Book of My Mother

XX

LET’S FACE IT, I too am but one of the living, a sinner like all the living. My beloved lies buried in earth, rotting all alone in the silence of the dead, in the terrifying solitude of the dead, and I am outside and I go on living and my hand is moving selfishly just now. And if my hand traces words which tell of my grief, it is a movement of life, that is of joy after all, which stirs that hand. And tomorrow I shall reread these pages and add more words and that will give me a kind of pleasure. Sin of living. I shall correct the proofs, and that too will be a sin of living.

My mother is dead, but I gaze at the beauty of women. My mother lies abandoned in earth, where horrible things go on, but I love the sunshine and the tittle-tattle of tiny birds. Sin of living. When I was telling of a mother’s departure and a son’s remorse for having gone to see Diane that same evening, I described that Diane with too much pleasure. Sin of living. My mother is dead, but on the radio ceaselessly burbling beside me as I write, “The Blue Danube” has only to start to flow and I cannot resist its corny charm and despite my filial grief I fall immediately under the spell of those slender, gently twirling Viennese maidens.

The sin of living is everywhere. If the sister of the consumptive wife is young and healthy, may God take pity on the husband and the sister who together nurse the sick woman they sincerely love. They are alive and well, and when the consumptive wife is asleep, drugged with morphine and smiling with a rattle in her throat, they walk together in the garden steeped in night. They are sad, but they savor the sweetness of the fragrant garden, the sweetness of being together, and that is almost an act of adultery. Or take the widow who, sincere in her grief, has nonetheless put on silk stockings to go to the funeral and powdered her face. Sin of living. Tomorrow she will wear a dress which she has no wish to be unflattering and which will set off her beauty. Sin of living. And beneath the grief of this lover sobbing in despair at the graveside there lurks perhaps an awful involuntary joy, a sinful joy at being still alive, an unconscious joy, an organic joy which is beyond his control, an involuntary joy at the contrast between the dead woman and the living man giving vent to grief which nevertheless is sincere. To feel grief is to live, to be one of the living, to be still of this world.

My mother is dead but I am hungry, and soon, despite my grief, I shall eat. Sin of living. To eat is to consider oneself, to love living. My dark-ringed eyes are in mourning for my mother, but I want to live. Thank God, they who sin by living soon become the dead whom the living offend.

What is more, we very soon forget our dead. Poor dead, how forsaken you are in your earth and how deeply I pity you, poignant in your everlasting solitude. Dead, my darlings, how terribly alone you are. In five years or less I shall be more willing to accept the idea that a mother is something ended. In five years I shall have forgotten some of her gestures. If I were to live a thousand years, perhaps in my thousandth year I would no longer remember her.