Book of My Mother

VIII

WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN I left Marseilles and went to Geneva, where I registered at the university and nymphs were kind to me. My mother was then quite alone. She was uprooted in Marseilles. She did have some relatives of a kind there, but they were excessively rich and invited her to their homes only to ram their opulence down her throat, boast of their grand connections, and ask patronizing questions about her husband’s modest business. After a few visits, she had stopped going to see them. Since her first heart attack, she had been unable to help my father in his work, so she spent most of the time alone in her flat. She saw no one, for she did not know how to make social contacts. In any case, the wives of my father’s business acquaintances were not her sort and probably did not like her. She could not laugh with those tradesmen’s wives, take an interest in matters which interested them, or talk like them. Since she had no other company, she sought the company of her flat. After lunch, when her housework was done, she would dress nicely and pay a call on herself. She would walk round her beloved flat, examine each room in turn, pat a bedspread, arrange a cushion, fondly survey her dining room, check to see that all was in order, and enjoy the general neatness, the smell of floor polish, and the hideous new stamped-velvet sofa. She would sit down on the sofa and receive herself in her own home. The glass-bowl coffeemaker she had just bought was a new acquaintance. She smiled at it, then put it a little farther away, to get a better view of it. Or else she looked at the fine handbag I had bought her, which she kept wrapped in tissue paper and never used, for it would have been a shame to dirty it.

Her life was made up of her flat, writing to her son, waiting for letters from her son, preparing for her visits to her son, waiting for her husband in the silent flat, welcoming him when he arrived, and being proud of his compliments. There were also the tearooms, where she listened to snatches of the conversation of fine ladies while she ate cake — the consolation of the lonely. She took part in things as best she could, humbly made do with such poor pastimes, ever a spectator, never a player. She would also go all alone to the cinema. The characters on the screen admitted her to their company, and she wept over the misfortunes of those beautiful Christian ladies. To the end of her days she lived in isolation, a timid child with her overplump face pressed hungrily against the window of the cake shop of social life. I do not know why I am telling of my mother’s sad life. It may be to avenge her.

At the table she would lay a place every day for the absent son. And on my birthday she would even serve the absent son. She would put the choicest morsels on the plate of the absent son, next to my photograph and a few flowers. For dessert on my birthday she would put on the plate of the absent son the first slice of almond cake — always the same kind of cake, because it was the one I had loved as a child. Then, with a trembling hand, she would pour Samos wine — always the same wine — into the glass of the absent son. She would eat in silence beside her husband, and she would gaze at my photograph.