The lady next to her spends half an hour tidying her shelves, taking out all her belongings and putting them back again. My mother went through the same motions when she was living with me, at the beginning of her illness. What is the meaning of such behavior? To impose on the outside world some form of “order” that cannot be achieved inside?

  How many Sundays have I spent sitting opposite her, watching her eat? Trees gently sway in the window.

  She would announce cheerfully, “Annie, you’ve got a visitor,” when a schoolfriend came round to see me. “Visits” meant a lot to her. A token of love, proof that we exist for other people.

  Sunday 23

  She was sleeping in the raised chair used for minor care and dressings in the hallway, her mouth wide open. My mind goes blank whenever I come here.

  The old lady in her room is always carrying around her handbag, as though she were walking down the street. She brought another patient back to the room; the two women sat down side by side and just stayed there, saying nothing, exchanging polite smiles. Two little girls playing at being grown-up women on a social visit. It’s heartrending.

  Peals of laughter could be heard coming from the kitchen. A typical summer Sunday afternoon in the long-term geriatric ward.

  Memories flash through my mind. I can see her in our grocery store, telling customers that Mademoiselle B, who had given birth to a child whose father was German, had no layette ready for the baby. It was only years later that I realized the full implications of her remark which, although suggested, were never openly stated: the girl may have been planning to get rid of the child.

  Other memories, sentences from the past: “I don’t have four arms!” (whenever my father or I would ask her to do something). And also: “You’re not strong enough to...” She was always going on about her own physical strength, an asset in our world; I was a mere “weakling.” Inferior to her.

  Sunday 30

  In the garden, I stand up and walk away, leaving her in the hands of the nurses sitting by some old ladies and a drooling grandpa. At that point she shouts, “Annie!” She hasn’t spoken my name for over a year. On hearing her voice, I freeze, emotionally drained. The call has come from the deepest recesses of my life, from early childhood. I turn around and walk up to her. She looks at me pleadingly: “Take me away!” All the other people have stopped talking and are listening. I would like to die; I explain to her that I can’t do that, not right now. Afterward, it occurred to me that she may have shouted my name because of the people around her. But I’m not so sure.

  When she’d had enough of her brioche, she hid it under her skirt. As a child, I would steal candy from the store and stuff it inside my panties.

  J U L Y

  Sunday 7

  She stopped walking two Sundays ago. I have gotten used to the wheelchair. I take her downstairs into the garden. It’s a hot day. “The sun is nice,” she says. It always takes me by surprise when I hear her use the same expressions as before, in her present state. She can’t see things clearly now. At one point, she grabbed my leg and my skirt, savagely. Two young nurses sit down away from the patients to have a chat. A third nurse, older and hideously ugly, stays back with the group. My mother is wearing a printed dress with small flowers, like the ones I wore when I was a little girl. It makes her look tiny. I realize that it’s only now that I have truly grown up.

  She said, “See you next Sunday” although I won’t be coming for two months on account of my operation. An operation which might cause me to die before her.

  I told the boys about her strange attitudes and expressions. We burst out laughing. Pain cannot be kept intact, it needs to be “processed,” converted into humor.

  Today I was feeling guilty, yet again. So I tried to alleviate her condition by clipping her nails, which were filthy, and by washing her hands and shaving her face. I wonder if she has become incontinent now that she moves around in a wheelchair. I didn’t dare ask her.

  A U G U S T

  Saturday 17

  I haven’t been back to see my mother although I am perfectly able to walk with crutches. I won’t go to this temple of old age hobbling “like an old lady.”

  My mother—her energy, her constant anxiety too. I feel the same tenseness, only in my writing.

  My father used to say of her admiringly: “You’ll never have the last word with her!”

