If, p.3
If, page 3
“Mom, it’s Lise. I have bad news. My big boy has cancer. I forbid you to cry in front of me.” At this exact moment, even though it still seems this cancer might destroy my entire life, it begins a clandestine reconstruction process. It has just taught me to reject empathy and pathos. It has just taught me that, to be the best mother I can be to my son, I need to stop being one to my mother. Because I have decided, almost subconsciously, to apply the logic of concentric circles, fine-tuned and tested during previous crises in our lives. Every calamity is like the ripples formed on the surface by a stone thrown into water. The closer these ripples are to the center, the deeper and more pronounced they are. As they get further away, they are less defined and more spaced apart. And this implies a direction of travel. Each circle must be able to lean on the next, without reciprocation. You are at the center, the most affected. You will not bear our pain as parents. Neither will your brother and sister, in the second circle. Just as we, in the third circle, will not bear your grandparents’ pain, or our friends’, and they in turn must find support on which to draw strength, they must find people further removed from you. And so on till the last, almost imperceptible wrinkle. I remember nothing about my parents’ reaction, other than that it is dignified and matches my hopes. The news has been imparted, once and for all. Now practical decisions can be addressed swiftly. “Would you like us to come to be with you? We could catch the last high-speed train from Bordeaux.” “Yes, maybe, so you can look after the other two while I’m not there.” “Your sister just happens to be heading for Paris for a colloquium. Do you want us to tell her?” “Yes, why not. She’s a doctor, she could help us. Let’s keep each other in the loop.” I hang up. I breathe. I can go back in.
The waiting starts again, in a cubicle this time, with you lying down, a needle in your wrist. You’ve just come up from the hospital’s basement, where they had to take you after the fiasco with the nurse, to put in the drip under anesthetic. A laughing gas mask, a few hallucinatory comments, and the job is done. Oh, how we’d laugh about your wild imaginings under the effects of nitrous oxide. But, truth be told, no one’s laughing, especially not you: you’re ashen, nauseous, and already exhausted. Someone walks past in the corridor, at last. I rush out. It’s a woman, the duty intern. I frantically ask my first questions. I don’t remember what they are. Neither can I remember her replies. She leaves. More waiting. Then another person comes. A doctor. He’s young, not very tall, blue-eyed. He looks the straight-talking type. “Can I have a word, Doctor?” He takes me aside, to a room with windows, probably the nurses’ office. He closes the door, perches on the edge of the table, facing me. He maintains eye contact. I trust him. “Does anyone know what’s wrong with my son?” “We don’t yet have definitive results from the biopsy, but it’s a lymphoma or a type of leukemia.” The word hurts. What if? What if I was right in my incoherent raving? The only oncological emergency for children. “Will he die?” The question pops out, of its own accord. I need to know. “Look, I wouldn’t have said it so bluntly a few years ago, but there are now treatments. The Curie Institute knows how to tackle these conditions. Of course it will take a long time and it will be difficult. And there are no guarantees, particularly as we’re still waiting for a precise diagnosis. But they know how to tackle them.” His words are both hard and soothing. “For now, we’ll keep your son in overnight. We’ll scan him and give him a first treatment via the drip. He’ll go to the Curie tomorrow to start chemotherapy.” “One last question, Doctor: What should I tell my son?” “Well, tell him his blood is sick, and that’s why we have to inject stuff into his blood.” I like this. It’s logical and clear. I’ll use it. “Thank you, Doctor, thank you.” When I come out of the room I go over to Olivier. We haven’t yet spoken to each other this evening. I tell him about my conversation, take him in my arms, and say we’re going to get through this, together. I don’t believe it. I say it simply because I’d like him to say it to me.
