STAMMERED SONGBOOK Page 6

  I am afraid your slow dying, this eternal suspension between life and death, will continue to be an open wound for a long time to come. The ruin, the loss is so total. It swallows everything up. Strips you of door frames of language. Knocks window-panes from their rebates, tears the paper from your walls and scrapes the plasterwork and stones till they give way. Perhaps, perhaps a calmer land will stretch out beyond bewilderment.

  I am beginning gradually to unlearn the art of hope, and as hope evaporates despair does not increase—on the contrary. Every day I wake on the edge of perplexity, the crude ore from which the new day will distil pleasure or desperation—or one of the countless alloys both contain. Growing older: getting up in the morning with permanent wounds, the stinging of which, on the way to the bidet or the breakfast table, seeks a precarious balance between despair and ecstasy. The body is again not a perfect fit. We are like adolescents, when we used to hang around angrily in the gap between our most intimate image and the image that was expected of us. Perhaps we are late adolescents: too young to be called old, too old to be young, with gout in our knees and more fragile teeth.

  Later, when everything is over, I should thank my friends for the gentle Wailing Walls they erected around me, but perhaps I shall have to ask their forgiveness for all the moments when with almost voyeuristic pleasure I absorbed their bodies. The natural, worldly elegance with which they hold cups, make roll-ups, direct a ballet of pots and pans in the kitchen, and even when they are asleep they don’t fall apart but their organism keeps them intact until they wake up again.

  And on the bus in town, I don’t look around me, I seem to be rather grazing with my eyes—sometimes I put my sunglasses on, even though there are clouds. The alarming ease with which feet negotiate steps, the toes lift the heel, the soles spring, and, going round corners, bodies regain their balance without informing us—and the way dogged nature goes on dreaming up new variations on the age-old theme of curves, arses, tits and balls, winks and quips, etcetera. I never tire of staring at it and try to smile as you sometimes used to, in those unguarded moments when a person thinks one of those countless thoughts that they share with no one: a sigh through one’s nose, half mocking, half bewildered—one’s own small respiratory philosophy.

  What do we, basically, mean? What are we? Fluffs of seed that tickle God’s intergalactic nostrils. Our existence at most makes him sneeze—his only talent for poetry. And apart from that, according to Darwin and his prophets: creatures constructed mainly of carbon, descended from an ape that one fine day fell out of its tree. Since then we have been laboriously learning to sit on the bumps, impossible to calibrate definitively. Nevertheless I am grateful to the roughly four billion years that life has folded up in our genes because the coincidence of evolution has equipped us with, among other things, mouths with blood-red stamp pads, with which we seal a host of light-footed fates, and can at least frank our tragic farces adequately.

  Tomorrow we shall wake up and it will all be over. We’ll hear you downstairs, at about seven in the morning, opening the cupboards and heating the kettle for coffee. We’ll hear you crossing the kitchen floor in your veteran, worn-out slippers and we’ll count the taps on the table top with each plate that you put down. We’ll hear you moaning when the plastic round the vacuum-sealed packet of ground coffee won’t budge using the scissors or your fingers, after which you’ll tear it open with your teeth and spill coffee everywhere—and also the morning mood that sounds in the rattling of the cutlery and the rummaging in the cupboard when you fill our lunch boxes with bread and an apple or a piece of chocolate. We’ll hear the commotion that was the medium of your stubbornness and the concern, which you could never express in subtle language, but bottled up until it spewed out as rage. Were you frightened of us? Probably you were, but equally, when the school results were disappointing or we had unsuitable sweethearts, you were probably angry at what you yourself had missed.

  I threw away my own future, you said, by not giving two hoots about it at school, but you never freed yourself from the well-behaved Catholicism that you imbibed with your mother’s milk. I wasn’t allowed to go to art school when I was fourteen—no reproach. Too decadent, a place of free love and worse, according to the pastors for whom you cherished so much respect that every syllable that escaped them was Living Bread. And yet later, when I made my own way, you felt guilty, and were angry at your own anger back then.

  Tomorrow you’ll get up. You’ll have put on your pink padded dressing gown and will fry eggs, and surround us with your haze of sleep and concern.

  Death, let her go in a kind of forgetfulness, like one of her numerous absent-minded episodes from the past. So that without giving it a second thought she leaves life behind on the edge of the cupboard and exits the room, running her fingertips over the table top, for example one afternoon in June, when there were still poplars in front of the house and the dark grey of an approaching storm compressed the light into a bright yellow band on the horizon, behind the trunks. And then the wind getting up and the first heavy rain pattering on the leaves. And she’s gone, and has long since forgotten the way back.

  There is a dream that keeps recurring since you’ve been ill. I’m trying to find my way through a building where it is pitch-black, so dark that I am only aware of rooms that I feel my way into through the echo of my breath and my footsteps resounding from their walls, sometimes far away, sometimes nearby. Sometimes my feet bump into steps, and I pull myself up via the banisters of a staircase which leads to still other landings, other rooms and other staircases.

