A Very Easy Death

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AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the afternoon of Thursday, 24 October 1963, I was in Rome, in my room at the Hotel Minerva; I was to fly home the next day and I was putting papers away when the telephone rang. It was Bost calling me from Paris: ‘Your mother has had an accident,’ he said. I thought: she has been knocked down by a car; she was climbing laboriously from the roadway to the pavement, leaning on her stick, and a car knocked her down. ‘She had a fall in the bathroom: she has broken the neck of her femur,’ said Bost. He lived in the same building as my mother. About ten o’clock the evening before, he had been going up the stairs with Olga, and they noticed three people ahead of them – a woman and two policemen. ‘It’s the landing above the second floor,’ the woman was saying. Had something happened to Madame de Beauvoir? Yes. A fall. For two hours she had crawled across the floor before she could reach the telephone; she had asked a friend, Madame Tardieu, to have the door forced open. Bost and Olga followed them up to the flat. They found Maman lying on the floor in her red corduroy dressing-gown. Dr Lacroix, a woman doctor who was living in the house, diagnosed a fracture of the neck of the femur: Maman had been taken away by the emergency service of the Boucicaut hospital and she spent the night in the public ward. ‘But I’m taking her to the C nursing home,’ Bost told me. ‘That’s where Professor B operates – he’s one of the best bone surgeons. She was against it; she was afraid it would cost you too much. But I persuaded her in the end.’

Poor Maman! I had lunched with her when I came back from Moscow five weeks before; she looked poorly, as usual. There had been a time, not very long ago, when she took pleasure in the thought that she did not look her age; now there could no longer be any mistake about it – she was a woman of seventy-seven, quite worn out. The arthritis in her hips, which had first appeared after the war, had grown worse year by year, in spite of massage and cures at Aix-les-Bains; it took her an hour to make her way round one block of houses. She had a good deal of pain and she slept badly in spite of the six aspirins she took every day. For the last two or three years, and especially since the last winter, I had always seen her with those dark rings round her eyes, her face thin and a pinched look about her nose. It was nothing serious, said D, her doctor – an upset liver and sluggish bowels. He prescribed some drugs: tamarind jelly for constipation. That day I had not been surprised at her feeling poorly; what did upset me was that she should have had a bad summer. She could have taken a holiday in a country hotel or a convent that took boarders. But she expected to be asked to stay at Meyrignac by my cousin Jeanne, as she was every year, and at Scharrachbergen, where my sister lived. Both of them were prevented from inviting her. So she stayed on in Paris; it rained, and the town was deserted. ‘I’m never depressed, as you know,’ she said to me, ‘but I was depressed then.’ Fortunately, a little while after I passed through, my sister had had her to stay in Alsace for a fortnight. Now her friends were in Paris again; I was coming back; and but for that broken bone I should certainly have found her in good form once more. Her heart was in excellent condition and her blood-pressure was that of a young woman: I had never been afraid of a sudden mishap for her.

At about six o’clock I telephoned her at the nursing home. I told her that I was on my way back and that I was coming to see her. She answered in a wavering, doubtful voice. Professor B took over the telephone: he was going to operate on Saturday morning.

‘You haven’t written me a letter for two months!’ she said, as I came towards her bed. I protested: we had seen each other; I had sent her a letter from Rome. She listened to me with an air of disbelief. Her forehead and hands were burning hot; her mouth was slightly twisted, she had difficulty in articulating and her mind was confused. Was this the effect of shock? Or had her fall been caused by a slight stroke? She had always had a nervous tic. (No, not always, but for a long while. Since when?) She blinked; her eyebrows went up, her forehead wrinkled. While I was there, this nervous movement never stopped for a second. And when her smooth, rounded eyelids came down they completely covered her pupils. Dr J, an assistant, looked in: there was no point in operating; the femur had not shifted, and with three months of rest it would re-knit. Maman seemed relieved. In a muddled way she told me about her efforts to reach the telephone, her intense anxiety; the kindness of Bost and Olga. She had been taken to the hospital in her dressing-gown, without any baggage at all. The next day Olga had brought her toilet things, some eau de Cologne and a pretty white wool bed-jacket. When she said thank you Olga had replied, ‘But I do it out of affection, Madame.’ Several times, with an earnest, musing air, Maman repeated, ‘She said to me, “I do it out of affection.” ’

