by Annie Ernaux
Rather than go and see her, I preferred it when she came over to our place: it seemed easier to fit her into our life for a couple of weeks than to share three hours of her empty existence. She rushed over as soon as we invited her. We had left the housing estate and moved to the old village, which was beside the new town. My mother liked this place. She would be standing on the station platform, usually in a red suit, holding a suitcase, which she refused to let me carry. As soon as she had unpacked, she would be out weeding the flowerbeds. In summer she spent a month with us in the Nièvre. She would wander off on her own along country lanes and would return laden with blackberries, her legs scratched by the brambles. She never said, “I’m too old to …” (go fishing with the boys, take them to the funfair, stay up late, and so on).
Around half past six one evening in December 1979, as she was crossing the N15, she was run over by a Citroën CX which drove through the traffic lights on the pedestrian crossing. (The article published in the local newspaper implied that the driver had been unlucky. It mentioned that “visibility had been impaired owing to recent rainfall” and suggested that “the glare of the cars coming in the opposite direction, together with a number of other factors, may explain why the driver failed to see the seventy-year-old woman.”) The accident left her with a broken leg and multiple head injuries. The surgeon at the clinic was confident she would pull through thanks to her strong constitution. She struggled in her coma, trying to wrench the drip away from her body and lift her plastered leg. She shouted to her sister—the blonde one who had been dead twenty years—to watch out, a car was coming straight at her. I looked at her bare shoulders and her body, which for the first time I saw defenseless and in pain. I felt I was standing in front of the young woman who had suffered in giving birth to me one night during the war. With a shock, I realized she could die.
She recovered and regained the use of her broken leg. She was determined to win the case against the driver of the CX and underwent all the medical examinations with brazen resolve. She felt proud when people told her how lucky she had been, as if the car hurtling towards her had been an obstacle which, as usual, she had managed to overcome.
She had changed. She started laying the table much earlier, at eleven o’clock in the morning and half past six in the evening. All she read was France Dimanche† and the photo-romances passed on to her by a former customer (she hid these in the dresser when I came to see her). She switched on the television when she got up—in those days there were no programs, just the test-card and background music—left it on all day, barely glancing at it, and fell asleep in front of the set at night. She became irritable, saying about minor inconveniences, “It’s disgusting”: a ten-centime increase in the price of bread ora pleated skirt she had to iron. She was inclined to panic if she received a circular from her pension fund, or a leaflet announcing she had won a prize—“I didn’t send in for anything!” When she talked about Annecy and taking the boys round the old part of town, or feeding the swans on the lake, she was on the verge of tears. Her letters were shorter and less frequent than before, she seemed to have run out of words. A strange smell clung to her flat.
Things started happening to her. The train she was waiting for on the station platform had already left. When she went out to buy something, she discovered all the shops were closed. Her keys kept disappearing. The mail-order firm La Redoute sent her articles she hadn’t asked for. She turned against her relatives in Yvetot, accusing them of prying into her financial affairs, and refused to see them. One day, she told me over the phone: “I’m sick to death of going round in circles in this bloody flat.” She seemed to brace herself against invisible threats.
The month of July 1983 was scorching, even in Normandy. She stopped drinking and lost her appetite, claiming that the drugs she took provided enough nourishment. One day she fainted in the sun and was taken to the medical service of the old people’s home. A few days later, after she had been fed and rehydrated, she felt better and asked to go home; “Otherwise,” she said, “I’ll jump out of the window.” According to the doctor, she could no longer be left on her own. He advised me to put her into an old people’s home. I rejected this solution.
At the beginning of September, I went over to fetch her in the car. I had decided that she would move in with me. By then I had separated from my husband and was living with my two sons. As I was driving along, I thought, “Now I’ll be able to look after her” (just as in my childhood days: “When I grow up, I’ll take her around the world, we’ll visit the Louvre,” and so on). It was a lovely day. She looked perfectly serene, sitting in the front of the car, her handbag in her lap. As usual, we talked about the boys, their studies, and my job. She was in a cheerful frame of mind and entertained me with stories about the women who had shared her room at the hospital. She made only one odd remark, about one of the other patients: “A real bitch, I could have slapped her face!” That was the last time I can remember seeing my mother happy.
And here her story stops for there was no longer a place for her in society. She was slowly turning insane. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, the name given by the doctors to a form of senile dementia. Over the past few days, I have found it more and more difficult to write, possibly because I would like never to reach this point. And yet I know I shall have no peace of mind until I find the words that will reunite the demented woman she had become with the strong, radiant woman she once was.
She got confused by the different rooms in the house and would ask me angrily how to get to her own bedroom. She started losing things—“I can’t put my hands on it”—and was astonished to find them in places where she claimed she had never put them. She demanded that I give her some sewing or ironing or even some vegetables to peel, but as soon as she started on something, she lost patience and gave up. She seemed to live in a state of perpetual restlessness. Although she longed for new occupations—watching television, having lunch, going out in the garden—they never gave her the slightest satisfaction.
