Dimitri Verhulst - The Latecomer

Since people in these parts treat proverbs as dogma and unthinkingly assume that where there’s smoke there must be fire, there can be no doubt that at least some of them believed my wife when she once again began to complain that I was an incorrigible drunk. It’s true that I drink two glasses of red wine a day. Drink? Drank! Two. Sometimes, as an exception, three … in the evening after dinner. It was a habit I developed sometime in my mid-thirties and it stuck. I almost said ‘and it has stuck’, but the senile shufflers in an old folks’ home aren’t granted much pleasure after dinner: organising evening activities is the last thing the staff are interested in; they just pump everyone full of stupefying concoctions so they’ll doze off in front of the idiot box like good boys and girls.

I haven’t needed to renounce my small, hen-pecked pleasures entirely. Here in the canteen I can order a glass of red now and then in the daytime. When I’m sitting in my armchair with an addled, depressed look on my face and Curvy Cora comes to give me a little professional cheer, rubbing my shoulders and saying, ‘Oh, Désiré, you’re sitting here all quiet and alone without so much as a drink. If you’re not careful you’ll get dehydrated. Should I go and fetch you something?’ I’m brave enough to ask for a glass of wine. That’s allowed. It’s the cheapest plonk, of course, a watery concoction I sip expressionlessly, more grape juice than wine, and you’d need to guzzle a whole case of it to counter the effect of the medication.

‘Here, Désiré, look. Your glass of wine. Enjoy. But make sure you don’t get drunk and start singing, huh? The other residents might think the dance afternoon has come early.’

… Ooh, cootchie-cootchie-coo.

It was divine providence, by the way, that I happened to be sitting in the canteen with a glass — unfortunately still dirty — of Château Migraine the first time my wife came to visit me in this home. The day after my admission. I can still see her walking in with a basket of fruit, a TV-commercial smile and a box of chocolates. Of course, I pretended not to know her.

‘Look who’s come to see you, Désiré, your wife!’

‘Whozzat?’

‘Your wife!’

‘Oh …’

Once the image of her incorrigible husband had fully sunk in, she screeched theatrically in the hope that the nursing staff would lend their compassionate and militantly feminist ears to her chorus of woes as an unhappy housewife.

‘I can’t believe it, Désiré. You’re drinking again already! And then you act surprised you’re going bonkers!’

Which inspired me to declare, ‘Sit down next to me, Camilla, and have one yourself. It’s on me. I’ve got a tab here!’

Needless to say, this reunion and my remark insulted her deeply, not least because my wife isn’t called Camilla, but Moniek. And, given that I have the good fortune of living in a country where wives generally keep their maiden names, not Moniek Cordier, but Moniek De Petter. A beautiful name … to see on a headstone.

(Incidentally, according to her passport she’s not Moniek, but Monique. She thought spelling it like that was way too stuffy and didn’t suit her at all. People who consider it necessary to change their name … Need I say more?)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was still, as I recall, explaining when and where my idea for the role of a lifetime emerged and that it probably began to take shape during a game of pétanque. More specifically because of something Roland, my regular partner, said …

Of all my buddies, Roland has always been the most modern. He was the first in my circle of acquaintance to ignore the apocalyptic warnings about all kinds of tumours and warm up his meals in a microwave. The first to know that, unlike an LP, a CD did not have two playable sides. The first to acquire a mobile phone and praise its advantages. The one who sent text messages and, as if that wasn’t enough, sent them to the people who were meant to receive them. The first computer I ever saw in real life was in his living room. While the rest of us were still pondering the possible effects the Internet would have on our private lives, he’d already done a course and cobbled together a club website. Roland did his banking online, booked trips from his armchair, took digital photos of our games and put them on his Facebook page (without asking us if we were OK with it first). He’d long switched to buying his boules and equipment on auction sites. That kind of guy, someone who keeps abreast of everything, who knocks your boule out of the solar system, then says, ‘There’s something I have to tell you …’

A lot of Roland’s most outrageous stories began with, ‘There’s something I have to tell you …’

And this was definitely something worth telling: an Australian had put his whole life up for sale on the Internet! His actual life. All he had and all he was . His wife wasn’t included in the price; she’d left him, you see, and that was the reason the nutcase was flogging his entire existence to the highest bidder. You did get his crappy job in a carpet shop in Perth, along with his friends Melanie and Em. His hobby (skydiving), his three-bedroom house, his Jet Ski, his barbie and his sneakers (Converse, size 8) were all part of the package. The guy was completely disillusioned and wanted to wipe the slate clean. And what was possibly even crazier was that there were already more than a hundred registered bidders and the price of his life had shot up to almost two million Australian dollars!

The fantasy of just-selling-off-your-whole-existence amused us no end and, discussing it, we tried to imagine what it would be like to associate with someone you didn’t know at all but had just purchased as an ex-lover. Or going up to someone and saying, ‘Pleased to meet you. I just bought you as my dad. How’s Mum? Oh, she’s dead? Whoops, didn’t know that, it wasn’t in the ad. How long now?’

That afternoon I didn’t play my best. Unable to concentrate on the match, I kept fantasising about that crazy Aussie escape artist. I can still hear Roland shouting, ‘Hey, Désiré, wake up! It’s your throw! You’re staring into thin air as if you’ve gone completely senile!’

And how they laughed. Especially when I, incomprehensibly, threw my boule in the wrong direction.

I’m crossing the Styx and taking: a tube of toothpaste (just for a joke), a stray Joseph Roth quote, the wondrous memory of an ardent kiss I never got …

People my age don’t have Facebook or other sociable computer whatsits to cheat loneliness; no, we bump into each other in real life with gruesome frequency at funerals, the most natural occasion for us to maintain contact with our diminishing outside world. Towards the end of my run-of-the-mill middle-class existence, there was a deceptive ease about the way I pulled on my black overcoat, ready to accompany another old acquaintance to his or her final resting place. After a while, I caught myself driving to the crematorium on autopilot, the way I’d driven to the library for work all those years.

Can you believe I sometimes miss it, standing in a cold church to say goodbye to another lost buddy? The theatrics of it all. It’s undoubtedly the only performance in which the supporting roles are more sought-after than the lead. Arriving in the morning while the bell tolls for someone else, the old crones and geezers gather in front of the portal, some of them still dumbstruck at attending yet another funeral before their own. The laconic sighs, ‘Here we are again, huh?’ And then the inevitable questions. ‘How old was he? … Seventy-nine? … Oh, that’s much too soon to have to go in this day and age, but yeah, what can we do about it?’