Will, стр. 10

That same evening I started writing. The heartburn wasn’t going away and I couldn’t get over Four-Eyes and how he’d kept staring at me. I never finished the manuscript and you can tell from the opening sentences how I was feeling at the time:

Listen to me. I am a legion of voices, most of which you detest, few of which I cherish. I am still breathing—of necessity—but all of you, if you knew this story, would begrudge me every breath I take. And that’s something I understand, because really knowing someone in the long term is not in your nature and I—unfortunately—am nothing but long-term. It has turned me into an avenging angel, anchored in the wrong, cowardly era. For me it’s truth that counts, for you the opposite: living day to day.

Can you sense my arrogant rage? It’s strange for someone like me, who was already at a ripe old age back then, to get the chance to reread something like this years later and recognize how silly it is. Also important: at that stage I still considered myself a great yet misunderstood poet. I felt that what you could call devils, if you like, had grabbed me by the hair and were dragging me back into history after all those years to show me what I now consider the truth: it never ends. It’s also a fact that back then I felt too superior to even imagine that there wouldn’t be any readers for a book like that or realize that I wouldn’t have been able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion anyway. I had to wait more than twenty years to realize finally that my story is only suitable for one person, and that’s you, my great-grandson. Something else—and I know how grotesque this is, as if an aged prostitute is running through her old tricks one last time in the hope of outwitting her wrinkles, but I have to be honest with you and own up to it. I wasn’t planning on publishing that book under the name Wilfried Wils. I feel what little shame I have left rising, but I won’t back out now. I was going to publish the book under the name Angelo, my secret name, which now, unfortunately, in contrast to the old days, when I often used it as a nom de plume, suits these worn-out old bones like lipstick suits a pig.

It was in a wrought-iron bed, my mother had told me, a bed once made by my grandfather, a child’s bed made to pass the time, that I fell ill. I was wasting away. I was five and hope was fading with every hour that let itself be mustered into days that became weeks and finally months. But not a tear ran down my father’s cheeks. He had always known that his son, his only child, would survive him. My mother, less self-assured, convinced that she was and would remain a victim from the cradle to the grave, was already picturing herself walking beside a tiny coffin with a permanently smoking crater in her chest where her heart had been. The doctor—‘Geerschouwers by name,’ my mother said emphatically, as if a name added even more gravity to this inauspicious story, and by the way, ‘long dead, son, stumbled in the street and broke his neck just like that’—well, the doctor had said that the trouble was inside my head. Meningitis. Whereupon years later my father still added ‘but the man-ain’t-rightus’, as if that daft claim possessed a magic to make people laugh the story off. Meningitis. And it was no laughing matter. It was 1925 and I had one foot in the grave. I can’t remember it at all myself, neither the illness nor the period that preceded it. The first thing I do remember, after four months in coma, is looking up at a strange man and a strange woman, and the woman being unable to stop crying because I’d opened my eyes. The man shouted, ‘Wilfried, Wilfried, you’re alive! You’re cured!’ but I didn’t have the faintest who this Wilfried could be. If my head hadn’t hurt so much I would have turned around to see if somebody behind me was answering to that name with a smile. They called Dr Geerschouwers, afraid that my illness had robbed me of my senses, and he explained that things like this did happen. And so this physician introduced me to my father, my mother and myself. ‘Your name is Wilfried, Will-Freed.’ They had to teach me everything all over again. I had to take them at their word. Believe that this funny man was my father and this bleating sheep my mum. I was five. I repeat: it was 1925. And after a while I worked out that it was better to act like I believed everything they told me. But it took more than a year before I automatically looked up at the sound of my twice-given name. Recognizing my mother and father and addressing them as such was easy, but the name Wilfried always chafed at a spot in my head where there already was a name, maybe one I had chosen myself or one that had been whispered to me during my ‘man-ain’t-rightus’ period. Later, during catechism, I began to suspect that an angel had given me my true name: Angelo. That’s what I’m really called. Deep inside I’m Angelo. Maybe this Angelo was really a demon sent to deceive me, but in that respect, he differed little from the two I was forced to call my parents from the age of five, who also forced me to act like I was called Wilfried. No. No. No. Wilfried doesn’t have a story. Angelo does.

I’m more or less halfway through the moyenne, which is now called secondary school but also translates as average. I am a very average student and the time has come for everyone to see that as an