The Encounter

How old does a man have to be not to feel like an orphan when he loses his mother?

When I returned after being away for six years to the small flat where Mother died, it felt like the slipknot on a rope round my chest was being tightened without pity.

I sat down in the old armchair next to the window where she always did the darning and looked around at the silence, the smell and all the old things that had lain waiting for me. The silence and the smells had greater reality for me than the damp-streaked wallpaper.

My mother died four years ago and I learned of her death only when I got the funeral notice. I'd thought about her a lot since then but I hadn't wept for her enormously. Now, as I crossed the threshold of our fl at, I suddenly grasped that she had died. It hit me head-on.

Outside, it was Christmas.

What brought it home to me was coming back to Paris and to the crowded boulevards of its poorer districts lined with brightly lit shop window displays, and with illuminated trees at street corners.

Christmas!

I was a fool to come home on a day like that.

There was a smell that I didn't recognize in her bedroom — the smell of her dying. The bed had been entirely stripped and the mattress rolled up in an old sheet. The people who took care of her had forgotten to take away the glass for the holy water and the sprig of blessed palm.

These sorry items were on the marble dresser next to a black wooden crucifix. There was no water left in the glass and the leaves on the sprig had gone yellow. When I picked it up, they fell on the bedroom carpet like golden flakes.

There was a photograph of me on the wall in the ornate old frame that had been used to display my father's medals. The photo was about ten years old but it wasn't very flattering. I looked like a sickly and repressed young man, with hollow cheeks, a sidelong glance and the kind of vague pouting expression that could only belong to someone very bad or very miserable.

Only a mother's eyes could forgive a snap like that for being such a disappointment, and even find beauty in it.

I thought I was better looking now. The years had filled me out, and I had acquired a direct look and relaxed features.

I still had to say hello to my own room.

It was unchanged. My bed was made. The books I used to like were stacked on the mantelpiece, and next to the wardrobe key the little manikin I'd carved from a piece of hazel wood just for fun was still there.

I flopped onto the bed on my back. The bedspread had its familiar coarse feel and its good old smell of colourfast linen. I closed my eyes and said aloud, the way I used to in the morning to ask for my breakfast, "Hey there, Ma!"

Some people pray in a different way, with prepared sentences. But that simple call said in an everyday way was the best I could do. For a very short moment I hoped that by concentrating with all my heart and soul the past might answer me back. I think I would have given the rest of my life without a second thought to see my mother for just a second, standing behind the door. Yes, I'd give anything just to hear her asking in that voice of hers which was always slightly anxious when she talked to me, "Are you awake, my dear?"

I was awake.

And a whole life would pass by before I could go back to sleep.

My spoken words went on expanding and vibrating and filling the silence of the flat long enough to allow me to feel all the sorrow it held.

It wasn't possible to spend the evening in here. I needed noise, light and drink. I needed life!

In the wardrobe I found my imitation camelhair coat with the mothballs Ma had naturally provided. It used to be a "generous" fit but now it was tight on my shoulders.

As I put it on I looked at my other clothes hanging inside their dust covers. These old outfits that no longer suited me seemed so crass! They spoke of my past more eloquently than my own memories.

They alone could say exactly what I had been.

I went out. Or rather, I fled.

The stair lady was muttering curses as she swept. Still the same old woman. When I was still a lad she already had that worn-out look of someone who'd come to the end of the line. I used to think of her as exceedingly old — almost older than she looked now. She looked at me without recognizing my face. Her eyes had got worse; and I had changed.

Oily drizzle was falling in stops and starts and the gleaming roadway multiplied the streetlamps. The narrow streets of Levallois were full of happy people. They were knocking off work bearing Christmas supplies and thronged around open-air stalls where fishmongers shucked bucket-loads of oysters under wreaths of coloured lights.

The delis and cake shops were packed. A limping paper-hawker zigzagged from one pavement to the other calling out the news, but nobody gave a damn.

I walked on aimlessly, churning over the sorrow that gripped me in the gut. I stopped in front of the narrow window of a small book and stationery shop that also sold odds and ends. It was one of those local shops where you can get all kinds of stuff: prayer books in the season of first communions, fireworks around the 14th of July, exercise books at the start of the school year and Christmas decorations in December. Shops like that were all my youth, and I love them all the more as they decline and vanish.

That's why I felt so intensely the wish to go in and buy something, for the sole pleasure of the smell that brought back lost sensations.

Four or five women had squeezed into the narrow space. The saleslady looked like an aged widow. The look of someone in mourning forever! There was a smell of cocoa wafting from the room at the back.

I was glad there were people inside the shop. It meant I could linger, inspect its inexpensive treats and rediscover images of my childhood that I felt in special need of that day.

The place was like a fairy grotto piled high with glittering treasures. Christmas tree decorations were stacked on the shelves: glass birds, paper Father Christmases, baskets of fruit made of painted cotton and all those dainty balls as fragile as soap bubbles that help to make a tree into a fairy tale.

I was next to be served. There were people waiting behind me.

"What can I get you?"

I pointed to a silver cardboard birdcage sprinkled with glitter-dust. Inside it an exotic bird made of blue and yellow velvet stood on a golden perch.

"That one," I stammered.

"Will that be all?"

"Yes."

The saleslady put the cage in a little cardboard box and tied it up with a ribbon.

"Three twenty!"

When I went out I was feeling better. I couldn't grasp exactly why the purchase of a Christmas decoration I had no use for had suddenly brought me back in touch with my past.

It was a mystery.

I went into a bar for an aperitif. The place was full of overexcited men talking about what they were going to do for the rest of the evening. Most of them had packets under their arms or in their pockets.

I was tempted to catch a bus to go and nose around the big department stores on the Grands Boulevards.

But when I thought about it I preferred to stay in my own neck of the woods. The crowd in Levallois was humbler but also noisier and warmer than in the centre of town. At every step I saw faces that "said something" to me but nobody recognized me.

At...