Book of My Mother Read online

  My mother’s incomparable love. My daughter loves me, but while I am writing here all alone she is having lunch with some pea-brained moron who is simply wild about art and beauty. (He pronounces it “bewtee.”) My daughter loves me, but she has her life and she leaves me all alone.

  My mother was my talisman. All that she wanted was to sit by my side and sew. She would breathe in a little saliva as she sewed, and then we would look at each other and I would feel in my place, reassured, a son. Then she would get up and go into her lovely kitchen, which was the bridge of her ship, to perform her sacred little tasks, pat her meatballs, though they did not need it, and put frightful jagged-edged paper on the shelves. Then she would call me to come and admire the jagged-edged paper and she would look at me to see if I approved. It is such humble things which make up sublime love.

  Some men must have passion and young huntresses with long thighs, or glamorous stars – who, by the way, blow their noses in handkerchiefs and do not produce pearls. That is their affair, and much good may it do them. Speaking for myself, my mother is all I want – especially Maman in her old age, with her white hair and her enthusiastic chatter about things I already knew by heart. What I want is my old mother, my mother with the false teeth which she wore during the last years of her life and which she used to wash under the tap. She was so sweet without her false teeth, so defenseless, innocent and harmless as a gummy babe, childlike, her pronunciation distorted, and with motherly coyness she would stifle her laughter and put her hand in front of the gap in her mouth. With her alone I was not alone. Now I am alone with everyone.

  With those I love most dearly – friends, daughter, and loving women – I always have to pretend a little, conceal a little. With my mother I had only to be what I was, with my anguish, my failings, my afflictions of the body and the soul. She did not love me less. My mother’s incomparable love.

  With her alone I could have lived far from the world. Never, like others, would she have thought, “He has stopped publishing books” or “He is getting old.” No. “My son,” she would have said trustingly to herself. And so, lifting up my eyes, which bear the noble mark of your goodness, and cutting through the immensity of space and silence, I reciprocate that act of faith, and I say to you gravely, “Maman.”

  XIII

  OH, HER TEARS at the station in Geneva on the evening she left for Marseilles, while the engine shrieked like a madwoman in despair, clanked and belched steam from under the axles! At the carriage door she gazed at me so tenderly, wild eyed and distraught, no longer worried about appearing smart and well dressed. She knew that she was leaving me for a whole year and that a gulf which now I hate separated my life from her own humble life. Oh, the tearful blessing of my mother at the carriage door, my mother looking at me so intently, my mother suddenly so old, beaten, her hair disheveled and her hat absurdly askew! Oh, the blessing of my mother, defenseless, discomfited, wretched, vanquished, an outcast, so dependent and lowly, a little crazy in her distress, a little unhinged by her distress! Over now, the wonder of being together, the pitiful festival of her life. Oh, her panic-stricken distress at the carriage door of the train, which was starting to move, which was about to bear her away toward her life of solitude, which was bearing her away, powerless and condemned, far from her son, while she blessed me and wept and stammered thanks! Strange that I did not take her tears seriously enough. Strange that only now do I realize that my mother was a human being, someone apart from myself, someone who truly suffered. Perhaps that very evening I would go to see my lover.

  A son said to me, and it is he who speaks now, I too have lost my mother, said that son with dark-ringed eyes. I too lived far away from her and she would come and stay with me for a few weeks which for her as well were the meager enchantment of her life. I too, said that son, on the very evening of her departure, instead of weeping all night for my mother, who was incomparable, I would go, sad but soon consoled, to see one who was comparable, one of the exquisite she-devils of my life, whose name was Diane – Diane, priestess of love. I would go, giving scarcely a thought to my mother, whose head was nodding, dazed with grief, in the train which was bearing her away from me and where she was thinking only of her son – the son who at the very instant, thinking no more of his mother all alone and tiny in her train, was laughing aloud for love in the taxi which was taking him to his Diane. Oh, the sinful pleasure of saying that name! And I would take advantage of the noise of the engine to sing love songs at the top of my voice with no fear of the comments of the driver, to whom I planned to give a sparkling tip, so happy was I at last to be seeing Diane again.

  While my mother was weeping and blowing her nose in her train, said that son whom I dislike, I was gazing joyfully at my youthful face in the taxi mirror, gazing at the lips which in just a few minutes Diane would so passionately kiss, and quivering with impatience I sang sickening songs of stupid passion and above all the luminous name of the blonde she-devil called Diane – Diane, slender and fervent and overintelligent, toward whom the taxi was speeding me, admirably shaved, admirably dressed, and taut with desire. And all at once here was the villa where dwelt the orphan Diane, the most beautiful and sumptuous of maidens, who stood waiting for me under the roses round the door, tall in her white linen dress sheathing the firm nudity which was offered to me alone. Diane, live and sunlit and devilishly jealous, poetic yet athletic, sensual yet idealistic and given to singing hymns on Sunday. Diane, nurtured on sunshine and on fruit, who would send me hundred-word love telegrams from her travels – yes, always telegrams, so that the beloved would know at once how dearly his loving loved one loved him incessantly. Diane who would phone me at three or four in the morning to ask if I still loved her and tell me that “I love you and love you like an imbecile and I hate myself for loving you so much, my beloved, and no Romanian peasant girl with long plaits ever looked at her man with such trusting adoration.”

