My Mother's Book

(Le Livre de ma mère)

by

Albert Cohen

English translation

1993

E. M. Langille

My Mother's Book

I

Each man is alone and each holds all others in contempt and our grief is a desert island.

Still, that is no reason not to take comfort, this evening, in words. Poor lost soul sitting at his desk

taking comfort in words, sitting at his desk, the telephone off the hook because he is frightened of

the outside, and, in the evening, if the telephone is off the hook, he feels like a king, protected from

evil outside. So quick to nastiness; nasty for nothing.

Such a curious happiness, sad and crippled but soft like weakness or contraband liquor, such

happiness, just the same, to be writing, at this moment, alone in my kingdom and far from the

knaves outside. Who are these knaves? I shan't tell you. I don't want any trouble. I don't want them

coming to intrude on my sham peace or to keep me from writing page after page, by the dozen, by

the hundred, depending on my preference and my destiny. I, furthermore, have resolved, once and

for all, to tell all painters that they are gifted -- if not, they bite. And, as a general rule, I tell

everyone how charming they are. Such is my everyday manner. But at night, and until daybreak, I

have a few thoughts of my own.

Sumptuous, you, my golden pen, dance across the paper, go! Dance whilst I still have the

youth, go! Find your slow irregular path, hesitating, as in a dream, little path, awkward but

controlled. Go! I love you, you, my only consolation; go on dancing across the pages where sadly I

2

find pleasure, squinting sullenly in enjoyment. Yes words, my homeland, they console and avenge.

But they will never bring back my mother. However filled with the fiery past, pounding in my

head, however sweet smelling, the words I write will never bring back my dead mother. The night's

forbidden subject. In the background the image of my mother alive, when, for the last time I saw

her in France, in the background, maternal ghost.

Suddenly at my desk, because everything is in its place and because there is hot coffee and

cigarettes and my lighter is working and my pen dances and I am close by the fire and my cat, I

have a moment of happiness so intense that my eyes well with tears. I pity myself; pity this childish

capacity for happiness -- bad omen. Oh! What pity to feel so contented, all because of a pen that

writes smoothly, pity for this poor hapless heart that longs to stop aching, longs to find some reason

to go on living. Then, for a few minutes, I find myself in a tiny middle class oasis whose comforts I

relish intensely. But grief lies in wait, underneath the surface, permanent, unforgettable. Yes, I

relish being, if but for a few moments, an honest burgher, like them. One loves to be what one is

not. And no one's soul is more refined than that of a true bourgeoise, she who falls into a trance on

hearing verse and, who, at the sight of a Cézanne, froths at the mouth, holding court, in her

inimitable jargon, picked up here and there, pointing to mass and volume, and declaring that

nothing is more sensuous than that red! And your sister, is she sensuous? Now, where was I? I

know, let's draw a little picture in the margin to help gather our thoughts, a little neurasthenic

picture, a slow picture full of decisions and schemes, a strange island, a spiritual homeland, an oasis

of thought which, in its turn, follows the ever curving lines, a little drawing not quite demented,

careful, childish and devoted. Shush! don't wake her, daughters of Jerusalem, don't wake her whilst

she sleeps.

3

Who is sleeping? asks my pen. Who is sleeping, if not my mother, eternally. Don't wake

her, daughters of Jerusalem, my grief is buried in the cemetery of a town whose name I cannot

bring myself to pronounce for this name is a synonym of my mother buried in the earth. Go pen,

now curving, no longer hesitant, be reasonable and once again an instrument of clarity, dip your nib

in will and don't make such long commas. This inspiration is pointless. Soul, oh my pen, be brave

and hardworking, leave the land of the obscure, stop being foolish, almost foolish and unsparing,

morbidly unsparing. And you my only friend, you whom I see in the looking glass, hold back your

dry tears and, now that you dare, speak -- with a heart of false bronze -- of your dead mother, speak

calmly, feign calmness, who knows? Perhaps you'll grow accustomed to it. Speak of your mother in

'their' detached manner, whistle a lullaby and make believe that things are not so tragic, smile that

you might go on living, smile in the looking glass and when you are in company, smile even at this

page. Smile in your mourning more breathless than fear. Smile, that you might believe that nothing

matters, smile and force yourself to feign life, smile underneath the dangling sword of your

mother's death, smile your whole life through, smile until it kills you.

4

II

Friday afternoon, which, in the Jewish household, is the beginning of the holy Sabbath, my

mother wore her finery. She wore her solemn black silk dress and what jewellery she had not sold.

For I, in my happy youth, was a prodigal son and gave banknotes prodigiously to old bearded

beggars. And if a friend fancied my cigarette case, the gilt case was his. In Geneva, where I was a

generous hearted student, foolish though tender, she sold her most noble jewels. Jewels of which

she was naively proud and which were the outward sign of her personal dignity, my darling,

daughter of notables, dignity of a forgotten age.

So often, always, cheated by the estate jewellers, she sold her jewels for me, behind my

father's back. My father's harshness frightened us, her me, and made us accomplices. I still see her

coming out of a Geneva jewellers, so proud of the meagre, grand sum she had secured for me,

happy, overcome with happiness, happy to have sold her treasured earrings for me, her rings and

her pearls, the adornments of her cast, honour of an Levantine lady. So happy, my darling, already

walking with difficulty, already tracked by death. So happy to be rid of her jewels for me, to give

me the banknotes, which, in a very few days, would turn to smoke in my young and ready hands. I

took the banknotes, carefree and golden, so little preoccupied with my mother, for I had sparkling

sharp teeth and was the loved lover, although loving, of a beautiful girl, and of another and another

and so on infinitely in the shimmering looking glass of the Castle of Love. I took the banknotes and

did not know, son that I was, that those humble, great sums were my mother's offering on the altar

5

of motherhood. Oh priestess of your son, oh majesty that I was much to slow to recognize -- too

late now.

Every Sabbath when I came home from Geneva for the holiday, my mother waited for my

father and me, sprigs of myrtle in hand, to return from the synagogue. Having finished her

housework for the Sabbath, her humble apartment, her Jewish kingdom and her poor homeland, she

was seated, alone, at the ceremonious Sabbath table, ceremonious she waited for her husband and

her son. Seated, constraining herself, immobile so not to spoil her finery, breathless and prim,

corseted with dignity, breathless to be so well groomed and respectable, breathless at the thought of

pleasing her two lovers, her husband and her son. Soon she will hear their footsteps on the stairs,

breathless under her shining hair, anointed with venerable sweet almond oil, for she was artful in

her finery, breathless like a little girl on prize giving day, my ageing mother waiting for her two

reasons for living, her son and her husband.

Seated beneath a portrait of me at fifteen, her altar, that horrid picture which she thought

exquisite, seated at the Sabbath table, three candles already lighted, at the feast table, already a

small corner of the kingdom of the Messiah, my mother breathed happily, yet not without some

quickness, for soon they would be here, her two men, her life's two lights. Oh yes, she thought

rejoicing, they will find the apartment clean and luxurious. They will compliment her for her

immaculate housekeeping; compliment her on the elegance of her dress. Her son appeared to pay

no mind but he noticed everything, would cast a quick glance on her new collar, her lace cuffs and,

certainly these refinements would meet with his august approval. And bursting with pride she

already imagined every word that she would tell them, with some slight, innocent, exaggeration

perhaps, of her remarkable domestic prowess. And they will see just how competent she is, a

queenly housekeeper. Such was the ambition of my mother.

6

She sat, swollen with maternal love, listing, in her mind, all that she had cooked, cleaned

and put away. Now and again she would go out to the kitchen and, with her tiny hands where shone

a noble wedding ring, she would gracefully, uselessly, poke meatballs simmering in their tomato

sauce. Her dimpled, little hands with skin so soft that it warranted my compliments -- not without

some hypocrisy and much love -- for her naive satisfaction delighted me. She was so skilful in the

kitchen, so clumsy at everything else. But in her kitchen, spruce old lady, what a first rate captain

she was.

My mother's naive poking in her kitchen, poking the meatballs with her wooden spoon,

ritual, wise poking, tender and sweet, absurd and useless, so loving and contented, announcing that

all was perfect and would meet with the approval of her two fussy men. Oh my mother's expert and

silly poking, all alone, smiling imperceptibly in her kitchen, awkward, majestic grace, my mother's

majesty.

Back from her kitchen she would sit down, very prim in her domestic calling, satisfied with

her adequate, little destiny of loneliness, exclusively adorned by husband and son whose servant she

was and guardian protector. This woman who had once been young and pretty was a daughter of

the Law of Moses, a moral law, which in her eyes, was more important than God. No amorous love

affairs, no escapades à la Karenina. No. But a husband and a son to guide and to serve with humble

majesty. She did not marry for love. She was proposed in marriage and she docilely accepted. And

biblical love was born, so different from my own western passions. My mother's sacred love was

born in marriage, grew with the birth of the child that I was and was fulfilled in the sacred bond of

husband and wife, allied against evil. There are passions iridescent and glistening. There is no

greater love.

7

On one Sabbath that now comes to mind, she was sitting, waiting, pleased with herself and

with her son's good countenance. She was planning to prepare some marzipan on Sunday. "I'll cook

it better than last time" she thought. And, oh yes, on Sunday she would make a corn cake for him

with lots of sultanas. Very well. Suddenly, noticing that it was already 8 o’clock she was overcome

with dread, losing, if only for a moment, her studied composure, loosing, at the same time that self-

control which is the prerogative of self-assured peoples, those certain of tomorrow, those

accustomed to happiness. They said they'd be home by 7 o'clock. An accident? Run over? Her

forehead pearled with sweat, she checks the clock in the bedroom. Only ten to seven. Smile in the

looking glass -- thanks be to the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. But closing the door she

scrapes her hand on a nail -- tetanus! Quick! iodine. She dreaded death, and worse the thought of

the night gown that she wore on her wedding night and which she would wear again on the day of

her death, the terrible nightgown, put away in the bottom drawer of her wardrobe, terrifying drawer

never opened. In spite of her religious faith she could not bring herself to believe in eternal life.

Then, suddenly, life returns, she hears footsteps in the stairwell, the touching footsteps of her two

beloved.

One last glance in the looking glass to wipe off that dusting of powder, put on in secret and

with an enormous feeling of guilt, a naive white powder sold by Roger et Gallet and which was

called, I think, Vera Violetta. And hastily, she opens the door, secured by a safety chain, because

you never know, and memories of pogroms are tenacious. Quickly prepare for the entrance of the

two beloved. Thus was the passionate life of my saintly mother. Very little like Hollywood, as you

can see. Compliments from her husband and her son. Of life, that is all she asked.

8

She opened the door without their having to knock. Neither father nor son expressed

surprise that the door open magically. They were used to it and knew that she, always ready, lie in

wait for love. Yes ready, so much so that her searching eyes, forever inquiring after my health

angered me on occasion. Secretly I hated her for watching me so closely, for guessing. Oh sacred

guardian forever lost! Standing in front of the open door she was smiling, breathless, dignified,

almost flirtatious. Such I remember her, when I dare, as if the dead were living. "Welcome", she

would say with timid and sententious dignity, longing to please us, breathless on this Sabbath to be

so dignified and beautiful. "Welcome, peaceful Sabbath", she would say, and, hands splayed like

shafts of light she blessed me, a priestess, glared at me with the ardour of a wild beast, with all the

amber watchfulness of a lioness, to see if I was still in good health, or, with maternal solicitation, if

I looked sad or worried. But on this day everything was perfect. She smelled the sweet scent of the

myrtle we brought for her. She rubbed the sprigs in her dainty hands, drinking in the divine

perfume a little theatrically as becomes one of our oriental tribe. At that moment she was so

beautiful, my old mother, already moving with difficulty, my mother.

III

What I now tell is a memory of times when my mother was already old, times when I was

an adult, disguised as an international civil servant. I had come from Geneva to spend part of the

holiday with my parents in Marseille. My mother was delighted that her son, whom she imagined

had such a lofty station among the Gentiles, accept, with a good heart, to pray on the Sabbath in

Marseille's synagogue. I still hear her speaking to me.

"Tell me, my son, in Geneva, do you also pray in the house of the Eternal? You ought to, I

assure you. Our God is a great god you know and a Holy God, the True God. He carried us up out

of the land of Pharaoh, it's a well-known fact, the Bible says so. Listen, my son, even if you don't

believe in our God, because of all those experts, a curse upon them with their figures! go now and

then to the synagogue" she gently pleaded, "just for me". In the end she was reassured that my

attendance at synagogue, even atheist, would spare me the bouts of bronchitis to which, every

winter, I was prone.

"And tell me, my darling eye, this position of yours in the International Bureau of Work,

what is your title exactly"? -- «Attaché to the Diplomatic Division» -- So! I suppose that the

customs officials can't lay a hand on you. You walk by and they bow. What a wonder! God be

praised to have let me live to see the day. If your grandfather, of blessed memory, may he rest in

peace, were living, how proud he would be. Even he, the royal notary of Corfu, the revered, the

well-respected, even he had to open his luggage at customs. He was a man of vast knowledge; you

would have enjoyed talking to him. So tomorrow, if you like, I will make you some nougat. Eat

well, my darling. God knows what foul food you eat in those sumptuous restaurants in Geneva!

Say, my child, you don't eat the unmentionable? (translation pork) Oh well, if you do don't tell me.

I don't want to know".

"And now, my son, listen to my advice, for old women are wise. In this Diplomatic

Department I suppose you have a superintendent. If he's overbearing, don't get angry, put up a

little ... if you answer back, bile will rush to his head and God only knows what a viper's tongue he

has, and what a knife for your back! What can I say? We must put up with a great deal -- Oh that

hat suits you!" And because I was smiling she added sighing "How can they, poor unhappy girls,

resist such a smile?" Biased, she tenderly scrutinized me, imagining my passionate love affairs,

frightened of some gentile girl, so beautiful and so clever, but jealous and bold, and who had the

untoward habit, overwhelmed with passion, to kill one's son, at the drop of a hat. Fearsome, these

daughters of Baal, unafraid, or so she was told, to undress in front of a man who was not their

husband. Naked, and smoking a cigarette! Real temptresses. "Tell me, my child, don't you think

you should pay a visit to the Chief Rabbi. He knows proper, quiet girls, good housewives. A simple

call wouldn't commit you. You see them first and, if none be to your taste you put your hat on and,

farewell, you leave. But, who knows .... perhaps God has chosen one of them, just for you. It's not

fitting that a man live alone. I hope to die with some peace of mind, knowing that you have a

virtuous wife by your side". Faced with my silence, she sighed, tried to suppress the image of a

revolver suddenly pulled out of some half naked temptress' handbag and, put herself in the hands of

the Eternal, of Jacob's Almighty, who brought Daniel forth from the lion's den. He will protect me

from the temptresses. She promised to go the synagogue more often.

By this time she was already small and round. But her eyes were magnificent and her hands

dainty. I loved to kiss her hands. How I would like to re-read the letters she wrote from Marseille in

her fine hand. I can't. I am afraid of living gestures. When I come across her letters I close my eyes.

