I put on my sister’s nightdress; I lay down on the couch beside Maman’s bed: for my part, too, I was apprehensive. As the evening came on, the room grew dismal; it was lit only by the bedside lamp, for Maman had had the blind pulled down. I felt that the gloom made its funereal mystery even deeper. In fact, I slept better that night, and the three that followed it, than at home, for I was shielded from the anxiety of the telephone and from the wild running of my imagination: I was there; I thought of nothing.
Maman had no nightmares. The first night she often woke and asked for a drink. The second, her coccyx hurt her a great deaclass="underline" Mademoiselle Cournot laid her on her right side, but then her arm tortured her. They set her on a round rubber cushion, which eased the place that hurt; but there was the danger that it might harm the skin of her buttocks, such frail, blue skin. On Friday and Saturday she slept quite well. From the day of Thursday onwards she had regained her confidence, thanks to the equanil. She no longer asked, ‘Do you think I will come through?’ but ‘Do you think I shall be able to go back to a normal life?’
‘Ah, today I can see you!’ she said to me in a happy voice. ‘Yesterday I couldn’t see you at all.’
The next day Jeanne, who had come up from Limoges, found her looking less ravaged than she had feared. They chatted for nearly an hour. When she came back on Saturday morning with Chantal, Maman said to them gaily, ‘Well, my funeral isn’t for tomorrow! I shall live to be a hundred: they will have to put me down.’
Dr P was puzzled. ‘There is no possible forecast with her; she has such immense vitality.’
I told Maman of his last remark. ‘Yes, I have plenty of vitality,’ she observed with pleasure. She was rather surprised: her bowels were not working any more, and yet the doctors did not seem to worry.
‘The main thing is that they have worked: that proves they are not paralysed. The doctors are very pleased.’
‘If they are pleased, that’s all that matters.’
On Saturday evening we talked before going to sleep. ‘It’s very odd,’ she said in a thoughtful tone, ‘but when I think of Mademoiselle Leblon, I see her in my flat: she’s a kind of swollen dummy with no arms, like those you see in dry-cleaners’. Dr P is a strip of black paper on my stomach. So when I see him in the flesh, it seems very odd to me.’
I said to her, ‘You have got used to me, you see: I don’t frighten you any more.’
‘Of course not.’
‘But you said I frightened you.’
‘I said that? One says the strangest things.’
I, too, grew used to this way of life. I arrived at eight in the evening; Poupette told me how the day had passed; Dr N came by. Mademoiselle Cournot appeared, and I read in the lobby while she changed the dressing. Four times a day, a table loaded with bandages, gauze, linen, cotton-wool, sticking-plaster, tins, basins and scissors was wheeled into the room; I studiously looked away when it was wheeled out again. Mademoiselle Cournot, helped by a nurse she knew, washed Maman and made her ready for the night. I went to bed. She gave Maman various injections, and then she went off to drink a cup of coffee, while I read by the light of the bedside lamp. She came back and sat down near the door, which she left ajar so that a little light should come through from the entrance corridor: she read and knitted. There was the slight sound of the electric apparatus that caused the mattress to vibrate. I went to sleep. At seven, time to get up. During the dressing of the wound I turned my face to the wall, thanking my good fortune I had a cold that was blocking my nose: Poupette had suffered from the smell, but for my part I was aware of almost nothing, except for the scent of the eau de Cologne that I often put on Maman’s forehead and cheeks, and that seemed to me sweetish and sickening: I shall never be able to use that brand again.
Mademoiselle Cournot left; I dressed; I ate my breakfast. I prepared a whitish medicine for Maman; it was very unpleasant, she said, but it helped her digestion. Then, spoon by spoon, I gave her tea in which I had crumbled a biscuit. The maid swept and dusted. I watered the flowers and arranged them. The telephone-bell rang often; I hurried into the lobby. I closed the doors behind me, but I was not sure whether Maman could hear and I spoke cautiously. She laughed when I told her, ‘Madame Raymond asked me how your femur was getting on.’
‘They don’t understand anything about it.’
Often, too, a nurse would call me: friends of Maman’s, and relations, came to ask after her. Generally, she was not strong enough to see them, but she was very pleased at the attention. I went out during the dressing. Then I helped her have lunch: she could not chew, and she ate mashed vegetables, gruel, very finely chopped mince, stewed fruit, custard: she forced herself to empty her plate. ‘I must feed myself up.’ Between meals, she drank a mixture of fresh fruit juices in little sips. ‘There are vitamins in it. They’re good for me.’ Poupette came at about two o’clock: ‘I like this routine very much,’ said Maman. One day she said to us regretfully, ‘How stupid! Now that for once I have you both with me, I am ill!’
I was calmer than before Prague. The transition from my mother to a living corpse had been definitively accomplished. The world had shrunk to the size of her room: when I crossed Paris in a taxi I saw nothing more than a stage with extras walking about on it. My real life took place at her side, and it had only one aim – protecting her. In the night the slightest sound seemed huge to me – the rustling of Mademoiselle Cournot’s paper, the purring of the electric motor. I walked in stockinged feet in the daytime. The coming and going on the staircase, and overhead, shattered my ears. The din of the wheeled tables that went by on the landing between eleven o’clock and noon, loaded with clattering metal trays, cans and bowls, seemed to me scandalous. I was furious when a thoughtless maid asked Maman, when she was dozing, to say which she would like to eat the next day, sautéd rabbit or roast chicken. And again, when at lunch-time, she was brought an unappetizing mince instead of the promised brains. I shared Maman’s likings; we were in favour of Mademoiselle Cournot, Mademoiselle Laurent and the girls called Martin and Parent; I, too, thought Madame Gontrand over-talkative. ‘She told me that she spent her afternoon off buying shoes for her daughter: what’s that to me?’