I Remain in Darkness, page 5
I wipe her mouth with a face cloth. She looks at me and asks, “Are you happy?”
I go to the bathroom, the floor is sticky with urine. I automatically associate it with that morning’s scene at A’s place. I know absolutely nothing about her sex life. She used to say: “If people knew that, we’d be mortified.”
Sunday 24
The way she sometimes looks me up and down, haughtily, as though I were a perfect stranger. She manages to eat the éclair on her own, getting it all over her fingers. Yet it’s probably the pastry which she finds the easiest to eat. A song from the sixties on television, “since you’re getting married tomorrow,” something like that. My life since those days. And my mother, who has been so much a part of my life, always.
She smells bad. I can’t change her. I sprinkle her with eau de cologne.
D E C E M B E R
Sunday 1
She couldn’t find the way to her mouth, her hand kept wandering off to the right. I helped her to eat her cake. When her fingers were empty, she continued to raise them to her lips. I wonder if a child does that; I can’t remember.
When I write down all these things, I scribble away as fast as I can (as if I felt guilty), without choosing my words. Today she was wearing an old flowered bathrobe with all the threads pulled out. For a split-second, my mother appeared to me wearing the pelt of a wild beast.
She has finished the fruit jellies. If I leave the box on her bedside table, she won’t touch it or try to pick out one of the squares. Now all she wants is to grab things or tear them apart.
The woman with glasses was in tears, sobbing, “I want to die.” By her side, her husband, the one with reddish eyes, replied softly: “But you’re making me die.” He may be right. In one of the rooms, a woman was squawking like a duck being chased round a farmyard.
Before leaving, I made her drink some water. She says, “You’ll have your reward.” The word kills me.
Driving back home along the highway, I can still smell her eau de cologne on my fingers. Suddenly, for no particular reason, memories cross my mind—the Yvetot fair and outings with her. Could it be the smell of her face powder?
Now I often catch sight of that black shadow on her face. When I was a little girl, for me she was a white shadow. How could I have forgotten that she used to call me her “white doll” up to the age of sixteen?
All that I have standing between me and death is my demented mother.
Sunday 8
She turns to face me, her mouth wide open, her hair tied back. A flowered gown. And still that smell. I can’t change her and I dare not disturb the nurses and paramedics who are chatting in the office. I can hear them talking. One of them keeps saying, “that’s the problem” and “going through all that for nothing” (I think she means saving money).
She has trouble finding her mouth with the first cake. The second one she can eat on her own. So there is still room for improvement. The long-haired male nurse with liberal views (he calls himself an “idealist”) came to look at the beauty spot on her head at my request. It had been bleeding.
Sunday 15
She is in the dining room, in her wheelchair, the only woman to be turned toward the wall. The ceiling has been decked out with tinsel. She points to the decorations and says to me, “That’s Annie’s dress.” I am always on her mind. The wallpaper here suddenly reminds me of the kind we had in the café at Yvetot before 1950. I feel that nothing has really changed since my early childhood and that life is simply a series of scenes interspersed with songs. I settle in front of the television set with the rest of them. Behind my mother, an old lady is chuckling to herself. Another one, slightly less deranged, shouts out to her: “Quit laughing! You’re crazy!” Then she takes an interest in another, completely senile woman who is pestering an elderly man in a wheelchair. Continually on the alert. By the window, I make out the old guy who was always trying to call people who never answered. Then I hear a deep voice belonging to a man (which one?), a wild voice coming from his guts. Voices revert to their primitive state here.
A Santa Claus figure stares back from the far side of the room. Jacques Martin’s show, quizzes, some guy won a trip to America. The woman on the alert shouts, “Oh! My God!” Then they showed sexy, painted toenails: a glossy commercial. I imagined a whole lifetime—childhood, adulthood, old age—lived out in front of television and its immutable images: glamour, youth, adventure.
Sunday 22
I am sitting opposite her, a box of chocolates on my lap. Her greedy instincts are back, she leers at the chocolates, tries to grab them with clumsy fingers. After eating each candy, she wipes her mouth carefully. My seat is lower than hers, I must raise my head slightly. I am ten years old, I look up at her, she’s my mother. It’s the same age gap, the same ritual.
As I leave: “Why don’t you take me home with you, it would be more fun.”
3 Painting by Courbet depicting the open thighs of a recumbent woman.
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F E B R U A R Y
Sunday 2
Since I decided to tell her story, I have been unable to write anything after returning from the hospital. Maybe now I don’t need to. But its mostly because I am caught up in her past, her history.
However, I am seized with panic whenever I think of her. I am afraid she is going to die. Sometimes I even think of moving her back home. The same mad impulse which led me to take her to my place in 1970, and then in 1983, only to realize that living with her was impossible.