In the afternoon, she settled down at the living room table with her writing pad and her address book, like she used to. She started several letters but, after an hour, found she couldn’t go on and tore up everything she had written. One of these letters, written in November, read: “Dear Paulette, I am still lost in my world of darkness.”
Then she forgot the order of things and how they worked. She couldn’t remember how to arrange the plates and glasses on the table, or how to switch off the light when she left the room (she climbed on to a chair and tried to unscrew the bulb).
She wore tattered skirts and darned stockings, which she refused to part with: “You must have a packet, the way you throw everything away!” The only feelings she could experience were anger and suspicion. In every word she detected a threat against herself. She was plagued by urgent necessities, such as buying lacquer for her hair, knowing what day the doctor would come and how much money she had in her savings book. Sometimes she affected a playful attitude, chuckling to herself to show that she was all right.
She no longer understood what she read. She paced from one room to the next, searching all the time. She emptied the contents of her wardrobe on to the bed and rearranged her dresses and mementos on different shelves. The next day she started all over again, as if she couldn’t get the order right. One Saturday afternoon in January, she crammed half her clothes into plastic bags and sewed the edges together with cotton thread. When she wasn’t tidying up, she would be sitting in the living room, her arms crossed, staring straight ahead of her. Nothing could make her happy.
She forgot people’s names. She called me “Madame” in icy tones. She no longer recognized her own grandsons. At mealtimes, she asked them whether they got decent wages. She imagined she lived and worked on a farm where they too were employed. And yet she could see herself clearly. She felt ashamed when she soiled her nightdress, hiding it under her pillow and confessing to me one morning: “I couldn’t help it.” She was despe
rate to cling on to the world. She started to sew furiously, forming piles of scarves and handkerchiefs and joining them together with large, irregular stitches. She became attached to things, like her sponge bag which she carried around with her, entering a state of near panic as soon as she lost sight of it.
During this period, I was responsible for two road accidents. My stomach ached and I had trouble swallowing. I lost my temper and felt like crying for the slightest little thing. Sometimes the boys and I would roar with laughter, pretending to see my mother’s lapses of memory as a deliberate joke on her part. I talked about her to people who didn’t know her. They stared at me in silence. I felt I was going mad too. One day I drove aimlessly along country lanes for hours and hours, returning home after dusk. I started an affair with a man who repelled me.
I didn’t want her to become a little girl again, somehow she didn’t have the “right.”
She started talking to people who weren’t there. The first time it happened, I was marking some essays. I put my hands over my ears. I thought, “It’s all over.” Then I wrote down “Mummy’s talking to herself” on a piece of paper. (I wrote those words for myself, to make the thought more bearable. Now I am writing the same words, but for other people, so that they can understand.)
She decided not to get up in the morning. She would eat only sweet things and dairy products. Anything else made her sick. Towards the end of February, the doctor had her moved to the hospital at Pontoise, where she was admitted to the gastroenterology unit. Her health improved within a few days. The nurses had to tie her to her chair because she kept trying to escape from the ward. For the first time I rinsed her false teeth, cleaned her fingernails, and applied cold cream to her face.
Two weeks later, she was moved to the geriatric unit, a modern, three-story building which stands in a small cluster of trees behind the hospital. Most of the patients there are women. Those admitted for only short visits are sent to the first floor. The second and third floors receive the old people who are entitled to stay there until they die. The top floor seems to be reserved for the disabled and the mentally handicapped. The rooms—single or double—are light and clean. They are decorated with flowered wallpaper, engravings, a wall clock, a couple of armchairs in imitation leather, and each has a small bathroom with a lavatory. Some long-term patients have to wait for months before they can get a bed, especially if there haven’t been many deaths during the previous winter. My mother was sent to the first floor.
She talked animatedly and recalled scenes she thought she had witnessed the day before, a holdup or a child drowning. She told me that she had just been out shopping and that the streets were swarming with people. Fear and resentment had returned to torment her. She felt indignant at having to work her fingers to the bone for employers who didn’t pay her. She was approached by men. She greeted me angrily: “I’ve been so hard up lately, can’t even afford a piece of cheese.” In her pockets she kept bits of bread left over from lunch.
Even in her condition, she refused to give in. The religious streak in her faded, she had no incentive to go to church or to keep her rosary. She wanted to get better—“They’re bound to find out what the matter is”—and leave the hospital—“I’ll be all right once I’m with you.” She wandered from one corridor to the next until she was exhausted. She begged for wine.
One evening in April, she was already asleep at half past six, lying across the rumpled sheets in her slip. Her knees were up, showing her private parts. It was very warm in the room. I started to cry because she was my mother, the same woman I had known in my childhood. Her chest was covered in tiny blue veins.
