Albert Cohen - Book of My Mother

Night has fallen. To stop thinking of my mother I went into the garden. My grief and my red robe, swept by the wind into two bat wings revealing living nakedness, made of me a poor mad king in the unbearable night where she was watching out for me. A stray dog looked at me with the eyes of my mother and I came back inside. The dead we have loved are terrifying at midnight, and our terror brings them back to life. In the daytime I am more or less the same, though I am dressed like them and know how to pretend. In the daytime in their offices and drawing rooms I smile and do not know what to say. But a twin me, a brilliant, soulless changeling, immediately stands in for me and evokes their admiration and my own keen contempt. And while he talks and plays the wit and the charmer I think of my dead mother. She rules over me, she is my folly, queen of the meandering of my brain, which leads always to her, enthroned in a weird upright coffin in the middle of my brain. Sometimes for three seconds I believe that she is not dead. And then I know once again that she is dead. “Dead,” I repeat in the drawing rooms where she awaits me, where she looms darkly between me and those who expressed their thin-lipped sympathy with the same false sorrow in their eyes as I have in mine when I express my deepest sympathy.

IN THE STREETS I am obsessed by my dead mother, and gloomily I watch the bustling crowds of people who do not know that they will die and that the wood of their coffin already exists in some sawmill or forest; vaguely I watch the young made-up women who are tomorrow’s corpses laughing and displaying the teeth which are the sign and beginning of their skeleton, displaying their thirty-two little bits of skeleton and splitting their sides as though they shall never die. In the streets I am as sad as an oil lamp alight in bright sunshine, pale, useless, and dismal as a lamp alight on a fine summer day, pitiful in the streets, those rivers which nurture the lone soul that I am, slowly wandering and absentminded, absentminded in streets teeming with useless old women and not one is my mother though all of them look like her. I am a sweating nightmare in the streets, where incessantly I think of my living mother just before the instant of her dying. Should I go up to that passerby and tell him that I have lost my mother and that we must exchange a kiss of fellowship, a fervent kiss of communion in a misfortune which he himself has known or is destined to know? No — he would report me to the police.

Today I am driven crazy by death, death is everywhere, and those roses on my table that exhale their fragrance as I write, horribly alive, are precorpses forced to simulate life three days longer in water, and people enjoy watching that, watching death throes, and they buy flower corpses and girls feast their eyes on them. Begone, dead roses! I have just thrown them out of the window on to a beribboned old lady with a shopping bag. Old — we all know what that forebodes. All the same, she at least is alive this morning. The old lady looked at me reproachfully. “Such beautiful flowers,” she thought. “It’s not right throwing them out of the window like that.” She does not know that the helpless child that I am wanted to seize death by the throat and kill it.

I must find a little pastime here and now. Anything will do. Yes, I shall make up absurd little ditties to the tune of that old French song about the church cock or something similar. I shall amuse myself listlessly all alone by inventing cows which do strange things with a “something” air, the “something” has to end in — ive. A cow in night attire Sings in the church choir With a suggestive air. A cow consumed in passion Dances in wifely fashion With a restive air. A cow ill at ease Swings on a trapeze With a pensive air. A cow in fine fettle Puts on the kettle With a dubitative air. A cow on a dune Smiles at the moon With a passive air. A cow pale and gaunt Flirts in a low haunt With a plaintive air. A lily-white cow Prances on a bough With an expressive air. A cow in the sun Gobbles a cream bun With an impulsive air. A small Jewish cow Fans her sweating brow With a fugitive air. A cow in a stole Dances round a maypole With a vindictive air. A cow with a sheen Munches a tureen With a contemplative air. A cow black as night Flies a huge kite With a ruminative air. A cow with a feller Waltzes in the cellar With a festive air. A cow clad in yellow Strums on a cello With a sensitive air. A cow with rheumatics Performs acrobatics With a tentative air. A cow of small girth Splits her sides with mirth With an aggressive air. A cow in despair Sighs on her chair With a naïve air. A cow on a scooter Keeps blowing her hooter With a furtive air. A cow drunk on claret Skips in a garret With a massive air. A cow above reproach Sucks mints in a coach With an active air. There. Grief is not always expressed in noble words: it can also find an outlet in sad little jokes, little old ladies making faces at the dead windows of my eyes. Anyway, my cows didn’t do the trick.

What about trying mixed-up proverbs? Here we go. A stitch in time is worth two in the bush. A rolling drone blows nobody any good. Too many crooks have a silver lining. Birds of a feather repent at leisure. Virtue is the root of all evil. I do not feel any brighter. I have this obsessive thought that I can see my mother’s gaze in the attentive eyes of my cat. What about trying God? God — that reminds me of something. I have had a few setbacks in that department. Anyway, when He has a free moment He can let me know.

Poets who have sung of grief which uplifts and enriches have never known grief. Lukewarm souls and stunted hearts, they have never known grief, even though they start a new line and see genius in creating blank spaces sprinkled with words, idlers who in their impotence make a virtue of necessity. Their feelings are short-lived, and that is why they start a new line. Little fusspots, pretentious dwarfs perched on high heels and brandishing the rattle of their rhymes, so utterly wearisome, making a song and dance about each word they excrete, terribly proud of their adjectival torments, enraptured when they have produced fourteen lines, spewing over their desk miserable little words in which they see countless wonders and which they suck and force you to suck with them, informing all and sundry of the rare words which have emerged, padding their skinny shoulders with colossal impertinence, wily managers of their constipated genius, so convinced of the importance of their poems. Had they known grief which harps and sweats with a gaping mouth, these self-satisfied poseurs, who never paid for anything with their blood, would not sing of its beauty, nor would they tell us that nothing uplifts us as much as a great sorrow. I know what grief is, and I know that it neither uplifts nor enriches, but that it shrivels you till you are reduced to size, like the boiled shrunken head of a Peruvian warrior, and I know that poets who suffer as they search for rhymes and sing of the honor of suffering, refined midgets strutting on stilts, have never known grief which makes of you a man who once was.

LET’S FACE IT, I too am but one of the living, a sinner like all the living. My beloved lies buried in earth, rotting all alone in the silence of the dead, in the terrifying solitude of the dead, and I am outside and I go on living and my hand is moving selfishly just now. And if my hand traces words which tell of my grief, it is a movement of life, that is of joy after all, which stirs that hand. And tomorrow I shall reread these pages and add more words and that will give me a kind of pleasure. Sin of living. I shall correct the proofs, and that too will be a sin of living.

My mother is dead, but I gaze at the beauty of women. My mother lies abandoned in earth, where horrible things go on, but I love the sunshine and the tittle-tattle of tiny birds. Sin of living. When I was telling of a mother’s departure and a son’s remorse for having gone to see Diane that same evening, I described that Diane with too much pleasure. Sin of living. My mother is dead, but on the radio ceaselessly burbling beside me as I write, “The Blue Danube” has only to start to flow and I cannot resist its corny charm and despite my filial grief I fall immediately under the spell of those slender, gently twirling Viennese maidens.