Wednesday 12
When I entered the room, she was hunched over her wheelchair, staring into space, with one hand stretched out in front of her. Reaching out, touching. So typical of her, that urge to carry on exploring the outside world. Today she could eat on her own, with either hand. Gets thinner and thinner every day. Each time I visit her, I notice some small detail that upsets me and highlights the agony of the situation. Today it was those long brown socks they have to wear, the ones which reach up to their knees and which are always falling down because they are too baggy.
I did a curious thing: lifted her gown to see her naked thighs. They are painfully thin.
As soon as she laughs, she’s her usual self.
It was a cold, sunny day. I can’t get away from that landmark, the beginning of her illness: “two years ago...” Back then, she would go out walking with our dog Maya; ask to see a lawyer; go upstairs to bed with the boys at night.
Thursday 20
I am finding it more and more difficult to cope. Because I am writing about my mother’s childhood and adolescence, I can “picture” her in my mind, radiating energy, beauty and warmth. And then I go and visit her, like today, and catch her in her sleep, mouth gaping, all skin and bone. I need to shout, “Mummy, it’s me!” The two images are incompatible. In my writing, I am heading toward the moment when she will be confined to her wheelchair in her present state. Suppose she were no longer there, suppose life were to outpace fiction... I don’t know whether I am engaged in giving the kiss of life or the kiss of death.
Cake Day. “The Thursday ladies are here!” chants one of the nurses. Cakes are handed round by volunteer workers—two for each patient. Now I remain calm when she spits out the pieces of custard tart that are too big for her. I cut them up into smaller pieces. Her skinny body scares me. Maybe they have lost patience trying to feed her. She says: “With you, I’m in safe hands.”
M A R C H
Sunday 2
I have the impression that she has been the same for some time now, that her condition has remained stable. I am getting used to it. She can never find her mouth and is covered with bruises, probably because she rams into the bars across her bed. I think of the silly expressions we use for children, like “You have a booboo?” or “Baby wants to go beddy-byes?”
Sunday 16
I hand her an almond bun; she can’t eat it on her own, her lips suck wildly at thin air. Right now, I would like her to be dead and free of such degradation. Her body stiffens, she strains to stand up and a foul stench fills the atmosphere. She has just relieved herself like a newborn baby after being fed. Such horror and helplessness. Her right fist is clenched, her fingers digging deep into me—she also possesses the strength of a newborn baby.
Easter Sunday
It’s her third Easter in this place. When I arrive, I always have trouble recognizing her because her face never looks the same. Today her mouth is twisted to the right. I have brought her a chocolate hen. The piece I break off is too big, she can’t put the whole thing into her mouth; it slips out, she tries to catch it but clutches her chin instead. This scene, and all the other ones when she grabs at nothing, are the ones I find the most afflicting. After that, she kneads a lump of chocolate instead of bringing it to her lips, then makes a few unsuccessful attempts to eat it. By now she is smothered in chocolate. At this point, everything gets out of hand: horror has ceased to matter, it has even become necessary. Go on, spread it all over yourself, make a real mess of it. I can feel anger swelling up inside me, anger that comes straight from my childhood—an impulse to break everything, dirty everything and roll in the mud. Now this rage is directed against her. After I have fed her and wiped her mouth: “Do you still have all your teeth? Because my dentures are...” (the last word is muffled). I tell her not to worry, I’ll have another set made; I tell her the first thing that comes into my head, like one does with children.
My mother’s neighbor is in tears, sobbing in her wheelchair. I offer her a chocolate but she shakes her head, raising her ugly, puffed face. It breaks my heart. So does the following scene: as I bend forward to check the safety catch of my mother’s wheelchair, she leans over and kisses my hair. How can I survive that kiss, such love, my mother, my mother.
A P R I L
Sunday 6
Her face exudes sweetness, there is no sign of the contracted jaws and haunted expression she’s had in recent weeks. She had been dressed in long woolen socks that came up to her thighs. She raised her gown: her groin was covered in Mercurochrome, probably because, steeped in urine, the skin had become inflamed. Now she has “caught up” with the woman I saw here at Easter two years ago, who exposed her vagina shamelessly.
Monday 7
She is dead. I am overcome with grief. I haven’t stopped crying since this morning. I don’t grasp what’s going on. That’s it. Yes, time has stopped. One just can’t imagine the pain. I long to see her again. This moment was something I had never imagined or foreseen. I preferred it when she was crazy.
I want to throw up, my head is aching. I had all that time to get closer to her and I didn’t make the most of it. Not to have realized yesterday that I might be seeing her for the last time.
The bunch of forsythia I brought her yesterday was still on the table, in a jam jar. I had also brought her a bar of chocolate flavored with “forest fruits” and she had eaten the whole thing. I had shaved her face and sprinkled her body with eau de cologne. Now it’s all over. She was “life itself.” She would stretch out her hands to seize life.
She looks like a sad little doll. I gave the nurse the nightgown she wanted to be buried in—white cotton edged with lace. They won’t let one do anything. I wanted to slip it on her myself.
I shall never hear the sound of her voice again.
