We no longer liked this nursing-home. The smiling, painstaking nurses were overwhelmed with work, badly paid, harshly treated. Mademoiselle Cournot brought her own coffee; she was not provided with anything more than the hot water. The night-nurses had no shower, nor even a washroom where they could wash and make themselves up again after a sleepless night. Mademoiselle Cournot, quite upset, told us one morning about her differences with the sister, who blamed her for wearing brown shoes.
‘They have no heels,’ said Mademoiselle Cournot.
‘They have to be white.’
Mademoiselle Cournot looked miserable. ‘Don’t put on that weary expression before you have even begun your day’s work,’ cried the sister.
Maman repeated that phrase over and over again for two days: she had always delighted in taking sides very strongly. One evening Mademoiselle Cournot’s friend came into the room, crying: her patient had decided not to speak to her any more. Their profession brought these girls into very close touch with tragedies; but that did not harden them at all against the little dramas of their personal life.
‘You feel yourself growing half-witted,’ said Poupette.
For my part I put up with the silliness of the conversations, the ritual facetiousness – ‘That was a good trick you played on Professor B!’ ‘With those dark glasses you look just like Greta Garbo!’ – with indifference. But the words went bad in my mouth. I had the feeling of playacting wherever I went. When I spoke to an old friend about her forthcoming removal, the liveliness in my voice seemed to me phoney: when with perfect truth I observed ‘That was very good’ to the manager of a restaurant, I had the impression of telling a white lie. At other times it was the outside world that seemed to be acting a part. I saw a hotel as a nursing-home; I took the chambermaids for nurses; and the restaurant waitresses too – they were making me follow a course of treatment that consisted of eating. I looked at people with a fresh eye, obsessed by the complicated system of tubes that was concealed under their clothing. Sometimes I myself turned into a lift-and-force pump or into a sequence of pockets and guts.
Poupette was living on her nerves. My blood-pressure mounted; a pulse throbbed in my head. What tried us more than anything were Maman’s death-agonies, her resurrections, and our own inconsistency. In this race between pain and death we most earnestly hoped that death would come first. Yet when Maman was asleep with her face lifeless, we would anxiously gaze at the white bed-jacket to catch the faint movement of the black ribbon that held her watch: dread of the last spasm gripped us by the throat.
She was well when I left her in the early afternoon of Sunday. On Monday morning her wasted face terrified me; it was terribly obvious, the work of those mysterious colonies between her skin and her bones that were devouring her cells. At ten in the evening Poupette had secretly passed the nurse a piece of paper – ‘Should I call my sister?’ The nurse shook her head: Maman’s heart was holding out. But new forms of wretchedness were to come. Madame Gontrand showed me Maman’s right side: water dripped from the pores of her skin; the sheet was soaked. She hardly urinated any more and her flesh was puffing up in an oedema. She looked at her hands, and in a puzzled way she moved her swollen fingers. ‘It is because you have to keep so still,’ I told her.
Tranquillized by equanil and morphia, she was aware of her sickness, but she accepted it patiently. ‘One day when I thought I was better already your sister said something that has been very useful to me: she said that I should be unwell again. So I know that it’s normal.’ She saw Madame de Saint-Ange for a moment and said to her, ‘Oh, now I am coming along very well!’ A smile uncovered her gums: already it was the macabre grin of a skeleton; at the same time her eyes shone with a somewhat feverish innocence. She was suddenly unwell after having eaten; I rang and rang for the nurse; what I had wanted was happening; she was dying and it filled me with panic. A tablet brought her round.
In the evening I imagined her dead, and it wrung my heart. ‘Things are going rather better locally,’ Poupette told me in the morning, and I regretted it bitterly. Maman was so well that she read a few pages of Simenon. In the night she suffered a great deal. ‘I hurt all over!’ They gave her an injection of morphia. When she opened her eyes during the day they had an unseeing, glassy look and I thought, ‘This time it is the end.’ She went to sleep again. I asked N, ‘Is this the end?’
‘Oh, no!’ he said in a half-pitying, half-triumphant tone, ‘she has been revived too well for that!’
So it was to be pain that would win? Finish me off. Give me my revolver. Have pity on me. She said, ‘I hurt all over.’ She moved her swollen fingers anxiously. Her confidence waned: ‘These doctors are beginning to irritate me. They are always telling me that I am getting better. And I feel myself getting worse.’
I had grown very fond of this dying woman. As we talked in the half-darkness I assuaged an old unhappiness; I was renewing the dialogue that had been broken off during my adolescence and that our differences and our likenesses had never allowed us to take up again. And the early tenderness that I had thought dead for ever came to life again, since it had become possible for it to slip into simple words and actions.
I looked at her. She was there, present, conscious, and completely unaware of what she was living through. Not to know what is happening underneath one’s skin is normal enough. But for her the outside of her body was unknown – her wounded abdomen, her fistula, the filth that issued from it, the blueness of her skin, the liquid that oozed out of her pores: she could not explore it with her almost paralysed hands, and when they treated her and dressed her wound her head was thrown back. She had not asked for a mirror again: her dying face did not exist for her. She rested and dreamed, infinitely far removed from her rotting flesh, her ears filled with the sound of our lies; her whole person was concentrated upon one passionate hope – getting well. I should have liked to spare her pointless unpleasantnesses: ‘You don’t have to take this medicine any more.’ ‘It would be better to take it.’ And she gulped down the chalky liquid. She found it difficult to eat: ‘Don’t force yourself: that’s enough; don’t eat any more.’ ‘Do you think so?’ She looked at the dish, hesitated, ‘Give me a little more.’ In the end I spirited her plate away: ‘You finished it all up,’ I said. She compelled herself to swallow yoghourt in the afternoon. She often asked for fruit-juice. She moved her arms a little, and slowly, carefully raised her hands, cupping them together, and gropingly she seized the glass, which I still held. She drew up the beneficent vitamins through the little tube: a ghoul’s mouth avidly sucking life.
Her eyes had grown huge in her wasted face; she opened them wide, fixed them; at the cost of an immense effort she wrenched herself from her dim private world to rise to the surface of those pools of dark light; she concentrated her whole being there; she gazed at me with a dramatic immobility – it was as though she had just discovered sight. ‘I can see you!’ Every time she had to win it from the darkness again. By her eyes she clung to the world, as by her nails she clung to the sheet, so that she might not be engulfed. ‘Live! Live!’
How desolate I was, that Wednesday evening, in the cab that was taking me away! I knew this journey through the fashionable quarters by heart: Lancôme, Houbigant, Hermès, Lanvin. Often a red light stopped me in front of Cardin’s: I saw ridiculously elegant hats, waistcoats, scarves, slippers, shoes. Farther on there were beautiful downy dressing-gowns, softly coloured: I thought, ‘I will buy her one to take the place of the red peignoir.’ Scents, furs, lingerie, jewels: the sumptuous arrogance of a world in which death had no place: but it was there, lurking behind this façade, in the grey secrecy of nursing-homes, hospitals, sick-rooms. And for me that was now the only truth.