32

A CRUST OF BREAD

A month after my father becomes a widower at eighty-seven, he and my mother rush into nuptials. Poum is seventy-two. After forty-three years of visiting his wife, the mother of my seven half-brothers and sisters, every Sunday, it’s something of an anticlimax for them. After a first impish flurry, they become reflective and slightly abashed – anxiety lingers even without its unwedded body of fear.

Catastrophes reach Alexandre in series, as if he were being gunned down. The Crash of Wall Street, the war, the death of his son, the loss of his bank and his having to start from scratch at seventy-two, these are the icebergs of his several Titanics. They happen suddenly, out of nowhere – just like his death.

When he is ninety, he will announce to Poum one morning: ‘I’m going to die tonight.’ She will laugh and tell him not to be ridiculous. He will go on to live a completely ordinary day – but by dusk he’ll be dead.

After those three short sinless years, Poum becomes a captive again. She loses her life as she knew it. It is ripped away, bit by bit. Like Hector’s from Andromache, his body is taken from her first. Put in a coffin, it is borne away from her on the shoulders of four men, crosses the threshold of the apartment and then goes down the three floors of the Hausmannian building. We look at it, standing side by side. He reminds me of a boat, the men carrying him are like a human sea removing him, in wobbly unison, especially round the corners of the staircase where he dips dangerously before righting himself and disappearing from our vision. She stands to attention, a bit like a soldier, and I stand beside her, ineffectually. That is the moment he is buried for me. The rest of the rigmarole, a few days later, has nothing to do with him.

People come out of the woodwork, cousins, nephews; the Spartans fill the apartment, checking this and that. My mother welcomes them, searching their faces for traces of him. During the reading of the will, she will gaze out of the notary’s window as if this were all happening to someone else. From then on, her hold on reality loosens.

Once I come to see her and she clutches my sleeve. ‘Do you know what I just saw? An ordinary man in a business suit climbing on that flimsy wire fence, then doing a balancing act on a lower branch of the tree to hoist himself further over. It looked like he was going to burgle something. Then I thought he was going to steal a rose from the garden beds in front of the church. But no! All that effort was only to reach a particular flower and sniff it.’ She smiles tenderly at me, at the little street where she lives now in the same quarter but in a smaller apartment, at the Paris sky above us, at the staid, old church and at me, her daughter. She envelops us all, holding us all together in her shipwrecked gaze.

In the twelve-year period during which she desultorily, almost hurriedly survives Alexandre, Poum develops new habits to counter the ridiculousness of a world without him. My mother is not a gardener but she starts picking weeds against concrete walls and transferring them to a pot of their own. ‘Look at him now in his big pot! He is just like the Abbé Suger, who was a serf and became Grand Connétable du Royaume, regent for Louis VI the Fat,’ she says. In her eighties, her sense of hope is as hardy as that weed.

When the doctor starts speaking of Alzheimer’s disease, my mother scoffs: ‘These doctors are so stupid. They think they know everything.’ We are pressured to see them nevertheless.

At the onset, on that first specialist’s doorstep, she pulls my arm: ‘We won’t listen to him, will we?’ I promise we’re just getting that other doctor out of our hair. We’re both sure there’s nothing wrong with her. We sit in front of the bespectacled specialist, his glasses squatting tight on his thin nose. He tries to order me out of the room. My mother tugs at my shirt. I refuse staunchly as she takes refuge in her faraway gazes, which are misconstrued as one more symptom. We sit in front of his desk like two refugees haggling with an officer at a frontier post. I try to explain that there is nothing wrong with my mother. She has always been like this. She’s an eccentric – not sick. He shakes his head forebodingly. ‘We will proceed with the test.’ My mother smiles magnanimously, humouring him.

He spreads his hands on his desk. ‘Well, Madame, there is a long avenue in the heart of Paris called the Champs Élysées. It leads to a famous place and a famous monument. What is the name of that monument?’ Poum cries out: ‘The Empire State Building!’ I whisper urgently, ‘The Arc de Triomphe, the Étoile,’ but she shrugs. The doctor gives me a dark look. She catches it and smiles at me reassuringly.

He smears the desk again with his spatulated fingers. I hate his guts. ‘Now, Madame, another little test.’ He moves his hands in a V motion. ‘What do you put in a container of this shape when it is filled with water?’

Marie-Antoinette’s answer rings out: ‘Pencils!’

I intervene hurriedly: ‘But she always has pencils on her desk in a vase!’

The doctor makes a church out of his hands and stares at us: ‘But not in water.’ He has won. We leave in a daze of eerie shame.

Within a year, she’s in a nursing home, lost in her shrinking body, her fumbling gaze still always staring beyond. When I drive her there the first time, I have vomiting fits and arrive so dehydrated I am laid flat on my back on the floor of her bedroom and have to have an injection before they let me drive again. Poum talks to the nurses: ‘It’s very sad, but we will have to leave her here,’ she reasons with them, smiling reassuringly. ‘You can drive me back.’ She waves at me on the floor and makes a grab for her getaway handbag. I find myself wishing she could escape. In the last weeks of her life, I push her around in a wheelchair. She loves the lift. We go up and down. She points towards the metal doors as we wait for it to come to us and says: ‘You’ll see, it will just be like going to another world.’

It is another world, amid the juxtaposed worlds of her presence and absence. It seems to me only a few days earlier that she is hopping on a bus. I have walked her to the stop and am on the kerb, waving. She bends into the street shouting at me. Cars whizz between us. ‘Do you know that Frederick II loved his sister?’ she shouts. I move towards her between the cars. She leans out of the bus, ignoring the driver yelling at her. ‘Do you know what he wrote to her?’ She smiles as she used to when Alexandre was alive. ‘Send me something of you, even if only a crust of bread into which you have bitten.’

The bus surges forward, ripping her away from me.