Where We Going, Daddy__ Life With Two Sons Unlike Any Other - Jean-Louis Fournier [9]
You’ve got to understand them, they have to be serious all night so they need to relax during the day. So they just muck about.
The only thing we got right was your names. By choosing Mathieu and Thomas we were going the safe route, with a nod toward the saints. Because you never know, and it’s always best to keep on the right side of everyone.
If we were hoping to attract God’s blessing on you, we kind of messed up.
To think of your feeble little limbs, you just weren’t built to be called Tarzan … I can’t really see you in the jungle, swinging from branch to branch, challenging bloodthirsty beasts, and dislocating a lion’s jaw or breaking a buffalo’s neck with your bare hands.
You were more like Tarzoon, the shame of the jungle.
Mind you, I prefer you to Tarzan and his arrogance. You’re so much more touching, my two little birds. You remind me of E.T.
Thomas wears glasses, little red glasses, they really suit him. Along with his dungarees, they make him look like an American student—a charmer!
I can’t remember how we found out he couldn’t see clearly. Now that he has his glasses, everything he sees must be in sharp focus, Snoopy, his drawings … For a while I had the extraordinarily naive belief that he would finally be able to read. First I would buy him strip cartoons, then children’s “early reader” books, then the classics: Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Le Grand Meaulnes … and why not a bit of Proust.
No, he’ll never be able to read. Even if the letters on the page are now clear, it will still all be a haze inside his head. He’ll never know that all those tiny lines and twirls covering the pages of books tell us stories and can transport us somewhere else. Confronted with them, he’s like me trying to decipher hieroglyphics.
He must think they’re drawings, minute drawings that don’t mean anything. Or perhaps he thinks they’re lines of ants, and watches them, amazed that they don’t run away when he brings his hand down to crush them.
To elicit sympathy from passersby, beggars display their misfortune, their clubfeet or amputations, their old dogs and flea-bitten cats, their children. I could do the same. I’ve got two good claims on people’s heartstrings, all I’d have to do is put my two boys in their threadbare navy blue coats. I could sit down on a cardboard box on the ground with them and look devastated. I could have a stereo playing rousing music and Mathieu could beat in time to it on his ball.
Look, I’ve always wanted to be a comedian, so I could recite Vigny’s stirring poem “Death of a Wolf” while Thomas did his star turn as a crying wolf, “Whooo, cries da wolf” …
People might be really moved and struck by the performance. They’d give us money to go and drink an absinthe to their old grandfather.
I’ve done something crazy, I’ve just bought myself a Bentley. An old one, a Mark VI, 22 horsepower, it goes through nine gallons of gas every hundred miles. It’s navy blue and black, with a red leather interior. The dashboard is burled walnut, with loads of little round dials and faceted indicator lights like precious stones. It’s like a beautiful old carriage; when it draws up to the sidewalk people expect the Queen of England to step out.
I use it to pick up Thomas and Mathieu from their special school, sitting them down on the back seat, like two princes.
I’m proud of my car; everyone gazes at it respectfully, trying to make out some famous passenger in the back.
If they could see what’s in the back, they’d be disappointed. Instead of the Queen of England, there are two dribbling, misshapen little kids, and one of them—the really gifted one—keeps saying, “Where we going, Daddy? Where we going, Daddy?”
I remember once driving along and not being able to resist the temptation to talk to them like a father who’s just picked his children up from high school. I invented questions about their