I Remain in Darkness Read online

  Thursday 17

  I went over to fetch her at Us. She has been allocated a bed in the long-term geriatric ward at Pontoise Hospital. This may be the last time she is driven around in a car; she doesn’t realize it. When we reach the hospital car park, her face crumples. I understand then that she thought she was coming back to my place. Now her room is on the fourth floor.

  A bunch of women circle us, addressing my mother with the familiar tu form: “You’re going to be in our group?” They are like kids talking to the “new girl” at school. When I take leave of her, she looks at me in panic and confusion: “You’re not leaving, are you?”

  The situation is reversed, now she is my little girl. I CANNOT be her mother.

  Friday 18

  She was sleeping in her slip. The crisscross of blue veins on her chest. The skin on the inside of her arms creased like the underside of a mushroom. I wake her up gently. Later, she hurls a stream of abuse at her roommate, a fat, docile woman. The nurse comes and speaks to us; he’s a young bearded man with a casual, laid-back attitude. After he has left, my mother turns to her roommate with envy: “Are you happy now? You finally got to see your little doctor friend!” Ever and always, men on her mind—and thank God for that. A virtuous woman consumed by longing.

  Tuesday 22

  “I dreamt of Victor Hugo; he had come over to visit the village. He stopped to speak with me.” She laughs as she evokes her dream. Singled out by the great poet, chosen, how typical of her.

  Her face is becoming puffy, her features are changing. I had brought her some cider at her request. They came to tell me in solemn tones that all alcoholic beverages were strictly forbidden.

  Friday 25

  Her second pair of glasses has gone missing. I ask her what she has done with them, she falls asleep. For the first time I touch her like a child who is sleeping. Outdoors—the month of May. The May dew, which she would collect on a flannel and rub onto my face to soften my complexion. At my First Communion, in May, she had taken the collection in a black suit, a wide-brimmed hat and high-heeled shoes with straps, “a fine figure of a woman.” She was forty-five years old. I’m one year younger. She was sleeping with her eyes open, her alabaster legs uncovered, her vagina exposed. I start to cry. The old lady next to her is forever making her bed, folding then unfolding the blanket. Women.

  J U N E

  Sunday 3

  She is in the dining room, seated opposite another woman whom she is observing with a sinister smile, a cross between curiosity and sadism (when and where have I seen her smile that way?). The woman’s eyes are misty with tears, she seems mesmerized by my mother and her perverse, inquisitorial expression. Today all the women are crazy. The one now sharing my mother’s room kept shouting, “Please, give me some buttered bread!” Another one was muttering to herself in the corridor. A frenzy of activity, strange and mysterious.

  Thursday 7

  “Having to end my days here,” every time I come. Still fiercely envious of my mother-in-law: “If it had been Raymond’s mother (she probably means Philippe, my husband), sure they would have found room for her at home.” The old lady sharing my mother’s room terrifies me. As soon as I walked in, she screamed: “I want to go to the toilet!” I took her to the bathroom. When she comes out, she starts shouting again, waving her diaper, and insists that I help her on with her panties. I do what she asks. She also needs to have her nose blown. My mother looks on and says: “She’s impossible. She’s had three children already.”

  Friday 15

  When I arrived, she was sitting near the elevator, looking frantic. She spoke so quietly I could barely hear her. In the corridor leading to her room, she walked with hunched shoulders. She crumbled her cookie onto the floor. I feel like crying when I see how badly she needs my love because I cannot satisfy her demand (I loved her so desperately as a child). I think of how badly I want A to love me now, just when he is drifting away from me.

  When I take the elevator to go downstairs, I catch sight of her face framed between the two doors that slam shut, seemingly blotting her out with a bang.

  The same visits, over and over again: we sit facing each other, exchanging a few sentences in a semi-coherent way. I know all the other patients. One of them, a youngish woman with a proud bearing, constantly paces the corridor with quick, short steps. She reminds me of the broken clock in Ravel’s opera, The Child and the Enchantments. Today I discovered that she has a husband—sixty-something, with reddish eyes, dressed in a navy suit.

  A nurse yells into the phone: “Is anyone dying?”

  Saturday 23

  In the hall downstairs, an old man in pajamas is always busy making phone calls. The other day, he showed me a piece of paper with a telephone number. I dialed it for him, it was the wrong number. He spends all day trying to get hold of someone, maybe one of his children or an organization. Hoping, every morning.

  The little old lady next to my mother had snot running onto her blouse. My mother was in a state of complete apathy; she hadn’t even noticed. She has cut herself off from other people. She mislays all her personal possessions but has quit looking for them. She has given up. I think of the frantic efforts she would make to find her toiletry bag at my place; she still had a hold over the real world through her belongings. I am dismayed by such indifference. Everything she once owned is gone. Her watch and her eau de cologne have vanished. Now meals are all she has left.

  I always see the same few visitors.

  J U L Y

  Thursday 12

  Back from Spain. She stands up abruptly from the table when she sees me walk in through the dining room door (years ago, at boarding school, waiting in the closed-in playground, I would jump to my feet as soon as I made out her figure reaching the top of the stairs: the same surge of excitement). She announces proudly: “This is my daughter!” The women around her murmur: “She’s beautiful!” I can see how happy she is. We go downstairs into the garden, sit on a bench. I recalled that when I was ten, we had both been to visit an uncle who was recovering from a prostate operation. It was at the Hotel-Dieu Hospital in Rouen. The sun was shining, men and women were walking around in maroon bathrobes: I was so sad and so happy that my mother was with me, a strong, protective figure warding off illness and death.

  We took the elevator to go back upstairs. In the mirror, I could see both of us, she with her hunched shoulders. What mattered was that she was standing beside me, alive.

  Thursday 26, Boisgibault

  It occurred to me that she had never pampered nor shown any love for her own body. She had never touched her face, her hair or her arms the way I do, or slipped her hand into her blouse. A worn-out body. She would collapse onto a chair at the end of the day.

  A violent woman, with only one system of values to account for the world, that of religion.

  I’m not sure that I could write a book about her in the same vein as A Man’s Place. There was no true distance between the two of us. Rather, a sense of identification.

  A U G U S T

  Saturday 11

  I feel intense satisfaction at the prospect of visiting my mother today, as if I were about to learn some fundamental truth about myself. It’s crystal-clear: she is me in old age and I can see the deterioration of her body threatening to take hold of me—the wrinkles on her legs, the creases in her neck, shown off by her recent haircut. She is still prey to her fears, she has never ceased to feel alienated: “The boss isn’t easy to handle, we’re underpaid for all the work we do” and so on. She munches the food I have brought her.

  Food, urine, shit: this combination of smells hits one as soon as one leaves the elevator. Quite often, the women go two by two, with one assuming the dominant role. For instance, there’s a tall, upright woman who makes her companion—a small, stooped figure shuffling along in her slippers—walk the whole length of the corridor, then back again in the opposite direction. The place is a cage. My mother is a solitary figure.

  When I take the elevator to
go downstairs, I glance at myself in the mirror once again, just to make sure.

  Monday 20

  Now when I come to see her, I’m still young, I have a love life. In ten or fifteen years’ time, I’ll still be coming to see her but I too will be old.

  Today she was wondering what she might buy—clothes, trinkets, whatever. But she can have nothing of her own. The outfit she is wearing is the one provided by the hospital, so much easier to clean when it gets soiled. She has lost all the clothes she had brought with her, as well as her glasses, of which she took such good care at my place six months ago. Here, the things that get lost are never found. No one cares: they’re going to die anyway. The head nurse—tall, haughty, with black hair in a pageboy style.

  The clock-lady went up to an elderly man, took his hand, raised it to her lips, then walked on. Two old ladies holding hands were strolling along the corridor; twice they stopped to greet me: “Good day, Madame!” They seemed to have forgotten they had already done so or maybe they didn’t recognize me.

  Friday 24

  I intend to give the clothes my mother left behind at home to Le Secours Catholique, a charitable organization, or to sell them at the flea market in Pontoise. Guilty feelings. The sewing basket where she kept her needlework and buttons, her thimble—these are the things I shall keep.

  I must not give in to emotion as I write about her.

  Wednesday 29

  I realized that I forgot about her in between visits. She said: “I hope he’ll take to the water.”—“Who’s that, mummy?”—“The goldfish I hope to have one day.” Later on, she remarked: “I’m afraid my condition may be irreversible.” Her hands and body were cold as marble. And that crazy expression.

  S E P T E M B E R

  Monday 3

  I read through Cleaned Out, which is shortly coming out in paperback. At the end of the book—a portrait of her by me, aged five. In those days I used to call her Cubby.

  Wednesday 5

  Indoors, the same warm temperature, all year round. There are no more seasons. All the women in their striped or flowered aprons are metamorphosed into maids. One of them, a tall, imposing figure with a queenly bearing and a shawl, reminded me of Proust’s Françoise.

  My mother inquires: “Don’t you get bored at home?” When she talks about me, she really means herself. God, she must be so bored! Or has the word lost all significance for her? What does she actually remember about her life? What does life mean to her now?

  Tuesday 11

  I dreamt of her, she had wet her panties. The first time it happened in real life, it was a tremendous shock.

  Every time I visit her, her face needs shaving. At the fête of the Communist Party, I was standing next to a transsexual with bluish skin. Subconsciously, I thought of my mother.

  Today she couldn’t understand any of my questions. “Are you getting enough sleep?”—“Yes, yes, it’s perfectly clean.” Giving a detailed account of everything she has done that day: I went shopping downtown, the streets were crowded and so on, as though she were leading a normal existence. Such a vivid imagination to make up for her condition. Before I left, she snapped: “It’ll be ages before I get to leave this fucking place.”

  Monday 17

  Shaving her face, cold but alive, and seeing her blank expression, I wondered: “Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?”

  When I entered the dining room, she was feverishly wiping the table with the palm of her hand.

  In her flowered apron, she looks like Lucie, the woman who came to clean for us in Lillebonne and who had lost all her teeth. My mother too has lost all her teeth, her dentures have gone missing.

