I Remain in Darkness, page 6
My stomach suddenly starts acting up, like when I came across the slip of paper. I am incapable of doing anything although I know there is nothing to wait for.
The newspaper is the only thing I can read.
Maybe one day I’ll read the notes I took after visiting her in the hospital and they will form a continuous sequence of events running from life to death. But for the moment, time has been severed: it stopped on Monday morning.
Saturday 12
In a letter of condolence from one of her friends in Annecy, I read: “That’s life!” The expression means absolutely nothing to me.
Last week, while I was driving around, I decided that something nice would happen to me if I reached my destination before a certain time. Now I expect nothing.
I understand why a woman from our neighborhood who had lost her ten-month-old baby had spent the afternoon at the hairdresser’s.
I am terrified to reread what I have written about her. And afraid to begin writing about the burial ceremony, or the last day when I saw her alive.
There are two days which I find it impossible to reconcile: a day like any other Sunday, when I went to see her, and the following day, Monday, the last day, the day of her death. Life and death remain separate, divided by some invisible barrier.
Right now I am experiencing this split notion of time. Hopefully, one day that feeling will end and everything will be reunited, like in a story. Before writing, I should probably wait until these two days have merged together in my own life.
I am going through this phase because for the past two and a half years (since the day I found her sleeping), I have desperately wanted her to live. I accepted her the way she was, in her state of decline.
Now the full meaning of that day is becoming clear to me. It was one evening in May, the sun was out. She was lying in bed, asleep. I thought back to my childhood and the Sunday afternoons when we would share the same bed. Then, in Sées in 1958, when I was shivering on my bed, obsessed with Claude G, and later with A, in 1984. One and only love.
As soon as I wake up, I immediately “know” that my mother is dead. Every morning I emerge from her death. Yesterday I thought of the undertaker’s assistant with his side parting, his head tilted to one side out of professional sympathy.
Sunday 13
The weather is still cold. Yesterday there was snow. The same thoughts when I wake up.
In the days following her death, all I could do was sob uncontrollably. Now the tears swell up unexpectedly, when I catch sight of some object or notice some small detail.
Today it’s Sunday; for the first time I won’t be going to the hospital between two and three o’ clock this afternoon.
I had bought a bunch of forsythia for her in the village.
I feel more upset outdoors than indoors. As though I were searching for her outside. Outside, the world exists. Before, she too existed somewhere in the world.
September 1983. We are in her small apartment, sorting and throwing away papers before she moves into my place at Cergy. So it was already the beginning of the end.
I can’t read through the pages I have just written.
Neither can I write a “real book” about her.
I tried to recollect every single detail about that last visit, as if something could be saved from oblivion.
Monday 14
This morning, I had the impression she was still alive. In the baker’s, standing before the rows of cakes, I thought: “I don’t need to buy those any more” and “I don’t need to go to the hospital.”
I recalled the popular melody “Les Roses Blanches,”4 which always moved me to tears as a child. I start crying again, because of that song and its lyrics.
Wednesday 16
As soon as I settle at my desk, alone, I am overwhelmed by grief. I can speak only of her, to write about anything else would be impossible.
The first time I wrote “Mummy is dead” was agony. I could never write those words in a fictional work.
Sunday 20
I looked at some pictures of her, aged fifty. I feel certain she is still alive, bursting with health, with her reddish blond hair. It’s a black and white photograph but I see it in color, with the sun shining.
Between three and four o’ clock, I felt like writing about the last time I saw her alive, exactly two weeks ago.
Monday 28
This morning, after seeing the words “cubic meter” on a water bill, I remembered that I used to call her Cubby when I was six or seven years old. Tears come to my eyes, thinking of time.
4 A 1925 song with strong sentimental overtones: a little boy steals a bunch of white roses to take to his mother in the hospital but when he gets there he learns she has just died.
Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness
