Book of My Mother

XXV

NO, SHE IS SILENT under the earth, locked up in the earthen jail which she may not leave, imprisoned in the solitude of earth, with silent, stifling earth oppressive and inexorable above her, ferociously on her right, stolidly on her left, and extending infinitely beneath her as she lies abandoned and of interest to nothing, not even her somber thick earth, while living beings walk above her. Deep down in earth she is inaction, languor, prostration. God, how absurd it all is!

Stretched out and unutterably alone, quite dead, she who once was active, she who cared ceaselessly for her husband and son, the holy Maman who tirelessly offered cupping glasses and compresses and useless comforting herb teas, stretched out, stiff, she who carried so many trays to her two men on their beds of sickness, stretched out, unseeing, she who once was naïve and quick eyed and believed the advertisements for patent medicines, stretched out, idle, she who constantly reassured. All at once I recall what she said one day when someone had gratuitously hurt me. Instead of consoling me with abstract and allegedly wise words, she had merely said, “Give a little tilt to your hat, my son, and go out and enjoy yourself, for you are young. Off you go now, enemy of yourself.” Thus spake my wise Maman.

Stretched out in the great dormitory, indifferent, piteously alone, she who was so delighted at her luck in getting that good seat on the train, delighted and beaming all over her broad face. Stretched out, insensible, she who so childishly rejoiced in the fine dress I had bought her. Where is it now, that cursed dress which lives on somewhere with the scent of my mother? Stretched out, apathetic, the bustling enthusiast who adored working out detailed schemes and artless plans for our happiness, stretched out, she who conjured up poetic visions of all the wonderful things she would do when she won the jackpot in the lottery, and she was already planning to annoy certain nasty people by flaunting her opulence, but afterward, she said, she would forgive them and even give them a nice present. Stretched out in her sullen earthen sleep, in her mineral indifference, she thinks no more of jackpots, is no longer delighted, no longer concerned. She is no longer concerned even about me. Yet she loved me.

You, her lowered eyelids, are you still intact? And you, Mother, so paled and yellowed, whom with a blink of the mind’s eye I dare to imagine in your rotted box, wasted and abandoned, you who moved and always toward me came, now so surly and laconic in your earthen melancholy, recumbent in the black silence of the grave, tell me, you who loved me, do you think sometimes of your son in your grave where live only roots, joyless rootlets, and mournful creatures of darkness moving in incomprehensible ways and always silent though terrifyingly active? Perhaps in her sickly suffocation she now dreams impassively of me, though when she lived she always feared for me in her dreams. Under her stifling plank she wonders perhaps whether I remember to have a hot drink in the morning before going to work. “He does not dress warmly enough,” perhaps murmurs my dead mother. “He is so delicate, he worries about everything, and I am not there,” faintly she murmurs, my dead mother.

Not true: she does not dream of me, she never thinks. She is joyless in her mold, and above her there is life and the light headiness of the morning and the huge risen sun. She is paralyzed and withered in her rich mold, parchment-like and green-tinged here and there, the once pretty Maman of her boy of ten, half skeleton, insensible despite my slow tears, deaf, impassive, while above her little scraps of creation wake and joyously busy themselves with living, begetting and murdering under the benevolent eye of God. On a tree above her grave an early squirrel is rubbing its front paws together: what luck, there are lots of walnuts this year! Above her grave in the early morn the sky is immensely and powerfully blue and the little birds are setting up their joyous trills and their innocent babble in the flowering dawn, their angelic waking and fluttering prattle, their penny poems, their sweet, sharp, icy calls and all their rippling repertoire, and, except for a cuckoo idiotically obsessed with playing hide-and-seek, all those birdies bid a thousand good mornings in filial homage to the sun, and, “Oh, how grand it is to live in the fresh air!” chirp those little darlings, snooty, tiny, tufted troubadours, drunk on the new day, who come flocking now, in a flurry of gracious polkas, to peck in the grass upon her grave.