‘She seemed so ashamed of being a nuisance, so immensely grateful for what was done for her: it was enough to break your heart,’ Olga told me that evening. She spoke indignantly of Dr D. He was annoyed at Dr Lacroix’s having been called in and he had refused to go and see Maman at the hospital on Thursday. ‘I stood there clutching the telephone for twenty minutes,’ said Olga. ‘After the shock and after her night in the hospital, your mother needed comforting by her usual doctor. He wouldn’t listen to a word of it.’ Bost did not think that Maman had had a stroke: when he had helped her up she seemed a little bewildered but quite clear in her mind. He doubted whether she would recover in three months, however: the breaking of the neck of the femur was not in itself a serious matter, but a long period of lying still caused bed-sores, and with old people they did not heal. The lying position was tiring for the lungs: patients developed pneumonia and it carried them off. I was not very much affected. In spite of her frailty my mother was tough. And after all, she was of an age to die.

Bost had told my sister, and I had a long talk with her on the telephone. ‘I knew it would happen!’ she said. In Alsace she had thought Maman had aged so and had grown so weak that she had said to Lionel, ‘She will never get through the winter.’ One night Maman had had violent abdominal pains: she had very nearly asked to be taken to hospital. But in the morning she was better. And when they took her home by car, ‘charmed, delighted with her stay’, as she put it, she had recovered her strength and her cheerfulness. But half-way through October, about ten days before her accident, Francine Diato telephoned my sister. ‘I have just been having lunch with your mother. She seemed to me so poorly that I thought I ought to warn you.’ My sister invented an excuse for coming to Paris at once, and she took Maman to a radiologist. When he had looked at the plates her doctor stated categorically, ‘There is nothing for you to worry about. A kind of pocket has formed in the intestine, a faecal pocket that makes the movement of the bowels difficult. And then your mother does not eat enough, which could cause deficiencies; but she is in no danger.’ He advised Maman to feed herself better and prescribed her new and very strongly-acting medicines. ‘But I was still worried,’ said Poupette. ‘I begged Maman to have someone in at night. She never would: she could not bear the idea of a strange woman sleeping in her flat.’ Poupette and I agreed that she should come to Paris in a fortnight’s time, when I planned to leave for Prague.

The next day Maman’s mouth was still twisted and her speech somewhat troubled; her long eyelids were drooping over her eyes, and her eyebrows twitched. Her right arm, which she had broken twenty years before, falling off a bicycle, had never mended properly; her recent fall had hurt her left arm: she could scarcely move either of them. Fortunately, she was being looked after with the greatest care. Her room overlooked a garden, far from the noise of the street. Her bed had been moved, and they had put it along the wall that ran parallel to the window so that the telephone, which was fixed to the wall, was within hand’s reach. With her back propped up with pillows, she was sitting rather than lying: her lungs would not get tired. Her pneumatic mattress, connected to an electrical device, vibrated, massaging her: this was to prevent bed-sores. Every morning a physiotherapist came and exercised her legs. It seemed as if the dangers Bost had spoken of could be averted. In her rather drowsy voice Maman told me that a maid cut up her meat and helped her to eat, and that the meals were excellent. Whereas at the hospital they had given her black pudding and potatoes! ‘Black pudding! For invalids!’ She talked more easily than on the day before. She went back over the two dreadful hours when she was dragging herself across the floor, wondering whether she would manage to get hold of the telephone flex and pull the instrument to her. ‘One day I said to Madame Marchand, who also lives by herself, “Luckily there is always the telephone.” And she said to me, “But you still have to be able to get to it.” ’ In a most significant voice Maman repeated the last words several times: she added, ‘If I had not managed to get there, I should have been done for.’

