But we were discussing the tart. There had to be a tart no matter what. Some people had such funny ideas: fancy suggesting that a meal in the garden with the whole family didn’t need to end with a big mouthful of pastry!
‘Désiré, get your bum into gear and go for a drive to get us a nice tart! Then your legs might remember what it’s like to move for once!’
I returned one and a half hours later.
‘So, Robinson Crusoe, where have you been? And you went off without your phone too, so we couldn’t even reach you. Our Charlotte, the poor child, started biting her nails she was so worried. And that’s no life for a woman, walking around with ratty little chewed fingernails. And all because of you!’
‘What do you mean, where have I been? I had to go to the shop, didn’t I?’
‘Of course you had to go to the shop. But did you really need to take an hour and a half to buy a tart? Or are you going to tell me they still had to bake it?’
‘A tart?’
And I plonked a shiny new toaster down on the garden table. ‘It’s a good one. In terms of value for money, the best! A two-year guarantee.’
I could see our children’s panic in the looks they exchanged. They knew what they were in for.
My show had begun. The first act.
Mother Goose was sitting in her armchair, the armchair that was always covered with blankets to keep the cushions clean, waiting for the start of the soap opera she had already been addicted to for twenty-three whole seasons, and began jabbering at me:
‘Shall we play a game?’
Moniek had never been one for games, she found them too frivolous. But she probably thought she was clever enough to pull the wool over my eyes.
I said, ‘What game?’
‘A memory game! I’m going to market to buy!’
‘Are you going to market?’
‘No, that’s the name of the game. I’m going to market to buy. For instance, I say, “I’m going to market to buy a first-aid kit.” And then it’s your turn and you can add something, but you have to remember what I’m buying too, because then you can get it for me. So you say something like, “I’m going to market to buy a first-aid kit and three pairs of socks.” And so on. Ready?’
I said, ‘I don’t want to go to market. Just go by yourself!’
Her TV show was starting on its eleven billionth episode, something to help her in her struggle against despondency.
On paper it seemed easy enough: I would more or less crumble away like one of those lonely bluffs you see in Westerns. Slowly but inexorably, with something resembling grandeur, I would blur and gradually disappear in the mist I myself was discharging. Degenerating so gently that in the end the existential night would fall almost unnoticed. If there’s such a thing as the art of living, then there must also be an art of dying. But my craving for results was so fierce I had to be careful not to overplay my hand. What’s more, I had reached a fair age and was already slipping into the pathetic state all elderly people have to contend with sooner or later. There’s no need for me to list the skills I had already lost by the time I started on my last and greatest adventure. They were enough to make you weep, my irreparable ailments, that much was certain. My grave-bound roller coaster was already going fast enough. The milepost of no-longer-being-able-to-trim-my-own-toenails had shot by long ago. My life, which had largely been a disappointment, was coming to an end anyway. It wasn’t as if my little plan was cheating the planet of my presence in any significant way.
Strangely enough, I had decided to play a role in the piece I feared most: dementia. For thirty-eight years my memory allowed me to carry out the profession of librarian flawlessly — and that in an era in which card indexes were gradually being replaced by the first, monstrous computers and people, as a result, mostly had to rely on the completely biodegradable database in their heads. If you gave me a subject or an author’s name, I’d spit out a whole series of titles. Without wavering. If somebody mentioned ‘Louis Albrechts’, for instance, I could instantly add ‘Town and Regional Planning in Scotland’. And here I’m citing a book that wasn’t borrowed once (because for goodness’ sake, who, in our provincial dormitory town, was going to be interested in how the Scots planned anything at all?) but was simply fixed in my brain because I saw its spine every day. There were probably thousands of names, titles and subjects like that, books I could summon up at the drop of a hat, a modest talent that justified my existence in the eyes of many a lazy student uninspired by the theme of their essay or presentation. A memory like an elephant, people said. But I lost my glasses at least ten times a day and my car keys just as often, and the names of people who lived up the street went in one ear and straight out the other. And if I didn’t arm myself with a shopping list, I was sure to come home with either the wrong groceries or far too few. My absentmindedness is legendary, inasmuch as there is anything legendary about me at all. More than once I’ve managed to put a lasagne in a cold oven. I’ve killed two, yes two, car engines by filling up with diesel instead of petrol, and at family get-togethers the kids still tell the story of how we once left for a holiday on the Lac du Bourget, our favourite destination, and I didn’t realise until we’d reached the French border that I’d forgotten to hitch the caravan to the tow bar. More often than not, Moniek would seize on situations like this to exclaim, ‘There you have it. It’s come to this: Gorbachoff’s Syndrome! … The booze and nothing else …’
The ninny!
My suggestion that they too, in their capacity as passengers, could have noticed that we weren’t pulling the caravan made no difference. No, I was the driver, the one who was constantly looking in the rear-view mirror, and therefore solely responsible for the extra kilometres we had to cover because of my negligence …
Anyway, I wasn’t entirely relaxed about my forgetfulness either and took my worries to a neurologist friend of mine. What could it be that allowed my brain cells to juggle dusty quiz-winning encyclopaedic facts while being totally impervious to frequently used telephone numbers, birthdates, the names of friends’ wives and the names of my brother’s grandchildren, even though he never shut up once he got onto the subject of those little descendants of his? For years now, a myriad of life’s petty details had drifted through my consciousness without leaving any kind of impression. Add in the aggravating genetic circumstance of having witnessed the dotage of no less than two of my grandparents: my mother’s mother saw tomahawk-brandishing Indians dancing around the deathbed she clung to for dear life; she wept and sweated and pissed the sheets with fear, to the exhaustion of the nuns, who tied her down and tried to cure her with prayer. That was more than enough to convince anyone that their degeneration was predestined and every hiccup of forgetfulness, a first hesitant sign. But my buddy and well-known noggin researcher reassured me with an apt metaphor. He said, ‘If you’re searching for a name and feel like you’re rummaging through a file in vain, you’re fine. The essential thing is that you have that file at your disposal, that you possess a file in which you have stored all your names and information. With Alzheimer’s, or dementia in general, the whole filing cabinet’s gone.’
That image was very useful. Convincing the outside world that my whole filing cabinet was rotting away was now my task.
But rot has a rhythm of its own and too much haste would betray me.