The passage of love, everywhere and always

In Romain Gary’s celebrated 1960 novel The Promise at Dawn, the title promise is a mother’s pledge of everlasting love to her child at the beginning of his life. It is also a promise destined not to be fulfilled.

The novel blends real events with invention and offers, in the writer’s view, one of the most striking tributes to a mother. Yet this is not a mother one would wish upon even an enemy. Gary says he owes her everything: his literary, diplomatic and military careers, his guardian angel, and even the battles she fought in his place. He also recognizes that he owes her all his emotional wounds.

“It's not good to be loved so much, so young, so early. You acquire bad habits. You think that's how it is. You think it exists elsewhere, that you can find it again. […] At the dawn of life, a mother's love gives you a promise that it will never keep. After that, you are condemned to eat a cold dish for the rest of your days. From then on, every woman who takes you in her arms and presses you to her heart offers nothing but condolences. You always return to your mother's grave to howl like an abandoned dog.”

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It's not good to be loved so much, so young, so early. You acquire bad habits. You think that's how it is. You think it exists elsewhere, that you can find it again. […] At the dawn of life, a mother's love gives you a promise that it will never keep. After that, you are condemned to eat a cold dish for the rest of your days. From then on, every woman who takes you in her arms and presses you to her heart offers nothing but condolences. You always return to your mother's grave to howl like an abandoned dog.

The exact opposite of The Promise at Dawn is Gary’s 1975 novel The Life Before Us, which has been republished in Greek this year in a new translation. Here, the mothers are prostitutes who abandon their children when an accidental pregnancy results from an encounter with an unknown man.

One such child is Momo, or Muhammad, who tells the story of his life to the bourgeois couple Nadine and Ramon in a marginal language pretending to be literate. His mother gave him to Madame Rosa, an elderly Polish Jewish woman, former prostitute and Auschwitz survivor. No longer able to work, Madame Rosa earns a living by caring for the children of prostitutes.

Sick, obese, confused, undocumented and constantly living outside the law, Madame Rosa lives on the sixth floor of a building without an elevator. She has created a secret shelter in the basement and goes there when she is afraid. When Momo asks what she fears, she gives him what he considers the truest answer he has ever heard: “You don't need reasons to be afraid.”

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You don't need reasons to be afraid.