Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“How’s your dad? Still around, is he?”

“Eddie, did you know my mother?”

“Astrid? Sure, I knew her. Shame about her, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Was it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me about her.”

“All right.”

Eddie plopped himself on the couch and patted the cushion next to him. I leapt on it excitedly, unaware of how intensely unsatisfying our conversation would be: in all my anticipating, I had completely forgotten that Eddie was the world’s worst storyteller.

“I met her in Paris, with your father,” he began. “I think it was autumn, because the leaves were brown. I think the American name for autumn, ‘fall,’ is really beautiful. Personally, I like fall, or the fall, as they say, and also spring. Summer I can only tolerate for the first three days and after that I’m looking for a meat freezer to hide in.”

“Eddie…”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I got sidetracked, didn’t I? I forgot to tell you how I feel about winter.”

“My mother.”

“Right. Your mother. She was a beautiful woman. I don’t think she was French, but she had the same physique. French women are small and thin with quite small breasts. If you want big breasts, you have to cross the border into Switzerland.”

“Dad said you met my mother in Paris.”

“That’s right. It was in Paris. I miss Paris. Did you know that in France they have a different word when something disgusts you? You can’t say ‘Yuck!’ No one will know what you mean. You have to say ‘Berk!’ It’s weird. The same goes when you hurt yourself. It’s ‘Aie!’ not ‘Ow!’ ”

“What was my dad doing in Paris?”

“He was doing nothing in those days, the same kind of nothing he does now, except then he was doing it in French. Well, actually he didn’t do nothing. He was always scribbling in his little green notebook.”

“All of Dad’s notebooks are black. He always uses the same kind.”

“No, this one was definitely green. I can see it in my mind’s eye. It’s a shame you can’t see the pictures I’ve got showing in my mind’s eye right now. They’re so damn vivid. I wish we could project all the mind’s eyes onto a screen and sell tickets. I think how much you could expect the public to pay would really determine your self-worth.”

I eased myself off the couch, telling Eddie to go on without me, walked to my father’s bedroom, and stood at the open door, staring stupidly at the vast chaos and disorder that may or may not have been hiding the secret story of my mother in a green notebook. Normally I don’t enter my father’s bedroom, for the same reason you don’t walk in and chat with a man when he’s on the toilet, but this was important enough to force me to break my own rule. I stepped into my father’s open bowels, his howling sandstorm; that he slept in here was an achievement in itself.

I set about my task. First I had to navigate my way through a yellowing archive of newspapers that would rival those stored in the public library. They were stacked up and pushed into the dark corners of the room, the stacks so numerous they carpeted the floor all the way to the bed. I stepped on the newspapers and over things I could only imagine he’d pulled out of garbage bins and those I imagined he’d dragged out of people’s mouths. On the way I found things I had long considered missing: the tomato sauce, the mustard, all the teaspoons, the soup spoons, and the big plates. I opened up one of his wardrobes, and under a heap of clothes I found the first pile of notebooks- there must have been a hundred of them. They were all black. Black, black, black. In the second wardrobe I found another hundred, again, disappointingly, all black. I stepped inside the wardrobe- it was very deep. There I found a pile of magazines but tried not to linger on them. From all the photographs inside, Dad had cut out the eyes. I tried not to dwell on this. A man can read a magazine and might be inclined to remove the eyes if he feels they are staring at him insolently, can’t he? I ignored them, and moved deeper inside the wardrobe (it really was a deep wardrobe). Yet another box revealed yet another pile of notebooks, as well as all the cut-out eyes from the magazines. They watched me pitilessly as I rummaged through the notebooks, and seemed to widen with mine at the sight of, wedged under the cardboard flap at the bottom of the box, a green one.

I took it and got the hell out of his suffocating room. I could hear Eddie in the living room, still talking to himself. I went to my own room to examine the green notebook.

The edges of it were worn. I opened it to see that the ink had run in parts, but not so the writing was illegible. The handwriting went from small and neat to large and loopy, and in later passages, when it ran diagonally down the page, it was as though it had been written while on the back of a camel or the bow of a ship tossed around in bad weather. Some of the pages were barely hanging on by a staple, and when the notebook was closed, the corners stuck out like bookmarks.

There was a title page, in French: Petites misèries de la vie humaine.

This doesn’t mean little miseries either, as I first thought, but translates, more or less, to “Minor irritations of human life.” It gave me a sick feeling, although it served well to brace me for the story of how I came to be, the story that was located in the following journal, which I reprint here for you to read.

Petites misères de la vie humaine

11 May

Paris – perfect city to be lonely & miserable in. London too grim to be a sad sack with any dignity. O London! You grisly town! You cold gray cloud! You low-lying layer of mist & fog! You dense moan! You drizzling forlorn sigh! You shallow gene pool! You career town! You brittle town! You fallen empire! You page-three town! Lesson from London – hell isn’t red-hot but cold & gray.

And Rome? Full of sexual predators who live with their mothers.

Venice? Too many tourists as dumb as believers feed Italian pigeons, whereas in their own cities they snub them.

Athens? Everywhere mounted policemen ride by, pausing only so their horses can shit on cobblestone streets- horse shit lying in such mammoth piles you think there must be no better laxative in the world than bales of hay.

Spain? Streets smell like socks fried in urine- too many Catholics baptized in piss. Tho the real problem with Spain is you’re constantly frustrated by fireworks- sexual stink of exploding fiestas salt in wound of loneliness.

But Paris – beautiful poor ugly opulent vast complex gray rainy & French. You see unbelievable women, umbrellas, beggars, tree-lined streets, bicycles, church spires, Africans, gloomy domes, balconies, broken flowerpots, rudeness that will ring through eternity, aimless pedestrians, majestic gardens, black trees, bad teeth, ritzy stores, socialists moving their hands up the thighs of intellectuals, protesting artists, bad drivers, pay toilets, visible cheese smells, witty scarves, shadows of body odors in the metro, fashionable cemeteries, tasteful transvestites, filtered light, slums, grime, desire, artistic lampposts, multicolored phlegm of passive chimney smokers, demented cobblestone faces in terrace cafés, high collars, hot chocolates, flashy gargoyles, velvet berets, emaciated cats, pickpockets running away with glittering entrails of rich German tourists, & great phallic monuments in the squares & the sex shops.

It’s no rumor: prancing arrogant Parisians sit cross-legged in cafés & philosophize uninvited- but why is it that when I hear someone make a great philosophical argument I get the same feeling as when I see someone has put clothes on his dog?

With me is Caroline’s last postcard. Typical Caroline. “I’m in Paris ” & an address, some grimy suburb just out of the city. I’ll go there & tell her my brother’s dead, the man she loved, and then…But NOT YET- clumsy love declarations are a high heart risk. Should I see her? Should I wait? The problem with most people is they’ve NEVER been torn in half, not really not right down the middle like I have, NEVER ripped themselves to shreds NEVER listened to the warring factions BOTH make their case so convincing AND so right & they don’t know what it is to have your brain & your body want TWO things each that’s FOUR compelling ideas all at once.