The Lover

by Marguerite Duras

  My mother didn’t foresee what was going to become of us as a result of witnessing her despair. I’m speaking particularly of the boys, her sons. But even if she had foreseen it, how could she have kept quiet about what had become her own essential fate? How could she have made them all lie—her face, her eyes, her voice? Her love? She could have died. Done away with herself. Broken up our intolerable community. Seen to it that the eldest was completely separated from the younger two. But she didn’t. She was careless, muddle-headed, irresponsible. All that. She went on living. And all three of us loved her beyond love. Just because she couldn’t, because she wasn’t able to keep quiet, hide things, lie, we, different as we all three were from one another, all three loved her in the same way.

  • • •

  It went on for a long time. Seven years. When it began we were ten. And then we were twelve. Then thirteen. Then fourteen, fifteen, Then sixteen, seventeen.

  It lasted all that age, seven years. And then finally hope was given up. Abandoned. Like the struggles against the sea. From the shade of the veranda we look at the mountains of Siam, dark in broad daylight, almost black. My mother is quiet at last, mute. We, her children, are heroic, desperate.

  My younger brother died in December 1942, during the Japanese occupation. I’d left Saigon after graduating from high school in 1931. He wrote to me just once in ten years. I never knew why. The letter was conventional, made out in a fair copy in careful handwriting without any mistakes. He told me everyone was well, the school was a success. It was a long letter, two whole pages. I recognized his writing, the same as when he was a child. He also said he had an apartment, a car, he told me the make. That he’d taken up tennis again. That he was fine, everything was fine. That he sent his fondest love. He didn’t mention the war, or our elder brother.

  I often bracket my two brothers together as she used to do, our mother. I say, My brothers, and she too, outside the family, used to say, My sons. She always talked in an insulting way about her sons’ strength. For the outside world she didn’t distinguish between them, she didn’t say the elder son was much stronger than the younger, she said he was as strong as her brothers, the farmers in the North of France. She was proud of her sons’ strength in the same way as she’d been proud of her brothers’. Like her elder son, she looked down on the weak. Of my lover from Cholon she spoke in the same way as my elder brother. I won’t write the words down. They were words that had to do with the carrion you find in the desert. I say, My brothers, because that’s what I used to say too. It was only afterwards that I referred to them differently, after my younger brother grew up and was martyred.

  Not only do we never have any celebrations in our family, not a Christmas tree, or so much as an embroidered handkerchief or a flower. We don’t even take notice of any death, any funeral, any remembrance. There’s just her. My elder brother will always be a murderer. My younger brother will die because of him. As for me, I left, tore myself away. Until she died my elder brother had her to himself.

  At that time, the time of Cholon, of the image, of the lover, my mother has an access of madness. She knows nothing of what’s happened in Cholon. But I can see she’s watching me, she suspects something. She knows her daughter, her child, and hovering around that child, for some time, there’s been an air of strangeness, a sort of reserve, quite recent, that catches the eye. The girl speaks even more slowly than usual, she’s absent-minded, she who’s usually so interested in everything, her expression has changed, she’s become a spectator even of her mother, of her mother’s unhappiness, it’s as if she were witnessing its outcome. There’s a sudden terror in my mother’s life. Her daughter’s in the direst danger, the danger of never getting married, never having a place in society, of being defenseless against it, lost, alone. My mother has attacks during which she falls on me, locks me up in my room, punches me, undresses me, comes up to me and smells my body, my underwear, says she can smell the Chinese’s scent, goes even further, looks for suspect stains on my underwear, and shouts, for the whole town to hear, that her daughter’s a prostitute, she’s going to throw her out, she wishes she’d die, no one will have anything to do with her, she’s disgraced, worse than a bitch. And she weeps, asking what she can do, except drive her out of the house so she can’t stink the place up any more.

  Outside the walls of the locked room, my brother.

  He answers my mother, tells her she’s right to beat the girl, his voice is lowered, confidential, coaxing, he says they must find out the truth, at all costs, must find out in order to save the girl, save the mother from being driven to desperation. The mother hits her as hard as she can. The younger brother shouts at the mother to leave her alone. He goes out into the garden, hides, he’s afraid I’ll be killed, he’s afraid, he’s always afraid of that stranger, our elder brother. My younger brother’s fear calms my mother down. She weeps for the disaster of her life, of her disgraced child. I weep with her. I lie. I swear by my own life that nothing has happened to me, nothing, not even a kiss. How could I, I say, with a Chinese, how could I do that with a Chinese, so ugly, such a weakling? I know my elder brother’s glued to the door, listening, he knows what my mother’s doing, he knows the girl’s naked, being beaten, and he’d like it to go on and on to the brink of harm. My mother is not unaware of my elder brother’s obscure and terrifying intent.

  We’re still very small. Battles break out regularly between my brothers, for no apparent reason except the classic one by which the elder brother says to the younger, Clear out, you’re in the way. And straightway lashes out. They fight without a word, all you can hear is their breathing, their groans, the hollow thud of the blows. My mother accompanies this scene, like all others, with an opera of shrieks.