Would she have been able to shout loud enough to make herself heard? No, surely not. I pictured her distress. She believed in heaven, but in spite of her age, her feebleness, and her poor health, she clung ferociously to this world, and she had an animal dread of death. She had told my sister of a nightmare that she often had. ‘I am being chased: I run, I run, and I come up against a wall; I have to jump over this wall, and I do not know what there is behind it; it terrifies me.’ She also said to her, ‘Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.’ When she was creeping along the floor, she thought that the moment for the jump had come.

‘It must have hurt dreadfully when you fell?’ I asked her.

‘No. I don’t remember that it did. I didn’t even feel it.’

So she lost consciousness, I thought. She remembered having felt giddy; she added that a few days before, when she had just taken one of her new medicines, she felt her legs giving way under her: she had just had time to lie down on her divan. I looked distrustfully at the bottles she had asked our young cousin Marthe Cordonnier to bring from her flat, together with various other things. She was bent on continuing the treatment: was this advisable?

Professor B came to see her at the end of the day and I followed him into the corridor. Once she had recovered, he said, my mother would walk no worse than before. ‘She will be able to potter around again.’ Did he think she had had a fainting-fit? Not at all. He seemed disconcerted when I told him that her bowels had been giving her trouble. The Boucicaut had reported a broken neck of the femur and he had confined himself to that: he would have her examined by a physician.

‘You will be able to walk just as you did before,’ I said to Maman. ‘You will be able to go back to a normal life.’

‘Oh, I shall never set foot in that flat again! I never want to see it any more. Not at any price!’

And she had been so proud of that flat. She had come to loathe the one in the rue de Rennes, which my father had filled with the noise of his ill-temper as he grew older and hypochondriac. After his death and my grandmother’s, which happened very shortly after, she had wanted to make a break with her memories. Some years earlier a woman she knew had done up a studio, and this modernity quite dazzled Maman. In 1942, of course, it was easy enough to find somewhere to live, and she was able to make her dream come true: she rented a studio with a gallery, in the rue Blomet. She sold the ebonized pearwood desk, the Henri II dining-room suite, the double bed and the grand piano; she kept the rest of the furniture and some of the old red carpet. She hung my sister’s paintings on the walls. She put a divan in the bedroom. In those days she went up and down the inside staircase perfectly happily. I did not think the place really very cheerful: it was on the second floor and in spite of the big windows overhead there was not much light. The upstairs rooms – bedroom, kitchen, bathroom – were always dark, and it was there that Maman spent most of her day since the time every stair began to force a groan out of her. In the course of twenty years everything, the walls, the furniture, the carpet, had grown worn and dirty. When the building changed hands in 1960 and Maman imagined she was going to be evicted she thought of a rest-home. She did not find anything she liked; and besides she was fond of her own place. She learnt that no one had the right to put her out and she stayed on in the rue Blomet. But now we – her friends and I – were going to look for a pleasant rest-home where she should settle as soon as she was better. ‘You shall never go back to the rue Blomet, I promise you,’ I said.

On Sunday her eyes were still half-closed; her memory was drowsing, and the words came dropping heavily from her lips. She told me about her ‘calvary’ again. Yet there was one thing that comforted her – the fact that they had brought her to this clinic: she had an exaggerated notion of its excellence. ‘At the Boucicaut they would have operated on me yesterday! It appears that this is the best clinic in Paris.’ And since for her the pleasure of praising was incomplete unless it was accompanied by blame she added, referring to a nearby establishment, ‘This is far better than the G Clinic. I have been told that the G Clinic is not at all the thing!’

‘I have not slept so well for ages,’ she said to me on Monday. She had her normal look again; her voice was clear and her eyes were taking notice of the things around her. ‘Dr Lacroix ought to be sent some flowers.’ I promised to see to it. ‘And what about the policemen? Shouldn’t they be given something? I put them to great trouble.’ I found it hard to convince her that it was not called for.

