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As SOON AS I woke up, I telephoned my sister. Maman had come to in the middle of the night; she knew that she had been operated upon and she hardly seemed at all surprised. I took a cab. The same journey, the same warm blue autumn, the same nursing-home. But I was stepping into another story: instead of a convalescence, a deathbed. Before, I came here to spend comparatively unemotional hours; I went through the hall without paying attention. It was behind those closed doors that the tragedies were taking place: nothing showed through. From now on one of these dramas belonged to me. I went up the stairs as quickly as I could, as slowly as I could. Now there was a sign hanging on the door: No Visitors. The scene had changed. The bed was in the position it had been the day before, with both sides free. The sweets had been put away in cupboards; so had the books. There were no flowers any more on the big table in the corner, but bottles, balloon-flasks, test-tubes. Maman was asleep: she no longer had the tube in her nose and it was less painful to look at her, but, under the bed, one could see jars and pipes that communicated with her stomach and her intestines. Her left arm was attached to an intravenous drip. She was no longer wearing any clothes whatever: the bed-jacket was spread over her chest and her naked shoulders. A new character had made her appearance – a private nurse, Mademoiselle Leblon, as gracious as an Ingres portrait. She had a blue headdress to cover her hair and white padded slippers on her feet: she supervised the drip and shook the flask to dilute its plasma. My sister told me that according to the doctors a respite of some weeks or even of some months was not impossible. She had said to Professor B ‘But what shall we say to Maman when the disease starts again, in another place?’. ‘Don’t worry about that. We shall find something to say. We always do. And the patient always believes it.’
In the afternoon Maman had her eyes open: she spoke so that one could hardly make out what she said, but sensibly. ‘Well,’ I said to her, ‘so you break your leg and they go and operate on you for appendicitis!’
She raised one finger and, with a certain pride, whispered, ‘Not appendicitis. Pe-ri-ton-it-is.’ She added. ‘What luck … be here.’
‘You are glad that I am here?’
‘No. Me.’ Peritonitis: and her being in this clinic had saved her! The betrayal was beginning. ‘Glad not to have that tube. So glad!’
With the removal of the filth that had swollen her abdomen the day before, she was no longer in pain. And with her two daughters at her bedside she believed that she was safe. When Dr P and Dr N came in she said to them in a contented voice, ‘I am not forsaken,’ before she closed her eyes again. They spoke to one another: ‘It is extraordinary how quickly she has picked up. Amazing!’ Indeed it was. Thanks to the transfusions and the infusions Maman’s face had some colour again and a look of health. The poor suffering thing that had been lying on this bed the day before had turned back into a woman.
I showed Maman the book of crosswords Chantal had brought. Speaking to the nurse she faltered, ‘I have a big dictionary, the new Larousse; I treated myself to it, for crosswords.’ That dictionary: one of her last delights. She had talked to me about it for a long time before she bought it, and her face lit up every time I consulted it. ‘We’ll bring it for you,’ I said.
‘Yes. And Le Nouvel Œdipe too; I have not got all the …’
One had to listen very intently to catch the words that she laboured to breathe out; words whose mystery made them as disturbing as those of an oracle. Her memories, her desires, her anxieties were floating somewhere outside time, turned into unreal and poignant dreams by her childlike voice and the imminence of her death.
She slept a great deal; from time to time she took up a few drops of water through the tube; she spat in paper handkerchiefs that the nurse held to her mouth. In the evening she began to cough: Mademoiselle Laurent, who had come to ask after her, straightened her up, massaged her and helped her to spit. Afterwards Maman looked at her with a real smile – the first for four days.
Poupette decided to spend her nights at the nursing-home. ‘You were with Papa and Grandmama when they died; I was far away,’ she said to me. ‘I am going to look after Maman. Besides, I want to stay with her.’
I agreed. Maman was astonished. ‘What do you want to sleep here for?’
‘I slept in Lionel’s room when he was operated on. It’s always done.’
‘Oh, I see.’
I went home, feverish with ’flu. Leaving the overheated clinic I had caught cold in the autumnal dampness: I went to bed, stupefied with pills. I did not switch off the telephone: Maman might die at any moment, ‘blown out like a candle’, said the doctors, and my sister was to call me at the least alarm. The bell woke me with a start: four in the morning. ‘It is the end.’ I picked up the receiver and heard an unknown voice: a wrong number. I could not get to sleep again until dawn. At half-past eight the telephone bell again: I ran for it – an utterly unimportant message. I loathed the hearse-black apparatus: ‘Your mother has cancer. Your mother will not get through the night.’ One of these days it would crackle into my ear, ‘It is the end.’
I go through the garden. I go into the hall. You might think you were in an airport – low tables, modern armchairs, people kissing one another as they say hallo or good-bye, others waiting, suitcases, hold-alls, flowers in the vases, bouquets wrapped in shiny paper as if they were meant for welcoming travellers about to land … But there is a feeling of something not quite right in the whisperings, the expressions. And sometimes a man entirely clothed in white appears in the opening of the door at the far end, and there is blood on his shoes. I go up one floor. On my left a long corridor with the bedrooms, the nurses’ rooms and the duty-room. On the right a square lobby furnished with an upholstered bench and a desk with a white telephone standing upon it. The one side gives on to a waiting-room; the other on to room 114. No Visitors. Beyond the door I come to a short passage: on the left the lavatory with the wash-stand, the bed-pan, cotton-wool, jars; on the right a cupboard which holds Maman’s things; on a coat-hanger there is the red dressing-gown, all dusty. ‘I never want to see that dressing-gown again.’ I open the second door. Before, I went through all this without seeing it. Now I know that it will form part of my life for ever.
‘I am very well,’ said Maman. With a knowing air she added, ‘When the doctors were talking to one another yesterday, I heard them. They said, “It’s amazing!” ’ This word delighted her: she often pronounced it, gravely, as though it were a spell that guaranteed her recovery. Yet she still felt very weak and her overriding desire was to avoid the slightest effort. Her dream was to be fed by drip all her life long. ‘I shall never eat again.’
‘What, you who so loved your food?’
‘No. I shall not eat any more.’
Mademoiselle Leblon took a brush and comb to do her hair for her: ‘Cut it all off,’ Maman ordered firmly. We protested. ‘You will tire me: cut it off, do.’ She insisted with a strange obstinacy: it was as though she wanted to bring lasting rest by making this sacrifice. Gently Mademoiselle Leblon undid her plait and untangled her hair; she plaited it again and pinned the silvery coil round Maman’s head. Maman’s relaxed face had recovered a surprising purity and I thought of a Leonardo drawing of a very beautiful old woman. ‘You are as beautiful as a Leonardo,’ I said.