  They both have the same talent for anger, those black, murderous fits of anger you only see in brothers, sisters, mothers. My elder brother can’t bear not being able to do evil freely, to be boss over it not only here but everywhere. My younger brother can’t bear having to look on helpless at this horror, at what his elder brother is like.

  When they fought we were equally afraid for both of their lives. My mother used to say they’d always fought, they’d never played together, never talked to one another. That they had nothing in common but her, their mother, and especially their sister. Nothing but blood.

  I believe it was only her eldest that my mother called “my child.” She sometimes called him that. The other two she called “the younger ones.”

  We said nothing about all this outside, one of the first things we’d learned was to keep quiet about the ruling principle of our life, poverty. And then about everything else. Our first confidants, though the word seems excessive, are our lovers, the people we meet away from our various homes, first in the streets of Saigon and then on ocean liners and trains, and then all over the place.

  It takes my mother all of a sudden toward the end of the afternoon, especially in the dry season, and then she’ll have the house scrubbed from top to bottom, to clean it through, scour it out, freshen it up, she says. The house is built on a raised strip of land, clear of the garden, the snakes, the scorpions, the red ants, the floodwaters of the Mekong, those that follow the great tornados of the monsoon. Because the house is raised like this it can be cleaned by having buckets of water thrown over it, sluiced right through like a garden. All the chairs are piled up on the tables, the whole house is streaming, water is lapping around the piano in the small sitting room. The water pours down the steps, spreads through the yard toward the kitchen quarters. The little houseboys are delighted, we join in with them, splash one another, then wash the floor with yellow soap. Everyone’s barefoot, including our mother. She laughs. She’s got no objection to anything. The whole house smells nice, with the delicious smell of wet earth after a storm, enough to make you wild with delight, especially when it’s mixed with the other, the smell of yellow soap, of purity, of respectability, of clean linen, of whiteness, of our mother, of the immense candor and innocence of our
mother. The house-boys’ families come along, and the houseboys’ visitors, and the white children from neighboring houses. My mother’s very happy with this disorder, she can be very very happy sometimes, long enough to forget, the time it takes to clean out the house may be enough to make her happy. She goes into the sitting room, sits down at the piano, plays the only tunes she knows by heart, the ones she learned at the normal school. She sings. Sometimes she laughs while she plays. Gets up, dances, and sings. And everyone thinks, and so does she, that you can be happy here in this house suddenly transmogrified into a pond, a water meadow, a ford, a beach.

  The two smaller children, the girl and the younger brother, are the first to remember. They suddenly stop laughing and go into the darkening garden.

  I remember, just as I’m writing this, that our elder brother wasn’t in Vinh Long when we sluiced the house out. He was living with our guardian, a village priest, in the department of Lot-et-Garonne. He too used to laugh sometimes, but never as much as we did. I forget everything, and I forgot to say this, that we were children who laughed, my younger brother and I, laughed fit to burst, fit to die.

  I see the war as I see my childhood. I see wartime and the reign of my elder brother as one. Partly, no doubt, because it was during the war that my younger brother died: his heart, as I’ve said, had given out, given up. As for my elder brother, I don’t think I ever saw him during the war. By that time it didn’t matter to me whether he was alive or dead. I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything, present in the body, in the mind, awake and asleep, all the time, a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child’s body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples. Because evil is there, at the gates, against the skin.

  We go back to the apartment. We are lovers. We can’t stop loving each other.

  Sometimes I don’t go back to the boarding school. I sleep with him. I don’t want to sleep in his arms, his warmth, but I do sleep in the same room, the same bed. Sometimes I stay away from high school. At night we go and have dinner in town. He gives me my shower, washes me, rinses me, he adores that, he puts my make-up on and dresses me, he adores me. I’m the darling of his life. He lives in terror lest I meet another man. I’m never afraid of anything like that. He’s also afraid, not because I’m white, but because I’m so young, so young he could go to prison if we were found out. He tells me to go on lying to my mother, and above all to my elder brother, never to say anything to anyone. I go on lying. I laugh at his fear. I tell him we’re much too poor for my mother to start another lawsuit, and anyway she’s lost all those she ever did start, against the land registrar, against the officials, the government, the law, she doesn’t know how to conduct them properly, how to keep calm, wait, go on waiting, she can’t, she makes a scene and spoils her chances. With this one it would be the same, so no need to be afraid.