  In the mail this week, there was a letter addressed to my mother. France Million—When Luck Comes Your Way. Beside a photograph of Anne-Marie Peysson, all smiles, you could read: “Is Madame Blanche Duchesne the lucky person to whom Anne-Marie Peysson will hand over a 250,000 franc check?” At the bottom of the page, there was a facsimile of a check made out to my mother and the words: “The exceptional digital portrait of Madame Blanche Duchesne,” a portrait that “comes to life when seen from a distance of one meter.” At that distance, one could make out the contours of a young face with pouting lips. My mother’s name was mentioned dozens of times, to convince her that she had been chosen, that she would be the winner if she replied before October 5. Assholes. Someone should grab Anne-Marie Peysson by the scruff of her neck and drag her to the geriatric unit of Pontoise Hospital.

  Sunday 23

  On the train, a few days ago, a nun with shiny, bulging eyes was staring at the other passengers. The face of the Inquisition. I thought about my mother uneasily.

  The nurse told me that she was always talking about me, and only about me. Guilty feelings. I have also noticed that she often thinks she is me.

  I was born because my sister died, I replaced her. Therefore, I have no real self.

  Saturday 29

  When I walked into the dining room, they were all watching television. Only she looked up: she spends all day waiting for me.

  Worse was to come, something I could never have imagined. I opened the drawer of her bedside table to make sure she still had some biscuits. I saw what I believed to be a cookie and took it. It was a human turd. I slammed the drawer shut in utter confusion. Then it occurred to me that if I left it there, someone would find it, and that subconsciously, I probably wanted this to happen so that they could see how low my mother had fallen. I found a piece of paper and went to flush it down the toilet. I recalled a scene from my childhood: I had hidden some excrements in my bedroom cupboard because I felt too lazy to go downstairs and use the outdoor toilet.

  Today nothing she says makes any sense: “They’ve changed all the ’a’ and ’o’ in words” and “Marie-Louise comes to see me quite often.” Marie-Louise, her sister, has been dead for twenty years.

  O C T O B E R

  Sunday 7

  Now I come and see her on Sundays. The television is broadcasting Jacques Martin’s show L’École des Fans2. Children are singing. The old people stare blankly at them. When my mother and I entered her room, my nostrils were assailed by the overpowering stench of shit. We sat down opposite each other. As usual, the other old lady was yapping, “Please, give me some cake.” No one ever comes to see her. As I walked toward her, I noticed a huge pile of shit by her armchair. The nurse on duty assures me that neither the old woman (who wears a diaper), nor my mother could have done that. Apparently, an elderly man wanders around the hospital, slips into a room and defecates onto the floor.

  Once again, I try to reach the elevator and get it to start before she catches up with me, before the doors slam shut in front of her face. Such distress at seeing her in her present condition. Yet she can still arouse anger in me. At the local baker’s this morning, a woman gave a little girl a resounding smack. The child, humiliated but proud, does not cry. The mother’s face is harsh, with a strained expression. The scene upsets me; it reminds me of my own mother, who would slap me for the slightest little thing.

  Friday 12

  I thought back to the time when my mother was staying with me, between the months of September and February: I was (subconsciously?) cruel toward her, panicked at the idea that she was becoming a woman without a past, a frightened woman clinging to me like a child. However, it wasn’t as bad as today. At least she showed longing and aggressiveness.

  For the first time, I have a clear picture of what her life must be like in this place, in between my visits: the meals in the dining room, the waiting. I am accumulating bags of guilt for the future. But letting her stay at my place would have meant the end of my life. It was either her or me. I can remember the last sentence she wrote: “I remain in darkness.”

  I can’t face wearing the garments she left behind, her bed jacket and so on. I just want to keep them, like exhibits in a museum.

  I am constantly comparing my mother to other elderly
women—their complexion, the state of their legs—to see “how far gone she is.”

  Friday 19

  Vivid memories of the corset she used to wear, which encased the lower part of her body, from below her breasts to the swelling of her buttocks. I could see her cleft through the crisscross of laces.

  Thursday 25

  I read The Confessor’s Handbook, an old book given to me by A. I remembered the expression in her eyes when I was a child: she was the confessor.

  Sunday 28

  “Acolyte” was a term she liked to use when referring to some of our customers’ drinking companions. To show people that she knew complicated words. This woman never could take humiliation.

  Flashes of me, aged sixteen: boys, hoping for wild love, continually. And her, my guardian: “You’re far too young! You’ve got plenty of time!” But one never has enough time.

  Writing a book about one’s mother inevitably raises the issue of writing.

  Monday 29

  She looks even more withered and confused. All she is wearing is her hospital gown, open at the back, exposing her spine, her buttocks and the mesh of her panties. A glorious sun is beating down through the double-glazed windows. I think about my room at the students’ hostel twenty years ago. Today I am here with her. We have so little imagination.

  The little old lady needed to go to the can, wobbling on her crooked, spindly legs, squealing as usual. She spent a long time in there while I sat beside my mother. I recalled the spell of gastroenteritis I had suffered in tenth grade; I was reading Sartre’s novel Nausea. Like the old lady, I sat hunched over my swollen belly. It was a cold, sunny month of February.