A Woman's Story

I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.

I shall never hear the sound of her voice again. It was her voice, together with her words, her hands, and her way of moving and laughing, which linked the woman I am to the child I once was. The last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.

With so much misery around, fighting for social advancement had lost all meaning.

Parting with one's family was invariably seen as a sign of misfortune. (In Norman French, "ambition" refers to the trauma of separation; a dog, for instance, can die of ambition.)

Ya no volveré a oír su voz. Es ella, con sus palabras, sus manos, sus gestos, su manera de reír y de caminar, la que unía a la mujer que soy con la niña que fui. Perdí el nexo con el mundo del que salí.

She knew all the household tips that lessened the strain of poverty. This knowledge - handed down from mother to daughter for many centuries - stops at my generation. I am only the archivist.

Me parece que ahora escribo sobre mi madre para, a mi vez, traerla al mundo.

Until I was twenty, I thought I was responsible for her growing old.

It’s stupid not to know when in our lives we’ll be happiest.

Living with us was like living in a world that welcomed her and rejected her at the same time.

Because she feared people wouldn't love her for who she was, she hoped they would love her for what she could give.

Ci rivolgevamo la parola con quel tono particolare, un misto di irritazione e perenni rimostranze, che faceva sempre pensare, a torto, che stessimo litigando, e che saprei riconoscere, tra una madre e una figlia, in qualsiasi lingua.

Etrafta bunca sefalet varken toplumsal ilerleme için çırpınmak tüm anlamını yitirmişti.

İnsanların ona olduğu gibi sevmeyeceklerinden korktuğu için, vereceği şeylerle sevilmeyi umuyordu.

I feel such emptiness at the thought: this is the first spring she will never see. (Now I can feel the power of ordinary sentences, or even clichés.)

Nobody knows that I am writing about her. But then, in a sense, I feel I am not writing about her. It’s more like experiencing again the times and places we shared when she was alive.

insanların onu olduğu gibi sevmeyeceklerinden korktuğu için vereceği şeylerle sevilmeyi umuyordu

We had gone back to addressing each other in that particular tone of speech- a cross between exasperation and perpetual resentment- which led people to believe, wrongly, that we were always arguing. I would recognize that tone of conversation between a mother and her daughter anywhere in the world.

In the afternoon, she settled down at the living room table with her writing pad and her address book, like she used to. She started several letters but, after an hour, found she couldn’t go on and tore up everything she had written. One of these letters, written in November, read: ‘Dear Paulette, I remain in darkness.

dünyanın her yerinde, her gün bir kadının etrafını sarmış, onu taşlamaya hazır erkekler var