Book of My Mother (10 page)

What about trying mixed-up proverbs? Here we go. A stitch in time is worth two in the bush. A rolling drone blows nobody any good. Too many crooks have a silver lining. Birds of a feather repent at leisure. Virtue is the root of all evil. I do not feel any brighter. I have this obsessive thought that I can see my mother’s gaze in the attentive eyes of my cat. What about trying God? God – that reminds me of something. I have had a few setbacks in that department. Anyway, when He has a free moment He can let me know.

Poets who have sung of grief which uplifts and enriches have never known grief. Lukewarm souls and stunted hearts, they have never known grief, even though they start a new line and see genius in creating blank spaces sprinkled with words, idlers who in their impotence make a virtue of necessity. Their feelings are short-lived, and that is why they start a new line. Little fusspots, pretentious dwarfs perched on high heels and brandishing the rattle of their rhymes, so utterly wearisome, making a song and dance about each word they excrete, terribly proud of their adjectival torments, enraptured when they have produced fourteen lines, spewing over their desk miserable little words in which they see countless wonders and which they suck and force you to suck with them, informing all and sundry of the rare words which have emerged, padding their skinny shoulders with colossal impertinence, wily managers of their constipated genius, so convinced of the importance of their poems. Had they known grief which harps and sweats with a gaping mouth, these self-satisfied poseurs, who never paid for anything with their blood, would not sing of its beauty, nor would they tell us that nothing uplifts us as much as a great sorrow. I know what grief is, and I know that it neither uplifts nor enriches, but that it shrivels you till you are reduced to size, like the boiled shrunken head of a Peruvian warrior, and I know that poets who suffer as they search for rhymes and sing of the honor of suffering, refined midgets strutting on stilts, have never known grief which makes of you a man who once was.

L
ET’S FACE IT
, I too am but one of the living, a sinner like all the living. My beloved lies buried in earth, rotting all alone in the silence of the dead, in the terrifying solitude of the dead, and I am outside and I go on living and my hand is moving selfishly just now. And if my hand traces words which tell of my grief, it is a movement of life, that is of joy after all, which stirs that hand. And tomorrow I shall reread these pages and add more words and that will give me a kind of pleasure. Sin of living. I shall correct the proofs, and that too will be a sin of living.

My mother is dead, but I gaze at the beauty of women. My mother lies abandoned in earth, where horrible things go on, but I love the sunshine and the tittle-tattle of tiny birds. Sin of living. When I was telling of a mother’s departure and a son’s remorse for having gone to see Diane that same evening, I described that Diane with too much pleasure. Sin of living. My mother is dead, but on the radio ceaselessly burbling beside me as I write, “The Blue Danube” has only to start to flow and I cannot resist its corny charm and despite my filial grief I fall immediately under the spell of those slender, gently twirling Viennese maidens.

The sin of living is everywhere. If the sister of the consumptive wife is young and healthy, may God take pity on the husband and the sister who together nurse the sick woman they sincerely love. They are alive and well, and when the consumptive wife is asleep, drugged with morphine and smiling with a rattle in her throat, they walk together in the garden steeped in night. They are sad, but they savor the sweetness of the fragrant garden, the sweetness of being together, and that is almost an act of adultery. Or take the widow who, sincere in her grief, has nonetheless put on silk stockings to go to the funeral and powdered her face. Sin of living. Tomorrow she will wear a dress which she has no wish to be unflattering and which will set off her beauty. Sin of living. And beneath the grief of this lover sobbing in despair at the graveside there lurks perhaps an awful involuntary joy, a sinful joy at being still alive, an unconscious joy, an organic joy which is beyond his control, an involuntary joy at the contrast between the dead woman and the living man giving vent to grief which nevertheless is sincere. To feel grief is to live, to be one of the living, to be still of this world.

My mother is dead but I am hungry, and soon, despite my grief, I shall eat. Sin of living. To eat is to consider oneself, to love living. My dark-ringed eyes are in mourning for my mother, but I want to live. Thank God, they who sin by living soon become the dead whom the living offend.