  On the night of my mother’s departure, said that son, Diane accompanied me home, and in the flat which my mother had blessed before leaving I dared to undress the impatient Diane. When our ardor was spent, and with countless kisses tattooed on our faces, we fell asleep in the fragrant bed at the foot of the precipice of joy and we had the same sated smile in our sleep while my old mother was blessing me and blowing her nose in the train which was bearing her far away from me. O shame! Sons and daughters, cursed breed!

  Thus spoke that son. Like him perhaps, on the evening of my mother’s departure – the very evening when piteously she had stood at the carriage door and thanked me and blessed me with hands spread out like sunbeams, blessed me with all the fervor of her face glistening with slow tears – like him perhaps I would go, hurrying out of the station, go impatiently, son that I was, to see an adoring, fragrant, whirling and twirling lover, an Atalanta wreathed in sunlight. O cruelty of youth! It is right that I should suffer now. My suffering is my vengeance against myself. She expected so much of me, with her plump face, wholly loving, so naïve and childlike. My old Maman. And I gave her so little. Too late. Now the train has left forever, for the forever. Crushed, devastated, her hair disheveled, and ceaselessly blessing me, my dead mother is at the carriage door of the train of death. And I trail after the moving train, panting as I trail, ghastly pale, sweating and obsequious, in the wake of the moving train which is bearing away my dead mother and her blessings.

  XIV

  IN MY SLEEP, which is the music of tombs, I have just now seen her again, beautiful as in her youth, mortally beautiful and weary, so placid and mute. She was about to leave my bedroom, but I called her back in a hysterical voice of which I was ashamed in my dream. She told me she had urgent things to do, a tallow star of David to sew on the teddy bear she had bought for her little boy soon after we arrived in Marseilles. But she agreed to stay a little longer, despite the order of the Gestapo. “Poor orphan,” she said. She explained that it was not her fault that she was dead, and that she would try to come see me sometimes. Then she assured me she wo
uld never again phone the countess, “I’ll never do it again. Please forgive me,” she said, looking at her little hands, on which blue marks had appeared. I woke and read books all night so that she would not come back. But I find her in all the books. Go away, you are not alive. Go away, you are too alive.

  In another dream I meet her in an unreal street like a film-set street, in France during the Occupation. But she does not see me, and my heart aches with pity as I watch that little bent and almost beggarly old woman picking up cabbage stumps after the market closes and putting them in a suitcase where there is a yellow Star of David. She looks rather like the wicked fairy in stories, and she is dressed like an Orthodox priest, with a queer cylindrical black hat, but I am in no mood to laugh. I kiss her in the slippery street, and a carriage passes by, inside which there is someone who is Pétain. Then she opens the suitcase, which is held together with string, and takes out a teddy bear and some almond paste she has kept for me, and despite the hunger in France she has never touched it. How proud I am to carry her suitcase. She is afraid it will tire me, and I am cross with her because she wants to carry the suitcase herself. But I can see she is glad I am cross, because it shows I am in good health. All at once she tells me that she would rather I had been a doctor, with a fine waiting room and a bronze lioness, and that I would have been happier that way. “Now that I am dead there is no harm in telling you.” Then she asks me if I remember our walk on the day of the suede shoes. “We were happy then,” she says. Why did I take a huge cardboard false nose from my pocket? Why did I clap it proudly on my face, and why are Maman and I now walking royally along the street buzzing with mistrust? Maman’s queer hat is now a crown, but of cardboard too, and a sick horse is following us and coughing and falling in a flash of sparks in the dank night. An ancient coach with the gilt peeling off, all encrusted with tiny mirrors, is wobbling and pitching behind a gently consumptive horse, which falls then picks itself up and draws the royal coach, nodding wisely, and its silken eyes are sad but intelligent. I know that this is the coach of the moral Law, eternal and splendid. Maman and I are now in the coach, and we gravely greet a crowd which laughs and mocks because the coach is not a sixty-ton tank, and the crowd throws rotten eggs at us while my mother shows them the sacred scrolls of the Ten Commandments. Then we weep, my mother and I. “Jerusalem,” she says to me suddenly, and the old sick horse gives a great solemn nod then turns to look at us and its eyes are so kind, and I repeat “Jerusalem” and I know that its meaning is also “Maman” and I awake and I am appalled at my solitude.

  What is so terrible about the dead is that they are so alive, so beautiful and so remote. So beautiful is she, my dead mother, that I could write for nights on end so that I might have that presence near me, that majestic form of death, that form moving slowly beside me, regally moving, protective yet indifferent and frighteningly calm, a sad shadow, a loving and distant shadow, more calm than sad, more detached than calm. Take off your shoes, for this is a sacred place where I tell of death.

