The Lover

by Marguerite Duras

  He drives her back to the boarding school in the black limousine. Stops just short of the entrance so that no one sees him. It’s at night. She gets out, runs off, doesn’t turn to look at him. As soon as she’s inside the door she sees the lights are still on in the big playground. As soon as she turns out of the corridor she sees her, waiting for her, worried already, erect, unsmiling. She asks, Where’ve you been? She says, I just didn’t come back here to sleep. She doesn’t say why and Hélène Lagonelle doesn’t ask. She takes the pink hat off and undoes her braids for the night. You didn’t go to class either. No, she didn’t. Hélène says they’ve phoned, that’s how she knows, she’s to go and see the vice-principal. There are lots of girls in the shadowy playground. They’re all in white. There are big lamps in the trees. The lights are still on in some of the classrooms. Some of the pupils are working late, others stay in the classrooms to chat, or play cards, or sing. There’s no fixed time for them to go to bed, it’s so hot during the day they’re allowed to do more or less as they like in the evening, or rather as the young teachers on duty like. We’re the only two white girls in this state boarding school. There are lots of half-castes, most of them abandoned by their fathers, soldiers or sailors or minor officials in the customs, post, or public works department. Most of them were brought up by the Assistance Board. There are a few quadroons too. Hélène Lagonelle believes the French government raises them to be nurses in hospitals or to work in orphanages, leper colonies, and mental homes. She also thinks they’re sent to isolation hospitals to look after people with cholera or the plague. That’s what Hélène Lagonelle thinks, and she cries because she doesn’t want any of those jobs, she’s always talking about running away.

  I go to see the teacher on duty, a young half-caste herself who spends a lot of time looking at Hélène and me. She says, You didn’t go to class and you didn’t sleep here last night, we’re going to have to inform your mother. I say I couldn’t help it, but from now on I’ll try to come back and sleep here every night, there’s no need to tell my mother. The young woman looks at me and smiles.

  I’ll do it again. My mother will be informed. She’ll come and see the head of the boarding school and ask her to let me do as I like in the evenings, not to check the time I come in, not to force me to go out with the other girls on Sunday excursions. She says, She’s a child who’s always been free, otherwise she’d run away, even I, her own mother, can’t do anything about it, if I want to keep her I have to let her be free. The head agrees because I’m white and the place needs a few whites among all the half-castes for the sake of its reputation. My mother also said I was working hard in high school even though I had my freedom, and that what had happened with her sons was so awful, such a disaster, that her daughter’s education was the only hope left to her.

  The head let me live in the boarding school as if it were a hotel.

  Soon I’ll have a diamond on my engagement finger. Then the teachers will stop making remarks. People will guess I’m not engaged, but the diamond’s very valuable, no one will doubt that it’s genuine, and no one will say anything any more, because of the value of the diamond that’s been given to this very young girl.

  I come back to Hélène Lagonelle. She’s lying on a bench, crying because she thinks I’m going to leave. I sit on the bench. I’m worn out by the beauty of Hélène Lagonelle’s body lying against mine. Her body is sublime, naked under the dress, within arm’s reach. Her breasts are such as I’ve never seen. I’ve never touched them. She’s immodest, Hélène Lagonelle, she doesn’t realize, she walks around the dormitories without any clothes on. The most beautiful of all the things given by God is this body of Hélène Lagonelle’s, peerless, the balance between her figure and the way the body bears the breasts, outside itself, as if they were separate. Nothing could be more extraordinary than the outer roundness of these breasts proffered to the hands, this outwardness held out toward them. Even the body of my younger brother, like that of a little coolie, is as nothing beside this splendor. The shapes of men’s bodies are miserly, internalized. Nor do they get spoiled like those of such girls as Hélène Lagonelle, which never last, a summer or so perhaps, that’s all. She comes from the high plateaus of Da Lat. Her father works for the post office. She came quite recently, right in the middle of the school year. She’s frightened, she comes up and sits beside you and stays there without speaking, crying sometimes. She has the pink-and-brown complexion of the mountains, you can always recognize it here where all the other children are pale green with anemia and the torrid heat. Hélène Lagonelle doesn’t go to high school. She’s not capable of it, Hélène L. She can’t learn, can’t remember things. She goes to the primary classes at the boarding school, but it’s no use. She weeps up against me, and I stroke her hair, her hands, tell her I’m going to stay here with her. She doesn’t know she’s very beautiful, Hélène Lagonelle. Her parents don’t know what to do with her, they want to marry her off as soon as possible. She could have all the fiancés she likes, Hélène Lagonelle, but she doesn’t like, she doesn’t want to get married, she wants to go back to her mother. She, Hélène L. Hélène Lagonelle. In the end she’ll do what her mother wants. She’s much more beautiful than I am, the girl in the clown’s hat and lamé shoes, infinitely more marriageable, she can be married off, set up in matrimony, you can frighten her, explain it to her, what frightens her and what she doesn’t understand, tell her to stay where she is, wait.

