MS-BRML-NWWR-2-38

[0286] speak calmly. [0287] We were so old, she and I, she had had me so
young, that we were like a couple of old cronies, sexless, un-
related, with the same memories, the same rancours, the same
expectations. [0288] She never called me son, fortunately, I couldn't
have borne it, But Dan, I don't know why, my name is not Do ^{[place = overwritten] a}n.

[0289] Dan was my father's name perhaps, yes, perhaps she took me for my
father. [0290] I took her for my mother and she took me for my father.
[0291] Dan, you remember the day I saved the swallow. [0292] Dan, you remember
the day you buried the ring. [0294] I remembered, I rembered , I mean I
knew more or less what she was talking about, and if I hadn't always
taken part personally in the scenes she evoked, it was just as if
I had.

[0295] I called her Mag, when I had to call her something. [0296] And I
called her Mag because for me, without my knowing why, the letter
g abolished the syllable Ma, and as ^{[place = supralinear] if} it were spat on it, better
than any other letter would have done.

[0297] And at the same time I
satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to
have a Ma, b ^{[place = overwritten] t}hat is a mother, and to proclaim it, audibly. [0298] For
before you say mag you say ma, inevitably. [0299] And da, in my part
of the world, means father.

[0300] Besides ^{[place = inline] ,} for me the question did not
arise, at the period I'm worming into now, I mean the question
of whether to call her Ma, Mag ^{[place = inline] ,} or the Countess Caca, she having
for countless years been as deaf as a post. [0301] I think she was
quite incontinent, both of faeces ^{[place = margin left] [?]} and water, but a kind of
prudishness made us avoid the subject when we met, and I could
never be certain of it.

[0302] In any case it can't have amounted to
much, a few niggardly wetted goat-droppings ^{[place = margin right] [?]} ev ^{[place = inline] e}ry two or three
days. [0303] The room smelt of ammonia, oh not merely of ammonia, but
of ammonia, ammonia. [0304] She knew it was me, by my smell. [0305] Her
shrunken hairy old face lit up, she was happy to smell me. [0306] She
jabbered away with a rattle of dentures, and most of the time