  Marie-Claude Carpenter. She was American—from Boston, I seem to remember. Very pale eyes, grey-blue. 1943. Marie-Claude Carpenter was fair. Scarcely faded. Quite good-looking, I think. With a brief smile that froze very quickly, disappeared in a flash. With a voice that suddenly comes back to me, low, slightly grating in the high notes. She was forty-five, old already, old age itself. She lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, near the place de l’Alma. Her apartment was the huge top floor of a block overlooking the Seine. People went to dinner there in the winter. Or to lunch in the summer. The meals were ordered from the best caterers in Paris. Always passable, almost. But only just enough, skimpy. She was never seen anywhere else but at home, never out. Sometimes there was an expert on Mallarmé there. And often one, two, or three literary people, they’d come once and never be seen again. I never found out where she got them from, where she met them, or why she invited them. I never heard anyone else refer to any of them, and I never read or heard of their work. The meals didn’t last very long. We talked a lot about the war, it was the time of Stalingrad, the end of the winter of ’42. Marie-Claude Carpenter used to listen a lot, ask a lot of questions, but didn’t say much, often used to express surprise at how little she knew of what went on, then she’d laugh. Straightway after the meal she’d apologize for having to leave so soon, but she had things to do, she said. She never said what. When there were enough of us we’d stay on for an hour or two after she left. She used to say, Stay as long as you like. No one spoke about her when she wasn’t there. I don’t think anyone could have, because no one knew her. You always went home with the feeling of having experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spent a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers too, of having lived through a space of time without any consequences and without any cause, human or other. It was like having crossed a third frontier, having been on a train, having waited in doctors’ waiting rooms, hotels, airports. In summer we had lunch on a big terrace looking over the river, and coffee was served in the garden covering the whole roof. There was a swimming pool. But no one went in. We just sat and looked at Paris. The empty avenues, the river, the streets. In the empty streets, catalpas in flower. Marie-Claude Carpenter. I looked at her a lot, practically all the time, it embarrassed her but I couldn’t help it. I looked at her to try to find out, find out who she was, Marie-Claude Carpenter. Why she was there rather than somewhere else, why she was from so far away too, from Boston, why she was rich, why no one knew anything about her, not anything, no one, why these seemingly compulsory parties. And why, why, in her eyes, deep down in the depths of sight, that particle of death? Marie-Claude Carpenter. Why did all her dresses have something indefinable in common that made them look as if they didn’t quite belong to her, as if they might just as well have been on some other body? Dresses that were neutral, plain, very light in color, white, like summer in the middle of winter.

  Betty Fernandez. My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women. Betty Fernandez. She was a foreigner too. As soon as I say the name there she is, walking along a Paris street, she’s short-sighted, can’t see much, screws up her eyes to recognize you, then greets you with a light handshake. Hello, how are you? Dead a long time ago now. Thirty years, perhaps. I can remember her grace, it’s too late now for me to forget, nothing mars its perfection still, nothing ever will, not the circumstances, nor the time, nor the cold or the hunger or the defeat of Germany, nor the coming to light of the crime. She goes along the street still, above the history of such things however terrible. Here too the eyes are pale. The pink dress is old, the black wide-brimmed hat dusty in the sunlight of the street.

  She’s slim, tall, drawn in India ink, an engraving. People stop and look in amazement at the elegance of this foreigner who walks along unseeing. Like a queen. People never know at first where she’s from. And then they think she can only be from somewhere else, from there. Because of this she’s beautiful. She’s dressed in old European clothes, scraps of brocade, out-of-date old suits, old curtains, old oddments, old models, moth-eaten old fox furs, old otterskins, that’s her kind of beauty, tattered, chilly, plaintive and in exile, nothing suits her, everything’s too big, and yet it looks marvelous. Her clothes are loose, she’s too thin, nothing fits, yet it looks marvelous. She’s made in such a way, face and body, that anything that touches her shares immediately and infallibly in her beauty.

  She entertained, Betty Fernandez, she had an “at home.” We went sometimes. Once Drieu La Rochelle was there. Clearly suffering from pride, he scarcely deigned to speak, and when he did it was as if his voice was dubbed, his words translated, stiff. Maybe Brasillach was there too, but I don’t remember, unfortunately. Sartre never came. There were poets from Montparnasse, but I don’t remember any names, not one. There were no Germans. We didn’t talk politics. We talked about literature. Ramon Fernandez used to talk about Balzac. We could have listened to him forever and a day. He spoke with a knowledge that’s almost completely forgotten, and of whic
h almost nothing completely verifiable can survive. He offered opinions rather than information. He spoke about Balzac as he might have done about himself, as if he himself had once tried to be Balzac. He had a sublime courtesy even in knowledge, a way at once profound and clear of handling knowledge without ever making it seem an obligation or a burden. He was sincere. It was always a joy to meet him in the street or in a café, and it was a pleasure to him to greet you. Hallo how are you? he’d say, in the English style, without a comma, laughing. And while he laughed his jest became the war itself, together with all the unavoidable suffering it caused, both resistance and collaboration, hunger and cold, martyrdom and infamy. She, Betty Fernandez, spoke only of people, those she’d seen in the street or those she knew, about how they were, the things still left for sale in the shops, extra rations of milk or fish, good ways of dealing with shortages, with cold and constant hunger, she was always concerned with the practical details of life, she didn’t go beyond that, always a good friend, very loyal and affectionate. Collaborators, the Fernandezes were. And I, two years after the war, I was a member of the French Communist party. The parallel is complete and absolute. The two things are the same, the same pity, the same call for help, the same lack of judgment, the same superstition if you like, that consists in believing in a political solution to the personal problem. She too, Betty Fernandez, looked out at the empty streets of the German occupation, looked at Paris, at the squares of catalpas in flower, like the other woman, Marie-Claude Carpenter. Was “at home” certain days, like her.