A Very Easy Death

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AT NOON I telephoned. ‘Haven’t you gone, then?’ said Poupette, so clearly did she hear me. Maman was very well; on Thursday, too; on Friday she talked to me, pleased that I should be calling her from so far away. She was reading a little, and doing crosswords. On Saturday I was not able to telephone. At half past eleven on Sunday evening I asked for the Diatos’ number: while I was waiting in my bedroom for the call to be put through, I was brought a telegram. ‘Maman very ill. Can you come back?’ Francine told me that Poupette was spending the night at the clinic. A little while after I got through to her. ‘A dreadful day,’ she told me. ‘I held Maman’s hand all the time and she kept begging me not to let her go. She said, “I shall not see Simone again.” Now they have given her equanil and she is sleeping.’

I asked the porter to reserve me a place in the aeroplane that was leaving the next morning at half past ten. Engagements had been fixed; Sartre advised me to wait a day or two. Impossible. I did not particularly want to see Maman again before her death; but I could not bear the idea that she should not see me again. Why attribute such importance to a moment since there would be no memory? There would not be any atonement either. For myself I understood, to the innermost fibre of my being, that the absolute could be enclosed within the last moments of a dying person.

At half past one on Monday I walked into room 114. Maman had been told of my coming back, and she thought it was in line with my plans. She took off her dark glasses and smiled at me. Under the effect of the tranquillizers she was in a state of euphoria. Her face had changed; its colour was yellow and a puffy fold ran down from under her right eye along her nose. Yet there were flowers again on all the tables. Mademoiselle Leblon had gone; Maman no longer needed a private nurse since the intravenous drip had been stopped. The evening I left, Mademoiselle Leblon had begun a transfusion that was meant to go on for two hours: Maman’s overburdened veins could bear blood even less than they could bear plasma. She cried out for five minutes on end. ‘Stop!’ Poupette had said. The nurse resisted. ‘What will Dr N say?’ ‘I take full responsibility.’ N was indeed very angry. ‘The cicatrization will be slower.’ Yet he knew very well that the wound would not close; it was forming a fistula through which the intestine was emptying itself – it was that which was preventing a fresh blockage, for the intestinal motion, the ‘traffic’, had stopped. How long would Maman hold out? According to the analyses the tumour was an extremely virulent sarcoma which had begun to disseminate throughout the organism: in view of her age, however, the development might be quite slow.

She told me about her last two days. On Saturday she had begun a novel by Simenon and had beaten Poupette at crosswords – there was a pile of the squares that she cut out of the papers on her table. On Sunday she had had mashed potatoes for lunch which had not gone down properly (in fact it was the beginning of the metastases that played havoc with her) and she had a long waking nightmare. ‘I was in a blue sheet, over a hole; your sister was holding the sheet and I begged her, “Don’t let me fall into the hole …” “I am holding you; you will not fall,” said Poupette.’

Poupette had spent the night sitting up in an armchair and Maman, who was usually anxious about Poupette’s sleep, said, ‘Stay awake; don’t let me go. If I go to sleep, wake me up; don’t let me go while I am sleeping.’ At one moment, my sister told me, Maman closed her eyes, exhausted. Her hands clawed the sheets and she articulated, ‘Live! Live!’

To spare her this anguish, the doctors had prescribed pills, and injections of equanil; Maman avidly insisted upon having them. She was in an excellent mood all day long. Again she picked upon the strangeness of her impressions. ‘There was a tiresome round opposite me. Your sister could not see it. I said to her, “Cover that round.” She could not see any round.’ It was a little metal plate set in the window-frame and it had been covered by pulling down the blind a little – they had at last repaired it. She had seen Chantal and Catherine, and in a satisfied tone she told us, ‘Dr P said to me that I had been very clever. I have managed things very cleverly – while I am getting over my operation my femur is joining up again.’ In the evening I suggested taking my sister’s place, for she had scarcely closed her eyes the night before; but Maman was used to her; and she thought her much more competent than me, since she had looked after Lionel.

The day of Tuesday passed off well. In the night Maman had horrible dreams. ‘They put me in a box,’ she said to my sister. ‘I am here, but I am in the box. I am myself, and yet it is not me any longer. Men carry the box away!’ She struggled. ‘Don’t let them carry me away!’

For a long while Poupette kept her hand on Maman’s forehead. ‘I promise. They shall not put you in the box.’

She asked for an extra dose of equanil. Saved from her visions at last, Maman questioned her. ‘But what does it all mean, this box, and these men?’

‘They are memories of your operation: male nurses carried you on a stretcher.’

Maman went to sleep. But in the morning there was all the sadness of a defenceless animal in her eyes. When the nurses made her bed, and then made her urinate with a catheter, it hurt her and she groaned: in a faint voice she asked me, ‘Do you think I shall come through?’

I scolded her. Timidly she questioned Dr N. ‘Are you pleased with me?’

