Strangely, among the small posters listing the names and ranks of those in charge of the ward, the hospital regulations, and the other notices common to such places, there was a reproduction of a very, very famous Manet painting, whose title I could not quite recall. A Manet! What could my mother possibly understand of a Manet? Did she even know the place, the importance of a painting in the life of a man, of a society?
Two beds. Only one was occupied. By my mother. She was looking at me with that smile of happiness she always wore when I came home after a long absence, or on the evenings of Pessah when we were all reunited. The whole family.
I forced myself, in turn, to return my mother’s smile. It was the eighth day of her hospitalisation.
“So, Maman, how are you feeling today?”
Without answering, my mother went on looking at me. She was filled with such intense happiness that an anguish came over me, because I knew very well that I was the centre and cause of that happiness. And that responsibility was a very heavy burden for me to bear.
Then, in her soft voice, she let fall: “My son, when you are here, everything always goes very well. But you know, I wouldn’t want…” She broke off and turned her head toward the window, toward the tree one could see, swaying gently in the breeze. All at once I felt freed.
“What is it you wouldn’t want, Maman?” “No, nothing. In any case, what I would want now no longer exists, no longer matters… El rhècha darethi!” That way of mixing Arabic and French without warning had always been her way of communicating with us. But since our arrival in France, French was taking a larger place.
My mother went on staring at the window, and her face had that transparency I used to admire when I was very small, a long time ago… A very long time ago. Lord, I thought, considering the age I am now, when I was little, what does that mean? In any case, it’s nearly forty years ago. In those days my conversations with my mother, it’s true, were always carried on in that Judeo-Arabic which was her own language. But for years now, especially since our arrival in France, my mother had been trying to express herself in that laboured French of hers, sprinkled here and there with Arabic expressions that surged up when emotion was too strong. She would then throw furtive glances around her as if she feared people would take offence at her accent or at her mistakes. Of course it was not that way of speaking that pained me, but the attitude of guilt into which it plunged her. So much so that, to comfort her in a way, I caught myself speaking Arabic more often than I had in my adolescence.
“Maman, do you need anything else? Ouach tchrabi, ya M’ma?” I had asked this question with a detached air, while laying down beside her the wool jacket and the little coffee cup she had asked me for the day before. Flowers — she loathed flowers. “Flowers are for the dead,” she used to say, “not for the living!”
“In any case, what I would want now no longer exists, no longer matters…” The sentence she had let slip a moment earlier terrified me, I did not know why. I wanted to understand, and yet at the same time I sensed that the words she would speak were going to hurt me: “Well then, tell me, Maman, what do you wish for that no longer exists? And anyway, that way of speaking means nothing at all!”
I felt all the absurdity of my behaviour. I was asking a question and, in the same sentence, asking her not to answer it.
I knew very well I shouldn’t have let my anxiety, my irritation show through.
My mother went on looking at me without saying anything. I could not get the thought out of my head that she was storing up images the way one stacks clothes in a suitcase before setting off on a journey. Setting off on a journey! the thought made me shudder. In the corridor, on the other side of the door, a trolley was passing. One could hear vials clinking, a nurse laughing. That was the present of that particular day, all that was simple, prosaic. My mother turned her eyes again toward the window, toward the tree that was moving, toward the spring outside, toward the rest of the world. Suddenly, as though what she was asking me had only secondary importance, she said: “Tell me, Gabriel, do you have everything you need at home?”
I was taken aback. She didn’t usually call me by my given name.
She always said “my son,” or “my Gaby,” or else ya guelbi. Without waiting for my reply, she went on: “I mean in YOUR house?”
She had stressed that possessive as if to mark clearly the difference between the house where I had lived with Daniella and the one where I had been living since my departure. The one where I lived alone. And behind that “YOUR” there was Daniella, of course — well, the absence of Daniella. I knew it. She never uttered the name of the woman I loved. Whom she too had so loved. Quite simply because she had accepted, from the very first day, the reality of our break-up, without however understanding it. My mother knew many things even though she gave that impression of naïve innocence proper to little girls.
