“Why are you groaning, father? Do you feel ill?”
I think he heard me, for his groans became fainter, and he turned his
eyes from the wall facing him as if he were trying to look at me; but
he could not quite turn them so far. I shouted the same question in his
ear three times, and always with the same result. My courage soon broke
down. My father was already closer to death than he was to me; my cries
could no longer reach him. Terror seized me, and immediately the words
we had exchanged only the evening before came back to me. So few hours
had passed, yet he was already on his way to discover which of us was
right. How strange! My sorrow was accompanied by remorse. I hid my face
in my father’s pillow and burst into the same hopeless sobs for which I
had chidden Maria.
It was now her turn to calm me, but she went a strange way about it,
talking of my father as if he were already dead, though he lay groaning
with his eyes wide open.
“Poor dear,” she said. “To think of his dying like that, with all his
fine thick hair too.” She stroked it as she spoke. It was true; my
father’s head was covered by a great mane of curly white hair, whereas
mine, at thirty, was already very thin.
I had quite forgotten that there were such things as doctors in the
world, and that sometimes they were supposed to be able to save one.
I had already seen death on that face contorted with pain, and I had
given up hope. It was Maria who first thought of the doctor, and she
went to wake the gardener to send him to the town.
I stayed alone for about ten minutes, which seemed an eternity,
supporting my father. I remember I tried to put into my hands all the
tenderness with which my heart was suddenly filled. He could no longer
hear my words. What could I do to make him feel how much I loved him?
When the gardener came I went to my room to write a note, and had great
difficulty in framing the few words necessary to give the doctor an
idea of the case so that he might know what medicines to bring with
him. I kept seeing before me the imminent and certain death of my
father, and asking myself: “What is there for me to do in the world
now?”
Then followed several long hours of waiting. I have a fairly clear
remembrance of those hours. It soon became unnecessary to support my
father, for he lay back quite unconscious on the bed. His groaning
had ceased; he seemed to have lost all sense of everything. His
breathing was hurried; half unconsciously mine became so too. It was
impossible for me to go on breathing long at that pace, so I allowed
myself short intervals of rest, hoping thereby that I might induce a
quieter heart-beat in my patient. But it hurried on and never tired.
We tried in vain to make him take a spoonful of tea. His torpor became
less profound when it was a question of defending himself against our
interference. He kept his teeth resolutely shut. His obstinacy did
not leave him even in a state of unconsciousness. Long before dawn
the rhythm of his breathing changed. It fell into periods alternating
between what seemed almost like the breathing of a healthy man and
bursts of hurried respiration, with sometimes a long terrible interval
when it seemed to stop altogether, which made Maria and me feel that
death must be close at hand. But then the sequence of periods would
begin again, a colourless music, infinitely sad. That noisy, uneven
breathing seemed to become part of the room. From that time and for
long, long afterwards it was always there.
I flung myself on a sofa, while Maria sat up on a chair near the bed.
My bitterest tears were shed on that sofa. Tears throw a veil over our
faults and allow us to accuse Fate without fear of contradiction. I
wept because I was losing my father for whom I had always lived. It did
not matter that I had been so little with him. Had not all my efforts
to become better been made in order to give satisfaction to him? It is
true that the success I strove for would have been a personal triumph
for me as against him who had always doubted me, but it would have been
a consolation to him as well. And now he could wait no longer and was
going away convinced of my incurable incapacity. The tears I shed were
indeed bitter.
While I sit writing, or rather engraving these tragic memories on my
paper, I realise that the image that obsessed me at the first attempt
to look into my past--the image of an engine drawing a string of
coaches up a hill--came to me for the first time while I lay on the
sofa listening to my father’s breathing. That is just what engines
do when drawing an enormous weight: they emit regular puffs, which
then become faster and finally stop altogether; and that pause seems
dangerous too, because as you listen you cannot help fearing that the
engine and the train must go tumbling head over heels down into the
valley. How curious that is! My first real effort to remember had
carried me back to the night which was the most important in my life.
Dr. Coprosich arrived at the house before it grew light, accompanied by
a male nurse, who was carrying a box of drugs. He was obliged to come
on foot because he had been unable to find a carriage, on account of
the violent storm.
I received him in tears, and he was very kind to me, and urged me not
to give up hope. But I may as well say at once that from the moment of
our first meeting there are few men who have aroused in me such violent
antipathy as Dr. Coprosich. He is still alive, though very decrepit;
and he is greatly esteemed by everybody in the town. When I see him
tottering along through the streets to get a little air and exercise,
all my former dislike revives.