He answered yes without the least conviction, but she clung to this lifebuoy. She always discovered excellent reasons to justify her extreme weariness. There had been dehydration; the mashed potatoes were too heavy; on that particular day she blamed the nurses for only having given her three dressings instead of four the day before. ‘Dr N was furious, in the evening,’ she said. ‘How he blew them up!’ Several times she repeated, ‘He was furious!’ in a satisfied tone. Her face had lost its beauty; it jerked with nervous tics; rancour and demandingness showed through in her voice once again.

‘I am so very tired,’ she sighed. She had agreed to see Marthe’s brother, a young Jesuit, in the afternoon.

‘Would you like me to put him off?’

‘No. Your sister will like to see him. They will talk theology. I shall close my eyes: I won’t have to talk.’

She ate no lunch. She went to sleep, with her head drooping forward: when Poupette opened the door she thought it was all over. Charles Cordonnier only stayed five minutes. He spoke of the luncheons to which his father used to invite Maman every week. ‘I certainly expect to see you in the boulevard Raspail again, one of these Thursdays.’

She gazed at him, incredulous and distressed. ‘Do you think I shall go there again?’

I had never yet seen such a look of unhappiness on her face: that day she guessed that there was no hope for her. We thought the end so close that when Poupette came I did not go.

‘So I am getting worse, since you are both here,’ she murmured.

‘We are always here.’

‘Not both at the same time.’

Once again I pretended to be cross. ‘I’m staying because you are low in your spirits. But if it only worries you, I’ll go away.’

‘No, no,’ she said, in a downcast voice.

My unfair harshness wrung my heart. At the time the truth was crushing her and when she needed to escape from it by talking, we were condemning her to silence; we forced her to say nothing about her anxieties and to suppress her doubts: as it had so often happened in her life, she felt both guilty and misunderstood. But we had no choice: hope was her most urgent need. Chantal and Catherine had been so frightened by her appearance that they had telephoned to Limoges to advise their mother to come back.

Poupette was utterly tired out. ‘I am going to sleep here tonight,’ I decided.

Maman looked uneasy. ‘Will you be able to manage? Will you know how to put your hand on my forehead if I have nightmares?’

‘Of course I will.’

She thought it over; she looked at me intently. ‘You frighten me, you do.’

I had always rather intimidated Maman because of the intellectual esteem that she had for me, and that she resolutely declined to have for her younger daughter. It worked the other way too: her prudishness had frozen me at a very early age. As a child I was a frank little girl; and then I saw the way grown-ups lived, each shut up inside little private walls; sometimes Maman made a hole in the walls, a hole that was quickly plugged up again. ‘She told me in confidence,’ whispered Maman with a consequential air. Or a crack was discovered from outside. ‘She is very close, and she told me nothing; but it seems that …’ The confessions and the gossip had something furtive about them that I found revolting, and I wanted my ramparts to be impregnable. I was particularly diligent in giving away nothing to Maman, out of fear of her distress and horror of having her peer into me. Soon she no longer ventured to ask me questions. Our brief confrontation on my loss of faith cost us both a great deal. The sight of her tears grieved me; but I soon realized that she was weeping over her failure, without caring about what was happening inside me. And she antagonized me by preferring the force of authority to friendliness. We might still have come to an understanding if, instead of asking everybody to pray for my soul, she had given me a little confidence and sympathy. I know now what prevented her from doing so: she had too much to pay back, too many wounds to salve, to put herself in another’s place. In actual doing she made every sacrifice, but her feelings did not take her out of herself. Besides, how could she have tried to understand me since she avoided looking into her own heart? As for discovering an attitude that would not have set us apart, nothing in her life had ever prepared her for such a thing: the unexpected sent her into a panic, because she had been taught never to think, act or feel except in a ready-made framework.

The silence between us became quite impenetrable. Until She Came to Stay came out she knew almost nothing at all about my life. She tried to persuade herself that at least as far as morals were concerned I was ‘a good girl’. Public rumour destroyed her illusions; but at that particular time our relationship had changed. She was financially dependent upon me; she took no practical decision without consulting me; I was the family’s breadwinner – her son, as it were. Then again, I was a well-known writer. These circumstances to some degree excused the irregularity of my life, which in any case she minimized – a free union was, after all, less impious than a civil marriage. She was often shocked by what was in my books; but she was flattered by their success. But this, by giving me authority in her eyes, made her conflict worse. It was useless for me to avoid all argument – or maybe for the very reason that I did avoid it, she thought that I was sitting in judgment on her. Poupette, ‘the baby’, was less respected than I was; she had been less marked by Maman, and so she had not inherited her stiffness; and she had a freer relationship with her. Poupette undertook to give her all the comforting assurances that could be thought of when my Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter came out. For my part, I confined myself to taking her a bunch of flowers and making the simplest apology: I may add that this moved and astonished her. One day she said to me, ‘Parents do not understand their children; but it works both ways …’ We talked about these misunderstandings, but in a general way. And we never returned to the question. I would knock. I would hear a little moaning noise, the scuffling of her slippers on the floor, another sigh; and I would promise myself that this time I should find things to talk about, a common ground of understanding. By the end of five minutes the game was lost: we had so few shared interests! I leafed through her books: we did not read the same ones. I made her talk; I listened to her; I commented. But since she was my mother, her unpleasant phrases irked me more than if they had come from any other mouth. And I was as rigid as I had been at twenty when she tried (with her usual clumsiness) to move on to an intimate plane. ‘I know you don’t think me intelligent; but still, you get your vitality from me. The idea makes me happy.’ I should have been delighted to agree that my vitality came from her; but the beginning of her remark utterly chilled me. So we each paralysed the other. It was all that that she meant, when she looked firmly at me and said, ‘You frighten me, you do.’

