And yet, in the midst of that certainty, doubt remained, and I was suddenly filled with the conviction that there were things I still did not know about or fully understand — Paris, for example, and the two men who had one day come to our apartment.
It happened when my mother had gotten up to go to the restroom, leaving on the table her leather purse — brown to match the tights she was wearing, her turtleneck sweater, and her shoes — and my father, like a newly-released spring, immediately snatched it up and rummaged around inside for something I could not see but at which I could easily guess. However, it wasn’t this unexpected action on his part that I found most revealing, even though it was the first time I’d seen him do such a thing, the first time I’d seen actual evidence of what, until then, I had known only through the consequences for my mother and myself of similar actions and through the partial and slightly rose-tinted accounts that my mother was just beginning to give me. For when I saw my father grab the bag, open it, and start rifling through its contents, I happened to look up to see where my mother had gone, and there she was, standing in the middle of the room. She had presumably failed to find the restroom and was coming back to ask for my father’s help, and so she had seen him do something that she was not supposed to see, and instead of alerting him to this from afar and coming back to the table to confront him or making some sound that would cause him to glance up and perhaps concoct some excuse while there was still time, she allowed him to carry on and stood quite still while my impeccably dressed father, so focused on what he was doing, so completely unaware that he had been found out, continued his rummagings without raising his eyes from the bag he was holding.
It was only a matter of seconds. Then, as if she had seen nothing, she turned and set off again in search of the restroom, thus preventing my father from discovering her there and realizing that he had been discovered and having to come up with some even less credible excuse than the one he would have concocted had he been interrupted moments before, because he had taken her money now and was putting it in his jacket pocket. It was only a matter of seconds, but during those seconds — as my mother watched intently, with a look on her face that expressed neither surprise nor anger, nor even weariness, but infinite understanding, as she watched him rifling through her bag and taking the money, which I did not see but she must have seen, and as I watched, too, through the window, as if this were a scene from a silent movie, with no means of intervening, so near and yet so far, artificially detached from a situation of which I could only be a spectator because neither of the two actors, neither my mother nor my father, was thinking about me — in those few seconds, what took shape in my mind was the evidence of a bond that did not include me, a bond that was no stronger than the one binding my mother to me, but different, a bond that had undergone its own evolution, independent of me and my significance, that had been born before I was born and had survived over time without me, a bond ruled by different codes of conduct, different criteria, and subject to different demands. What would my mother not have done to maintain that bond? What sacrifices, apart from her blind perseverance, would she have been prepared to make?
On that rainy afternoon when I had left school early, or had perhaps delayed going home for rather longer than usual, my mother returned from the restroom, but her expression and attitude were no different, no harder or sterner, than when she had left the table. She slowly made her way through the tightly-packed tables, reached the one she had left only shortly before, and sat down on her chair without saying a word, holding my father’s gaze, for he, pathetic in his miserable little victory and unaware of his own tragic futility, was looking at her and smiling. That rainy afternoon, on her way back from the restroom, my mother gave no hint that she, like me on the other side of the window, had witnessed what he had done. She remained seated, answering my father’s questions ever more languidly, as if nothing were keeping her there now and she were simply waiting for the right moment to leave. She did not stay much longer, just long enough for a brief exchange of words, whose sole intention was that this encounter, which they both knew was drawing to a close, would at least end elegantly; he, I assume, was anxious not to burn his last bridges in a battle he knew was lost, and she, I suppose, did not want to open any unnecessary wounds. When my father had made one final joke and they had both fallen silent again, my mother got up, took her raincoat, and, without bending down to kiss him, said something along the lines of All right, I have to go now or See you around, then turned and walked toward the exit. When, seconds later, she came out onto the street, the café doors swinging shut behind her, I saw no tears in her eyes, no sadness or anguish, only a desire to escape and get away from there as quickly as possible.
XXV
My mother’s face now is completely inexpressive, inscrutable, it doesn’t and never will say what she feels, whether there is sorrow, anguish, or a desire to escape in the way she leans back against her pillow or blinks when they bring her meals. In order to feel sorrow or anguish, in order for others to be able to deduce from our exterior a tiny part of what we would not dare put into words, we need the faculty of memory, which my mother does not have. My mother gets angry, shouts, and weeps, but she does so mechanically. There’s no point asking her about the present — or about the past. She doesn’t think, she doesn’t recognize me, her face cannot show me anything I don’t know already.
Once my mother had left the café, it wasn’t certainty or a lack of certainty that made me stay in the same spot from which I’d observed her furtive encounter with my father. If certainty, or a desire for it, had been important to me, I would probably have followed her, anxious to question her and find answers, even though in doing so, I would have to confess that I had spied on them. Instead, I remained huddled on the sidewalk, watching her vanish around the same corner where, half an hour earlier, the blind man and his dog had vanished just moments before my father emerged from the uncertain past to reinstall himself in the present, when all I was thinking about was the bus that would take me home to my mother’s company, to her unconditional love, to my own unpredictable outbursts of stifled anger, compensated, after repentance, by equally violent outbursts of devotion and affection. To say that I was confused would not fully describe the state I was in. It’s true that I was bewildered and didn’t know quite what to think or do, but the chaos of contradictory feelings into which I was plunged was not enough to make me distrust my fledgling intuition, which I was already beginning to trust in as if it were some long-known fact. However much I would have liked to deny it, however hesitant I was about seeking certainty, however much I lacked any conclusive proof, and however many excuses I came up with for that lack — purely in order to continue ignoring the evidence and thus avoid having to change the past by imposing on it images quite different from those I had imagined up until then — a new and doubtless irreversible intuition was nonetheless taking root in me. I remained quite still and unresponsive, but this was due more to a kind of artificial calm than to mere passivity or the inability to behave otherwise, rather like when someone slaps us across the face and we choose not to return the blow, knowing that such a response contains far more scorn, force, and violence than if we had allowed ourselves to be swept along by what our mind was urging us to do.