Silences, or a Woman's Life. Marie Chaix

I could imagine her slumping back into her chair, cursing her cane as she put it away, settling for two minutes (or ten, or more) into a morose contemplation of the wall. She’d inspect all of them, each in his frame—the dead, the living, the missing, the dearly loved ones: mute witnesses of a halted life, discreet ghosts come to haunt her muffled solitude and remind her incessantly that there was nothing they could do about it. Then she would come back to herself, shivering, drawing the fringed shawl across her bosom; shrugging her shoulders, picking up her spectacles, and concentrating once more on her knitting—the one occupation (along with embroidery) that she could satisfactorily manage left-handed, with a needle held fast in an elastic strap slipped over the wrist of her paralyzed right hand.

      Anyone who hadn’t known her “before” and who saw her for the first time after she had become (as she liked to say) a “professional invalid” had a hard time imagining what her life had been like. Often enough, age leaves faces cruelly stamped with marks of behavior, accident, or simply the passage of the years. This is why studying an unfamiliar face is so fascinating: the features are shaped according to a formula mysteriously suited to each individual, according to a subterranean progress whose reflection, as it blooms or withers, becomes the “expression” of that face, tinged variously with sorrow, boredom, resignation, or discouragement, or, on the contrary, with vitality, gaiety, and optimism. An aging face is a pathetic appeal uttered unawares by someone’s past experience. Show me your wrinkles, your wounds, and the circles under your eyes, and I may start learning who you were.

      Her face provided few clues. Through what miracle, through what special dispensation of time had it preserved the invulner-ability of a sensible, smiling statue? She had her secrets; but her vanity was boundless. It was hard to believe the pleasure she took in misleading her occasional visitors. She would deploy a subtle charm, all restraint, sweetness, and warmth, soothing glances and words. People went away astonished, without a thought for her faltering gestures and fettered body. “The woman has probably suffered, but something like grace has seen her though” is what they would be thinking, remembering only the brightness of her clear gaze, whose liquid placidity perfectly concealed the rugged terrain that had taken what seemed like centuries to traverse.

      Her old age had caught us unprepared. One day when she was still youthful, something—perhaps some grief too intense to be borne—made her stumble and, for many a long day, go blank. “Coma” was the medical term for this passage through the land of mists. Against every expectation, the sleeper then came back to life—a life on which she opened her eyes without recognizing it. Henceforth she would walk with a cane; she would never again run her fingers over the keys—oh, everything she now would lack was too much to take in at a glance. But she would have plenty of time to think about it, now that she was old.

      In a matter of days—for her, countless centuries of sleep—she had gone to the end of the bleak sunset path where people usually adopt successive disguises, planning stops along the way so as to ultimately get used to the imperceptible changes that from year to year transform them into other people.

      She woke up from her journey tired and wobbly, astonished at having become that “someone else,” that person on the far side of things, on the downhill side of things, the nebulous ghost that waits for each of us someplace else, farther on, later, but inescapably there, with white hair, sunken eyes, slow gestures, the shawl worn all year round.

      For a long time she refused to look in a mirror. She would mumble, “What do I look like? What’s happening? Half my face feels like marble.” Did she sometimes think, “Better not to have woken up”?

      She never let on. To all appearances, she was ready to play her new role of dignified old lady without a murmur.

      Having known her “before,” I still saw her youth amid the marks of age. Two women walked together on the frontiers of dream, sometimes losing sight of one another, sometimes reuniting and merging into one. In the depths of her unaltered gaze and grave voice, she fitfully summoned up the memory of the woman who had deserted her body but now sprang forth, obscurely and fortuitously, in the glint of a green eye or the lilting sparkle of her words.

      For a long time, sheltered by her glance, I did not see that she was growing old. It was no doubt to protect myself from the grief I felt at her sudden illness that, with her help, I learned overnight to love another woman; noticing, it’s true, how spent her gestures and how slow her movements had become, but interpreting this as a role she had ingeniously contrived, an artful stratagem that allowed her to conceal whatever it was in her that had lost its vigor.

      The tapestries, the woodwork, the jumble of cloth that surrounded her formed an enclave untouched by the city and by time, a place where an ageless woman on the fringe of things was living an unreal old age. The doctors—they always knew best—said that normally she should have succumbed to her attack. And yet here she was, a goddess of pearl-embroidered velvet, living out a present that would have been denied her if she hadn’t hung on to it with every ounce of her strength, constructing and reconstructing a past that she did not blame for having abandoned her.

      Then one night, a city night like any other, it happens. Later you think: you weren’t expecting it but you needn’t have been surprised. By then it’s too late: it’s already happened. A moment when the threads that hold a life together loosen and stretch and split and are left dangling. There is nothing to be held together now, no days to be linked to other days, nothing to be collected and clung to. The knot forgets to reknot itself and sunders. It’s the conclusion to a long story

      That’s all there was to it. On a mild autumn night, a night when you light up a cigarette after the movies on your way home to listen to Mahler’s Fifth; on an October evening when you leave your windows open on the horse-chestnut trees (now shedding their plumage); on an evening when you’re not expecting it, it happens. The phone rings. You don’t like hearing the phone ring at night; but after all, it may be a wrong number. Juliette’s voice sounds unnatural:

      “Come over. Come over right away. Something’s gone wrong. Why weren’t you here? How could you go to the movies just when . . . ! Come over right away, something’s gone wrong.”

      It was the right number after all. That evening I had felt engulfed by the city, safe from anything unexpected. But it’s here, I’ve been found out, there’s no escape. I begin an interminable descent, sliding down a slippery rope without any knots to break my fall.

      I’ll take my time. Since she didn’t wait for me before taking flight or warn me that the time for her departure had come, she can wait now. Time enough for the sluggish flow running up and down my nerves and paralyzing me to withdraw and let me walk again; for the far-off gray swell to reach, overwhelm, and drown me; time for me to realize that this night, let’s face it, is not a night like any other, that now you—you too, but why must it be you?—have become someone I shall have to usher to the gate of the stone garden.

      Only a few blocks separate my place from hers. I walk them slowly, drinking in the darkness, making it last, inching along like someone afraid of arriving early at an appointment made long before. We’ll meet again somewhere, you and I, under an unknown sky. Neither of us will be the same. I’m practicing a mute language that will communicate with your silence. I want to be indifferent and look at you without trembling. I’m creating a void inside me that gets colder and more intoxicating with each gulp of darkness, with each step that brings me closer to you. This void, weighty as a suit of armor, is the one guarantee of my strength. (Something’s gone wrong. Of course something’s gone wrong. Something was bound to go wrong. We knew that. We’d been told that. Miracles don’t happen.) I stop. Ridiculous words start assailing my throat. I try inhaling cigarette smoke to keep them down. I’m babbling. Keep calm. Keep moving. Only one short block to go.

      Something has certainly gone wrong. Things have been going wrong for ages now. “She’s living on borrowed time” was what they said. I’d been hearing that for ten years. I’d grown accustomed to this shadow-woman, to this frail survivor of a collapse that had cost her half of her self; accustomed to the slowing down of her entire being—that was how she kept going, it seemed, eking out her life at her own pace. Her gestures may have been clumsy, but in every instance they were planned and evaluated ahead