I put them away, my eyes closed. I dare not look at photographs of her, where I know she is

thinking of me.

"I, my son, don't have schooling like you, but I tell you, the love stories you read about in

books are pagan ways. Me, I think they're playing games. They only see each other when they are

dressed, like in the theatre. They adore each other, they cry, they kiss, oh abomination, on the

mouth, and, a year later, divorce! So where is love? A marriage which starts with love is a bad sign.

These great storybook lovers, I wonder if they would still love their poetess if she were sick, always

in bed and if he, the man, were forced to care for her as one cares for a baby. You know what I

mean, not very pleasant. Well, I think love would lose its hold. True love, must I tell you, is habit.

It's growing old together. Do you want meatballs with peas or tomatoes?

"My son, explain to me how you can enjoy hiking in the mountains. What enjoyment, all

those cows with sharp horns, with staring eyes! What enjoyment in all those rocks. You might fall.

Would you enjoy that? Are you a mule that you must climb stony cliffs? Wouldn't it be better to go

to Nice -- what with gardens and music and taxis and shops? Men were born to live like men and

not like snakes, in the rubble. This mountain where you go is like a hideout for bandits. Are you

Albanian? And how can you like all that snow? What enjoyment walking on bicarbonate that gets

your shoes wet? My heart trembles like a little bird when I see those skis in your room. Those skis

are the horns of the Devil. Putting sabres on one's feet, how crazy. Don't you know that those

demon skiers break their legs. They love it, they're pagans. May the thoughtless break their legs if

such be their pleasure. But you, you are a Cohen, of the house of Aaron, the brother of Moses, our

master." I reminded her that Moses climbed Mount Sinai. She was somewhat taken aback.

Evidently the precedent was eminent. She thought for a moment, then explained that Mount Sinai

was very small and that Moses went there once and that, what's more, he did not go for his own

pleasure, but to see God.

IV

She no longer speaks, she who spoke so sweetly. She is pathetically dead. She was stolen

from my arms as in a dream. She died during the War in occupied France while I was in London.

All of her hopes of growing old by my side to end so, the fear of the Germans, the yellow star, my

inability to protect her, shame in the street, misery perhaps, and her son so far away. Could one

conceal from her that she was dying and that she would never see her son again? She had so often

repeated, in her letters, the joy of our meeting again. It seems one must praise God and thank him

for his blessings.

She was taken away, silent, and she did not struggle. She who had once been so busy in her

kitchen. She was carried away from the bed where she so often thought about her son, where she

awaited his letters, where she had nightmares of his perils. She was carried away, stiff, and sealed in

a box. Sealed away like an object led by two horses; the people in the street went about their

shopping.

She was lowered into a hole in the ground without protest, she who always spoke with so

much animation, her dainty hands in perpetual gesture. Now she is quiet underneath the earth,

sealed in an earthly gaol with no hope of escape, silent prisoner, silent in the solitude of the earth,

with suffocating earth, so heavy, above her, whose dainty little hands will never move again. A

Salvation Army Poster informed me yesterday that God loves me.

Alone, poor worthless soul, gone now from the earth, alone -- someone had the charming

forethought to put a heavy marble slab on her grave so that she might not escape.

Underneath the earth, my beloved, while my hand, created by her, my hand that she kissed,

the former living laid out in splendid idleness, forever immobile, she who, shy, danced as a young

virgin smiling mazurkas. We are so alone. You in the earth, I in my room. I a little dead among the

living, you a little living among the dead. Right now you are smiling imperceptibly because I have

a headache.

V

To cry for one's mother is to cry for childhood. Man longs for his childhood, wants it back

and he loves his mother all the more that he grows old. His mother is his childhood. I was once a

child. I am no longer. I can't fathom it. Suddenly I recall our arrival in Marseille. I was five years

old. Disembarking from the boat, clutching my mother's skirts -- she was wearing a boater spangled

with cherries -- I was terrified by the locomotive street cars. I reassured myself imagining that there

must be a horse hidden within.

We didn't know anyone in Marseille where, from our Greek Island, Corfu, we had alighted

as in a dream. My father, mother and me in an absurd dream, slightly clownish. Why Marseille?

The head of the expedition himself did not know. He had heard that Marseille was a big city. His

first brilliant strategy was to be swindled by a businessman, blond, and whose nose was not hooked.

I still see my parents, in our hotel room, sitting on the edge of the bed crying. My mother's tears

were falling on the cherry spangled boater.

Shortly after our arrival, my father dropped me off, terrified, for I didn't speak a word of

French, at a small school run by nuns. There I spent every day from dawn until dusk while my

parents tried to make a living in the vast and frightening world. They would often have to leave so

early in the morning that they dared not wake me. So, when the alarm went off at 7 o'clock, I found

my café au lait still warm, wrapped by my mother in a flannel cosy. My mother who had found

time at five in the morning to draw a little reassuring picture to replace her kiss. I still see certain of

these drawings: little Albert transported by a boat dwarfed alongside a gigantic piece of nougat, all

for him; an elephant named Guillaume, carrying his girlfriend, an ant, who answered to the sweet

name of Nastrine; a little hippopotamus who didn't want to finish his soup; a chick of vaguely

rabbinical aspect playing with a lion. On those days I had breakfast alone sitting in front of my

mother's picture to keep me company. I had breakfast and thought about pretty Paul, my hero, my

intimate friend, so admired that, having asked him to come one Thursday to my house for a visit, I

gave him all our silver, an offering he coldly accepted. Or else I told myself stories in which I saved

France galloping at the head of a regiment. I still see myself slicing bread and conscientiously

sticking my tongue out, indispensable for a clean cut. I recall leaving the apartment and closing the

door with a lasso. I was five or six years old and very small. The doorknob was high. I took out of

my pocket a piece of string and closing one eye, aimed at the door knob. Once lassoed, I pulled the

door shut. And, just as my parents recommended. I pushed on the door several times to ensure that

it was properly closed. I do the same today.

The Catholic school run by the nuns was free. At lunch time there were two meal plans. For

the poor a penny bowl of rice and, for the rich, a three penny bowl of rice garnished with a

minuscule sausage. I watched from a distance the rice and sausage which I could only devour with

my eyes. When I had three pennies it was Paul, calculated disposition of the seducer, who ate rice

and sausage.

I still recall that in the Catholic school run by nuns, where the Mother Superior, always

armed with disciplinary castanets we called clappers, beat the rhythm of our puny marching in the

sour corridors. She sighed with regret, contemplating the beautiful child that I was, so absorbed

making hospital bandages from shredded bed linens, which incidentally seemed to be the only thing

we did, or otherwise preoccupied by the concoction of foul truffles. These I made melting two

chunks of Menier chocolate in my tightly closed fist. To assist the operation I foolishly shook my

hands with the predictable result that my face and school uniform were camouflaged with a

revolting paste of sticky, brown streaks which admiring classmates would lick in my hand. We

baptised my confectionary "His Grace the Bishop's Delight".

Yes the mother superior, for whom I cultivated a respectful passion, sighed and looking at

my raven locks murmured: "What a pity", alluding to my Jewish origins.

I was paradoxically the favourite of those sweet Catholic nuns. They gave me lessons in

deportment and recommended that I always maintain a modest countenance, that, walking in the

street, I never swing my arms like a dandy. Completely convinced and admiring, I firmly decided

not to make a pact with the Devil. Wearing an immense Lavalière bow, the thought of which I now

find mortifying, I made a point of walking in the manner the nuns had recommended, hands

devotedly clasped, and, like a little moron, eyes cast downwards as if in perpetual prayer. I was, as

a result, forever bumping into passers-by. Also, I was teased by the bullies of the lay school who

threw stones at me. But the stones of oppression I suffered like a true martyr in honour of my

darling nuns -- to whom, their little Albert extends tender and respectful greetings.

Then, when I was ten years old the improvement in my father's business allowed me to

attend the Lycée. I still see myself at ten. I had big eyes like a little girl and cheeks as smooth as a

velvety peach, a suit bought at the Belle Jardinière, a sailor's suit outfitted with a white braid and a

whistle, which of course I couldn't resist blowing, pretending that I was the son of a rear admiral

who was, at the same time, a lion tamer and a locomotive engineer, a heroic son and cabin-boy

sailing fatefully, fearlessly at his father's side. I was a little mad, persuaded that everything I saw

was truly and in reality, but in miniature, in my head. Not the image of the Mediterranean but the

Mediterranean itself, tiny and salty, in my head, miniature but real, with all its fish, with all its

rocks and boats, absolutely, fully, in my head, with coal and sailors, each boat with the same

captain, the same captain but a dwarf whom one might touch if one had fingers small enough. I was

sure that in my head, circus of the world, there was the true earth with its forests, all of the horses in

the world, but oh! how small, all kings, in flesh and blood, all of the dead, all of the sky and its stars

and even God, exquisitely small.

I still see myself. I was loving, delighted to obey, desirous to be praised by adults. I loved to

admire. One day going home from school I followed a General for more than two hours for the sole

reason that I wanted to revel in his martial oak leaves. I was mad with respect for that short, bow-

legged general. From time to time I would run ahead of him, quickly turn around and walk towards

him in order to scrutinize his glorious face. I still see myself. I was too gentle and I blushed easily

and if I saw in the distance a pretty little girl, unknown to me, and whose only face I gazed upon, I

rushed headlong into love. I cried out with the joy of love, whirling my arms through the air with

the ecstasy of love. A bad sign.

In my room I dedicated a secret altar to France. On the shelf of my wardrobe, kept locked, I

had erected a reliquary to the glories of France. Surrounded with candles, bits of looking glass and

tiny chalices made out of aluminium foil, the relics were pictures of Racine, La Fontaine, Corneille,

Joan of Arc, Duguesclin, Napoléon, Jules Verne, naturally, and even a certain Louis Boussenard.

On my secret altar dedicated to France there were also little French flags, ripped slightly to

make them more "prestigious", a tiny cannon on a lace handkerchief beside a President of the

Republic, Loubet or Fallières, whom I thought a genius, the photograph of an unknown Colonel,

rank which seemed more desirable than that of General, God only knows why. There was encased

in gold paper, a strand of hair which a hoaxer classmate swore was from the head of a

Revolutionary soldier and which he sold for the exorbitant price of one hundred apricot stones.

Leaning against my egg cup was a miniature poem I composed for France. In the egg cup, paper

flowers shadowing a photograph of my beloved dead canary. Glued to the wall of this minuscule

temple were little votive plaques bearing lofty and original messages such as "Glory to France" or,

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". Thin on Jewish conspiracy. Very Protocols of the Elders of Zion all

of that!

I remember, as a schoolboy, having a Jewish accent so strong that my classmates laughed

when I talked of one day fulfilling the requirements for the baccalaureate. They prophesied that

never would I write nor speak French as they did. Incidentally, they were right! Berndet, Miron,

Louraille, suddenly their prestigious names come to mind.

VI

We didn't have any acquaintances in Marseille. Proud, if poor, we didn't socialize with any

one. Or rather, no one socialized with us. We didn't admit as much, perhaps didn't realize it. We

were so guileless, so lost in the West that when my parents laid a fire in the fireplace they lit fast

burning splinters rather than split logs. The height of absurdity was their tightly closing the iron

screen once the fire lit -- an operation which they considered healthier than leaving the screen open.

These two fugitives from the Levantine spring, where fireplaces were unknown, thought that the

visible flames in that mysterious hearth would give off mortal vapours. Was it not one of those

devilish contraptions that asphyxiated the writer whom my mother called the Great Zola. She

obviously had never read any of his books but she knew that he had come to the defence of Captain

Dreyfus. "How outlandish for Dreyfus to have chosen a career as an officer, she sighed, with a huge

knife strapped to his belt. Not a suitable occupation for one of us". In short, to get back to our

fireplace, we shivered in the cold, seated in front of a crackling fire hidden from view by an iron

flue screen. We warmed ourselves in front of icy crackling.

Socially, we were nothing at all, isolated, without any outside contacts. So in the winter we

would go to the theatre every Sunday, my mother and I, two friends, two gentle and timid souls,

looking obscurely during those three hours for a substitute for the social life we were denied.

Would that this shared hardship, until now un-avowed, could unite me once again with my mother.

I recall also our Sunday walks, in summer; I, a little boy. We were not rich and the ride

around the Corniche only cost three pennies. It took an hour to go round by street car. That was, in

summertime, our vacation, our social whirl, our hunting party. She and I, two weaklings, so loving

that we could have taught God a thing or two. This must have been around the time that President

Fallières, fat, red, ordinary, and who made me shiver with respect, came to visit our Lycée. "The

Head of France" I repeated to myself, my skin tingling with admiration.

On this particular Sunday my mother and I were ridiculously well dressed. I look back with

pity on those two naive souls, long ago, so uselessly well dressed, no one with them, no one fussed

over them. They were well dressed for no one. I, in the uncomfortable suit of a child prince, my

little girl's face, angelic and so delighted that I was annoying. She, queen of Sheba disguised as a

bourgeoise, corseted, breathless, bewildered by so much elegance. I still see her long black lace

gloves, her ruffled, pleated bodice, puffs and frills, her veil, her feather boa, her fan, her flared,

wasp-waist skirt which, lifted, revealed mother of pearl buttoned, silver buckled boots. In a word,

for our Sunday excursions, we dressed like matinee singers, the only thing missing was a sheaf of

music in hand.

Arriving at La Plage bus stop, across from a rust-pocked casino, we sat down, solemnly,

emotional, on iron chairs at a green table. We shyly asked the garçon of the café called "Au Kass'

Kroutts'" for a glass of beer, plates, forks and, to win him over, some green olives. Once the garçon

was out of sight --when danger had subsided -- we smiled at each other with satisfaction, my

mother and I, a little clumsy. She then unpacked lunch, serving, embarrassed if other customers

leered, all kinds of eastern delights, spinach meatballs, cheese pastries, boutargue, corinthian raisin

rissole and so on. She passed me a stiff napkin, lovingly ironed the night before by my mother so

thrilled to think, ironing, humming an aria from Lucia di Lammermoor, that she would be going the

next day with her son to the sea side. She is dead.

We politely started eating, started looking spuriously at the sea, so dependent on each other.

That was the most exquisite moment of the week, my mother's fancy, her passion: lunching with

her son by the sea. In hushed tones, for she had an inferiority complex, she would tell me to breath

in the salt air, to breathe in enough salt air to last all week. I obeyed, just as simple as she.

Customers glared at that little simpleton consciously opening his mouth as wide as possible to

swallow the salt air of the Mediterranean. Simple, but we loved each other. And we talked and

talked, we talked about the other customers, we spoke in hushed tones, well behaved, polite, we

talked, happy, although less so than when we were at home, preparing to go, happy, but with some

secret sadness, born perhaps in the realisation that we only had each other. Why so forlorn?

Because we were poor, proud foreigners, but most of all because we were naive and didn't

understand the first thing about social life, didn't master the cunning art of making friends. I now

think that our ungainly affection, so readily offered, our too visible weakness and our trepidation,

made potential friends keep their distance.

