‘She is rotting alive.’ Poupette told me, and I asked her no questions. We talked. Then I sat by Maman’s bed: I should have thought her dead but for the faint movement of the black ribbon against the whiteness of her bedjacket. At about six she opened her eyes.
‘What time is it? I don’t understand. Is it night already?’
‘You have slept the whole afternoon.’
‘I have slept forty-eight hours!’
‘Oh no,’ I said and I reminded her of what had happened the day before.
She looked at the darkness and the neon signs far out through the window and said, ‘I don’t understand,’ again, in an offended voice. I told her about the visits and the telephone calls I had had about her. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ she said. She turned her surprise over and over in her mind: ‘I heard the doctors: they were saying “She must be deeply sedated – dazed.” ’ For once they had forgotten to be careful. I explained that there was no point in suffering as she had done yesterday; they were going to make her sleep a great deal until her bed-sores had healed over. ‘Yes,’ she said reproachfully, ‘but these are days that I lose.’
‘Today I haven’t lived.’ ‘I am losing days.’ Every day had an irreplaceable value for her. And she was going to die. She did not know it: but I did. In her name, I revolted against it.
She drank a little soup and we waited for Poupette. ‘Sleeping here tires her,’ said Maman.
‘I’m sure it doesn’t,’ I said.
She sighed. ‘It’s all the same to me.’ And after a moment’s thought, ‘What worries me is that everything is all the same to me,’ Before going to sleep again she asked me suspiciously, ‘But can people be dazed, just like that?’ Was it a protest? I think it was rather that she wanted me to reassure her: her torpor was brought about by drugs and it did not mean a worsening of her condition.
When Mademoiselle Cournot came in Maman opened her eyes. They wandered, but she fixed her gaze and looked steadily at the nurse with a gravity even more moving than that of a baby discovering the world.
‘You, there, who are you?’
‘I’m Mademoiselle Cournot.’
‘Why are you here at this time of the day?’
‘It is night now,’ I told her again.
Her wide-open eyes questioned Mademoiselle Cournot. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I spend every night sitting next to you: I’m sure you remember.’
‘Really! What a curious notion,’ said Maman. I got ready to go. ‘Are you going?’
‘Would it worry you if I did?’
Once again she replied, ‘It’s all the same to me. Everything is the same to me.’
I did not leave at once: the day nurses said that Maman would certainly not get through the night. Her pulse leapt from forty-eight to a hundred. At about ten o’clock it steadied. Poupette lay down; I went home. I was now sure that P had not deceived us. Maman would die within a day or so without too much suffering.
She woke up clear in her mind. As soon as she felt any pain they gave her a sedative. I arrived at three: she was asleep, with Chantal by her bed.
‘Poor Chantal,’ she said to me a little later, ‘she has so much to do, and I take up her time.’
‘But she likes coming. She is so fond of you.’
Maman reflected: in a surprised, grieved voice she said, ‘As for me, I no longer know whether I am fond of anyone.’
I remembered her proud ‘People like me because I am cheerful.’ Gradually many people had become wearisome to her. Her heart was now quite numb: tiredness had taken everything away from her. And yet not one of her most loving words had ever moved me nearly as much as this statement of indifference. Formerly the ready-made phrases and the conventional gestures had masked her real feelings. I measured their warmth by the coldness that their absence left in her.
She dropped off, and her breath was so imperceptible that I thought, ‘If only it could stop, without any violence.’ But the black ribbon rose and felclass="underline" the leap was not to be so easy. I woke her up at five, as she had insisted, to give her some yoghourt. ‘Your sister wants me to: it’s good for me.’ She ate two or three spoonfuls: I thought of the food that is put on the graves of the dead in certain countries. I held her a rose to smell, one that Catherine had brought the day before – ‘The last of the Meyrignac roses.’ She only gave it a preoccupied glance. She sank down into sleep again: a burning pain in her buttock woke her violently. Morphia injection: no result. As I had done two days before I held her hand, urged her, ‘One minute more. The injection is going to work. In one minute it will be over.’
‘It’s a Chinese torture,’ she said, in a flat, expressionless voice, too weakened even to protest.
I rang again; insisted; another injection. The Parent girl arranged the bed and moved Maman a little; she went to sleep again; her hands were deathly cold. The maid grumbled because I sent away the dinner that she brought at six o’clock: the implacable routine of clinics, where deathbeds and death itself are daily occurrences. At half past seven Maman said to me, ‘Ah! Now I feel well. Really well. It’s a long time since I’ve felt so well.’ Jeanne’s eldest daughter came, and she helped me give her a little soup and some coffee custard. It was difficult, because she coughed: she almost choked. Poupette and Mademoiselle Cournot advised me to leave. In all likelihood nothing would happen that night, and my being there would worry Maman. I kissed her, and with one of her hideous smiles she said to me, ‘I am glad you have seen me looking so well!’
I went to bed half an hour after midnight, dosed with sleeping-pills. I woke: the telephone was ringing. ‘There are only a few minutes left. Marcel is coming to fetch you in a car.’ Marcel – Lionel’s cousin – drove me at great speed through a deserted Paris. We gulped down some coffee at a red-lit bar near the Porte Champerret. Poupette came to meet us in the garden of the nursing-home. ‘It’s all over.’ We went up the stairs. It was so expected and so unimaginable, that dead body lying on the bed in Maman’s place. Her hand was cold; so was her forehead. It was still Maman, and it was her absence for ever. There was a bandage holding up her chin, framing her face. My sister wanted to go and fetch clothes from the rue Blomet.
‘What’s the point?’
‘Apparently that is what’s done.’
‘We shan’t do it.’
I could not conceive putting a dress and shoes on Maman as though she was going out to dinner; and I did not think that she would have wanted it – she had often said that she was not in the least concerned with what happened to her body.
‘Just dress her in one of her long nightgowns,’ I said to Mademoiselle Cournot.
‘And what about her wedding-ring?’ asked Poupette, taking it out of the table drawer. We put it on to her finger. Why? No doubt because that little round of gold belonged nowhere else on earth.
Poupette was utterly exhausted. After a last look at what was no longer Maman I quickly took her away. We had a drink with Marcel at the bar of the Dôme. She told us what had happened.
At nine o’clock N came out of the room and said angrily, ‘Another clip has given way. After all that has been done for her: how irritating!’ He went off, leaving my sister dumbfounded. In spite of her icy hands Maman complained of being too hot, and she had some difficulty in breathing. She was given an injection and she went to sleep. Poupette undressed, got into bed and went through the motions of reading a detective story. Towards midnight Maman moved about. Poupette and the nurse went to her bedside. She opened her eyes. ‘What are you doing here? Why are you looking so worried? I am quite well.’ ‘You have been having a bad dream.’ As Mademoiselle Cournot smoothed the sheets she touched Maman’s feet: there was the chill of death upon them. My sister wondered whether to call me. But at that time of night my presence would have frightened Maman, whose mind was perfectly clear. Poupette went back to bed. At one o’clock Maman stirred again. In a roguish voice she whispered the words of an old refrain that Papa used to sing, You are going away and you will leave us. ‘No, no,’ said Poupette, ‘I shan’t leave you,’ and Maman gave a little knowing smile. She found it harder and harder to breathe. After another injection she murmured in a rather thick voice, ‘We must … keep … back … desh.’