1 9 8 5

J A N U A R Y

Sunday 6

On New Year’s Day my mother and the other patients had been dressed in their former clothes, a skirt and blouse. They were given a glass of champagne. A parody of real life. Just imagine that morning. The nurses whipping out slips and dresses from drawers and clothing the weary bodies, shouting, “Happy New Year! Let’s celebrate! Come on, Granny!” All day long, they pretended to be having fun. The women seem to be vaguely waiting. There is nothing to wait for. Come evening, off go the skirt and blouse. Like when you’re a child, and you dress up in costume to go to a make-believe party. Here, it’s all in the past; there are no more real parties to look forward to.

She used to say: “You must fight to survive.” And also: “If you’re not strong, then you’ve got to be smart.” Everything in life was seen as a struggle. I speak of her in the past tense. Yet the woman who stands before me today is the same one I knew in the past. That’s what is so terrible.

Saturday 19

All her energy is channeled into eating. Passionately, voraciously.

In early January, I had that dream in which I am lying in a stream, caught between two currents, with long tapering plants floating beneath me. My loins are white; I have the impression that they are also my mother’s, it’s the same body. Shall I ever dare to analyze that?

“Who’s that singing?” one of the women asks time and again. Yet she probably hears her every day; only one of them sings, always the same one, singing away her life.

F E B R U A R Y

Friday 1

As I enter the department store Les Galeries Lafayette, I catch sight of a woman talking to herself, maybe asking me for something. I hurry past but glance at her, she glances back. Blue-gray eyes. Afterward, I think, that’s my mother, that’s the way she used to look at me before. Stirrings of guilt.

Saturday 2

It’s one year day for day since I met A and I find my mother tied to her armchair. “I thought you’d never come.” I untie her, we walk up and down the corridor, I tie her up again before leaving (we have no alternative, the nurses insist). Just like I used to strap my kids into the stroller.

One of her favorite sentences: “After all, you only live once” (to eat, to laugh, to buy things). And, to me: “You expect too much from life!”

Saturday 16

She was at the far end of the corridor, feeling the rail running along the wall, unaware of my presence. Later, in the bedroom, she searches through her neighbor’s belongings (yet another woman, the fourth since she was moved here). The bathroom floor is sticky with dried urine. Urine is everywhere, impossible to get rid of that sweet, cloying smell. Before leaving, I take her back to the dining room (I was about to write “refectory,” like at boarding-school). A nurse with a cheery smile hands her a sweet: “Go on, have one, it’ll give you something to do.” Sheer compassion.

Museum of Fine Arts, Lille, a few days ago. A contemplative atmosphere, empty rooms guarded by an attendant. We tend to think of attendants as crazy people (they spend all day cooped up there on their own, with no one to talk to). Saw Time and the Old Women by Goya. But that’s definitely not my mother. Neither is the main character in Lolleh Bellon’s play Tender Relations, which I went to see the other night.

My mother went through menopause the same year in which her own mother, my grandmother, died, one month or two weeks before that “fearful Sunday,” the Sunday when it happened—June 15, 1952. Around June 25, she gets back from the doctor’s. My father alluded to a possible pregnancy: “So, maybe it’s not the last time we’re celebrating Communion?” But she knew. No, I’ve gotten the dates mixed up, it was in late May, after the renewal of the vows, that she went to see the doctor. So, she had stopped menstruating for at least two months. She was forty-five years old. What happened that Sunday occurred afterward and may be ascribed to the fact that she had stopped having her period. I can still see my father’s smile and contentment at the thought that my mother might be expecting. A huge disappointment, to be sure. In those days, people would talk about a “change of life;” they would say, “I’m through with that” or “that’s all over now.” It seemed that everything had come to an end.

After my grandmother’s death in July 1952, she invariably dressed in black or gray. It was only eighteen years later, in Annecy, that she took to wearing colors again, red suits and so on.

