Simone de Beauvoir - A Very Easy Death

With the removal of the filth that had swollen her abdomen the day before, she was no longer in pain. And with her two daughters at her bedside she believed that she was safe. When Dr P and Dr N came in she said to them in a contented voice, ‘I am not forsaken,’ before she closed her eyes again. They spoke to one another: ‘It is extraordinary how quickly she has picked up. Amazing!’ Indeed it was. Thanks to the transfusions and the infusions Maman’s face had some colour again and a look of health. The poor suffering thing that had been lying on this bed the day before had turned back into a woman.

I showed Maman the book of crosswords Chantal had brought. Speaking to the nurse she faltered, ‘I have a big dictionary, the new Larousse; I treated myself to it, for crosswords.’ That dictionary: one of her last delights. She had talked to me about it for a long time before she bought it, and her face lit up every time I consulted it. ‘We’ll bring it for you,’ I said.

‘Yes. And Le Nouvel Œdipe too; I have not got all the …’

One had to listen very intently to catch the words that she laboured to breathe out; words whose mystery made them as disturbing as those of an oracle. Her memories, her desires, her anxieties were floating somewhere outside time, turned into unreal and poignant dreams by her childlike voice and the imminence of her death.

She slept a great deal; from time to time she took up a few drops of water through the tube; she spat in paper handkerchiefs that the nurse held to her mouth. In the evening she began to cough: Mademoiselle Laurent, who had come to ask after her, straightened her up, massaged her and helped her to spit. Afterwards Maman looked at her with a real smile – the first for four days.

Poupette decided to spend her nights at the nursing-home. ‘You were with Papa and Grandmama when they died; I was far away,’ she said to me. ‘I am going to look after Maman. Besides, I want to stay with her.’

I agreed. Maman was astonished. ‘What do you want to sleep here for?’

‘I slept in Lionel’s room when he was operated on. It’s always done.’

‘Oh, I see.’

I went home, feverish with ’flu. Leaving the overheated clinic I had caught cold in the autumnal dampness: I went to bed, stupefied with pills. I did not switch off the telephone: Maman might die at any moment, ‘blown out like a candle’, said the doctors, and my sister was to call me at the least alarm. The bell woke me with a start: four in the morning. ‘It is the end.’ I picked up the receiver and heard an unknown voice: a wrong number. I could not get to sleep again until dawn. At half-past eight the telephone bell again: I ran for it – an utterly unimportant message. I loathed the hearse-black apparatus: ‘Your mother has cancer. Your mother will not get through the night.’ One of these days it would crackle into my ear, ‘It is the end.’

I go through the garden. I go into the hall. You might think you were in an airport – low tables, modern armchairs, people kissing one another as they say hallo or good-bye, others waiting, suitcases, hold-alls, flowers in the vases, bouquets wrapped in shiny paper as if they were meant for welcoming travellers about to land … But there is a feeling of something not quite right in the whisperings, the expressions. And sometimes a man entirely clothed in white appears in the opening of the door at the far end, and there is blood on his shoes. I go up one floor. On my left a long corridor with the bedrooms, the nurses’ rooms and the duty-room. On the right a square lobby furnished with an upholstered bench and a desk with a white telephone standing upon it. The one side gives on to a waiting-room; the other on to room 114. No Visitors. Beyond the door I come to a short passage: on the left the lavatory with the wash-stand, the bed-pan, cotton-wool, jars; on the right a cupboard which holds Maman’s things; on a coat-hanger there is the red dressing-gown, all dusty. ‘I never want to see that dressing-gown again.’ I open the second door. Before, I went through all this without seeing it. Now I know that it will form part of my life for ever.

‘I am very well,’ said Maman. With a knowing air she added, ‘When the doctors were talking to one another yesterday, I heard them. They said, “It’s amazing!” ’ This word delighted her: she often pronounced it, gravely, as though it were a spell that guaranteed her recovery. Yet she still felt very weak and her overriding desire was to avoid the slightest effort. Her dream was to be fed by drip all her life long. ‘I shall never eat again.’

‘What, you who so loved your food?’

‘No. I shall not eat any more.’

Mademoiselle Leblon took a brush and comb to do her hair for her: ‘Cut it all off,’ Maman ordered firmly. We protested. ‘You will tire me: cut it off, do.’ She insisted with a strange obstinacy: it was as though she wanted to bring lasting rest by making this sacrifice. Gently Mademoiselle Leblon undid her plait and untangled her hair; she plaited it again and pinned the silvery coil round Maman’s head. Maman’s relaxed face had recovered a surprising purity and I thought of a Leonardo drawing of a very beautiful old woman. ‘You are as beautiful as a Leonardo,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘I was not so bad, once upon a time.’ In a rather mysterious voice she told the nurse, ‘I had lovely hair, and I did it up in bandeaux round my head.’ And she went on talking about herself, how she had taken her librarian’s diploma, her love for books. As Mademoiselle Leblon answered, she was preparing a flask of serum: she explained to me that the clear fluid also contained glucose and various salts. ‘A positive cocktail,’ I observed.

All day long we dazed Maman with plans. She listened, with her eyes closed. My sister and her husband had just bought an old farmhouse in Alsace and they were going to have it done up. Maman would have a big room, completely independent, and there she would finish her convalescence. ‘But wouldn’t it bore Lionel if I were to stay for a long while?’

‘Of course not.’

‘To be sure, I wouldn’t be in the way there. At Scharrachbergen it was too small: I was a nuisance.’

We talked about Meyrignac. Maman went back to her memories of the time she was a young woman there. And for years past she had been enthusiastically telling me about the improvements at Meyrignac. She was very fond of Jeanne, whose three elder daughters lived in Paris and very often came to see her at the clinic – pretty, blooming, cheerful girls.

‘I have no granddaughters and they have no grandmother,’ she explained to Mademoiselle Leblon. ‘So I am their grandmother.’

While she was dozing I looked at a paper: opening her eyes she asked me, ‘What is happening at Saigon?’ I told her the news. Once, in a tone of bantering reproof, she observed, ‘I was operated on behind my back!’ and when Dr P came in she said, ‘Here is the guilty man,’ but in a laughing voice. He stayed with her for a little while, and when he remarked, ‘It is never too late to learn’, she replied in a rather solemn tone, ‘Yes. I have learnt that I had peritonitis.’

I said jokingly, ‘You really are extraordinary! You come in to have your femur patched up, and they operate on you for peritonitis!’

‘It’s quite true. I am not an ordinary woman at all!’

This circumstance, this mistake, amused her for days. ‘I tricked Professor B thoroughly. He thought he was going to operate on my leg, but in fact Dr P operated on me for peritonitis.’

What touched our hearts that day was the way she noticed the slightest agreeable sensation: it was as though, at the age of seventy-eight, she were waking afresh to the miracle of living. While the nurse was settling her pillows the metal of a tube touched her thigh – ‘It’s cool! How pleasant!’ She breathed in the smell of eau de Cologne and talcum powder – ‘How good it smells.’ She had the bunches of flowers and the plants arranged on her wheeled table. ‘The little red roses come from Meyrignac. At Meyrignac there are roses still.’ She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. ‘How lovely. I shouldn’t see that from my flat!’ She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now?