She leaned back against her pillows, looked straight at me and said very firmly, ‘I have been overdoing it, you know. I tired myself out – I was at the end of my tether. I would not admit that I was old. But one must face up to things: in a few days I shall be seventy-eight, and that is a great age. I must arrange my life accordingly. I am going to start a fresh chapter.’

I gazed at her with admiration. For a great while she had insisted upon considering herself young. Once, when her son-in-law made a clumsy remark, she had crossly replied, ‘I know very well that I am old, and I don’t like it at all: I don’t care to be reminded of it.’ Suddenly, coming out of the fog she had been floating in these three days past, she found the strength to face her seventy-eight years, clear-sighted and determined: ‘I am going to start a fresh chapter.’

She had started a fresh chapter with astonishing courage after my father’s death. It had grieved her very deeply indeed. But she had not bogged down in her past. She had taken advantage of the freedom that had been given back to her to rebuild a kind of life for herself that matched her own tastes. My father did not leave her a penny, and she was fifty-four. She passed examinations, attended courses, and she won a certificate that enabled her to work as an assistant librarian in the Red Cross. She learnt to ride a bicycle again to go to her office. She thought of doing dress-making at home after the war. When that time came I was in a position to help her. But idleness did not suit her. She was eager to live in her own way at last and she discovered a whole mass of activities for herself. She looked after the library in an observation sanatorium just outside Paris as a volunteer, and then the one that belonged to a Catholic club in her neighbourhood. She liked handling books, putting wrappers on them, arranging them, dealing with the tickets, giving advice to readers. She studied German and Italian, and kept up her English. She did embroidery at Dorcas meetings, took part in charity sales, attended lectures. She made herself a great many new friends: she also took up again with former acquaintances and relations whom my father’s surliness had driven away, and she very cheerfully had them all to her studio. At last she was able to satisfy one of her oldest longings, and travel. She fought stubbornly against the anchylosis that was stiffening her legs. She went to see my sister in Vienna and Milan. In the summer she tripped through the streets of Florence and Rome. She went to see the museums of Belgium and Holland. During these last years, when she was almost paralysed, she gave up hurrying about the face of the earth. But when friends or cousins invited her out of Paris or into the country, nothing would stop her: she would have herself hoisted into the train by the guard without a second thought. Her greatest delight was to travel by car. A little while before, her great-niece Catherine had taken her to Meyrignac, driving by night in the little very slow Citroën – close on three hundred miles. She stepped out of the car as fresh as a blossom.

Her vitality filled me with wonder, and I respected her courage. Why, as soon as she could speak again, did she utter words that froze me? Telling me of her night at the Boucicaut she said, ‘You know what the women of the lower classes are like: they moan.’ ‘These hospital nurses, they are only there for the money. So …’ They were ready-made phrases, as automatic as drawing breath; but it was still her consciousness that gave them life and it was impossible to hear them without distress. The contrast between the truth of her suffering body and the nonsense that her head was stuffed with saddened me.

The physiotherapist came to Maman’s bed, turned down the sheet and took hold of her left leg: Maman had an open hospital nightdress on and she did not mind that her wrinkled belly, criss-crossed with tiny lines, and her bald pubis showed. ‘I no longer have any sort of shame,’ she observed in a surprised voice.

‘You are perfectly right not to have any,’ I said. But I turned away and gazed fixedly into the garden. The sight of my mother’s nakedness had jarred me. No body existed less for me: none existed more. As a child I had loved it dearly; as an adolescent it had filled me with an uneasy repulsion: all this was perfectly in the ordinary course of things and it seemed reasonable to me that her body should retain its dual nature, that it should be both repugnant and holy – a taboo. But for all that, I was astonished at the violence of my distress. My mother’s indifferent acquiescence made it worse: she was abandoning the exigencies and prohibitions that had oppressed her all her life long and I approved of her doing so. Only this body, suddenly reduced by her capitulation to being a body and nothing more, hardly differed at all from a corpse – a poor defenceless carcass turned and manipulated by professional hands, one in which life seemed to carry on only because of its own stupid momentum. For me, my mother had always been there, and I had never seriously thought that some day, that soon I should see her go. Her death, like her birth, had its place in some legendary time. When I said to myself ‘She is of an age to die’ the words were devoid of meaning, as so many words are. For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.