At that time the doctor cannot have been more than forty. He had
devoted himself to the study of legal medicine, and though he was
notorious as being a very patriotic Italian the Imperial Courts of
Justice entrusted him with the most important missions. He was a thin,
nervous type. The real insignificance of his face was disguised by his
baldness, which made him appear to have a very lofty brow. Another
defect also added to his importance; when he took off his spectacles
(as he constantly did when meditating on anything), his myopic eyes
looked round or above his interlocutor, and were strangely like the
colourless eyeballs of a statue, threatening or perhaps ironical.
His eyes became very disagreeable then. But directly he put on his
eyeglasses (as he always did for the least word) they became at once
the eyes of any honest bourgeois, submitting whatever he says to a
careful examination.
He sat down to rest for a few minutes in the hall. He asked me to
describe exactly what had happened from the moment of the first alarm
till his arrival. He removed his eyeglasses and fixed his uncanny eyes
on the wall behind my back. I tried to give an exact account, which
was not very easy considering the state I was in. I remembered that
Dr. Coprosich could not bear people who knew nothing about medicine
to use medical terms, as if they were pretending to some knowledge of
the subject. And when I happened to mention “stertorous breathing” he
put on his spectacles in order to say: “Go slow with your definitions.
We shall soon see what the trouble is.” I told him of my father’s
strange demeanour, of his anxiety to see me and of his anxiety to get
to bed. I did not repeat to him my father’s strange speeches; perhaps
I was afraid I should have to repeat my answers too. But I told him
what difficulty my father had had in expressing himself; and how he
seemed to be revolving something in his mind which he could not succeed
in formulating. The doctor, putting on his great spectacles again,
exclaimed triumphantly:
“I know what was going on in his head.” I knew too, but I didn’t say so
for fear of making him angry: it was the cerebral hæmorrhage.
We went in to the sick man’s room. The male nurse helped him to turn
over in all directions that poor lifeless body, for what seemed to me
a century. He examined him thoroughly, and tried in vain to make the
patient help himself a little.
“That will do,” he said after a time. He came up to me with his
spectacles in his hand, and his eyes on the floor, and said:
“You must be brave. It is a very serious case.”
We went to my room, and he washed his face and hands. He was without
his spectacles of course, and when he raised his head to dry it,
it looked like the strange little head of an amulet, carved by an
unskilful hand. He said he remembered that we had been to see him
several months ago, and he expressed surprise that we had not been
again. He imagined that we had left him for another doctor; he had
stated very clearly then that my father ought to have treatment. He was
terrifying, scolding me there without his glasses. He raised his voice
and demanded an explanation. His eyes roved everywhere in search of it.
Of course he was quite right and I deserved his scolding. Also I don’t
think it was that which made me hate Dr. Coprosich. I tried to excuse
myself by telling him how my father hated doctors and drugs; I wept as
I spoke and the doctor generously tried to calm me by saying that even
if we had called him in earlier his knowledge would only have availed
to delay the catastrophe, not to avert it.
But as he proceeded to inquire into the causes leading up to my
father’s illness, he found occasion to reproach me. He wanted to know
if my father had complained of his health during the last months,
whether he had eaten and slept well. I was not able to tell him
anything definite; I had not even noticed whether my father’s appetite
was good or bad, though we had had our meals together day after day. I
was overwhelmed by a sense of guilt, but the doctor did not press his
questions. I told him that Maria always thought my father was dying,
and that I had laughed at her for it.
He stood drying his ears and gazing up at the ceiling.
“He will probably recover consciousness, in part at least, in the
course of the next few hours,” he said.
“Is there any hope then?” I exclaimed.
“None whatever!” he answered dryly. “But leeches have never been known
to fail in a case like this. He will certainly become partly conscious,
but will probably lose his reason.”
He shrugged his shoulders and put the towel back in its place. That
shrugging of his shoulders seemed to suggest that he had not much
opinion of his own work, and I felt encouraged to speak. I was
terrified at the thought that my father might become conscious only to
realise that he was dying, but if I had not seen the doctor shrug his
shoulders I should not have dared to express my fears.
“Doctor!” I implored. “Doesn’t it seem to you wicked to let him recover
consciousness?”
I burst into tears. My nerves were so shaken that I felt a perpetual
desire to cry, and I gave way to it now unrestrainedly; I wanted him
to see me crying, thinking he would the more readily forgive me for
desiring to criticise him.
