The Last Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

chair.
    Before sitting, I kissed my grandfather hello. He seemed preoccupied, and registered no displeasure. Indeed, he seemed barely to register who I was. But then, when drinks had been poured and I was quietly crunching potato chips from a blue bowl, I caught him frowning at me, his eyebrows, ever exuberant (their hairs were very long), working, as if the sight of me in the middle distance had provoked an aggravating memory.
    My grandmother was telling a story about an aging Italian opera singer who had visited the hotel every year for a decade—a woman we all knew, who wore grand, flowing tunics and who annually pinched my cheeks between her curiously strong fingers—when my grandfather interrupted her.
    "Our country, in this time, has a problem of manners," he began. "It is not a uniquely French problem—indeed it stems, in part, I, like many, would contend, from the influence of your country"—he nodded at my mother—"although not, naturally, from your own gracious influence. What preoccupies me, however, as a nationalist—and I'm not afraid to say it, implying thereby only a love and a reverence for my nation, culture and history above all other nations, cultures and histories, which is perfectly natural and in no way implies disrespect for those others—anyway, as a nationalist and a Frenchman, I am concerned with the manners and mores of this country, and of our people. And it seems to me—" here his roving, appropriative gaze, which had been sliding like oil around the assembly, and beyond, to the Provençal plates on the wall and the darkening corner of sea he could distinguish from his chair, came to rest upon me—"that the loss of certain basic courtesies among our citizens, and among our youngest citizens above all, does not, of itself, comprise the fairly innocent informality that well-intentioned liberals would have us believe. No. It is, I am convinced, a symptom of a far-reaching and truly distressing cultural collapse, one in which the individual places his own will and desire above the common good in ways we, who are now aging, would have considered unthinkable. Rudeness is, I argue, a symptom of the profound anarchy that our culture currently faces but refuses to acknowledge, a chaos in which everyone has lost sight of his place in a natural—or rather, civilized, which is far greater a compliment than the natural, civilization being what distinguishes us from mere beasts—hierarchy. What motivates good behavior—" He paused and sipped his scotch, with a slurp rendered louder by our silence; even Etienne, whose eyes rolled to the ceiling and whose feet twitched, sensed that our grandfather's discourses demanded attention. "What motivates good behavior and what motivates excellence are the same thing: fear. Fear of God, fear of the rod, fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of pain. And that is a fact. And in our society, today, nobody is afraid of anything. Shame, rebuke, imprisonment—none of it means anything to anyone. Kids need to be taught," he said, looking now at my father, who managed to meet his gaze without apparently seeing him, "that their actions have repercussions, real ones. Kids should be a lot more afraid than they are."
    "Not just kids," I said, nodding and licking the salt from my lips.
    "You would have me believe that we"—my grandfather's ire was a fierce steeliness in the quiet of his tone—"that we, around you here in this living room, behave with as little regard for anyone outside ourselves as you and your little friends?"
    Tempted to insist that my friends were not "little," but wise to the cost of such baiting, I adopted my most innocent and childish voice, and said, "Oh no, nothing like that. No, I meant the woman in the market today. Right, Maman?"
    My mother, who sought only to slip invisibly through these evenings, glared at me and pressed her lips.
    "What woman?" asked my grandmother.
    "Yes, what happened?"