The next morning I went to buy the nightdresses that the nurses had asked for – short ones, otherwise they wrinkled under the patient’s bottom, which caused bed-sores.

‘Do you want shorties? Baby-doll nighties?’ asked the shop-assistants. I fingered frothy night-things as nonsensical as their names, in pastel colours, made for young, happy bodies. It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me far more than I had thought it would. I could not really see why. It had wrenched her out of the framework, the role, the set of images in which I had imprisoned her: I recognized her in this patient in bed, but I did not recognize either the pity or the kind of disturbance that she aroused in me. Finally I decided upon some pink three-quarter nightgowns with white spots.

Dr T, who was looking after Maman’s general condition, came to see her while I was there.

‘It seems that you eat too little?’

‘I was depressed this summer. I didn’t have the heart to eat.’

‘You found cooking a nuisance?’

‘What happened was that I made myself little treats, and then I left them.’

‘Aha. It wasn’t laziness, then. So you made yourself little treats?’

Maman concentrated. ‘Once I made myself a cheese soufflé: after two spoonfuls I couldn’t eat any more.’

‘I see,’ said Dr T, with a condescending smile.

Dr J, Professor B, Dr T: neat, trim, shining, well-groomed, bending over this ill-kempt, rather wild-looking old woman from an immense height: great men; bigwigs. I recognized that piddling self-importance: it was that of the judges on the bench when they have a man whose life is at stake before them. ‘So you made yourself little treats?’ There was no reason to smile while Maman was searching her memory with trustful willingness: it was her health that was at stake. And what right had B to say to me ‘She will be able to potter around again’? I objected to his scale of values. I bristled when the privileged classes spoke through my mother’s mouth; but I felt wholly on the side of the bedfast invalid struggling to thrust back paralysis and death.

On the other hand I did like the nurses; they were linked to their patient by the extreme closeness of those necessary tasks that were humiliating for her and revolting for them, and the interest they took in Maman did at least have the appearance of friendship. Mlle Laurent, the physiotherapist, could raise her spirits, give her a sense of security and calm her; and she never assumed any superiority.

‘We will have your stomach X-rayed tomorrow,’ said Dr T, finally.

Maman was distressed. ‘So you are going to make me swallow that horrible stuff.’

‘It’s not as bad as all that!’

‘Oh, but it is.’ When she was alone with me she said pitifully, ‘I can’t tell you how nasty it is. It tastes vile.’

‘Don’t think about it in advance.’

But she could not think about anything else. Ever since she had entered the nursing-home the food had been her chief preoccupation. Still, her childish concern surprised me. She had borne a great deal of sickness and pain without wincing. Was there a deeper anxiety hiding behind the fear of an unpleasant preparation? I did not ask myself that at the time.

The next day they told me that the X-rays – stomach and lungs – had gone off very well, and that there was nothing out of order. Maman, looking calm, wearing one of the pink nightgowns with white spots and the bed-jacket Olga had lent her, and with her hair in a big plait, no longer had the look of a sick woman. The use of her left arm had come back to her; she could unfold a paper, open a book or pick up the telephone without help. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. She did crosswords, read a book on Voltaire in love and Jean de Léry’s account of his expedition in Brazil; she looked through Le Figaro and France-Soir. I came every morning; I only stayed an hour or two; she did not want to keep me any longer. She had a great many visitors and sometimes indeed she complained of it: ‘I have seen too many people today.’ The room was full of flowers – cyclamens, azaleas, roses, anemones; and on her bedside table there were piles of boxes of chocolates and sweets.