What is more, we very soon forget our dead. Poor dead, how forsaken you are in your earth and how deeply I pity you, poignant in your everlasting solitude. Dead, my darlings, how terribly alone you are. In five years or less I shall be more willing to accept the idea that a mother is something ended. In five years I shall have forgotten some of her gestures. If I were to live a thousand years, perhaps in my thousandth year I would no longer remember her.

W
HAT KIND OF
a farce is this? My mother was born, she came into the world, she took delight in her son, she delighted in her dresses, she laughed, she had high hopes, she took much trouble, she covered my schoolbooks with pretty glossy pink paper with such care and the little intake of saliva which denotes concentration, she was so afraid of illness, she had such absurd faith in her doctors, she prepared so many months in advance for her lovely visits to Geneva, which were her dream, she was so delighted by my compliments, so happy when I told her she had certainly lost a few kilos, which was never true, so happy when I pretended to like her poor, dignified, clumsy little hats, which were so economically concocted and revamped. And all that, all of it, to what purpose? To no purpose. To end up in a hole.

She had been young, my old Maman. I remember that when I was six she came to fetch me one day from the Catholic sisters’ school. How beautiful I thought her, my young Maman. I proudly surveyed her face under her hat on which a stuffed parakeet was expiring, a hat as ridiculous as my own sailor hat of boiled leather, unique of its kind, fruit of the meditations of a hatter instantly punished and struck down by well-deserved bankruptcy. I gazed fervently at my slender Maman of twenty-five and told her she was the most beautiful Maman in the world. And she laughed happily. Devil or God, why in the future corpse did you put that laugh, that absurd need of joy which only immortals should have? We are born to be swindled on this earth.

Why, my God, why did she laugh with joy at being young and beautiful, since now she lies deep in earth? How hard it is to breathe in a coffin: the poor dead stifle there. Why in her youth did she laugh because she was young, laugh because her child admired her, why if that other laugh was one day to come – the frozen laugh of the dead turned to skeletons? Why was my darling a sweetly toothless baby, a baby they bathed in a bucket in the sunshine, a baby joyfully splashing and enthusiastically jerking her little legs in the water, a frenzied dainty little cyclist in the water, foolishly delighted to be living and kicking, and now nothing? Why did she live if she was horribly to die? Why was she happy, why did she hum old arias with a vivacity which embarrassed me, why did she wait and hope so much? Why, before my visits to Marseilles, did she so eagerly and pointlessly, a month in advance, take such pains to prepare and arrange the flat, which she wanted to be grand enough for me, that poor flat which she insisted was repainted and repapered in my honor and which in my honor she would cram with artificial flowers and even, on the eve of my arrival, with expensive fresh flowers strangled by a narrow vase quite bewildered to find itself at so unusual a festival? How hopeless she was at arranging flowers, poor darling. Why so much effort and enthusiasm to fix up her poor flat like a theater set for the great event, the arrival of the eyes of her son, her modest flat in poor taste which was her faith, that pathetically respectable flat all festooned and garlanded in my honor, her lamentable homeland which my naïve darling thought sumptuous and sure to find favor in my eyes and do credit to the impeccable housekeeper she was convinced she was? I did not compliment her enough on her taste, and sometimes I even laughed at her a little. Too late now. What is done is done. Anyway, she loved everything about me – even my sarcasm.

Why so much commotion, since the earth now lies heavy upon her and she is impassible? Why on the eve of my arrival did she so fervently deck her revered humble washroom with incongruous theatrical curtains, the poor washroom which with all the ardor of her soul she turned into a Palace of Lace? Why so much enthusiasm if it was destined to end in nothingness? Why did she attach importance to so many things, and what was the point of it? Why in expectation of the visit of her Western darling did she so passionately purchase such huge quantities of the tea which for her was a strange medicinal herb inconceivably liked by the Gentiles, proudly proclaiming in a burst of courage in the local shop where it had been growing musty since the time of Napoléon III that she was buying tea for Her Son Who Was About To Arrive, that insipid tea which had lost all taste, which she made so badly and with so much care, and which I would declare perfect, only to tease her about her incompetence the following day. Nevermore will I tease her. Why did she so cherish her piles of linen, which she would inspect and usually pat, delighted and proud and sighing with satisfaction? Why was she so enthusiastic about going to the theater with me – “Quick, hurry up, we’ll be late” – why so much excitement about everything, why did she smile at me so much if she was so completely to disappear?

