Samuel Beckett
Digital Manuscript Project
Molloy

MS-WU-MSS008-3-51-2

MS. Pages: cover - 04r 05r - 07r
[p. cover]
MOLLOY
BY
SAMUEL BECKETT






[p. 01r]
I

[0001] I am in my mother's room. [0002] It's I who live there now. [0003] I don't know how I got there. [0004] Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. [0005] I was helped. [0006] I'd never have got there alone. [0007] There's this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. [0008] He says not. [0009] He gives me money and takes away the pages. [0010] So many pages, so much money. [0011] Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don't know how to work any more. [0012] That doesn't matter apparently. [0013] What I'd like now is to speak of the tqhings thaat remain, say my good-byes, finish dying. [0014] They don't want that. [0015] Yes, they're more than one, apparently. [0016] But it's always the same one that comes. [0017] You'll do that later, he says. [0018] Very good. [0019] The fact is I haven't much will left. [0020] When he comes for the fresh pages he brings back the previous week's. [0021] They are marked with signs I don't understand. [0022] Anyway I don't reread them. [0023] When I've done nothing he gives me nothing, he scolds me. [0024] Yet I don't work for money. [0025] For what then? [0026] I don't know. [0027] The fact is I don't know much. [0028] For example my qmother's death. [0029] Was she already dead when I came? [0030] Or did she only die later? [0031] I mean enough to bury. [0032] I don't know. [0033] Perhaps they haven't buried her yet. [0034] In any case I have her room. [0035] I sleep in her bed. [0036] I piss and shit in her pot. [0037] I have taken her place. [0038] I must resemble her more and more. [0039] All I need now is a son. [0040] Perhaps I have one somewhere. [0041] But I think not. [0042] He would be old now, nearly as old as me. [0043] It was a little skivvy. [0044] It wasn't real love. [0045] The real love was

[p. 02r]

[0045] in another. [0046] We'll come to that. [0047] Her name? I've forgotten it again. [0048] It seems to me sometimes that I even knew my son, that I helped him. [0049] Then I tell myself it is impossible. [0050] It is impossible I could ever have helped anyone. [0051] I've forgotten how to spell too, and half the words. [0052] That doesn't matter apparently. [0053] Good. [0054] He's a queer card who comes to see me. [0055] He comes every Sunday apparently. [0056] The other days he isn't free. [0057] He's always thirsty. [0058] It was he who told me I'd begun all wrong, that I should have begun differently. [0059] He must be right. [0060] I began at the beginning, like an old fool, can you imagine that. [0061] Here's my beginning. [0062] Because they're keeping it apparently. [0063] I took a lot of trouble with it. [0064] Here it is. [0065] It gave me a lot of trouble. [0066] It was the beginning, you see. [0067] Whereas now it's nearly the end. [0068] Is what I do now any better? [0069] I don't know. [0070] That's beside the point. [0071] Here's my beginning. [0072] It must mean something, since they're keeping it. [0073] Here it is.

[0074] This time, then once more I think, then I think it'll be over, with that world too. [0075] Premonition of the last but one. [0076] All grows dim. [0077] A little more, and you'll go blind. [0078] It's in the head., [0079] It doesn't work any more, it says, I don't work any more. [0080] You go dumb as well and sounds fade. [0081] The threshold scarcely crossed that's how it is. [0082] It's the head. It must have had enough. [0083] So that you say, I'll manage this time, then perhaps once more, then nothing more. [0084] You are hard set to formulate this thought, for it is one, in a sense. [0085] Then you try to pay attention, to consider with attention all those dim things, saying to yourself laboriously, It's my own fault. [0086] Fault? [0087] that was the word. [0088] But what fault? [0089] It's not goodbye, and what magic in these dim things to which it will be time enough, when next they pass, to say goodbye. [0090] For you must say goodbye, it would be stupid not to say goodbye, when the time comes. [0091] If you think of the forms and light of other days it is without regret. [0092] But you seldom think of them, with what would you think of them. [0093] I don't know. [0094] People pass too, hard to distinguish from yourself. [0095] That is discouraging. [0096] That's how I saw A and B going slowly towards each other,

