I Remain in Darkness

  “ I R E M A I N I N D A R K N E S S ”

  ALSO BY ANNIE ERNAUX

  S H A M E

  E X T E R I O R S

  A F R O Z E N W O M A N

  A M A N ’ S P L A C E

  S I M P L E P A S S I O N

  A W O M A N ’ S S T O R Y

  C L E A N E D O U T

  English translation copyright © 1999 by Seven Stories Press

  © Editions Gallimard 1997

  A Seven Stories Press First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ernaux, Annie, 1940–

  [Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit. English]

  “I remain in darkness” / Annie Ernaux; [translated by Tanya Leslie]. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-58322-014-6 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-58322-052-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-60980-238-7 (ebk)

  1. Ernaux, Annie, 1940- —Diaries. 2. Authors, French—20th century—Diaries. 3. Alzheimer’s disease. I. Leslie, Tanya. II. Title.

  PQ2665.R67Z46713 1999

  848’.91403—dc21 99-41332

  [B] CIP

  M Y M O T H E R began losing her memory and acting strangely two years after a serious road accident from which she had fully recovered—she was knocked down by a car that had run a red light. For several months, she was able to continue living on her own in the old people’s residence of Yvetot, Normandy, where she was renting a small apartment. In summer 1983, in the grueling heat, she fainted and was taken to the hospital. It was discovered that she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for several days. Her refrigerator was empty except for a packet of cube sugar. Clearly, she could no longer be left on her own.

  I decided to let her come and stay with me in Cergy; I was convinced that the familiar surroundings and the company of my two teenage sons Éric and David, whom she had helped me to bring up, would cause her symptoms to disappear and that she would soon become the energetic, independent woman she had been for most of her life.

  This was not the case. Her lapses of memory got worse and the doctor mentioned the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease. She could no longer recognize the places or people she knew, like my children, my ex-husband, myself. She became a confused woman, and would nervously roam the house, or would spend hours slumped on the stairs in the corridor. In February 1984, seeing her state of prostration and her refusal to eat anything, the doctor had her taken to Pontoise Hospital. She remained there for two months, then spent some time in a private nursing home before being sent back to Pontoise and placed in the long-term geriatric ward, where she died of heart failure in April 1986, aged seventy-nine.

  While she was still living with me, I began jotting down on small undated scraps of paper the things she said or did that filled me with terror. I could not bear to see my own mother slip into such a state of decline. One day I dreamt that I screamed out at her in anger: “Stop being crazy!” Subsequently, when I got back from the hospital, I would feel this strong urge to write about her, the things she said, and her body, which I was feeling closer to every day. I would write hastily, in the turmoil of my emotions, without thinking or trying to marshal my thoughts.

  Wherever I went, I was haunted by the sight of my mother in that place.

  Toward the end of 1985, I began writing the story of her life, with guilty feelings. I felt that I was projecting myself into a time when she would no longer be. Also, I was torn between my writing, which portrayed her as a young woman moving toward the world, and the reality of hospital visits, which reminded me of her inexorable decline.

  When my mother died, I tore up this first draft and started work on another book, A Womans Story, which came out in 1988. While I was writing the book, I could not bring myself to read through the notes I had taken during my mother’s illness. Somehow I felt I hadn’t the right: I had committed to paper her last months and days, including the day preceding her death, without realizing it. This disregard for consequences—which may characterize all forms of writing, it certainly applies to mine—was horrifying. In a strange way, the diary of those hospital visits was leading me to my mother’s death.

  For a long time, I believed that I would never have this text published. Maybe because I wanted to offer only one image, one side of the truth portraying my mother and my relationship with her, a truth which I sought to convey in A Woman’s Story. However I have come round to thinking that the consistency and coherence achieved in any written work—even when its innermost contradictions are laid bare—must be questioned whenever possible. Publishing these pages gave me that opportunity.

  I have delivered these pages in their original form, echoing the bewilderment and distress that I experienced at the time. I have chosen not to alter the way I transcribed those moments when I was close to her, removed from time (except maybe from my early childhood regained), removed from any thought except: “she’s my mother.” She had ceased to be the woman who had always ruled my life and yet, despite her misshapen features, because of her voice, her mannerisms and her laugh, she remained my mother, more so than ever.

  On no account should these pages be read as the objective chronicle of a patient’s stay in the long-term geriatric ward and certainly not as an accusation (on the whole, the nurses were extremely caring), but merely as vestiges of pain.

  “I remain in darkness” was the last sentence my mother wrote. I often dream of her, picturing her the way she was before her illness. She is alive and yet she has been dead. When I wake up, for a few moments, I am certain that she is still living out there under this dual identity, at once dead and alive, reminding me of those characters in Greek mythology whose souls have been ferried twice across the River Styx.

  March 1996

  1 9 8 3

  D E C E M B E R

  She just sits there on a chair in the living room. Staring straight ahead, her features frozen, sagging. Her mouth not quite open but gaping slightly, from a distance.

  She says, “I can’t put my hands on it” (her toiletry bag, her cardigan, whatever). Things seem to slip away from her.

  She has to watch television now. She can’t wait until I have cleared the table. At this moment all she understands is her longing.

  Every evening David and I take her upstairs to bed. At the point where the floorboards become carpeted, she lifts her leg up high, as though she were wading into water. We laugh, she laughs too. Later on, after she had snuggled down into bed, gay as a lark, and knocked over all the things on her bedside table by trying to apply some face cream, she says to me: “Now I’ll go to sleep; thank you MADAME.”

  The doctor came round to see her. She wasn’t able to say how old she was. She clearly recalled having had two children. “Two girls,” she added. She had slipped on two bras, one on top of the other. I remembered the day when she found out that I had been wearing one without her knowing. The shouts. I was fourteen, it was one morning in June. I was wearing a slip, washing my face.

  My stomach pains have started again. I no longer feel anger at her and her loss of memory. A wave of indifference.

  We went to the shopping mall. She wanted to get the most expensive handbag in La Bagagerie—black, made of leather. She kept saying: “I want the best one, it’s my last handbag.”

  After that I drove her to the department store La Samaritaine. This time, it was a dress and a cardigan. She wal
ks slowly, I need to help her along. She chuckles to herself. The salesgirls give us strange looks, they seem embarrassed. Not me; I stare at them defiantly.

  She asked Philippe anxiously: “Who are you to my daughter?” He snorts: “I’m her husband!” She laughs.

  1 9 8 4

  J A N U A R Y

  Invariably, she mistakes my study for her bedroom. She opens the study door just a crack, realizes it’s the wrong room and gently closes the door; I see the latch spring up, as if there were no one on the other side. Mounting panic. In one hour, the same thing will happen again. She has no idea where she is.

  She hides her soiled underwear beneath her pillow. Last night, I thought of the blood-soaked panties she would stuff at the bottom of the dirty laundry pile in the attic, leaving them there until washing day. I must have been seven years old; I would stare at them, fascinated. Now they are filled with shit.

  Tonight, I was marking essays. Her voice rang out from the adjoining living room, loud and clear, like an actor on stage. She was speaking to an imaginary child: “It’s getting late, sweetie, you’d better run off home.” She was in a merry frame of mind, giggling away to herself. I put my hands over my ears, I felt that I was losing touch with humanity. We are not on stage; T H I S I S M Y M O T H E R T A L K I N G T O H E R S E L F.

  I came across a letter she had begun writing: “Dear Paulette, I remain in darkness.” She can’t write any more now. The words seem to belong to another woman. That was one month ago.

  F E B R U A R Y

  At mealtimes, her conversation suggests she is employed on a farm where my sons are hired workers and I’m the manager. She won’t eat anything except cream cheese and sweet foods.

  My niece Isabelle came to have lunch last Sunday; she burst into laughter every time my mother made some incongruous remark. Only we have the right to laugh at my mother’s insanity, we being myself and the boys, not her. Not outside people. Éric and David say: “Granny’s really too much!,” as if she were still extraordinary in her condition.

  This morning she got up and, in a timid voice: “I wet the bed, I couldn’t help it.” The same words I would use when I was a child.

  Saturday, threw up her coffee. She was lying in bed, motionless. Her eyes were sunken, and red around the edges. I undressed her to change her clothes. Her body is white and flaccid. I started to sob. Because of time passing, because of the past. And because the body which I see is also mine.

  I don’t want her to die. I’d rather she were crazy.

  Monday 25

  We waited in the emergency room for two hours, with my mother lying on a stretcher. She wet herself. A young man had tried to commit suicide by taking pills. We went into the examination room and they laid my mother down on a table. The intern rolled up her chemise to reveal her stomach—the thighs, the white vagina, a few stretchmarks. Suddenly, I felt I was the one who was being exposed in public.

  I thought back to the cat who had died when I was fifteen; she had urinated on my pillow before dying. And the blood and bodily fluids I had lost just before my abortion, twenty years ago.

  M A R C H

  Thursday 15

  In the corridor of the hospital—or rather, I should say the nursing home attached to the hospital, second floor—I suddenly hear: “Annie!” She’s calling my name, she has been moved to a different room. How could she have made out my figure from a distance, she can barely see (because of her cataract). As I walk into the room, she says, “I’m saved.” She probably means, “now that you’re here.” She tells me a whole bunch of stories, giving me all the details: the work she is forced to do without being paid, without being given anything to drink. A lurid imagination. At least now she always recognizes me, which wasn’t the case when she was staying at home.

  Saturday 17

  Greets me frostily. Scowls: “I don’t enjoy your visits! How can you behave like that, aren’t you ashamed?” I am stunned; I have just spent all night with A, making love. How COULD she know? Once again, that sinking feeling, that childhood belief that her eagle eye can see everything, like God in Cain’s grave. She adds: “I don’t believe it, you must have been drugged!” Later on: “Well, seems to me the world is going crazy.” I laugh, slightly relieved. No woman will ever be this close to me, it’s like she’s inside me.

