They never speak of it any more. It’s an understood thing that he won’t approach his father any more to let him marry her. That the father will have no pity on his son. He has no pity on anyone. Of all the Chinese immigrants who hold the trade of the place in their hands, the man with the blue terraces is the most terrible, the richest, the one whose property extends the farthest beyond Sadec, to Cholon, the Chinese capital of French Indochina. The man from Cholon knows his father’s decision and the girl’s are the same, and both are irrevocable. To a lesser degree he begins to understand that the journey which will separate him from her is a piece of good luck for their affair. That she’s not the marrying kind, she’ll run away from any marriage, he must give her up, forget her, give her back to the whites, to her brothers.
Ever since he’d been infatuated with her body the girl had stopped being incommoded by it, by its thinness. And similarly, strangely, her mother no longer worried about it as she had before, just as if she too had discovered it was plausible after all, as acceptable as any other body. The lover from Cholon thinks the growth of the little white girl has been stunted by the excessive heat. He too was born and grew up in this heat. He discovers this kinship between them. He says all the years she’s spent here, in this intolerable latitude, have turned her into a girl of Indochina. That she has the same slender wrists as they, the same thick hair that looks as if it’s absorbed all its owner’s strength, and it’s long like theirs too, and above all there’s her skin, all over her body, that comes from the rainwater stored here for women and children to bathe in. He says compared with the women here the women in France have hard skins on their bodies, almost rough. He says the low diet of the tropics, mostly fish and fruit, has something to do with it too. Also the cottons and silks the clothes here are made of, and the loose clothes themselves, leaving a space between themselves and the body, leaving it naked, free.
The lover from Cholon is so accustomed to the adolescence of the white girl, he’s lost. The pleasure he takes in her every evening has absorbed all his time, all his life. He scarcely speaks to her any more. Perhaps he thinks she won’t understand any longer what he’d say about her, about the love he never knew before and of which he can’t speak. Perhaps he realizes they never have spoken to each other, except when they cry out to each other in the bedroom in the evening. Yes, I think he didn’t know, he realizes he didn’t know.
He looks at her. Goes on looking at her, his eyes shut. He inhales her face, breathes it in. He breathes her in, the child, his eyes shut he breathes in her breath, the warm air coming out of her. Less and less clearly can he make out the limits of this body, it’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished, in the room it keeps growing, it’s still without set form, continually coming into being, not only there where it’s visible but elsewhere too, stretching beyond sight, toward risk, toward death, it’s nimble, it launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up, adult, it’s without guile, and it’s frighteningly intelligent.
• • •
I used to watch what he did with me, how he used me, and I’d never thought anyone could act like that, he acted beyond my hope and in accordance with my body’s destiny. So I became his child. And he became something else for me too. I began to recognize the inexpressible softness of his skin, of his member, apart from himself. The shadow of another man must have passed through the room, the shadow of a young murderer, but I didn’t know that then, had no inkling of it yet. The shadow of a young hunter must have passed through the room too, but that one, yes, I knew about, sometimes he was present in the pleasure and I’d tell the lover from Cholon, talk to him of the other’s body and member, of his indescribable sweetness, of his courage in the forest and on the rivers whose estuaries hold the black panthers. Everything chimed with his desire and made him possess me. I had become his child. It was with his own child he made love every evening. And sometimes he takes fright, suddenly he’s worried about her health, as if he suddenly realized she was mortal and it suddenly struck him he might lose her. Her being so thin strikes him, and sometimes this makes him suddenly afraid. And there’s the headache, too, which often makes her lie limp, motionless, ghastly pale, with a wet bandage over her eyes. And the loathing of life that sometimes seizes her, when she thinks of her mother and suddenly cries out and weeps with rage at the thought of not being able to change things, not being able to make her mother happy before she dies, not being able to kill those responsible. His face against hers he receives her tears, crushes her to him, mad with desire for her tears, for her anger.
He takes her as he would his own child. He’d take his own child the same way. He plays with his child’s body, turns it over, covers his face with it, his lips, his eyes. And she, she goes on abandoning herself in exactly the same way as he set when he started. Then suddenly it’s she who’s imploring, she doesn’t say what for, and he, he shouts to her to be quiet, that he doesn’t want to have anything more to do with her, doesn’t want to have his pleasure of her any more. And now once more they are caught together, locked together in terror, and now the terror abates again, and now they succumb to it again, amid tears, despair, and happiness.
They are silent all evening long. In the black car that takes her back to the boarding school she leans her head on his shoulder. He puts his arm around her. He says it’s a good thing the boat from France is coming soon to take her away and separate them. They are silent during the drive. Sometimes he tells the driver to go around by the river. She sleeps, exhausted, on his shoulder. He wakes her with kisses.
