Silences, or a Woman's Life. Marie Chaix

the winds, the city streets. I was a happening whose very essence she longed to extract, so that she could emerge from her lethargy and, for an instant, be restored to the life that other people lead, the life that eluded her, doomed as she was to the confines of her infirmity, like a still life in its frame—“Stilleben,” she would say in self-mockery. “I’m nothing but a Stilleben,” mingling German with her French, as she often did, especially since her accident.

      It was true that, seen from a distance, settled in the living room with the tapestry and the unopened piano in the background, she recalled some antique painting of a Rhenish queen whose reign was nearing its end—a pale face in a cloud of blonde ruffles—or the portrait of the artist’s wife eking out her old age in a dim Flemish interior: a picture like the ones that follow you as you pass the ill-lighted anterooms of a museum. But when you drew nearer, the light from within her eyes illuminated the whole scene.

      She used to say: “When you’re here, it’s brighter and warmer. My old wheels start turning—look, I’m actually moving!”

      Ten years of partial paralysis had subjected her to a pitiless apprenticeship of immobility, but they had taught her as well the art of movement. None of her gestures was haphazard. She was aware of the slightest blink of her eyelids, of the smallest arc her good arm described. It was a feat to drink a cup of tea without spilling a drop. To follow an entire conversation and respond to every question demanded of her a concentration that only her infinite pride could disguise as easygoing urbanity. Her liveliest moments were thus for her the most exhausting. But she let nothing show—at most a flush would redden her brow or a sigh escape her lips. If anyone tried to assist her in finishing a sentence or disentangling the strands of her yarn, she became irritable. The impudence of being offered a helping hand made her furious. “Having a cane is quite enough,” she would mutter, clutching the armrest of her chair.

      She wasn’t all that old. She was at that precarious age that made others say, with the slightest hint of cruelty, “How beautiful she must have been!” It was the age when everything starts slowing down, even if you refuse to admit it, when past life matters more than what lies ahead. One thing seems sure: the best is behind you. To go on living with a smile means inventing a whole new set of demands on oneself.

      The age when hair turns white . . . Some women find it comforting; it makes them more beautiful. They’re the ones whose busy, well-filled lives have manifestly followed the rhythm of the seasons, unchecked by heat, frost, or bad weather. Their lives may not always have been rosy, but these have left no more trace on their faces than a butterfly on a windowpane: white-haired ladies whose smooth skin and bright glances reassure us. You can imagine them experiencing one great love: bearing children whom they teach to survive the years by accepting joys and avoiding crises; contemplating at present their excited or tearful or rambunctious grandchildren; as though it were normal for successive generations to move from inevitable wars to times of grace, from stirring infatuations to sorrows that will be forgotten. When you see them, slow-moving and serene in their haloes of white locks, you take heart, and you tell yourself that growing old isn’t perhaps so terrible after all.

      But usually you glimpse these old ladies in the street, or, when you’re little, emerging from church with lace shawls over their heads; or you look for them in photograph albums where you can barely make them out in the yellowing prints. It’s rare that you know any of them. More likely you will fondly imagine them, some melancholy day when you discover in your mirror a white hair in the midst of the brown, or when a tiny line appears at the corner of your eye or mouth.

      She would have enjoyed being a quiet, proud old lady, with a little black silk ribbon around her neck—the kind you read about in novels, the kind whose beauty is enhanced by their great age. How often did I hear her say, “If I can still be myself, I don’t mind growing old. But if I get to be ugly—kill me!” That was in the days when we all used to laugh at her fastidiousness, when there was no evident threat to her vigor. Now age has duped her by making each year count double. There had been no more joking about a future tinged with the violet light of melancholy. The question was how to disguise the present, now that her fast-dwindling powers were so hard put to withstand its gray injustice.

      She had held her own nevertheless. She still was beautiful. Her unblemished face showed no signs of her terrible infirmity or of the ordeals that had affected her so cruelly. It seemed ageless because it reflected simultaneously all the stages of her life. You might glimpse the adolescent or the little girl through the transitory mask of the full-grown woman or the woman in love—a disturbing, ever-changing image, like the curious snapshots produced by double exposure that show several pictures superimposed. The pale green eyes that imparted to her face a translucency of stained glass seemed to beg forgiveness for having kept their limpid youthfulness, for shedding on time and objects a light undimmed by the slightest regret. “Believe it or not,” they said, “I’m still here, and I’m hanging on.” I sometimes forgot that there was more to her than her face.

      Of late she didn’t stir from her chair. I would kiss her, then congratulate her on her looks or the harmonious colors of her clothes (helped by her housekeeper, she took inordinate pains with her dress, showing a predilection for mauve, for muslin scarves and soft wools). At last I would sit down on the stool covered in the same cross-stitching as her chair and lay my hands open on her lap. On them she would place her own left hand, on which scattered spots seemed woven into a mitt of beige lace.

      She would turn her head toward the window and, not looking at me, casually remark, “It would be nice to go out with you for a little walk, but it’s a little chilly, don’t you think?”

      I would bend nearer her hand, caressing the blue path of her veins with the tip of my forefinger, and answer in a most natural tone, “It’s much warmer here, we’ll have plenty of time for walking some other day,” thinking all the while of the effort she would make a little later, when, leaning on Juliette and on her cane, she took me to the door.

      When she wasn’t tired, we would talk at great length, about everything and nothing, above all about the past. A dream she’d had, or a news item on the radio, or three notes of a concerto would momentarily bring back to her an episode whose details she conscientiously described to me in a carefully chosen vocabulary. She was afraid of losing her memory, of no longer finding her words. Each story was an exercise for her. “I’m giving my head a workout,” she’d say with a laugh—proof that not all her gears had jammed.

      To illustrate her tales, she made me fetch albums from the cupboard, or else with her cane pointed out on the wall in front of her a portrait, a family gathering, or some other framed relic: a child’s drawing, a certificate of confirmation. Often, in the middle of a sentence or at the turning point of a situation she was minutely describing, she would stop, as though an obstacle had abruptly and unexpectedly fallen across her path. She would cast a quick imploring look at me, her eyes would go gray and distant, she would run her hand over her forehead and shake her head, and then begin a sweeping gesture as if to dispel a cloud of smoke. I would grasp her hand as it fluttered through the air, and she would smile at me gratefully.

      “I’ve lost it,” she would breathlessly declare, “it’s vanished. What were we talking about?”

      I would quickly invent some silly thing to tell her. Not hearing what I said, she would laugh, for my sake. Then, knowing how reluctant I always was to leave, she would exclaim with a conspicuous glance at the watch she no longer ever wore, “Oh, my, how late it is! You’ve got to be going.”

      I would help her to her feet and hand her her cane, which she gripped with a look of rage. She quickly restored a smile to her briefly straitened features, then started forward and saw me to the door, lurching all the way. I avoided paying attention to how she walked or making any gesture that might let her think I had doubts about her absolute self-sufficiency. Leaning against the doorjamb, she watched me ring for the elevator and, as I disappeared behind the sliding door, blew me a kiss.

      This parting glimpse of her was as upsetting to me as a reproach. I was abandoning her to dark walls covered with pictures, photographs, and bound books she would never again open; to a confined universe cluttered with massive pieces of furniture that had become way stations of her unvarying round