• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1681 0

to her neck, her temples, her ears, the tiny black reptiles were writhing among her bloodstained locks, as on the head of Medusa. But in her pale and peaceful, entirely motionless face I saw her beautiful eyes, wide open, luminous and calm as of old (perhaps even more charged with the light of intelligence than they had been before her illness, since, as she could not speak and must not move, it was to her eyes alone that she entrusted her thought, that thought which can be reborn, as though by spontaneous generation, thanks to the withdrawal of a few drops of blood), her eyes, soft and liquid as oil, in which the rekindled fire that was now burning lit up for the sick woman the recaptured universe. Her calm was no longer the wisdom of despair but of hope. She realised that she was better, wanted to be careful and not to move, and made me the present only of a beautiful smile so that I should know that she was feeling better, as she gently pressed my hand.

I knew the disgust that my grandmother felt at the sight of certain animals, let alone at being touched by them. I knew that it was in consideration of a higher utility that she was enduring the leeches. And so it infuriated me to hear Françoise repeating to her with the little chuckle one gives to a baby one is trying to amuse: “Oh, look at the little beasties running all over Madame.” This was moreover to treat our patient with a lack of respect, as though she had lapsed into second childhood. But my grandmother, whose face had assumed the calm fortitude of a stoic, did not even seem to hear her.

Alas! no sooner had the leeches been removed than the congestion returned and grew steadily worse. I was surprised to find that at this stage, when my grandmother was so ill, Françoise was constantly disappearing. The fact was that she had ordered herself a mourning dress, and did not wish to keep the dressmaker waiting. In the lives of most women, everything, even the greatest sorrow, resolves itself into a question of “trying-on.”

A few days later, while I was asleep in bed, my mother came to call me in the early hours of the morning. With that tender concern which in the gravest circumstances people who are overwhelmed by grief show for the comfort and convenience of others, “Forgive me for disturbing your sleep,” she said to me.

“I wasn’t asleep,” I answered as I awoke.

I said this in good faith. The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of ushering us into the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of the slightly more diffused light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought, half veiled from our perception, on which we were still drifting a moment ago, kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakenings produce an interruption of memory. A little later we describe these states as sleep because we no longer remember them. And when that bright star shines which at the moment of waking lights up behind the sleeper the whole expanse of his sleep, it makes him imagine for a few moments that it was not a sleeping but a waking state; a shooting star indeed, which blots out with the fading of its light not only the illusory existence but every aspect of our dream, and merely enables him who has awoken to say to himself: “I was asleep.”

In a voice so gentle that it seemed to be afraid of hurting me, my mother asked whether it would tire me too much to get up, and, stroking my hands, went on:

“My poor child, you have only your Papa and Mamma to rely on now.”

We went into the sickroom. Bent in a semi-circle on the bed, a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes, lay panting, whimpering, making the blankets heave with its convulsions. The eyelids were closed, and it was because they did not shut properly rather than because they opened that they disclosed a chink of eyeball, blurred, rheumy, reflecting