I put on my sister’s nightdress; I lay down on the couch beside Maman’s bed: for my part, too, I was apprehensive. As the evening came on, the room grew dismal; it was lit only by the bedside lamp, for Maman had had the blind pulled down. I felt that the gloom made its funereal mystery even deeper. In fact, I slept better that night, and the three that followed it, than at home, for I was shielded from the anxiety of the telephone and from the wild running of my imagination: I was there; I thought of nothing.

Maman had no nightmares. The first night she often woke and asked for a drink. The second, her coccyx hurt her a great deal: Mademoiselle Cournot laid her on her right side, but then her arm tortured her. They set her on a round rubber cushion, which eased the place that hurt; but there was the danger that it might harm the skin of her buttocks, such frail, blue skin. On Friday and Saturday she slept quite well. From the day of Thursday onwards she had regained her confidence, thanks to the equanil. She no longer asked, ‘Do you think I will come through?’ but ‘Do you think I shall be able to go back to a normal life?’

‘Ah, today I can see you!’ she said to me in a happy voice. ‘Yesterday I couldn’t see you at all.’

The next day Jeanne, who had come up from Limoges, found her looking less ravaged than she had feared. They chatted for nearly an hour. When she came back on Saturday morning with Chantal, Maman said to them gaily, ‘Well, my funeral isn’t for tomorrow! I shall live to be a hundred: they will have to put me down.’

Dr P was puzzled. ‘There is no possible forecast with her; she has such immense vitality.’

I told Maman of his last remark. ‘Yes, I have plenty of vitality,’ she observed with pleasure. She was rather surprised: her bowels were not working any more, and yet the doctors did not seem to worry.

‘The main thing is that they have worked: that proves they are not paralysed. The doctors are very pleased.’

‘If they are pleased, that’s all that matters.’

On Saturday evening we talked before going to sleep. ‘It’s very odd,’ she said in a thoughtful tone, ‘but when I think of Mademoiselle Leblon, I see her in my flat: she’s a kind of swollen dummy with no arms, like those you see in dry-cleaners’. Dr P is a strip of black paper on my stomach. So when I see him in the flesh, it seems very odd to me.’

I said to her, ‘You have got used to me, you see: I don’t frighten you any more.’

‘Of course not.’

‘But you said I frightened you.’

‘I said that? One says the strangest things.’

I, too, grew used to this way of life. I arrived at eight in the evening; Poupette told me how the day had passed; Dr N came by. Mademoiselle Cournot appeared, and I read in the lobby while she changed the dressing. Four times a day, a table loaded with bandages, gauze, linen, cotton-wool, sticking-plaster, tins, basins and scissors was wheeled into the room; I studiously looked away when it was wheeled out again. Mademoiselle Cournot, helped by a nurse she knew, washed Maman and made her ready for the night. I went to bed. She gave Maman various injections, and then she went off to drink a cup of coffee, while I read by the light of the bedside lamp. She came back and sat down near the door, which she left ajar so that a little light should come through from the entrance corridor: she read and knitted. There was the slight sound of the electric apparatus that caused the mattress to vibrate. I went to sleep. At seven, time to get up. During the dressing of the wound I turned my face to the wall, thanking my good fortune I had a cold that was blocking my nose: Poupette had suffered from the smell, but for my part I was aware of almost nothing, except for the scent of the eau de Cologne that I often put on Maman’s forehead and cheeks, and that seemed to me sweetish and sickening: I shall never be able to use that brand again.

Mademoiselle Cournot left; I dressed; I ate my breakfast. I prepared a whitish medicine for Maman; it was very unpleasant, she said, but it helped her digestion. Then, spoon by spoon, I gave her tea in which I had crumbled a biscuit. The maid swept and dusted. I watered the flowers and arranged them. The telephone-bell rang often; I hurried into the lobby. I closed the doors behind me, but I was not sure whether Maman could hear and I spoke cautiously. She laughed when I told her, ‘Madame Raymond asked me how your femur was getting on.’