He said to me very kindly:
“There, there, you must try to control yourself. Your father will never
be sufficiently conscious to realise his condition. He is not a doctor.
One has only not to tell him that he is dying, and he will never find
out. But something worse may happen to him; he may go mad. I brought a
strait-jacket with me in case that should happen, and the nurse will
stay here.”
More terrified than ever I begged him not to apply the leeches.
Whereupon he calmly told me that the nurse had already applied them,
because he had told him to before leaving my father’s room. Then I flew
into a rage. Could anything be more wicked than to force a desperately
ill person to come to, when there was not the smallest chance of saving
his life and only misery lay before him; perhaps too the unspeakable
torture of a strait-jacket? In an absolute fury, but still crying
piteously all the time, as if imploring for mercy, I declared that it
seemed an unheard-of cruelty not to let a condemned man die in peace.
I hate that man because he then got angry with me too. And for one
thing I can never forgive him. He got so excited that he forgot to put
on his spectacles, and yet succeeded in discovering exactly where my
head was, and fixing it with his terrible eyes. He said it looked as
if I wanted to cut the slender thread of hope which still existed. He
said it crudely, just like that. Here I joined battle with him. Weeping
and shouting with rage I protested that only a few seconds before he
had said himself that there was absolutely no hope of saving my father.
I refused to let my house and its inmates be made use of for such
an experiment. There were plenty of places in the world where they
specialised in it!
He replied very severely, and with an almost menacing calm:
“I was explaining to you the scientific standpoint in such a case, but
who knows what may happen in half an hour’s time or, let us say, by
to-morrow? If I have succeeded in keeping your father alive I have left
a loophole for any contingency.”
Then he put on his glasses, and with the manners of a pedantic official
went on to make countless other demonstrations of the important rôle a
doctor might sometimes play in the economic fortunes of a family. One
half-hour of life, more or less, might alter the whole character of a
patrimony.
If I went on crying now it was because I pitied myself for having to
listen to such stuff at a moment like that. I was exhausted and in no
mood to argue. So it was too late to stop them applying the leeches!
The doctor has a great deal of power beside a sick bed, and I treated
Dr. Coprosich with all respect. Perhaps that was why I did not dare
to propose a consultation, a thing for which I reproached myself for
many a long year. My remorse is dead now, together with all the other
matters I have to relate; so I can speak of them as coldly as if they
had happened to a stranger. All that remains to me of those days is my
hatred of the doctor, and that will never die.
After a little while we went into my father’s bedroom again. We found
him lying on his left side. They had put a bandage on his forehead to
cover the wound which the leeches had made. The doctor wanted to try at
once whether he had recovered consciousness, and shouted in his ear. My
father made not the faintest movement.
“So much the better!” I said courageously, but still in tears.
“They cannot fail to take effect,” remarked the doctor. “Can’t you see
that his breathing has become different?”
It was quite true that his breathing, which was now uniformly quick and
laboured, no longer had that periodic character which had frightened me
so much, earlier.
The nurse said something to the doctor to which he assented. It was
about trying on the strait-jacket. They took the horrible thing out of
the bag, and between them raised my father, forcing him to sit upright
on the bed. Then suddenly he opened his eyes. They were dim, and still
unaccustomed to the light. I was in an agony of fear lest he should
wake up and see everything. But instead of that when his head fell back
on the pillow his eyes closed too, like those of certain dolls.
The doctor was triumphant:
“There, that is quite different,” he said in a low voice.
Yes, it was quite different, and for me it meant something horribly
threatening. I kissed my father warmly on the forehead, and said to him
in my secret heart:
“Oh, may you sleep till eternal sleep overtakes you!” And so I prayed
that my father might die. The doctor however guessed nothing, for he
said cheerfully:
“You must admit that you are glad to see him come to.”
Dawn had come by the time the doctor went away--an overcast, hesitating
dawn. The wind seemed to me less violent though it still blew in gusts,
and blew the frozen snow about.
I went with the doctor as far as the garden. I behaved to him with
exaggerated politeness so that he should not guess what I really felt
towards him. My face expressed only consideration and respect. It
was not till I saw him going down the garden path to the gate that I
allowed myself a grimace of disgust. He looked such an insignificant
black little thing in the snow, staggering down the path, and
occasionally stopping, as each fresh gust smote him, in order to
withstand it better. But the grimace was not enough; I felt the need of
violent movement after my long effort at self-control. I walked up and
down the path for several minutes in the cold, with nothing on my head,
stamping my feet furiously in the deep snow. But I don’t really know
whether my childish fury was directed against the doctor or against
myself. Myself perhaps first, because I had desired my father’s death,
but had not dared to say so. It was true that I had desired it solely
out of filial affection, but the fact that I had remained silent about
it made it a crime which weighed heavily on my mind.
