10]
While I talked to them about their schoolwork, I watched their tousled little heads and blank expressions in the rear-view mirror. Maybe I was hoping they’d give me a proper answer, that we’d stop the whole joke about handicaps, it wasn’t funny anymore, this game, and we were finally going to be sensible like everyone else, they were finally going to be like everyone else …
I waited quite a while for an answer.
Thomas said, “Where we going, Daddy?” several times, while Mathieu went “Brmm, brmm” …
It wasn’t a game.
Every weekend, Thomas and Mathieu come home from special school covered in scrapes and scratches. They must fight like dogs. Alternatively—now that cockfighting’s been banned, and to help make ends meet—I can see the teachers at their rural institution organizing child-fights.
Judging by how deep the gashes are, they clearly attach metal spurs to the children’s fingers. Which isn’t acceptable.
I’m going to have to write to the management and ask them to stop.
Thomas needn’t be jealous of his brother any longer, he’s going to have a brace too. An impressive surgical corset with chrome-plated metal and leather. His frame’s collapsing, he’s becoming hunchbacked like his brother. Soon they’ll be like little old men who’ve spent their whole lives harvesting beetroot in the fields.
These braces cost a fortune, they’re entirely handmade in a specialized workshop in Paris, near La Motte-Picquet, a place called Maison Leprêtre. Every year we have to take them to the workshop to be measured for new braces, because they’re growing. They always meekly let the experts get on with it.
When they’ve got their braces on they look like Roman warriors in breastplates, or characters from a science fiction cartoon because of the gleaming chrome.
When you pick them up in your arms it feels like you’re holding a robot. A metal doll.
It takes a monkey wrench to get them undressed at night. When you peel their breastplates off, you find purple welts left on their naked torsos by the metal stays, and all that’s left are two shivering little plucked birds.
I’ve directed several television programs about handicapped children. I remember the first one: my opening sequence was stock footage of a beautiful baby competition, and the soundtrack was a song all about glorious, victorious youth.
I have an unusual attitude toward beautiful baby competitions. I really don’t understand why anyone congratulates and rewards people who have beautiful children, as if they did it on purpose. Why, then, don’t they punish and fine those who have handicapped children?
I can still see those arrogant, self-assured mothers, brandishing their masterpieces in front of the jury.
I wanted them to drop them.
I’ve just gotten back to the apartment. Josée is alone in the children’s bedroom, the beds are both empty and the window is wide open. I lean out of it and look down, vaguely concerned.
We now live on the fourteenth floor.
Where are the kids? I can’t hear them anywhere. Josée’s thrown them out the window. She might have had a moment of madness; you read about that sort of thing in the papers sometimes.
“Josée, why’ve you thrown the boys out the window?”
I only asked it as a joke, to dispel the image.
She hasn’t answered, she doesn’t understand, she’s speechless.
I carry on in the same tone of voice: “What you’ve done is very bad, Josée. I know they’re handicapped, but that’s no excuse to throw them out.”
Josée’s terrified, she looks at me in stunned silence, I think she’s frightened of me. She goes into our bedroom, comes back with the children in her arms, and stands them in front of me.
They’re fine.
Josée’s quite shaken, she must be thinking, “Hardly surprising the boss’s kids are crazy.”
Mathieu and Thomas will never know Bach, Schubert, Brahms, Chopin …
They will never benefit from the blessings