‘They don’t understand anything about it.’

Often, too, a nurse would call me: friends of Maman’s, and relations, came to ask after her. Generally, she was not strong enough to see them, but she was very pleased at the attention. I went out during the dressing. Then I helped her have lunch: she could not chew, and she ate mashed vegetables, gruel, very finely chopped mince, stewed fruit, custard: she forced herself to empty her plate. ‘I must feed myself up.’ Between meals, she drank a mixture of fresh fruit juices in little sips. ‘There are vitamins in it. They’re good for me.’ Poupette came at about two o’clock: ‘I like this routine very much,’ said Maman. One day she said to us regretfully, ‘How stupid! Now that for once I have you both with me, I am ill!’

I was calmer than before Prague. The transition from my mother to a living corpse had been definitively accomplished. The world had shrunk to the size of her room: when I crossed Paris in a taxi I saw nothing more than a stage with extras walking about on it. My real life took place at her side, and it had only one aim – protecting her. In the night the slightest sound seemed huge to me – the rustling of Mademoiselle Cournot’s paper, the purring of the electric motor. I walked in stockinged feet in the daytime. The coming and going on the staircase, and overhead, shattered my ears. The din of the wheeled tables that went by on the landing between eleven o’clock and noon, loaded with clattering metal trays, cans and bowls, seemed to me scandalous. I was furious when a thoughtless maid asked Maman, when she was dozing, to say which she would like to eat the next day, sautéd rabbit or roast chicken. And again, when at lunch-time, she was brought an unappetizing mince instead of the promised brains. I shared Maman’s likings; we were in favour of Mademoiselle Cournot, Mademoiselle Laurent and the girls called Martin and Parent; I, too, thought Madame Gontrand over-talkative. ‘She told me that she spent her afternoon off buying shoes for her daughter: what’s that to me?’

We no longer liked this nursing-home. The smiling, painstaking nurses were overwhelmed with work, badly paid, harshly treated. Mademoiselle Cournot brought her own coffee; she was not provided with anything more than the hot water. The night-nurses had no shower, nor even a washroom where they could wash and make themselves up again after a sleepless night. Mademoiselle Cournot, quite upset, told us one morning about her differences with the sister, who blamed her for wearing brown shoes.

‘They have no heels,’ said Mademoiselle Cournot.

‘They have to be white.’

Mademoiselle Cournot looked miserable. ‘Don’t put on that weary expression before you have even begun your day’s work,’ cried the sister.

Maman repeated that phrase over and over again for two days: she had always delighted in taking sides very strongly. One evening Mademoiselle Cournot’s friend came into the room, crying: her patient had decided not to speak to her any more. Their profession brought these girls into very close touch with tragedies; but that did not harden them at all against the little dramas of their personal life.

‘You feel yourself growing half-witted,’ said Poupette.

For my part I put up with the silliness of the conversations, the ritual facetiousness – ‘That was a good trick you played on Professor B!’ ‘With those dark glasses you look just like Greta Garbo!’ – with indifference. But the words went bad in my mouth. I had the feeling of playacting wherever I went. When I spoke to an old friend about her forthcoming removal, the liveliness in my voice seemed to me phoney: when with perfect truth I observed ‘That was very good’ to the manager of a restaurant, I had the impression of telling a white lie. At other times it was the outside world that seemed to be acting a part. I saw a hotel as a nursing-home; I took the chambermaids for nurses; and the restaurant waitresses too – they were making me follow a course of treatment that consisted of eating. I looked at people with a fresh eye, obsessed by the complicated system of tubes that was concealed under their clothing. Sometimes I myself turned into a lift-and-force pump or into a sequence of pockets and guts.

Poupette was living on her nerves. My blood-pressure mounted; a pulse throbbed in my head. What tried us more than anything were Maman’s death-agonies, her resurrections, and our own inconsistency. In this race between pain and death we most earnestly hoped that death would come first. Yet when Maman was asleep with her face lifeless, we would anxiously gaze at the white bed-jacket to catch the faint movement of the black ribbon that held her watch: dread of the last spasm gripped us by the throat.

She was well when I left her in the early afternoon of Sunday. On Monday morning her wasted face terrified me; it was terribly obvious, the work of those mysterious colonies between her skin and her bones that were devouring her cells. At ten in the evening Poupette had secretly passed the nurse a piece of paper – ‘Should I call my sister?’ The nurse shook her head: Maman’s heart was holding out. But new forms of wretchedness were to come. Madame Gontrand showed me Maman’s right side: water dripped from the pores of her skin; the sheet was soaked. She hardly urinated any more and her flesh was puffing up in an oedema. She looked at her hands, and in a puzzled way she moved her swollen fingers. ‘It is because you have to keep so still,’ I told her.

