Book of My Mother

XVII

HERE I AM at my table, with my bones all ready, waiting for it to end, for my own turn to come, one year or three years or at most twenty years from now. But I go on writing as if I were immortal, with such interest and care, like a welder conscientiously going on with his welding while the ship goes down. Here I am, tricking my orphan’s grief with inky signs, awaiting the dark dampness where I shall be the mute companion of certain silent little lives which get about in wriggles. I can see myself now. There is a worm, a very handsome brown-freckled little fellow, who has come to pay me a visit. He makes his way into my nostril, which does not shudder, for it has become senseless. The worm is at home. My nostril is his house and his little larder.

Heavy lies the earth upon me, upon me imperturbable and unprotesting, heavy the rain-drenched silent earth. And I am all alone like my mother, all alone and stretched out forever, not very well dressed, in a suit which is unbrushed and loose fitting because the gent inside it has got rather slim. All alone, poor useless creature whom in turn they have dumped in the earth, with no company except the parallel rows of his mute comrades, those stretched-out regiments of the silent who once were alive, a corpse all alone in the black silence who grins all over his face from the other world, while a person who loved him so dearly and who wept so bitterly at the funeral three years ago is wondering whether to wear her white dress to that dance, but perhaps not: the pink might be better.