Читать книгу Speechless - Tom Lanoye - Страница 10

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AND THIS IS the story of a stroke, devastating as an internal lightning bolt, and of the agonizingly slow decline that over the next two years afflicted a five-fold mother and first-class amateur actress. Her life had always been dedicated to the spoken word, hard work, healthy food for all the family, economical indulgence and affordable hygiene from head to toe. And yet she of all people was repaid by life, which she had always honoured—employing limited means and unbridled ambition, proud stubbornness and stubborn pride—with ingratitude and blunt cruelty.

She lost first her speech, then her dignity, then her heartbeat.

Everyone who knew her had always expected that things would turn out differently. That her heart, fragile and wonky as she always called it herself, would not wait for two years. It would stop beating as soon as that mouth of hers could no longer speak, no longer scold, praise, taste, snigger and declaim—and I’m still omitting arguing and puffing frugally on her filter cigarettes, lighter and lighter as the years went on, and I’m still overlooking the contemptuous pursing of her thin lips when she didn’t like something. I shan’t even mention the mocking raising of one corner of her mouth and the opposite eyebrow when she wished to indicate that no one need try to tell her anything about her trade, her methods of upbringing, her cookery books, her view of excellent theatre or the rest of human existence.

And I’d like to warn you, reader. If you don’t like works that are largely based on truth and simply supply the missing parts from imagination; if you’re put off by a novel which according to many people cannot be called a novel, because it lacks a proper head, a beautiful curly tail and an orderly middle section, let alone contains a respectable coherent story by way of intestines; if texts that are at the same time a lament, a tribute and a resounding curse make you ill, because they are about life itself and at the same time present only one dear relation of the author—then the moment has already come for you to shut this book.

Replace it on the pile in the shop where you are standing, push it back among the other books on the shelf in your club, your rest home, your public library, your friends’ drawing room or the property you have forced your way into.

Buy something else, borrow something else, steal something else.

And miss my mother’s story.