Samuel Beckett
Digital Manuscript Project
Molloy

MS-BRML-NWWR-2-38

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Segment 1

[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] an.

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Segment 2

[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.

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Segment 3

[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.

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Segment 4

[0297] And at the same time I
satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need, the need to
have a Ma, b [place = overwritten] that 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.

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Segment 5

[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.

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Segment 6

[0302] In any case it can't have amounted to
much, a few niggardly wetted goat-droppings [place = margin right] [?] ev [place = inline] ery 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

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Transcription
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