  In my sleep she is alive and she explains that she is hiding in a far-off hamlet under a false name, in a hamlet tucked away beneath a mountain, where she remains hidden for love of me in a farmer’s house. She explains that she is obliged to stay there, that she has come to see me in secret, but that if certain authorities knew she was not dead, there would be dire consequences. She is loving in these dreams, but perhaps less so than in life – gentle but a little detached, tender but not passionate, affectionate but with an evasive affability and a slowness of speech I had never perceived in her lifetime. They have changed her among the dead. In these dreams she never really looks at me and her gaze always seems to be turned elsewhere, as if toward secret important things now more grave than her son. The dead always look elsewhere, and that is terrible. And in these dreams I face the fact that if she still loves me, it is because she once loved me so dearly that she cannot not love me still, albeit less. Then, with that same incomprehensible calm which seems to denote a lessening in her love, she says that she must now return to the village where she is hiding. And in these dreams I contract her fear that it will become known that she is alive. For in these dreams she is alive illegally and she is guilty of not being dead. But all this is folly. It is not in a village but in earth reeking of earth that she is hidden. And the truth is that nevermore will she speak to me, nevermore will she worry about me. Oh, the terrifying selfish solitude of the outstretched dead! How completely you have ceased to love us, beloved dead, dear faithless dead. You leave us alone, alone and ignorant.

  XV

  I DO NOT WANT her in dreams. I want her in life, here with me, well dressed, by her son and proud of being looked after by her son. She bore me for nine months and she is no longer here. I am a fruit without a tree, a chick without a hen, a lion cub all alone in the desert, and I am cold. If she were here, she would say, “Cry, my child, you’ll feel better after for it.” She is not here and I do not want to cry. I only want to cry by her side. I want to go for a walk with her and listen to her as no one else ever listened to her. I want to flatter her. I want to wheedle her into wasting time keeping me company while I shave or while I dress. I want – if Thou art God, prove it – I want to be ill and have her bring me her own remedies, roasted linseed ground and mixed with powdered sugar – “It’s good for coughs, my son.” I want her to brush my suits. I want her to tell me stories. I was put on earth to listen to my mother’s interminable stories. I want her partiality – I want her to be cross with those who do not like me. I want to show her my diplomatic passport, to see her delight, because she is convinced, my naïve darling, that it is important to have a diplomatic passport. I shall not disillusion her, because I want her to be pleased and to bless me. But I also want to be her little boy as I used to be. I want her to draw me her naïve flowers, which I shall try to copy. I want her to knot my tie and then give me a little pat on the cheek. I want to be Maman’s little boy – a very nice little boy who likes to hold the hem of his Maman’s skirt as she sits at his bedside when he is ill. When I am holding the hem of her skirt, no one can harm me. You think it is ridiculous to talk like this at my age? Then allow me to be ridiculous.

  The little bird whose mother they have killed is ridiculous. Perched on its branch, it twitters a dirge, a monotonous and ineffectual tweet-tweet. That lamb is ridiculous too. It is bleating in the desert because it has lost its mother ewe. Trembling in the sand, it will soon die of thirst, but it is looking for its mother in the desert.

  I want to hear her superstitiously advising me not to say certain dangerous words for three days after being vaccinated. I want to see her starched awkwardness when I introduce one of my friends to her. I want her to be here and to tell me, as she used to tell me, not to write too much, “because thinking like that all the time is bad for the head, and there are scholars, you know, my son, who have gone mad through thinking, and my mind is at rest when you’re asleep, because at least you’re not thinking when you’re asleep.” I say that I want, I ask, but I get nothing, and God loves me so little that I feel ashamed for Him.

  XVI

  WIDE AWAKE I dream, and I tell myself what it would be like if she were alive. I would live with her simply in solitude. A little house by the sea, far from mankind. Just the two of us, she and I, in a crooked little house. A very peaceful and untalented little life. I would forge myself a new soul – the soul of a little old lady like her – to avoid embarrassing her, and make her utterly happy. I would stop smoking, just to please her. We would cope nicely together with the household chores. We would do the cooking, making little remarks like “I really do think that a bit, just a touch, of chicory brings out the flavor in coffee” or “It’s better not to put in enough salt rather than too much – you can always add some later.” Like her, I would pat the dinner with a wooden spoon. Two old sisters, she and I, and while one strained the macaroni the other would grate the cheese. We would sweep up everywhere, chatting all the time, we would polish the brass, an
d when all was done we would sit ourselves down. We would smile at each other in contentment and good companionship, sigh with satisfaction, pleasantly tired, and happily survey the result of our work, our kitchen so spotless and tidy. For love of her and to please her I would play up my satisfaction. And then we would reward ourselves with hot coffee, and as we sipped she would smile at me through her glasses, which would be touching the rim of her cup. We would sometimes get the giggles together. We would always be doing each other little turns with a smile. In the evening after dinner, when everything was perfectly trim, we would chat cozily by the fire, she and I, looking at each other so agreeably, two real little old ladies, so easy and comfortable and sincere, two little pippins, impish and contented, with very few teeth but sprightly as they come, and for love of her I would be sewing like her, Maman and I, sworn pals, chatting together, together forever. And that is my idea of paradise.