Her statutory eight-week stay in the ward ended. She was transferred to a private nursing home, but only temporarily, because they didn’t take in “confused” people. At the end of May, she was moved back to the geriatric unit at Pontoise hospital. A bed had become free on the third floor.
As she gets out of the car and walks through the entrance, this is the last time that, despite her distracted air, she is unmistakably herself: wearing her glasses, her grey chiné suit, a pair of smart shoes, and stockings, her head held high. In her suitcase there are her blouses, her own underwear, and a few photographs and mementos.
She slowly slipped into a world without seasons, warm, gentle, and sweet-smelling, where there was no notion of time, just the inevitable routine of eating and going to bed. In between meals, there was nothing for her to do except walk along the corridors, stare blankly at the American soap operas and the glossy commercials on television, and sit down for dinner an hour before the food was ready, folding and unfolding her napkin feverishly. There were, I’m sure, the small parties: the free cakes handed round by charitable ladies on Thursday afternoons, a glass of champagne on New Year’s Day, and the traditional sprig of lily of the valley on May Day. There was love, too, with the women still holding hands, touching each other’s hair, and fighting. And, of course, the unchanging philosophy of the nurses: “Go on, Mrs. D—, have a sweet, it’ll give you something to do.”
Within a few weeks, she lost her self-respect. Her body began to sag and she walked around with her shoulders hunched and her head bent. She lost her glasses and her eyes took on a glazed expression. Her face looked bare, and slightly swollen, because of the tranquilizers. There was something wild about her appearance.
One by one she mislaid all her possessions, her favorite cardigan, her second pair of spectacles, and her sponge bag.
She didn’t care, she had given up trying to find things. She couldn’t remember what belonged to her, suddenly she had nothing of her own. One day she glanced at the Savoyard chimney sweep she had carried around with her since Annecy and remarked: “I used to have one like that.” For reasons of convenience, my mother, like most of the other women, wore a smock open at the back and a flowered blouse on top. Nothing seemed to shame her now, not even wearing an incontinence pad or eating voraciously with her fingers.
She gradually found it harder to distinguish between the people around her. The words that reached her were meaningless but she replied at random just the same. She still felt the need to communicate. Her speech mechanism had remained intact, producing logical sentences and correctly pronounced words, but what she said was dictated by her imagination and bore no relation to reality. She invented the life she could no longer live: she went to Paris, she had bought herself a goldfish, she had been taken to see her husband’s grave, and so on. And yet sometimes she knew: “I’m afraid my condition is irreversible.” Or else she remembered: “I did everything I could to make my daughter happy and she wasn’t any happier for it.”
She lived through the summer—like the other residents, she was dressed in a straw hat every time she went down to sit in the gardens—and the following winter. On New Year’s Day, she was given a skirt and a blouse of her own, and poured a glass of champagne. She walked more slowly now, one hand gripping the rail that ran along the walls of the corridor. Sometimes she fell down. She lost the bottom half of her false teeth and, a little later, the top half. Her lips shriveled and the lower part of her face developed into one large chin. Every time I went to see her, I was terrified she would look even less “human.” When I was away from her, I pictured her with the expression and the features she’d had before, and never with those of the woman she had become.
The following summer she fractured her hipbone. They decided not to operate. There was no point in fixing her up with an artificial hip, nor, for that matter, making her new teeth and spectacles. Now she never left her wheelchair, to which she was tied by a cotton strip, wrapped firmly around her waist. She was installed in the dining room with the other women, opposite the television set.
The people who had known her wrote to me saying, “She deserved better than that.” They felt that the sooner she was “out of her misery,” the better. Maybe one day the whole of society will agree with them. They didn’t come to see her, for them she was already dead. And yet she still wanted to live. She
kept straining to get up, pressing on her good leg and tearing at the cotton strip. She tried to grab everything within her reach. She was always hungry, all her energy had become concentrated around her mouth. She liked being kissed and would purse her lips in an attempt at mimicry. She was a little girl who would never grow up.
I brought her chocolates and pastries, which I cut up into little pieces and fed to her. At first I always got the wrong sort of cake—it was either too firm or too creamy—and she couldn’t eat it (the indescribable pain of seeing her struggle with the crumbs, using her tongue and her fingers to finish them up). I washed her hands, shaved her face, and sprinkled her with perfume. One day I started to brush her hair and when I stopped she said: “I like it when you do my hair.” After that I brushed her hair every time I went to see her. I remained in her room, sitting opposite her. She often grabbed my skirt, passing her fingers over the fabric as if to inspect the quality. She tore up the paper from the cake shop with violence, her teeth clenched firmly together. She talked about money and former customers, laughing, her head thrown back. These were gestures she had always had, and words that had been with her all her life. I didn’t want her to die.
I needed to feed her, to touch her, and to hear her.
On several occasions I felt the sudden urge to take her away and give up everything else just to look after her. I realized instantly that I was incapable of doing such a thing. (I still felt guilty about having put her into a home, even if, as people said, I “had no alternative.”)
