Erwin Mortier - Stammered Songbook - A Mother's Book of Hours

What strikes me most about her, what makes me saddest, is the double silence of her being. Language has packed its bags and jumped over the railing of the capsizing ship, but there is also another silence in her or around her. I can no longer hear the music of her soul; the existential aura around her, that whole vibrating fabric of symbols with which she wove herself into the world — or, conversely, the world into her.

I am very sensitive to that whole system, that web, that network, which constitutes our being and which for want of a better designation I still call our soul. It is the subtle poetry, the tragedy, the beauty, the microscopic dread which every concrete life carries with it and in some way is able to emanate wordlessly. People have their own echo; I find it hard to explain. I can sometimes hear the white noise of their existence, the snatches of music — and they sound nice or not and in me too the whole human fanfare reverberates, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes shrilly.

But with her I hear scarcely a thing any more, sometimes the same kind of whoosh that first struck me when I was very young and one night the château was ablaze. I remember looking at the sea of flame and as we got closer was surprised that it did not spread silently. I heard the inferno softly shrieking. Somewhere in those caverns of fire and dense smoke glass burst into smithereens, burning beams whistled, stones cracked, etc. I now hear something similar in her: a faint lament of virtually soundless, all-embracing decay.

He cooks scrambled eggs for her, and lovingly puts the pan on the table. She gives him a look of displeasure and shakes her head, grumbling.

You know I don’t like scrambled eggs, she says. I only eat fried eggs.

Fried eggs used to make her gag. She only liked omelettes.

He puts the pan aside, fries two eggs and eats the scrambled eggs himself.

She’s changing, he says.

She’s becoming more silent every day. More and more tears have to replace the words that have vanished into thin air. Sometimes her lips move, the corners of her mouth tremble, and she produces a short burst of sighing. Then it seems there are still thoughts there, but on different wavelengths, beyond the range of my eardrum. I think of her as if she were an old valve radio, the kind I used to see in elderly relations’ houses. I’m thinking of the interference and the snatches of voices when the tuner moved through the frequencies. Sometimes she seems in despair and for a moment her brain seems to be searching: stammering, stuttering, lots of silence.

Her “I” is becoming lost. That “something” that makes people so recognizably themselves. The whole repertoire of habits, ways of talking, sleeping, walking, standing, it’s all changing. A kind of hybrid person is being created from traits and behaviour that I can remember as hers, and others which are unknown and perplexing, as if a parasitic consciousness is emerging in her flesh.

And then those afternoons when we sit at table and do our best not to lose patience when for the umpteenth time she gets stuck in mid-sentence. I can almost see the sentences stumbling over her lips. Verbal rubble, grammatical ruins lie strewn around her over the tablecloth.

Yes, that’s it, she says each time we finish the sentence for her — as one finishes off a lame horse.

My father looks at me and raises his eyebrows meaningfully.

It’s only the beginning, I say while she is in the bathroom. I have resolved never to give false hope, but it feels as if I am gouging a knife into myself and into him, into his melancholy father’s flesh.

Afternoons full of the pack ice of silence, ice floes of silence, when I think: if only I could hear her say everyday banalities just once more.

Would you like some coffee?

Are you hungry?

You will be staying for supper, won’t you?

Apart from that we do the best we can not to regard the slow death that is taking place at home as an ordeal — which is not an obvious reaction. Rationally I can only hope that my mother won’t have to suffer much longer, because it’s so pointless. She has scarcely any awareness left of time, place or other people. The flamboyant woman who always liked life and pleasure around her has become a twisted, emaciated figure who shuffles down the garden path to the car, laboriously opens the door and sits in it, presumably because she feels safe in the little Peugeot, that tin womb.

It breaks my heart to see it.

At the same time I find the thought of her no longer being there at all chilling, and I’m also rather concerned about my father, who at present with great patience and devotion is postponing his grief — a suitcase that is becoming heavier and heavier…

Sometimes I am struck by the lack of feeling of my fellow human beings, for example when I hear that it’s terrible, of course, but that sixty-five isn’t that young any more. As if there’s an age at which you can abandon someone to their fate.

We write poems — that is, attempts at eloquent complaints about the whims of fate and destiny, against the structure of the universe and ourselves. But there is no sign of life at the window concerned, while the queue grows longer and longer — and an A4 sheet is stuck on the glass, announcing: our customer services department is never open.

I babysat her for an afternoon. She was restless and sometimes aggressive. She wanted to wander off. My father had gone to watch my nephews play football. I had to bolt the back door.

After a while she calmed down, and then we — I can’t call it anything else—“played house”, but without the pleasure children get from it. She brought a pair of Dad’s trousers from the bathroom. First she wanted me to put them on, probably so I would look like him. Then I had to fold the trousers up for her. She took them over to the table. I had to smooth the bundle for her. Then she wanted to step out of her shoes and into her slippers, and out of her slippers into her shoes, and into her slippers again. Then into bed for a moment — and me on the landing crying, waiting for her to get up again (she always gets up, always, after about five minutes).

Only after two hours or so did she calm down completely. Sat shivering in the chair downstairs. I asked: are you cold?

She nodded.

Helped her into her knitted jacket, and then sat next to her. I rubbed her back, and she occasionally rubbed my belly with the back of her hand.

Sometimes she looked up and fixed me with a searching gaze. It is horrible to detect something in her pupils of the hopeless battle that must be being waged in her head, the dogged struggle, doomed to defeat.