Seated at that green table we observed the other customers, we tried to hear what they were

saying, not out of vulgar curiosity, but rather, out of the need for company, in order to be, even at a

distance, if only for a while, their friends. We made up for all that we were missing as best we

could, by listening. Is that wretched? I don't think so. What is wretched is that on this earth it is not

enough, to be welcomed with open arms, to be gentle and naive.

Seated at that green table, we talked so much we became giddy. Our eternal subjects of

conversation were us-two and my father, some relatives from out of town, never anyone else. We

talked at great lengths in order to hide our boredom, in order to hide the fact that we were not quite

adequate company for each other. Oh how, far from the dignified company I now keep, when the

mood takes me, oh how I long to see my mother again, and grow a little weary by her side.

On this particular Sunday, I imagined, poor little bugger, that I was suddenly, magically,

capable of bounding twenty yards in the air, in one jump I was going to take flight and soar above

the street-car and even above the dome of the casino, and, that the enthusiastic customers would

applaud the boy wonder and, what's more, would love him. I imagined my return to the earth, out

of breath, but not too much, seated at my mother's side, now proud and vindicated. The customers

gathered round to congratulate Mummy for having given birth to such a sublime acrobat, they

would shake her hand, they would invite us to their table. Everyone was smiling at us and asked us

to luncheon next Sunday. I stood up and tried again to perform my wondrous feat but to no avail. I

sat down, looking at Mother to whom I could never give the stunning gift I had imagined.

At nine o'clock in the evening my mother packed up and we went to wait for the street car

near the melancholy, reeking, urinals, all-the-while watching, besotted and hypnotized, the arrival

of joyous rich throngs at the Casino. We waited silently for the street car, humble accomplices. To

ward off solitude's depression my mother fished for something to talk about. "When we get home

I'll cover your schoolbooks with pink paper". Without knowing why, I wanted to cry. I squeezed

my mother's hand tightly. The good life, as you can see. My mother and me. But we loved each

other.

VII

Mother of my childhood, beside whom I felt warm, her herb teas, nevermore. Nevermore

her sweet wardrobe stacked with verbena scented clothes, and, reassuring lace, her beautiful cherry-

wood wardrobe, which I opened on Thursdays, my childhood kingdom, marvellous valley of peace,

dark and spicy, fruity, as comforting as the shadow of the sitting room table underneath which I

pretended to be an Arab chieftain. Nevermore her ring of keys, jingling on an apron string, her

medals, Order of Good Housekeeping. Nevermore her jewel case full of old silver trinkets which I

played with when I was home sick. Oh my mother's dispersed furniture. Mother who was living and

gave so much encouragement, giver of strength who knew how to encourage me blindly, with

absurd reasons, reassuring me. Mother, from on high, do you see your obedient little ten year old

son.

Suddenly, I see her, restless, because the doctor has come to look in on her little boy. How

breathless greeting the doctor at the door. The doctor, a scented, pontificating dunce whom we held

in the highest esteem. His payed visits were, for my mother, a form of social life. A nice man from

the outside talking to that lonely woman, now lively and more distinguished. He even deigned,

from the summit of his eminent position, to make political allusions, not medical, rehabilitating my

mother, putting her on an equal footing and removing, if but for a few moments, the leprous stigma

of isolation. Doubtless she remembers that her father was a prominent citizen. I still see her

peasant-like respect for the doctor, sonorous dunce who seemed, to us, a wonder of the world and

whom I adored, even down to the pock marks on his majestic nose. I still see the convincing

admiration with which she watches him, sweet scented head, auscultate my chest. She handed him a

fresh towel which he accepted as if by divine right. How she respected the royal necessity of a fresh

towel. I still see her walking on tip toes so as not to disturb him genially taking my pulse, gold

watch in hand. It was lovely, wasn't it Mother, so solicitous, so cut off from the joys of this world.

I still see her watching breathlessly as the medical dunce nobly scribbled the prescription. I

see her nudging me to keep quiet while he wrote so not to disturb the inspiration of the great man in

communion with towering knowledge. I still see her, charmed, breathless, a little girl accompanying

him to the door, blushing, longing for the assurance that her little boy would soon get well. And

after, she would dash to the chemists, inferior divinity but greatly appreciated, to formulate the

redoubtable potion. Importance of medicine for my mother. She was given to cramming me full of

all of her cottage remedies in order that I might benefit from them. She would not let me be until I

had drunk them all. "This one is very powerful" she would say, handing me a new potion. To make

her happy, even as a grown man, I swallowed every imaginable remedy for every imaginable organ

and tissue. She watched me swallowing with charmed, almost severe heedfulness. Yes, my mother

was homely. But everything that's worthwhile in me I owe to her. Unable to do anything else for

you mother, I kiss my own hand, the hand which comes from you.

Your child died with you. By your death, I have passed suddenly from childhood to old age.

With you I never had to play at being an adult. Now, I must pretend to be a gentlemen, someone

serious with responsibilities. No longer anyone to scold me if I eat too fast or if I read until too late

in the night. I am no longer ten years old. I no longer play will spools or paper cut-outs in my warm

room, far from the joy of winter streets, in the golden circle of the oil lamp, beneath your watchful

eyes, while you sew, studiously, and dream of sweet plans, vague and delightful. Swindled even as

you dreamed.

Oh bygone days, my sweet childhood, oh little room, pillows embroidered with reassuring

kittens, virtuous chromos, comforts and jam, tea, cough syrup, arnica, butterfly pilot light in the

kitchen, orgeat syrup, old lace, smells, mothballs, kisses at bedtime. Mother's kisses telling me, after

having tucked me in bed that now I am going to fly to the moon with a squirrel, my little friend. Oh

my childhood, coign jelly, pink candles, Thursday's illustrated newspapers, Teddy bears, sweet

convalescence, birthdays, New Year’s greetings on lacy paper, Christmas turkey, La Fontaine's

fables mechanically recited, flowers, sweets, anticipation of the holiday, hoola-hoops, lemonade,

dirty little hands, scraped knees, scab picked too soon, see-saws, fake leopard skin school bag,

Japanese pencil boxes, pencil boxes with several compartments, sergeant major pens, Blanzy Poure

bayonet pens, bread and chocolate snacks, hoarded apricot stones, box for collecting dried plants,

marbles, Mother's songs, lessons which she reviewed with me before school, hours spent watching

her cook with great importance, childhood, small peace, second-hand happiness, mother's cakes,

mother's smiles, oh! all that I shall never see again, oh charms! oh dead sounds of the past, vanished

smoke and desolate seasons. The shores recede. My own death approaches.

VIII

At eighteen I left Marseille for Geneva where I enrolled at the University and where the

nymphs were so eager to please. Abruptly, my mother's solitude was absolute. She was lost in

Marseille. She did have distant cousins but they were too rich and only invited her to show off their

wealth, to talk to her about influential friends and ask condescending questions about her husband's

modest business. After a few visits she withdrew. No longer able, after her first heart attack, to

work at my father's side, she stayed home most of the time alone. She didn't see anyone because she

was not outgoing. And anyhow, the wives of my father's friends were not her type and she,

doubtless, not theirs. She didn't know how to laugh with shopkeeper's wives, to be interested in

what interested them, to talk the way they talked. She did not socialize with anyone, she socialized

with her apartment. In the afternoon, having finished her housework, she would pay a visit to

herself. Well dressed, she walked around her beloved apartment, inspected each room, straightened

a bed spread, fluffed a pillow, admired the new wall paper, revelled in the dining room, looked

about to see that everything was in its place, cherished order and smell of wax and that new,

ghastly, crushed velvet sofa. She sat down on the sofa like a guest in her own house. That new

coffee pot is a new friend. She smiled at it, held it up so better to admire it. Or else she examined

the lovely handbag I had given her, never used, wrapped in tissue paper, because it would be a

shame to ruin it.

Her life was her apartment, writing to her son and awaiting his letters, planning trips to see

him, waiting for her husband in the silent apartment, welcoming him when he came in, being proud

of his compliments. There were also pastry shops where she could listen to ladies chatting, eating a

piece of cake, sweet consolation for the lonely. She participated in social life the only way she knew

how, happy in these meagre diversions, always a spectator, never an actress. Her life was also going

all alone to the cinema. The people on the screen, they allowed her to join their company. She wept

at the distress of those beautiful Christian heroines.

She was lonely her whole life through, a timid child, large head pressed against the window

of the social pastry shop. I don't know why I am talking about my mother's lonely life. Perhaps to

avenge her.

At the table, she always set a place for her absent son. On his birthday she even dished out

on his place the choicest morsels. In front of the absent son's plate were flowers and his picture.

And on my birthday she served almond cake, always the same thing because it was my favourite.

Then, with trembling hands she poured Samos wine in his glass, always the same, in the absent

son's glass. Silently, she ate beside her husband, gazing at my photograph.

IX

Since leaving Marseille, the annual event was my mother's summer visit to Geneva. She

was ready months too early: mending clothes, shopping for presents, unsuccessful dieting. In this

way a sort of happiness preceded her departure. This was her own private scheme to feel close to

me. During her stay, highlight of her life, she was entirely given to pleasing me. In the company of

my friends she tried desperately to repress her Levantine gestures, to mask her accent, half

Marseillais, half Balkan, now an indistinct murmur she thought sounded like Parisian French. Poor

darling.

She did not have much will power. She did not know how to stick to a diet. Her heart

patient's corpulence was every year more noticeable. She, none the less, assured me on each visit

that she had lost several pounds since the year before. I didn't disillusion her. The truth was that, for

some weeks before leaving Marseille, she fasted desperately, in an effort to lose weight and gratify

me. But she never lost as much weight as she had gained. Thus, ever more obese, she poetically

imagined being slimmer.

She arrived in Geneva determined to stick to a strict diet. She constantly infringed on it,

never quite realizing how -- her infractions being all "particular instances" -- although habitual. "I

only want to see how this pastry turned out", "This marzipan is really nothing, my son, just an ant's

mouthful, it doesn't pass my lips, just enough to satisfy my craving. Don't you know that unsatisfied

hunger makes you fat". And if I tried to persuade her not to put sugar in her coffee she replied that

sugar is not fattening. "Put some in water, you'll see. It just disappears". And if a chemist's scales

showed weight gain she claimed that they were wrong, because she didn't stand still or was wearing

a hat. And of course there was always an excellent reason for a hearty meal. One day, because she

had just arrived in Geneva and had to celebrate such a wondrous occasion. Or another because she

felt tired and honey cakes give strength. Or another because she had received a letter from my

father. A few days later because she had received no letter. On another occasion because in a few

days she would be going home. Or still again because she didn't want to be poor company making

me eat alone. She just tightened her corset, that was all. "After all, I'm not a young bride anymore."

If I scolded her she obeyed faithfully, suddenly appalled by the spectre of illness, believing

me if I said that by sticking to a diet, in six months, she would have a model's figure. Refusing to

eat for the rest of the day, she envisaged a thousand pictures of slim felicity. And then, if suddenly,

overwrought with pity, knowing in the end that it was all for nought, I told her that diets are futile

she approved with enthusiasm. "You see my son, I think all those diets are depressing, they make

you gain weight". I suggested that we dine out in a smart restaurant. "Oh yes! Let’s have some fun

before we die". Like a young girl she put on her most beautiful dress. She ate with hearty appetite

and without guilt all because I had approved. I watched her and thought that she would not live

long and that it was fitting that she enjoy her fare of small pleasures. I watched her, totally absorbed

with eating. I watched paternally her moving little hands, moving in those days.

She had no sense of organization but thought she did. During one of my visits to Marseille I

bought her an alphabetical file and explained the mysteries of filing, that the gas bill should go

under the letter G etc.. She listened with passionate sincerity and, at once, began to file things away.

Some months later, during another visit, I noticed that the gas bill was under the letter Z "because

it's easier for me, she explained, I remember easier". The rent receipts were no longer under R but

had emigrated to Y. "My child, you have to put something under Y". Slowly the old regime was

reinstated. Income tax returns were burnt, rent receipts under the baking soda, electricity bills

beside the cologne, bank books in an envelope marked Fire Insurance, and prescriptions in the

record case of an old gramophone. When I alluded to the return to clerical anarchy she simply cast

her eyes downwards like a guilty child. "All that organization was getting me confused, but if you

want me to, I'll start filing all over again." Would that I could blow you a kiss, in the night, across

the wide, eternal galaxy of stars.

When crossing the street together in Geneva she was absolutely hare-brained. Aware of her

hereditary clumsiness, walking with considerable discomfort, my sweet, heart-patient was so afraid

of motor cars, so afraid of being run over, that she would only cross the street under my protective

guidance, studiously, with brave panic stricken effort. I took her paternally by the arm, she ducked

and rushed head long, paying no mind to traffic, closing her eyes to better follow my guidance, all

given to my direction, absurdly rushing, so hurriedly, filled with horror, so concerned not to be run

over, so desirous to live. Fulfilling her duty to live she bravely threw herself in front of the

oncoming motors, with terrific fear yet convinced of the safety of my guiding arm and that under

her protector she should fear no evil. So clumsy, my darling. And what a mountain climbing

adventure it was to get her into the street car. I made fun of her. She liked my teasing, now she is

laid out in her grumpy, earthly sleep, she who was so afraid of being run over, laid out in plant-like

stupor.

In Geneva's street cars she loved watching, at every stop, the eruption of everyone's will to

live, the arrival of new passengers sitting with satisfaction, two ladies smiling, out of breath, as if to

congratulate each other, totally given to their own concerns, triumphant, that is to say, at not having

missed the street car. People, -- everything that enters into their life is so important, silly fools. My

mother liked to watch. It was the only social contact she was allowed. She understood everything.

She even understood why a little shop girl inspected the expensive soap just bought. "Poor little

dear, she consoles herself with expensive soap, it's a substitute for the good life, she can make

believe that she's successful". She no longer speaks. She is in her earthly melancholy.

No more idle walks through Geneva, with my mother who walked with difficulty. I was

happy to respect her slow pace, forced myself to walk even more slowly than she did to spare her

fatigue and humiliation. She admired everything about beloved Geneva and indeed Switzerland.

She was a great believer in this wise, little country. Naive, she dreamed of universal Swiss

dominion, of a Swiss world empire. She used to say that good Swiss citizens, reasonable,

conscientious, a little severe, should be at the helm of government in every county. Thus, all would

be well managed. Police constables and postmen would be cleanly shaven with polished boots. The

post-office would be tidy, cottages smothered under a canopy of flowers, customs officials would

be friendly, the train stations all in brightly shining brass. And there would be no more wars. She

admired the purity of lake Geneva, "Even their water is immaculate" she said. I still see her reading

respectfully the pediment of the University of Geneva: "The People of Geneva, Dedicating this

Building to Higher Learning, pay Homage to the Benefits of Education, Fundamental Guarantee of

Freedom". "How beautiful, she murmured, what beautiful words they come up with".

