Where We Going, Daddy__ Life With Two Sons Unlike Any Other - Jean-Louis Fournier [15]
He was very moved by that visit. He wanted to go back. He was fascinated by that strange world where twenty-year-old children smother their teddy bears with kisses, come and take you by the hand, or threaten to cut you in two with a pair of scissors.
He’d always loved the absurd; now he’d found some masters of the art.
3. Pierre Desproges (1939–1988), outspoken and eloquent French humorist.
When I think of Mathieu and Thomas, I see them as two tousled little birds. Not eagles or peacocks, but modest birds, sparrows.
Their spindly little legs sticking out from under their short navy blue coats. I also remember, from bath time, their mauve transparent skin, like baby birds before they grow feathers; I remember their prominent breastbones and their ribs sticking out along their torsos. Their brains were birdlike too.
All that was missing were the wings.
Shame.
They could have gotten away from this world that wasn’t right for them.
They’d have gotten out more quickly, on the wing.
I’ve never talked about my two boys until now. Why not? Was I ashamed? Afraid of being pitied?
A combination of both. I think it was mainly to avoid the terrible question: “What do they do?”
I could have invented things …
“Thomas is in the States, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s studying for a degree in particle accelerators. He’s happy, it’s going well, he’s met a young American girl called Marilyn, such a beautiful girl, I’m sure he’s going to settle over there.”
“Isn’t that a bit hard for you, him being so far away?”
“America’s not the end of the earth. And what really matters is that he’s happy. We get all his news, he calls his mother once a week. But Mathieu, who’s interning with an architect in Sydney, never gets in touch anymore …”
I could have told the truth too.
“Do you really want to know what they do? Mathieu doesn’t do anything anymore, he’s no longer with us. Didn’t you know? No, don’t apologize, the death of a handicapped child often goes unnoticed. People talk in terms of release …
“Thomas is still here, lurking in the corridors of his special school, clutching a chewed old doll and talking to his hand with weird screaming noises.”
“But he must be quite big now, how old is he?”
“No, he’s not big. Old, yes, but not big. He’ll never be big.
You never get big when your head’s full of straw.”
When I was little I used to do the most outlandish things to attract attention. Aged six, I would steal a herring from the fishmonger on market day, and my great game was to chase girls and rub my fish over their bare legs.
In high school, wanting to appear romantic and like Byron, I wore floppy cravats instead of ties, and, wanting to be an iconoclast, I put the statue of the Virgin Mary in the restrooms.
Every time I went into a shop to try something on I only had to hear the words “They’ve been very popular, I must have sold ten of them yesterday” to decide against buying the thing. I didn’t want to be like everyone else.
Later, when I started working in television and was entrusted with small directing projects, I always tried—with varying degrees of success—to find an unusual camera angle.
I remember an anecdote about the painter Édouard Pignon, who was the subject of a television documentary I made. When he was painting the trunks of some olive trees a child walked past; after looking at the painting, the child said, “It doesn’t look like anything, what you’re doing there.” Flattered, Pignon replied, “You’ve just given me the most wonderful compliment, there’s nothing harder than doing something that doesn’t look like anything else.”
My boys don’t look like anyone else. To think I always wanted to do things differently—I should be glad.
At any given time, in every school, in every town, somewhere at the back of the