  Monday 26

  I went over to see her with David, who is obviously very upset. The familiar smells, her bedroom with the chimney sweep from Annecy, the statuette of Sainte Thérèse—everything in its place. Such permanence almost brings me comfort. Seeing her, touching her—she is so different from what she used to be and yet she’s definitely “herself.” The dining room was full of old ladies, the same ones. Rock music blaring from the television set. When I come here, I feel that I should be writing about these things instead.

  S E P T E M B E R

  Thursday 5

  Tomorrow it’ll be two years since I collected my mother from the old people’s home in Yvetot. I remember dropping by her flat in the Béguinage area; a woman to whom she proudly announced, “I’m going to stay with my daughter!”; conversations in the car.

  Today I came to see her with Éric. She was in the hall downstairs, groping her way along a pipe running across the wall. I recognized her slippers. Her roommate was strutting around in the heat in a fur coat, dangling her handbag; she looked just like an old whore.

  Her fingernails are too long and so is her hair, giving her an unkempt appearance. I don’t have the energy to cut either. When I reflect on her gradual decline, I no longer “feel” anything and I have almost given up wondering whether it is “because of me.” She had already started losing her faculties in 1982 before she came to my place. But I failed to give her the support she needed, she remained “in darkness” alone.

  In Le Monde, Claude Sarraute wrote, “One was worth a million.” This was one of my mother’s expressions, as was “one was worth a dozen.” I hated these locutions, which I saw as old-fashioned. Showing consideration, choosing one’s words so as not to hurt people’s feelings, were alien to her.

  For me, she is the personification of time. She is also pushing me toward death.

  Saturday 7

  I used to dress up wearing her clothes. “I’ll tell my mother!” She was the avenger, the one who might pick a fight with the other girl’s mother.

  I can remember the “cup of tea” at the dentist’s surgery in Rouen. We were waiting in a room with huge armchairs and glass cabinets filled with grimacing Chinese figurines. The waiting rooms of my childhood are strange, terrifying places where I am transported to the “other world,” the world of rich, important people, a “window display” that I am not allowed to touch. My mother was talking in a low voice. After an unusually painful visit, the dentist announced: “I think this calls for a cup of tea!” I am amazed that such a vile beverage should be seen as a reward and naturally expect my mother to reply, “She doesn’t like tea!” Instead, she says nothing and smiles. She knew that in “high society” drinking tea was “the thing to do.”

  Friday 13

  My mother has fractured her hip bone. Panic. Last night, seagulls were continually circling above the house, then the terrible screech of a bird rang out, a barn owl or maybe a seagull. Strangely enough, I had just been thinking of writing a book about her. I am in a state of total disarray.

  Evening. I saw her; she was sleeping, mouth wide open. An urinary catheter. Her hands were twitching. I cried. I feel that all this has been going on for a long time. What can she feel? She will recover, in other words, slowly waste away between her bed and her wheelchair. I saw no one—no doctor, no nurse—in the ward where she has been moved.

  Sunday 15

  She has been returned to her familiar surroundings. Strapped into her wheelchair: her body tense, straining to stand up, full of vigor, her eyes unseeing. She is incapable of eating on her own, the right hand groping toward the left. It suddenly occurs to me that if society follows its present course, people like my mother may not be left alive in twenty or fifty years’ time. I have no views on such an eventuality, on whether or not it is justified.

  “You’re overdoing it,” she would say disapprovingly. My face was flushed, I was breathless with so much running around and shouting. And if I stared at her: “Do you want to buy me or something?” Gathering all her favorite sayings when she can barely speak. But she still has her voice and, occasionally, expressions that are so typically “her” merge to form a single identity. I vainly try to pin them down. Her obsessions: work, alcohol (repressed), horrific events, disasters and so on. She had never wished to set herself boundaries but because of her working-class background she had adopted those of religion and puritanism, seen as the nearest thing to dignity. Personally, I have never cared about boundaries.