Tranquillized by equanil and morphia, she was aware of her sickness, but she accepted it patiently. ‘One day when I thought I was better already your sister said something that has been very useful to me: she said that I should be unwell again. So I know that it’s normal.’ She saw Madame de Saint-Ange for a moment and said to her, ‘Oh, now I am coming along very well!’ A smile uncovered her gums: already it was the macabre grin of a skeleton; at the same time her eyes shone with a somewhat feverish innocence. She was suddenly unwell after having eaten; I rang and rang for the nurse; what I had wanted was happening; she was dying and it filled me with panic. A tablet brought her round.

In the evening I imagined her dead, and it wrung my heart. ‘Things are going rather better locally,’ Poupette told me in the morning, and I regretted it bitterly. Maman was so well that she read a few pages of Simenon. In the night she suffered a great deal. ‘I hurt all over!’ They gave her an injection of morphia. When she opened her eyes during the day they had an unseeing, glassy look and I thought, ‘This time it is the end.’ She went to sleep again. I asked N, ‘Is this the end?’

‘Oh, no!’ he said in a half-pitying, half-triumphant tone, ‘she has been revived too well for that!’

So it was to be pain that would win? Finish me off. Give me my revolver. Have pity on me. She said, ‘I hurt all over.’ She moved her swollen fingers anxiously. Her confidence waned: ‘These doctors are beginning to irritate me. They are always telling me that I am getting better. And I feel myself getting worse.’

I had grown very fond of this dying woman. As we talked in the half-darkness I assuaged an old unhappiness; I was renewing the dialogue that had been broken off during my adolescence and that our differences and our likenesses had never allowed us to take up again. And the early tenderness that I had thought dead for ever came to life again, since it had become possible for it to slip into simple words and actions.

I looked at her. She was there, present, conscious, and completely unaware of what she was living through. Not to know what is happening underneath one’s skin is normal enough. But for her the outside of her body was unknown – her wounded abdomen, her fistula, the filth that issued from it, the blueness of her skin, the liquid that oozed out of her pores: she could not explore it with her almost paralysed hands, and when they treated her and dressed her wound her head was thrown back. She had not asked for a mirror again: her dying face did not exist for her. She rested and dreamed, infinitely far removed from her rotting flesh, her ears filled with the sound of our lies; her whole person was concentrated upon one passionate hope – getting well. I should have liked to spare her pointless unpleasantnesses: ‘You don’t have to take this medicine any more.’ ‘It would be better to take it.’ And she gulped down the chalky liquid. She found it difficult to eat: ‘Don’t force yourself: that’s enough; don’t eat any more.’ ‘Do you think so?’ She looked at the dish, hesitated, ‘Give me a little more.’ In the end I spirited her plate away: ‘You finished it all up,’ I said. She compelled herself to swallow yoghourt in the afternoon. She often asked for fruit-juice. She moved her arms a little, and slowly, carefully raised her hands, cupping them together, and gropingly she seized the glass, which I still held. She drew up the beneficent vitamins through the little tube: a ghoul’s mouth avidly sucking life.

Her eyes had grown huge in her wasted face; she opened them wide, fixed them; at the cost of an immense effort she wrenched herself from her dim private world to rise to the surface of those pools of dark light; she concentrated her whole being there; she gazed at me with a dramatic immobility – it was as though she had just discovered sight. ‘I can see you!’ Every time she had to win it from the darkness again. By her eyes she clung to the world, as by her nails she clung to the sheet, so that she might not be engulfed. ‘Live! Live!’

How desolate I was, that Wednesday evening, in the cab that was taking me away! I knew this journey through the fashionable quarters by heart: Lancôme, Houbigant, Hermès, Lanvin. Often a red light stopped me in front of Cardin’s: I saw ridiculously elegant hats, waistcoats, scarves, slippers, shoes. Farther on there were beautiful downy dressing-gowns, softly coloured: I thought, ‘I will buy her one to take the place of the red peignoir.’ Scents, furs, lingerie, jewels: the sumptuous arrogance of a world in which death had no place: but it was there, lurking behind this façade, in the grey secrecy of nursing-homes, hospitals, sick-rooms. And for me that was now the only truth.

On Thursday Maman’s face shocked me, as it did every day: it was a little hollower and more tormented than the day before. But she could see. She examined me: ‘I am looking at you. Your hair is quite brown.’

‘Of course it is. You have always known that.’

‘Because both you and your sister had a broad white streak. It was so that I could hold on, not to fall.’ She moved her fingers. ‘They are going down, aren’t they?’ She went to sleep. As she opened her eyes she said to me, ‘When I see a big white wristband I know I am going to wake up. When I go to sleep, I go to sleep in petticoats.’ What memories, what phantasms were invading her? Her life had always been turned towards the outward world and I found it very moving to see her suddenly lost within herself. She no longer liked to be distracted. That day a friend, Mademoiselle Vauthier, told her an anecdote about a charwoman, with too much liveliness altogether. I quickly got rid of her, for Maman was closing her eyes. When I came back she said, ‘You ought not to tell sick people stories of that kind; it does not interest them.’