Saturday 23

She has lost the lower half of her dentures. The nurse on duty remarks: “It doesn’t matter, she only eats blended stuff!”

Today she was in high spirits. (It’s worse.) We walked up and down the two corridors. In one of the rooms, an old lady was holding up her skirts; you could see the garter and stockings. Later on, when I walked past the same room, she was standing in profile. Her buttocks were all shriveled. Another old lady called me over and asked me to pick up her mentholated drops, which she had scattered all over the floor.

M A R C H

Saturday 2

The elevator door slides open: she is standing right in front, next to an old lady. They are all the same, forever seeking out each other’s company.

In such circumstances, how could she possibly find her dentures.

Every time I leave the hospital, I need to listen to music at full blast as I drive along the highway. Today, amid exhilaration and despair, I chose Léo Ferré’s hit C’est Extra. I need to feel sexy because of my mother’s body and her life in the hospital.

She would often say, “Caught you!” doing this or that. Watching me all the time.

Sunday 24, Paris Book Fair

I went to see her before going up to Paris. I feel absolutely nothing when I am with her. As soon as the elevator door snaps shut, I want to cry. Her skin is getting more and more cracked, it badly needs cream. Now she has lost the upper half of her dentures. Without her teeth, she looks like the elderly nurse from the old people’s home in Yvetot, old father Roy, in his blue coat. So weak she can hardly walk. Yet she still shows an interest in my clothes; she always feels the fabric, “it’s lovely.” Pointing to my black swallowtail coat: “When you’re through with it, have a thought for me!” Words she used to say, words from the past.

Sunday 31

She loves and hates the same way as before, fiercely, has made “friends” and “enemies.” All the patients here recreate a “civilized” world: a woman is seated at the entrance, greeting people who go by with a chirpy “Good Day!” as though she were sitting on her doorstep in the street. Another old lady says to my mother: “You’re far prettier than me, you’ve got youth on your side!”

A P R I L

Monday 15

Her face has changed. The space between her mouth and her chin is growing longer, her lips are becoming obscenely thin. All she thinks about is leaving this place.

In the dining room, the television is on, continuously (is it less tedious for the staff?). One woman had removed the waxcloth and was folding it up like a linen tablecloth. Another patient was being lowered down in the hoist.

Friday 19

I can’t bring myself to give away her clothes or sell them off at the flea market. Today I sold a set of Restoration armchairs and a sideboard table which my husband and I had acquired after taking out a loan. Parting with these objects means nothing to me. Like my mother, I am letting go of things. The people who bought this antique furniture are young “executives,” like we were at the time.

Sunday 21

Confined to her wheelchair once more. She vainly tries to eat her dessert, an apricot mousse: her hand can’t find her mouth, her tongue keeps darting toward the inaccessible treat. I fed it to her, like I used to feed my own children. I think she realized this. Her fingers are stiff (are they overprescribing Haldol?). She began tearing up the cake box, trying to eat the cardboard. She tore up everything—her napkin, a slip—struggling to twist things, oblivious of her own strength. I look at her sagging chin, her gaping mouth. I have never felt so guilty; I felt that I was the one to have induced her present condition.

Saturday 27

She is looking much better although she can walk only short distances. She doesn’t need any help with her cake. Afterward, she wants to wash her hands. I take her to the bathroom. “I might as well use the toilet too.” She has difficulty removing the stretch panties, encumbered by diapers: “They put on too many of them.” I help her to take off her panties and to put them back on. A child. Period. She says, “You’ll have to bring some old rags for me to wipe my bottom with.” Adds: “I went to see Dad’s grave but I never made it, they were driving in the wrong direction” (naturally, she wants to live, she doesn’t want to be reunited with him). “There wasn’t a speck of dust on his tombstone, it’s a marble slab.”