  Frightening to realize that I have always seen my mother as a figure of death. When she made the pilgrimage to Lourdes on her own, I was convinced she would deliberately die there. Later on, I was terrified by the account she gave of my sister’s death: I feel that I too shall have to die before she can start loving me because that day she said, referring to me, “She’s not nearly as nice as the other one (my sister).”

  She will never again wear the clothes left behind at my place; they seem to belong to a dead person. Yet she is alive and can still make me feel guilty.

  I notice that I have inherited her brusque, violent temper, as well as a tendency to seize things and throw them down with fury. A pointed this out to me. I also detect a similarity between some aspects of his behavior and my mother’s obsession with tidying when she was at my place, almost two years ago. He keeps sorting and moving around the books in his library, drawing comfort from his intellectual possessions, making up for his terrible feelings of inadequacy for not having gotten past his baccalauréat. My mother was trying to cling to the world, to persuade herself that she wasn’t crazy. The days when she was staying with me seem far away already. Fond memories of that time: she would start sewing and lose all the needles. Now...

  I was brimming with love for her when I was eighteen; she was a big, warm sanctuary. At the time I was suffering from bulimia.

  Thursday 19

  The other day, she warned me she was going to be sick. I began watching her, just like I used to watch Éric when he was a little boy and pretended to throw up the food he didn’t want.

  I have never seen a photograph of my mother as a child. The first one was taken on her wedding day. In another one, dated a few years later, she is attending a wedding. Heavy-set face, low forehead, bull-like features. One sentence sums her up: “She was the sort of woman who burned up life” (leaving behind no papers, no traces).

  She preferred giving to everyone, rather than taking from them. Maybe to get attention, to be acknowledged? When I was a little girl, I too liked to give—picture cards, candy, whatever—to be loved, to be popular. Not any more. Isn’t writing, and my particular style of writing, also a way of giving?

  A scene from my childhood. She is standing, naked, facing my father who is lying in bed. He scoffs: “Not a pretty sight!” Her genitals—The Origin of the World?3.

  She would scold the dirty old men in the café: “Off with you, ugly old man” (the same applied to the dogs chasing our bitch in heat).

  O C T O B E R

  Friday 4

  I may have invented or embroidered the story she would tell people about Lourdes—a liquid mountain into which one sank and drowned when one didn’t know it was water. I believed she would die there.

  The expression: “I am an only child.”

  Her taste for using convoluted words to “show off.”

  When I saw The Ostrich’s Eggs by Roussin on television, I imagined all those women I hated, the exact opposite of my mother, with their delicate bodies and porcelain features, their silk and pearls, their fancy expressions.

  Tuesday 8

  She is standing in the hall; at first, I don’t recognize her. Her hair has been pulled back into a ponytail, there is a fixed expression on her face. I show her the little chimney sweep above her bed, a present from a friend in Annecy. She gazes at it and murmurs: “I used to have one like that.” I am always wondering how she sees the world now. When I think of the woman she used to be, her red dresses, her flamboyant temper, it makes me cry. But usually, I think of nothing, I am here with her, that’s all that matters. At least I still have her voice. Voice is everything. The worst thing about death is the loss of voice.

  She would say: “So-and-so, or such-and-such a dog died of ambition.” To die of ambition refers to the trauma of separation, of being far away.

  Tuesday 15

  A gray October day like in 1962 when I took my teachers’ training certificate in literature. We sit facing each other. She is eating a custard tart; her hands are shaking, she keeps shifting the cake from one hand to the other. “I was ravenous, haven’t eaten for days. I was deprived.” Deprived—the usual understatement, meaning short of money. Several sentences arouse feelings of guilt in me: “It would be great to spend Christmas back there” and “It doesn’t take you long to get here,” in other words, you should come more often.

  When she sees me walk in, she greets me the same way she used to greet visitors: “Gee, I was wondering when you’d come!” The same enthusiasm and joie de vivre as before. An old lady inquires anxiously of her: “You’re not leaving, are you?”—“No, I’m not leaving,” she is quick to reply, to avoid upsetting her, if only slightly.