I spent that night beside her. She was as much afraid of the nightmares as she was of pain. When Dr N came she begged, ‘Let them inject me as often as necessary,’ and she imitated the action of a nurse thrusting in the needle.

‘Ha, ha, you are going to become a real drug-addict!’ said N in a bantering tone. ‘I can supply you with morphia at very interesting rates.’ His expression hardened and he coldly said in my direction, ‘There are two points upon which a self-respecting doctor does not compromise – drugs and abortion.’

Friday passed uneventfully. On Saturday Maman slept all the time. ‘That’s splendid,’ said Poupette to her. ‘You have rested.’

‘Today I have not lived,’ sighed Maman.

A hard task, dying, when one loves life so much. ‘She may hold out for two or three months,’ the doctors told us that evening. So we had to organize our lives and get Maman used to spending a few hours without us. As her husband had come to Paris the day before, my sister decided to leave Maman alone that night with Mademoiselle Cournot. She would come in the morning; Marthe would come at about half past two; and I would come at five.

At five I opened the door. The blind was down and it was almost entirely dark. Marthe was holding Maman’s hand, and Maman was lying crumpled up, on her right side, with a pitiful, exhausted look: the bed-sores on her left buttock were completely raw and lying like this she suffered less, but the discomfort of her position was tiring her out. She had waited in extreme anxiety until eleven o’clock for Poupette and Lionel to come, because the nurses had forgotten to pin the bell-cord to her sheet: the push button was out of her reach and she had no way of calling anyone. Her friend, Madame Tardieu, had come to see her, but all the same Maman said to my sister, ‘You leave me in the power of the brutes!’ (She hated the Sunday nurses.) Then she recovered enough spirit to say to Lionel, ‘So you hoped to be rid of mother-in-law? Well, it’s not to be; not yet.’ She was alone for an hour after lunch and the tormenting anxiety seized upon her again. In a feverish voice she said to me, ‘I must not be left alone; I am still too weak. I must not be left in the power of the brutes!’

‘We won’t leave you any more.’

Marthe went away; Maman dozed off and woke with a start – her right buttock was hurting. Madame Gontrand changed her. Maman still complained: I wanted to ring again. ‘It would be no good. It would still be Madame Gontrand. She’s no good.’ There was nothing imaginary about Maman’s pains; they had exact organic causes. Yet below a certain threshold they could be soothed by the attentions of Mademoiselle Parent or Mademoiselle Martin; exactly the same things done by Madame Gontrand did not ease her. However, she went to sleep again. At half past six she took some soup and custard, and it gave her pleasure. Then suddenly she cried out, a burning pain in her left buttock. It was not at all surprising. Her flayed body was bathing in the uric acid that oozed from her skin; the nurses burnt their fingers when they changed her draw-sheet. I rang and rang, panic-stricken: how the interminable seconds dragged out! I held Maman’s hand, I stroked her forehead, I talked. ‘They will give you an injection. It won’t hurt any more. Just one minute more. Only one minute.’ All tense, on the edge of shrieking, she moaned, ‘It burns, it’s awful; I can’t stand it. I can’t bear it any longer.’ And half sobbing, ‘I’m so utterly miserable,’ in that child’s voice that pierced me to the heart. How completely alone she was! I touched her, I talked to her; but it was impossible to enter into her suffering. Her heart took to beating madly, her eyes turned back, I thought ‘She is dying’, and she murmured, ‘I am going to faint.’ At last Madame Gontrand gave her an injection of morphia. It did not work. I rang again. I was terrified by the idea that the pain might have started in the morning, when Maman had no one with her and no means of calling anyone: there was no longer any question of leaving her alone for a moment. This time the nurses gave Maman equanil, changed her draw-sheet and put an ointment on her open places that left a metallic sheen on their hands. The burning went off; it had lasted only a quarter of an hour – an eternity. He shrieked for hours. ‘It’s stupid,’ said Maman. ‘It’s so stupid.’ Yes: so stupid as to make one weep. I could no longer understand the doctors, nor my sister nor myself. Nothing on earth could possibly justify these moments of pointless torment.

On Monday morning I talked to Poupette on the telephone: the end was near. The oedema was not being reabsorbed: the abdomen was not closing. The doctors had told the nurses that the only thing left to do was to daze Maman with sedatives.

