The Lover

by Marguerite Duras

  It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it’s the fact that she’s wearing a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon.

  The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat.

  How I came by it I’ve forgotten. I can’t think who could have given it to me. It must have been my mother who bought it for me because I asked her. The one thing certain is that it was another markdown, another final reduction. But why was it bought? No woman, no girl wore a man’s fedora in that colony then. No native woman, either. What must have happened is: I try it on just for fun, look at myself in the shopkeeper’s glass, and see that there, beneath the man’s hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become, on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly it’s deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time. With the shoes it must have been much the same, but after the hat. They contradict the hat, as the hat contradicts the puny body, so they’re right for me. I wear them all the time too, go overywhere in these shoes, this hat, out of doors, in all weathers, on every occasion. And to town.

  I found a photograph of my son when he was twenty. He’s in California with his friends, Erika and Elizabeth Lennard. He’s thin, so thin you’d think he was a white Ugandan too. His smile strikes me as arrogant, derisive. He’s trying to assume the warped image of a young drifter. That’s how he likes to see himself, poor, with that poor boy’s look, that attitude of someone young and thin. It’s this photograph that comes closest to the one never taken of the girl on the ferry.

  The one who bought the flat-brimmed pink hat with the broad black ribbon was her, the woman in another photograph, my mother. I recognize her better in that than in more recent photos. It’s the courtyard of a house by the Small Lake in Hanoi. We’re together, she and us, her children. I’m four years old. My mother’s in the middle of the picture. I recognize the awkward way she holds herself, the way she doesn’t smile, the way she waits for the photo to be over and done with. By her drawn face, by a certain untidiness in her dress, by her drowsy expression, I can tell that it’s hot, that she’s tired, that she’s bored. But it’s by the way we’re dressed, us children, all anyhow, that I recognize a mood my mother sometimes used to fall into, and of which already, at the age we were in the photo, we knew the warning signs—the way she’d suddenly be unable to wash us, dress us, or sometimes even feed us. Every day my mother experienced this deep despondency about living. Sometimes it lasted, sometimes it would vanish with the dark. I had the luck to have a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t quite make her forget it. What I’ll never know is what kind of practical considerations made her leave us like that, every day. This time, perhaps, it’s the foolish thing she’s just done, the house she’s just bought—the one in the photograph—which we absolutely didn’t need, and at a time when my father was already very ill, not far from death, only a few months. Or has she just learned she’s got the same illness he is going to die of? The dates are right. What I don’t know, and she can’t have known either, is what kind of considerations they were that haunted her and made that dejection rise up before her. Was it the death, already at hand, of my father? Or the dying of the light? Doubts about her marriage? About her husband? About her children? Or about all these appurtenances in general?

  It happened every day. Of that I’m sure. It must have come on quite suddenly. At a given moment every day the despair would make its appearance. And then would follow an inability to go on, or sleep, or sometimes nothing, or sometimes, instead, the buying of houses, the removals, or sometimes the moodiness, just the moodiness, the dejection. Or sometimes she’d be like a queen, give anything she was asked for, take anything she was offered, that house by the Small Lake, for absolutely no reason, my father already dying, or the flat-brimmed hat, because the girl had set her heart on it, or the same thing with the gold lamé shoes. Or else nothing, or just sleep, die.

  I’ve never seen any of those films where American Indian women wear the same kind of flat-brimmed hat, with their hair in braids hanging down in front. That day I have braids too, not put up as usual, but not the same as theirs either. I too have a couple of long braids hanging down in front like those women in the films I’ve never seen, but mine are the braids of a child. Ever since I’ve had the hat, I’ve stopped putting my hair up so that I can wear it. For some time I’ve scraped my hair back to try to make it flat, so that people can’t see it. Every night I comb and braid it before I go to bed, as my mother taught me. My hair is heavy, soft, burdensome, a coppery mass that comes down to my waist. People often say it’s my prettiest feature, and I take that to mean I’m not pretty. I had this remarkable hair cut off when I was twenty-three, in Paris, five years after I left my mother. I said, “Cut it off.” And he did. All at once, a clean sweep, I felt the cold scissors on the skin of my neck. It fell on the floor. They asked me if I wanted to keep it, they’d wrap it up for me to take away. I said no. After that people didn’t say I had pretty hair any more, I mean not as much as they used to, before. Afterwards they’d just say, “She’s got nice eyes. And her smile’s not unattractive.”

  On the ferry, look, I’ve still got my hair. Fifteen and a half. I’m using make-up already. I use Crème Tokalon, and try to camouflage the freckles on my cheeks, under the eyes. On top of the Crème Tokalon I put natural-color powder—Houbigant. The powder is my mother’s, she wears it to go to government receptions. That day I’ve got lipstick on too, dark red, cherry, as the fashion was then. I don’t know where I got that, perhaps Hélène Lagonelle stole it for me from her mother, I forget. I’m not wearing perfume. My mother makes do with Palmolive and eau de Cologne.