‘Don’t you get bored?’ I asked her.

‘Oh, no!’

She was discovering the pleasures of being waited on, looked after, petted. Before, she had had to make a great effort to climb over the edge of her bath, helping herself with a stool; putting on her stockings had meant painful contortions. Now, a nurse came every morning and evening, and rubbed her with eau de Cologne and powdered her with talcum. Her meals were brought on a tray. ‘There is one nurse who irritates me,’ she said. ‘She asks me when I expect to leave. But I don’t want to leave at all.’ When she was told that presently she would be able to sit up in an armchair and that presently she would be transferred to a convalescent home, her face clouded over: ‘They are going to hustle me and push me about.’ Yet there were times when she concerned herself with her future. A friend had talked to her about rest-homes an hour from Paris: ‘No one will come and see me; I shall be too lonely,’ she said unhappily. I assured her that she would not have to go into exile and I showed her the list of addresses I had gathered. She was quite happy to think of herself reading or knitting in the sun in the garden of a home at Neuilly. A little regretfully, but not without irony, she said, ‘The people in my quarter are going to be sorry not to see me any more. The women at the club will miss me.’ Once she said to me, ‘I have lived for others too much. Now I shall become one of those self-centred old women who only live for themselves.’ One thing worried her. ‘I shan’t be able to wash and dress myself any more.’ I set her mind at rest: an attendant, a nurse, would look after that. Meanwhile, she was happily taking her ease in one of the beds of ‘the best nursing-home in Paris, so much better than the G Clinic’. They paid the closest attention to her. As well as the X-rays there had been several blood-tests – everything was normal. Her temperature rose in the evening and I would have liked to know why; but the nurse did not seem to think it at all significant.

‘I saw too many people yesterday, and they tired me,’ she told me on Sunday. She was in a bad mood. Her usual nurses were off duty; an inexperienced girl had upset the bed-pan full of urine; the bed and even the bolster had been soaked. She closed her eyes often, and her recollection was confused. Dr T could not make out the plates that Dr D had sent and the next day there was to be a fresh intestinal X-ray. ‘They will give me a barium enema, and it hurts,’ Maman told me. ‘And they are going to shake me about again and trundle me around: I should so like to be left in peace.’

I pressed her damp, rather cold hand. ‘Don’t think about it in advance. Don’t worry. Worrying is bad for you.’

Gradually her spirits came back, but she seemed weaker than the day before. Friends telephoned and I answered. ‘Well!’ I said to her, ‘There is no end to it. The Queen of England wouldn’t be more spoilt – flowers, letters, sweeties, telephone-calls! What quantities of people think of you!’ I was holding her tired hand: she kept her eyes shut, but there was a faint smile on her sad mouth. ‘They like me because I am cheerful.’

She expected many visitors on Monday and I was busy. I did not come until Tuesday morning. I opened the door and stopped dead. Maman, who was so thin, seemed to have grown still thinner and more shrivelled, wizened, dried up, a pinkish twig. In a somewhat bewildered voice she whispered, ‘They have dried me out completely.’ She had waited until the evening to be X-rayed and for twenty hours on end they had not allowed her to drink. The barium enema had not hurt; but the thirst and the anxiety had quite worn her out. Her face had dissolved: she was tense with unhappiness. What was the result of the X-rays? ‘We can’t understand them.’ the nurses replied in frightened voices. I managed to see Dr T. The information the plates gave was still obscure: according to him there was no ‘pocket’, but the bowel was contorted by spasms, nervous in origin, which had prevented it from working since the day before. My mother was obstinately sanguine; but for all that she was anxious and highly-strung – that was the explanation of her tics. She was too exhausted to see visitors and she asked me to telephone Father P, her confessor, and put him off. She scarcely spoke to me, and she could not manage a smile.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow evening,’ I said as I left. My sister was arriving during the night and she would go to the clinic in the morning. At nine in the evening my telephone rang. It was Professor B. ‘I should like to have a night-nurse for your mother: do you agree? She is not well. You thought of not coming until tomorrow evening: it would be better to be there in the morning.’ In the end he told me that there was a tumour blocking the small intestine: Maman had cancer.