Lost forever, the aimless wandering in front of Geneva's shop windows. To make her feel at

home I too acted like a Levantine. Surreptitiously, we ate salted pistachios, in the street, shuffling

along, like two Mediterranean brothers, we needed, that we might love each other, neither lofty

conversations nor drawing room manners. Also we couldn't help being a little cowardly, shuffling

along. How quickly she tired. That slow pace, even then a funeral march, the beginning of her

death,

We walked slowly, suddenly she told me, me, her best friend, a thought which seemed

important. "My son, men are animals. Look at them, they have paws, sharp teeth. But one day, in

Ancient times Moses came and decided, in his own mind, to change these beasts to men, into

children of God, by the Holy Commandments, you `onderstand'. He told them, Thou shalt not do

this, thou shalt not do that, it's evil, animals kill but you shall not. Me, I think that he invented the

Ten Commandments while wandering on Mount Sinai gathering his thoughts. But he told them it

was God, to impress them, you `onderstand'. You know how they are, Jews. They always must have

the best. When they are sick they summon the best doctors. So Moses, who knew them well, said to

himself, if I tell them that the Ten Commandments are from the Eternal they will pay attention,

they will duly respect them.

All of a sudden she took my arm, enjoyed leaning on it, delighted that she still had three

weeks to spend with me. "Tell me, my son, those fables you write (so she referred to a novel I had

just published) how do you come up with them, those fables? In the newspaper you read about an

accident, it's not hard, it's a fact, it took place, you just have to write it down. But you, you make it

all up, hundreds of pages out of your brain. What a wonder". And in my honour she immolated her

former idols. "Writing a book is difficult, but doctors, they're nothing. They only repeat what they

learned in books, and they act so important with their waiting room where there is always a bronze

lioness, agonizing! Hundreds of pages" she repeated dreamily. "And me, poor wretch, I can't even

write a sympathy letter. Once I wrote «I send you my condolences», I don't know what else to say.

You should write me a form letter for such occasions. But don't write anything too deep, everyone

will know that I didn't write it". All of a sudden she sighed with pleasure, "It's pleasant to wander

about with you, you listen. With you, one can carry on a conversation".

On that day, in spite of her protests, I bought her a pair of suede shoes. ("Keep your money,

my son, old women don't need suede shoes".) I remember how hurriedly she rushed home, "to see

the new shoes". I still see her opening the box in the elevator, then walking victoriously around my

flat, new shoes in hand, contemplating them, closing one eye so better to see them, expounding on

their beauty both visible and invisible.

She was given to enormous, unreasonable flights of fancy. Before going to bed she put the

shoes beside her bed "so I can see them first thing in the morning". She fell asleep, proud to have a

worthy son. The next morning she put her cherished shoes on the breakfast table next to the coffee

pot. "My invited guests", she smiled. The doorbell rang and she shuddered. A telegram from

Marseille? But it was only a suit dropped off by my tailor. Exaltation, carnival atmosphere. She

stroked the suit, declared categorically (she knew no such thing) that it was scotch wool. "May you

wear it with youth and good health" she sententiously pronounced. And placing her hand on my

head she prayed that I might wear it for a hundred years, -- a prospect I quite frankly found

depressing. Begging me to try it on, she exclaimed, enraptured - "The true son of a Sultan". And

then as if irresistibly, she couldn't help alluding to the one thing she yearned for more that anything

else: "Let's see, the only thing lacking is a bride to be". I remember. It was on that morning that she

made me promise never to embark in what she called " the Angle of Death", by which she meant

aeroplanes. She is dead.

In my solitude I sing a lullaby, sweet, so sweet, that my mother used to sing, my mother on

whose eyes death has placed its icy fingers, and I say to myself, choked, a whimper in my throat, a

whimper that won't come out, I say to myself that her little hands are no longer warm and that

nevermore will I lift them, sweet, to my forehead. Nevermore will I know her clumsy kisses, just

pecks, nevermore. Mourning bell tolls songs for the dead whom we have loved. I will never see her

again and I will never be able to obliterate my indifference -- nor my anger.

I was unkind to her on occasion and she did not deserve it. Sons of Cruelty! Cruelty of the

absurd scene I made. And why? Because, worried that I had not come home, unable to sleep, she

telephoned, at four in the morning, my worldly hosts who, to be sure, couldn't hold a candle to my

mother. She telephoned to reassure herself that nothing untoward had befallen me. Once home, I

made a ghastly scene forever graven in my heart. I still see her so humble, my saint, brought before

stupid accusations, overcome with humility, so aware of her transgression, so aware of her guilt, the

poor thing who had done no wrong. She was crying, my poor child, tears which I can never make

not to have fallen. Oh her desperate little liver-spotted hands. Darling, you see, I'm trying to make it

up to you, confessing. Why do we make those we love suffer? What horrible power we have over

them. Why that indignant anger? Perhaps because of her foreign accent and incorrect grammar,

telephoning those cultured morons.

Having taken vengeance on myself, I tell myself that it is fitting that I suffer. I who

persecuted a poor clumsy saint. Brothers, brothers in misery, in superficiality, what a shambles filial

love. I was angry with her because she loved me too much, because her heart was generous,

emotional, afraid for her son. You are right, Mother, I was only unkind to you once and I asked

your forgiveness and you forgave me with a joyous heart. You know, don't you, that I loved you

unconditionally. We were a wonderful pair, so talkative, accomplices, inexhaustible friends. But I

could have loved you more, have written you every day, give you that feeling of worth that only I

could give and which made you so proud, you, humble and unknown, mother, my darling little girl.

I didn't write her often enough. I didn't have enough love to imagine her opening the mail

box, in Marseille, several times a day, always finding it empty. (Now every time I open the letter

box and find not the letter from my daughter I've been waiting for for weeks, I smile. My mother is

avenged.) The worst was that I was sometimes annoyed by her telegrams from Marseille, always

the same: "Worried-no news-telegraph-health". I hate myself for having once telegraphed, the sweet

scent of a nymph still on my face: "I feel terrific-letter will follow". That letter was not

forthcoming. Darling, this book is my last letter.

I cling to the memory that, once an adult, --it took some time--, I used to give her money

behind my father's back which gave her the disinterested joy of imagining that she was protected by

her son. I should have given her a vacuum cleaner. That would have afforded her some poetic

pleasure. She would have gone, every once in a while, to pay it a visit, would have cherished it,

would have looked at it in every light with an artists detachment and satisfied breath. Such things

were important to her, made her life blossom. I cling to the memory that I listened to her often, that

I hypocritically participated in family quarrels which interested her but which left me cold. I agreed

with her, approved of her criticisms of a disgraced relative, the same one she smothered with praise

two days later if, by chance, she received from those quarters a friendly letter. I cling to the poor

consolation that I knew how to walk in time with her slow heart-patient's pace. "You, at least my

son, you're not like everyone else, you walk normally, it's a pleasure to walk by your side". I should

hope so. We were walking two or three hundred yards an hour.

It is comforting to think that I knew how to flatter her. When she would try on a new dress,

never new, always transformed, and which at any rate didn't suit her, I always said: "You are as

elegant as a young girl". She glowed with timid happiness, blushing, believed me.

With each of my enormous compliments she daintily covered her mouth with her little

hand. At once she was tingling with life, rehabilitated. What did it matter that she was alone and

despised. She drank in my praise, she had a son. The real consolation is that she did not witness my

distress learning of her death. Rubbing my hands, trying to cheer up, I just confided this thought to

my cat, courteously purring.

Another regret. I took it for granted that my mother was alive. I didn't know how precious

was her coming and going in my apartment. I didn't look forward to her coming to Geneva. Is it

possible? There was once a wondrous time when I had but to sent a ten word telegram and, two

days later, there she was, at the train station with her conventional timid smile, suitcase falling

apart, hat too small. I only had to write ten words and there she was, as if by magic. I was the

magician. I did not use my magic often enough, stupidly preoccupied, as I was, with nymphs. You

did not write ten words. Now write 40,000.

It's lunacy to think endlessly about that telegram. I wrote ten words at the post office and,

that was all. Now she is at the coach door waving to me, now awkwardly hurrying on the steps,

terrified at the thought of falling, now walking towards me, dignified and ashamed, hair marcelled,

salient nose, hat too small, heels askewed, ankles swollen. She is ludicrous, lumbering painfully,

arms outstretched like a grocer's scales, but I admire her, ungainly, though with opulent eyes, living

Jerusalem. She is disguised as a respectable European lady but she arrives from Ancient Canaan

and knows it not. Now her tiny hand caresses my cheek, eyes welling with tears. She combed her

hair and freshened up in the train, half an hour before arriving at the station. I know her well. Long

preparations in the looking glass. She wanted to look elegant as an homage to her son, to be

favourably judged by him. Now she places herself under my protection. I will take care of

everything, of the porter and the cab. She passively follows me, suppressing her eternal wanderer's

disquiet, showing her passport to the Swiss border guards. But she is not too afraid. I am there. In

the cab she takes my hand and awkwardly kisses it, a canary feather. She smells like cheap

perfume. Now we are in my flat. She is intimidated by the sumptuousness of the apartment. She

swallows her saliva -- her nervous tic when she wants to be distinguished. And now she pulls

presents out of the suitcase. All those cakes prepared by her hand, poems of love. I thank her and

she gives me one of her little kisses, a shy poetic kiss. She pinches my cheek and then kisses her

fingers. You see darling, I remember everything. I look at her. Yes, I know her well I know her

little ingenuous secrets. I know that she has not given me all of her presents. I know there are more,

hidden in the suitcase. She will take them out one by one, the following days. She wants to make

the pleasure last, to give me a present every day. I act as if I don't suspect a thing. I don't want to

spoil it for her. Now it's the next morning. She brings me my breakfast tray. She is wearing a

dressing gown, gone yesterday's virtuous elegance. I am happy that she is in her dressing gown and

slippers. It's more relaxing.

It's the only bogus happiness I have left, writing about her, unshaven, listening to music on

the radio, with my cat, to whom, in secret, I speak the venetian dialect spoken by the Jews of Corfu,

and which I spoke, sometimes, with my mother, my impassive cat, my substitute mother, my

pathetic little mother, so unloving. Sometimes when I am alone with my cat I lean over her and call

her my little mother. But she looks back at me and doesn't understand. And I sit down with no

release from my ridiculous affliction.

I am haunted by the scene I made. "I'm sorry", she wept, my beloved. She was so horrified

to have telephoned a countess and to have inquired "if my son Albert is still at your house Madam".

The countess, because of whom I hurt my saintly mother, was an idiot with no behind and who took

her diplomat husband's honours and responsibilities seriously and who never stopped talking, fool,

like a parrot drunk on white wine. "I'll never do it again", she wept, my beloved. When I saw the

blue liver spots on her hands my eyes burned with tears, I fell to my knees and madly kissed her

little hands and she mine and we looked at each other, son and mother, forever. She put me on her

knee and consoled me. But, the next evening, when I attended another glittering reception, I did not

take my mother.

She was not indignant at being left out. She didn't find her lonely destiny unjust, her poor

destiny, to stay hidden, never to meet my acquaintances, my cretinous worldly acquaintances -- foul

band of well bred hypocrites. She knew that she was not familiar with what she called "the social

graces". She accepted, loyal dog, her humble lot, waiting alone in my apartment, sewing for me,

waiting in obscurity for her son's return. That's all she asked for. To admire her son, her son in

dinner-suit or evening dress, her son in good health, was enough to ensure her happiness. To learn

from him the names of the invited guests, To know the details of the dinner served, the extravagant

menu and all about the ladies' low-cut gowns, those distinguished ladies she would never meet, was

enough for her venomless soul. She savoured this paradise, from which she was excluded, from a

distance. My beloved, now I introduce you to everyone, proud of you, proud of your jewish accent,

proud of your improper usage, madly proud of your ignorance of the social graces. A bit late, this

pride.

XI

One evening, having arranged to meet her at 5 o'clock at University Square, I arrived,

delayed by an amorous golden head, at only eight o'clock. She didn't see me coming. I looked at

her, shame in my heart, waiting for me patiently, sitting on a park bench, all alone, in the twilight

and cooling air, coat too small, crooked, sagging hat. She was waiting there for hours, docilely,

peacefully, inert, older because alone, resigned, used to solitude, used to my being late, no protest in

her humble waiting, servant, poor saintly sucker.

Waiting for her son for three hours, what could be more natural, did he not have every right.

I hate him, that son. She saw me at last and, at once, started living again, entirely dependant on me.

I still see her springing to life, I see her emerging from stupor to life, younger, abruptly awaking

from slave-like sleep, or that of a loyal dog, to an extreme interest in living. She straightened her

hat and relaxed her expression, for she wanted to pay me homage. And later, Mother ageing. She

had two distinctive gestures, where did they come from? from what antique childhood? I still see

them clearly, two awkward, poetic gestures. The terrible thing about the dead is their living gestures

in our mind. They go on living, hideously, without our understanding why.

Your two eternal gestures, each time you would see me walking towards our appointed

meeting place. First, your eyes shining with timid happiness, you uselessly pointed at me, with

dignified delight, to show that you saw me, in fact to recover your composure. I used to suppress an

absurd urge to laugh, irritated, ashamed of your ridiculous gestures, anticipated, well-known and

which pointed me out to no one. And then, darling, you stood up and came to greet me, blushing,

shy, on show, smiling with bewilderment to be recognized from a distance and stared at for too

long. Awkward debutante with the delighted and reserved smile of a dull, little girl. And all the

while your eyes pouring over me to see that I was not judging you, inside. Poor mother. You were

so afraid of displeasing me, of not being European enough to suit me. That is why you had a second

gesture of shyness. How well I knew it and how living in my past turned eyes. You raised your

little hand and touched the corner of your mouth, still walking towards me your other hand waving

like a pendulum to the rhythm of your ungainly walk. It was a gesture from our Orient. The gesture

of bashful virgins hiding their face. Or perhaps the gesture was intended to hide your little scar, old

mother, eternal bride. What folly to explain the humble treasure of your little gestures, oh my

living, my royal cadaver. I know that no one is interested in what I say about your gestures and that,

admittedly, no one gives a damn about anyone else.

Nevermore will you wait for me on the park bench. You abandoned me, you didn't wait.

You left, you didn't have the courage to await your son's homecoming. This time he kept you

waiting too long. He was too late and you left. That's the first spiteful thing you've ever done to me.

Now I am alone and it's my turn to wait on life's autumn bench, in the cold howling wind of

twilight. Wind carrying dead leaves upwards in ill-fated swirls, musty, swelling like old bedrooms.

It's my turn to wait for my mother who's not coming, will come no more. The people I see before

me are useless and alive, loathsomely alive. I cast their way eyes full of affliction and when I see an

old woman, alive, I think of my beautiful mother and say to myself: "charming sweetheart" to the

horrid old woman. Piteous vengeance. I am unhappy mother and you don't answer. This is horrible,

for she always answered and came running, quickly, whenever I called. Now, over, forever silent.

Stubborn silence, obstinate deafness, terrible insensitivity of the dead. Are you at least happy?

happy to be, at last free of the nasty living.