  Sometimes I seem to be walking through long chambers, sometimes through back rooms, one after another. And everywhere the same impenetrable darkness, and everywhere the dry smell of dust, as if in an attic while the summer sun makes the tiles tick with the heat. Sometimes I feel beneath my fingers the surface of doors that will not open. And always there is that moment of gruesome realization that there is no “outside” in the dream, that I am shut up in a universe of darkness and rooms, chambers, staircases, passages and corridors that stretches out endlessly in all directions. The vast desolation of that universe, in which I am utterly alone, vomits me up out of sleep bathed in sweat.

  And there is that other dream, a dream that as time goes on returns more and more frequently. I am staying with friends, family and loved ones in a house somewhere in woody hill country. It is early in the morning, a golden-yellow morning of a day at the height of summer. I walk through the house, and in the rooms hear the breathing of all those still asleep, past the table with the empty glasses and plates from the evening meal, onto a terrace, descending the steps into the garden, which slopes down to the wood. The grass gives off an overpowering smell of the earth; the sun is playing in the tops of the trees.

  I sit down on a bench by a stream, suck in the air, the silence and the sounds of the sleeping life in the house. And there is always a voice that says: this is your last day. I’m not seized by fear at that moment, not even sadness. Only a yawning regret that everything will soon be over. I feel it as a bout of nausea and cramp in my jaws, deeply in love with life as I am, gruesome, majestic life.

  Being ill was a kind of weightlessness when I was a child, a treat, taking leave of myself through fever and the shivers, as if I was going to evaporate. When I lay on the sofa at home racked by flu, I would wait until time shivered perceptibly through the rooms and death invariably followed at two-thirty, the time when objects lost the memory of their use. The fingerprints of their purpose slid off them and they appeared to me in a threatening nakedness, just as the worn-out things in the attic, liberated from any context, entertained each other with cheerful promiscuity and no longer cared a fig about habits.

  But nothing could equal the abysmal feeling when the awareness revealed itself that it did not matter at all to objects whether I was there to see them or not. I waited for that shock, time after time, with the same mixture of rapture and terror that drove my pals towards the bumper cars at the village fair. They screamed their heads off at every collision, in something halfway between a guffaw and a cry of fear. Beneath the veils of habit objects demonstrated solemn indifference. I could sometimes be deadly jealous of their superior ability to be filled with what was absent. That ineffable privilege objects have of being not at home in themselves.

  Then you would bring me glasses of diluted lemon juice, in order to tear me free, with the bitter aftertaste and the sudden assault on my taste buds, of my daily death.

  We are not aware of even a tenth of the extent to which, long after the physical umbilical cord has been cut, we remain present in the membranes of our parents. Only when they disappear and die, when that alarmingly banal transition from life to death takes place in their bodies, is the last link severed. Then the weight of their fists slides from our shoulders, a weight we only feel when it is lifted.

  It is a catharsis that liberates and wounds in equal measure. I feel like making music, crying languorously, rejoicing—all at once. And also cursing and hurling the kind of cries at the incomprehensibility of the universe that, equipped with more music, we used to call prayers. Nothing is unambiguous, to the extent it ever was.

  It is unreal yet a fact that we can only truly reach out to our parents when they are less and less present, that the final farewell has to come before we no longer confront each other as parents and children.

  If anyone had told me fifteen or twenty years ago that mourning also contains rage, seething rage, or surges of unbridled desire, I would have nodded pityingly as if listening to an obscure mathematical equation being explained by a fruitcake. The raw blessing of being knocked to and fro in the surf of longing, tumbling with the surging tide, to break on the beach, to feel the fear and sadness being pulverized. Honi soit qui mal
y pense. One can be too young, or at least too wet behind the ears. One can know everything but not all knowledge has already been embodied. If only there were someone who was given time, before the body turns out the lamps in all its rooms, to write down what it is, if it is only: there’s not much to it. It’s over just like that.

  I try to tell myself—it seems to be best for everyone, not least myself—that there is no longer a person contained in that body. That when you feel in my drawers for spoons or forks or try to pull the hem of the tablecloth level with the edge of the table with your fingers, nothing more is involved than a set of reflexes, remnants of a memory of actions that flares up momentarily in your neurones.

  It’s easier when I write about it than when you’re in front of me. My imagination, that most human of our characteristics, gets in my way, and despite everything reconstructs a personality from that battered mosaic. Then I find it difficult to think of the moment when we shall have to decide that it’s enough. Then I think, though I am not religious at all: a human being has a soul.

  But it may be that we need precisely that illusion to be able to let her go lovingly.

  Were we right to keep silent with her? For as long as she could still speak, however falteringly, she never indicated that she felt there was anything seriously wrong. But what about afterwards, when language had already gone, but there may still have been some more or less lucid awareness in her mind? Should we have said: you’re ill, Mum, but it doesn’t matter, we’re with you. You’re forgetting all sorts of things, and you’ll forget even more, but it doesn’t matter.

