She smiled. ‘I was not so bad, once upon a time.’ In a rather mysterious voice she told the nurse, ‘I had lovely hair, and I did it up in bandeaux round my head.’ And she went on talking about herself, how she had taken her librarian’s diploma, her love for books. As Mademoiselle Leblon answered, she was preparing a flask of serum: she explained to me that the clear fluid also contained glucose and various salts. ‘A positive cocktail,’ I observed.
All day long we dazed Maman with plans. She listened, with her eyes closed. My sister and her husband had just bought an old farmhouse in Alsace and they were going to have it done up. Maman would have a big room, completely independent, and there she would finish her convalescence. ‘But wouldn’t it bore Lionel if I were to stay for a long while?’
‘Of course not.’
‘To be sure, I wouldn’t be in the way there. At Scharrachbergen it was too smalclass="underline" I was a nuisance.’
We talked about Meyrignac. Maman went back to her memories of the time she was a young woman there. And for years past she had been enthusiastically telling me about the improvements at Meyrignac. She was very fond of Jeanne, whose three elder daughters lived in Paris and very often came to see her at the clinic – pretty, blooming, cheerful girls.
‘I have no granddaughters and they have no grandmother,’ she explained to Mademoiselle Leblon. ‘So I am their grandmother.’
While she was dozing I looked at a paper: opening her eyes she asked me, ‘What is happening at Saigon?’ I told her the news. Once, in a tone of bantering reproof, she observed, ‘I was operated on behind my back!’ and when Dr P came in she said, ‘Here is the guilty man,’ but in a laughing voice. He stayed with her for a little while, and when he remarked, ‘It is never too late to learn’, she replied in a rather solemn tone, ‘Yes. I have learnt that I had peritonitis.’
I said jokingly, ‘You really are extraordinary! You come in to have your femur patched up, and they operate on you for peritonitis!’
‘It’s quite true. I am not an ordinary woman at all!’
This circumstance, this mistake, amused her for days. ‘I tricked Professor B thoroughly. He thought he was going to operate on my leg, but in fact Dr P operated on me for peritonitis.’
What touched our hearts that day was the way she noticed the slightest agreeable sensation: it was as though, at the age of seventy-eight, she were waking afresh to the miracle of living. While the nurse was settling her pillows the metal of a tube touched her thigh – ‘It’s cool! How pleasant!’ She breathed in the smell of eau de Cologne and talcum powder – ‘How good it smells.’ She had the bunches of flowers and the plants arranged on her wheeled table. ‘The little red roses come from Meyrignac. At Meyrignac there are roses still.’ She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. ‘How lovely. I shouldn’t see that from my flat!’ She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now?
‘If she has a few days of happiness like this, keeping her alive will have been worth while,’ said Poupette to me. But what was it going to cost?
‘This is a death-chamber,’ I thought the next day. Across the window there was a heavy blue curtain. (The blind was broken and it could not be pulled down; but formerly the light had not worried Maman.) She was lying in the darkness with her eyes closed. I took her hand and she whispered, ‘It’s Simone: and I can’t see you!’ Poupette left; I opened a detective story. From time to time Maman sighed, ‘I am not in my right mind.’ To Dr P she complained, ‘I am in a coma.’
‘If you were, you wouldn’t know it.’
That reply comforted her. A little later she said to me with a thoughtful air, ‘I have undergone a very grave operation. I am a person who has been operated upon in a very serious way.’ I improved on this and little by little she recovered her spirits. The evening before, she told me, she had dreamed with her eyes open. ‘There were men in the room, evil men dressed in blue; they wanted to take me away and make me drink cocktails. Your sister sent them off …’ I had said the word cocktail, talking about the mixture that Mademoiselle Leblon was getting ready; she was wearing a blue headdress; as for the men, they were the male nurses who had taken Maman off to the operating theatre. ‘Yes. That’s it, no doubt …’ She asked me to open the window. ‘How pleasant it is to have fresh air.’ Birds were singing and she was enchanted. ‘Birds!’ And before I went away she said, ‘It’s odd. I feel a yellow light on my left cheek. A pretty light coming through a yellow paper: it’s very pleasant.’
I asked Dr P, ‘Has the operation in itself been a success?’
‘It will have been a success if the movement through the intestines starts again. We shall know within two or three days.’
I liked Dr P. He did not assume consequential airs; he talked to Maman as though she were a human being and he answered my questions willingly. On the other hand, Dr N and I did not get along together at all. He was smart, athletic, energetic, infatuated with technique, and he had resuscitated Maman with great zeal; but for him she was the subject of an interesting experiment and not a person. He frightened us. Maman had an old relative who had been kept alive in a coma for the last six months. ‘I hope you wouldn’t let them keep me going like that,’ she had said to us. ‘It’s horrible!’ If Dr N took it into his head to beat a record he would be a dangerous opponent.
‘He woke Maman to give her an enema that did not work,’ Poupette told me in distress on Sunday morning. ‘Why does he torment her?’ I stopped N as he went by: he never spoke to me of his own accord. Once again I begged him, ‘Do not torment her.’ And in an outraged tone he replied, ‘I am not tormenting her. I am doing what has to be done.’
The blue curtain was raised, the room less gloomy. Maman had had herself bought some dark glasses. She took them off as I came in. ‘Ah, today I can see you!’ She felt well in herself. In a calm voice she said, ‘Tell me, have I a right side?’
‘How do you mean? Of course you have.’
‘It’s funny: yesterday they told me that I looked well. But I only looked well on the left side. I felt the other was all grey. It seemed to me that I had no right side any more – that I was divided into two. Now it’s coming back a little.’
I touched her right cheek. ‘Do you feel that?’
‘Yes, but as though it were a dream.’
I touched her left cheek.
‘That’s real,’ she said.
The broken thigh, the operation-wound, the dressings, the tubes, the infusions – all that happened on the left side. Was that why the other no longer seemed to exist?
‘You look splendid. The doctors are very pleased with you,’ I asserted.
‘No. Dr N is not pleased: he wants me to break wind for him.’ She smiled to herself. ‘When I get out of here I shall send him a box of those chocolate dog-messes.’
The pneumatic mattress massaged her skin; there were pads between her knees, and they had a hoop over them to prevent the sheets from touching; another arrangement stopped her heels touching the draw-sheet: but for all that, bed-sores were beginning to appear all over her body. With her hips paralysed by arthritis, her right arm half powerless and her left immovably fixed to the intravenous dripper, she could not make the first beginnings of a movement.
‘Pull me up,’ she said.
I dared not, all by myself. I was not worried by her nakedness any more: it was no longer my mother, but a poor tormented body. Yet I was frightened by the horrible mystery that I sensed, without in any way visualizing anything, under the dressings, and I was afraid of hurting her. That morning she had had to have another enema and Mademoiselle Leblon had needed my help. I took hold of that skeleton clothed in damp blue skin, holding under the armpits. When Maman was laid over on her side, her face screwed up, her eyes turned back and she cried, ‘I am going to fall.’ She was remembering the time she had fallen down. Standing by the side of her bed I held her and comforted her.