My phone rings. My sister, Mathilde, is in the hospital’s upper floors looking for us. She arrives two minutes later, trailing her suitcase and grumbling. “I thought he was up there, no one told me.” Paradoxically, her bad mood cheers me up. Familiar territory at last. And I know that with her there won’t be even a whiff of pathos. But most of all, she’s here. I cling once more to the muddle-headed hope that something is being mended here by grace of this catastrophe. Something that draws on my painful roots. Mathilde, I’ve been told, experienced my birth—the year she turned eleven—as a criminal invasion, and didn’t talk to my mother for many months. A result of her life up until then, which was most likely as damaging as mine. And our inevitably chaotic relationship is built on this unstable foundation. My parents chose her as my godmother, thinking this would help her invest emotionally in someone she didn’t want. And there have been signs of that at various key moments in my life. A sort of silent intensity that occasionally displayed affection for me. But there was also, predominantly, its opposite. A lack of thoughtfulness, withdrawals, stinging rejections, instead of an affinity rich with promise. Mathilde didn’t have the words. And I, being too young, always found them too late. I had to grow up with this deficiency, with the deep-seated conviction that, although I wasn’t really sure why, I intrinsically deserved the cruel privations of what I was given. Until that fateful day in 2003. My mother’s seventieth birthday. My brothers had given me the job of finding a present for my mother from the four of us, but my sister didn’t like the idea. This difference of opinion fanned the flames of her ancient jealousy. She became barbaric. A few—hideous—words screeched into the phone. “No one in the family likes you, anyway. You’re hardly even human. Your life’s an insult to the lives of patients I treat in my clinic every day. One day you’ll hit absolute rock bottom, and then you’ll get it.” I didn’t know how to respond, and did, in fact, end up hitting rock bottom. Although I didn’t understand any of it.
This evening, eight years later, in this hospital, when my son has a potentially fatal illness, do I finally have the right to claim to be human? Can I finally, thanks to my newfound complicity with the dying, accord myself legitimacy to exist? It’s a strong possibility, because, in the name of this crisis, the sisterly authority is granting me some remission and is honoring me with her presence. The despicable calculations of a macabre bookkeeper: buying myself a crumb of clemency over my son’s weakening body. The worst of it is I’m instantly taken in by this wily deal. The worst of it is the horror in front of me now is so bad that only this petty fixer-upper trade-off makes it bearable. A tidy little arrangement with death. At the expense of my dignity perhaps, but what does that matter. I have much more important things to worry about.
* * *
—
The rest of the evening goes astonishingly well. Lise, Olivier, and their son embark on an active phase. Doing something means they can stop thinking. Not thinking means they can do something. Added to this is a productive form of curiosity. Everything is a distraction, an entertainment even, and overrides the tragedy. First, they need to go downstairs to the scanner. A wheelchair is supplied for the child, who sits in it without any fuss. Once in the basement, the nocturnal calm becomes a blessing: the parents and child launch themselves down the deserted corridors at breakneck speed, taking turns to push each other in the chair, cornering tightly, rolling on the floor breathless and smiling at the end of their mad dash. Childhood reclaims its rights. Next comes the preparation procedure for the scanner, another form of entertainment with actors, technicians, costumes, props, and endlessly rehearsed moves. Lise puts on the lead apron, pretends to crumple under its weight. The child laughs out loud. And his laugh has no trouble penetrating the lead, electrifying his mother to the core. Galvanized, she repeats the performance. A running gag. She’d do anything to ensure her son keeps lighting up like this. And what she does and says is complete nonsense, an outpouring of witticisms, jokes, and winks, finding everything amusing for his amusement. Nothing can suppress fate, Lise knows that. So she might as well play along. Of course, the questions are still there, torturing her very flesh at every possible occasion, stinging her in the briefest interlude. The time the child spends in the scanner is an opportunity to put these questions to her sister and the medical staff. They remain unanswered. It’s far too soon for answers. Too soon, in fact, even for questions. It won’t be until the child is transferred to the Curie, tomorrow, that his parents see an oncologist. For now, they go back upstairs. A bed in a twin room, the adults wait in the corridor. Wait for what, exactly? Nothing in particular. For time to pass, for this tomorrow to come. The waiting is filled with silences, cigarettes, inconsequential exchanges, even jokes. The husband and wife look at each other, the sisters approach each other cautiously, tenderness blooms, but unvoiced. At three in the morning, with the child finally asleep, Mathilde leaves for her hotel and Lise goes home while Olivier starts the first of a long series of nights on a camp bed at his son’s feet.