The sick man was still asleep. He said only a few words which I could
not hear, but he said them in a calm, confidential tone, contrasting
strangely with his hurried breathing which gave such an impression of
unrest. Would he soon be conscious again and realise the worst?
Maria and the male nurse were both sitting by his bed. I felt
confidence in the latter, and was only irritated by a certain air of
exaggerated conscientiousness. He rejected Maria’s proposal to give the
invalid a spoonful of broth, a remedy in which she had great faith.
The doctor had not said anything about giving him broth, and the nurse
wanted to wait for his next visit before venturing on anything so
important. I thought him much more overbearing than was necessary. Poor
Maria did not press the matter, nor did I. But I made another grimace
of disgust.
They persuaded me to lie down now, so that I could sit up with the
hired nurse during the night. Two were enough at a time if the invalid
needed anything, and we could take it in turns to rest on the sofa.
I lay down and fell asleep at once, losing consciousness completely
without the faintest flicker of a dream.
Last night however, after I had spent the whole of yesterday in
trying to recall what I have here set down, I had an exceedingly
vivid dream which with one enormous bound carried me back over the
years to the very time I have been speaking of. I saw myself and the
doctor standing in the room where we had been discussing the leeches
and the strait-jacket. The room looks quite different now because
it is my wife’s and my bedroom. I was instructing the doctor in the
various steps he should take to cure my father, while he, spectacles in
hand, and with a distracted look, was shouting that it was not worth
while doing all these things. I did not see him as he is now, old and
decrepit, but keen and vigorous as he was then. This is what he was
saying: “We must not apply leeches; they will only recall him to life
and suffering.” I meanwhile was banging a book of prescriptions with my
fist and shouting: “Bring leeches! I will have those leeches! And the
strait-jacket too!”
Apparently I made a noise in my dream, for my wife woke me up in the
middle of it. Distant shades! It seems one can only recapture you by an
optical illusion which turns you upside down.
My sleeping so peacefully is the last thing I can remember about that
day. Then followed several weary days which seem to me now to have
been all exactly alike. As the weather improved they said that my
father’s condition improved too. He could walk across the room now by
himself, and began his daily progress from bed to sofa, in search of
air. Sometimes he would watch for a few minutes through the closed
windows the sunlit, dazzling snow which still covered the garden.
I would go in from time to time expecting to find that return of
consciousness prophesied by Coprosich, and resolved to overcloud it
again by discussion. But though my father’s eyesight and hearing seemed
to improve daily there was no real return of consciousness.
All the time my father was ill my heart was filled with a strange
mixture of grief and resentment. The principal element in this
resentment was my rage against Coprosich, which only grew greater the
longer I tried to conceal it. But I also felt furious with myself for
not daring to renew my discussion with the doctor, and tell him that
I did not care a fig for all his science, and that I hoped my father
would die and be saved all that suffering.
And finally I began to feel resentment against my father. Anyone will
understand who has tried watching day after day, for weeks on end, by
the bed of somebody who is ill, when one knows nothing about nursing
and is therefore obliged to be a passive spectator. I felt the need of
a real rest in order to clear up my mind and take some of the sting
out of the grief I felt on my father’s account and on my own. Instead
of which I was obliged to be constantly fighting with him, now forcing
him to take his medicine and now preventing him leaving the room. And
conflict always produces anger.
One evening Carlo, the nurse, called me in to see a further improvement
in my father. Greatly excited I rushed in, fearing that the old man
had become conscious of his condition and would upbraid me for it.
My father was standing in the middle of the room in his underclothes,
with his red silk night-cap on his head. He still had great
difficulty in breathing, but from time to time said a few words quite
intelligibly. Just as I went in he said to Carlo:
“Open!”
He wanted him to open the window. Carlo replied that he could not
because it was too cold. For a little while my father forgot what
it was he had asked. He sat down in an arm-chair by the window and
stretched out his legs so as to be more comfortable. When he saw me he
said:
“Have you been asleep?” I don’t think he heard my reply. This was not
the kind of recovery I had feared. When you are actually dying you
have other things to do than to think about death. His whole being was
concentrated on the effort to get his breath. Instead of listening to
my answer he shouted to Carlo again:
“Open!”