She knew, for example, that one does not leave a Jewish wife such as
Daniella was for some passing affair with another woman. There was also the absence of a child, which she could not have failed to know was an obsession for Daniella as much as for myself. And then there was my work as a writer, which, for M’ma Ouarda, was not a profession. To say nothing of this choice of science-fiction literature, which had imposed itself upon me of its own accord; the incredible success of my first three books, and what had followed — the television, the cinema — all this made of me, in my mother’s eyes, an enigmatic being, if not even a little mad. And yet, without asking herself too many questions, she had accepted in one piece my way of life. But my abrupt departure from the family home — that, she could not explain. M’ma Ouarda knew instinctively that a half-public life turns the other half, the private half, upside down, but she carefully refrained from passing the slightest judgment on me. She used to say: with all your complicated ideas, you don’t see what’s staring you in the face. She was quite right. My eyes had been put out.
I had left one day, just like that, very early one morning. It was a Saturday, a Shabbat of course, as Daniella implacably said. I could no longer bear the constraints inherent in that day — the words, the gestures that were the privilege of religion as Daniella lived it. I knew I came from all that clutter, but that I was also someone else. Someone else who disturbed Daniella, even frightened her. Her religious behaviour, in its rigour, had ended by drawing me away from what, for me, had only ever been an endearing folklore. I had left. The dietary customs, the gestures of the feasts, all the music of my earliest childhood, had become as if petrified into a set of prohibitions, of obligations, of received ideas that were not to be discussed. All that went without saying when it came from my mother, or my father, or my uncle, had become unbearable to me as the years passed.
It was a kind of theatre out of keeping with this twentieth century, especially when I found myself, after the death of my father and that of my uncle, as the only male actor in the play. Little by little, the woman I loved had disappeared behind that stage curtain, which had become a frontier. Imperceptibly, another man had been born in me. And one morning, I had left.
“You know I have everything I need, Maman. I’m a grown man now, I know how to keep a house.”
I realised I had spent several minutes reassuring my mother as to what might be lacking in my house. She had looked at me oddly, as if she wondered why I was telling her about my house. Then the curious sentence came, incomprehensible, with no apparent connection to what had preceded it, nor to the setting around us: “Later, my son, in five years, in ten years, come and see me… Find a little time, Ya Guelbi, even if you are far away…” I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand. Had my mother just fixed an appointment with me? “Later,” she repeated, “later my son, in five years, in ten years…”
She was looking at me. I told myself she was holding back from asking me for something she lacked, so I repeated the question I had put to her a moment earlier: “Do you need anything, Maman?” “No, no. Or perhaps, yes, just a little coffee. I don’t know if here…” “Of course, Maman, there’s a machine in the corridor. It’s quite near.
I’ll run and fetch it, and you’ll drink it from the cup I brought you.”
The machine was out of order. I had to go down to the cafeteria on the ground floor. Of course there were people. I had to wait my turn, then I came back up with my two plastic cups, walking with measured steps so as not to spill the coffee, telling myself I would pour one of them into the porcelain cup and that the gesture would be at once ridiculous and touching.
Arriving in the vicinity of my mother’s room, I caught wind of an agitation, a flurry among the nurses. The one who knew me well, called Véronique, signalled to me from a distance, even motioning for me to run. I rushed in her wake into the room. My mother watched me arrive with my two cups in my hands. She had a smile — the sketch of a smile, full of tenderness. Then her gaze froze, became empty. There are seconds, like that, that one could almost number. The first, the second, the third… Yes, there had been a gaze right up to the eighth second, I think, perhaps to the ninth. But in the tenth, nothing more. There had been nothing more. Nothing in the eleventh either, nor in the ones that followed, which kept on slipping by without my mother forever.
Apart from my mother, I curiously thought. Nothing more. Stupidly I had put my two coffee cups down on the bedside table. I was out of breath as if I had been running for hours. I made as if to sit down, then stood up again.
