A Very Easy Death

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POUPETTE slept at my place. At ten in the morning we went back to the clinic: as in hotels, the room had to be vacated before noon. Once again we climbed the stairs, opened the two doors: the bed was empty. The walls, the window, the lamps, the furniture, everything was in its place; and on the whiteness of the sheet there was nothing. Foreseeing is not knowing: the shock was as violent as though we had not expected it at all. We took the suitcases out of the cupboard and piled in the books, linen, toilet things, papers: six weeks of an intimacy rotted by betrayal. We left the red dressing-gown behind. We crossed the garden. Somewhere at the bottom, hidden in the greenery, there was a mortuary and inside it Maman’s body with the bandage round its chin. Poupette had suffered – by her own desire and also by chance – the hardest blows, and she was too overcome for me to suggest that we should go and see it again. And I was not sure that I wanted to.

We left the suitcases at the rue Blomet, with the concierge. We noticed an undertaker’s. ‘This will do as well as anywhere else.’ Two gentlemen in black asked to know our wishes. They showed us photographs of various kinds of coffin. ‘This one is more aesthetic.’ Poupette burst into sobbing laughter. ‘More aesthetic! That box! She didn’t want to be put into that box!’ The burial was fixed for Friday, in two days’ time. Did we want flowers? We said yes, without knowing why: not a wreath, not a cross, but a big sheaf. Very good: they would take care of everything. In the afternoon we took the suitcases up to the flat: Mademoiselle Leblon had transformed it: it was so much cleaner and more cheerful that we scarcely recognized it – so much the better. We stuffed the bag with the bedjacket and the nightdresses in it into a chest of drawers, put the books on a shelf, threw away the eau de Cologne, the sweets and the toilet things, and carried the rest to my place. That night I could not get off to sleep. I was not sorry that I had left Maman with ‘I am glad you have seen me looking so well’ as her last words. But I did reproach myself for having abandoned her body too soon. She, and my sister too, said, ‘A corpse no longer means anything.’ Yet it was her flesh, her bones, and for some time still her face. With my father I had stayed by him until the time he became a mere thing for me: I tamed the transition between presence and the void. With Maman I went away almost immediately after having kissed her, and that was why it seemed to me that it was still her that was lying, all alone, in the cold of the mortuary. The coffining would take place in the afternoon of the next day: would I go?

I was at the nursing-home at about four, to pay the bill. Post had arrived for Maman, and a bag of fruit bon-bons. I went up to say good-bye to the nurses. I found the girls, Martin and Parent, very jolly in the corridor. My throat was constricted and I could barely force out a couple of words. I went past the door of 114: they had taken down the notice ‘No Visitors’. In the garden I hesitated for a moment: my courage failed me: and what was the point anyhow? I went away. I saw Cardin’s again, and the beautiful dressing-gowns. I told myself that I should never sit in the lobby again, never pick up the white telephone, never make that journey any more: I should so happily have broken with those habits if Maman had been cured, but I still had a nostalgia for them, since it was in losing her that I lost them.

We wanted to give keepsakes to her closest friends. As we looked at her straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished piece of knitting, and at her blotting-pad, her scissors, her thimble, emotion rose up and drowned us. Everyone knows the power of things: life is solidified in them, more immediately present than in any one of its instants. They lay there on my table, orphaned, useless, waiting to turn into rubbish or to find another identity – my hussif, that Aunt Françoise left me. We set aside her watch for Marthe. As she undid the black ribbon Poupette began to cry. ‘It’s so stupid and I’m not at all a worshipper of things, but I just can’t throw this ribbon away.’ ‘Keep it.’ It is useless to try to integrate life and death and to behave rationally in the presence of something that is not rational: each must manage as well as he can in the tumult of his feelings. I can understand all last wishes and the total absence of them: the hugging of the bones or the abandonment of the body of the one you love to the common grave. If my sister had wanted to dress Maman or to keep her wedding-ring I should certainly have accepted her reactions as willingly as my own. We did not have to ask ourselves questions about the funeral. We felt we knew what Maman wanted and we kept to that.

But we came up against some macabre difficulties. We owned a perpetual concession in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, bought a hundred and thirty years before by a lady named Mignot, our great-grandfather’s sister. She was buried there, as well as our grandfather, his wife, his brother, my uncle Gaston and Papa. There was no room left. In such cases the dead person is buried in a provisional grave, and when the bones of those who have been buried before are gathered into a single coffin, then there is a reburial in the family vault. Only as ground in the cemetery is very valuable the management does its best to get the perpetual concessions back into its own hands: it insists that the owner should reaffirm his rights every thirty years. This period had elapsed. We had not been notified in due time that we ran the danger of losing our rights and we therefore still had them – on condition that there was no descendant of the Mignots who might dispute our possession. Until such time as a lawyer should have provided proofs of this, Maman’s body would be kept in a repository.

We dreaded the next day’s ceremony. We took tranquillizers, slept until seven, drank some tea, ate, and took more tranquillizers. A little before eight a black motor-hearse stopped in the deserted street: before dawn it had gone to fetch the corpse, which had been taken out of the nursing-home by a side-door. We walked through the cold morning fog; we took our seats, Poupette between the driver and one of the Messieurs Durand, I at the back, next to a kind of metal locker. ‘Is she there?’ asked my sister. ‘Yes.’ She gave a short sob: ‘The only comfort I have,’ she said, ‘is that it will happen to me too. Otherwise it would be too unfair.’ Yes. We were taking part in the dress rehearsal for our own burial. The misfortune is that although everyone must come to this, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days which she confused with convalescence and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

As we drove across Paris I looked at the streets and the people, carefully thinking of nothing. There were cars waiting at the gates of the cemetery: the family. They followed us as far as the chapel. Everybody got out. While the undertaker’s men were bringing out the coffin I drew Poupette over towards Maman’s sister, whose face was red and swollen with grief. We went in, making a procession: the chapel was full of people. No flowers on the catafalque: the undertakers had left them in the hearse – it did not matter.

A young priest, wearing trousers under his chasuble, celebrated the mass and gave a short, strangely sad sermon. ‘God is very far away,’ he said. ‘Even for those among you whose faith is the strongest there are days when God is so far that He seems not to be there. One might almost say careless. But He has sent us His son.’ Two kneeling-chairs had been placed for communion. Almost everybody communicated. The priest spoke again, briefly. And emotion seized both of us by the throat when he said, ‘Françoise de Beauvoir’; the words brought her to life; they summed up her history, from birth to marriage, to widowhood, to the grave; Françoise de Beauvoir – that retiring woman, so rarely named – became an important person.

People went by in a line; some of the women were crying. We were still shaking hands when the undertaker’s men took the coffin out of the chapel; this time Poupette saw it and she collapsed on my shoulder. ‘I had promised her that she shouldn’t be put into that box!’ I congratulated myself that she did not have that other prayer to remember – ‘Don’t let me fall into the hole!’ One of the Messieurs Durand explained to the people there that now they might go away – it was over. The hearse moved off all by itself; I do not even know where it went.

In a blotting-pad that I had brought back from the clinic I found two lines on a narrow piece of paper, written by Maman in a hand as stiff and firm as when she was twenty: ‘I should like a very simple funeral. No flowers or wreaths. But a great many prayers.’ Well, we had carried out her last wishes, and all the more faithfully since the flowers had been forgotten.