Book of My Mother Read online

  I can hear my mother saying with her wise smile, “That life wouldn’t suit you. You couldn’t live that way. You wouldn’t change.” And she adds what she so often said to me in her lifetime: “My crazy lord, my prince of ancient times.” She also says, drawing closer, “And, anyway, I wouldn’t like you to change. Don’t you know that mothers like their sons to be superior and even a bit ungrateful? It’s a sign of good health.”

  I raise my head, I look at myself in the mirror, and, while some chap on the radio goes on and on, I watch myself write – gentle, good as gold, with an expression all at once almost kind, absorbed and peaceful as a child engrossed in a very foolish forbidden game, absorbed, weightless, smiling slightly, holding the paper lightly with the left hand while the right advances with childlike application. I feel quite sorry for this man who is writing with such loving care and who is going to die soon.

  XVII

  HERE I AM at my table, with my bones all ready, waiting for it to end, for my own turn to come, one year or three years or at most twenty years from now. But I go on writing as if I were immortal, with such interest and care, like a welder conscientiously going on with his welding while the ship goes down. Here I am, tricking my orphan’s grief with inky signs, awaiting the dark dampness where I shall be the mute companion of certain silent little lives which get about in wriggles. I can see myself now. There is a worm, a very handsome brown-freckled little fellow, who has come to pay me a visit. He makes his way into my nostril, which does not shudder, for it has become senseless. The worm is at home. My nostril is his house and his little larder.

  Heavy lies the earth upon me, upon me imperturbable and unprotesting, heavy the rain-drenched silent earth. And I am all alone like my mother, all alone and stretched out forever, not very well dressed, in a suit which is unbrushed and loose fitting because the gent inside it has got rather slim. All alone, poor useless creature whom in turn they have dumped in the earth, with no company except the parallel rows of his mute comrades, those stretched-out regiments of the silent who once were alive, a corpse all alone in the black silence who grins all over his face from the other world, while a person who loved him so dearly and who wept so bitterly at the funeral three years ago is wondering whether to wear her white dress to that dance, but perhaps not: the pink might be better.

  XVIII

  SHE NEVER ANSWERS, she who always answered. I try to believe it is a good thing she is dead. One comforting thought is that now she is dead she is no longer Jewish and they can no longer harm her, no longer frighten her. In her graveyard she is no longer a Jewess with eyes on the defensive, carnally denying guilt, a Jewess with her mouth gaping in obscure stupefaction, the legacy of fear and waiting. The eyes of living Jews are always afraid. Misfortune is our specialty of the house. You know, in smart restaurants they have a tart which is the speciality of the house. Our speciality of the house is misfortune: wholesale, trade, and retail. Another comforting thought is that she will not see me die.

  Nothing more. Silence. She is silence. “Dead,” I murmur ceaselessly at the window beneath the sky beloved of foolish lovers but which orphans detest because their mother is not there. “Dead,” I murmur with the slight tremor of the insane. “She who thought, hoped, and sang is dead,” I murmur, resisting the dangerous lure of paradise. “Dead,” I repeat idiotically, with a smile which does little to console. All this is not very varied and not very amusing. Nor is it so for me. For pity’s sake, do not laugh. After all, the death of my mother is the only thing in the world which is tragic. You do not agree? Just wait till it is your turn to be the mourner. Or the mourned.

  I turn around and see things she saw and touched. They are here beside me: this pen, that suitcase. But she herself is not here. I call her by her name of majesty, and she does not answer. That is horrible, for she always answered and came running. How often I called her in her lifetime, for everything, for nothing, to find mislaid keys or pens or to chat, and always she would come running, and always she would find the keys or the pen, and always she would have tales of ancient times to tell. I went and opened the door of my room automatically, but she was not behind the door.

  A little bird came to peck on the windowsill and I shooed it away. She loved to watch fluffy little birds. They serve no purpose now and I want no more of them. Enough of that music. I have turned off the radio because all great music is my mother and her eyes which cherished me, which looked at me sometimes with wild tenderness. Now a brass band is marching down the street. How joyful they are, those living creatures, and how alone am I. I shall go and keep myself company in front of the mirror. That is a pastime, a little trick to play on death. And in the mirror there will be someone who will sympathize.

  I stare into the mirror, but it is my mother who is in the mirror. My grief becomes physical and I am pale and clammy. My cheeks are wet not with tears – the privilege of those who suffer little – but with drops trickling down from my forehead. The sweat of the death of my mother is ice cold. And suddenly there comes an indifference to distress, an anesthetic for distress, a little game of distress which makes me automatically press my eyeball as I gaze into the mirror. This creates an optical illusion and I see two orphans in the mirror. And with me that makes three, which is company. Such grief is not very poetic, not very noble. The little game of pressing my eyeballs gives me a dismal interest in life, a semblance of interest in something. Should I eat cake, just for something to do? No, I want the cakes she made. What is left to me is a mirror and the bewilderment which I contemplate in it, which I contemplate with a smile so as to want to simulate living, while I murmur with a slightly mad little laugh that everything in the garden is lovely and that I am sunk. Sunk, sank, sink, sonk. I have made a discovery: being miserable does not mean you can’t have a bit of fun.