Shouts from the adjoining rooms. An old man keeps repeating, “hello, hello.” It might well be the same guy who was always trying to call people from the phone in the hall downstairs. A woman gives a curious squawk, mimicking an exotic bird, tacatacata. Today it was like a concert, life fighting to go on, breathing more fiercely than usual.

I remember the first days of my affair with A last year, when my mother’s health began to slip. Back then, her face was not puffy like it is today. One evening, I watched her fall asleep: it was early evening, the sun was still out. I cried but somehow I felt I wasn’t unhappy.

M A Y

Saturday 4

She hadn’t been able to walk for days. I had a hard time lifting her out of the wheelchair. After that, she had no problems making her way along the corridor. Guilty feelings: she starts walking again as soon as I’m with her. I gave her some doughnuts and a bar of chocolate; she stills snaps the pieces into two (so that they last longer, she would say). At one point: “How long will I be staying here? I’ll be dead before then!”

Her neighbor, who is suffering from the same condition, but in the early stages, walks around with her toiletry bag all day. She lays it down on her bedside table, carefully puts it away into a drawer, then takes it out again. That’s exactly what my mother used to do at my place. Having something to connect one to the real world, something of one’s own.

When I was twelve, I would spend hours lovingly admiring and touching a manicure set made of black patent leather. We had so few possessions: every one of them was a dream.

She never wanted me to spend the school holidays with friends of hers. Was she afraid they might find fault with me? Or might not like me? Or—this has never occurred to me before—might she have been jealous? I would be furiously jealous when she addressed my cousin Colette or my friend Nicole as “my lollipop” or “my sweetie.” Those girls weren’t her daughters, she had no right to speak to them like that.

It’s almost one year since she lost her glasses.

Saturday 18

Today she was in a state of total apathy, refusing to see me. It was a lovely day; we went downstairs into the garden, with me clumsily pushing her wheelchair. I realize that I have come to accept her degradation and her new, distorted features. I recollect that terrible moment when she began “going downhill.” She kept going round in circles, searching the house for imaginary objects. (Later on, I was reminded of the tortoise we had in our garden at Annecy, who would scuttle along the gravel paths and barbed wire fence in early fall.) It was then that she wrote: “I remain in darkness.”

Pentecost

As I park the car, I notice quite a few patients sitting outside in wheelchairs and some other people whom I assume are visitors. I go upstairs, my mother is standing in the corridor, she recognizes me, I wheel her downstairs into the garden. I realize that the old people are all patients from the geriatric unit, sporting ridiculous straw hats and minded by the nurses. My mother’s chin seems to sag a little more every week, wrinkles have started to radiate from the corners of her mouth. We just sit there on a bench. She eats her cake. It strikes me that I never bring her the “right sort of cake”; today it’s a brittle slab of shortbread oozing with jam which she gets all over her fingers. I shouldn’t bring her anything except fruit jellies and almond buns. Some of the women are talking to themselves. An old man is vigorously shaking his head beneath his straw hat. My mind goes blank.

J U N E

Sunday 2

Mother’s Day. I have brought along the straw hat she used to wear. We went down into the garden, sat on a bench. She didn’t need a wheelchair today. Maybe, for other people, she has come to resemble a witch—her gradual metamorphosis since she came here one year ago. She is bent double, she who walked so straight. Her skin, spared wrinkles for so many years, is a crisscross of lines. Today she is holding a corner of her gown, clutching it. In the elevator, she stood facing the mirror. I am sure that she could see herself.

Sunday 9

She was waiting for me in her wheelchair, opposite the elevator.

She talks about suicide, money and church mass, which she can no longer attend. “I’m afraid I may have to stay here for years.” Sometimes I leave my sentences unfinished. “You know what I mean,” she would say when she was trying to find the right turn of phrase.

The lady next to her spends half an hour tidying her shelves, taking out all her belongings and putting them back again. My mother went through the same motions when she was living with me, at the beginning of her illness. What is the meaning of such behavior? To impose on the outside world some form of “order” that cannot be achieved inside?

