On Thursday Maman’s face shocked me, as it did every day: it was a little hollower and more tormented than the day before. But she could see. She examined me: ‘I am looking at you. Your hair is quite brown.’
‘Of course it is. You have always known that.’
‘Because both you and your sister had a broad white streak. It was so that I could hold on, not to fall.’ She moved her fingers. ‘They are going down, aren’t they?’ She went to sleep. As she opened her eyes she said to me, ‘When I see a big white wristband I know I am going to wake up. When I go to sleep, I go to sleep in petticoats.’ What memories, what phantasms were invading her? Her life had always been turned towards the outward world and I found it very moving to see her suddenly lost within herself. She no longer liked to be distracted. That day a friend, Mademoiselle Vauthier, told her an anecdote about a charwoman, with too much liveliness altogether. I quickly got rid of her, for Maman was closing her eyes. When I came back she said, ‘You ought not to tell sick people stories of that kind; it does not interest them.’
I spent that night beside her. She was as much afraid of the nightmares as she was of pain. When Dr N came she begged, ‘Let them inject me as often as necessary,’ and she imitated the action of a nurse thrusting in the needle.
‘Ha, ha, you are going to become a real drug-addict!’ said N in a bantering tone. ‘I can supply you with morphia at very interesting rates.’ His expression hardened and he coldly said in my direction, ‘There are two points upon which a self-respecting doctor does not compromise – drugs and abortion.’
Friday passed uneventfully. On Saturday Maman slept all the time. ‘That’s splendid,’ said Poupette to her. ‘You have rested.’
‘Today I have not lived,’ sighed Maman.
A hard task, dying, when one loves life so much. ‘She may hold out for two or three months,’ the doctors told us that evening. So we had to organize our lives and get Maman used to spending a few hours without us. As her husband had come to Paris the day before, my sister decided to leave Maman alone that night with Mademoiselle Cournot. She would come in the morning; Marthe would come at about half past two; and I would come at five.
At five I opened the door. The blind was down and it was almost entirely dark. Marthe was holding Maman’s hand, and Maman was lying crumpled up, on her right side, with a pitiful, exhausted look: the bed-sores on her left buttock were completely raw and lying like this she suffered less, but the discomfort of her position was tiring her out. She had waited in extreme anxiety until eleven o’clock for Poupette and Lionel to come, because the nurses had forgotten to pin the bell-cord to her sheet: the push button was out of her reach and she had no way of calling anyone. Her friend, Madame Tardieu, had come to see her, but all the same Maman said to my sister, ‘You leave me in the power of the brutes!’ (She hated the Sunday nurses.) Then she recovered enough spirit to say to Lionel, ‘So you hoped to be rid of mother-in-law? Well, it’s not to be; not yet.’ She was alone for an hour after lunch and the tormenting anxiety seized upon her again. In a feverish voice she said to me, ‘I must not be left alone; I am still too weak. I must not be left in the power of the brutes!’
‘We won’t leave you any more.’
Marthe went away; Maman dozed off and woke with a start – her right buttock was hurting. Madame Gontrand changed her. Maman still complained: I wanted to ring again. ‘It would be no good. It would still be Madame Gontrand. She’s no good.’ There was nothing imaginary about Maman’s pains; they had exact organic causes. Yet below a certain threshold they could be soothed by the attentions of Mademoiselle Parent or Mademoiselle Martin; exactly the same things done by Madame Gontrand did not ease her. However, she went to sleep again. At half past six she took some soup and custard, and it gave her pleasure. Then suddenly she cried out, a burning pain in her left buttock. It was not at all surprising. Her flayed body was bathing in the uric acid that oozed from her skin; the nurses burnt their fingers when they changed her draw-sheet. I rang and rang, panic-stricken: how the interminable seconds dragged out! I held Maman’s hand, I stroked her forehead, I talked. ‘They will give you an injection. It won’t hurt any more. Just one minute more. Only one minute.’ All tense, on the edge of shrieking, she moaned, ‘It burns, it’s awful; I can’t stand it. I can’t bear it any longer.’ And half sobbing, ‘I’m so utterly miserable,’ in that child’s voice that pierced me to the heart. How completely alone she was! I touched her, I talked to her; but it was impossible to enter into her suffering. Her heart took to beating madly, her eyes turned back, I thought ‘She is dying’, and she murmured, ‘I am going to faint.’ At last Madame Gontrand gave her an injection of morphia. It did not work. I rang again. I was terrified by the idea that the pain might have started in the morning, when Maman had no one with her and no means of calling anyone: there was no longer any question of leaving her alone for a moment. This time the nurses gave Maman equanil, changed her draw-sheet and put an ointment on her open places that left a metallic sheen on their hands. The burning went off; it had lasted only a quarter of an hour – an eternity. He shrieked for hours. ‘It’s stupid,’ said Maman. ‘It’s so stupid.’ Yes: so stupid as to make one weep. I could no longer understand the doctors, nor my sister nor myself. Nothing on earth could possibly justify these moments of pointless torment.
On Monday morning I talked to Poupette on the telephone: the end was near. The oedema was not being reabsorbed: the abdomen was not closing. The doctors had told the nurses that the only thing left to do was to daze Maman with sedatives.
At two o’clock I found my sister outside door 114, almost out of her mind. She had said to Mademoiselle Martin, ‘Don’t let Maman suffer as she did yesterday.’ ‘But Madame, if we give her such a lot of injections just for the bed-sores, the morphia won’t work when the time of the great pain comes.’ Questioned closely, she expained that generally speaking, in cases like Maman’s, the patient died in hideous torment. Have pity on me. Finish me off. Had Dr P lied, then? Get a revolver somehow: kill Maman: strangle her. Empty romantic fantasies. But it was just as impossible for me to see myself listening to Maman scream for hours. ‘We’ll go and talk to P.’ He came and we seized upon him. ‘You promised she wouldn’t suffer.’ ‘She will not suffer.’ He pointed out that if they had wanted to prolong her life at any cost and give her an extra week of martyrdom, another operation would have been necessary, together with transfusions and resuscitating injections. Yes. That morning even N had said to Poupette, ‘We did everything that had to be done while there was still a chance. Now it would be mere sadism to try to delay her death.’ But this abstention was not enough for us. We asked P, ‘Will morphia stop the great pains?’ ‘She will be given the doses that are called for.’
He had spoken firmly and he gave us confidence. We grew calmer. He went into Maman’s room to see her dressing again. ‘She’s asleep,’ we told him. ‘She won’t even know I’m there.’ No doubt she was still asleep when he left. But remembering her anguish of the day before I said to Poupette, ‘She mustn’t wake up and find herself alone.’ My sister opened the door: she turned back towards me, terribly pale, and collapsed on the bench, sobbing, ‘I’ve seen her stomach!’ I went to get some equanil for her. When Dr P came back she said to him, ‘I saw her stomach! It’s awful!’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, rather confused, ‘it’s quite normal.’