He could not rest. He got up from the chair and tried standing. Then
with a great effort, and with the help of the nurse, he lay down on the
bed, lying first for an instant on his left side, and then changing
almost immediately to his right, for he knew that he could hold out
in this position for several minutes on end. Then he called the nurse
again to help him to his feet, and went back to the arm-chair, where he
remained sitting much longer than before.
The same day, on one of his frequent journeys from the bed to the
arm-chair, he stopped in front of the glass and looked at himself in it
for quite a long time. Then he murmured:
“I look like a Mexican!”
It must have been to break the awful monotony of his journey to and
from the arm-chair that he started trying to smoke that day. But he got
no further than filling his mouth once with smoke and puffing it out
again, exhausted.
Once Carlo called me in during a moment of complete consciousness:
“Am I seriously ill then?” he had asked in a terrified voice; but it
was only one brief flash followed by a moment’s delirium. He sat up in
bed and thought he had just woke up, and that he was spending the night
in an hotel in Vienna. It was probably the longing to cool his burning
mouth which made him dream of Vienna where there is such lovely water
and so cold. He went on to speak of the delicious water which awaited
him at the nearest fountain.
He was a restless patient, but otherwise very good. I was continually
afraid of his becoming irritable when he discovered how ill he really
was, so that his gentleness did nothing to diminish my fatigue; but
he always patiently accepted any new suggestion that was made to him,
because he was always hoping to get relief from one of them. When
the nurse offered to go and get him a glass of milk he accepted with
genuine delight. But he was soon as eager to get rid of the milk as he
was to have it, and because it was not taken from him after he had had
one small sip, he threw it on the ground.
The doctor never showed any sign of being disappointed by the invalid’s
condition. Every day he noticed a slight improvement, but he regarded
the catastrophe as inevitable. One day he arrived in his carriage
and was in a great hurry to be off again. He told me to persuade my
father to lie down as much as possible, because a horizontal position
was better for the circulation. He spoke to my father about it too,
who heard what he said and promised to do so with an air of complete
understanding, but nevertheless remained standing in the middle of the
room and seemed to fall back at once into a state of absent-mindedness,
or rather into that preoccupation with his lack of breath which I
described above.
The following night I experienced for the last time the fear of that
much-dreaded return of consciousness. He was sitting by the window in
an arm-chair, and gazing through the panes out on to the clear starlit
sky. His breathing was still laboured, but he was so absorbed in
watching the sky that it did not seem to trouble him. Perhaps it was
his efforts to get his breath which made him seem to nod his head as if
in sign of assent.
I thought with horror: Now at last he is considering the problem he has
always avoided. I tried to discover which exact point of the sky it
was that he was gazing at. There he sat, upright, with the intense and
concentrated effort of someone who is trying to peer through a window
too high up. I thought he was looking at the Pleiades. During his whole
life he had probably never gazed into the distance for so long on end.
Suddenly he turned his whole body towards me, still sitting upright in
his chair.
“Look! Look!” he said, with a stern, commanding air. He returned once
more to his study of the sky, and then said to me again:
“Did you see? Did you see?”
He tried to go back again to the stars, but he could not: he sank
exhausted into the arm-chair, and when I asked him what it was he had
wanted to show me, he did not seem to remember that he had wanted
to show me anything--he probably did not even hear me. The word he
had been searching for, which he so much wanted to confide to me had
escaped him for ever.
The night was long, but not particularly fatiguing either for me or for
the nurse. We let the sick man do as he liked, and he went on walking
about the room in his queer costume, quite unconscious that he was
waiting for death. Once he tried to go out in the passage where it was
very cold. I would not let him and he obeyed at once. Another time
when his nurse, who had heard the doctor’s orders, tried to prevent
him getting up, my father rebelled. He shook off his stupor and wept
and swore as he struggled to raise himself. I insisted on his being
allowed to move about exactly as he pleased. He quieted down at once,
and returned to his life of silence and his vain pilgrimage in search
of relief.
When the doctor came he allowed himself to be examined, and even tried
to do as he was told and to take a deep breath. Then, turning to me, he
said:
“What is he saying?”
He forgot me for a moment, but soon came back again:
“When can I go out?”
The doctor, encouraged by his docility, urged me to tell him that he
ought to lie down more. My father only listened to voices he knew, like
mine and Maria’s and the nurse’s. I had no faith in the value of that
prescription, but I repeated it to him and put a touch of severity into
my tone.
“Yes, yes,” my father agreed, and at once got up and went to the
arm-chair.
The doctor watched him and murmured with resignation:
“It is clear that it relieves him a little to change his position.”
