A Very Easy Death

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As SOON AS I woke up, I telephoned my sister. Maman had come to in the middle of the night; she knew that she had been operated upon and she hardly seemed at all surprised. I took a cab. The same journey, the same warm blue autumn, the same nursing-home. But I was stepping into another story: instead of a convalescence, a deathbed. Before, I came here to spend comparatively unemotional hours; I went through the hall without paying attention. It was behind those closed doors that the tragedies were taking place: nothing showed through. From now on one of these dramas belonged to me. I went up the stairs as quickly as I could, as slowly as I could. Now there was a sign hanging on the door: No Visitors. The scene had changed. The bed was in the position it had been the day before, with both sides free. The sweets had been put away in cupboards; so had the books. There were no flowers any more on the big table in the corner, but bottles, balloon-flasks, test-tubes. Maman was asleep: she no longer had the tube in her nose and it was less painful to look at her, but, under the bed, one could see jars and pipes that communicated with her stomach and her intestines. Her left arm was attached to an intravenous drip. She was no longer wearing any clothes whatever: the bed-jacket was spread over her chest and her naked shoulders. A new character had made her appearance – a private nurse, Mademoiselle Leblon, as gracious as an Ingres portrait. She had a blue headdress to cover her hair and white padded slippers on her feet: she supervised the drip and shook the flask to dilute its plasma. My sister told me that according to the doctors a respite of some weeks or even of some months was not impossible. She had said to Professor B ‘But what shall we say to Maman when the disease starts again, in another place?’. ‘Don’t worry about that. We shall find something to say. We always do. And the patient always believes it.’

In the afternoon Maman had her eyes open: she spoke so that one could hardly make out what she said, but sensibly. ‘Well,’ I said to her, ‘so you break your leg and they go and operate on you for appendicitis!’

She raised one finger and, with a certain pride, whispered, ‘Not appendicitis. Pe-ri-ton-it-is.’ She added. ‘What luck … be here.’

‘You are glad that I am here?’

‘No. Me.’ Peritonitis: and her being in this clinic had saved her! The betrayal was beginning. ‘Glad not to have that tube. So glad!’

With the removal of the filth that had swollen her abdomen the day before, she was no longer in pain. And with her two daughters at her bedside she believed that she was safe. When Dr P and Dr N came in she said to them in a contented voice, ‘I am not forsaken,’ before she closed her eyes again. They spoke to one another: ‘It is extraordinary how quickly she has picked up. Amazing!’ Indeed it was. Thanks to the transfusions and the infusions Maman’s face had some colour again and a look of health. The poor suffering thing that had been lying on this bed the day before had turned back into a woman.

I showed Maman the book of crosswords Chantal had brought. Speaking to the nurse she faltered, ‘I have a big dictionary, the new Larousse; I treated myself to it, for crosswords.’ That dictionary: one of her last delights. She had talked to me about it for a long time before she bought it, and her face lit up every time I consulted it. ‘We’ll bring it for you,’ I said.

‘Yes. And Le Nouvel Œdipe too; I have not got all the …’

One had to listen very intently to catch the words that she laboured to breathe out; words whose mystery made them as disturbing as those of an oracle. Her memories, her desires, her anxieties were floating somewhere outside time, turned into unreal and poignant dreams by her childlike voice and the imminence of her death.

She slept a great deal; from time to time she took up a few drops of water through the tube; she spat in paper handkerchiefs that the nurse held to her mouth. In the evening she began to cough: Mademoiselle Laurent, who had come to ask after her, straightened her up, massaged her and helped her to spit. Afterwards Maman looked at her with a real smile – the first for four days.

Poupette decided to spend her nights at the nursing-home. ‘You were with Papa and Grandmama when they died; I was far away,’ she said to me. ‘I am going to look after Maman. Besides, I want to stay with her.’

I agreed. Maman was astonished. ‘What do you want to sleep here for?’

‘I slept in Lionel’s room when he was operated on. It’s always done.’

‘Oh, I see.’