I can’t remember any of the words she said yesterday. Yes I can, she said to some visitors, “take a seat, make yourself comfortable,” something like that.
Tuesday 8
A new day, one which will never dawn for her. She was life, nothing but life, and violence too. The weather is gray; I think of that new town that she never liked, where she died. Shall I ever recover from such pain?
Everything I do reminds me of her. Maybe I could consume my grief and wear it out by telling her story. I can’t look at my notes, it’s too painful. What I find most distressing is the gulf separating her two and a half years of decline, when she had grown so close to me, from her death. She had become a child again, one who would never grow up. Every time I went there, I wanted to feed her, clip her fingernails and comb her hair. Her clean, soft hair on Easter Sunday. One can’t imagine that it will all be over one day.
Even today, it’s not over yet.
Tomorrow I might throw a flower into her coffin or place a rosary between her hands. But no written text, no way. I shudder at the thought of a book about her. Literature is so powerless.
I remembered Le Louvrais, that bleak district that she never took to, the Paris region where she lead an unhappy life. I feel like walking past the hairdresser’s where I accompanied her in January 1984.
Now I must use the simple past, “she was” and so on. Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep, I thought, “It’s the past perfect from now on.” I keep recalling that last Sunday, the very last day.
Thursday 10
I feel panic-stricken, as if something were about to happen. I realize nothing can ever happen now.
“They’re together now” (my father and mother), “she’s better off where she is.” Meaningless sentences that fail to move me; maybe one needs to say them anyway. At the butcher’s this morning—the last time I went was “before it happened”—I was horrified by the meticulous care with which people chose their meat.
I saw myself sitting next to her last Sunday, reading about Roger Vadim’s affair with Brigitte Bardot. At one point, she had reached out for the newspaper. The other lady wanted us to shut the door.
I went downstairs to the cellar. There was her suitcase, along with her purse, a white summer handbag and several scarves. I just stand there before the gaping suitcase and these scarce belongings. I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
I don’t want to open my mail, I am incapable of reading anything.
I know that I have experienced this condition only two or three times before in my life, after an unhappy love affair and after my abortion. Also, one Thursday afternoon, when I had “missed” her in Rouen. And when I had to leave her in Calais before taking the ferry for England in 1960.
I had accepted the fact that she was a little girl who would never grow up. For the first time, I understood a verse from a poem by Paul Éluard: “time is overflowing.”
Everything people ask me to do—write articles, attend conferences—seems impossible and irrelevant.
The worst thing is to have written about her over the last two years, in her condition—a text for Le Figaro newspaper, a short story for the magazine L’Autre Journal, the diary of my hospital visits. Not to have thought that she might die.
I received a batch of essays to be corrected and graded. It doesn’t annoy me like it usually does; I tell myself that I might just as well not look at them and that it doesn’t really matter whether or not the corrections get done.
I believed she was going to die when I was five years old, when she made the pilgrimage to Lourdes.
I have searched for my mother’s love in all corners of the world. This is not literature that I am writing. I can see the difference with my other books. Or rather, no I can’t, for I am incapable of producing books that are not precisely that—an attempt to salvage part of our lives, to understand, but first to salvage. Over the phone, Annie M told me that it was impossible to express emotion directly; we need to resort to stratagems. I’m not so sure.
Love and hate. I wasn’t able to tell her about my abortion. But that doesn’t matter now.
I have to read the newspaper several times before grasping the meaning of an article. There is no book that I could face reading right now. Some would be unbearable because they chronicle what I have just experienced. Others are perfectly useless, mere fabrications.
I feel the urge to go back to the hairdresser’s salon in the Cordeliers quarter, where I took her in January 1984.
I could also just sit here and wait, doing nothing, but somehow I can’t.
In my present state, I could “sink even lower,” I know that.
All the hardships I have endured were merely rehearsals to prepare me for this devastating pain.
Over the phone, I made an appointment to have the piano tuned. The woman says: “It’s the 9th today. Oh no it’s not, it’s the 10th!” She laughs. There are plenty of people in the world who don’t care whether it’s the 9th or the 10th day of the month.
I dread reading through the “diary” of my visits to Pontoise Hospital.
I roam the house, telling myself that I should make the bed or cook a meal. Everything seems pointless. When I sit down at my desk, it’s the only thing I can write about.
I did some gardening. It helped me to take my mind off things. I raked the earth and pulled out the weeds in the driveway. The weather is the same as when she was still alive—cold and misty.
Of course, I could wait before writing about my mother. I could wait until I have escaped from these days. But they are the truth, whatever that is.
When I used to write about her after getting back from the hospital, wasn’t it a way of holding onto life?
Friday 11
I know that something is wrong because I need to read my students’ papers several times before understanding them.
I’ll have to tell her story in order to “distance myself from it.” I remembered there was a file with documents belonging to my mother in one of the drawers of my desk. I couldn’t throw away all the papers, only a few of them. There was a slip confirming her application for a change of address when she moved to Cergy in September 1983.