How many Sundays have I spent sitting opposite her, watching her eat? Trees gently sway in the window.

She would announce cheerfully, “Annie, you’ve got a visitor,” when a schoolfriend came round to see me. “Visits” meant a lot to her. A token of love, proof that we exist for other people.

Sunday 23

She was sleeping in the raised chair used for minor care and dressings in the hallway, her mouth wide open. My mind goes blank whenever I come here.

The old lady in her room is always carrying around her handbag, as though she were walking down the street. She brought another patient back to the room; the two women sat down side by side and just stayed there, saying nothing, exchanging polite smiles. Two little girls playing at being grown-up women on a social visit. It’s heartrending.

Peals of laughter could be heard coming from the kitchen. A typical summer Sunday afternoon in the long-term geriatric ward.

Memories flash through my mind. I can see her in our grocery store, telling customers that Mademoiselle B, who had given birth to a child whose father was German, had no layette ready for the baby. It was only years later that I realized the full implications of her remark which, although suggested, were never openly stated: the girl may have been planning to get rid of the child.

Other memories, sentences from the past: “I don’t have four arms!” (whenever my father or I would ask her to do something). And also: “You’re not strong enough to...” She was always going on about her own physical strength, an asset in our world; I was a mere “weakling.” Inferior to her.

Sunday 30

In the garden, I stand up and walk away, leaving her in the hands of the nurses sitting by some old ladies and a drooling grandpa. At that point she shouts, “Annie!” She hasn’t spoken my name for over a year. On hearing her voice, I freeze, emotionally drained. The call has come from the deepest recesses of my life, from early childhood. I turn around and walk up to her. She looks at me pleadingly: “Take me away!” All the other people have stopped talking and are listening. I would like to die; I explain to her that I can’t do that, not right now. Afterward, it occurred to me that she may have shouted my name because of the people around her. But I’m not so sure.

When she’d had enough of her brioche, she hid it under her skirt. As a child, I would steal candy from the store and stuff it inside my panties.

J U L Y

Sunday 7

She stopped walking two Sundays ago. I have gotten used to the wheelchair. I take her downstairs into the garden. It’s a hot day. “The sun is nice,” she says. It always takes me by surprise when I hear her use the same expressions as before, in her present state. She can’t see things clearly now. At one point, she grabbed my leg and my skirt, savagely. Two young nurses sit down away from the patients to have a chat. A third nurse, older and hideously ugly, stays back with the group. My mother is wearing a printed dress with small flowers, like the ones I wore when I was a little girl. It makes her look tiny. I realize that it’s only now that I have truly grown up.

She said, “See you next Sunday” although I won’t be coming for two months on account of my operation. An operation which might cause me to die before her.

I told the boys about her strange attitudes and expressions. We burst out laughing. Pain cannot be kept intact, it needs to be “processed,” converted into humor.

Today I was feeling guilty, yet again. So I tried to alleviate her condition by clipping her nails, which were filthy, and by washing her hands and shaving her face. I wonder if she has become incontinent now that she moves around in a wheelchair. I didn’t dare ask her.

A U G U S T

Saturday 17

I haven’t been back to see my mother although I am perfectly able to walk with crutches. I won’t go to this temple of old age hobbling “like an old lady.”

My mother—her energy, her constant anxiety too. I feel the same tenseness, only in my writing.

My father used to say of her admiringly: “You’ll never have the last word with her!”

Monday 26

I went over to see her with David, who is obviously very upset. The familiar smells, her bedroom with the chimney sweep from Annecy, the statuette of Sainte Thérèse—everything in its place. Such permanence almost brings me comfort. Seeing her, touching her—she is so different from what she used to be and yet she’s definitely “herself.” The dining room was full of old ladies, the same ones. Rock music blaring from the television set. When I come here, I feel that I should be writing about these things instead.