All her efforts to please, her guileless titivation, her enthusiasms, her little sparks of pride, her joys, her moments of susceptibility – all that is dead forever, has suddenly never existed, was pointless. Just as the pages I am writing now, the nights I spend writing them, are all so vain, so pointless. I shall die. No more I soon. And after my death someone perhaps will also wonder why I came into the world, why I lived and so absurdly enjoyed writing, and why I was so ridiculously delighted at what seemed to me a written truth, a well-turned phrase, or a flash of inspiration. And even what I have just written about my death and the uselessness of writing gives me some joy of living and some sense of usefulness.

H
ERE
I
AM
in my room, one of the human nation, scandalized by universal death, asking sterile questions. Here I am, asking constantly for my mother, asking nothingness for my mother. Here I am, a man destitute, abandoned, and aghast, an ashen-faced man seeking to understand; here I am, sweating and breathing hard, for I understand nothing of my human adventure, and my labored breathing is painful but insists sadly on going on, and in the moment between breathing in and breathing out there is always my mother plodding toward me. Each breath I draw is a death striving to live, despair simulating hope. Here I am in front of the mirror, wildly yearning for some happiness in my distress, sadly lacerating myself with grief and yet petrified, dragging my nails across my bare chest, smiling and weak in front of my mirror, where I seek my childhood and my mother, my mirror, which keeps me cold company and in which I know with a smile that I am sunk, completely lost without my mother. Here I am in front of the mirror, a window opening onto death, making knots in a piece of string I have picked up at random which keeps me company, tugging it straight, reknotting it, twisting it mechanically, snapping it in my impatience, sweating and stammering cheerful words in an effort to live. O broken thread of my destiny! In front of the mirror to which I put my questions, I cannot understand why my mother is no more since once she was.

She came into the world, she understood nothing of it, and she went away. After having been irreplaceably herself, she vanished. Why, oh why? Poor humans that we are, going from the forever which placed us in our cradle to the forever which will come after our grave. And between those two forevers what is this farce which we act out, this brief farce made up of ambitions, hopes, loves, and joys doomed to vanish forever, this farce which Thou makest us perform? Hey, Thou up there, what is this snare? Why did she laugh, why didst Thou give her a desire to laugh and live if from her cradle Thou hadst sentenced her to death, O Judge of the monotonous sentence, Judge devoid of imagination, who knowest only one sentence, always the death sentence, why, and what is this trickery? She loved to breathe the sea air on those Sundays of my childhood. Why is she now beneath a stifling plank, that plank so close to her beautiful face? She loved to breathe, she loved life. I cry out against this fraud, this sinister joke. O God, with the right accorded to me by my death throes soon to come, I tell Thee that Thy joke is not funny, Thy joke of giving us such a terrifying and splendid love of life only then to lay us out one after another, each beside the other, and make of us motionless objects which future motionless objects bury deep in earth like reeking muck, rotting rubbish to be cast out of sight, waxy refuse, we who once were babies dimpling delightedly. Why all that earth on my mother, that cramped space of the box around her, when she so loved to breathe the sea air?

I
WANT HER
not to be dead. I want hope, I demand hope. Who will give me a belief in a wondrous life where I shall see my mother again? Brothers, O my brother humans, force me to believe in an everlasting life, but give me good reasons – not all that bunkum which sickens me while, ashamed of the conviction in your eyes, I amiably reply yes, yes. That heaven where I want to see my mother again must be real, not an invention of my distress.