XIV
I should like to hold these things fast, for always.
I see them now as they really are, just as I see my son in his present form. But it is not enough to say: "I see them." I have carefully preserved all my pictures of him; I want to keep intact the memory of the heart he gave me.
This is not difficult to tell. Other feelings are too bound up with self for description. You'd have to explain a person's whole nature to understand them. Love is indefinable, grief is indefinable, but a mother's heart can open up like a book. It is uniform and simple, free from all alloy, and its very infiniteness is like finiteness.
My little boy is near me, awkwardly assaying his first steps in the garden. Without raising my eyes from my work I watch him and I thank him.
It is he. Although he changes from day to day, I know his ways by heart: the big curl in which the sunlight lies coiled, the almost imperceptible arch of his eyebrows, mere shades of lines, the red pollen blown on the petals of his cheeks, his profile of curves, his neck of mother-of-pearl, the spreading fan of his fingers, his unique form which is unique only to me.
I must rack my brain in order to force into my memory that once he lay hidden in my warm womb and I carried him as though he were one of my organs, as though he were a secret, that I carried him as one carries a joy or a pain. I no longer remember this.
I am in a hurry for him to grow up and be able to listen; I should like to talk to him. I have found words for the others, though they awoke in me only an uncertain love and set my heart in chaos. He has given me an intelligible emotion, and to him I have said nothing.
I love him as I love no one, because he is the sole human being for whom I am responsible. My love is responsibility first and foremost. If he bends over, I suppress a cry; if the sun shines too strong on him, I shield him with my body; if he makes a new gesture, a slight disquiet flits through me. In whatever concerns him danger seems to lurk. He is a lively, approachable child, people like him, and when they come up and speak to him, I smile a pleasant, natural smile, though his life and his death keep up an incessant sport within me and incessantly it devolves upon me to secure his life. It is a tragic stake, a terribly cruel problem; it is the entire basis of mother-love.
He has run as far as the ivy thicket, thirty yards from my chair. I tremble so that I have to get up and leave my work. Every now and then he comes tottering to present me with a shaving of wood fished up from the sand he plays in, a big earth-coated pebble, treasure-troves of all sorts. "Look, mother." His attention flatters me.
If I were to disappear without leaving anything?... Without leaving a will? Or suppose that from beyond the tomb I were to say: "Before you took your first steps your life was all arranged. In order that you should be happy I kept you from having dignity or a sense of justice. No need for you to undergo the bitter struggle that presses upon a man, the primordial cares of existence, honesty—honor, in short. Are you not my child? If I have taken trouble and pains it was to deprive human beings all for your sake. You will be exempted from earning your bread and pursuing an occupation. You will depend upon the labor of others, you will be under the delusion that you are distinguished from those upon whom you depend. That is the end to which my efforts will have served." But this is wrong, unwholesome, dishonorable.
When he is grown up into a tall young man whom people take notice of, shall I have the courage to look him in the face and say:
"You are not everything to me: you never have been my whole passion. I have cherished you on my knees, I have served you, I have idolized you. I have never deceived myself. I knew perfectly that in loving a child one gives without ever receiving. I have reserved the highest place for others. It is not to you that I have dedicated the essential thing in my life, its supreme reason, if a supreme reason can be found.
"Therefore you have the right to leave me. You must be finer, you must repudiate me. I bow before what you are. I free you from the duty in which children are cooped up, and I assume the duty myself. Whatever I may have done, never let my course of life be an example to you; there is no example; you, nothing but you, is what will count.
"You will have so much to do, everything I have failed to do. Go, keep your face set forward, never turn back. What were you born for if not to depart from me? To be sure, you are flesh of my flesh, but a part of my flesh that is unlike me, a contrary current that has emanated from me.... You say no to everything I am.
"Does it hurt me to see you disappear? Am I alarmed? Do I suffer? That does not concern you. I was forewarned. On the day you were born I was told that the tearing-away process would last as long as I last. We leave each other each minute. Your head mounts upward towards the heavens, mine draws closer to the earth.
"It is right and proper that this should be so. Without you, you know, my existence would be justified. It was not merely to bring you into the world that I was born. The thing is that your existence should be justified.... No, do not delay. Life is nothing but a departure and every time one halts one commits treason.
"I shall have to come to understand many things, thanks to you. I have always tried to be clear and know myself, but when I went to the bottom of things, I mean to the bottom of myself, there always remained another soul, a rebellious soul which refused to reveal its mystery, and I have doubted whether it is humanly possible to learn the truth of it.
"I was not mistaken. The real, unknown part of myself, my unreachable soul, is in your eyes. You will see through what I have got no knowledge of. If you beheld how I look at you! You are like the travellers who come from afar, from the lands of fable concealed under lovely names of gold. You resemble those travellers. Your eyes will see beyond the horizon in which I go astray. I tell you that of the two of us the one who ought to kneel, listen, and learn is not you.
"My little baby, I shall owe to you the sole love that is sorrowful and perfect, the love that neither barters nor expects reward. Since I have given everything, you will owe me nothing."
Shall I have the courage to say this to him? It will be hard perhaps, but already I find that it is a veritable grace from heaven to have twenty years in which to attain to such courage.
Here he is coming back, running this time and brandishing in his plump hand a twig he has broken off all by himself. He drops plump on his knees as on two round balls, all hampered in his clumsy race to me. His chubby cheeks are stained with crimson. He throws himself on me. "Mother," he lisps, the little flatterer....
The mournful moment of a kiss, the exasperating moment of an abortive embrace, the fleeting moment of contact—he is gone.