All this — these gestures, these glances, the breathing — was just before the bells rung, the buttons the nurse had begun pressing frantically, just before the useless alarms that all this set off in my life more than in the hospital, before Véronique’s frantic race through the corridors in search of a doctor, an intern, anyone in a white coat capable of interrupting the course of things.
Just before any concern became obsolete, and before the words of the Shema Israel rose to my lips without my even realising it, and as if without my consent.
Nurse Véronique, having come back near me in the room, waited respectfully for the prayer I was murmuring to end, taken aback to see me place my right hand over my eyes; then she gently touched my arm: “I must tell you, Monsieur, that I was alone with her until the last moment. She spoke words that remain a mystery to me.”
“What was it? What did my mother say?” “She made a sign to me with her hand, then she smiled at me, and she said: B and A, that makes BA. I then asked her what she meant by that. She turned her head toward the door and added: The cat is lying down and… It was at that second that you arrived, and that was when she went away.”
“Thank you, Véronique, thank you. I think I know what she was trying to tell you. I must tell you that my mother… that my mother… could neither read nor write.”
Discreetly, the nurse left the room. B and A, that makes BA. I took M’ma Ouarda’s still-warm hand. M’ma Ouarda. So, Ya M’ma, your road ends in this little town in the south of France.
One day, a very long time ago, you were watching me work at the dining-room table, back there in Constantine, and you said abruptly: “My son, is it difficult to learn to read?”
I lifted my eyes toward you, astonished not to have thought of this possibility myself. And straight away, I lied:
“Why no, Maman, I’m sure that in a month or two, if we both set to it, I could…” I was what, thirteen or fourteen, perhaps… I went to buy a beginner’s reader, full of big letters and naïve pictures.
But the book no longer contained the lesson of B and A makes BA. It was already the whatchamacallit method, the whole-word method or whatever… Sounds, I think, associated with whole words. There was no alphabet, or hardly any, only obvious and idiotic noises. I armed myself with patience, I took all my memories in hand: “Look, Maman, do you see? This is a B, which is pronounced bay, and this is an A, which is pronounced A quite simply. If I put the B in front of the A, we no longer pronounce Bay and A, but we pronounce BA.”
One day, a very long time ago, Maman… I had wanted to, I had tried.
But that day, the bean stew was beginning to burn. You ran off to turn everything down.
“My son, I think it’s not at my age that…” Another day, I took up the picture book again. There was a dog sitting obediently next to a cat lying down and sleeping. The three words had been set apart — chien, chat and couché — and the group of letters C and H common to them carefully underlined. Opposite, the sound “SHHH” had been written. I tried again that time, but uncle Robert had arrived just then. He had burst out laughing: well, well! school at home! Come on, pour me an anisette with an olive instead, or I’ll die of thirst on the spot!
I do believe I never tried again to offer you the world, mother. I was ashamed. I was left with these questions in my belly like daggers.
Gabriel raised his head. He had reread in one go these pages he had written, ten years ago now, in one of those spiral notebooks that are taller and wider than school notebooks. Yes, it was the day he had suddenly resolved to set down in black and white everything that had founded him, everything that had made him, from his first cry. As if a life recounted in its smallest details and entrusted to unknown readers could help him better live his own. Incredible presumption! And first of all, had he had the honesty to set it all down? He took the other spiral notebooks from his briefcase, considering them thoughtfully. Yes, can one really succeed in telling everything? “I do not yet know,” he said to himself, “that is an enigma which I, author of science-fiction novels, cannot yet solve.”
And here he was, just back from the little cemetery of Farioule where he had paid a strange visit to a tombstone. Here he was, having come back to sit beneath these plane trees he had so loved during the first months of exile — that is to say, more than thirty-five years ago. He felt overwhelmed by a bitter guilt. A while ago, before M’ma Ouarda’s grave, he had not had the courage to give in to the masquerade of prayer. He had stood very straight for long minutes, thinking only — and curiously — of that aborted attempt to teach his mother to read. An attempt some thirty years old.
Gabriel put the notebooks back into his briefcase before answering the waiter who was approaching.