  Hélène Lagonelle is seventeen, seventeen, yet she still doesn’t know what I know. It’s as if I guessed she never will.

  Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers.

  I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.

  I am worn out with desire.

  I want to take Hélène Lagonelle with me to where every evening, my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out. I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.

  A pleasure unto death.

  I see her as being of one flesh with the man from Cholon, but in a shining, solar, innocent present, in a continual self-flowering which springs out of each action, each tear, each of her faults, each of her ignorances. Hélène Lagonelle is the mate of the bondsman who gives me such abstract, such harsh pleasure, the obscure man from Cholon, from China. Hélène Lagonelle is from China.

  I haven’t forgotten Hélène Lagonelle. I haven’t forgotten the bondsman. When I went away, when I left him, I didn’t go near another man for two years. But that mysterious fidelity must have been to myself.

  I’m still part of the family, it’s there I live, to the exclusion of everywhere else. It’s in its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance, that I’m most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I’ll be a writer.

  That’s the place where later on, once the present is left behind, I must stay, to the exclusion of everywhere else. The hours I spend in the apartment show it in a new light. It’s a place that’s intolerable, bordering on death, a place of violence, pain, despair, dishonor. And so is Cholon. On the other bank of the river. As soon as you’ve crossed to the other side.

/>   I don’t know what became of Hélène Lagonelle, I don’t even know if she’s dead. It was she who left the boarding school first, a long while before I went to France. She went back to Da Lat. Her mother sent for her, I believe to arrange a match for her, I believe she was to meet someone just out from France. But I may be wrong, I may be projecting what I thought would happen to Hélène Lagonelle onto her prompt departure at her mother’s request.

  Let me tell you what he did, too, what it was like. Well—he stole from the houseboys in order to go and smoke opium. He stole from our mother. He rummaged in closets. He stole. He gambled. My father bought a house in Entre-Deux-Mers before he died. It was the only thing we owned. He gambles. My mother sells the house to pay his debts. But it isn’t enough, it’s never enough. When he’s young he tries to sell me to customers at the Coupole. It’s for him my mother wants to go on living, so he can go on eating, so he can have a roof over his head, so he can still hear someone call him by his name. Then there’s the place she bought for him near Amboise, ten years’ savings. Mortgaged in one night. She pays the interest. And all the profit from the cutting down of the woods I told you about. In one night. He stole from my mother when she was dying. He was the sort of person who rummaged in closets, who had a gift for it, knew where to look, could find the right piles of sheets, the hiding places. He stole wedding rings, that sort of thing, lots of them, jewelry, food. He stole from Dô, the houseboys, my younger brother. From me. Plenty. He’d have sold her, his own mother. When she dies he sends for the lawyer right away, in the midst of all the emotion. He takes advantage of it. The lawyer says the will is not valid. It favors the elder son too much at my expense. The difference is enormous, laughable. I have to refuse or accept, in full knowledge of the facts. I say I’ll accept: I’ll sign. I’ve accepted. My brother lowers his eyes. Thanks. He weeps. In the midst of all the emotion of our mother’s death. He’s quite sincere. At the liberation of Paris, probably on the run for having been a collaborator in the South, he has nowhere to go. He comes to me. He’s running away from some danger, I never quite knew what. Perhaps he informed on people, Jews perhaps, anything is possible. He’s very mild and affectionate, as always after he’s committed murders or when he needs your help. My husband has been deported. He sympathizes. He stays three days. I’ve forgotten, and when I go out I don’t lock anything up. He rummages around. I’ve been keeping my rice and sugar rations for when my husband comes back. He rummages around and takes them. He also rummages around in a little closet in my bedroom. He finds what he’s looking for and takes all my savings, fifty thousand francs. He doesn’t leave a single note. He quits the apartment with the spoils. When I see him again I won’t mention it, it’s too shaming for him, I couldn’t. After the fake will, the fake Louis XIV chateau is sold for a song. The sale was a put-up job, like the will.

  After my mother’s death he’s left alone. He has no friends, never has had, sometimes he’s had women who “worked” for him in Montparnasse, sometimes women who didn’t work for him, at least to begin with, sometimes men, but then they did the paying. He lived a very lonely life. And more so as he grew older. He was only a layabout, he operated on a very small scale. He inspired fear in his immediate circle, but no farther. When he lost us he lost his real empire. He wasn’t a gangster, just a family layabout, a rummager in closets, a murderer without a gun. He didn’t take any risks. Layabouts all live as he did, without any loyalty, without any grandeur, in fear. He was afraid. After my mother’s death he leads a strange existence. In Tours. The only people he knows are waiters in cafés, for the racing tips, and the bibulous patrons of backroom poker games. He starts to look like them, drinks a lot, gets bloodshot eyes and slurred speech. In Tours he had nothing. Both houses had been sold off. Nothing. For a year he lived in a furniture warehouse leased by my mother. For a year he slept in an armchair. They let him go there. Stay for a year. Then they threw him out.