When Lise comes home at 3:30 a.m., she finds her mother in her bed. It feels terribly incongruous. Particularly as her father is asleep in her hospitalized child’s empty bed. She understands that this is a self-defense reflex in the face of their distress. Some people hold each other close, others hold each other in bed. It’s just unexpected for a woman not well versed in signs of maternal affection. In all honesty, Lise isn’t entirely sure this is to do with protecting and consoling her. She can’t help thinking it might be geared instead toward the reciprocal. One thing she does know for sure, though, is that she has no desire to spend the rest of the night next to her mother. And she says so. She needs to refuel her batteries. In the morning she’ll have to deal with the younger children’s school, the look in people’s eyes, settling her boy at the Curie, and the start of chemotherapy. The time has come to arm herself. She takes half an Atarax and collapses, shattered, into a soupy lethargy.
* * *
—
It’s a harsh wake-up. Submerged within the folds of artificial sleep, her head weighs heavy. Her eyelids are taut, her neck stiff. No part of her has so much as quivered before the images come crashing in, anarchic and lapidary. And the images are paired with a riot of words. Relentless reminiscences of the night before. A shred of hope emerges from their very confusion. It takes the hypothetical form of a nightmare. For a moment, Lise finds herself assessing proof of this in the very onslaught and extravagance of her memories. Besides, her current circumstances also seem to support this possibility. The sheets are all messed up, aren’t they? And she’s covered in sweat and her limbs are stiff. In the half-consciousness of morning on the day after the catastrophe, the boundary between illusion and reality reveals just how permeable it is. The dazed mother can see a way out because, having spent so much time thinking life was just a dream, she is now allowed to believe the horror was a hallucination. It doesn’t strike her as totally impossible, although increasingly improbable. With each passing minute, signs for the case against do indeed accumulate. With her mind now awake, her memory recovers its acuity and reconstitutes a rigorous chronology of events. Their sheer length and orderliness point to reality. And are soon seconded by sensations: her hand reaching to find that Olivier isn’t on the right-hand side of the bed, her mouth woolly from the Atarax, the tension gripping her breastbone. Reason fights on, searching for and finding explanations. Perhaps her husband went to work early, last night’s supper didn’t go down very well and she spent a restless night full of gloomy dreams. At last her eyes open and, on the chair by the bed, alight on the ultimate proof: a bag, her mother’s bag. There’s no room for doubt. All of it is—incontrovertibly, inescapably, mercilessly—true. She needs to get up and go into battle.
2
Tuesday, December 18. Day Two.
I’m obsessed with the thought of your transfer to the Curie Institute. I’m to be there waiting for you at the end of the morning. But first I must honor my other life, the one I had before, the one involving your brother and sister, along with school, activities, friends, and the neighborhood. A life that will and must keep going. So this is what it means to have a sick child. Leading a double life, juggling the ordinary and the extraordinary, normality and anarchy. An irony of this fate is that it is my everyday life that becomes secondary, while the other life, the intruder, the parasite, becomes central, unabating, omnipotent, sucking the blood out of my physical, mental, and social space. When I’m on the street, in shops, in a café or out for dinner, I’ll have to cheat the whole time in order not to stop being the woman I still was less than twenty-four hours ago. Becoming an actress playing the part of me, and putting on the mask of who I was. The character is more real than I am, a me that was once very much here, but is now lost. I must hide, if not the fact of the cancer itself, at least the deep fault line it has carved. Smiling, as usual. Listening, as usual. Understanding, as usual. And it starts right now, because I need to take Anna and Nils to school. I’ll see so many friends and acquaintances who don’t know. Their cheerful hellos will whip my face. How will I reply to the routine “How are you?” except with another “Fine, how are you?” only it will be more pointless and untruthful than ever. I don’t even have to wait until then to come up with my performance. Getting out of bed, having breakfast, and preparing to leave stand in as a dress rehearsal. Now is the time to gauge the true—and incalculable—value of having your grandparents here. They help me turn the obstructed cogs of routine. Your grandmother serves breakfast while your grandfather gets Nils dressed. I don’t yet have enough information to know what to say to the children, and I don’t want to lie to them. And so I concentrate on what needs doing: tidying up, organizing school bags, and making after-school snacks. I’m longing for midday, and nothing else.