I went to bed soon afterwards, but I could not close my eyes; I was
probing the future, and trying to discover in it some motive for
continuing my efforts at self-improvement. I cried a great deal,
more on my own account than for my poor father who roamed his room
perpetually in a vain effort to find peace.
When I got up Maria went to lie down, and I joined the nurse at my
father’s bedside. I was very tired and depressed, and my father was
more restless than ever.
Then came that terrible, unforgettable scene which threw its shadow
far into the future, and deprived me of all my courage and of all joy
in life. The intensity of my grief was only mitigated when time had
blunted all my feelings.
The nurse said:
“What a good thing it would be if we could persuade him to stay in bed.
The doctor attaches so much importance to it.”
I had been lying down on the sofa. I got up at once and went over to
the bed where my father was lying at the moment, struggling more than
ever to get his breath. I was resolved to insist on his remaining on
the bed for at least half an hour, as the doctor had ordered. Surely it
was my duty to do so.
Suddenly my father started struggling to escape the pressure of my
hands which were holding him down, and began edging himself towards the
other side of the bed. I kept my hand firmly on his shoulder and forced
him down, while at the same time I ordered him in a loud voice not to
move about. He obeyed for a few seconds, startled by the sternness of
my voice. Then he exclaimed:
“I am dying!”
And he sat straight up. I in my turn was startled by his cry and
relaxed the pressure of my hand, so that he succeeded in sitting on the
edge of the bed, exactly facing me. I think he was furious at finding
himself held down by force, even for a moment, and that he had the
impression that it was I who was depriving him of the air he needed so
much, just as I was shutting out the light by standing, while he was
sitting down. With a supreme effort he struggled to his feet, raised
his arm high above his head, and brought it down with the whole weight
of his falling body on my cheek. Then he slipped from the bed on to the
floor and lay there--dead!
I did not realise he was dead, but my heart contracted with grief
at the thought of the punishment which the dying man had tried to
administer to me. I raised him with Carlo’s help and got him back on to
the bed. Then, crying like a child who has been punished, I shouted in
his ear:
“It was not my fault! It was that cursed doctor who wanted to make you
lie down!”
It was a lie. Then I promised, like a child, never to do it again:
“I will let you do exactly what you like.”
The nurse said:
“He is dead.”
They had to use force to get me to leave the room. He was dead and it
was impossible for me to prove my innocence.
When I was alone I tried to recover myself. I began reasoning: it was
out of the question that my father, who was not in his right mind,
could have taken such perfect aim at my cheek with the direct intention
of punishing me.
But how could I ever know for certain that my reasoning was just? I
even thought of consulting Coprosich about it. He, as a doctor, might
be able to throw some light on a dying man’s ability to plan and
execute a design like that. Perhaps I had only been the victim of a
supreme effort on my father’s part to recover his breath. But I never
spoke to Coprosich about it. I could not bear to go and tell him what
sort of a parting I had had from my father, especially as it was he who
had actually accused me of not showing him enough kindness.
It was another terrible blow to me when, later in the evening, I heard
Carlo say to Maria in the kitchen:
“You should have seen how the old man raised his arm and gave his son a
great blow in the face. It was the last thing he did.” Carlo had seen
it then, so of course Coprosich would hear all about it.
When at last I went back to the death chamber I found they had already
dressed the corpse. His beautiful white hair had been brushed, no
doubt by the nurse. Death had already stiffened the body, which lay
there proud and menacing. His large, shapely, powerful hands were
livid, but were disposed so naturally that they seemed ready to grasp
and punish. After that I felt that I could not bear to see him again.
At the funeral I tried to recall my father as I had always known him
since childhood, indulgent and weak; and I persuaded myself that the
blow he had given me when he was dying could not have been intentional.
I became gentle and kind, and the memory of my father was always with
me and grew ever dearer to me. It was like a delightful dream; now that
we were in perfect agreement, I was the weak one and he the strong.
I returned to the religion of my childhood and held to it for a long
time. I imagined that my father could hear what I said, and I was able
to tell him that it had not been my fault, but the doctor’s. The lie
was no longer of any importance because now he understood everything
and so did I. For some time I continued these conversations with my
father, which were as sweet and secret as an illicit love; to everyone
else I went on laughing at religious practices, though in reality--I
will confess it here--I daily with my whole heart commended my father’s
soul to the care of some unknown being. It is the essence of true
religion that one does not need to make a loud profession of it in
order to get the consolation which at certain moments one cannot do
without.