I went home, feverish with ’flu. Leaving the overheated clinic I had caught cold in the autumnal dampness: I went to bed, stupefied with pills. I did not switch off the telephone: Maman might die at any moment, ‘blown out like a candle’, said the doctors, and my sister was to call me at the least alarm. The bell woke me with a start: four in the morning. ‘It is the end.’ I picked up the receiver and heard an unknown voice: a wrong number. I could not get to sleep again until dawn. At half-past eight the telephone bell again: I ran for it – an utterly unimportant message. I loathed the hearse-black apparatus: ‘Your mother has cancer. Your mother will not get through the night.’ One of these days it would crackle into my ear, ‘It is the end.’

I go through the garden. I go into the hall. You might think you were in an airport – low tables, modern armchairs, people kissing one another as they say hallo or good-bye, others waiting, suitcases, hold-alls, flowers in the vases, bouquets wrapped in shiny paper as if they were meant for welcoming travellers about to land … But there is a feeling of something not quite right in the whisperings, the expressions. And sometimes a man entirely clothed in white appears in the opening of the door at the far end, and there is blood on his shoes. I go up one floor. On my left a long corridor with the bedrooms, the nurses’ rooms and the duty-room. On the right a square lobby furnished with an upholstered bench and a desk with a white telephone standing upon it. The one side gives on to a waiting-room; the other on to room 114. No Visitors. Beyond the door I come to a short passage: on the left the lavatory with the wash-stand, the bed-pan, cotton-wool, jars; on the right a cupboard which holds Maman’s things; on a coat-hanger there is the red dressing-gown, all dusty. ‘I never want to see that dressing-gown again.’ I open the second door. Before, I went through all this without seeing it. Now I know that it will form part of my life for ever.

‘I am very well,’ said Maman. With a knowing air she added, ‘When the doctors were talking to one another yesterday, I heard them. They said, “It’s amazing!” ’ This word delighted her: she often pronounced it, gravely, as though it were a spell that guaranteed her recovery. Yet she still felt very weak and her overriding desire was to avoid the slightest effort. Her dream was to be fed by drip all her life long. ‘I shall never eat again.’

‘What, you who so loved your food?’

‘No. I shall not eat any more.’

Mademoiselle Leblon took a brush and comb to do her hair for her: ‘Cut it all off,’ Maman ordered firmly. We protested. ‘You will tire me: cut it off, do.’ She insisted with a strange obstinacy: it was as though she wanted to bring lasting rest by making this sacrifice. Gently Mademoiselle Leblon undid her plait and untangled her hair; she plaited it again and pinned the silvery coil round Maman’s head. Maman’s relaxed face had recovered a surprising purity and I thought of a Leonardo drawing of a very beautiful old woman. ‘You are as beautiful as a Leonardo,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘I was not so bad, once upon a time.’ In a rather mysterious voice she told the nurse, ‘I had lovely hair, and I did it up in bandeaux round my head.’ And she went on talking about herself, how she had taken her librarian’s diploma, her love for books. As Mademoiselle Leblon answered, she was preparing a flask of serum: she explained to me that the clear fluid also contained glucose and various salts. ‘A positive cocktail,’ I observed.

All day long we dazed Maman with plans. She listened, with her eyes closed. My sister and her husband had just bought an old farmhouse in Alsace and they were going to have it done up. Maman would have a big room, completely independent, and there she would finish her convalescence. ‘But wouldn’t it bore Lionel if I were to stay for a long while?’

‘Of course not.’

‘To be sure, I wouldn’t be in the way there. At Scharrachbergen it was too small: I was a nuisance.’

We talked about Meyrignac. Maman went back to her memories of the time she was a young woman there. And for years past she had been enthusiastically telling me about the improvements at Meyrignac. She was very fond of Jeanne, whose three elder daughters lived in Paris and very often came to see her at the clinic – pretty, blooming, cheerful girls.

‘I have no granddaughters and they have no grandmother,’ she explained to Mademoiselle Leblon. ‘So I am their grandmother.’