I don’t know how I come to find myself sitting at a café table, on the corner of the street where the elementary school is. I must, at some point, have come out of the apartment building with the children, let them run along the charming passageway lined with artists’ studios that leads to the rue Broca, walked under Port-Royal Bridge and up the rue des Lyonnais, gone into the nursery school, climbed the stairs to the third floor and left Nils with his teacher, not without explaining the situation in a few simple words, to preempt any possible distress in my little youngest. I must then have gone back downstairs, come out of the nursery school, continued up the rue des Lyonnais, and cut across toward the rue de l’Arbalète, where, in between the two schools, I would have seen dozens of familiar faces to whom I said nothing, before dropping Anna at the elementary school, not without explaining the situation in a few simple words to the head teacher to preempt any possible distress in my little middle child. I must have done all this, but so mechanically that I can’t seem to remember it. Habit backed up by willpower. And now here I am, as usual in the Café d’Avant—the “Before” Café—whose name suddenly seems peculiarly preordained. And this will in fact be the place I come to unfailingly every morning for months on end, to spend half an hour breathing the air of my former social life, before going to take over from your father and staying at the Institute from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
This morning is different, though. I’m not sitting with the whole of the usual group of friends for a bit of idle chitchat. I’m at a separate table with my parents and two close friends. When did I tell them? Just now, when I came in, right after saying hello? Yesterday evening by text? I don’t remember. It must have been a terrible shock; they have tears in their eyes. Not me. We’re talking about you, slightly embarrassed, them because they don’t know what to say, me because I can tell they’re embarrassed. I hate myself for denting the peace of their well-balanced lives with my little personal catastrophe. I already experience your illness as a weight threatening to destabilize the system that regulates our get-togethers here, a system based on the blithe pleasure of superficial acquaintance. I can already feel the rift opening. My friends are quick to go join the other group, as much of a relief for me as for them. My mother goes to make a phone call. A few minutes later, a man enters the café, comes over to me with a resolute step, and hands me a business card. “We know each other by sight, my wife’s a doctor. I know a lot of people in oncology. I know you’re being sent to the Curie, but you must go to Gustave Roussy, it’s the best. Get in touch with Professor X, he’s a pro.” I rage internally. How can this stranger appropriate this confidential, embryonic situation? What does he think he knows about my son’s illness, when I don’t know anything about it myself yet? And by what right is he questioning the one solid thing that I have: the Curie Institute, which, as well as having a good reputation, has the unique advantage of being half an hour from home? “Thank you so much, we already have a bed at the Curie and have been referred to an oncologist.” “No, no, take my card. I really do know a lot of people, your son will get better care. You know, when you don’t have any connections…” Now he’s seriously bothering me. I know I should thank him humbly, with a quavering voice and moist eyes, for the priceless favor he’s doing us. And, while I’m at it, I should admire him for his exceptional social standing as one who rubs shoulders with the best. And then let him play the false modesty card—oh, it’s nothing, really, it’s only natural. But, well, I don’t have the strength for that this morning. I find these little courtesies so draining. I take the card he’s proffering and manage a forced thank-you, to get him to leave me in peace. My mother, who has come to sit back down and witnessed the end of the scene, apologizes. She was making a phone call on the café terrace and it was when he overheard her conversation that this man gave himself permission to intervene. We’re all a little shaken by his intrusion. Even so, I’m subjected to a few reprimands from my parents for being insufficiently grateful. So I have to get up and go ask the man to forgive my bad manners, justifying them—because, apparently, this wasn’t clear enough—with the context of my circumstances. A grotesque situation that stirs further feelings of rebellion in me and teaches me an instant lesson: when it comes to my son’s illness, I won’t let anyone outside the team caring for him tell me what to do. So they can all come along with their advice, their opinions, their convictions, and their interpersonal skills, driven by kindness, a sense of doing the right thing, or their good conscience, sometimes bolstered by a power complex and suspect motives. The bleeding hearts and the manipulators, the overemotional and the proud, and, in rather greater numbers, those who are a bit of both. Fate has mapped out my route from Necker to the Curie. I won’t listen to another instruction, won’t lend an ear to another opinion. The Institute will be my only religion, my creed, my chapel, my church. Indisputably. I have neither the time nor the energy to look elsewhere. My own little scheme for economizing on despair. It hunts down any doubts and drives them out of me. It makes choices for me and leaves me free to act. Free also to crush anything that gets in the way.