XII

For three hours she waited for me in the square. I could have spent those three hours with

her. While she waited, a halo of patience, I, charmed fool, pursued one of those poetic, scented

nymphs, favouring, to coin a phrase, the chaff over the seed. I lost three hours of my mother's life.

And my God! for whom. For an Atlantes, for a pleasurable disposition of the flesh. I dared to chose

an Atlantes over the most sacred goodness. My mother's incomparable love.

Anyhow, had I suddenly lost my strength or all my teeth, the poetic nymph would have told

her maid, pointing to me, to sweep up that toothless rubbish. Or, rather, more nobly, that musical

young miss would have felt, all of a sudden, purely felt, the veritable spiritual revelation, that she

no longer loved me and that it would be prurient to live a lie and continue to see a man whom she

loved no longer. Her soul would have taken flight in a flutter of feathers. Noble ladies love strong

men, energetic, affirmative, in a word, gorillas. Toothless or not, strong or weak, young or old, our

mother loves us. She loves us all the more that we are weak. Our mother's incomparable love.

A word in passing. If poor Romeo accidentally had his nose cut off, Juliet, on seeing him,

would have fled in horror. Thirty grams of flesh and Juliet's heart would have no longer sustained a

noble passion. Less thirty grams and it's over, sublime gargle in the moon light, "That birds would

sing and think it were not night" and so forth. If Hamlet, suffering from some abberation of the

pituitary gland, lost seventy pounds, Ophelia wouldn't love him with all her heart. In order that

Ophelia's heart swell up with divine longings she requires at least a hundred and fifty pounds of

beef. And if, by the same token, Laura were transformed into a legless stump, Petrarch would have

certainly dedicated fewer mystic poems to her. Poor Laura would have been the same Laura, her

eyes the same eyes, her soul too. Only, Petrarch needed thighs for his soul to be enraptured with

Laura. Poor flesh eaters that we are, we with our farcical, spiritual quests. Enough, my friend, don't

go on. They get the point.

My mother's incomparable love. On matters concerning her son she was unreasonable.

Possessed by that immortal genius which deifies the beloved, she acquiesced in all of my whims. If

on a given evening I proposed that we go to the cinema, she replied instantly that yes, what a

terrific idea "and rightly so, one's got to have fun and enjoy life, it's foolish to sit at home like a

couple of old folks, I'll be ready in just a moment, I only have to get my hat". (She only ever had to

get her hat, even at night when, melancholy over some blond pixy, I woke her up to go out with

me). But, if I maliciously changed my mind, because I knew what would happen, saying that, after

all, I preferred to stay at home, she agreed immediately, not trying to be easy to get along with, but

rather, with passionate, explosive sincerity. All of my decisions were remarkably faultless. She

agreed, without even knowing that she was contradicting herself, and she would then say that "it

would be perfectly pleasant to stay at home where it's warm and cosy and that instead of going out

to see a ludicrous movie, one in which the star always has an immaculate hair-do, even when sick,

and anyhow the weather's bad and it would be tiring to come in late and at night there are thieves in

the street, Satan's sons, who snatch one's handbag". Thus, on the subject of our going to the cinema,

if I maliciously changed my mind four times she did as well, contradicting herself with fervent

conviction. "You just get ready for bed, she whispered, if my final decision was to stay home, and,

if you want, I'll tell you the story of Diamantine, the soap-maker's daughter, the one with one tooth

and no neck, you know, well apparently a mouse was the cause of her undoing. That I should tell

and retell the story. Know, my son, that in former times, for it's been a long time and Diamantine is

dead, and she's better off where she is, but we are better off than she, here on earth, know my

son ...". And so she started. For my part, I listened with delight, happy, flattered, physically

charmed. I was in love with my mother's unending stories, rendered ever more complex by the

addition of incidental genealogies, interrupted by sweets miraculously produced from a suitcase,

often interrupting herself to wonder aloud why she hadn't received any news from my father. I

firmly reassured her troubled mind and my obedient mother allowed herself to be heartened and

went on telling her endless stories, sad or burlesque, all drawn from the ghetto where I was born. I

shall never forget them. How I should like to return to the ghetto, to live there surrounded by

rabbis, bearded women, to live there a devote life, passionate, quibbling, mad life.

My mother's love. She was by my side like a loving dog, nodding and enthusiastic,

delighted just to be at her master's side. The naive ardour of her face brought tears to my eyes and

her adorable weaknesses and the kindness of her eyes. Fleeting politics? I don't get involved. I let

them figure it out. In a thousand years their nations will have vanished. My mother's love is

immortal.

My mother's love. She approved of my whims. She approved of us eating sandwiches at a

lunch counter because it is wise to save money "and don't waste the money you earn with your

brains, my child". But she also approved of going to Geneva's most expensive restaurant because

life is short. Odd, the most loving being, my mother, that I should keep my distance from her, avoid

her kisses and her eyes, why, why this cruel prudishness. Too late. Never again will I see her

alighting from her train in Geneva, carrying for me, radiant, her tribute, gold sovereign, secretly

stashed away. During one of her visits she made an enormous batch of currant jelly, more that a

hundred jars, just to be certain that I wouldn't run out of sweets when she was gone. During her

stays she wanted only to cook copiously, for me, then, dressed like a clumsy queen, corseted,

prouder and slower than a presumptuous ship of war she wanted to go out with her son, slowly,

decorously.

My mother's love. Never again will I go in the middle of a sleepless night to knock on her

door asking her to keep me company. With a son's cruel impudence I would knock on her door at

two or three in the morning. She always answered, jumping out of bed, that she wasn't sleeping,

that I didn't wake her up. She would put on her house-coat and, staggering with sleep, would offer

her maternal fare, eggnog or marzipan, what could be more straightforward than making marzipan

at three in the morning for one's son. Or else she proposed that we should drink a steaming café au

lait and chat infinitely. She didn't find anything odd about drinking coffee at the foot of my bed at

three in the morning, talking till dawn about ancestral feuds, a subject on which she was a

passionate expert.

No more mother to sit by my side until I fall asleep. At night, getting ready for bed, I

sometimes put a chair beside my bedstand to keep me company. In the absence of my mother I

make do with a chair. Love's millionaire is now penniless. If, my friend, one of these nights you

can't sleep, don't bother to knock on any door. Make sure you don't knock on 'her' door at three in

the morning, you'll not be well received. "I insist that you respect my right to get some sleep" she

will answer, eyes frozen, chin firm. My mother's incomparable love. Yes I know that I keep turning

it over, ruminating, repeating myself. Such is the ruminating pain of my joyless heart, limp,

perpetual movement. Thus, I avenge life, dwelling on the kindness of my buried mother.

My mother's love, nevermore, She is in her final cradle, the benefactress, the sweet

dispenser. Nevermore will she be there to scold me if I get carried away with myself. Nevermore to

feed me and give me life, to give birth to me. Nevermore to keep me company shaving or eating,

watching me, passive but attentive sentry, trying to guess if I really like the squares she prepared.

Nevermore to tell me not to eat so fast. I loved her treating me like a child.

Nevermore her dosing off in an armchair, ageing heart-patient. When I asked if she was

sleeping, suddenly awake, she always answered that she was only resting her eyes. She then got up

to wait on me, to offer me something to eat and God knows what else. Unconditional kindness. Oh

mother of my lost childhood. Let me lament in psalms for my youth, lost on the other shore.

Out of love for me she overcame her fear of animals and came to love my cat. She

awkwardly caressed this animal whose elastic limbs were always beyond reach, a clawed beast

always ready to break the Ten Commandments, but loved by her son and all the more fetching for

that. Though she pet the cat, it was always from a distance, her little hand ready to pull back. Of her

love I recall everything, her shy exultation when she saw me on the platform at the train station, her

clumsy handwriting the day she took down a dictation with so many spelling mistakes and so much

good will, pages from one of my books which she was simply unable to understand. I remember, I

remember, and therein is not the finest of my possessions.

My mother's love. Nevermore will I have by my side a person so incomparably good. Why

are men so wicked? My incredulity knows no limit. Why so hateful? so belligerent? Why must

they take revenge, talk behind one's back, they who soon will die, poor things. That this horrible

game we play, whereby we are born, laugh, move and then move no more, not make us good is

beyond me. And why, if one is gentle -- in other words unimportant, benign -- do 'they' snap in

cockatoo's voice. The tenderhearted wear a mask of anger, to be left alone, or even -- and this is

tragic -- to be loved. And what if we were to go to bed and sleep soundly. A sleeping dog doesn't

have fleas. Yes, let's go to sleep. Sleep has the advantages of death without the one small drawback.

Let's go get settled in our pleasant coffin. How I would like to take out, as the toothless take out

their teeth and put them in a glass of water beside the bed, to take my brain out of my skull and my

heart and soak them, poor billionaires, in a refreshing solution while I sleep like the little child I

shall never be again.

During her visits in Geneva she always waited for me in the window. I still see her face

pressed against the glass panes, too big and full of me, so worried, so attentive, a bit vulgar in its

excessive watchfulness, eyes fixed on the curve in the sidewalk. She always appears to me as she

was in the window. At the window and on the lookout when I came home from work. I lifted my

eyes and how sweet to see that heavy, waiting face from the street, the thought that she waited for

me, and I was dutifully reassured. Now, every time I go home I am still in the habit of looking up at

the window. But here is never anyone there. Who needs to wait for me in the window?

When I went out she was also in the window, to stay with me a minute longer, to

contemplate the disappearing figure, her son, her lot in this earth, her dear son whom she watched

disappearing, whom she watched with that strange and penetrating pity which we have for those

whom we love and whose secret deprivation we know, that same sharp pity which I feel for my

loved ones when, from my window, I see them in the street, alone, so lost and so disarmed, walking

catastrophes, unknowing that I am looking down on them. All my loved ones are not only my

daughter and Marianne and a few others, but all of the people in the street, all misfits, all dear and

whom I love, from a distance for, up close, they don't smell like a bed of roses. Yes, I looked up

towards my mother, once, twice, reassured, protected, but not fully aware of my happiness. Now,

when I go out, I still look up, somewhat lost and haggard. But there is never anyone there.

Nevermore will she nurse me, she the only one. The only one who never would have been

impatient, were my illness to last twenty years, were I the most insufferable patient. She would not

have nursed me out of love or affection. But out of need. And if I were an invalid, the only

worthwhile thing for twenty years would have been to nurse me. Such was she. All other women

have their autonomous little self, their quest for personal happiness and their sleep which they

safeguard and -- beware he who disturbs it. My mother didn't have a "me" but rather a son. What

did it matter if she didn't get sleep or was tired if I needed her. What is left for me to love of a love

sure never to be disappointed. A pen, a lighter, my cat.

Oh you, alone, mother, my mother and mother of all men, you alone, our mother, deserve

our confidence and our love. All else, wives, brothers, sisters, children, friends, all else is misery, a

leaf carried on the wind.

There are great geniuses of painting, of whom I know nothing. I don't go to galleries, I

won't go, they don't interest me, don't know anything about them, don't care to. There are literary

geniuses. I know it, and the countess de Noailles is not among them, neither the former nor the

latter. But I know better still that my mother was a genius in the art of loving. Like yours, you

reading this. I remember everything, all of the sleepless nights at my sick bed, her staggering

indulgence and the beautiful ring she had, with some regret but with the weakness of love, accepted

to give me. She was easily convinced by her mindless twenty year old. And her secret savings all

destined for me when I was a student and all of her tricks to hide my frivolity from my father to

prevent his being angry with a spendthrift son. And her naive pride when the crafty tailor said, just

to flatter her, that her thirteen year old son had "style". How she savoured that ghastly word. And

her fingers covertly in the shape of horns to ward off the evil eye when ladies fussed over her

wondrous little boy. And during her stays in Geneva, her suitcase always full of sweets, those

sweets which she called "the consolation of the throat" bought secretly as a provision for one of my

sudden cravings. And her hand held bluntly out to squeeze mine, like a friends. "My little

Kangaroo", she used to call me. All of that is so near. It was only a few thousand hours ago,

My mother's incomparable love. My daughter loves me. But while I write in solitude she is

lunching with a little moron, in love with art and beauty -( he pronounces "aht"). My daughter loves

me, but she has her own life and leaves me alone with mine. My mother was my mistletoe. Nothing

could be more important to her than sewing by my side. Sighing, she sewed, we looked at each

other. I felt that I was in my place, reassured, a son. She would get up and go to her beloved

kitchen, footbridge under her command, and there perform all of her sacred duties, uselessly stir the

meat balls, put wretched lace paper on the shelves. Then she would call me to inspect her work,

watching to see a sign of approval. Of these humble things sublime love is born.

Someone else needs passion, longs for a young huntress with long thighs or a glamorous

star, who incidentally blows her nose in a handkerchief (and doesn't find pearls in it either). That's

his business and he's welcome to it. Me, the object of my passion is my mother, especially my

mother in old age, white hair and her enthusiastic prattle which I knew by heart. Me, my passion is

my mother, yes, and old age's false teeth which she rinsed under the tap. She was sweet without her

teeth, so disarmed, so good as to be inoffensive, like a newborn, all gums, childish, unable to

pronounce correctly without her false teeth but with maternal elegance she suppressed her laughter

and held her hand up to hide her empty mouth. With her I was never alone. Now I am alone with

everyone. With those whom I love, friends, girls and loving women I have to show off, to hide a

little. With my mother I had only to be what I was, with my anxiety, with my piteous weakness, my

wretchedness, bodily and spiritual. She didn't love me less. My mother's incomparable love.

With her alone I could have lived far from the madding crowd. Never would she have

judged or criticized me. Never would she have thought, like others, "He no longer writes, he's

getting old". "Not my son", she would have said in all good faith. Well, me, I send you, my eyes

ennobled by your love, I send you through time and space, the same article of faith and, verily, I

say unto you: my mother.

XIII

My mother's fear at the train station in Geneva, the evening she left for Marseille, when the

locomotive shrieked its mad desperate hysteria with clash of steel and steam hissing from under the

axles. At the coach door she looked at me so tenderly, with madness and despair, no longer worried

about elegance, no longer preoccupied with being well dressed. She knew that she was leaving for a

year and that my life was separated from her humble life by a chasm which, now, I contemplate

with horror. O her tearful blessing at the coach door, blessing looking at me with such intensity,

from her suddenly old, ravaged, dishevelled, hat absurdly crooked, her blessing, vulnerable,

downcast, wretched, overcome pariah, so dependant and so obscure, mad with unhappiness, insane

with despair. Over, the wonder of our being together, her life's poor party. Her desperate panic at

the coach door as the train started to leave the station, the train which was going to carry her away

to her life of loneliness, which carried her away, powerless and condemned, far away from her son,

whilst tearfully she blessed me, now sobbing, stammering her thanks. Odd, I didn't take her tears

seriously. Odd that I now realize that my mother was human, a being other than me, with real

sufferings. On that same night I flew with wingèd heels to be by a lover's side.

