A Good Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

alighting on the far end, where more cheese has appeared. Someone is cutting up portions of Camembert and brie, both perfectly runny; there is also Saint-Nectaire, Roquefort and Crottin de Chavignol, not to mention a fougasse that smells deliciously of golden straw and warm milk. We wouldn’t be eating cheese at all if we weren’t our father’s children. When I was seven or eight and the others much younger, he had come home one Sunday and plunked a hunk of something smelly on the table, a small, soft, orangey-coloured substance that bore no resemblance whatsoever to what we in those days called cheese. As far as we knew, cheese came in a jar, like peanut butter, a sort of gooey spread made of melted cheddar, or else in thin, plastic-encased slices. What he’d brought home, he said, was Oka, a great cheese made by Trappist monks in their monastery. He made us taste it. We didn’t want to, but gradually, because our father insisted, we educated our taste buds, as it were, and became cheese lovers. And on our cheeseboard, Oka reigned supreme. Even when the American company Kraft bought the cheese works, retired the monks, changed the product in every conceivable way—texture, odour, taste—except that of appearance, we remained faithful to it. We still buy it, if only so we can say, in a rare show of familial unanimity, that the Americans killed our Oka.
    Father raises his hand over the table.
    “Dad, do you remember when we were lost… and it was me who…”
    “Chee . . . ee . . . se.”
    He turns to me with the kind of smile normally associated with idiocy, or innocence, or someone on drugs. “Yes… I was… com… plete… ly… lost… ha! ha!” He’s gloating. To confess to something in private is like writing something in your will; you don’t do it to get at the truth, but to liberate yourself from the burden of having lied. He isn’t asking my forgiveness for cuffng me, or for lying, or for the troutless dinner. He is simply confessing and laughing it off. When he tries to stand up, I assume to get at the cheese, which no one has passed to him, the entire family having pretended not to have heard his thunderous call for “Cheese!” he sets his hand down on his plate. He stops, lifts it up, looks at it, sees it smeared with yule log and icing sugar, and licks it clean with his tongue, beginning with the palm and moving along the fingers one at a time, still with that beatific smile which is perhaps not as idiotic as I’d thought. “Lost,” he says again, with a nod towards the cheese.
    He has won again. Ever since that day of the oldest rock from the Canadian Shield he’s known that it was his own pigheadedness that got us lost. Fifty years ago. That story has been told any number of times, usually when someone new was being introduced into the family circle, and each time he defended his own infallibility. And now here he is, with his air of saintly beatitude, confessing to a terrible lie that destroyed my respect for him once and for all, and not only for him but for any kind of authority.
    Because my life since then has been a broiling revolt against lying authority. That’s what I told my analyst, and he seemed to agree with me. It confirmed his own theories. A dominating, authoritative father, my own inability to direct my rebelliousness against that authority. Finally he explained that my father was a crafty, benevolent dictator and I was afraid that I would never have the strength to challenge him. My analyst did not wear a goatee, swore by neither Lacan nor Freud, played tennis, and refrained from scratching his head during our sessions. He seemed perfectly normal to me, a sort of friend whom I paid to listen to my ramblings. I told him a great deal; our sessions went on at great length. None of them did me any good. But what a good talker I was, a model client! I would dredge up so many telling anecdotes that I must have paid for a whole new kitchen in his house, as well as a few trips to