Samuel Beckett
Digital Manuscript Project
Molloy

MS-WU-MSS008-3-49

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Segment 1

[0294] personally in the scences she evoked, it was just as if I had.
[0295] I called her Mag, when I had to call her something. [0296] And if I
called her Mag because for me, without my knowing why, the letter
g abolished the syllable Ma, and as 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, that is a mother, and to proclaim it, audibly.

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Segment 2

[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.

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Segment 3

[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
didn't realize what she was saying.

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Segment 4

[0307] Anyone but myself would
have been lost in this clattering gabble, which can 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 mony [place = overwritten] ey, five goodbye.
[0311] I was hard put to
ram this code into her ruined and frantic understanding, but I did it. [place = overwritten] ,[] [place = supralinear] in the end.

Transcription
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