[p. 03r]

[0096] unconscious of what they were doing. [0097] It was on a road remarkably bare, I mean without hedges or ditches or any kind of border, in the country, for cows were chewing in denormous fields, lying and standing, in the evening silence,. [0098] pPerhaps I'm inventing a little, perhaps embellishing, but on the whole it was like that. [0099] They chew, swallow, then after a short pause effortlessly bring up the next mouthful. [0100] A neck muscle stirs and the jaws begin to grind again. [0101] But perhaps I'm remembering things. [0102] The road, hard and white, seared the tender pastures, rose and fell at the whim of hills and hollows. [0103] The town wasn't far. [0104] It was two men, unmistakably, one short and one tall. [0105] They had left the town, first one, then the other, and the first, weary or remembering a duty, had retraced his steps. [0106] The air was sharp, for they wore overcoats. [0107] They looked alike, but no more than others do. [0108] At first a wide space lay between them. [0109] They couldn't have seen each other, even had they raised their heads and looked about, because of this wide space, and then because of the undulating land, which caused the road to be in waves, not deep, but deep enough, deep enough. [0110] But the moment came when together they descended into the same trough and in this trough finally met. [0111] To say they were acquainted, no, nothing warrants it. [0112] But perhaps at the sound of their steps, or warned by some obscure instinct, they raised their heads and observed each other, for a good fifteen paces, before they stopped, breast to breast. [0113] Yes, they did not pass each other by, but halted, face to face, as in the country, of an evening, on a deserted road, two wayfaring strangers often do, without there being anything extraordinary about it. [0114] But they knew each other perhaps. [0115] Now in any case they do, now I think they will know each other, greet each other, even in the depths of the town. [0116] They turned towards the sea which, far in the east, beyond the fields, climbed high in the waning sky, and exchanged a few words. [0117] Then each went on his way. [0118] Each went on his way, A towards the town, B by ways he seemed hardly to know, or not at all, for he went with uncertain step and often stopped to look about him, like someone trying to fix landmarks in his mind, for one day, perhaps, he may have to retrace

[p. 04r]

[0118] his steps, you never know. [0119] The treacherous hills where fearfully he ventured were doubtless only known to him from afar, seen perhaps from his bedroom window or, one black day, from the summit of a monument which, having nothing in particular to do and turning to height for solace, he had paid his few coppers to climb, up the winding stones. [0120] From there he must have seen everything, the plain, the sea, and then these very hills that some call mountains, indigo in places in the evening light, their serried ranges crowding to the sky-line, cloven with hidden valleys that the eye divines from sudden shifts of colour and then from other signs for which there are no words, nor even thoughts. [0121] But all are not divined, even from that height, and often where only one escarpment is supposed, and one crest, in reality there are two, two escarpments, two crests, riven by a valley. [0122] But how he knows these hills, that is he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling hold their sabbath, all that too quite differently disposed. [0123] He looks old and it is a sorry sight to see him solitary after so many years, so many days and nights unthinkingly given to that rumour rising at birth and even earlier, What shall I do? What shall I do? now low, a murmur, now precise as the headwaiter's And to Follow? and often rising to a scream. [0124] And in the end, or almost, to be babroad alone, by unknown ways, in the gathering night, with a stick. [0125] It was a stout stick, he used it to thrust himself onward, or as a defence, when the time came, against dogs and marauders. [0126] Yes, night was gathering, but the man was innocent, greatly innocent, he had nothing to fear, though he went in fear, he had nothing they could do to him, or very little. [0127] But he can't have known it. [0128] I wouldn't know it myself, if I thought about it. [0129] Yes, he saw himself threatened, his body threatened, his reason threatened, and perhaps he was, perhaps they were, in spite of his innocence. [0130] What business has innocence here? [0131] What relation to the innumerable spirits of darkness? [0132] It's not clear. [0133] It seemed to me he wore a cocked hat. [0134] I remember being struck by it, as I wouldn't have been for example by a cap or by a bowler.

MS. Pages: cover - 04r 05r - 07r