I Remain in Darkness – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781910695975
• eBook ISBN:
  9781910695982
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

A powerful meditation on ageing and familial love, I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie Ernaux's attempts to help her mother recover from Alzheimer's disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman's gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. Haunting and devastatingly poignant, I Remain in Darkness showcases Ernaux's unique talent for evoking life's darkest and most bewildering episodes.

1984

JANUARY

Invariably, she mistakes my study for her bedroom. She opens the study door just a crack, realizes it’s the wrong room and gently closes the door; I see the latch spring up, as if there were no one on the other side. Mounting panic. In one hour, the same thing will happen again. She has no idea where she is.

She hides her soiled underwear beneath her pillow. Last night, I thought of the blood-soaked underwear she would stuff at the bottom of the dirty laundry pile in the attic, leaving them there until washing day. I must have been around seven years old; I would stare at them, fascinated. Now they are filled with shit.

Tonight, I was marking essays. Her voice rang out from the adjoining living room, loud and clear, like an actor on stage. She was speaking to an imaginary child: ‘It’s getting late, sweetheart, you’d better run off home.’ She was in a good mood, giggling away to herself. I put my hands over my ears, I felt that I was losing touch with humanity. We are not on stage, THIS IS MY MOTHER TALKING TO HERSELF.

I came across a letter she had begun writing: ‘Dear Paulette, I remain in darkness.’ Now she can no longer write. The words seem to belong to another woman. That was one month ago.

FEBRUARY

At the dinner table, she speaks as if she were employed on a farm where my sons are hired workers and I’m the manager. She won’t eat anything except fromage frais and sweets.

Isabelle (my niece) came over for lunch last Sunday. She burst into laughter every time my mother made some incongruous remark. Only we have the right to laugh at my mother’s insanity, we being myself and the boys, not her. Not outside people. Éric and David say: ‘Granny’s really too much!’ as if, in spite of her dementia, she were still extraordinary.

This morning she got up and, in a timid voice, said: ‘I wet the bed, I couldn’t help it.’ The same words I would use when I was a child.

Saturday, she threw up her coffee. She was lying in bed, motionless. Her eyes were sunken, and red around the edges. I undressed her to change her clothes. Her body was white and flaccid. Afterwards, I cried. Because of time passing, because of the past. And because the body which I see is also mine.

I’m scared of her dying. I’d rather she were crazy.

Monday 25

We waited in the emergency room for two hours, my mother lying on a stretcher. She wet herself. A young man had tried to commit suicide by taking barbiturates. We went into the examination room and they laid my mother down on a table. The junior doctor rolled up her gown to reveal her stomach – the thighs, the white vagina, a few stretchmarks. Suddenly, I felt I was the one who was being exposed in public.

I thought back to the cat who had died when I was fifteen; she had urinated on my pillow before dying. And to the blood and bodily fluids I had lost just before my abortion, twenty years ago.

MARCH

Thursday 15

In the corridor of the hospital – or rather, I should say the nursing home attached to the hospital, on the first floor – I suddenly hear: ‘Annie!’ She’s calling my name, she has been moved to a different room. How could she have made out my figure from a distance, she can barely see (because of her cataracts). As I walk into the room, she says, ‘I’m saved.’ She no doubt means, ‘Now that you’re here.’ She tells me all sorts of stories, giving me all the details: the work she is forced to do without being paid, without being given anything to drink. A lurid imagination. At least now she always recognizes me, which wasn’t the case when she was staying at home with me.

Saturday 17

Greets me frostily. Scowls: ‘I don’t enjoy your visits! How can you behave like that, aren’t you ashamed?’ I am stunned. I have just spent all night with A., making love. How COULD she know? Once again, that sinking feeling, that childhood belief that her eagle eye can see everything, like God in Cain’s grave. She adds: ‘I don’t believe it, you must have been drugged!’ Later on: ‘Well, seems to me the world is going crazy’ I laugh, slightly relieved. No woman will ever be this close to me, it’s like she’s a part of me.

Sunday 18

Seven o’clock in the evening; she was already asleep. I woke her up. She thinks that the woman sharing her room is a little boy who has drowned in a water tank: ‘The gendarmes just sat there on a bench, they made no attempt to save him.’ Suddenly, she remarks: ‘So, the wedding’s in a fortnight, right?’ (Ironically, I’m seeing my lawyer tomorrow to file divorce proceedings.)