At two o’clock I found my sister outside door 114, almost out of her mind. She had said to Mademoiselle Martin, ‘Don’t let Maman suffer as she did yesterday.’ ‘But Madame, if we give her such a lot of injections just for the bed-sores, the morphia won’t work when the time of the great pain comes.’ Questioned closely, she expained that generally speaking, in cases like Maman’s, the patient died in hideous torment. Have pity on me. Finish me off. Had Dr P lied, then? Get a revolver somehow: kill Maman: strangle her. Empty romantic fantasies. But it was just as impossible for me to see myself listening to Maman scream for hours. ‘We’ll go and talk to P.’ He came and we seized upon him. ‘You promised she wouldn’t suffer.’ ‘She will not suffer.’ He pointed out that if they had wanted to prolong her life at any cost and give her an extra week of martyrdom, another operation would have been necessary, together with transfusions and resuscitating injections. Yes. That morning even N had said to Poupette, ‘We did everything that had to be done while there was still a chance. Now it would be mere sadism to try to delay her death.’ But this abstention was not enough for us. We asked P, ‘Will morphia stop the great pains?’ ‘She will be given the doses that are called for.’

He had spoken firmly and he gave us confidence. We grew calmer. He went into Maman’s room to see her dressing again. ‘She’s asleep,’ we told him. ‘She won’t even know I’m there.’ No doubt she was still asleep when he left. But remembering her anguish of the day before I said to Poupette, ‘She mustn’t wake up and find herself alone.’ My sister opened the door: she turned back towards me, terribly pale, and collapsed on the bench, sobbing, ‘I’ve seen her stomach!’ I went to get some equanil for her. When Dr P came back she said to him, ‘I saw her stomach! It’s awful!’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, rather confused, ‘it’s quite normal.’

‘She is rotting alive.’ Poupette told me, and I asked her no questions. We talked. Then I sat by Maman’s bed: I should have thought her dead but for the faint movement of the black ribbon against the whiteness of her bedjacket. At about six she opened her eyes.

‘What time is it? I don’t understand. Is it night already?’

‘You have slept the whole afternoon.’

‘I have slept forty-eight hours!’

‘Oh no,’ I said and I reminded her of what had happened the day before.

She looked at the darkness and the neon signs far out through the window and said, ‘I don’t understand,’ again, in an offended voice. I told her about the visits and the telephone calls I had had about her. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ she said. She turned her surprise over and over in her mind: ‘I heard the doctors: they were saying “She must be deeply sedated – dazed.” ’ For once they had forgotten to be careful. I explained that there was no point in suffering as she had done yesterday; they were going to make her sleep a great deal until her bed-sores had healed over. ‘Yes,’ she said reproachfully, ‘but these are days that I lose.’

‘Today I haven’t lived.’ ‘I am losing days.’ Every day had an irreplaceable value for her. And she was going to die. She did not know it: but I did. In her name, I revolted against it.

She drank a little soup and we waited for Poupette. ‘Sleeping here tires her,’ said Maman.

‘I’m sure it doesn’t,’ I said.

She sighed. ‘It’s all the same to me.’ And after a moment’s thought, ‘What worries me is that everything is all the same to me,’ Before going to sleep again she asked me suspiciously, ‘But can people be dazed, just like that?’ Was it a protest? I think it was rather that she wanted me to reassure her: her torpor was brought about by drugs and it did not mean a worsening of her condition.

When Mademoiselle Cournot came in Maman opened her eyes. They wandered, but she fixed her gaze and looked steadily at the nurse with a gravity even more moving than that of a baby discovering the world.

‘You, there, who are you?’

‘I’m Mademoiselle Cournot.’

‘Why are you here at this time of the day?’

‘It is night now,’ I told her again.

Her wide-open eyes questioned Mademoiselle Cournot. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I spend every night sitting next to you: I’m sure you remember.’

‘Really! What a curious notion,’ said Maman. I got ready to go. ‘Are you going?’

‘Would it worry you if I did?’

Once again she replied, ‘It’s all the same to me. Everything is the same to me.’

I did not leave at once: the day nurses said that Maman would certainly not get through the night. Her pulse leapt from forty-eight to a hundred. At about ten o’clock it steadied. Poupette lay down; I went home. I was now sure that P had not deceived us. Maman would die within a day or so without too much suffering.

She woke up clear in her mind. As soon as she felt any pain they gave her a sedative. I arrived at three: she was asleep, with Chantal by her bed.

‘Poor Chantal,’ she said to me a little later, ‘she has so much to do, and I take up her time.’

‘But she likes coming. She is so fond of you.’

Maman reflected: in a surprised, grieved voice she said, ‘As for me, I no longer know whether I am fond of anyone.’

I remembered her proud ‘People like me because I am cheerful.’ Gradually many people had become wearisome to her. Her heart was now quite numb: tiredness had taken everything away from her. And yet not one of her most loving words had ever moved me nearly as much as this statement of indifference. Formerly the ready-made phrases and the conventional gestures had masked her real feelings. I measured their warmth by the coldness that their absence left in her.