While she was dozing I looked at a paper: opening her eyes she asked me, ‘What is happening at Saigon?’ I told her the news. Once, in a tone of bantering reproof, she observed, ‘I was operated on behind my back!’ and when Dr P came in she said, ‘Here is the guilty man,’ but in a laughing voice. He stayed with her for a little while, and when he remarked, ‘It is never too late to learn’, she replied in a rather solemn tone, ‘Yes. I have learnt that I had peritonitis.’

I said jokingly, ‘You really are extraordinary! You come in to have your femur patched up, and they operate on you for peritonitis!’

‘It’s quite true. I am not an ordinary woman at all!’

This circumstance, this mistake, amused her for days. ‘I tricked Professor B thoroughly. He thought he was going to operate on my leg, but in fact Dr P operated on me for peritonitis.’

What touched our hearts that day was the way she noticed the slightest agreeable sensation: it was as though, at the age of seventy-eight, she were waking afresh to the miracle of living. While the nurse was settling her pillows the metal of a tube touched her thigh – ‘It’s cool! How pleasant!’ She breathed in the smell of eau de Cologne and talcum powder – ‘How good it smells.’ She had the bunches of flowers and the plants arranged on her wheeled table. ‘The little red roses come from Meyrignac. At Meyrignac there are roses still.’ She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. ‘How lovely. I shouldn’t see that from my flat!’ She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now?

‘If she has a few days of happiness like this, keeping her alive will have been worth while,’ said Poupette to me. But what was it going to cost?

‘This is a death-chamber,’ I thought the next day. Across the window there was a heavy blue curtain. (The blind was broken and it could not be pulled down; but formerly the light had not worried Maman.) She was lying in the darkness with her eyes closed. I took her hand and she whispered, ‘It’s Simone: and I can’t see you!’ Poupette left; I opened a detective story. From time to time Maman sighed, ‘I am not in my right mind.’ To Dr P she complained, ‘I am in a coma.’

‘If you were, you wouldn’t know it.’

That reply comforted her. A little later she said to me with a thoughtful air, ‘I have undergone a very grave operation. I am a person who has been operated upon in a very serious way.’ I improved on this and little by little she recovered her spirits. The evening before, she told me, she had dreamed with her eyes open. ‘There were men in the room, evil men dressed in blue; they wanted to take me away and make me drink cocktails. Your sister sent them off …’ I had said the word cocktail, talking about the mixture that Mademoiselle Leblon was getting ready; she was wearing a blue headdress; as for the men, they were the male nurses who had taken Maman off to the operating theatre. ‘Yes. That’s it, no doubt …’ She asked me to open the window. ‘How pleasant it is to have fresh air.’ Birds were singing and she was enchanted. ‘Birds!’ And before I went away she said, ‘It’s odd. I feel a yellow light on my left cheek. A pretty light coming through a yellow paper: it’s very pleasant.’

I asked Dr P, ‘Has the operation in itself been a success?’

‘It will have been a success if the movement through the intestines starts again. We shall know within two or three days.’

I liked Dr P. He did not assume consequential airs; he talked to Maman as though she were a human being and he answered my questions willingly. On the other hand, Dr N and I did not get along together at all. He was smart, athletic, energetic, infatuated with technique, and he had resuscitated Maman with great zeal; but for him she was the subject of an interesting experiment and not a person. He frightened us. Maman had an old relative who had been kept alive in a coma for the last six months. ‘I hope you wouldn’t let them keep me going like that,’ she had said to us. ‘It’s horrible!’ If Dr N took it into his head to beat a record he would be a dangerous opponent.

‘He woke Maman to give her an enema that did not work,’ Poupette told me in distress on Sunday morning. ‘Why does he torment her?’ I stopped N as he went by: he never spoke to me of his own accord. Once again I begged him, ‘Do not torment her.’ And in an outraged tone he replied, ‘I am not tormenting her. I am doing what has to be done.’

The blue curtain was raised, the room less gloomy. Maman had had herself bought some dark glasses. She took them off as I came in. ‘Ah, today I can see you!’ She felt well in herself. In a calm voice she said, ‘Tell me, have I a right side?’

‘How do you mean? Of course you have.’

