In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [94]
of memory; the darkness was increasing, and the wind; my father, who was to take me to her, had not yet arrived. Suddenly my breath failed me, I felt my heart turn to stone; I had just remembered that for weeks on end I had forgotten to write to my grandmother. What must she be thinking of me? “Oh God,” I said to myself, “how wretched she must be in that little room which they have taken for her, as small as for an old servant, where she’s all alone with the nurse they have put there to look after her, from which she cannot stir, for she’s still slightly paralysed and has always refused to get up! She must think that I’ve forgotten her now that she’s dead; how lonely she must be feeling, how deserted! Oh, I must hurry to see her, I mustn’t lose a minute, I can’t wait for my father to come—but where is it? How can I have forgotten the address? Will she know me again, I wonder? How can I have forgotten her all these months? It’s so dark, I shan’t be able to find her; the wind is holding me back; but look! there’s my father walking ahead of me”; I call out to him: “Where is grandmother? Tell me her address. Is she all right? Are you quite sure she has everything she needs?” “Yes, yes,” says my father, “you needn’t worry. Her nurse is well trained. We send a very small sum from time to time, so she can get your grandmother the little she needs. She sometimes asks what’s become of you. She was told you were going to write a book. She seemed pleased. She wiped away a tear.” And then I seemed to remember that shortly after her death, my grandmother had said to me, sobbing, with a humble look, like an old servant who has been given notice, like a stranger: “You will let me see something of you occasionally, won’t you; don’t let too many years go by without visiting me. Remember that you were my grandson, once, and that grandmothers don’t forget.” And seeing again that face of hers, so submissive, so sad, so gentle, I wanted to run to her at once and say to her, as I ought to have said to her then: “Why, grandmother, you can see me as often as you like, I have only you in the world, I shall never leave you any more.” What tears my silence must have made her shed through all those months in which I have never been to the place where she is lying! What can she have been saying to herself? And it is in a voice choked with tears that I too say to my father: “Quick, quick, her address, take me to her.” But he says: “Well . . . I don’t know whether you will be able to see her. Besides, you know, she’s very frail now, very frail, she’s not at all herself, I’m afraid you would find it rather painful. And I can’t remember the exact number of the avenue.” “But tell me, you who know, it’s not true that the dead have ceased to exist. It can’t possibly be true, in spite of what they say, because grandmother still exists.” My father smiles sadly: “Oh, hardly at all, you know, hardly at all. I think it would be better if you didn’t go. She has everything that she wants. They come and keep the place tidy for her.” “But is she often alone?” “Yes, but that’s better for her. It’s better for her not to think, it could only make her unhappy. Thinking often makes people unhappy. Besides, you know, she’s quite faded now. I shall leave a note of the exact address, so that you can go there; but I don’t see what good you can do, and I don’t suppose the nurse will allow you to see her.” “But you know quite well I shall always live close to her, stags, stags, Francis Jammes, fork.” But already I had retraced the dark meanderings of the stream, had ascended to the surface where the world of the living opens, so that if I still repeated: “Francis Jammes, stags, stags,” the sequence of these words no longer offered me the limpid meaning and logic which they had expressed so naturally for me only a moment before, and which I could not now recall. I could not even understand why the word “Aias” which my father had said to me just now had immediately signified: “Take care you don’t catch cold,” without any possibility of doubt.
I had forgotten to close the shutters,