  Sunday 18

  Seven o’ clock in the evening; she was already asleep. I woke her up. She thinks that the woman sharing her room is a little boy who has drowned in a water tank: “The gendarmes just sat there on a bench, they made no attempt to save him.” Suddenly, she remarks: “So, the wedding’s in a fortnight, right?” (Ironically, I’m seeing my lawyer tomorrow to file divorce proceedings.)

  Tuesday 28

  Her gnarled hands. The forefinger sticks out at the knuckle; it resembles a bird’s claw. She crosses her fingers, rubs them together. I can’t take my eyes off her hands. Without a word, she takes leave of me to go and have dinner. As she walks into the dining room, I am “her.” Such pain to see her life end this way.

  A P R I L

  Wednesday 4

  I have settled in her armchair, she is sitting on a chair. A chilling impression of dual personality. I am both myself and her. She has filled her pockets with bread—her longstanding obsession with food, her fear of being deprived, of going hungry (she used to store sugar lumps in her pockets and handbag). She complains that there is no one to talk to, that men are interested only in chasing women. Things that have haunted her all her life.

  Sunday 8

  Last Friday I was interviewed on the television show Apostrophes.

  Today she was in a different room with two bedridden ladies, both silent. She had been tied to her armchair. Her eyes were hurting and she kept applying saliva to her eyelids. She told me that there had been a hold-up that night but “they spared our lives, that’s all that matters.” I untied her to walk her along the corridor and show the nurse her eyes. I so hate seeing her naked flesh when I lift her up and the hospital gown parts at the back.

  In the corridor, through a half-open door, I glimpsed a woman with her legs in the air. In the next bed, another woman was moaning just like one does during orgasm. Tonight everything was surreal and the sun was beating down.

  Saturday 14

  She is eating the strawberry tart I have brought her, picking the fruit out from the custard. “They have no regard for me here, they make me work like a slave, we’re not even fed properly.” Her perennial obsessions, her fear of poverty which I have long forgotten.

  Opposite us, an emaciated woman, a phantom from Buchenwald, is sitting on her bed, her back straight, a fearful expression in her eyes. She lifts up her chemise and you can see the diaper sheathing her vagina. Such scenes inspire horror on television. Here it’s different. There is no horror. These are women.

  Easter Sunday

  When I get there, she is lying in bed. I shave her face. The two other women remain silent. The place reeks of urine and shit. It’s very warm. I can hear shouts from the adjoining room: it’s Madame Plassier, who used to share my mother’s room at the hospital. Then suddenly you realize, it’s Easter! Cars are zooming along the highway. Heading back home after a sunny weekend. The woman closest to my mother is lying on her bed, with one hand resting on her belly. It’s beyond sadness.

  Thursday 26

  Painful moments. She thinks that I have come to take her away and that she is going to leave this place. She is bitterly disappointed, she can’t swallow anything. I am overcome with remorse. Yet, occasionally, I feel serene: she’s my mother and somehow she’s not quite my mother anymore.

  Heard the stand-up comedian Zouc: “You have to wait until people die to make sure they have lost their hold over you.”

  Sunday 29

  I shave her face and cut her fingernails. Her hands were dirty. She’s perfectly lucid: “I’ll stay here until I die.” And then: “I did everything I could to make you happy but you weren’t any happier for it.”

  M A
Y

  Tuesday 8

  My mother was lying on the bed, a tiny figure, her head thrown back like on the Sunday afternoons of my childhood (did I really hate that?), her legs up in the air (did I hate that too?). She was wearing a diaper. Ashamed: “I put it on to avoid making a mess.” Angry, too, with no regard for the Christian virtues she once praised: “To have worked all one’s life and end up like this!” Those mad, glassy eyes. The features are definitely hers—the nose and the lips with their pretty, even contours.

  My mind went back to May 8, 1958, twenty-six years ago. I had gone into town in the pouring rain to meet Guy D. He never turned up. I was wearing a thick woolen coat and carrying a red umbrella.

  When I got into the elevator to leave, she was standing in front of it. When the doors snapped shut, she was still talking. An unbearable moment.

  Sunday 13

  Here, in Us1, it’s worse than at Pontoise Hospital. The nurse on duty says reproachfully: “She’s wet herself and messed up the whole room.”

  I am appalled at my own cruelty. I made my mother put on her corset and stockings. She laces up the corset clumsily. Her legs are thin; she has been dressed in a pair of Petit-Bateau interlock panties. She obeys me fearfully. The scene haunts me, I keep seeing my mother with that demented expression; I desperately feel like crying but the tears won’t come (maybe only after her death?). My sadistic streak reminds me of the way I behaved toward other little girls in my childhood. Maybe because I was terrified of her.