A son told me, and it is he who is speaking now. I too, said this puffy eyed son, I too lost a

mother. I too lived far away. Each year she came to see me for a few weeks, the poor extravaganza

of a lifetime. I too, says this son, on the same evening of her departure, instead of crying all night

long over my incomparable, I went, sad, but soon consoled, to lie at the side of a comparable, one

of life's exquisite she-devils and whose name was Diana, Diana queen of Love. I went without

giving a second thought to my mother whose nodding head, stunned with pain, in the train which

carried her away, whose only thoughts were for her son, the same who, at the very same moment,

without regard for his mother, tiny, all alone in the train, laughed with love in the cab whisking him

ever closer to Diana, sinful pleasure to say the name. And I took advantage of the cab's engine noise

to sing love songs at the top of my lungs, mindless of what the driver might think and to whom at

any rate I was about to give a golden tip, so happy was I to see Diana, at last, again.

And whilst my mother sobbed in the train, says to me this son, this for whom I don't care, I

eyed with pleasure my youthful face in the glossy cab windows, those lips which Diana, in a very

few minutes, would so terribly kiss, and I sang, vibrating with impatience, sickening songs of

consummate passion and especially the beloved name of the blond demon called Diana, slender

Diana, fervent and too clever, towards whom the cab sped me, admirably shaved, admirably

dressed, desirous. And suddenly I was there, in front of her villa where she led an orphan's life, the

most beautiful, the most sumptuous of young women, waiting for me on the porch, under a canopy

of roses, tall in her white cotton dress under which was her firm nakedness, for me alone, lively,

sunny Diana, devilishly jealous, poetess though athletic, sensuous and idealist, singing hymns,

Diana fed on sun and fruit, Diana who sent me, when on holiday, a hundred word telegram to tell

me of her love, yes always, telegrams, so that the beloved would know as soon as possible how

much his mistress loved him, Diana who telephoned at three or four in the morning to ask if I still

loved her and to announce "I love you like an imbecile, I'm disgusted to love you so much, my

darling, never did a long-locked Roumanian peasant look at her man with as much confident

adoration".

On the night of my mother's departure, says this son, Diana accompanied me home and, in

the apartment blessed by my mother before leaving, I dared to undress impatient Diana. After the

ardour of love, with so many kisses tattooed to our faces, we fell asleep at the bottom of joy's

precipice and in the odorous bed, with the same youthful smile in our sleep while my mother

blessed me and dried her tears in the train carrying her ever farther away from me. For shame sons

and daughters. Cursèd lot.

Thus spoke this one son. Like him, perhaps, on the night of my mother's departure, the same

night that, piteously standing at the coach door, she thanked me and blessed me her hands splayed

like the setting sun, blessed me, her whole face illuminated with slow tears, like him perhaps, I

went, hastily leaving the station, I went impatient son that I was, to be with an adoring lover,

scented, turning, whirling lover, a sun-lit Atlantes. Oh cruelty of youth. I deserve to suffer now. My

suffering is a vengeance against myself. She expected all from me, all loving, so naive and childish,

my old mother. I gave her so little. Too late! Now the train is gone forever. Ravaged, dishevelled,

blessing me, my dead mother is forever standing at death's coach door. I run behind the departing

train, out of breath, pale, sweaty and obsequious, behind the train carrying my dead mother blessing

me.

XIV

In my sleep, music of the tomb, I have seen her once again, beautiful as in her youth,

mortally beautiful, calm and quiet. She was about to leave my room and I called out to her, in a

hysterical voice which, even in my dream, filled me with shame. She told me that she had pressing

matters to tend to, a yellow star to sew on the Teddy Bear bought for her son shortly after our

arrival in Marseille. She none the less accepted to stay at my side a little longer, despite the

Gestapo's orders. "Poor orphan" she said to me. She said that her death wasn't her fault and that she

would try to see me again sometime. She assured me that never again would she telephone the

countess. "I won't ever do it again, forgive me" said she looking at her little hands where suddenly

there appeared bluish liver spots. I woke up and read to stop her from coming back. But I met her

in every book. Go away! You are not alive. Go away! you are too alive.

In another dream I meet her on the studio set, a street scene, in occupied France. She doesn't

see me and I watch her my heart aching with pity, old woman, bent over, almost a beggar, picking

up cabbage stalks at the market after closing, putting them in a suitcase on which there is a yellow

star. She looks like a troll and is dressed like an orthodox priest with a cylindrical black headdress,

but I don't laugh. I kiss her in the slippery street. A hackney cab passes carrying someone called

Petain. Suddenly she opens the string-bound suitcase and hauls out a Teddy bear and some

marzipan, saved just for me and in spite of wartime famine she never ate it. How proud I am to

carry her suitcase. She is afraid I will get tired and I get angry with her because she stubbornly

wants to continue carrying her suitcase. But I sense that she is glad that I am angry: it's a sign of

good health. She suddenly says that she would have preferred that I become a doctor with a

handsome waiting room and a bronze lioness and that I would be happier "Now that I am dead I can

tell you". Then she asks if I remember our walk the day I bought her the suede shoes. "We were so

happy" she says. Why did I pull out of my pocket an enormous paper maché false nose? Why did I

put it on and why now, mother and I, do we walk royally in the street, whispering distrust? Mother's

odd headdress is now a cardboard crown. A lame horse follows us, wheezing in the damp night. It

falls down in a shower of sparks. An ancient royal coach, gilt tarnished, yet encrusted with pieces of

looking glass, joggles and tosses behind the kind, consumptive horse who now falls, now gets up

and pulls the court coach with a great nodding of the head, eyes soft, sad but intelligent. I know that

it is the coach of Moral Law, eternal and beautiful. Mother and I are now sitting in the coach, we

ceremoniously wave to a laughing crowd, now jeering, because the coach is not a sixty ton tank,

they throw rotten eggs at us. Mother shows them the sacred scrolls of the Ten Commandments.

Then we, my mother and I cry, "we cry for Jerusalem" she says suddenly. And the old, sick horse

lifts its head solemnly and turns round to look at us. Its eyes are very kind, and I repeat "Jerusalem"

and I know that it also signifies mother. I wake up horror-struck at my solitude.

The terrible thing about the dead is that they are so alive, so beautiful and yet so far away.

So beautiful is she, my dead mother, that I could write for many nights just to feel her presence

near, august spectre of death, spectre slowly moving by my side, royally moving, protector, though

indifferent, frightfully calm, sad shadow, loving shadow off in the distance, more calm that sad,

foreign more than calm. Without sandals, for this is sacred ground where I speak of death.

In my sleep she is alive. She explains that she is in hiding in a far off hamlet, under a false

name, in a lost mountain village where she stays in hiding, out of love for me, among peasants. She

explains that she must stay there, that she only comes to see me in secret and that if the powers that

be knew that she were not dead there would be grave consequences. She is loving in these dreams,

but perhaps less than in life, sweet but alien, tender but not passionate, full of affection but with an

evasive affability and a certain slowness in speech which I don't associate with her. She has been

transformed in the land of the dead. In these dreams she never really looks at me. Her eyes seem to

wander as if towards some important secret, henceforth more solemn than her son. The dead always

let their eyes wander. It's unbearable. And in these dreams I don't hide the fact that if she still loves

me it's because she loved me so deeply when she was alive and that she can't not love me still, even

if less. Then she repeats, always with the same incomprehensibly calm voice, which seems to me

sullied by the slightest hint of affection that she must return to the village where she is hiding. In

these dreams I perceive her secret fear that she may be discovered alive. For, in these dreams she is

smuggled into life. It's unlawful that she not be dead. But all of that is phantasy. She is hidden not

in a village but in the earth, the fragrant earth. And the truth is that she will speak no more, nor will

she care for me. Ghastly, selfish solitude of the dead. How you no longer love us, beloved dead,

dear traitoress. You leave us alone, alone and ignorant.

XV

I didn't want her in the land of dreams but here, by my side, well dressed by her son and

proud to be protected by him. She carried me nine months and is no longer here. I am fruit without

a tree, a chick without a hen, a lion cub alone in the desert and I am cold. If she were here she

would say: "Cry my child, you'll feel better after". She is not here and I don't want to cry. I will

only cry by her side. I want for us to go for a walk, I want to listen to her as no one listened. I want

to flatter her, to muddle her so she wastes her time keeping me company while I shave or dress. I

want... If You are God, prove it... I want to be sick so that she can bring me her own brand of

medicine, roasted flax seeds, ground and mixed with granulated sugar," it's good for the cough, my

child". I want her to brush my suits. I want her to tell stories. I want her partiality. I want her to be

angry with those who don't like me. I want to show her my diplomatic passport to see her delight,

convinced that she is that it's important to hold a diplomatic passport. I won't disillusion her because

I want her to be happy and to bless me. I want to be her little boy. I want her to draw a big ship

loaded with nougat. I want her to draw ingenuous flowers that I will try to copy. I want her to tie

my tie and for her to give me a little pat. I want to be Mother's little boy, a nice little boy who,

when sick, likes to hold his mother's skirt as she sits on the edge of his bed. No one can harm me.

Am I absurd to say so at my age? So may I be.

The little bird whose mother was killed is absurd. On its branch it sings its death song a

monotonous, useless chirp. This lamb is absurd. In the desert it laments having lost it mother.

Quaking in the sand it will soon die of thirst, but in the desert, it looks for its mother.

I want to hear her recommend superstitiously that I not pronounce certain dangerous words

for three days following vaccination. I want to see her stiff awkwardness when I introduce her to

one of my friends. I want her to be here and say as she always did not to write too much "because

thinking like that all of the time is not good for your head, and there are scholars, you know well

my son, who lost their senses from too much thinking and I am relieved when you get some sleep

because you don't think in your sleep". I say I want, I beg but receive nothing and God loves me so

very little that I am ashamed for Him.

XVI

Wide awake, I dream, and tell myself how things would be if she were alive. I would live

with her, poorly, in solitude. A little house by the sea-side, far away from everyone. Us two, she

and I, a little house, sagging ever so slightly, and no one else about. A quiet little life devoid of

particular talents. I would be reborn in the body of an old woman, just like her, so as not to impose

upon her. That way she might be perfectly happy. Just for her I would quit smoking. Quietly we

would go about the business of running a household. We would prepare meals together and now

and then say something like this: "I think that a hint of chicory, just a hint mind you makes the

coffee better" or "it's best to use too little salt than too much". With my wooden spoon I would stir

and poke just as she does. Two old ladies, sisters, she and I, and while one of us would strain the

macaroni the other would grate the cheese. We would sweep up talking endlessly, we would scour

the copper pots and when everything was done we would sit. We would smile with pleasure and

friendship, we would sigh with satisfied fatigue, with happiness we would contemplate our day's

work, our clean, tidy kitchen. Out of love, just to please her I would exaggerate my satisfaction. We

would drink hot coffee as our reward, sipping away, she would smile at me though her spectacles.

Sometimes we would laugh. We would always do little favours for each other. In the evening, after

dinner, with everything put away, we would quietly talk, two little old ladies, so kind comfortable

and sincere, two little queens, two cunning old ladies, satisfied, without teeth, but spruce. I, out of

love, sewing at her side. My mother and I, sworn friends, talking, together eternally. That is how I

imagine paradise.

I hear my mother telling me with her wide smile: "This life doesn't suit you, you couldn't

manage it, you'll always be the same". And she adds that which she said time and time again:" My

lord half mad, my prince of ancient times". And, closer to my ear: "I wouldn't have you change,

you don't know that a mother loves that her son be haughty, and even a little hostile, it's a sign of

good health".

I lift my head and look at myself in the looking glass, and while the radio announcer drones,

I watch myself write, sweet, good as gold, with a face suddenly kind, preoccupied and quiet like a

child, busy with a silly forbidden game, preoccupied, weightless, smiling imperceptibly, lightly

holding down the paper with my left hand, the right writing childishly. This fellow writing with so

much care and love and who will soon die. I pity him a little.

XVII

Here I am, sitting at my table, my bones ready, waiting for the end, that it be my turn too, in

a year or in three years at best in twenty years. But I keep on writing as if I were immortal, with so

much interest and care like the welder who conscientiously bolts the hull of a ship destined to sink.

Here I am deluding my orphan's pain scrawling in ink, waiting for black darkness where I shall be

the speechless companion of certain beings undulating in their silent roaming. I already see myself.

There is a worm, a nice little chap with brown spots, who comes to pay me a visit. He enters

through my nostril no longer shuddering because useless. The worm is at home. My nostril is his

pantry.

Weighing heavily upon me, upon unprotesting, phlegmatic me, heavy, the earth of rain and

silence. And I, all alone, like my mother, all alone, eternally laid out, not well dressed, wearing a

suit which could use a brushing and is too big, too big because the gentleman has lost a little

weight. All alone, the poor useless soul, rid of, also in the earth, with no company other than

parallel rows of silent companions Stretched out regiments of the once living, now quiet, all alone

in the gloom, the dead man sniggering, his head in the other world, while a woman he once loved

and who wept pathetically at his funeral three years earlier wonders if her red dress or rather her

white one would be suitable for an upcoming ball.

XVIII

She never answers, she who always answered. I try to believe that she is in a better world,

that it is better that she be dead. A pleasant thought, now that she is dead and no longer Jewish they

can't harm her, can no longer frighten her. In her cemetery she is no longer a Jewess, eyes on the

defensive in perpetual denial of guilt, a Jewess with half open mouth, inherited stupefaction, born of

fear and waiting. The eyes of living Jews are always frightened. Our house special is misfortune,

our specialty, wholesale, retail, individually wrapped... Another good thought, she won't see me

die.

Nothing more, silence. She is silence. Dead, I repeat to myself insatiably, in front of the

window, under the blessed sky cherished by inane lovers, but which orphans hate for their mother is

not there. Dead, I repeat, quivering like a madman. She who thought hoped, sang is dead, I repeat,

resisting the dangerous appeal of paradise, dead, I say again stupidly, with a smile vaguely

consoling. It varies little and is not amusing. For me either. For pity's sake don't laugh. My mother

is dead, therein lies the only affliction in all the world. You don't believe me. Wait, you'll see, when

its your turn to be in mourning or the mourned.

I turn round and see objects which she saw and touched. There they are, close at hand, a

pen, a suitcase. But she is not there. I call her by her majestic name and she does not answer. This is

unbearable because she always answered hastily and came quickly running. If while she was living,

I called her for anything, for nothing, to find my keys or lost pen, to chat. she always came running

and, invariably, she found the keys or lost pens, always had stories to tell of former times.

Mechanically I get up and open my bedroom door. She is not behind that door.

A little bird comes to peck on my window sill. I shoo it away. She liked to watch chubby

little birds. They are useless now. I don't want them around. Enough of this music. I turn off the

radio. All sublime music is my mother and her eyes which cherished me, which gazed up with the

madness of tenderness. Now a band marches in the street. How happy to be alive and how lonely I

am. I am going to keep myself company in the looking glass. It's a pass-time, a way of tricking

death and, of course, in the looking glass there is someone who will sympathize.