In the dormitory the light is blue. There’s a smell of incense, they always burn incense at dusk. The heat is oppressive, all the windows are wide open, and there’s not a breath of air. I take my shoes off so as not to make any noise, but I’m not worried, I know the mistress in charge won’t get up, I know it’s accepted now that I come back at night at whatever time I like. I go straight to where H.L. is, always slightly anxious, always afraid she may have run away during the day. But she’s there. She sleeps deeply, H.L. An obstinate, almost hostile sleep, I remember. Expressing rejection. Her bare arms are flung up in abandon around her head. Her body is not lying down decorously like those of the other girls, her legs are bent, her face is invisible, her pillow awry. I expect she was waiting for me but fell asleep as she waited, impatient and angry. She must have been crying too, and then lapsed into oblivion. I’d like to wake her up, have a whispered conversation. I don’t talk to the man from Cholon any more, he doesn’t talk to me, I need to hear H.L.’s questions. She has the matchless attentiveness of those who don’t understand what is said to them. But I can’t wake her up. Once she’s awakened like that, in the middle of the night, H.L. can’t go back to sleep again. She gets up, wants to go outside, does so, goes down the stairs, along the corridors, out all alone into the big empty playgrounds, she runs, she calls out to me, she’s so happy, it’s irresistible, and when she’s not allowed to go out with the other girls, you know that’s just what she wants. I hesitate, but then no, I don’t wake her up. Under the mosquito net the heat is stifling, when you close the net after you it seems unendurable. But I know it’s because I’ve come in from outside, from the banks of the river where it’s always cool at night. I’m used to it, I keep still, wait for it to pass. It passes. I never fall asleep right away despite the new fatigues in my life. I think about the man from Cholon. He’s probably in a nightclub somewhere near the Fountain with his driver, they’ll be drinking in silence, they drink arrack when they’re on their own. Or else he’s gone home, he’s fallen asleep with the light on, still without speaking to anyone. That night I can’t bear the thought of the man from Cholon any more. Nor the thought of H.L. It’s as if they were happy, and as if it came from outside themselves. And I have nothing like that. My mother says, This one will never be satisfied with anything. I think I’m beginning to see my life. I think I can already say, I have a vague desire to die. From now on I treat that word and my life as inseparable. I think
I have a vague desire to be alone, just as I realize I’ve never been alone any more since I left childhood behind, and the family of the hunter. I’m going to write. That’s what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.
I forget the words of the telegram from Saigon. Forget whether it said my younger brother was dead or whether it said, Recalled to God. I seem to remember it was Recalled to God. I realized at once, she couldn’t have sent the telegram. My younger brother. Dead. At first it’s incomprehensible, and then suddenly, from all directions, from the ends of the earth, comes pain. It buried me, swept me away, I didn’t know anything, I ceased to exist except for pain, what pain, I didn’t know what pain, whether it was the pain returning of having lost a child a few months before, or a new pain. Now I think it was a new pain, I’d never known my stillborn child and hadn’t wanted to kill myself then as I wanted to now.
It was a mistake, and that momentary error filled the universe. The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn’t noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother’s body while he was alive, and we hadn’t noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother’s body was dead, and immortality with it. And the world went on without that visited body, and without its visitation. It was a complete mistake. And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.
• • •
Since my younger brother was dead, everything had to die after him. And through him. Death, a chain reaction of death, started with him, the child.
The corpse of the child was unaffected, itself, by the events of which it was the cause. Of the immortality it had harbored for the twenty-seven years of its life, it didn’t know the name.
No one saw clearly but I. And since I’d acquired that knowledge, the simple knowledge that my younger brother’s body was mine as well, I had to die. And I am dead. My younger brother gathered me to him, drew me to him, and I am dead.
People ought to be told of such things. Ought to be taught that immortality is mortal, that it can die, it’s happened before and it happens still. It doesn’t ever announce itself as such—it’s duplicity itself. It doesn’t exist in detail, only in principle. Certain people may harbor it, on condition they don’t know that’s what they’re doing. Just as certain other people may detect its presence in them, on the same condition, that they don’t know they can. It’s while it’s being lived that life is immortal, while it’s still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, it’s not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It’s as untrue to say it’s without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void. Look at the dead sands of the desert, the dead bodies of children: there’s no path for immortality there, it must halt and seek another way.
In the case of my younger brother it was an immortality without flaw, without commentary, smooth, pure, unique. My younger brother had nothing to cry in the wilderness, he had nothing to say, here or anywhere, nothing. He was uneducated, he never managed to learn anything. He couldn’t speak, could scarcely read, scarcely write, sometimes you’d think he couldn’t even suffer. He was someone who didn’t understand and was afraid.
The wild love I feel for him remains an unfathomable mystery to me. I don’t know why I loved him so much as to want to die of his death. I’d been parted from him for ten years when it happened, and hardly ever thought about him. I loved him, it seemed, forever, and nothing new could happen to that love. I’d forgotten about death.
• • •
We didn’t talk to each other much, we hardly talked at all about our elder brother, or our unhappiness, our mother’s unhappiness, the misfortune of the land on the plain. We talked instead about hunting, rifles, mechanics, cars. He’d get furious about our worn-down old car and tell me about, describe, the cars he’d have in the future. I knew all the makes of hunting rifles and all the brands of cars. We also talked, of course, about being eaten by tigers if we weren’t careful, or getting drowned in the river if we went on swimming in the currents. He was two years older than I.
