‘Don’t you get bored?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, no!’
She was discovering the pleasures of being waited on, looked after, petted. Before, she had had to make a great effort to climb over the edge of her bath, helping herself with a stool; putting on her stockings had meant painful contortions. Now, a nurse came every morning and evening, and rubbed her with eau de Cologne and powdered her with talcum. Her meals were brought on a tray. ‘There is one nurse who irritates me,’ she said. ‘She asks me when I expect to leave. But I don’t want to leave at all.’ When she was told that presently she would be able to sit up in an armchair and that presently she would be transferred to a convalescent home, her face clouded over: ‘They are going to hustle me and push me about.’ Yet there were times when she concerned herself with her future. A friend had talked to her about rest-homes an hour from Paris: ‘No one will come and see me; I shall be too lonely,’ she said unhappily. I assured her that she would not have to go into exile and I showed her the list of addresses I had gathered. She was quite happy to think of herself reading or knitting in the sun in the garden of a home at Neuilly. A little regretfully, but not without irony, she said, ‘The people in my quarter are going to be sorry not to see me any more. The women at the club will miss me.’ Once she said to me, ‘I have lived for others too much. Now I shall become one of those self-centred old women who only live for themselves.’ One thing worried her. ‘I shan’t be able to wash and dress myself any more.’ I set her mind at rest: an attendant, a nurse, would look after that. Meanwhile, she was happily taking her ease in one of the beds of ‘the best nursing-home in Paris, so much better than the G Clinic’. They paid the closest attention to her. As well as the X-rays there had been several blood-tests – everything was normal. Her temperature rose in the evening and I would have liked to know why; but the nurse did not seem to think it at all significant.
‘I saw too many people yesterday, and they tired me,’ she told me on Sunday. She was in a bad mood. Her usual nurses were off duty; an inexperienced girl had upset the bed-pan full of urine; the bed and even the bolster had been soaked. She closed her eyes often, and her recollection was confused. Dr T could not make out the plates that Dr D had sent and the next day there was to be a fresh intestinal X-ray. ‘They will give me a barium enema, and it hurts,’ Maman told me. ‘And they are going to shake me about again and trundle me around: I should so like to be left in peace.’
I pressed her damp, rather cold hand. ‘Don’t think about it in advance. Don’t worry. Worrying is bad for you.’
Gradually her spirits came back, but she seemed weaker than the day before. Friends telephoned and I answered. ‘Well!’ I said to her, ‘There is no end to it. The Queen of England wouldn’t be more spoilt – flowers, letters, sweeties, telephone-calls! What quantities of people think of you!’ I was holding her tired hand: she kept her eyes shut, but there was a faint smile on her sad mouth. ‘They like me because I am cheerful.’
She expected many visitors on Monday and I was busy. I did not come until Tuesday morning. I opened the door and stopped dead. Maman, who was so thin, seemed to have grown still thinner and more shrivelled, wizened, dried up, a pinkish twig. In a somewhat bewildered voice she whispered, ‘They have dried me out completely.’ She had waited until the evening to be X-rayed and for twenty hours on end they had not allowed her to drink. The barium enema had not hurt; but the thirst and the anxiety had quite worn her out. Her face had dissolved: she was tense with unhappiness. What was the result of the X-rays? ‘We can’t understand them.’ the nurses replied in frightened voices. I managed to see Dr T. The information the plates gave was still obscure: according to him there was no ‘pocket’, but the bowel was contorted by spasms, nervous in origin, which had prevented it from working since the day before. My mother was obstinately sanguine; but for all that she was anxious and highly-strung – that was the explanation of her tics. She was too exhausted to see visitors and she asked me to telephone Father P, her confessor, and put him off. She scarcely spoke to me, and she could not manage a smile.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow evening,’ I said as I left. My sister was arriving during the night and she would go to the clinic in the morning. At nine in the evening my telephone rang. It was Professor B. ‘I should like to have a night-nurse for your mother: do you agree? She is not well. You thought of not coming until tomorrow evening: it would be better to be there in the morning.’ In the end he told me that there was a tumour blocking the small intestine: Maman had cancer.
Cancer. It was all about us. Indeed, it was patently obvious – those ringed eyes, that thinness. But her doctor had ruled out that hypothesis. And it is notorious that the parents are the last to admit that their son is mad; the children that their mother has cancer. We believed it all the less since that was what she had been afraid of all her life. When she was forty, if she knocked her chest against a piece of furniture she grew terribly frightened – ‘I shall have cancer of the breast.’ Last winter one of my friends had been operated upon for cancer of the stomach. ‘That is what is going to happen to me, too.’ I had shrugged: there is a very wide difference between cancer and a sluggishness of the bowels that is treated with tamarind jelly. We never imagined that Maman’s obsession could possibly be justified. Yet – she told us this later – it was cancer that Francine Diato thought of: ‘I recognized that expression. And,’ she added, ‘that smell, too.’ Everything became clear. Maman’s sudden illness in Alsace arose from her tumour. The tumour had caused her fainting-fit and her fall. And these two weeks of bed had brought on the blockage of the intestine that had been threatening for a long while.
Poupette, who had telephoned Maman several times, thought she was in excellent health. Poupette was closer to her than I: she was fonder of her, too. I could not let her come to the nursing-home and all at once see death on her face. I telephoned her at the Diatos’, a little while after her train had got in. She was already asleep: what an awakening!
On that Wednesday, 6 November, the gas, the electricity and public transport were on strike. I had asked Bost to come and fetch me by car. Before he arrived Professor B telephoned again: Maman had vomited all night long; in all likelihood she would not get through the day.
The streets were less blocked with traffic than I had feared. At about ten I met Poupette outside the door of room 114. I repeated what Professor B had said. She told me that since the beginning of the morning a resuscitation expert, Dr N, had been working on Maman: he was going to put a tube into her nose to clean out her stomach. ‘But what’s the good of tormenting her, if she is dying? Let her die in peace,’ said Poupette, in tears. I sent her down to Bost, who was waiting in the halclass="underline" he would take her to have some coffee. Dr N passed by me; I stopped him. White coat, white cap: a young man with an unresponsive face. ‘Why this tube? Why torture Maman, since there’s no hope?’ He gave me a withering look. ‘I am doing what has to be done.’ He opened the door. After a moment a nurse told me to come in.
The bed was back in its ordinary place in the middle of the room with its head against the wall. On the left there was an intravenous dripper, connected with Maman’s arm. From her nose there emerged a tube of transparent plastic that passed through some complicated apparatus and ended in a jar. Her nose was pinched and her face had shrunk even more: it had the saddest air of submission. In a whisper she told me that the tube did not worry her too much, but that during the night she had suffered a great deal. She was thirsty and she was not allowed to drink: the nurse put a thin tube to her mouth with the other end in a glass of water; Maman moistened her lips, without swallowing. I was fascinated by the sucking motion, at once avid and restrained, of her lip, with its faint downy shadow, that rounded just as it had rounded in my childhood whenever Maman was cross or embarrassed. ‘Would you like me to have left that in her stomach?’ said N aggressively, showing me the jar full of a yellowish substance. I did not reply. In the corridor he said ‘At dawn she had scarcely four hours left. I have brought her back to life.’ I did not venture to ask him ‘For what?’