I look at myself in the looking glass but I see my mother. Grief overwhelms me and my

body aches. I am white and sweaty. On my cheeks there are no tears, privilege of the unhappy, only

beads of sweat dripping from my forehead. The ice cold sweat of my mother's death. Then, all at

once, I am indifferent to my fate, a little unhappy distraction standing before the looking glass, I

press a finger on my eyeball creating an optical illusion and, in the looking glass, I see two

orphans. Along with me that makes three. They'll keep me company. Sorrow without paltry,

ignoble grief. Sticking my finger in my eye gives me a dismal interest in living. Eat some cake for

something to do. No. I want her cake. I still have the looking glass and the mental distraction I see

there. I watch smilingly, pretending to want to go on living, murmuring with a mad chuckle that yes

indeed, milady, everything is fine milady, and that I am lost. Lost, losti, losto, losta. I have just

made this discovery. In heartache one has what fun one can.

Now it is night. To stop thinking of my mother I stepped out into the garden. My sorrow,

my red dressing-gown, blown open like scarlet wings revealing my living nudity, made me feel as

if I were a mad king in the intolerable night where lie in wait my mother's eyes. A stray dog looked

at me with my mother's eyes and I went inside. The beloved dead are terrifying at midnight, they

come back to haunt you. In the daylight I feel much the same. Though dressed like 'them' I put on a

front. By day in their offices and drawing rooms, I smile, knowing not what to say. A look alike, a

brilliant bastard, soulless fill-in for me immediately and, to my disgust, he is admired by all. And

while he speaks, is affable and charming, I think of my dead mother. She dominates me. She is my

madness, the queen of my soul's meanders all of which lead to the place where she is enthroned, in

a strange, vertical coffin, in the centre of my mind. From time to time, for a few seconds, I tell

myself that she is not dead. And then, once again I know that she is. Dead. I say to myself, in some

drawing room where she lies in wait, where she is darkly between me and those who, with their

lips, gave me their sympathies, their eyes falsely saddened, the same eyes I wear when I extend

condolences.

XIX

In the street I am obsessed by my dead mother. Gloomily looking at all the busy people,

aware that they will die, that the wood for their coffin exists somewhere, in a sawmill, or in the

forest, vaguely, I look at the young, powdered, female cadavers of the future who laugh with their

teeth, first sign and beginning of their skeleton, who show off thirty two bits of their skeleton and

who laugh as if they will never die. In the street I am sad, like an oil lamp in daylight, pale, useless

and lugubrious, like a lamp burning on a bright summer day, appalling in the street, nourishing

rivers of the lonely, walking slowly, absent-minded, absent-minded in the streets, swarming with

old useless women, none is she, but all look like her. I am a sweating nightmare in the streets where

I think endlessly about my living mother seconds before her death. And if I were to walk up to that

man there and tell him that I lost my mother and that we should exchange a brotherly kiss, a frantic

kiss of communion for a sorrow which was or will be his. No. He would call the police.

Today I am mad thinking of death, everywhere death, these roses on my table and which

give off such a sweet scent while I write, frightfully alive, these roses are dying segments of a

cadaver forced to feign life for three days in water. How can people like dying flowers? Yet they

buy dying flowers, young girls revel in them. Out of my sight dead roses. I've just thrown them out

the window on top of an elderly lady carrying a shopping bag. Old, we know what that means. Just

the same, she is alive this morning. The old lady looked at me with disapproval. Such pretty

flowers, she thought, how silly to throw them out the window. She doesn't know that, powerless

child, I wanted to take death by the throat and kill it.

I need a little distraction. Anything. Yes, make up an absurd little ditty to the tune of that

French song -- «The Church rooster» or I don't know what. A ditty to amuse myself

neurasthenically, all by myself, making up rhymes about cows that do strange things. A cow in love

Sings in a landau on a lascivious note. An andalusian cow Takes a bow on a timid note. A fat cow

Gets into a row on a pensive note. A cheerful cow Looks like a chow on the wrong note. A brown

cow Travels by dhow on a passive note. A red cow Flirts with a sow on a plaintive note. A rusty

cow Calls herself frau on an impulsive note. A Jewish cow Wants to leave now on a fearful note. A

spanish cow Dances you know how on a noxious note. An arrogant cow Just says bow-wow! on a

Jewish note. A black cow Refuses to kow-tow on a stubborn note. A gaunt cow Strokes her brow

on a sensitive note. An arthritic cow Takes a vow on a quick note. A dwarf cow Laughs anyhow on

a forced note. A scottish cow Follows a plough on an ardent note. An ascetic cow Always says

"Thou" on a furtive note. There! Grief is not always expressed in noble words. It comes out in sad,

little jokes, little old ladies making faces in the dead windows of my eyes. Anyhow, the cows were

pointless.

What if we tried false proverbs? Let's go! Once bitten half forgiven. A rolling stone twice

shy. A rat in the hand is better than silver or gold. A good name is the mother of all evil. I'm no

happier. The obsession: my mother's eyes in my cat's attentive gaze. And what about trying the

same thing with God? God, that reminds me of something. I've had a few disappointments on that

count. Oh well, when He's free He'll just have to shout.

The poets who sing of noble and uplifting sorrow have never known real pain, luke warm

souls and small hearts have never known pain, in spite of their metered verse, in spite of their

sugary words, pale pretenders, powerless poets making virtue out of necessity. Their feeling is

shallow, that's why they write verse. Fuss-budgets, pretentious dwarfs propped up on high heels,

shaking their rhyming rattles, so annoying, casting each excreted word in bronze, so proud of the

manner in which they combine adjectives, delighted to have at last composed their fourteen lines,

vomiting on paper a few words in which they see a thousand wonders, which they suckle and which

we suckle with them, notifying the public of their rare words, stuffing their tiny shoulders with

impertinence, convinced of the importance of their bunk. Grief which never subsides and sweats,

mouth half open. They would not sing of its beauty were they to understand it, they would not say

that nothing makes us more noble than great sorrow, petty bourgeois who never paid for anything

in blood. I know the pain. I know that it is neither noble nor uplifting but rather dries one up like

the shrunken head of a peruvian warrior and I know that poets who suffer looking for rhymes and

who sing of the honour of suffering, distinguished dwarfs on stilts have never known the grief that

makes one a man who was.

XX

Enough, enough already! I am only a living soul, a sinner like all those who are alive. My

beloved is in the earth, she rots all alone in the silence of the tomb, in the horrifying silence of the

tomb and I am outside, I go on living, at this very moment my hand moves selfishly. And if my

hand writes words which speak of my pain that too is a sign of life, of joy, in other words, which

makes my hand move. And these pages, tomorrow I will reread them, I will add more words and

from this I will derive a certain pleasure. Sin of life. I will correct the proofs and that will be

another sin of life.

My mother is dead, but I still look at womanly beauty. My mother is abandoned in the earth

where ghastly things take place, but I love the sun and the chirping of the little birds. Sin of life.

When recounting a mother's departure I told of her son's remorse to have gone to be with Diana on

that very same night. I described Diana with too much indulgence. Sin of Life. My mother is dead,

so what? The radio need only strum the Blue Danube beside me while I write that, unable to resists

its pernicious charms, I fall in love for all my filial grief, with slender, Viennese maidens, whirling

lightly, ever so lightly.

Sin of life everywhere. If the sister of a wife stricken with tuberculosis is healthy and

young. I pray that God take pity on the brother in law and the sister-in-law who, together, care for

the sick one they both sincerely love. They are young and healthy and when the consumptive wife

sleeps under morphine, with a smiling death rattle, they go out in the evening and walk about the

garden. They are sad but they savour the sweetness of the scented garden, the sweetness of being

together, it's almost adultery. This widow, sincere in her grief, puts silk stockings on to go to her

husband's funeral, she powdered her face. Sin of life. Tomorrow she won't wear a dowdy dress and

will enhance her beauty. Sin of life. And this lover who sobs at the grave side. Beneath his grief

there is perhaps a ghastly, involuntary joy, a sinful joy to go on living, him, a subconscious joy, an

organic joy he cannot suppress, an involuntary joy born of the contrast between the living and the

dead. To feel pain is to live, to be part of things, to still be here.

My mother is dead but I am hungry and pretty soon, in spite of my grief, I shall eat.

Sin of Life. To eat is to think of myself, to love living. My tired eyes wear my mother's mourning,

but I want to live. Thank God. Soon enough living sinners become offended cadavers.

And anyhow, we forget the dead quickly. Poor dead you are abandoned in the earth. I pity

you, heart-rendering in your eternal abandonment. Dead, my beloved darlings, you are alone. In

five years, or less, I will come to terms with the idea that a mother has an end. In five years I will

have forgotten her gestures. If I live a thousand years I won't remember her at all.

XXI

What is this charade? My mother was born, came into the world. She rejoiced in her son,

rejoiced in her dresses, she laughed, she had so much to live for, gave herself so much bother. With

loving care she covered my school books with pretty pink paper. She was afraid of illness, she had

an absurd faith in doctors, she prepared her stays in Geneva, her illusion, months in advance, she

was so delighted with my compliments, so happy when I told her she lost weight, never true, so

happy when I pretended to admire her dignified, crooked little hats, cheaply interchangeable and

patched up. What for? To end up in a hole.

She was once young my old mother. I recall that one day, when I was, say, six years old,

she came to pick me up at the nun's school. How beautiful she was, my young mother. I proudly

looked at her under her hat, a hat featuring an expiring stuffed parakeet--a hat as ridiculous as my

rawhide Jean Bart--a one-of-a-kind creation, fruit of the imagination and labour of a milliner,

immediately and justly punished, struck down with deserved bankruptcy. I looked at her with

fervour, my slender twenty-five year old mother. I told her that she was the most beautiful mother

in the world. She laughed with delight. Devil or God why did you make that future corpse laugh,

that absurd need for joy which only immortals should feel. We on this earth are misled from the

start.

Why, my God, did she laugh to be young and pretty, seeing that now she is underground? It

is difficult to breath in a coffin, the poor dead suffocate. Why did she laugh at her youth while

young, why did she laugh to see her child so admiring, why, if another laugh was destined to play

on her pretty face, the immobile laugh of the skull. Why was she a sweet toothless child, washed

outdoors, in the sun, in a wooden bucket, splashing joyously, wriggling her chubby legs in the

water, frantic cyclist in the water, mindlessly delighted to dive and wriggle, now nothing. Why did

she live if she must horribly die? Why did she delight in life, why did she hum, with embarrassing

gestures, old opera arias, why did she wait and hope? Why, before my visits to Marseille, why did

she get so excited, why did she take such useless pains to prepare and clean a month ahead of time

the apartment she wanted worthy of me, that poor apartment repainted and papered in my honour,

and in my honour she stuffed the apartment with artificial flowers and even, on the eve of my

arrival, real ones choked in a narrow vase.

She didn't know how to arrange flowers, my poor darling. Why so much bother and

enthusiasm to arrange and rearrange her apartment as if it were a stage set got ready for the

extraordinary event, the arrival of her son's eyes, her humble, tawdry apartment was her faith,

pitiful homeland which my naive darling thought of as sumptuous enough to find grace in my eyes,

a tribute to the impeccable housekeeper she was convinced she was. I didn't give her enough

compliments on her good taste. I obliquely made fun of her lack of it. Too late. It's true she loved

everything about me, even my irony.

Why so much fussing seeing that the earth lies heavy on her, imperturbable? Why so much

fussing on the eve of my arrival to decorate with inappropriate curtains the poor revered water

closet which, with all of her heart she transformed into a Lace Palace. Why so much enthusiasm if

she was destined to end in emptiness. Why so much attention given? and to what end?. Why did she

buy with such passion, preparing for the arrival of her European son, large quantities of that tea

which was for her a strange medicinal herb inconceivably loved by the Gentiles? that tea which she

was proud to proclaim in the local dry goods store, where it had been moulding since the time of

Napoleon III, that this was, this tea, for her Son Who Was Going To Arrive, that superannuated tea,

always stale, always badly prepared with loving care and which I always declared perfect if only

the next day to make fun of her incompetence. Teasing abolished. Why did she cherish her stacks of

linens inspected and uselessly stroked with a sigh of satisfaction? Why such enthusiasm to go to the

theatre? "Quick, let's hurry, we're going to be late"! Why so much fuss for everything? why, if she

was destined to vanish, did she smile at me so often? All her intimate desires, her enthusiasm, her

small pride, her touchiness, all is dead forever, suddenly did not exist, was in vain. By the same

token, these pages which I now write, the nights I spend writing them, all for nought. I shall die.

Soon I no more. And someone perhaps after my death will wonder why I came into the world, why

I lived, why I took absurd delight in writing, why I took ridiculous delight in what seemed to me to

be written truth, success, inspiration. Even what I have just written on my own death and on the

uselessness of writing gives me the joy of life and usefulness.

XXII

In my room, here I am one of the human nation, scandalized by universal death, sterilely

asking. Here I am, endlessly asking for my mother. Asking nothing for her. Here I am, naked man,

abandoned, stupefied, a pale man longing to understand, here I am sweating and breathing, but with

difficulty, because I do not understand the human adventure, my breathing is painful but it wants

sadly to go on. Between inspiration and expiration my breathing holds my mother walking heavily

towards me. Each breath I take is that of a cadaver wanting to go on living, desperation disguised as

hope. Here I am before the looking glass, mad in my grief, aspiring to some happiness, sadly

scratching my petrified grief, mechanically drawing my fingernails across my naked chest, smiling

and weak in front of my looking glass where I seek my childhood and my mother, my looking glass

coldly keeps me company, in it I know, smiling, that I am lost, lost without my mother. There I am

before the looking glass, window of death, tying knots with some string picked up who knows

where, keeping me company, pulling, knotting, mechanically complicating it, breaking it nervously,

in a sweat, stuttering happy words to try to go on living. Oh broken string of my destiny. Before the

looking glass I cannot understand that my mother no longer be -- given that she was,

She came, she understood nothing and she left. Having been herself irreplaceably, she

disappeared, why? oh why? Poor humans that we are, going from 'always' who put us in our

cradles, to 'always' coming out of our tomb. Between these two 'always' what a charade we play, a

short game of ambition, hope, love, joys destined to disappear forever. This game that you make us

play, say, You up there, why this hoax? Why did she laugh? why did You give her the desire to

laugh, to live, if You had, from birth, condemned her to die? Oh Judge of the monotonous sentence,

Judge without imagination, only knowing one sentence, always death, why this deceit? She loved

to breath the sea's salt air on my childhood Sunday afternoons. Why is she now under a suffocating

plank, pressed close against her lovely face. She loved to breath, she loved life. I cry out against this

abuse of confidence, against this sinister joke. Oh God, in the name of my own death pangs, so

close at hand, I tell You that your joke is not amusing. You give us the divine and beautiful love of

life only to lay us out one after the other, stiff, buried by future stiffs like stinking filth, rubbish too

repugnant to look at, waxy putrescence, we who once were babies delighting in our dimples. Why

this earth on top of my mother, encased in a little box, she who loved to breath the salt sea air?