  For a year he must have hoped to buy his mortgaged property back. He gambled away my mother’s furniture out of storage, bit by bit. The bronze Buddhas, the brasses, then the beds, then the wardrobes, then the sheets. And then one day he has nothing left, that does happen to people like him, one day he has the suit on his back and nothing else, not a sheet, not a shelter. He’s alone. For a year no one will open their door to him. He writes to a cousin in Paris. He can have a servant’s room in the boulevard Malesherbes. And when he’s over fifty he’ll have his first job, his first wages ever, as messenger for a marine insurance company. That lasted, I think, fifteen years. He had to go into the hospital. He didn’t die there. He died in his room.

  My mother never talked about that one of her children. She never mentioned the rummager in closets to anyone. She treated the fact that she was his mother as if it were a crime. She kept it hidden. She must have thought it was unintelligible, impossible to convey to anyone who didn’t know her son as she did, before God and only before Him. She repeated little platitudes about him, always the same ones. That if he’d wanted to he could have been the cleverest of the three. The most “artistic.” The most astute. And he was the one who’d loved his mother most. The one, in short, who’d understood her best. I didn’t know, she’d say, that you could expect that of a boy, such intuition, such deep affection.

  We met again once, he spoke about our dead brother. He said of his death, What an awful thing, how dreadful, our little brother, our little Paulo.

  There remains this image of our kinship: a meal in Sadec. All three of us are eating at the dining-room table. They’re seventeen, eighteen. My mother’s not with us. He watches us eat, my younger brother and me, then he puts down his fork and looks at my younger brother. For a very long time he looks at him, then suddenly, very calmly, says something terrible. About food. He says he must be careful, he shouldn’t eat so much. My younger brother doesn’t answer. The other goes on. Reminds him the big pieces of meat are for him, and he mustn’t forget it. Or else, he says. I ask, Why are they for you? He says, Because that’s how it is. I say, I wish you’d die. I can’t eat any more. Nor can my younger brother. He waits for my younger brother to dare to speak, just one word, his clenched fists are poised ready over the table to bash his face in. My younger brother says nothing. He’s very pale. Between his lashes, the beginning of tears.

  It was a dreary day, the day he died. In spring, I think it was, April. Someone telephones. They don’t say anything else, nothing, just that he’s been found dead, on the floor, in his room. But death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened, it was too late now for him to die, it had been all over since the death of my younger brother. The conquering words: It is finished.

  She asked for him to be buried with her. I don’t know where, in which cemetery. I just know it’s in the Loire. Both in the same grave. Just the two of them. It’s as it should be. An image of intolerable splendor.

  Dusk fell at the same time all the year round. It was very brief, almost like a blow. In the rainy season, for weeks on end, you couldn’t see the sky, it was full of an unvarying mist which even the light of the moon couldn’t pierce. In the dry season, though, the sky was bare, completely free of cloud, naked. Even moonless nights were light. And the shadows were as clear-cut as ever on the ground, and on the water, roads, and walls.

  I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune—those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance
of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.

  On the paths of the yard the shadows of the cinnamon-apple trees are inky black. The whole garden is still as marble. The house too—monumental, funereal. And my younger brother, who was walking beside me, now looks intently at the gate open on the empty road.

  One day he’s not there outside the high school. The driver’s alone in the black car. He says the father’s ill and the young master’s gone back to Sadec. He, the driver, has been told to stay in Saigon to take me to school and back again to the boarding house. The young master came back after a few days. Again he was there in the back of the black car, his face averted so as not to see people looking at him, still afraid. We kissed, without a word, kissed there outside the school, we’d forgotten. While we kissed, he wept. His father was going to live. His last hope was vanishing.

  He’d asked him, implored him to let him keep me with him, close to him, he’d told him he must understand, must have known a passion like this himself at least once in his long life, it couldn’t be otherwise, he’d begged him to let him have his turn at living, just once, this passion, this madness, this infatuation with the little white girl, he’d asked him to give him time to love her a while longer before sending her away to France, let him have her a little longer, another year perhaps, because it wasn’t possible for him to give up this love yet, it was too new, too strong still, too much in its first violence, it was too terrible for him to part yet from her body, especially since, as he the father knew, it could never happen again.