Book of My Mother

XXIV

YOU, HER THOUGHTS, her high hopes, her joys, have you vanished too, and is it possible? “The dead live,” I cry out sometimes, suddenly awakened in the night and sweating with the certainty of it. “My mother’s thoughts,” I stammer, “have fled to the land where time does not exist, and they await me there. Yes, there is God, and God will not do that to me. He will not take away my mother. He will give her back to me alive in the land where time does not exist, the land where she awaits me.” Feeble childish folly. There is no paradise. Your mother’s gestures, her laughter, all her lives of all her hours endure only in your faithful eyes. And when you die there will be a few remnants of them on these pages, and these pages too will be swept away by the wind that blows down the centuries, and she will never have been.

How enviable is the lot of those who believe what is good for them to believe. Not the barren truth, which is neither joyous nor beautiful and whose only virtue is that it is pitifully true amid the magnificent and senseless teeming of the innumerable forms of life which spring up at random and without reason under the gloomy eye of nothingness. You whom I used to call Maman have entered the valley of lethargy and you do not await me there. You are alone and I am alone. We are both terribly alone. You are dead forever, I know. And yet I know that when I suffer in my body, destined by the goodness of God for sickness and the humiliation of old age, or in my soul, when they harm your child and I can no longer feign to be made of steel, it is your name alone, Maman, that I shall call, not those of living loved ones nor that of God — your sacred name alone, Maman, when my body is weary of living or when they are too cruel to the child you defended so well. Can it be that you are alive in some wondrous place?