Silences, or a Woman's Life. Marie Chaix

least utterance and gesture, not missing a thing, and then missing the point of the story, the most obvious attitude, drifting off again, eyes now foundering and crying out for help. And that voice of hers, a little faint, cautiously articulating its words lest they be mistakenly shunted into inappropriate sentences by her disobedient brain; words repeated again and again, forced out in spite of her impatience: “Wait, I’ve lost track, you’re going too fast—please, start at the beginning.” Her ponderous, shuffling steps, dependent on the stability of a cane (you who were so erect and proud and beautiful!), a pathetic staff that she tried to forget by leaving it in corners or behind the curtains (“Juliette! Where did you hide my cane this time?”)—maintaining the illusion, as long as she remained seated, that she might get up by herself and start walking. How did I manage to accept her slowness, her lurching, her falls, the tears she held back, the formidable courage demanded of her by every passing minute? How did I manage, until tonight, to watch her living between parentheses?

      Startled by my approach, a black cat concealed by a garbage can jumps out of a pile of litter and streaks across the sidewalk in front of me. She’d always said that this meant bad luck. It was something she’d learned from her grandmother’s grotesque behavior whenever a black cat provoked her in this fashion. She would let out a shriek, tightly shut her eyes, cross herself, and, in a swirl of starched petticoats, turn around three times wherever she happened to be standing. All of a sudden I can’t go on. It’s stupid, but the black cat has reminded me of a gray one and a dark association of images makes me flop down on a bench between a row of overturned garbage cans and a foul-smelling outdoor urinal. The questionable charm of my surroundings scarcely bothers me. This is no place or time for daydreaming, but I’ve been turned to paper, rags, sawdust, succumbing to the nightmare that has so often entered my waking hours since Kienholz’s merciless revelation provided me with the images of a reality I was incapable of mastering. Tonight, as I sit on Rue de la Convention and stare at a depressing hospital wall, she looms in front of me with a gray cat on her lap . . .

      I’m afraid. Afraid of opening the door and finding her immobilized in her chair, turned to stone inside her waxy tatters, one hand clutching the cat, the other crushing her glasses. Afraid of a muddied glass eye in its white socket, of the orthopedic shoes permanently glued to marble feet, of the useless spools of cotton spilling out of a sewing basket. Afraid because she is no longer waiting for me. Where are you? Why are you abandoning me to the bony ghost that keeps haunting me?

      Stop. Imagine a different scene. Get up off the bench and start running. I get up and start running. I needn’t be so sure—I haven’t seen what’s happened yet. Maybe it’s just a plain dizzy spell. Juliette has fits over nothing. Ten years of struggle. Why precisely tonight—on such a mild night—would she decide to play tricks on me?

      Running is warming me up. My steps clatter and resound in the sleeping street. I’m already laughing about it. In a while we’ll be laughing together. I’ll pass her a glass of water with a few multicolored pills cupped in my hand to make her feel absolutely fine. Drawing a shawl over her breast, she’ll say to me, “You shouldn’t have bothered. You know I have my little weak spells, but I get over them. Now it’s time to go to bed.” I’ll breathe in the downy scent of her powdered cheek against my cheek, and tomorrow everything will go on as usual.

      I’ve reached the door of her building. I ring. The railing voice on the interphone makes me jump: “Finally! You sure took your time.” Took my time? But I’ve been running. I’m here. The door swings open with a long squeak. Quick, get inside and see her. Juliette rushes up to me. My head starts spinning.

      “Everything was going fine, we were watching television after dinner . . .” What I see is the slant-backed empty armchair; the flowered curtains are drawn; her unhidden cane against the arm-rest. “The cat was asleep on the table. We’d had a cup of chamomile tea. The program didn’t interest her, although it did me. ‘Juliette, pass me my knitting.’ Then, you see, I saved two stitches for her . . .” What I see is her workbox on the floor by the chair, and strands of colored wool untidily spilling out of it; her glasses have been placed on the stand.

      “We hadn’t been talking; and then she said to me in a funny voice, ‘I’m through with this. It’s finished.’ ‘But, Madame, you’re hardly started it,’ and she was stopping, you understand, she was stopping—look!” I see the photographs on the wall over the piano; there they are, all of them, with their gilt frames and fixed smiles, their gestures frozen on one particular day in their lives. “So I knew something had gone wrong. It was hard getting her to her room and helping her undress. She did what I told her to, like a robot. She didn’t say another word to me. She’s been asleep ever since—well, come and see.”

      I sit down instead. The cat jumps onto my lap and settles there, purring, kneading my skin with almost clawless paws. I don’t stop him and I stroke the gray back undulating beneath my fingers. Crossing her arms, Juliette paces around the table. “This time, you know—this time . . .” and she starts telling me what happened again from the beginning. By repeating her words she is trying to gain some understanding of what is awry in the situation. She’s irritating me. I’d like to understand, too, quietly and coolly. I’d like to find an explanation simple enough for us to grasp. To reassure us.

      “Stop walking around like that, you’re making me dizzy. She’s asleep? If she’s asleep, it can’t be too serious.”

      (A shrug of the shoulders.) “You don’t understand a thing. First of all, there’s the knitting. It’s crazy, all those unfinished stitches.”

      “That’s true—the knitting. That’s it. That’s the whole problem. Tell me again what happened with the knitting.”

      She hands me the unfinished work. Her tight-lipped expression chides my foolishness, my slowness in accepting a story that she already knows by heart. She watches me turn the woolen square over and over. A strand hangs from one of its corners—I give it a yank, and a ball of yarn tumbles out of the basket. The cat sits up on my lap and jumps on the ball.

      I can see her bent over the knitting needles. Her glasses have slipped down her nose. She hasn’t gotten very far with her work, three stripes of different colors—her first scarf of the winter. She’s making laborious headway—knit one, purl one; she straightens up from time to time to look blankly at the television screen. She takes a slightly longer break, shutting her eyes, shaking her head, trying to get rid of the stiffness invading her neck. Nothing serious, she knows, something that comes and goes. The sound of the television set suddenly starts hurting her behind the eyes, piercing her forehead like bright flashes of a neon sign—she wants to ask Juliette to stop the awful racket but the words are stuck in her cheeks. Something thick is rising in her throat and weighing down the bones of her jaw. Abruptly she turns into a fly: her big, multifaceted eyes can distinguish every fiber of the wool. She’s frightened. She wants to call out but can’t. Fly legs are muddling the stitches, which fall off the needles with a limp mucky sound and form holes as big as wells—she’s teetering on their edge. She’s certain of one thing: she has no more time, she has to act fast and can’t do it. She has to finish her stupid knitting and cry out for help. Juliette can’t hear her, she’s enthralled by the program. The cat’s asleep. Why are these thousands of flies flitting now around her head, and this viscous stuff in her mouth that’s so hard to swallow? At last Juliette turns around. Why is she shouting through a glass wall? “Madame! Madame!” She feels so, so far away, a little fly among flies. She starts blowing words through her proboscis, sticky bubbles floating in a fish tank: “Stop-this-knitting-it’s-done.” What a relief! Done. She’s said done. It’s done.

      I can see the stitches linked one above the other, and the last three, wobbling little loops slipping off the needle as it falls to the floor with a metallic sound. The flies have taken off, preceding her in a humming cloud that congregates on the ceiling above the window. She follows them awkwardly, her buzzing wings grazing the shag of the curtain, and alights on the cold curtain rod. Up there, with her overall view of the room, she sees an old woman’s ponderous body start moving like a stone statue ineffectually pushed forward, dragging itself down the corridor to her room, falling onto the bed and sinking into darkness.

      (Borrowed time. Living,