‘It’s funny: yesterday they told me that I looked well. But I only looked well on the left side. I felt the other was all grey. It seemed to me that I had no right side any more – that I was divided into two. Now it’s coming back a little.’

I touched her right cheek. ‘Do you feel that?’

‘Yes, but as though it were a dream.’

I touched her left cheek.

‘That’s real,’ she said.

The broken thigh, the operation-wound, the dressings, the tubes, the infusions – all that happened on the left side. Was that why the other no longer seemed to exist?

‘You look splendid. The doctors are very pleased with you,’ I asserted.

‘No. Dr N is not pleased: he wants me to break wind for him.’ She smiled to herself. ‘When I get out of here I shall send him a box of those chocolate dog-messes.’

The pneumatic mattress massaged her skin; there were pads between her knees, and they had a hoop over them to prevent the sheets from touching; another arrangement stopped her heels touching the draw-sheet: but for all that, bed-sores were beginning to appear all over her body. With her hips paralysed by arthritis, her right arm half powerless and her left immovably fixed to the intravenous dripper, she could not make the first beginnings of a movement.

‘Pull me up,’ she said.

I dared not, all by myself. I was not worried by her nakedness any more: it was no longer my mother, but a poor tormented body. Yet I was frightened by the horrible mystery that I sensed, without in any way visualizing anything, under the dressings, and I was afraid of hurting her. That morning she had had to have another enema and Mademoiselle Leblon had needed my help. I took hold of that skeleton clothed in damp blue skin, holding under the armpits. When Maman was laid over on her side, her face screwed up, her eyes turned back and she cried, ‘I am going to fall.’ She was remembering the time she had fallen down. Standing by the side of her bed I held her and comforted her.

We sat her up again, carefully propped with pillows. After a moment she exlaimed, ‘I have broken wind!’ A little later she cried, ‘Quick! The bed-pan.’

Mademoiselle Leblon and a red-haired nurse tried to put her on to a bed-pan; she cried out; seeing her raw flesh and the harsh gleam of the metal, I had the impression that they were setting her down on knife-edges. The two women urged her, pulled her about, and the red-haired nurse was rough with her; Maman cried out, her body tense with pain. ‘Ah! Leave her alone!’ I said.

I went out with the nurses. ‘It doesn’t matter. Let her do it in her bed.’

‘But it is so humiliating,’ protested Mademoiselle Leblon. ‘Patients cannot bear it.’

‘And she will be soaked,’ said the red-head. ‘It is very bad for her bed-sores.’

‘You can change the clothes at once,’ I said.

I went back to Maman. ‘That red-haired one is an evil woman,’ she moaned in her little girl’s voice. And much distressed she added, ‘Still, I didn’t think I was a cry-baby.’

‘You aren’t one.’ And I said to her, ‘You don’t have to bother about a bed-pan. They will change the sheets – there’s no sort of difficulty about it.’

‘Yes,’ she replied. And with a frown and a look of determination on her face she said, as though she were uttering a challenge, ‘The dead certainly do it in their beds.’

This took me completely aback. ‘It is so humiliating.’ And Maman, who had lived a life bristling with proud sensitivities, felt no shame. In this prim and spiritualistic woman it was also a form of courage to take on our animality with so much decision.

She was changed, cleaned and rubbed with alcohol. Now it was time for her to have a quite painful injection that was meant, I think, to counteract the urea, which she was not getting rid of properly. She seemed so exhausted that Mademoiselle Leblon hesitated. ‘Do it,’ said Maman, ‘since it’s good for me.’

Once more we turned her over on to her side; I held her and I watched her face, which showed a mixture of confused distress, courage, hope and anguish. ‘Since it is good for me.’ In order to get well. In order to die. I should have liked to beg someone to forgive me.

The next day I learnt that the afternoon had passed off well. A young male nurse had taken Mademoiselle Leblon’s place and Poupette said to Maman, ‘How lucky you are to have such a young, kind nurse.’

‘Yes,’ said Maman, ‘he’s a good-looking fellow.’

‘And you are a judge of men!’

‘Oh, not much of a judge,’ said Maman, with nostalgia in her voice.

‘You have regrets?’