Cancer. It was all about us. Indeed, it was patently obvious – those ringed eyes, that thinness. But her doctor had ruled out that hypothesis. And it is notorious that the parents are the last to admit that their son is mad; the children that their mother has cancer. We believed it all the less since that was what she had been afraid of all her life. When she was forty, if she knocked her chest against a piece of furniture she grew terribly frightened – ‘I shall have cancer of the breast.’ Last winter one of my friends had been operated upon for cancer of the stomach. ‘That is what is going to happen to me, too.’ I had shrugged: there is a very wide difference between cancer and a sluggishness of the bowels that is treated with tamarind jelly. We never imagined that Maman’s obsession could possibly be justified. Yet – she told us this later – it was cancer that Francine Diato thought of: ‘I recognized that expression. And,’ she added, ‘that smell, too.’ Everything became clear. Maman’s sudden illness in Alsace arose from her tumour. The tumour had caused her fainting-fit and her fall. And these two weeks of bed had brought on the blockage of the intestine that had been threatening for a long while.

Poupette, who had telephoned Maman several times, thought she was in excellent health. Poupette was closer to her than I: she was fonder of her, too. I could not let her come to the nursing-home and all at once see death on her face. I telephoned her at the Diatos’, a little while after her train had got in. She was already asleep: what an awakening!

On that Wednesday, 6 November, the gas, the electricity and public transport were on strike. I had asked Bost to come and fetch me by car. Before he arrived Professor B telephoned again: Maman had vomited all night long; in all likelihood she would not get through the day.

The streets were less blocked with traffic than I had feared. At about ten I met Poupette outside the door of room 114. I repeated what Professor B had said. She told me that since the beginning of the morning a resuscitation expert, Dr N, had been working on Maman: he was going to put a tube into her nose to clean out her stomach. ‘But what’s the good of tormenting her, if she is dying? Let her die in peace,’ said Poupette, in tears. I sent her down to Bost, who was waiting in the hall: he would take her to have some coffee. Dr N passed by me; I stopped him. White coat, white cap: a young man with an unresponsive face. ‘Why this tube? Why torture Maman, since there’s no hope?’ He gave me a withering look. ‘I am doing what has to be done.’ He opened the door. After a moment a nurse told me to come in.

The bed was back in its ordinary place in the middle of the room with its head against the wall. On the left there was an intravenous dripper, connected with Maman’s arm. From her nose there emerged a tube of transparent plastic that passed through some complicated apparatus and ended in a jar. Her nose was pinched and her face had shrunk even more: it had the saddest air of submission. In a whisper she told me that the tube did not worry her too much, but that during the night she had suffered a great deal. She was thirsty and she was not allowed to drink: the nurse put a thin tube to her mouth with the other end in a glass of water; Maman moistened her lips, without swallowing. I was fascinated by the sucking motion, at once avid and restrained, of her lip, with its faint downy shadow, that rounded just as it had rounded in my childhood whenever Maman was cross or embarrassed. ‘Would you like me to have left that in her stomach?’ said N aggressively, showing me the jar full of a yellowish substance. I did not reply. In the corridor he said ‘At dawn she had scarcely four hours left. I have brought her back to life.’ I did not venture to ask him ‘For what?’

Consultation of specialists. My sister at my side while a physician and a surgeon, Dr P, palpate the swollen abdomen. Maman groans under their fingers: she cries out. Morphine injection. She still groans. ‘Another injection,’ we beg. They are against it: too much morphine would paralyse the intestine. What are they hoping for then? There is no electricity, because of the strike, and they have sent a blood-sample to the American hospital, which has its own generator. Are they thinking of operating? That is hardly possible, the surgeon tells me as he leaves the room; the patient is too weak. He walks away, and an elderly nurse, Mme Gontrand, who has heard him, bursts out, ‘Don’t let her be operated on!’ Then she claps her hand to her mouth. ‘If Dr N knew I had said that to you! I was speaking as if it were my own mother.’ I question her. ‘What will happen if they do operate on her?’ But she has closed up again: she does not answer.