  Friday 18

  I gave a coin to the blind beggar on the market square, like she used to.

  She would say, “She made that man stray from his duty” or “one must do one’s duty in life.” I shudder at hearing such things, and that word in particular, and have since adolescence.

  My fantastic vision of her: a glimpse of her white coat, her shopkeeper’s coat, hovering behind me.

  Monday 21

  With other people, she was always afraid to let silence set in. “Have a word or two for each customer.”

  I have no idea what she thought of sex or how she made love. On the face of it, sex was the ultimate evil. In real life?

  Wednesday 23

  Today she says to me: “I’m sure I’d be happier with you rather than outside of you.”

  Her polite remarks, said out of habit: “Wouldn’t you like to sit down?” to one of the nurses who is standing nearby. I began reading a newspaper. Her hands reached out for the cake wrapping and I gave it to her—like to a child. One minute later, I glanced up and saw that she was eating it. She wouldn’t let me pull it away from her, fiercely clenching her fist. An agonizing reversal of roles between mother and child.

  N O V E M B E R

  Sunday 3

  The disheveled hair, the hands searching for each other, the right grasping the left like an unknown object. She can’t find her own mouth; every time she tries, the cake ends up to one side. The piece of pastry I put into her hands slips out. I have to pop it into her mouth. I am dismayed at such degradation and bestiality. A glazed expression, the tongue and lips protruding, sucking like those of a newborn baby. I began combing her hair and then stopped because I didn’t have an elastic band to tie it back. She said: “I like it when you do my hair.” Everything was forgotten. With her hair combed and her face shaved, she became a human being. It gives her such pleasure when I brush her hair and arrange her clothes. I remembered that when I walked in the woman next to my mother was stroking her neck and legs. Being alive is being caressed, being touched.

  Monday 11

  She is in a state of extreme agitation, she keeps trying to wrench away the bar of her wheelchair. She clutches it and pulls with all her might, her body straining with the effort.

  This violence reminds me of the aggressiveness she showed toward everything around her, including me. Suddenly I hate her, once again she is the “bad mother”—brutal and inflexible. There’s a suffocating smell of shit; I don’t know when I’ll be able to change her myself. I fed her small pieces of cake; she didn’t even glance at me. Today she would never say, “this is my daughter,” on seeing me walk in, like she did last year.

  Memories of her squatting on the bucket we used as a chamber pot, relieving herself shamelessly: that curious intimacy between girls which she imposed on me as a child and which I came to loathe later on in life.

  Forever insisting on the notion of pride: “How can you take that?,” in other words, how can you accept being treated that way? (By my husband.)

  Wednesday 13

  Yesterday, in Yvetot, my aunt and cousins said: “You really take after your mother, don’t you; you look just like your mother!” Speaking of her, my aunt remarks: “She worked hard all her life. She would scrub the floors, saying to your father, ’leave that, I’ll do it.’ ” She always took such pride in her sheer physical strength and her contempt for ill-health, which she dismissed as a failing. A working beast. I hated it when she said, “You’re such a weakling!

  Sunday 17

  My mother and the little old lady sharing her room were sitting side by side. A sweet picture illustrating a secret, magic bond between the two of them. A biblical scene basking in an extraordinary light, reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance painting. A moment of pure, indescribable bliss. My mother points to me and asks her companion: “Do you recognize her?” As usual, the other woman stammers; she hasn’t said anything intelligible for months. It doesn’t really matter whether or not they communicate by language. I sat down opposite them and fed my mother an éclair—the other woman didn’t want any—then a second one. From time to time, I nibbled a small piece. Sounds from the television filtered through, Viennese waltzes. I thought about all those Sunday afternoons spent in Yvetot. It’s not just the notion of time passing, it’s something else, something linked to death: now I belong in a chain, my life is part of a process that will outlive me.

 

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