Maman laughed and said, ‘I always say to my grandnieces, “My dears, make the most of your life.” ’

‘Now I understand why they love you so much. But you would never have said that to your daughters?’

‘To my daughters?’ said Maman, with sudden severity. ‘Certainly not!’

Dr P had brought her an eighty-year-old woman on whom he was to operate the next day and who was frightened: Maman lectured her, setting forth her own case as an example.

‘They are using me as an advertisement,’ she told me in an amused voice on Monday. She asked me, ‘Has my right side come back? I really do have a right side?’

‘Of course you have. Look at yourself,’ said my sister.

Maman fixed an unbelieving, severe and haughty gaze upon the mirror. ‘Is that me?’

‘Why, yes. You can see that all your face is there.’

‘It is quite grey.’

‘That’s the light. You are really pink.’

She did in fact look very well. Nevertheless, when she smiled at Mademoiselle Leblon she said to her, ‘Ah! This time I smiled at you with the whole of my mouth. Before, I only had half a smile.’

In the afternoon she was not smiling any more. Several times she repeated, in a surprised and blaming voice, ‘When I saw myself in the mirror I thought I was so ugly!’ The night before, something had gone wrong with the intravenous drip: the tube had had to be taken out and then thrust back into the vein. The night-nurse had fumbled, the liquid had flowed under the skin and it had hurt Maman very much. Her blue and hugely swollen arm was swathed in bandages. The apparatus was now attached to her right arm: her tired veins could just put up with the serum, but the plasma forced groans from her. In the evening an intense anxiety came over her: she was afraid of the night, of some fresh accident, of pain. With her face all tense she begged, ‘Watch over the drip very carefully!’ And that evening too, as I looked at her arm, into which there was flowing a life that was no longer anything but sickness and torment, I asked myself why?

At the nursing-home I did not have time to go into it. I had to help Maman to spit; I had to give her something to drink, arrange her pillows or her plait, move her leg, water her flowers, open the window, close it, read her the paper, answer her questions, wind up the watch that lay on her chest, hanging from a black ribbon. She took a pleasure in her dependence and she called for our attention all the time. But when I reached home, all the sadness and horror of these last days dropped upon me with all its weight. And I too had a cancer eating into me – remorse. ‘Don’t let them operate on her.’ And I had not prevented anything. Often, hearing of sick people undergoing a long martyrdom, I had felt indignant at the apathy of their relatives. ‘For my part, I should kill him.’ At the first trial I had given in: beaten by the ethics of society, I had abjured my own. ‘No,’ Sartre said to me. ‘You were beaten by technique: and that was fatal.’ Indeed it was. One is caught up in the wheels and dragged along, powerless in the face of specialists’ diagnoses, their forecasts, their decisions. The patient becomes their property: get him away from them if you can! There were only two things to choose between on that Wednesday – operating or euthanasia. Maman, vigorously resuscitated, and having a strong heart, would have stood out against the intestinal stoppage for a long while and she would have lived through hell, for the doctors would have refused euthanasia. I ought to have been there at six in the morning. But even so, would I have dared say to N, ‘Let her go’? That was what I was suggesting when I begged, ‘Do not torment her’, and he had snubbed me with all the arrogance of a man who is certain of his duty. They would have said to me, ‘You may be depriving her of several years of life.’ And I was forced to yield. These arguments did not bring me peace. The future horrified me. When I was fifteen my uncle Maurice died of cancer of the stomach. I was told that for days on end he shrieked ‘Finish me off. Give me my revolver. Have pity on me.’ Would Dr P keep his promise: ‘She shall not suffer’? A race had begun between death and torture. I asked myself how one manages to go on living when someone you love has called out to you ‘Have pity on me’ in vain.

And even if death were to win, all this odious deception! Maman thought that we were with her, next to her; but we were already placing ourselves on the far side of her history. An evil all-knowing spirit, I could see behind the scenes, while she was struggling, far, far away, in human loneliness. Her desperate eagerness to get well, her patience, her courage – it was all deceived. She would not be paid for any of her sufferings at all. I saw her face again: ‘Since it is good for me.’ Despairingly, I suffered a transgression that was mine without my being responsible for it and one that I could never expiate.

