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NWW copy
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Molloy
Samuel Beckett [→]
contrib
[0259] [[]Having waked between eleven o''clock and midday (I Heard the
angelus, recalling the incarnation, shorting after) I resolved
to go and see my mother.
[0260] I needed, before I could resoltve to go
and see that woman, reasons of an urgent nature, and with such
reasons, since I did not know what to do, or where to go, it
was child's play for me, the play of an only child, to fill
my mind until it was rid of all other preoccupation and I (was?) seized
with a trembling at the mere idea of being hindered from going
there, I mean to my mother, there and then. [0261] So I got up, adjusted
my crutches and went down to the road, where I found my bicycle
(I didn't know I had one) in the same place I must have left it.
[0262] [[]Which enables me to remark that, crippled though I was, I was
no mean cyclist, at that period. [0263] This is how I went about it.
[0264] I fastened my crutches to the cross-bar, one on either side, I
propped the foot of my stiff leg (I forget which, now they're
both stiff) on the projecting front axle, and I pedalled with
the other. [0265] It was a chainless bicycle, with a free-wheel, if
such a bicycle exists. [0266] Dear bicycle, I shall not call you
bike, you were green, like so many of your generation, I don't
know why. [0267] It is a pleasure to meet it again.[]] [20] [0268] To describe
it in detail would be a pleasure. [0269] It had a little red horn
instead of the bell fashionable in your days. [0270] To blow this
horn was horn was for me a real pleasure, almost a vice. [0271] I
will go further and declare that if I were obliged to record,
in a roll of honour, those activities which in the course of
my interminable existence have given me only a mild pain in the balls,[?] the act of blowing a rubber horn would figure among
the first. [0272] And when I had to part from my bicycle I took off
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[0272] the horn and kept it about me. [0273] I believe I have it still, somewhere, and if I use it no more, it is because it has gone dumb. [0274] Even motor-cars [?] have no horns today, as I understand the thing, or
rarely. [0275] When I see one, through the lowered window of a stationary
car, I often stop and blow it. [0276] This should all be re-written in
the pluperfect. [0277] What a rest, to speak of bicycles and horns.
[0278] Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse [(?)] if my
memory is correct. [0279] First taste of shit. [0280] So I shall only add
that every hundred yards or so I stopped to rest my legs, the good
one as well as the bad, and not only my legs, not only my legs.
[0281] I didn't, properly speaking, get down off the bicycle, I remained
astride it, my feet on the ground, my arms on the handle-[#]bars, my
head on my arms, and I waited until I felt better. [0282] But before I
leave this earthly paradise, suspended between the mountains and
the sea, sheltered from certain winds and exposed to all that
Auster vents, in the way of scents and langours, on this accursed
country, it would ill become me not to mention the awful cries of
the corn[#]crakes that run in the corn, in the meadows, all the
short summer night long dinning their rattles. [0283] And this enables
me, what is more, to know when that unreal journey began, the
second last but one of a form fading among fading forms, and which
I here declare without further ado to have begun in the second or
third week of June, at the moment, that is to say most painful of
all, when over what is called our hemisphere the sun is at its pitiless[|=|]most and the arctic radiance comes peeing [was] "pissing" ? on our midnights.
[0284] It is then the corn[#]crakes are heard. [0285] [[]My mother never refused to
see me, that is she never refused to receive me, for it was many
a long day since she had seen anything at all. [0286] I shall try and
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[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, unrelated, 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 Doan.
[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 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, bthat 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, 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, 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 [?] 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 [?] every 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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[0306] didn't realize what she was saying. [0307] Anyone but myself would
have been lost in this clattering gabble, which ccan only have
stopped during her brief instants of unconsciousness. [0308] In any
case I didn't come to listen to her. [0309] I got into communication
with her by knocking on her skull. [0310] One knock meant yes, two no,
three I don't know, four money, five good[|=|] bye[₰]. [0311] I was hard put to
ram this code into her ruined and frantic understanding, but I did
it, in the end. [0312] That she should confuse yes, no, I don't know,
and good[|=|]bye, was all the same to me, I confused them myself. [0313] But
that she should associate the four knocks with anything but
money was something to be avoided at all costs. [0314] During the period
of trraining, therefore, at the same time as I administered the four
knocks on her skull, I stuck a bank-[#] note under her nose or in her
mouth. [0315] In the innocence of my heart! [0316] For she seemed to have lost,
if not absolutely all notion of mensuration, at least the faculty of
counting beyond two. [0317] It was too far for her, yes, the distance
was too great, from one to four. [0318] By the time she came to the
fourth knock she imagined she was only at the second, the first
two having been erased from her memory as completely as if they had
never been felt, though I don't quite see how something never felt
can be erased from the memory, and yet it is a common occurrence.
[0319] She must have tjhought I was saying no to her all the time, whereas
nothing was further from my purpose. [0320] Enlightened by these considerations I looked for and finally found a more effective means of
putting the idea of money into her head. [0321] This consisted in
replacing the four knocks of my index-knuckle by one or more (according to my needs) thumps of the fist, on her skull. [0322] That she
understood. [0323] In any case I didn't come for money. [0324] I took her
money, but I didn't come for that. [0325] My mother. I don't think too
harshly of her. [0326] I know she did all she could not to have me,
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[0326] except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in
getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less
[3] compassionate sewers.[]] [0327] But it was well-meant and that's enough
for me. [0328] Not[₰], it is not enough for me, but I give her credit, though
she is my mother, for what she tried to do for me. [0329] And I forgive
her for having jostled me a little in the first months and spoiled
the only endurable, just endurable, period of my enormous history.
[0330] And I also give her credit for not having done it again, thanks to
me, or for having stopped in time, when she did. [0331] And if ever I'm
reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's
in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that
poor old uniparous whore and myself, the last of my foul brood,
neithrer man nor beast. [0332] I should add, before I get down to the facts,
vyou'd swear they were facts, of that distant summer afternoon, that
with this deaf, blind, impotent, mad old woman, who called me Dan and
whom I called Mag, and with her alone, I ---[
] no, I can't say it.
[0333] That is to say, I could say it but I won't say it,. yes, I could say
it easily, because it wouldn't be true. [0334] What did I see of her? [0335] A
head always, the hands sometimes, the arms rarely. [0336] A head always.
[0337] Veiled with hair, wrinkles, filth, slobber. [0338] A head that darkened
the air. [0339] Not that seeing matters, but it's something to go on
with. [0340] It's I who took the key from under the pillow, who took
the money out of the drawer, who put the key back under the pillow.
[0341] But I didn't come for money. [0342] I think there was a woman who came
each week. [0343] Once I touched with my lips, vaguely, hastily, that
little greay, wizened pear. [0344] Pah. [0345] Did that please her? [0346] I don't
know. [0347] Her babble stopped for a second, then began again. [0349] Perhaps
she said to herself, Pah. [0350] I smelt a terrible smell. [0351] It must have
come from the guts. [0352] Odou[₰]r of antiquity. [0353] Oh I'm not criticiszing
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