S E P T E M B E R

Thursday 5

Tomorrow it’ll be two years since I collected my mother from the old people’s home in Yvetot. I remember dropping by her flat in the Béguinage area; a woman to whom she proudly announced, “I’m going to stay with my daughter!”; conversations in the car.

Today I came to see her with Éric. She was in the hall downstairs, groping her way along a pipe running across the wall. I recognized her slippers. Her roommate was strutting around in the heat in a fur coat, dangling her handbag; she looked just like an old whore.

Her fingernails are too long and so is her hair, giving her an unkempt appearance. I don’t have the energy to cut either. When I reflect on her gradual decline, I no longer “feel” anything and I have almost given up wondering whether it is “because of me.” She had already started losing her faculties in 1982 before she came to my place. But I failed to give her the support she needed, she remained “in darkness” alone.

In Le Monde, Claude Sarraute wrote, “One was worth a million.” This was one of my mother’s expressions, as was “one was worth a dozen.” I hated these locutions, which I saw as old-fashioned. Showing consideration, choosing one’s words so as not to hurt people’s feelings, were alien to her.

For me, she is the personification of time. She is also pushing me toward death.

Saturday 7

I used to dress up wearing her clothes. “I’ll tell my mother!” She was the avenger, the one who might pick a fight with the other girl’s mother.

I can remember the “cup of tea” at the dentist’s surgery in Rouen. We were waiting in a room with huge armchairs and glass cabinets filled with grimacing Chinese figurines. The waiting rooms of my childhood are strange, terrifying places where I am transported to the “other world,” the world of rich, important people, a “window display” that I am not allowed to touch. My mother was talking in a low voice. After an unusually painful visit, the dentist announced: “I think this calls for a cup of tea!” I am amazed that such a vile beverage should be seen as a reward and naturally expect my mother to reply, “She doesn’t like tea!” Instead, she says nothing and smiles. She knew that in “high society” drinking tea was “the thing to do.”

Friday 13

My mother has fractured her hip bone. Panic. Last night, seagulls were continually circling above the house, then the terrible screech of a bird rang out, a barn owl or maybe a seagull. Strangely enough, I had just been thinking of writing a book about her. I am in a state of total disarray.

Evening. I saw her; she was sleeping, mouth wide open. An urinary catheter. Her hands were twitching. I cried. I feel that all this has been going on for a long time. What can she feel? She will recover, in other words, slowly waste away between her bed and her wheelchair. I saw no one—no doctor, no nurse—in the ward where she has been moved.

Sunday 15

She has been returned to her familiar surroundings. Strapped into her wheelchair: her body tense, straining to stand up, full of vigor, her eyes unseeing. She is incapable of eating on her own, the right hand groping toward the left. It suddenly occurs to me that if society follows its present course, people like my mother may not be left alive in twenty or fifty years’ time. I have no views on such an eventuality, on whether or not it is justified.

“You’re overdoing it,” she would say disapprovingly. My face was flushed, I was breathless with so much running around and shouting. And if I stared at her: “Do you want to buy me or something?” Gathering all her favorite sayings when she can barely speak. But she still has her voice and, occasionally, expressions that are so typically “her” merge to form a single identity. I vainly try to pin them down. Her obsessions: work, alcohol (repressed), horrific events, disasters and so on. She had never wished to set herself boundaries but because of her working-class background she had adopted those of religion and puritanism, seen as the nearest thing to dignity. Personally, I have never cared about boundaries.

Frightening to realize that I have always seen my mother as a figure of death. When she made the pilgrimage to Lourdes on her own, I was convinced she would deliberately die there. Later on, I was terrified by the account she gave of my sister’s death: I feel that I too shall have to die before she can start loving me because that day she said, referring to me, “She’s not nearly as nice as the other one (my sister).”

She will never again wear the clothes left behind at my place; they seem to belong to a dead person. Yet she is alive and can still make me feel guilty.