  Would she have wanted to give some sign? There is no answer to those questions, although they will go on gnawing at me as long as I live.

  I don’t believe she would ever have opted for an assisted death. When she had cancer she reacted in an oddly calm way. She seemed ready to accept that it could end badly, but fortunately it ended well.

  What can make me angry is the thought that all kinds of grousers and plaster saints will find her suffering more edifying than the painful dilemmas, the struggles or the pain of those who do decide to bow out in good time—and by extension the suffering and concern of my father and his children—more virtuous then those who help and support their loved ones in their conscious decision to end their own lives. The impoverished view of morality this expresses, and the exalted way in which the grocers of suffering set themselves as prophets.

  If only I could have just one look inside that head of hers. If only I could check to see if there is still “anyone” there. I was in the bath last week and heard on the radio a piece about scientists who have succeeded in talking to whales or dolphins. Even whales are more communicative than my mother now.

  If I could look into her head, and someone were to say: I want to stick it out to the bitter end, I would be reassured. But if the message was: let me go, please—I wouldn’t hesitate for a second, not a second.

  When he drops by he leaves her sitting in the car, it would be too much fuss forcing her to get out.

  How are things? I ask.

  Pretty poor, he says. Very poor indeed.

  When we say goodbye I see her figure behind the window glass of the car, the outline of her head, her thin shoulders.

  I knock on the glass. She doesn’t look up, she doesn’t wave, she no longer smiles.

  I have leaked out of her.

  The district nurse calls in twice a day. In the morning she pulls my mother’s nightdress off, washes her and helps her on with her clothes.

  She also replaces the bag hanging round my mother’s waist twice a day, cleans the hole in her abdomen and the rubber of the ring that keeps the bag in place.

  Twice a day my mother is in a panic. When we lay her on the sofa, on her back, she grabs my forearms tightly with both hands and as we lower her there is fear in her eyes, as if we are pushing her underwater, indescribable and hardly bearable.

  Keep hold of her, says the nurse, as she detaches the bag and my mother cries like a child. Are you OK? It’s a bit of a shock, the smell, I know…

  But I’m not shocked by the smell. I’m shocked by the sight of my mother’s body: pale, emaciated. Not an ounce of fat left under her skin, her muscles sinewy and thin as threads or cables. And her sadness, her infinite sadness.

  I might as well put her nappy on too, the nurse says casually. Then she can go straight to bed.

  I wonder why that sentence echoes in my head for so long.

  I stroke her cheek and her forehead. She calms down, and when it is all over she lies on the sofa and looks at me. Not a sweet look, but fear lying low, like our cats when there’s a storm and they crawl under the table and stare at us wide-eyed, as if it’s our fault.

  And so that happens twice a day, again and again, because by evening the whole morning ritual is forgotten again.

  We probe her like a piece of stone that has fallen from space. We take samples in search of life forms, death forms. We listen with stethoscopes to what is happening beneath her parchment surface.

  She has the heart of an eighteen-year-old, say the doctors.

  We push needles into the relief map of skin that her arms have become.

  Her blood couldn’t be better, say the doctors. All the values are normal.

  It’s only her muscular stiffness, say the doctors, that causes concern. But how do you get someone who’s no longer aware of anything to do stretching and limbering exercises? How do you give someone who’s in a constant state of panic a massage?

  She must become calmer, say the doctors. Otherwise there will come a moment when she will be using more energy than she absorbs by eating and drinking.

  Cardiovascular.

  Intramuscular.

  My mother crumbles into fragments of rock-hard Latin.

  We are like a ground-control station that with all kinds of techniques is keeping a precarious satellite in orbit around the earth—but for how much longer?

  Every morning at about ten, except for Mondays, he takes her in the car to the home where she can receive day care. He could also have her collected by a minibus, the dementia bus, which every day bumps its way along the country roads for miles around, carrying its load of superannuated schoolchildren, but he doesn’t want to, and I understand him. He takes her in the car. He only accompanies her as far as the entrance. He stops at the sluice gate that screens off the area where she is from the exit.

  One of the old ladies, who is also in day care, recognizes her and pulls up a chair for her by the big window. And so that’s where she sits. The nurses have asked me if they can pop her in the bath on Tuesday.

  That’s all right by me.

  At home it’s impossible to get her into the shower any longer. It seems that hot water calms her down.

  That she still responds when the nurse calls her name.

  My godchild comes to visit. He goes into the garden with his younger brother in search of skulls and bones from the blackbirds and pigeons that cats have caught. Their father and I drink white wine, and talk about life, about loss, about the life urge that in unguarded moments translates into raw pleasure, singing hunger. He lost his father early.

  It releases you from a life predicated on the future, which doesn’t exist yet anyway.

  We drink in silence; there are always enough pearls of wisdom.

  His sons come back in. My godson has found the skull of a wood pigeon and one of a rat and empty snail shells. He holds the fragile bones up to the light and looks in fascination at the curves in the gossamer-thin bone.