Tuesday 28

Her gnarled hands. The forefinger sticks out at the knuckle; it resembles a bird’s claw. She crosses her fingers, rubs them together. I can’t take my eyes off her hands. Without a word, she takes leave of me to go and have dinner. As she walks into the dining room, I am ‘her’. Such pain to see her life end this way.

APRIL

Wednesday 4

I have settled in her armchair, she is sitting on a chair. A chilling impression of split personality. I am both myself and her. She has filled her pockets with bread – her long-standing obsession with food, her fear of being deprived, of going hungry (she used to store lumps of sugar in her pockets and handbag). She complains that there is no one to talk to, that men are interested only in chasing women. Things that have haunted her all her life.

Sunday 8

Last Friday I was interviewed on the television show Apostrophes.

Today she was in a different room with two bedridden ladies, both silent. She had been tied to her armchair. Her eyes were hurting and she kept applying saliva to her eyelids. She told me that there had been a hold-up that night but ‘they spared our lives, that’s all that matters’. I untied her to walk her along the corridor and show the nurse her eyes. I so hate seeing her naked flesh when I lift her up and the hospital gown parts at the back.

In the corridor, through a half-open door, I glimpsed a woman with her legs in the air. In the next bed, another woman was moaning just like one does during orgasm. Tonight everything was surreal and the sun was beating down.

Saturday 14

She is eating the strawberry tart I have brought her, picking the fruit out from the custard. ‘They have no regard for me here, they make me work like a slave, we’re not even fed properly.’ Her perennial obsessions, the fear of poverty which I have long forgotten.

Opposite us, an emaciated woman, a phantom from Buchenwald, is sitting on her bed, her back straight, a fearful expression in her eyes. She lifts up her gown and you can see the nappy encasing her vagina. Such scenes inspire horror on television. Here it’s different. There is no horror. These are women.

Easter Sunday

When I get there, she is lying in bed. I shave her face. The two other women remain silent. Odour of piss and shit. It’s very warm. I can hear shouts from the adjoining room: it’s Madame Plassier, who used to share my mother’s room at the hospital. The sudden realization that it’s Easter! Cars are zooming along the motorway. Heading back home after a sunny weekend. The woman closest to my mother is lying on her bed, with one hand resting on her belly. It’s beyond sadness.

Thursday 26

Painful moments. She thinks that I have come to take her away and that she is going to leave this place. She is bitterly disappointed, she can’t swallow anything. I am overcome with remorse. Yet, occasionally, I feel serene: she’s my mother and somehow she’s no longer quite my mother.

Heard the stand-up comedian Zouc: ‘You have to wait until people die to make sure they have lost their hold over you.’

Sunday 29

I shave her face and cut her fingernails. Her hands were dirty. She’s perfectly lucid: ‘I’ll stay here until I die.’ And then: ‘I did everything I could to make you happy but you weren’t any happier for it.’

MAY

Tuesday 8

My mother was lying on the bed, a tiny figure, her head thrown back like on the Sunday afternoons of my childhood (did I really hate that?), her legs up in the air (did I hate that too?). She was wearing a nappy. Ashamed: ‘I put it on to avoid making a mess.’ Angry, too, with no regard for the Christian virtues she once praised: ‘To have worked all one’s life and end up like this.’ Those mad, glassy eyes. The features are definitely hers – the nose and the lips with their pretty, even contours.

My mind went back to 8 May 1958, twenty-six years ago. I had gone into town in the pouring rain to meet Guy D. He never turned up. I was wearing a thick woollen coat and carrying a red umbrella.

When I got into the lift to leave, she was standing in front of it. When the doors snapped shut, she was still talking. An unbearable moment.

Sunday 13

Here, in Us¹, it’s worse than at Pontoise Hospital. The nurse on duty says reproachfully: ‘She’s wet herself and messed up the whole room.’

I am appalled at my own cruelty. I made my mother put on her corset and stockings. She laces up the corset clumsily. Her legs are thin; she has been dressed in a pair of Petit-Bateau interlock pants. She obeys me fearfully. The scene haunts me, I keep seeing my mother with that demented expression; I desperately feel like crying but the tears won’t come (maybe only after her death?). My sadistic streak reminds me of the way I behaved towards other little girls in my childhood. Maybe because I was terrified of her.

Thursday 17

I went over to fetch her at Us. She has been allocated a bed in the long-term geriatric ward at Pontoise Hospital. This may be the last time she is driven around in a car; she doesn’t realize it. When we reach the hospital car park, her face crumples. I understand then that she thought she was coming back to my place. Now her room is on the third floor. A bunch o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1983
• 1984
• 1985
• 1986
• About the Author
• Copyright