Maman had gone to sleep: I went away, leaving telephone numbers with Poupette. When she called me at Sartre’s place at about five there was hope in her voice. ‘The surgeon wants to try the operation. The blood analyses are very encouraging; her strength has come back, and her heart will stand it. And after all, it is not absolutely sure that it is cancer: perhaps it is just peritonitis. If it is, she has a chance. Do you agree?’

Don’t let them operate on her.

‘Yes, I agree. When?’

‘Be here by two. They will not tell her they are going to operate; they will say they are going to X-ray her again.’

‘Don’t let them operate on her.’ A frail argument against the decision of a specialist; a frail argument against my sister’s hopes. Maman might not wake up again? That was not the worst way out. And I did not imagine that a surgeon would take that risk: she would get over it. Would the operation hasten the development of the disease? No doubt that is what Mme Gontrand had meant. But with the intestinal obstruction at this stage Maman could not survive three days, and I was terribly afraid that her death might be appalling.

An hour later the telephone, and Poupette sobbing, ‘Come at once. They have operated: they found a huge cancerous tumour …’ Sartre went down with me; he took me in a taxi as far as the nursing-home. My throat was constricted with anguish. A male nurse showed me the lobby between the entrance-hall and the operating-theatre where my sister was waiting. She was so upset that I asked for a tranquillizer for her. She told me that the doctors had warned Maman, in a very natural voice, that before X-raying her they would give her a sedative injection; Dr N had put her to sleep; Poupette had held Maman’s hand right through the anaesthetizing, and I could imagine what a trial it had been for her, the sight of that old, ravaged body, quite naked – that body which was her mother’s. Maman’s eyes had turned up; her mouth had opened: Poupette would never be able to forget that face, either. They had wheeled her into the operating-theatre and Dr N had come out a moment later: four pints of pus in the abdomen, the peritoneum burst, a huge tumour, a cancer of the worst kind. The surgeon was removing everything that could be removed. While we were there, waiting, my cousin Jeanne came in with her daughter Chantal; she had just come from Limoges and she thought she would find Maman quietly in bed: Chantal had brought a book of crossword puzzles. We discussed what we should say to Maman when she woke up. It was easy enough: the X-ray had shown that she had peritonitis and an operation had been decided upon at once.

Maman had just been taken up to her room, N told us. He was triumphant: she had been half-dead that morning and yet she had withstood a long and serious operation excellently. Thanks to the very latest methods of anaesthesia her heart, lungs, the whole organism had continued to function normally. There was no sort of doubt that he entirely washed his hands of the consequences of that feat. My sister had said to the surgeon, ‘Operate on Maman. But if it is cancer, promise me that you will not let her suffer.’ He had promised. What was his word worth?

Maman was sleeping, lying flat on her back, her face the colour of wax, her nose pinched, her mouth open. My sister and a night-nurse would sit up with her. I went home; I talked to Sartre; we played some Bartók. Suddenly, at eleven, an outburst of tears that almost degenerated into hysteria.

Amazement. When my father died I did not cry at all. I had said to my sister, ‘It will be the same for Maman.’ I had understood all my sorrows up until that night: even when they flowed over my head I recognized myself in them. This time my despair escaped from my control: someone other than myself was weeping in me. I talked to Sartre about my mother’s mouth as I had seen it that morning and about everything I had interpreted in it – greediness refused, an almost servile humility, hope, distress, loneliness – the loneliness of her death and of her life – that did not want to admit its existence. And he told me that my own mouth was not obeying me any more: I had put Maman’s mouth on my own face and in spite of myself, I copied its movements. Her whole person, her whole being, was concentrated there, and compassion wrung my heart.