Electrico W by Herve Le Tellier Page B

and a slightly muddy, chipped, discolored porcelain plaque. It said TO MOMMY .
    Thirty years old. How old would Duck have been? What sort of lies did they tell her that day? That her mother had gone to heaven?
    When my mother died I was in London. For an interview, with the chairman of a chemicals company. Mom had gone to the hospital a few days earlier, she was frightened. The doctor took me to one side, shook my hand: “I’m very concerned. Don’t go too far from Paris.” But I never guessed it would happen so quickly.
    I found out she had died when I returned to my hotel very late in the evening. The message left in my mailbox said: “Urgent: contacter le manager. Votre frère a phoné. Concerner votre mère.” Their use of French, even this approximate version, was thoughtful. I reread those words several times and went to sit near reception in an armchair that was a little too low for me. I wished I could feel something, feel the tears rising, but nothing came. I closed my eyes, tried to remember her face. I couldn’t.
    Under my eyelids, red and crimson hydras, almost translucent creatures, reached out their supple tentacles. I discovered the existence of these luminous shapes in my teens, and they had become familiar. They weren’t the blotches of color that stay engraved on objects, phosphenes, as I discovered, much later, they were called. They were well and truly microorganisms with lives of their own, capricious undulating specks of life.
    Every evening before I went to sleep, I liked to follow their aimless trajectories across what seemed to me to be a microscopic universe, a living primordial soup, a sort of original ocean. When I moved my eyes, the hydras followed the move for a moment, then stopped as if arrested in cloying jelly, before setting off again on their slow drifting. I concluded from this quirk that they were not the product of my imagination, and invented a serious illness for myself, an unknown infection involving giant bacteria. In the end I got used to them. I later learned they were caused by excess fluid in the vitreous humor, common in the shortsighted.
    The night I lost my mother, the hydras were everywhere, more mobile than ever in the shifting liquid shadows. They made it impossible for me to reconstitute her features or even find a memory of her, they were protecting me from pain.
    I remember the affectedly baleful expression on the hotel manager’s face when he came over to me, walking quickly, bending forward slightly.
    “Monsieur Balmer?” he asked, speaking French with almost no accent. “Terrible news, monsieur. Your mother … Your brother called this afternoon. She has passed away. Please accept my condolences and those of the hotel staff.”
    I returned to Paris on the first flight the following morning and took a taxi from the airport straight to the hospital.The driver wanted to chat—about the filthy weather, the staggered rail strike, the traffic—but I said, “I’m sorry, my mother died yesterday, I don’t feel like talking.”
    My words were like a thunderbolt and he stopped talking immediately. There was something comical about this metamorphosis, and it produced the beginnings of a smile on my face. The driver caught sight of it in the rearview mirror, and I immediately resumed my orphan’s mask.
    When I went into the room where my mother had been laid to rest, I didn’t recognize her. Her body looked tiny, with almost no depth to it, drowning in white sheets, like a pale skinny dwarf, a stranger’s corpse. Her mouth was open, gaping, as if she were asleep, knocked out by the smell of ether. Her dentures had been taken out, and, discomfited, I looked away from the obscene sight of this toothless old woman with her dry, twisted lips.
    My brother Paul was there, along with my father, and they turned to look at me. Paul stood up, put his arms around me, and hugged me with calculated intensity, he was family but not affectionate. I wanted to hug my father