  • • •

  On the ferry, beside the bus, there’s a big black limousine with a chauffeur in white cotton livery. Yes, it’s the big funereal car that’s in my books. It’s a Morris Léon-Bollée. The black Lancia at the French embassy in Calcutta hasn’t yet made its entrance on the literary scene.

  Between drivers and employers there are still sliding glass panels. There are still fold-down seats. A car is still as big as a bedroom.

  Inside the limousine there’s a very elegant man looking at me. He’s not a white man. He’s wearing European clothes—the light tussore suit of the Saigon bankers. He’s looking at me. I’m used to people looking at me. People do look at white women in the colonies; at twelve-year-old white girls too. For the past three years white men, too, have been looking at me in the streets, and my mother’s men friends have been kindly asking me to have tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis at the Sporting Club.

  • • •

  I could get it wrong, could think I’m beautiful like women who really are beautiful, like women who are looked at, just because people really do look at me a lot. I know it’s not a question of beauty, though, but of something else, for example, yes, something else—mind, for example. What I want to seem I do seem, beautiful too if that’s what people want me to be. Beautiful or pretty, pretty for the family for example, for the family no more than that. I can become anything anyone wants me to be. And believe it. Believe I’m charming too. And when I believe it, and it becomes true for anyone seeing me who wants me to be according to his taste, I know that too. And so I can be deliberately charming even though I’m haunted by the killing of my brother. In that death, just one accomplice, my mother. I use the word charming as people used to use it in relation to me, in relation to children.

  I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care
, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think. I look at the women in the streets of Saigon, and upcountry. Some of them are very beautiful, very white, they take enormous care of their beauty here, especially upcountry. They don’t do anything, just save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy, the long six-months leaves every three years, when at last they’ll be able to talk about what it’s like here, this peculiar colonial existence, the marvelous domestic service provided by the houseboys, the vegetation, the dances, the white villas, big enough to get lost in, occupied by officials in distant outposts. They wait, these women. They dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves. In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance, they already have huge wardrobes full of more dresses than they know what to do with, added to one by one like time, like the long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are deserted for a young maid who keeps her mouth shut. Ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves.

  This self-betrayal of women always struck me as a mistake, an error.

  You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it.

  Hélène Lagonelle was the only one who escaped the law of error. She was backward, a child still.

  • • •

  For a long time I’ve had no dresses of my own. My dresses are all a sort of sack, made out of old dresses of my mother’s which themselves are all a sort of sack. Except for those my mother has made for me by Dô. She’s the housekeeper who will never leave my mother even when she goes back to France, even when my elder brother tries to rape her in the house that goes with my mother’s job in Sadec, even when her wages stop being paid. Dô was brought up by the nuns, she can embroider and do pleats, she can sew by hand as people haven’t sewed by hand for centuries, with hair-fine needles. As she can embroider, my mother has her embroider sheets. As she can do pleats, my mother has her make me dresses with pleats, dresses with flounces, I wear them as if they were sacks, they’re frumpish, childish, two sets of pleats in front and a Peter Pan collar, with a gored skirt or panels cut on the bias to make them look “professional.” I wear these dresses as if they were sacks, with belts that take away their shape and make them timeless.

  Fifteen and a half. The body is thin, undersized almost, childish breasts still, red and pale-pink make-up. And then the clothes, the clothes that might make people laugh, but don’t. I can see it’s all there. All there, but nothing yet done. I can see it in the eyes, all there already in the eyes. I want to write. I’ve already told my mother: That’s what I want to do—write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. She says grimly, When you’ve got your math degree you can write if you like, it won’t be anything to do with me then. She’s against it, it’s not worthy, it’s not real work, it’s nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.

  The girl in the felt hat is in the muddy light of the river, alone on the deck of the ferry, leaning on the rails. The hat makes the whole scene pink. It’s the only color. In the misty sun of the river, the sun of the hot season, the banks have faded away, the river seems to reach to the horizon. It flows quietly, without a sound, like the blood in the body. No wind but that in the water. The engine of the ferry is the only sound, a rickety old engine with burned-out rods. From time to time, in faint bursts, the sound of voices. And the barking of dogs, coming from all directions, from beyond the mist, from all the villages. The girl has known the ferryman since she was a child. He smiles at her and asks after her mother the headmistress, Madame la Directrice. He says he often sees her cross over at night, says she often goes to the property in Cambodia. Her mother is well, says the girl. All around the ferry is the river, it’s brimfull, its moving waters sweep through, never mixing with, the stagnant waters of the rice fields. The river has picked up all it’s met with since Tonle Sap and the Cambodian forest. It carries everything along, straw huts, forests, burned-out fires, dead birds, dead dogs, drowned tigers and buffalos, drowned men, bait, islands of water hyacinths all stuck together. Everything flows toward the Pacific, no time for anything to sink, all is swept along by the deep and headlong storm of the inner current, suspended on the surface of the river’s strength.

