Maman had passed a quiet night: the nurse, seeing her anxiety, had held her hand all the time. They had found a way of putting her on the bed-pan without hurting her. She was beginning to eat again and presently the infusions would be stopped. ‘This evening!’ she begged.
‘This evening or tomorrow,’ said N.
In these circumstances there would still be a night-nurse, but my sister would sleep at her friends’ house. I asked Dr P’s advice. Sartre was taking the plane for Prague the next day: should I go with him? ‘Anything at all can happen, and at any time. But this state of affairs can also last for months. You would never get away. Prague is only an hour and a half from Paris, and telephoning is easy.’
I spoke to Maman about the plan. ‘Of course you must go! I don’t need you,’ she said. My going finally convinced her that she was out of danger. ‘I was very far gone! Peritonitis at seventy-eight! What luck that I was here! What luck they hadn’t operated on my leg.’ Her left arm, free of its bandages, had gone down a little. Carefully she raised her hand to her face and touched her nose, her mouth. ‘I had the feeling that my eyes were in the middle of my cheeks and that my nose was right down at the bottom of my face, all bent. It’s odd …’
Maman had not been in the habit of taking notice of herself. Now her body forced itself upon her attention. Ballasted with this weight, she no longer floated in the clouds and she no longer said anything that shocked me. When she spoke of the Boucicaut, it was to say how sorry she was for the patients who were condemned to a public ward. She was on the side of the nurses against the management, which was exploiting them. In spite of the gravity of her condition she never varied from the careful consideration that she had always shown. She was afraid of giving Mademoiselle Leblon too much work. She said thank you; she apologized – ‘All this blood they are using on an old woman, when there are young people who might need it!’ She blamed herself for taking up my time. ‘You have things to do, and you spend hours and hours here: it vexes me!’ There was some pride, but there was also remorse in her voice when she said, ‘My poor dears! I have upset you! You must have been terrified.’ Her anxiety extended to us, too. On Thursday morning, when the maid brought my sister’s breakfast, Maman was scarcely out of her coma, but she whispered, ‘Conf … conf …’
‘Confessor?’
‘No. Confiture.’ She was remembering that my sister liked jam for breakfast.
She was deeply concerned about the sales of my last book. As Mademoiselle Leblon was being evicted by her landlord, Maman agreed with my sister’s suggestion that she should stay at the studio: usually she could not bear the idea of anyone going into her place when she was not there. Her illness had quite broken the shell of her prejudices and her pretensions: perhaps because she no longer needed these defences. No question of renunciation or sacrifice any more: her first duty was to get better and so to look after herself; giving herself up to her own wishes and her own pleasures with no holding back, she was at last freed from resentment. Her restored beauty and her recovered smile expressed her inner harmony and, on this death-bed, a kind of happiness.
We noticed, and we were rather surprised at it, that she had not asked that her confessor, who had been put off on Tuesday, should come again. Well before her operation she had said to Marthe, ‘Pray for me, my dear, because when you are ill, you know, you can’t pray any more.’ No doubt she was too much taken up with getting well to undergo the fatigues of religious practices. One day Dr N said to her, ‘Recovering as quickly as this must mean that you are on good terms with God!’
‘Oh, we get along very well. But I don’t want to go and see Him right away.’
The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die. Of course, her devout friends thought that we were going against her wishes, and they tried to force matters. In spite of the notice No Visitors, one morning my sister saw a priest’s cassock in the opening door: she briskly thrust him back. ‘I am Father Avril. I have come as a friend.’
‘I don’t mind. Your clothes would frighten Maman.’
On Monday, a fresh intrusion. ‘Maman cannot see anyone,’ said my sister, drawing Madame de Saint-Ange into the lobby.
‘Very well. But I must discuss a very serious question with you: I know your mother’s beliefs …’
‘I know them too,’ replied my sister curtly. ‘Maman has all her faculties. The day she asks to see a priest she shall do so.’
When I left for Prague on Wednesday morning she had still not asked for one.
-
AT NOON I telephoned. ‘Haven’t you gone, then?’ said Poupette, so clearly did she hear me. Maman was very well; on Thursday, too; on Friday she talked to me, pleased that I should be calling her from so far away. She was reading a little, and doing crosswords. On Saturday I was not able to telephone. At half past eleven on Sunday evening I asked for the Diatos’ number: while I was waiting in my bedroom for the call to be put through, I was brought a telegram. ‘Maman very ill. Can you come back?’ Francine told me that Poupette was spending the night at the clinic. A little while after I got through to her. ‘A dreadful day,’ she told me. ‘I held Maman’s hand all the time and she kept begging me not to let her go. She said, “I shall not see Simone again.” Now they have given her equanil and she is sleeping.’
I asked the porter to reserve me a place in the aeroplane that was leaving the next morning at half past ten. Engagements had been fixed; Sartre advised me to wait a day or two. Impossible. I did not particularly want to see Maman again before her death; but I could not bear the idea that she should not see me again. Why attribute such importance to a moment since there would be no memory? There would not be any atonement either. For myself I understood, to the innermost fibre of my being, that the absolute could be enclosed within the last moments of a dying person.
At half past one on Monday I walked into room 114. Maman had been told of my coming back, and she thought it was in line with my plans. She took off her dark glasses and smiled at me. Under the effect of the tranquillizers she was in a state of euphoria. Her face had changed; its colour was yellow and a puffy fold ran down from under her right eye along her nose. Yet there were flowers again on all the tables. Mademoiselle Leblon had gone; Maman no longer needed a private nurse since the intravenous drip had been stopped. The evening I left, Mademoiselle Leblon had begun a transfusion that was meant to go on for two hours: Maman’s overburdened veins could bear blood even less than they could bear plasma. She cried out for five minutes on end. ‘Stop!’ Poupette had said. The nurse resisted. ‘What will Dr N say?’ ‘I take full responsibility.’ N was indeed very angry. ‘The cicatrization will be slower.’ Yet he knew very well that the wound would not close; it was forming a fistula through which the intestine was emptying itself – it was that which was preventing a fresh blockage, for the intestinal motion, the ‘traffic’, had stopped. How long would Maman hold out? According to the analyses the tumour was an extremely virulent sarcoma which had begun to disseminate throughout the organism: in view of her age, however, the development might be quite slow.
She told me about her last two days. On Saturday she had begun a novel by Simenon and had beaten Poupette at crosswords – there was a pile of the squares that she cut out of the papers on her table. On Sunday she had had mashed potatoes for lunch which had not gone down properly (in fact it was the beginning of the metastases that played havoc with her) and she had a long waking nightmare. ‘I was in a blue sheet, over a hole; your sister was holding the sheet and I begged her, “Don’t let me fall into the hole …” “I am holding you; you will not fall,” said Poupette.’