Winter Journal

by Paul Auster

  You couldn’t cry. You couldn’t grieve in the way people normally do, and so your body broke down and did the grieving for you. If not for the various incidental factors that preceded the onset of panic (your wife’s absence, the alcohol, the lack of sleep, your cousin’s phone call, the coffee), it is possible the attack never would have taken place. But in the end those elements are of only secondary importance. The question is why you couldn’t let yourself go in the minutes and hours that followed your mother’s death, why, for two full days, you were unable to shed any tears for her. Was it because a part of you was secretly glad she was dead? A dark thought, a thought so dark and disturbing that it scares you even to express it, but even if you are willing to entertain the possibility that it is true, you doubt that it would account for your failure to cry. You didn’t cry after your father’s death either. Nor after the deaths of your grandparents, nor after the death of your most beloved cousin, who died of breast cancer when she was thirty-eight, nor after the deaths of the many friends who have left you over the years. Not even at fourteen, when you were less than a foot away from a boy who was struck and killed by lightning, the boy whose dead body you sat next to and watched over for the next hour in a rain-drenched meadow, desperately trying to warm up his body and revive him because you didn’t understand he was dead—not even that monstrous death could coax a single tear from you. Your eyes water up when you watch certain movies, you have dropped tears onto the pages of numerous books, you have cried at moments of immense personal sorrow, but death freezes you and shuts you down, robbing you of all emotion, all affect, all connection to your own heart. From the very beginning, you have gone dead in the face of death, and that is what happened to you with your mother’s death as well. At least for the first little while, the first two days and nights, but then lightning struck again, and you were scorched.

  Forget what your cousin said to you on the phone. You were angry at her, yes, appalled that she would stoop to slinging mud at such an inappropriate time, revolted by her nastiness, her sanctimonious contempt for a person who never did her an ounce of harm, but her accusations of infidelity against your mother were old business to you by then, and even if you had no proof, no evidence to support or deny the charges, you had long suspected that your mother might have strayed during her marriage to your father. You were fifty-five years old when you had that conversation with your cousin, and with so much time to have pondered the details of your parents’ unfortunate marriage, you in fact hoped that your mother had found some comfort with another man (or men). But nothing was certain, and only once did you have any inkling that something might be amiss, a single moment when you were twelve or thirteen, which thoroughly perplexed you at the time: walking into the house one day after school, thinking no one else was there, picking up the telephone to make a call, and hearing a man’s voice on the line, a voice that did not belong to your father, saying no more than Good-bye, an altogether neutral word perhaps, but spoken with great tenderness, and then your mother saying back to him, Good-bye, darling. That was the end of the conversation. You had no idea what the context was, could not identify the man, had heard almost nothing, and yet you worried about it for days, so much so that you finally found the courage to ask your mother about it, she who had always been honest and direct with you, you felt, who had never refused to answer your questions, but this time, this one time, she looked puzzled when you told her what you had heard, as if she had been caught off guard, and then a moment later she laughed, saying she couldn’t remember, she didn’t know what you were talking about. It was entirely possible that she didn’t remember, that the conversation was of no importance and the endearment had not meant what you thought it had, but a tiny germ of doubt was planted in your head that day, doubt that quickly vanished in the weeks and months that followed, but four or five years later, when your mother announced that she was leaving your father, you couldn’t help thinking back to the last sentences of that accidentally overheard conversation. Did any of it matter? No, not that you could think of. Your parents had been destined to split up from the day they were married, and whether your mother had slept with the man she called darling, whether there was another man or several men or no man at all, did not play a part in their divorce. Symptoms are not causes, and whatever ugly little thoughts your cousin might have harbored against your mother, she knew nothing about anything. It is undeniable that her call helped to unleash your panic attack—the timing of the call, the circumstances of the call—but what she said to you that morning was stale news.

  On the other hand, even though you happened to be her son, you know next to nothing yourself. Too many gaps, too many silences and evasions, too many threads lost over the years for you to stitch together a coherent story. Useless to talk about her from the outside, then. Whatever can be told must be pulled from the inside, from your insides, the accumulation of memories and perceptions you continue to carry around in your body—and which left you, for reasons that will never be entirely known, gasping for breath on the dining room floor, certain you were about to die.

  A hasty, ill-considered marriage, an impetuous marriage between two incompatible souls that ran out of steam before the honeymoon was over. A twenty-one-year-old girl from New York (born and bred in Brooklyn, translated to Manhattan at sixteen) and a thirty-four-year-old bachelor from Newark who had begun life in Wisconsin and had left there, fatherless, at the age of seven, when your grandmother shot and killed your grandfather in the kitchen of their house. The bride was the younger of two daughters, the product of yet another ill-considered, mismatched marriage (Your father would be such a wonderful man—if only he were different) who had dropped out of high school to work (clerical jobs in offices, later a photographer’s assistant) and never told you much about her earlier loves and romances. A vague story about a boyfriend who had died in the war, an even vaguer story about a brief flirtation with actor Steve Cochran, but beyond that nothing at all. She finished up her diploma by going to school at night (Commercial High), but no college afterward, and no college for your father either, who was still a boy when he entered the Land of Work and began supporting himself as soon as he graduated from high school at eighteen. Those are the known facts, the few bits of verifiable information that have been passed down to you. Then come the invisible years, the first three or four years of your life, the blank time before any possibility of recall, and therefore you have nothing to go on but the various stories your mother told you later: your near death at sixteen months from tonsillitis (106° fever, and the doctor telling her: It’s in God’s hands now), the vagaries of your cranky, disobedient stomach, a condition that was diagnosed as an allergy or intolerance to something (wheat? gluten?) and forced you to subsist for two and a half years on a diet limited almost exclusively to bananas (so many bananas consumed in that time before memory that you still recoil from the sight and smell of them and have not eaten one in sixty years), the jutting nail that tore apart your cheek in the Newark department store in 1950, your remarkable ability at age three to identify the make and model of every car on the road (remarkable to your mother, who read it as a sign of incipient genius), but most of all the pleasure she communicated to you in the telling of these stories, the way she seemed to exult in the mere fact of your existence, and because her marriage was such an unhappy one, you realize now that she turned to you as a form of consolation, to give her life a meaning and a purpose it was otherwise lacking. You were the beneficiary of her unhappiness, and you were well loved, especially well loved, without question deeply loved. That first of all, that above and beyond everything else there might be to say: she was an ardent and dedicated mother to you during your infancy and early childhood, and whatever is good in you now, whatever strengths you might possess, come from that time before you can remember who you were.