Two orderlies entered pushing a cart with our dinners on it. I stared at the trays in horror, but as soon as the orderlies left the room Josephine sprang from her bed to unpack our provisions. She handed me an open-faced cheese sandwich of vache qui rit, a yogurt, and a banana.
“There, that will tide you over so you don’t starve, and later if you like I have some butter cookies.”
“I’m being wonderfully spoiled, Josephine, thank you so much. Your cuisine is excellent!”
Luna and Catherine sat in silence.
“What are you thinking?” I asked them.
“About everything you’ve told us…It’s crazy.”
“It’s not crazy, it’s life, and when passion overtakes you, it totally takes over!”
“She really got around, your aunt Bette! She wound up doing it with the whole family!”
“Luna! No disrespect for your grandmother, please!”
“Oh Catherine, no! I like her frankness. She’s not being disrespectful, simply spontaneous.”
“Spontaneity is good. Me, I like spontaneous people,” Josephine interjected while munching her sandwich.
“There are limits. We are after all talking about our own great aunt.”
Wham! That was aimed at my Josephine to let her know You’re not one of us! My friend got the message and looked back at Catherine perplexed. I think she was wondering where my daughter’s aggressiveness came from. Catherine had absolutely no idea what it felt like to be excluded. She had always lived in a world where she was granted her place. In my life this had not always been the case. I recognized it immediately as soon as any group of people drew itself into a closed circle. I am wildly hostile to such behavior and feel like a hunted animal when I sense any form of exclusion happening. My whole life I’ve been the daughter of the pariah, of the debauched, miscreant drug user judged by a narrow world that only recognizes its own social codes. This is why I’ve always felt close to all minorities: the young against the old, the sick against the healthy, individuals against the masses, Indians against cowboys, and blacks against whites. It takes having lived that experience to know that the smallest drop of gratuitous hostility can create a chasm between you and the other person when fate has confined you within a certain singular position. I have experienced this painful feeling too often, like a sort of castaway in freezing ocean water, and am always terribly sensitive to it. Catherine could never have a sense of the invisible, gut connection that united me with Josephine, and for me at that moment it was my own daughter who was the stranger.
“I have nothing against Aunt Bette. Especially considering the time back then. It could not have been easy to do all she did,” opined my dear Luna.
“You’re not kidding!”
“And did you like her?”
“As a child I found her too sophisticated and especially the focus of too much adulation. So no, I couldn’t warm to her. Besides that, Gabriel and I loved to spend time doing mock imitations of her dance steps with all those veils and exalted gestures.”
“And then?”
“And then she saved my life.”
“Really?” asked Catherine.
“Absolutely.”
“But Mamie, how did it end between her and Papyrus?”
“It’s a terrible story.”
“Oh là là! What a soap opera!” said Luna. “But we’re going to get kicked out now. Don’t you tell any bits of the story without us, all right?”
“And what if I tell it twice,” I replied with an impish wide-eyed stare back at Luna. “It’s going to be hard to spend the evening together and not pick up the thread, right, Josephine?”
“No, no, we want to hear the first telling too! We don’t want the warmed-over retelling! Please, you two!”
Mother and daughter left the room as the doctor was arriving on his rounds. I was just able to see Catherine take him aside as they quickly disappeared from my angle of vision. Luna came back and gave me a warm hug and kiss. She murmured that she loved me very much, and hearing that was like being lifted by pink butterflies. Then the doctor entered and she left. He began with me. He told me I had probably taken too many of my antihypertensive pills, perhaps accidentally double the normal dose, which is quite possible. He said I was fit as a fiddle, albeit an old fiddle, and that he would sign my release for the next day.
“As for you, Madame Morgel, we have ruled out any cardiac problem, and so you’re free to go home tomorrow as well.”
When we were alone I said to Josephine, “I’m sorry about what happened earlier.”
“What do you mean?”
“My daughter was not very kind, but it was me she was really aiming at.”
“But she loves you. She’s constantly here!”
“Yes, but my daughter never really got the knack for life. You, you have it, I think.”
Then she suddenly turned grave and serious.
“It’s not easy. It takes discipline.”
“And small pleasures. They bring a certain charm and are wonderfully helpful.”
“It’s true, they help.”
“Yes, they do. Me, at my age, I always reserve a few daily doses of little things that please me. What do you do that makes you happy, and that’s within reach, of course? Think of the simplest things, one mustn’t be too demanding, either.”
“Reading a good book, listening to music, walking around at flea markets with Mita my best friend. Drinking my coffee with milk in bed in the morning, putting on a new dress, finding a seat in the subway, watching the sunset at Place du Tertre, eating alone with my mother. And you? What are your pleasures?”
“For me eating with my mother was always a nightmare, and the Place du Tertre is too far away. Let’s see…I know, watching a thunderstorm at Place Saint-Sulpice, looking out the window of my living room, having a whiskey while watching TV, smoking a cigarette at the end of a meal. Eating a whole seafood platter. All things that are harmful to me, I guess.”
“And your family?”
“I love being with my daughter, even if she’s a bit crabby, and with my granddaughter. The problem is they live far away, in Italy.”
“One has to defend oneself by holding on to very simple things, because life is extremely complicated.”
“And when it stops being complicated, when it loses its richness, which is also the source of the bumps and burrs, and its contradictions, when it’s only a smooth plane, then life really stinks.”
That night I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. I was thinking of Catherine, and I couldn’t stop feeling as though I were somehow responsible for her sadness. A mother’s sense of omnipotence is irrational, but it is true that we give life to our children. That’s no small thing, therefore it’s understandable that we puff ourselves up, and especially that we think even after they’ve left our womb that they’re little pieces of our flesh that belong to us. Whereas in reality we’ve only ferried them across the uncertain river of existence, helping them pass from spirit to matter, as Aunt Bette would say. But it’s also true that when they disembark, it’s a little piece of our living flesh that goes out into the world. We owe them that at least, they didn’t ask to be disturbed, that’s for sure. So we can’t complain, even if it hurts.
After watching a little television, we turned off the lights and continued talking for a while in our nearly totally dark room. Soon I sensed that my friend was answering less and less and falling asleep. But as soon as I stopped talking, she would pick up the thread. In fact she was doing what children do, she wanted to fall asleep while I told her a story.
Josephine’s slow breathing, interrupted now and then by deeper breaths, gave me a tender feeling and yet I was also afraid. During the night in the hospital there are little sounds of light steps, metallic sounds of thermometers dropped in bowls and medicine bottles placed on trays. At night one hears sickness better. Doors open and close, letting silence circulate. A light green ray, impossible to extinguish, led me back to ancient fears. What I fear most in death is the solitude, because even without a soul and without consciousness, that stiff isolation crushes my heart. When Epicurus claimed that we never encounter our own death, it was the dumbest thing he ever said in his philosophical career. Life rests completely on this encounter.