Book of My Mother

XXII

HERE I AM in my room, one of the human nation, scandalized by universal death, asking sterile questions. Here I am, asking constantly for my mother, asking nothingness for my mother. Here I am, a man destitute, abandoned, and aghast, an ashen-faced man seeking to understand; here I am, sweating and breathing hard, for I understand nothing of my human adventure, and my labored breathing is painful but insists sadly on going on, and in the moment between breathing in and breathing out there is always my mother plodding toward me. Each breath I draw is a death striving to live, despair simulating hope. Here I am in front of the mirror, wildly yearning for some happiness in my distress, sadly lacerating myself with grief and yet petrified, dragging my nails across my bare chest, smiling and weak in front of my mirror, where I seek my childhood and my mother, my mirror, which keeps me cold company and in which I know with a smile that I am sunk, completely lost without my mother. Here I am in front of the mirror, a window opening onto death, making knots in a piece of string I have picked up at random which keeps me company, tugging it straight, reknotting it, twisting it mechanically, snapping it in my impatience, sweating and stammering cheerful words in an effort to live. O broken thread of my destiny! In front of the mirror to which I put my questions, I cannot understand why my mother is no more since once she was.

She came into the world, she understood nothing of it, and she went away. After having been irreplaceably herself, she vanished. Why, oh why? Poor humans that we are, going from the forever which placed us in our cradle to the forever which will come after our grave. And between those two forevers what is this farce which we act out, this brief farce made up of ambitions, hopes, loves, and joys doomed to vanish forever, this farce which Thou makest us perform? Hey, Thou up there, what is this snare? Why did she laugh, why didst Thou give her a desire to laugh and live if from her cradle Thou hadst sentenced her to death, O Judge of the monotonous sentence, Judge devoid of imagination, who knowest only one sentence, always the death sentence, why, and what is this trickery? She loved to breathe the sea air on those Sundays of my childhood. Why is she now beneath a stifling plank, that plank so close to her beautiful face? She loved to breathe, she loved life. I cry out against this fraud, this sinister joke. O God, with the right accorded to me by my death throes soon to come, I tell Thee that Thy joke is not funny, Thy joke of giving us such a terrifying and splendid love of life only then to lay us out one after another, each beside the other, and make of us motionless objects which future motionless objects bury deep in earth like reeking muck, rotting rubbish to be cast out of sight, waxy refuse, we who once were babies dimpling delightedly. Why all that earth on my mother, that cramped space of the box around her, when she so loved to breathe the sea air?