  I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She’s jealous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I’ll be the first to leave. There are still a few years to wait before she loses me, loses this one of her children. For the sons there’s nothing to fear. But this one, she knows, one day she’ll go, she’ll manage to escape. Head of the class in French. The headmaster of the high school tells her, your daughter’s head of the class in French, madame. My mother says nothing, nothing, she’s cross because it’s not her sons who are head of the class in French. The beast, my mother, my love, asks, What about math? Answer: Not yet, but it will come. My mother asks, When? Answer: When she makes up her mind to it, madame.

  • • •

  My mother, my love, her incredible ungainliness, with her cotton stockings darned by Dô, in the tropics she still thinks you have to wear stockings to be a lady, a headmistress, her dreadful shapeless dresses, mended by Dô, she’s still straight out of her Picardy farm full of female cousins, thinks you ought to wear everything till it’s worn out, that you have to be deserving, her shoes, her shoes are down-at-heel, she walks awkwardly, painfully, her hair’s drawn back tight into a bun like a Chinese woman’s, we’re ashamed of her, I’m ashamed of her in the street outside the school, when she drives up to the school in her old Citroën B12 everyone looks, but she, she doesn’t notice anything, ever, she ought to be locked up, beaten, killed. She looks at me and says, Perhaps you’ll escape. Day and night, this obsession. It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.

  When my mother emerges, comes out of her despair, she sees the man’s hat and the gold lamé shoes. She asks what’s it all about. I say nothing. She looks at me, is pleased, smiles. Not bad, she says, they quite suit you, make a change. She doesn’t ask if it’s she who bought them, she knows she did. She knows she’s capable of it, that sometimes, those times I’ve mentioned, you can get anything you like out of her, she can’t refuse us anything. I say, Don’t worry, they weren’t expensive. She asks where. I say it was in the rue Catinat, marked-down markdowns. She looks at me with some fellow feeling. She must think it’s a good sign, this show of imagination, the way the girl has thought of dressing like this. She not only accepts this buffoonery, this unseemliness, she, sober as a widow, dressed in dark colors like an unfrocked nun, she not only accepts it, she likes it.

  The link with poverty is there in the man’s hat too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow. All around her are wildernesses, wastes. The sons are wildernesses, they’ll never do anything. The salt land’s a wilderness too, the money’s lost for good, it’s all over. The only thing left is this girl, she’s growing up, perhaps one day she’ll find out how to bring in some money. That’s why, though she doesn’t know it, that’s why the mother lets the girl go out dressed like a child prostitute. And that’s why the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother smile.

  Her mother won’t stop her when she tries to make money. The child will say, I asked him for five hundred piastres so that we can go back to France. Her mother will say, Good, that’s what we’ll need to set ourselves up in Paris, we’ll be able to manage, she’ll say, with five hundred piastres. The child knows what she’s doing is what
the mother would have chosen for her to do, if she’d dared, if she’d had the strength, if the pain of her thoughts hadn’t been there every day, wearing her out.

  In the books I’ve written about my childhood I can’t remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don’t know if I wrote about how we hated her too, or about our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can’t understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child. It’s the area on whose brink silence begins. What happens there is silence, the slow travail of my whole life. I’m still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I’ve never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

  • • •

  When I’m on the Mekong ferry, the day of the black limousine, my mother hasn’t yet given up the land by the dike. Every so often, still, we make the journey, at night, as before, still all three of us, to spend a few days there. We stay on the veranda of the bungalow, facing the mountains of Siam. Then we go home again. There’s nothing she can do there, but she goes. My younger brother and I are beside her on the veranda overlooking the forest. We’re too old now, we don’t go bathing in the river any more, we don’t go hunting black panther in the marshes in the estuary any more, or go into the forest, or into the villages in the pepper plantations. Everything has grown up all around us. There are no more children, either on the buffalos or anywhere else. We too have become strange, and the same sluggishness that has overtaken my mother has overtaken us too. We’ve learned nothing, watching the forest, waiting, weeping. The lower part of the land is lost for good and all, the servants work the patches higher up, we let them keep the paddy for themselves, they stay on without wages, making use of the stout straw huts my mother had built. They love us as if we were members of their own family, they act as if they were looking after the bungalow for us, and they do look after it. All the cheap crockery is still there. The roof, rotted by the endless rain, goes on disintegrating. But the furniture is kept polished. And the shape of the bungalow stands out clear as a diagram, visible from the road. The doors are opened every day to let the wind through and dry out the wood. And shut every night against stray dogs and smugglers from the mountains.