Poupette had spent the night sitting up in an armchair and Maman, who was usually anxious about Poupette’s sleep, said, ‘Stay awake; don’t let me go. If I go to sleep, wake me up; don’t let me go while I am sleeping.’ At one moment, my sister told me, Maman closed her eyes, exhausted. Her hands clawed the sheets and she articulated, ‘Live! Live!’
To spare her this anguish, the doctors had prescribed pills, and injections of equanil; Maman avidly insisted upon having them. She was in an excellent mood all day long. Again she picked upon the strangeness of her impressions. ‘There was a tiresome round opposite me. Your sister could not see it. I said to her, “Cover that round.” She could not see any round.’ It was a little metal plate set in the window-frame and it had been covered by pulling down the blind a little – they had at last repaired it. She had seen Chantal and Catherine, and in a satisfied tone she told us, ‘Dr P said to me that I had been very clever. I have managed things very cleverly – while I am getting over my operation my femur is joining up again.’ In the evening I suggested taking my sister’s place, for she had scarcely closed her eyes the night before; but Maman was used to her; and she thought her much more competent than me, since she had looked after Lionel.
The day of Tuesday passed off well. In the night Maman had horrible dreams. ‘They put me in a box,’ she said to my sister. ‘I am here, but I am in the box. I am myself, and yet it is not me any longer. Men carry the box away!’ She struggled. ‘Don’t let them carry me away!’
For a long while Poupette kept her hand on Maman’s forehead. ‘I promise. They shall not put you in the box.’
She asked for an extra dose of equanil. Saved from her visions at last, Maman questioned her. ‘But what does it all mean, this box, and these men?’
‘They are memories of your operation: male nurses carried you on a stretcher.’
Maman went to sleep. But in the morning there was all the sadness of a defenceless animal in her eyes. When the nurses made her bed, and then made her urinate with a catheter, it hurt her and she groaned: in a faint voice she asked me, ‘Do you think I shall come through?’
I scolded her. Timidly she questioned Dr N. ‘Are you pleased with me?’
He answered yes without the least conviction, but she clung to this lifebuoy. She always discovered excellent reasons to justify her extreme weariness. There had been dehydration; the mashed potatoes were too heavy; on that particular day she blamed the nurses for only having given her three dressings instead of four the day before. ‘Dr N was furious, in the evening,’ she said. ‘How he blew them up!’ Several times she repeated, ‘He was furious!’ in a satisfied tone. Her face had lost its beauty; it jerked with nervous tics; rancour and demandingness showed through in her voice once again.
‘I am so very tired,’ she sighed. She had agreed to see Marthe’s brother, a young Jesuit, in the afternoon.
‘Would you like me to put him off?’
‘No. Your sister will like to see him. They will talk theology. I shall close my eyes: I won’t have to talk.’
She ate no lunch. She went to sleep, with her head drooping forward: when Poupette opened the door she thought it was all over. Charles Cordonnier only stayed five minutes. He spoke of the luncheons to which his father used to invite Maman every week. ‘I certainly expect to see you in the boulevard Raspail again, one of these Thursdays.’
She gazed at him, incredulous and distressed. ‘Do you think I shall go there again?’
I had never yet seen such a look of unhappiness on her face: that day she guessed that there was no hope for her. We thought the end so close that when Poupette came I did not go.
‘So I am getting worse, since you are both here,’ she murmured.
‘We are always here.’
‘Not both at the same time.’
Once again I pretended to be cross. ‘I’m staying because you are low in your spirits. But if it only worries you, I’ll go away.’
‘No, no,’ she said, in a downcast voice.
My unfair harshness wrung my heart. At the time the truth was crushing her and when she needed to escape from it by talking, we were condemning her to silence; we forced her to say nothing about her anxieties and to suppress her doubts: as it had so often happened in her life, she felt both guilty and misunderstood. But we had no choice: hope was her most urgent need. Chantal and Catherine had been so frightened by her appearance that they had telephoned to Limoges to advise their mother to come back.