The wind has ceased, and under the trees there’s the supernatural light that follows rain. Some birds are shrieking at the tops of their voices, crazy birds. As they sharpen their beaks on it, the cold air rings with an almost deafening clamor.
The liners used to go up the Saigon River, engines off, drawn by tugs to the port installations in the bend of the Mekong that’s on the same latitude as the town of Saigon. This bend or branch of the Mekong is called the River, the Saigon River. The boats stopped there for a week. As soon as they berthed, you were in France. You could dine in France and dance there, but it was too expensive for my mother, and anyway for her there was no point. But with him, the lover from Cholon, you could have gone. But he didn’t go because he’d have been afraid to be seen with the little white girl, so young. He didn’t say, but she knew. In those days, and it’s not so long ago, scarcely fifty years, it was only ships that went all over the world. Large parts of all the continents were still without roads or railways. Hundreds, thousands of square kilometers still had nothing but prehistoric tracks. It was the handsome ships of the Messageries Maritimes, the musketeers of the shipping lines, the Porthos, D’Artagnan, and Aramis, that linked Indochina to France.
The voyage lasted twenty-four days. The liners were like towns, with streets, bars, cafés, libraries, drawing rooms, meetings, lovers, weddings, deaths. Chance societies formed, fortuitous as everyone knew and did not forget, but for that very reason tolerable, and sometimes unforgettably pleasant. These were the only voyages the women ever made. And for many of them, and for some men too, the voyage out to the colony was the real adventure of the whole thing. For our mother those trips, together with our infancy, were always what she called “the happiest days of her life.”
Departures. They were always the same. Always the first departures over the sea. People have always left the land in the same sorrow and despair, but that never stopped men from going, Jews, philosophers, and pure travelers for the journey’s own sake. Nor did it ever stop women letting them go, the women who never went themselves, who stayed behind to look after the birthplace, the race, the property, the reason for the return. For centuries, because of the ships, journeys were longer and more tragic than they are today. A voyage covered its distance in a natural span of time. People were used to those slow human speeds on both land and sea, to those delays, those waitings on the wind or fair weather, to those expectations of shipwreck, sun, and death. The liners the little white girl knew were among the last mailboats in the world. It was while she was young that the first airlines were started, which were gradually to deprive mankind of journeys across the sea.
We still went every day to the flat in Cholon. He behaved as usual, for a while he behaved as usual, giving me a shower with the water from the jars, carrying me over to the bed. He’d come over to me, lie down too, but now he had no strength, no potency. Once the date of my departure was fixed, distant thought it still was, he could do nothing with my body any more. It had happened suddenly, without his realizing it. His body wanted nothing more to do with the body that was about to go away, to betray. He’d say, I can’t make love to you any more, I thought I still could, but I can’t. He’d say he was dead. He’d give a sweet, apologetic smile, say that perhaps it would never come back. I’d ask him if that’s what he wanted. He, almost laughing, would say, I don’t know, at this moment perhaps yes. His gentleness was unaffected by his pain. He didn’t speak of the pain, never said a word about it. Sometimes his face would quiver, he’d close his eyes and clench his teeth. But he never said anything about the images he saw behind his closed eyes. It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he’d loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me. Sometimes he’d say he’d like to caress me because he knew I longed for it, and he’d like to watc
h me as the pleasure came. So he did, and watched me at the same time, and called me his child. We decided not to see each other any more, but it wasn’t possible, it turned out to be impossible. Every evening he was there outside the high school in his black car, his head averted from humiliation.
When it was due to sail the boat gave three blasts on its siren, very long and terribly loud, they were heard all over the town, and over the harbor the sky grew dark. Then the tugs came up and towed the boat to the middle of the river, after which they cast off their cables and returned to harbor. Then the boat bade farewell again, uttering once more its terrible, mysteriously sad wails that made everyone weep, not only those who were parting from one another but the onlookers too, and those who were there for no special reason, who had no one particular in mind. Then, very slowly, under its own steam, the boat launched itself on the river. For a long while its tall shape could be seen advancing toward the sea. Many people stayed to watch, waving more and more slowly, more and more sadly, with scarves and handkerchiefs. Then finally the outline of the ship was swallowed up in the curve of the earth. On a clear day you could see it slowly sink.
For her too it was when the boat uttered its first farewell, when the gangway was hauled up and the tugs had started to tow and draw the boat away from land, that she had wept. She’d wept without letting anyone see her tears, because he was Chinese and one oughtn’t to weep for that kind of lover. Wept without letting her mother or her younger brother see she was sad, without letting them see anything, as was the custom between them. His big car was there, long and black with the white-liveried driver in front. It was a little way away from the Messageries Maritimes car park, on its own. That was how she’d recognized it. That was him in the back, that scarcely visible shape, motionless, overcome. She was leaning on the rails, like the first time, on the ferry. She knew he was watching her. She was watching him too, she couldn’t see him any more but she still looked toward the shape of the black car. And then at last she couldn’t see it any more. The harbor faded away, and then the land.
The Lover Page 8