  Night has fallen. To stop thinking of my mother I went into the garden. My grief and my red robe, swept by the wind into two bat wings revealing living nakedness, made of me a poor mad king in the unbearable night where she was watching out for me. A stray dog looked at me with the eyes of my mother and I came back inside. The dead we have loved are terrifying at midnight, and our terror brings them back to life. In the daytime I am more or less the same, though I am dressed like them and know how to pretend. In the daytime in their offices and drawing rooms I smile and do not know what to say. But a twin me, a brilliant, soulless changeling, immediately stands in for me and evokes their admiration and my own keen contempt. And while he talks and plays the wit and the charmer I think of my dead mother. She rules over me, she is my folly, queen of the meandering of my brain, which leads always to her, enthroned in a weird upright coffin in the middle of my brain. Sometimes for three seconds I believe that she is not dead. And then I know once again that she is dead. “Dead,” I repeat in the drawing rooms where she awaits me, where she looms darkly between me and those who expressed their thin-lipped sympathy with the same false sorrow in their eyes as I have in mine when I express my deepest sympathy.

  XIX

  IN THE STREETS I am obsessed by my dead mother, and gloomily I watch the bustling crowds of people who do not know that they will die and that the wood of their coffin already exists in some sawmill or forest; vaguely I watch the young made-up women who are tomorrow’s corpses laughing and displaying the teeth which are the sign and beginning of their skeleton, displaying their thirty-two little bits of skeleton and splitting their sides as though they shall never die. In the streets I am as sad as an oil lamp alight in bright sunshine, pale, useless, and dismal as a lamp alight on a fine summer day, pitiful in the streets, those rivers which nurture the lone soul that I am, slowly wandering and absentminded, absentminded in streets teeming with useless old women and not one is my mother though all of them look like her. I am a sweating nightmare in the streets, where incessantly I think of my living mother just before the instant of her dying. Should I go up to that passerby and tell him that I have lost my mother and that we must exchange a kiss of fellowship, a fervent
kiss of communion in a misfortune which he himself has known or is destined to know? No – he would report me to the police.

  Today I am driven crazy by death, death is everywhere, and those roses on my table that exhale their fragrance as I write, horribly alive, are precorpses forced to simulate life three days longer in water, and people enjoy watching that, watching death throes, and they buy flower corpses and girls feast their eyes on them. Begone, dead roses! I have just thrown them out of the window on to a beribboned old lady with a shopping bag. Old – we all know what that forebodes. All the same, she at least is alive this morning. The old lady looked at me reproachfully. “Such beautiful flowers,” she thought. “It’s not right throwing them out of the window like that.” She does not know that the helpless child that I am wanted to seize death by the throat and kill it.

  I must find a little pastime here and now. Anything will do. Yes, I shall make up absurd little ditties to the tune of that old French song about the church cock or something similar. I shall amuse myself listlessly all alone by inventing cows which do strange things with a “something” air, the “something” has to end in -ive. A cow in night attire Sings in the church choir With a suggestive air. A cow consumed in passion Dances in wifely fashion With a restive air. A cow ill at ease Swings on a trapeze With a pensive air. A cow in fine fettle Puts on the kettle With a dubitative air. A cow on a dune Smiles at the moon With a passive air. A cow pale and gaunt Flirts in a low haunt With a plaintive air. A lily-white cow Prances on a bough With an expressive air. A cow in the sun Gobbles a cream bun With an impulsive air. A small Jewish cow Fans her sweating brow With a fugitive air. A cow in a stole Dances round a maypole With a vindictive air. A cow with a sheen Munches a tureen With a contemplative air. A cow black as night Flies a huge kite With a ruminative air. A cow with a feller Waltzes in the cellar With a festive air. A cow clad in yellow Strums on a cello With a sensitive air. A cow with rheumatics Performs acrobatics With a tentative air. A cow of small girth Splits her sides with mirth With an aggressive air. A cow in despair Sighs on her chair With a naïve air. A cow on a scooter Keeps blowing her hooter With a furtive air. A cow drunk on claret Skips in a garret With a massive air. A cow above reproach Sucks mints in a coach With an active air. There. Grief is not always expressed in noble words: it can also find an outlet in sad little jokes, little old ladies making faces at the dead windows of my eyes. Anyway, my cows didn’t do the trick.

  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.

  XX

  LET’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.

  XXI

  WHAT 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 th
at, 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.