I notice that I have inherited her brusque, violent temper, as well as a tendency to seize things and throw them down with fury. A pointed this out to me. I also detect a similarity between some aspects of his behavior and my mother’s obsession with tidying when she was at my place, almost two years ago. He keeps sorting and moving around the books in his library, drawing comfort from his intellectual possessions, making up for his terrible feelings of inadequacy for not having gotten past his baccalauréat. My mother was trying to cling to the world, to persuade herself that she wasn’t crazy. The days when she was staying with me seem far away already. Fond memories of that time: she would start sewing and lose all the needles. Now...

I was brimming with love for her when I was eighteen; she was a big, warm sanctuary. At the time I was suffering from bulimia.

Thursday 19

The other day, she warned me she was going to be sick. I began watching her, just like I used to watch Éric when he was a little boy and pretended to throw up the food he didn’t want.

I have never seen a photograph of my mother as a child. The first one was taken on her wedding day. In another one, dated a few years later, she is attending a wedding. Heavy-set face, low forehead, bull-like features. One sentence sums her up: “She was the sort of woman who burned up life” (leaving behind no papers, no traces).

She preferred giving to everyone, rather than taking from them. Maybe to get attention, to be acknowledged? When I was a little girl, I too liked to give—picture cards, candy, whatever—to be loved, to be popular. Not any more. Isn’t writing, and my particular style of writing, also a way of giving?

A scene from my childhood. She is standing, naked, facing my father who is lying in bed. He scoffs: “Not a pretty sight!” Her genitals—The Origin of the World?3.

She would scold the dirty old men in the café: “Off with you, ugly old man” (the same applied to the dogs chasing our bitch in heat).

O C T O B E R

Friday 4

I may have invented or embroidered the story she would tell people about Lourdes—a liquid mountain into which one sank and drowned when one didn’t know it was water. I believed she would die there.

The expression: “I am an only child.”

Her taste for using convoluted words to “show off.”

When I saw The Ostrich’s Eggs by Roussin on television, I imagined all those women I hated, the exact opposite of my mother, with their delicate bodies and porcelain features, their silk and pearls, their fancy expressions.

Tuesday 8

She is standing in the hall; at first, I don’t recognize her. Her hair has been pulled back into a ponytail, there is a fixed expression on her face. I show her the little chimney sweep above her bed, a present from a friend in Annecy. She gazes at it and murmurs: “I used to have one like that.” I am always wondering how she sees the world now. When I think of the woman she used to be, her red dresses, her flamboyant temper, it makes me cry. But usually, I think of nothing, I am here with her, that’s all that matters. At least I still have her voice. Voice is everything. The worst thing about death is the loss of voice.

She would say: “So-and-so, or such-and-such a dog died of ambition.” To die of ambition refers to the trauma of separation, of being far away.

Tuesday 15

A gray October day like in 1962 when I took my teachers’ training certificate in literature. We sit facing each other. She is eating a custard tart; her hands are shaking, she keeps shifting the cake from one hand to the other. “I was ravenous, haven’t eaten for days. I was deprived.” Deprived—the usual understatement, meaning short of money. Several sentences arouse feelings of guilt in me: “It would be great to spend Christmas back there” and “It doesn’t take you long to get here,” in other words, you should come more often.

When she sees me walk in, she greets me the same way she used to greet visitors: “Gee, I was wondering when you’d come!” The same enthusiasm and joie de vivre as before. An old lady inquires anxiously of her: “You’re not leaving, are you?”—“No, I’m not leaving,” she is quick to reply, to avoid upsetting her, if only slightly.

Friday 18

I gave a coin to the blind beggar on the market square, like she used to.

She would say, “She made that man stray from his duty” or “one must do one’s duty in life.” I shudder at hearing such things, and that word in particular, and have since adolescence.

My fantastic vision of her: a glimpse of her white coat, her shopkeeper’s coat, hovering behind me.