Maman had passed a quiet night: the nurse, seeing her anxiety, had held her hand all the time. They had found a way of putting her on the bed-pan without hurting her. She was beginning to eat again and presently the infusions would be stopped. ‘This evening!’ she begged.

‘This evening or tomorrow,’ said N.

In these circumstances there would still be a night-nurse, but my sister would sleep at her friends’ house. I asked Dr P’s advice. Sartre was taking the plane for Prague the next day: should I go with him? ‘Anything at all can happen, and at any time. But this state of affairs can also last for months. You would never get away. Prague is only an hour and a half from Paris, and telephoning is easy.’

I spoke to Maman about the plan. ‘Of course you must go! I don’t need you,’ she said. My going finally convinced her that she was out of danger. ‘I was very far gone! Peritonitis at seventy-eight! What luck that I was here! What luck they hadn’t operated on my leg.’ Her left arm, free of its bandages, had gone down a little. Carefully she raised her hand to her face and touched her nose, her mouth. ‘I had the feeling that my eyes were in the middle of my cheeks and that my nose was right down at the bottom of my face, all bent. It’s odd …’

Maman had not been in the habit of taking notice of herself. Now her body forced itself upon her attention. Ballasted with this weight, she no longer floated in the clouds and she no longer said anything that shocked me. When she spoke of the Boucicaut, it was to say how sorry she was for the patients who were condemned to a public ward. She was on the side of the nurses against the management, which was exploiting them. In spite of the gravity of her condition she never varied from the careful consideration that she had always shown. She was afraid of giving Mademoiselle Leblon too much work. She said thank you; she apologized – ‘All this blood they are using on an old woman, when there are young people who might need it!’ She blamed herself for taking up my time. ‘You have things to do, and you spend hours and hours here: it vexes me!’ There was some pride, but there was also remorse in her voice when she said, ‘My poor dears! I have upset you! You must have been terrified.’ Her anxiety extended to us, too. On Thursday morning, when the maid brought my sister’s breakfast, Maman was scarcely out of her coma, but she whispered, ‘Conf … conf …’

‘Confessor?’

‘No. Confiture.’ She was remembering that my sister liked jam for breakfast.

She was deeply concerned about the sales of my last book. As Mademoiselle Leblon was being evicted by her landlord, Maman agreed with my sister’s suggestion that she should stay at the studio: usually she could not bear the idea of anyone going into her place when she was not there. Her illness had quite broken the shell of her prejudices and her pretensions: perhaps because she no longer needed these defences. No question of renunciation or sacrifice any more: her first duty was to get better and so to look after herself; giving herself up to her own wishes and her own pleasures with no holding back, she was at last freed from resentment. Her restored beauty and her recovered smile expressed her inner harmony and, on this death-bed, a kind of happiness.

We noticed, and we were rather surprised at it, that she had not asked that her confessor, who had been put off on Tuesday, should come again. Well before her operation she had said to Marthe, ‘Pray for me, my dear, because when you are ill, you know, you can’t pray any more.’ No doubt she was too much taken up with getting well to undergo the fatigues of religious practices. One day Dr N said to her, ‘Recovering as quickly as this must mean that you are on good terms with God!’

‘Oh, we get along very well. But I don’t want to go and see Him right away.’

The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die. Of course, her devout friends thought that we were going against her wishes, and they tried to force matters. In spite of the notice No Visitors, one morning my sister saw a priest’s cassock in the opening door: she briskly thrust him back. ‘I am Father Avril. I have come as a friend.’

‘I don’t mind. Your clothes would frighten Maman.’

On Monday, a fresh intrusion. ‘Maman cannot see anyone,’ said my sister, drawing Madame de Saint-Ange into the lobby.

‘Very well. But I must discuss a very serious question with you: I know your mother’s beliefs …’

‘I know them too,’ replied my sister curtly. ‘Maman has all her faculties. The day she asks to see a priest she shall do so.’

When I left for Prague on Wednesday morning she had still not asked for one.