Tahar Ben Jelloun - About My Mother

The house is no longer my mother’s house. Fortunately, she isn’t able to see what’s become of it — a sort of shelter, like the ones in slums. In the kitchen, dirty dishes are piled up next to the dirty linen. In the sitting room, damp is eating away at the mattresses. Only the bathroom is clean. There’s no toilet paper. Disease and death are also evident in the little day-to-day things, the apparently trivial details, the neglect, the sadness imbuing the objects and the walls. Disease or death, which is the more intolerable? A friend who was battling a disease that was consuming his body once said to me: ‘Death, true death, unbearable loss and absence, is the illness — the endless days and nights of decline, suffering and helplessness. That’s what death is, not that fraction of a second when the heart stops.’

And so my mother is dying. As she would have said, were she able to speak: ‘I’m collecting time and days, I bend over and pick them up in scraps. It’s not much, just some fragments of passing time, it’s not nothing. But if you’re all here, I’ll be able to stop stooping over this debris of time. I’ve had enough of storing up the empty hours, the whole days that blur with the nights, dreams that play tricks on me, memories that get bored and restless, like fish out of water. I’m drowning. I’m just going, and then a wave brings me back to the shore. I can’t feel anything, but I’m all wet, I’m ashamed I can’t dry myself. I’m losing control. What’s the good of telling you I’ve had enough, it’s all in God’s hands? He’s the one who guides my feet on this flat sea where I’m sinking and then pull myself up, it all depends on His will. I’ve forgotten to pray, I don’t know where I am any more, I’m going, my eyes are half-shut, my mouth open. Oh, I hate this hole! Why can’t I close my mouth? I’m snoring. I’ve always hated snoring, my last husband never worried about waking me up with his snoring. I can’t control anything any more. I want to go to the bathroom. I refuse to wet myself, no, I’m holding my water in, my bladder hurts, but I won’t give in. Not that! Not that! I’ll call Keltum. She can’t hear me, or is she pretending? I’m reaching out my hand, no one’s beside me. Where are my children? I know they’re here, this is when I need to feel them. They’re talking in the next room. I can hear them. I feel better. I’ll tell them to pray for me, to pray to God not to forget me.’

‘When the power of speech goes, it means the end is near,’ says my cousin, a good man. He adds: ‘But everything’s in God’s hands! Who knows who’ll be the first to go? So listen, I’ve already reserved a shroud for your mother. I had set it aside for myself, but I’m still hanging in there, and anyway, it is all in God’s hands. Don’t hesitate to call me, any time, day or night. I know there are practical matters to attend to, and you’re still young — inexperienced in these things, I mean. But I make no assumptions — life, death, illness, old age, time, it all comes and goes with the wind and the storms. Do we have any choice? I manage as best I can with this old prostate, I force myself to go out and walk for a good hour every day, even though what I see makes me deeply unhappy. I’m very fond of your mother, she’s the incarnation of grace, generosity and patience. She recognised me, you know, even though her tongue is heavy and she finds it hard to articulate her words. Just think, if we had old people’s homes in Morocco! I’d be in one and so would your mother. How awful! How wicked! Right, I’m going on with my walk, and don’t forget, I’m taking care of the shroud!’

My mother’s finding it harder and harder to wake up. She sleeps very deeply. How can we wake her? Keltum complains; she must give her her medication. I simply watch. She is somewhere else, perhaps in another city, another life. She climbs mountains and comes back down, as light as air. She used to love that image: climbing up and down, to express her confusion, her dissatisfaction. Where is she now? She no longer talks about Fez or her old childhood home. When she was little, she didn’t play with dolls, but with the vegetables her mother was preparing for lunch. She’d give each of them a name and a job, then she’d throw them into the pot, which irritated her mother. That was how she learned to cook.

‘These are the consequences of lying supine,’ the doctor tells me. Remaining horizontal creates all kinds of problems in her body. She calls out. I think it’s a cry for help. No, she’s worrying about dinner. Is the pot on the stove? That’s what she wanted to say. Manning her post to the end. It’s Keltum who translates her attempts at speech. She guesses, rather than hears, what my mother means.

I feed my mother. My mother, my child. A spoonful of milk and cheese. A little girl eating, her eyes closed, and my hand trembling with emotion. Tears well in my eyes. I give up. Keltum takes over and feeds her with a practised hand. I leave the room and wipe my eyes, thinking not of my mother, but of my children. I’m not sure how this transference occurred.

Taking her hand, feeling the bones under her withered skin, talking to her, telling her a story and waiting for her eyelids to twitch or her lips to move slightly. Memories need sunshine, light and music. It’s summer on the terrace of the house in Marshan, overlooking the sea. The east wind is raging, which irritates my mother, and she says she wishes we still lived in Fez, in the medina, where the wind never ventured. I watch her and again I see her knotting a headscarf under her chin. She loved watching the sea with its little white waves, heralding the arrival of a wind said to drive people mad. In the hazy light of the past, voices mingle and eyes meet, searching out beauty and serenity. Mother’s nature has always been serene. She’s never completely lost her ability to be gracefully present in the world. Still today, that’s what stands out. Perhaps the most upsetting thing is that her suffering undermines a grace that’s always been entirely natural.

She smiles, and closes her eyes. She has no desire to see herself reduced to a sick child. Off she goes through the alleyways of Fez, and spends the whole afternoon at the Moulay Idriss mausoleum. She claims he’s her ancestor, who came from Arabia in 808 and founded the town of Fez. She talks to him, confiding her worries, the burden of watching over her sick son and encouraging her other son to do well at school. ‘Oh, Moulay Idriss, saint of saints, the man closest to Sidna Muhammad, our Prophet, hear my prayer. Don’t forget me, keep illness from my door, make your light open the way to goodness. Oh, Moulay Idriss, our city’s patron, virtuous man, be the messenger of my trust and my faith. Let my house fill with your light, give me a sign so that I can go on being healthy enough to look after my children, and my husband, who never has any luck. Keep the evil eye away from us — the eye of the envious, the jealous — the evil eye of all those that make their pact with Satan. I don’t know the right response to the harm done me, I only know how to pray, I only know the path that leads me to you!’

No need for a go-between here. The bond is strong, it’s part of her, as it was part of her mother and her grandmother. Every Thursday she’d ask my father’s permission to go to Moulay Idriss. She’d set off with her cousin, her best friend, taking a little money, which she’d discreetly slip into the collection box at the mausoleum entrance. She’d give what she could and never mention it. By evening she’d be happy and radiant, no longer worried. The visit meant freedom. When she said her evening prayers, we heard her reminding Moulay Idriss of everything she’d told him. My father made no comment, but a surreptitious, mocking smile played on his lips.