Monday 21

With other people, she was always afraid to let silence set in. “Have a word or two for each customer.”

I have no idea what she thought of sex or how she made love. On the face of it, sex was the ultimate evil. In real life?

Wednesday 23

Today she says to me: “I’m sure I’d be happier with you rather than outside of you.”

Her polite remarks, said out of habit: “Wouldn’t you like to sit down?” to one of the nurses who is standing nearby. I began reading a newspaper. Her hands reached out for the cake wrapping and I gave it to her—like to a child. One minute later, I glanced up and saw that she was eating it. She wouldn’t let me pull it away from her, fiercely clenching her fist. An agonizing reversal of roles between mother and child.

N O V E M B E R

Sunday 3

The disheveled hair, the hands searching for each other, the right grasping the left like an unknown object. She can’t find her own mouth; every time she tries, the cake ends up to one side. The piece of pastry I put into her hands slips out. I have to pop it into her mouth. I am dismayed at such degradation and bestiality. A glazed expression, the tongue and lips protruding, sucking like those of a newborn baby. I began combing her hair and then stopped because I didn’t have an elastic band to tie it back. She said: “I like it when you do my hair.” Everything was forgotten. With her hair combed and her face shaved, she became a human being. It gives her such pleasure when I brush her hair and arrange her clothes. I remembered that when I walked in the woman next to my mother was stroking her neck and legs. Being alive is being caressed, being touched.

Monday 11

She is in a state of extreme agitation, she keeps trying to wrench away the bar of her wheelchair. She clutches it and pulls with all her might, her body straining with the effort.

This violence reminds me of the aggressiveness she showed toward everything around her, including me. Suddenly I hate her, once again she is the “bad mother”—brutal and inflexible. There’s a suffocating smell of shit; I don’t know when I’ll be able to change her myself. I fed her small pieces of cake; she didn’t even glance at me. Today she would never say, “this is my daughter,” on seeing me walk in, like she did last year.

Memories of her squatting on the bucket we used as a chamber pot, relieving herself shamelessly: that curious intimacy between girls which she imposed on me as a child and which I came to loathe later on in life.

Forever insisting on the notion of pride: “How can you take that?,” in other words, how can you accept being treated that way? (By my husband.)

Wednesday 13

Yesterday, in Yvetot, my aunt and cousins said: “You really take after your mother, don’t you; you look just like your mother!” Speaking of her, my aunt remarks: “She worked hard all her life. She would scrub the floors, saying to your father, ’leave that, I’ll do it.’ ” She always took such pride in her sheer physical strength and her contempt for ill-health, which she dismissed as a failing. A working beast. I hated it when she said, “You’re such a weakling!

Sunday 17

My mother and the little old lady sharing her room were sitting side by side. A sweet picture illustrating a secret, magic bond between the two of them. A biblical scene basking in an extraordinary light, reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance painting. A moment of pure, indescribable bliss. My mother points to me and asks her companion: “Do you recognize her?” As usual, the other woman stammers; she hasn’t said anything intelligible for months. It doesn’t really matter whether or not they communicate by language. I sat down opposite them and fed my mother an éclair—the other woman didn’t want any—then a second one. From time to time, I nibbled a small piece. Sounds from the television filtered through, Viennese waltzes. I thought about all those Sunday afternoons spent in Yvetot. It’s not just the notion of time passing, it’s something else, something linked to death: now I belong in a chain, my life is part of a process that will outlive me.

I wipe her mouth with a face cloth. She looks at me and asks, “Are you happy?”

I go to the bathroom, the floor is sticky with urine. I automatically associate it with that morning’s scene at A’s place. I know absolutely nothing about her sex life. She used to say: “If people knew that, we’d be mortified.”