She dropped off, and her breath was so imperceptible that I thought, ‘If only it could stop, without any violence.’ But the black ribbon rose and fell: the leap was not to be so easy. I woke her up at five, as she had insisted, to give her some yoghourt. ‘Your sister wants me to: it’s good for me.’ She ate two or three spoonfuls: I thought of the food that is put on the graves of the dead in certain countries. I held her a rose to smell, one that Catherine had brought the day before – ‘The last of the Meyrignac roses.’ She only gave it a preoccupied glance. She sank down into sleep again: a burning pain in her buttock woke her violently. Morphia injection: no result. As I had done two days before I held her hand, urged her, ‘One minute more. The injection is going to work. In one minute it will be over.’

‘It’s a Chinese torture,’ she said, in a flat, expressionless voice, too weakened even to protest.

I rang again; insisted; another injection. The Parent girl arranged the bed and moved Maman a little; she went to sleep again; her hands were deathly cold. The maid grumbled because I sent away the dinner that she brought at six o’clock: the implacable routine of clinics, where deathbeds and death itself are daily occurrences. At half past seven Maman said to me, ‘Ah! Now I feel well. Really well. It’s a long time since I’ve felt so well.’ Jeanne’s eldest daughter came, and she helped me give her a little soup and some coffee custard. It was difficult, because she coughed: she almost choked. Poupette and Mademoiselle Cournot advised me to leave. In all likelihood nothing would happen that night, and my being there would worry Maman. I kissed her, and with one of her hideous smiles she said to me, ‘I am glad you have seen me looking so well!’

I went to bed half an hour after midnight, dosed with sleeping-pills. I woke: the telephone was ringing. ‘There are only a few minutes left. Marcel is coming to fetch you in a car.’ Marcel – Lionel’s cousin – drove me at great speed through a deserted Paris. We gulped down some coffee at a red-lit bar near the Porte Champerret. Poupette came to meet us in the garden of the nursing-home. ‘It’s all over.’ We went up the stairs. It was so expected and so unimaginable, that dead body lying on the bed in Maman’s place. Her hand was cold; so was her forehead. It was still Maman, and it was her absence for ever. There was a bandage holding up her chin, framing her face. My sister wanted to go and fetch clothes from the rue Blomet.

‘What’s the point?’

‘Apparently that is what’s done.’

‘We shan’t do it.’

I could not conceive putting a dress and shoes on Maman as though she was going out to dinner; and I did not think that she would have wanted it – she had often said that she was not in the least concerned with what happened to her body.

‘Just dress her in one of her long nightgowns,’ I said to Mademoiselle Cournot.

‘And what about her wedding-ring?’ asked Poupette, taking it out of the table drawer. We put it on to her finger. Why? No doubt because that little round of gold belonged nowhere else on earth.

Poupette was utterly exhausted. After a last look at what was no longer Maman I quickly took her away. We had a drink with Marcel at the bar of the Dôme. She told us what had happened.

At nine o’clock N came out of the room and said angrily, ‘Another clip has given way. After all that has been done for her: how irritating!’ He went off, leaving my sister dumbfounded. In spite of her icy hands Maman complained of being too hot, and she had some difficulty in breathing. She was given an injection and she went to sleep. Poupette undressed, got into bed and went through the motions of reading a detective story. Towards midnight Maman moved about. Poupette and the nurse went to her bedside. She opened her eyes. ‘What are you doing here? Why are you looking so worried? I am quite well.’ ‘You have been having a bad dream.’ As Mademoiselle Cournot smoothed the sheets she touched Maman’s feet: there was the chill of death upon them. My sister wondered whether to call me. But at that time of night my presence would have frightened Maman, whose mind was perfectly clear. Poupette went back to bed. At one o’clock Maman stirred again. In a roguish voice she whispered the words of an old refrain that Papa used to sing, You are going away and you will leave us. ‘No, no,’ said Poupette, ‘I shan’t leave you,’ and Maman gave a little knowing smile. She found it harder and harder to breathe. After another injection she murmured in a rather thick voice, ‘We must … keep … back … desh.’

‘We must keep back the desk?’

‘No,’ said Maman. ‘Death.’ Stressing the word death very strongly. She added, ‘I don’t want to die.’

‘But you are better now!’

After that she wandered a little. ‘I should have liked to have the time to bring out my book … She must be allowed to nurse whoever she likes.’

My sister dressed herself: Maman had almost lost consciousness. Suddenly she cried, ‘I can’t breathe!’ Her mouth opened, her eyes stared wide, huge in that wasted, ravaged face: with a spasm she entered into coma.

‘Go and telephone,’ said Mademoiselle Cournot.

Poupette rang me up: I did not answer. The operator went on ringing for half an hour before I woke. Meanwhile Poupette went back to Maman: already she was no longer there – her heart was beating and she breathed, sitting there with glassy eyes that saw nothing. And then it was over. ‘The doctors said she would go out like a candle: it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all,’ said my sister, sobbing.

‘But, Madame,’ replied the nurse, ‘I assure you it was a very easy death.’