Poupette was utterly tired out. ‘I am going to sleep here tonight,’ I decided.
Maman looked uneasy. ‘Will you be able to manage? Will you know how to put your hand on my forehead if I have nightmares?’
‘Of course I will.’
She thought it over; she looked at me intently. ‘You frighten me, you do.’
I had always rather intimidated Maman because of the intellectual esteem that she had for me, and that she resolutely declined to have for her younger daughter. It worked the other way too: her prudishness had frozen me at a very early age. As a child I was a frank little girl; and then I saw the way grown-ups lived, each shut up inside little private walls; sometimes Maman made a hole in the walls, a hole that was quickly plugged up again. ‘She told me in confidence,’ whispered Maman with a consequential air. Or a crack was discovered from outside. ‘She is very close, and she told me nothing; but it seems that …’ The confessions and the gossip had something furtive about them that I found revolting, and I wanted my ramparts to be impregnable. I was particularly diligent in giving away nothing to Maman, out of fear of her distress and horror of having her peer into me. Soon she no longer ventured to ask me questions. Our brief confrontation on my loss of faith cost us both a great deal. The sight of her tears grieved me; but I soon realized that she was weeping over her failure, without caring about what was happening inside me. And she antagonized me by preferring the force of authority to friendliness. We might still have come to an understanding if, instead of asking everybody to pray for my soul, she had given me a little confidence and sympathy. I know now what prevented her from doing so: she had too much to pay back, too many wounds to salve, to put herself in another’s place. In actual doing she made every sacrifice, but her feelings did not take her out of herself. Besides, how could she have tried to understand me since she avoided looking into her own heart? As for discovering an attitude that would not have set us apart, nothing in her life had ever prepared her for such a thing: the unexpected sent her into a panic, because she had been taught never to think, act or feel except in a ready-made framework.
The silence between us became quite impenetrable. Until She Came to Stay came out she knew almost nothing at all about my life. She tried to persuade herself that at least as far as morals were concerned I was ‘a good girl’. Public rumour destroyed her illusions; but at that particular time our relationship had changed. She was financially dependent upon me; she took no practical decision without consulting me; I was the family’s breadwinner – her son, as it were. Then again, I was a well-known writer. These circumstances to some degree excused the irregularity of my life, which in any case she minimized – a free union was, after all, less impious than a civil marriage. She was often shocked by what was in my books; but she was flattered by their success. But this, by giving me authority in her eyes, made her conflict worse. It was useless for me to avoid all argument – or maybe for the very reason that I did avoid it, she thought that I was sitting in judgment on her. Poupette, ‘the baby’, was less respected than I was; she had been less marked by Maman, and so she had not inherited her stiffness; and she had a freer relationship with her. Poupette undertook to give her all the comforting assurances that could be thought of when my Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter came out. For my part, I confined myself to taking her a bunch of flowers and making the simplest apology: I may add that this moved and astonished her. One day she said to me, ‘Parents do not understand their children; but it works both ways …’ We talked about these misunderstandings, but in a general way. And we never returned to the question. I would knock. I would hear a little moaning noise, the scuffling of her slippers on the floor, another sigh; and I would promise myself that this time I should find things to talk about, a common ground of understanding. By the end of five minutes the game was lost: we had so few shared interests! I leafed through her books: we did not read the same ones. I made her talk; I listened to her; I commented. But since she was my mother, her unpleasant phrases irked me more than if they had come from any other mouth. And I was as rigid as I had been at twenty when she tried (with her usual clumsiness) to move on to an intimate plane. ‘I know you don’t think me intelligent; but still, you get your vitality from me. The idea makes me happy.’ I should have been delighted to agree that my vitality came from her; but the beginning of her remark utterly chilled me. So we each paralysed the other. It was all that that she meant, when she looked firmly at me and said, ‘You frighten me, you do.’