Fifty Days of Solitude Read Online Free PDF

ever-patient husband.
    But on page 101 there are three long paragraphs, occupying the whole page, of direct quotation from Dietrich in conversation with her husband, overheard and then reported by her daughter who, at the time, was six years old. We are told that the actress, as she spoke, was eating stuffed cabbage, before that she had munched “on a hunk of pumpernickel, loaded with goose fat.” A paragraph later “she took another dill pickle.”
    What was I to think? What could I believe? That the child Maria retained and then produced, without question or paraphrase, these hundred or so sentences verbatim? That, in addition, she could recall the exact food her mother ate on that day more than fifty years ago? Of course, it could be said that she remembered the kind of nourishment her mother had preferred in her younger years, but these exact details, first the cabbage, then the pickles? It boggled my mind.
    From this point on, unless I was given a letter or a diary entry, I questioned everything I read. This was too bad, because Maria knew her mother well enough to claim she might well have said these outrageous things about everyone she met or knew: her sharply critical custom was to talk in this manner all her life apparently. It was, I decided, the ubiquitous presence of all those quotation marks that made me doubt her narrative. Until the last fifty pages, that is, when she told the story of her ninety-year-old mother’s tragic end as a recluse, unable to walk, stranded in a soiled and reeking bed (which she refused to allow anyone to clean), drunk most of the time, drugged the rest.
    Holding on desperately to a life she was too frightened to give up, and to a vision she had of herself provided by an adoring public that she could not bear to see updated, Dietrich lived on, sick, closeted, deluded, and furious that the fate of her aged body was common to all who lived long, resentful that she was not uniquely and youthfully preserved as she thought she deserved to be. I found it easy to believe every word of this, not only because the direct dialogue here could perhaps have been remembered (more or less) by her daughter who came often to Paris to see her, but because Maria Riva’s description of her mother’s final state rang so true to my vision of the end beautiful women often came to when the surface they have spent their lives relying upon was lost.
    For Dietrich, the hardest loss, worse than friends, lovers, admirers, hearing, health, and agility, was the youthful state of her face and her legs. It seemed to me tragic to have the sense of one’s self dependent on these transient things, so that old age is spent in a constant state of mourning for lost beauty. It is the fate of those who had it to begin with, nurtured it, relied on it, used it, and discovered at the last that it was the sine qua non of their lives. There was little else.
    C ARE in the use of language came with seldom hearing it or using it aloud. I discovered that when I began to write in those dark, early mornings I approached the whole act of word choice warily. I attributed this to not wasting my verbal energies in hearing talk and in speaking. Every word I put down on paper seemed to take on a kind of holiness, a special, single precision (to use a computer term in a different sense), resembling not at all the usual detritus that was left over after spurts of talk.
    I realized that inconsequential conversation, and television and radio talk, had deafened me to careful usage and to precision in syntax, in sentence structure, in word choice. Now when I spoke aloud, as I did occasionally to fill an oppressive space of silence, I uttered some spontaneous foolishness. When I ended a long, soundless spell by taking up my clipboard to write, I proceeded slowly, carefully, feeling I had to consider each letter of every word, because quiet and unlimited time produced a boundless prospect for choice.
    I WAS not the only