XXIII

I don't want her to be dead. I want hope. I ask for hope. Who will make me believe in a

wonderful lie where I will be reunited with my mother. Brothers! oh my human brothers! make me

believe in eternal life, but give me proof, not some insipid joke, turning my stomach. Ashamed of

your earnest eyes, I say yes, yes affably. The heaven in which I long to see my mother, I want it to

be authentic. Not a projection of my distress.

It is you that I implore, God of my mother, my God, venerated in spite of my desperate

blasphemy. I implore Your help. Have pity on this poor beggar, abandoned in a corner of the world.

I no longer have a mother. I no longer have Mother. I am alone, with nothing. I implore You to

whom she so often prayed. Give me faith in You. Make me believe in eternal Life. Would that I

could buy it for a billion years in Hell, for after a billion years in Hell, a place where you are

foresworn, I would see my mother once again. She would welcome me timidly holding her little

hand to the corner of her mouth.

XXIV

You, all of her thoughts, her cherished hopes, her joys, are you gone too? How can it be?

The dead live, I cry out now and again when suddenly I wake in the night sweating with certainty.

My mother's thoughts I stammer, have fled to a timeless land where they await me. Yes, There is a

God, and God would not treat me so cruelly. He would not take my mother away. He will yield her

up in a timeless land where she awaits me. A child's fragile daydreaming. There is no paradise. Her

gestures, her laughter, every hour of her life's existence only in your faithful eyes. And when you

die only the remnants of these pages will remain and when they, in their time are carried away by

the ebb and flow of relentless time she will never have been.

How enviable the fate of those who believe what is good for them rather than the barren

truth, neither joyous nor beauteous and which has only piteous verity to recommend it, piteous truth

amidst the meandering profusion of infinite life, unforseen, unreasoning, all under the cheerless eye

of emptiness. You whom I call mother, you have gone down into the valley of stupor and you wait

for me. You are alone and I am alone. We are alone, both of us. You are dead forever. I know.

Even so, I know that when I am weary and by the grace of God, given to the sickness and

humiliation of old age, when my soul is weary, and when this world takes up arms against me and I

can no longer pretend to be clad in steel, it is your name, Mother, that, alone, I will invoke, not the

name of the living, nor the name of God, but your sacred name. Mother, when my body is tired of

living, or the world too harsh with the child you always defended, will you go on living somewhere

in some wondrous place?

XXV

No. She is silent under the earth, locked up in an earthly gaol, forbidden to leave, prisoner

of the earth's solitude, with silent, suffocating soil so heavy upon her, inexorably, on her right

ferociously, on her left stupidly and infinitely under her, abandoned and in whom nothing, not even

the dark, thick earth is interested, while the living walk on top of her. She is, underground, inaction,

languor, prostration. God! how absurd.

Laid out, immensely lonely, dead she who was active, she who cared for her husband and

her son, sacred Mother who indefatigably applied cupping glasses, and plasters and who offered

useless, reassuring herb teas, laid out, stiff, she who carried so many trays to her patients, laid out

and blind, a naive, sparkling eyed darling who believed the pharmaceutical promotion scams, laid

out, inert, she who was indefatigably comforting. I recall her words one day when someone had

unjustly hurt my feelings. Instead of consoling me with abstract, supposed words of wisdom she

simply said: "Cock your hat, my son, go out and amuse yourself for you are young, go, your own

worst enemy". Thus spoke my mother.

Laid out in the great dormitory, indifferent, piteously alone, she who was so delighted to

have a good seat on the train, what luck! delight written all over her wide face. Laid out and

insensitive she who delighted in the pretty dress I bought for her. Where is that cursed dress? Living

somewhere? Still smelling of my mother's scent? Laid out indifferent, she who was so enthusiastic,

who loved making complicated plans, silly plans of happiness, laid out she who forged poetically a

thousand blissful plans of winning the sweep-stakes, of snubbing, with new found opulence, those

who had been unkind. But no, she declared, recanting that she would rather offer them sumptuous

gifts. Laid out in her grumpy, earthly sleep, with mineral indifference, she doesn't think of winning

sweep-stakes, doesn't rejoice, doesn't worry. She isn't even worried about me. She loved me just the

same.

You, her closed eyelids are still intact. And you, pale mother, so white and yellow whom I

dare to look at, for a moment in your rotten box, my emaciated abandoned one, you who were so

busy and who always came to me, you so sullen now and quiet in your earthly melancholy, lying in

the black silence of the tomb, in the heavy damp silence of the earth, of the tomb, say, you who

once loved me, do you think of your son, in your tomb, where live only roots and joyless rootlets

and gloomy creatures of darkness, moving incomprehensibly, always silently, frightfully busy.

Perhaps in her limp asphyxia she still dreams of me, as she did in life when, in her dreams she was

always afraid for me. Under her suffocating plank she wonders if I drink something hot before

going to work. "He never dresses warmly enough" she mumbles, my dead mother. He is so frail, he

worries about everything and I am not there" she mumbles.

Not true, she doesn't dream about me, never thinks. She is gloomy in her soil, above there is

life and the exhilaration of morning, the kind, old sun shining, shining radiantly. She is paralysed

and dried up in the rich soil, parched here and there turning green, former, pretty Mother of my

tenth birthday, half skeletal, insensitive, despite my slow tears, deaf, expressionless. Above all

creation wakes, gets down to living joyously, procreating and killing beneath God's kindly eye. In a

tree above her morning grave, a squirrel rubs his front paws, super!, there are plenty of nuts this

year. Above her morning grave the sky is a giant powerful blue, tiny birds sing their glorious hearts

out, their innocence, in the flowering dawn, their angelic morning chatter and sprightly flight, their

three-penny poems, their sweet icy calls and all their liquid assets and, excepting the coocoo bird,

idiotically obsessed with playing hide and seek, the little birds fill creation with their song, send up

a thousand cheery hellos to father sun, how lovely to be out in the fresh air, sing these little

darlings, cocky little troubadours, proud crested and drunk with light, now affably dancing varied

polkas, pecking away on her grave.

XXVI

In the end we get used to unhappiness. Sometimes we say that we are not as unhappy as all

that. Let's smoke a cigarette while the fool on the radio talks about a declaration made by an

important head of State. The fool savours this declaration, revels in it, sucks the juice out of it.

Future cadavers, so dynamic, rather amusing.

When my cat, weak in mind, looks at me eagerly, with fixed surprise, trying to understand,

so interested, yes, I know, that my mother watches. Will this death, ceaselessly remembered, drive

me mad, eyes in the evening skyward where a pale, round cadaver shines, benign and maternal?

Since her death, I like to live alone, sometimes for days on end, far from the absurdly busy living,

alone, as she was alone, in her apartment in Marseille, alone, the telephone off the hook, alone in

this house, tidy as death, which I continually straighten up so as to believe in some order, alone in

my room, deliciously locked, too tidy, too clean, riotous symmetry, pencils lined up according to

size on the polished cemetery of my desk.

Sitting at this desk, I talk with her. I asks her if I should put my great coat on to go out.

"Yes, my darling, it's wiser". It is but I. I'm imitating her accent. I would like to have her by my

side, enthroned, her scent heavy in the air, in her black silk dress. If I were to talk to her for a long

time, patiently, look at her deeply, maybe her eyes would light up, a little, out of pity, out of

maternal love. I know it cannot be, just the same, the thought obsesses me.

XXVII

Now I have finished this book, too bad. Writing it I was with her. But Her Majesty my dead

mother will not read these lines written for her in filial hand, scrawled with sickly slowness. I don't

know what to do now. Read a modern poet who wracks his brain so as to be incomprehensible.

Return to the outside world, see apes dressed like men, who, moulded by society, play bridge and

don't like me, and who talk about their political games, forgotten ten years hence.

Sometimes, at night, having checked the lock on my door, I sit my hands on my knees, the

lights out. I stare into the looking glass. Haunted by minotaurs of melancholy, I wait, at the looking

glass. Shadows like rats, scramble across the floor, shadows that were the ill tempers of my life

among men, whilst shine sudden eyes, noble eyes that were those of my other beloved, Yvonne, I

wait at the looking glass, seated, hands flat, pharaoh like, I wait for my mother, in the moon light,

her messenger, to appear, perhaps. But only memories. Memories of this terrible life, which is not a

life and which hurts.

While a dog howls in the night, a poor dog, my brother, lamenting and giving voice to my

grief, I remember insatiably. Now I'm a baby, she's powdering me with talcum, then she puts me,

for a laugh, in a little hut made of three pillows. The young mother and her baby laugh a great deal.

She is dead. Now I am ten. I am sick and she watches over me all one night, in the light of a

kerosene lamp, on which there was a steaming tea pot, light from the kerosene lamp, light of my

mother dozing by my side, feet on a small heater, I groan and she kisses me. Now, a few days later,

I am convalescent, she brought me a rope of licorice which I asked her to buy -- how quickly she

ran out, docile, always prepared. At my bedside she sews and sighs lightly, sententiously. I am

perfectly happy. I crack the licorice whip and then eat tiny bites of a Petit Beurre starting with the

little brown indentations around the edge, that's the best part. I play with her wedding ring,

borrowed, spinning it on a plate. Mother's good smiles, reassuring, mother's indulgence. She is

dead. Now I am well and she makes gingerbread men with left-over dough, she will bake them for

me. She is dead. Now we're at the fair. She gives me tuppence. I put it in the belly of a cardboard

bear and wow! a cream puff comes out. "Mother watch me eat it, it's better when you watch me".

She is dead. Now I am twenty, in University Square where she waits for me, sacred patience. She

sees me, her face lights up with shy happiness. She is dead. Now her greeting on the sabbath.

Without having to knock, the door opens magically, offering of love. She is dead. Now her pride at

having found my lost pen. "You see, my child, I always find everything". She is dead. Now I ask

her to tidy up my room. She obeys with a good heart. She laughs and says "You need an army to

wait on you, and them you would wear out". What a kind smile. She is dead. Now her delight,

heavily climbing into a cab. Walking tires her out, my ailing mother. What sudden pride thinking

that I too am often sick. I am so much like you, your son. Now the coach door at the train station in

Geneva, the train will soon be leaving. Dishevelled, hat falling piteously, mouth stricken with grief,

eyes shining with sorrow she gazes up at me intensely, to grasp as much of me as possible before

the train lurches. She blesses me, tells me not to smoke more than twenty cigarettes a day, to dress

warmly in winter, extravagant tenderness, divine extravagance. Maternity. The divine majesty of

love, the sublime law, the eyes of God. All at once she appears proof of God's love.

Music of the most subtle despair, lost and smiling, pervasive, eating away with images of

the past, of dead happiness. Nevermore will I be a son, Nevermore our interminable chatter. I can

never tell her all the stories which, from London, I imagined recounting -- she would have found

them fascinating. I sometimes find myself thinking "Don't forget to tell this or that to Mother". And

all the presents I bought for her in London, pretty lace collars, she will never see. I'll have to toss

them out, those collars. Never again will I see her disembark from the train, well pleased,

embarrassed. Nevermore her dilapidated suitcase, full of impoverishing presents. What an

expedition to go see her son, prepared for months in advance, saved for, her desire to make a good

impression at the station and her virtuous handsomeness on the night of her arrival. Yes, I know I

have already said all that. But no one can stop me from unwrapping my poor treasure. Once again I

go open the bedroom door. Just the same, I know that she is never on the other side.

Hours pass. Now it is morning. Another morning without her. Someone rings the doorbell.

Get up, look through the Judas hole. It is only a frightful old woman collecting for charity,

notebook in hand. To punish her I don't let her in. I go back to my desk and pick up my pen. It

leaks. I have blue ink spots on my hand. She was crying, asking for forgiveness "I'll never do it

again" she sobbed. Her blue liver-spotted little hands. And elderly woman, so kind, crying like a

little girl, rattled with tears -- horrid. I imagine for a few seconds that this scene did not take place,

that just before my angry outburst I took pity on her terrified eyes, that her hands were white,

without liver spots. Alas! Just the same I loved her. But I was a son. And sons don't know that their

mothers are mortal.

XXVIII

Sons of mothers still living don't forget that your mother is mortal. I will not have written in

vain if one of you, having read my song of death, is kinder with your mother, one night, because of

me, because of my mother. Love her more deeply than I knew how to love mine. And every day

give her joy. I give you this advice with good reason, from the summit of my mourning. These

words I write, sons of mothers still living, are the only condolence I can give myself. While it is still

time, sons, while she is still alive. Hurry, for soon her face will be stiff, imperceptibly, virginally

smiling. But I know you. Nothing as long as your mothers are living will deter you from mad

indifference. No son knows truly that his mother will die; all sons get angry and impatient with

their mother -- fools soon admonished.

XIX

Praise be to you mothers of all countries, praise to you in your sister, my mother, praise be

with all the majesty of her death, Mothers of all the earth. Our Ladies, mothers, to you I pay

homage, old darlings, You who taught us how to tie our shoes, how to blow our noses, yes, who

taught us how to blow into the hankie, you mothers of all lands, you who patiently fed us, spoonful

after spoonful, the gruel which we never wanted to swallow, you who tried to get us to swallow

stewed prunes, to encourage us to swallow by telling us that prunes are little piccaninnies who want

to go indoors, when at last the little goose, suddenly a poet, opens the door, you who taught us how

to gargle and who gargled to show us how, you who straightened our curly locks and ties so that we

might be pretty before visitors came to call, or before school, you who harnessed and curried your

dirty little pony sons, you their overwhelmed owners, who washed them, the dirty scabbed knees,

our crusty brat noses, you who were never repulsed by us, you, always weak, indulgent, easily

duped by your adolescent sons -- you gave them all your savings. I pay you homage, mothers full

of grace, saintly guardians, courage and goodness, warmth and loving eyes, you whose eyes are

knowing, you who know at once if we've been hurt, you only humans whom we trust and who

never, never betray us. I pay you homage, mothers who think of us incessantly, even in your sleep,

mothers who forgive, who rub our foreheads with tired hands, mothers who wait, always at the

window watching us leave, mothers who think we are incomparable, exceptional, mother who

never tires of waiting on us, of tucking us in bed even when we're forty years old. And you never

love us less, were we defeated, degraded, weak, cowardly, Mother who sometimes makes me

believe in God.

XXX

Nothing will bring my mother back, will bring back she who answered to the name of

mother, who came running at the sound of Mother. My mother is dead, dead; my dead mother is

dead, dead. Thus echoes my grief, the interminable sound of my grief, every night every day and

when smiling to my friends, I have but one idea in mind and death in my heart. So echo the pistons

of the long train, always echoing, carrying, funeral train, my dishevelled cadaver at the coach door,

running behind the train, out of breath, sweating, obsequious, I, behind the train carrying my dead

mother.

XXXI

Years have passed since I wrote this song of death. I went on living, loving. I lived, I loved.

I had moments of happiness while she was abandoned in that horrible place. I committed the sin of

life, me too, like others. I laughed. And I will laugh again. Thank God that living sinners soon

become offended corpses.