When on my last reluctant walks through town I passed places to which memories were attached, I was no longer seized by the melancholy that I experienced until I was about fifty, the years when youth seemed about to tip over into old age. I recognized the fronts of houses where I had once partied and dined. The bourgeois ostentation of cornices and balustrades in wrought iron had a museum-like feel. Some of those houses had become shops, wine merchants’ premises or restaurants, or clothing outlets in whose windows one glimpsed the unmoving elegance of mannequins. Some were still inhabited and had remained more or less unchanged, paintwork a little flakier, stones a little more impregnated with rust, and divided up into student rooms. Sometimes, through an open window, I could see a bit of ceiling, a rosette in stucco, meanwhile stripped of the chandelier under whose arms I had raised glasses, sung, danced, argued, and hushed up forbidden loves. Or I saw a section of a mantelpiece, meanwhile painted in different colours, a corner of a poster in the place where once a tall mirror hung which long ago confronted me with my own reflection like a satirical poem. There was where the pianola must have stood whose melodies we sang, and over there the sofa where I was unfaithful under subdued lighting, or the palm plant in the stairwell, under which I blubbed at my own restlessness and shame, while I bobbed merrily along on the weightlessness of those centrifugal years between the two wars, when I finally escaped from under my mother’s wing by marrying — against her will, but without her sulking.
Times had changed. My brother took over my father’s business and brought it to new prosperity, and I left my daughter with my parents in order to follow my husband on his travels and study history. History. In my mother’s eyes an idiotic but otherwise innocent pastime, a form of flower-arranging for decadent people like me. I didn’t stick at it for long, I had a child that wanted breast-feeding, and noticed that knowledge infected my writing, impoverished my thoughts till they became nothing but sociology set to music. History, that prosthesis cobbled together with erudition from scraps of paper, potsherds and bone fragments, on which we limp through the annual accounts as if time were full of signposts. I gave it up. My mother triumphed, for once without a word.
I still judge her and her life too unjustly, the narrow niche that she was able to carve out for herself in time, which without her choice or will was hers, as if the dubious freedoms I was able to appropriate were a personal achievement — as if time is the work of my hands.
How could I not look back with at least mild mockery at the little hussy I now see reflected in my mind’s eye: a child that smoked cigarettes in cigarette-holders to make a sophisticated impression and adorned herself with affairs and friendships which all too soon went flat or sooner or later turned to melancholy, mine or theirs. As I found moving around town increasingly difficult, looking more and more often at the ground, frightened of the slightest unevenness in the paving stones of the pavement, I looked increasingly inwards, into my own rooms.
I wish I could keep life in my fingers, so it would show the compactness and brilliance of a diamond. I would turn it over and over, study each of its facets, absorb every play of the light, until it extinguishes in my palm because my fascination has finally been quenched. Melancholy turns out to be no more than a thin, transparent membrane, the umpteenth amnion surrounding a human life until, having become brittle, it tears open or springs loose and we stand a little closer to our original nakedness.
When I had trouble walking, I took the tram to scour the city, got off at certain stops and made short journeys on foot, to the next stop, and later still I could usually persuade my daughter to take trips in the car. She did it devotedly; no one could act as scornfully as she could. As long as we didn’t have to spend too long in one room, searching for words that didn’t sound too untrue, she was prepared to do anything for me.
It was she who found my husband. While waiting for the taxi that was to take him to the airport he had lain down on the bed for a moment. The taxi came, the driver hooted. No one came down. My daughter ran upstairs and was gone some time. The taxi hooted again. When I went upstairs I found her in the doorway of my bedroom. She was standing speechless watching my husband on the bed, in his light-beige summer jacket, his hat on his chest, feet hanging over the edge of the mattress, next to the valise. When the taxi driver hooted again she went back downstairs. “I’ll send him away,” she said. “He’s not needed any more.”
I never saw her cry, and I couldn’t either. We sat through the funeral service like stiff dolls, my insides seemed to have turned to zinc, dry rain pipes in which my heart pounded dully. My only thought was: it was just about time. His eyebrows were starting to get bushy, his nose hair too. Down appeared on his ears, he already had a double chin. He wasn’t made for old age. What more is there to say?
He stays away from my dreams, like my child. I sometimes imagine that the two of them are enjoying themselves royally somewhere in a part of my head, some convolution of the brain to which they had mislaid the key. I stand at the door and knock in vain — all I hear is an echo of zinc. Only once did I dream of him. He was sitting here in the chair by the bed when I dreamt that I woke up. He had lit a cigarette; I also caught the smell of the nylon of his summer jacket. He inhaled and blew out the smoke.
“You do know, don’t you, Helen, my lovely, why I drop by so seldom?” he asked and went on smoking. He looked dejected.
After his death I asked my child to take me every year at the end of the summer to the house where my mother had been born; the others had dropped out, being too old by now, too weak, too dead. She always acceded to my sighs with infectious reluctance and on the way there we were as silent as the grave. Once we had arrived and she had parked the car at the foot of the hill, near the path leading upward, she didn’t even need to refuse ostentatiously to go any farther with me. She knew that it was quite enough to get out, light a cigarette leaning against the bonnet and search for a scarf in her eternal handbag, the scarf that betrayed the nun manquée in her, like her belly, the belly of a virgin in a panel by Memling, apple-shaped, swelling, as if her skin, her membranes enclosed not a womb but a clenched fist.
I blamed myself for years for having sent her, in a fit of conformism or to please my mother, to the nuns’ school from an early age. I saw her change over the years into a bigoted type, against whom my mother, for as long as she lived, would never hear a word said, since for her everything was preferable to a creature like me, who mostly got things wrong in life.
She only survived my mother by a few years; just before her death she got one of the nuns to call me, a colleague of hers, at that girls’ boarding school where she had hung on after her schooldays as a teacher of religious studies and practical nincompoop. The nun said I must hurry. In her voice lay the dregs, I imagined, of the repeated reproaches she must have heard from the mouth of my child, but I did not even pay my respects to her body. I didn’t even know she was ill.
I’m sorry to be overloading these final pages with corpses; I’ll be as brief as possible. She supervised, she taught, she died. She wore suits of tailored insignificance and devoted herself to a cult of virginity that looked very like grass widowhood. The pupils called her the chalk line. For a while the rumour circulated that she was having an affair with the head, a priest. I would have been delighted, but when I asked her cautiously about it, she shot me a grimace of contempt that immediately gave me intestinal cramp. I blamed myself for not removing her from the school in time, not having encouraged her father more often to pay her a little more attention. Not having told him to his face that I might be happy to be the dovecote at which he could alight at will in between his adventures, but that the child hadn’t asked for it. But one day, I can’t remember when, let alone whether we were having a fight or not — one day we were standing staring out of the window and she said, with a calm that still sends shivers down my spine: “How else can I atone for the shame of being your daughter, Maman?” She turned away with a scornful little laugh. I was in pieces. I didn’t glue the pieces together, for years I walked over them ritually in my bare feet and absorbed the stabbing pain.