Sunday 24

The way she sometimes looks me up and down, haughtily, as though I were a perfect stranger. She manages to eat the éclair on her own, getting it all over her fingers. Yet it’s probably the pastry which she finds the easiest to eat. A song from the sixties on television, “since you’re getting married tomorrow,” something like that. My life since those days. And my mother, who has been so much a part of my life, always.

She smells bad. I can’t change her. I sprinkle her with eau de cologne.

D E C E M B E R

Sunday 1

She couldn’t find the way to her mouth, her hand kept wandering off to the right. I helped her to eat her cake. When her fingers were empty, she continued to raise them to her lips. I wonder if a child does that; I can’t remember.

When I write down all these things, I scribble away as fast as I can (as if I felt guilty), without choosing my words. Today she was wearing an old flowered bathrobe with all the threads pulled out. For a split-second, my mother appeared to me wearing the pelt of a wild beast.

She has finished the fruit jellies. If I leave the box on her bedside table, she won’t touch it or try to pick out one of the squares. Now all she wants is to grab things or tear them apart.

The woman with glasses was in tears, sobbing, “I want to die.” By her side, her husband, the one with reddish eyes, replied softly: “But you’re making me die.” He may be right. In one of the rooms, a woman was squawking like a duck being chased round a farmyard.

Before leaving, I made her drink some water. She says, “You’ll have your reward.” The word kills me.

Driving back home along the highway, I can still smell her eau de cologne on my fingers. Suddenly, for no particular reason, memories cross my mind—the Yvetot fair and outings with her. Could it be the smell of her face powder?

Now I often catch sight of that black shadow on her face. When I was a little girl, for me she was a white shadow. How could I have forgotten that she used to call me her “white doll” up to the age of sixteen?

All that I have standing between me and death is my demented mother.

Sunday 8

She turns to face me, her mouth wide open, her hair tied back. A flowered gown. And still that smell. I can’t change her and I dare not disturb the nurses and paramedics who are chatting in the office. I can hear them talking. One of them keeps saying, “that’s the problem” and “going through all that for nothing” (I think she means saving money).

She has trouble finding her mouth with the first cake. The second one she can eat on her own. So there is still room for improvement. The long-haired male nurse with liberal views (he calls himself an “idealist”) came to look at the beauty spot on her head at my request. It had been bleeding.

Sunday 15

She is in the dining room, in her wheelchair, the only woman to be turned toward the wall. The ceiling has been decked out with tinsel. She points to the decorations and says to me, “That’s Annie’s dress.” I am always on her mind. The wallpaper here suddenly reminds me of the kind we had in the café at Yvetot before 1950. I feel that nothing has really changed since my early childhood and that life is simply a series of scenes interspersed with songs. I settle in front of the television set with the rest of them. Behind my mother, an old lady is chuckling to herself. Another one, slightly less deranged, shouts out to her: “Quit laughing! You’re crazy!” Then she takes an interest in another, completely senile woman who is pestering an elderly man in a wheelchair. Continually on the alert. By the window, I make out the old guy who was always trying to call people who never answered. Then I hear a deep voice belonging to a man (which one?), a wild voice coming from his guts. Voices revert to their primitive state here.

A Santa Claus figure stares back from the far side of the room. Jacques Martin’s show, quizzes, some guy won a trip to America. The woman on the alert shouts, “Oh! My God!” Then they showed sexy, painted toenails: a glossy commercial. I imagined a whole lifetime—childhood, adulthood, old age—lived out in front of television and its immutable images: glamour, youth, adventure.

Sunday 22

I am sitting opposite her, a box of chocolates on my lap. Her greedy instincts are back, she leers at the chocolates, tries to grab them with clumsy fingers. After eating each candy, she wipes her mouth carefully. My seat is lower than hers, I must raise my head slightly. I am ten years old, I look up at her, she’s my mother. It’s the same age gap, the same ritual.

As I leave: “Why don’t you take me home with you, it would be more fun.”

3 Painting by Courbet depicting the open thighs of a recumbent woman.