Hiroshima Mon Amour

by Marguerite Duras

  They have to teach her to hear when she screams.

  They told her that later.

  She scrapes her hands like an idiot. Birds, set free inside a house, clip their wings and don't feel anything. Riva makes her fingers bleed and then sucks her blood. Grimaces and begins again. One day, on a quay, she learned to love blood. Like an animal, a bitch. You really have to look at something. Riva isn't blind. She looks. She sees nothing. But she looks. People's feet let themselves be looked at.

  The people who pass, pass in a necessary universe, yours and mine, in a span of time familiar to us.

  Riva's looking at these people's feet (just as meaningful as their faces) takes place in an organic universe, whence reason has fled. She looks at a world of feet.

  RIVA’S FATHER

  The father is worn out by the war. He isn't a bad person, merely stupefied by what has happened to him, involuntarily. He is dressed in black.

  RIVA’S MOTHER

  The mother is a lively person. Considerably younger than the father. She loves her child more than anything in the world. When Riva screams, she becomes terribly upset about her. The mother is afraid they'll do something more to her daughter. She's in complete control of the household. A strong person. She doesn't want Riva to die. She treats her child with rough tenderness. But an infinite tenderness. Contrary to the father, she hasn't given up hope for her daughter.

  They take her down into the cellar as though she were ten years old. They are in black. Riva, between them, is dressed in a light color. A very young girl's lace-trimmed nightgown that her mother made, a mother who constantly forgets that her child is growing up.

  RIVA IN THE NEVERS CELLAR

  AND IN HER ROOM

  Riva, completely white, is in a corner of the cellar. There, as everywhere else, always. Her eyes as they were beside the river. The eyes she had on the quay. Not guilty. Terrifying childhood.

  It is at night that she becomes rational again. That she remembers she is someone's wife. She too has been completely subjugated by desire. That he is dead doesn't keep her from desiring him. She wants him so badly she can't bear it any longer, and he is dead. An exhausted body, breathing heavily. Her mouth is moist. Her pose is that of a lustful woman, immodest to the point of vulgarity. More immodest than anywhere else. Disgusting. She desires a dead man.

  RIVA TOUCHES THE OBJECTS IN HER ROOM.

  “I REMEMBER ALREADY HAVING SEEN. . .”

  In this state anything can be seen by Riva. A whole collection of objects, or the objects taken separately. It hardly matters. Everything will be seen by her.

  RIVA LICKS THE SALTPETER IN THE CELLAR

  For lack of something better, saltpeter can be eaten. The salt of the stones. Riva eats the walls. She also kisses them. She is in a universe of walls. A man's memory is in these walls, one with the stone, the air, the earth.

  A CAT ENTERS THE NEVERS CELLAR

  The cat, always the same, comes into the cellar. Ready for any eventuality. Riva has completely forgotten that cats exist.

  Cats are completely domesticated. They have generally pleasant dispositions. Their eyes are not tame. The cat's eyes and Riva's eyes look alike and stare at each other. Blankly. Almost impossible to outstare a cat. Riva can do it. Little by little she enters the stare of the cat. There is nothing else in the cellar except a single stare, the stare of the cat-Riva.

  Eternity beggars description. It is neither beautiful nor ugly. Can it be a stone, the shining corner of some object? The stare of a cat? Everything at once? The cat is asleep. Riva is asleep. The cat with its eyes open. Inside the cat's stare or inside Riva's stare? Oval pupils, which fasten on nothing. Enormous pupils. Empty circuses. Where time beats.

  THE SQUARE AT NEVERS SEEN BY RIVA

  The square goes on. Where are these people going? They are rational. The bicycle wheels look like suns. What moves is more easily seen than what does not move. Bicycle wheels. Feet. The whole square moves.

  Sometimes, it's the sea. Even fairly often, the sea. Later she'll realize that it is dawn she has mistaken for the sea. It makes her sleepy, dawn, the sea.

  RIVA, LYING DOWN, HER HANDS IN HER HAIR

  When she didn't die, her hair began to grow back. Life's obstinacy. At night, during the day, her hair grows. Secretly, under the silk handkerchief. I softly caress my head. It's nicer to touch. It doesn't prick the fingers any more.

  WHEN RIVA’S HEAD WAS SHAVED AT NEVERS

  They shaved her head.

  They do it almost absent-mindedly. She had to be shaved. Let's do it. We have plenty of other things to do somewhere else. But we're doing our duty.

  A warm wind blows from the square to the spot where they shave her. And yet it is cooler here than anywhere else.

  The girl whose head has been shaved is the druggist's daughter. She seems almost to offer her head to the scissors. She almost helps them with the operation, as though her automatism were already a fact. It's nice to have your head shaved, it makes it lighter. (She is covered with the locks of hair that have fallen upon her.)

  They are shaving someone's head somewhere in France. Here it's the druggist's daughter. The wind bears the strains of the Marseillaise to the crowd and encourages the exercise of a hasty, ridiculous justice. They haven't time enough to be intelligent. This is a theater where there is no performance. None. Something might have been staged, but the performance failed to take place.

  After she has been shaved, the girl still waits. She's at their disposal. The city was made to suffer. This compensates. Helps work up an appetite. This girl has to leave. It's ugly, maybe disgusting. Since she seems inclined to stay here, they have to chase her away. They chase her like a rat. But she can't climb the steps very fast, not fast enough to please them. It seems she's still waiting for something else, something that didn't happen. That she is almost disappointed to have to move, move her legs, walk. She finds that the ramp is made to help her do that.

  AT MIDNIGHT RIVA COES HOME WITH HER HEAD SHAVED

  Riva watches her mother come toward her. Riva's expression seems to say, “To think you brought me into this world.” A closer guess would be: “What does it mean?”

  Perhaps Riva frowns slightly, asking the sky, her mother. She is at the exact limit of her strength. When her mother reaches her, she will have exceeded this limit and fall in her mother's arms as though she had fainted. But her eyes will still be open.

  What happens then between Riva and her mother is purely physical. Her mother takes Riva skillfully. She knows her child's weight. Riva will put herself at that part of her mother's body where since childhood she's been used to waiting for her sorrows to subside.

  Riva is cold. Her mother will rub her arms and back. She'll kiss her child's shaved head, without realizing what she's doing. Nothing pathetic, nothing. Her child is alive. Relatively speaking, that in itself is cause for rejoicing. She takes her home. She literally tears her away, she has to tear her away from that tree. Riva is then as heavy as she'll he when she's dead.

  PORTRAIT OF RIVA.

  THE RETURN OF REASON

  She paces the floor. Time has passed.

  Her madness is now restless. She has to move. She paces the floor. The circle is closing, but it's going to explode. It's in its final stages.

  Riva's face is like plaster. Her face hasn't been used for several months. Her lips have become thin. Her expression can shrink. Her body no longer has any meaning. When she paces the floor, her body serves merely to bear her head. She still calls him, but more and more rarely, and slowly. The memory of a memory. Her body is dirty, uninhabited. She's going to be free, it will soon be over. The circle is going to explode. She's destroying an imaginary universe, overturning objects; looking at them inside out.

  RIVA’S MADNESS

  When she looks at the lower corners of the room and recognizes something, her lips tremble. Is she smiling or crying? Same thing. She's listening. One might think she's preparing some vile deed. But she's not. All she's doing is
listening to the church bells of St.-Etienne. Complete consummation of pain. She listens to the sounds of the city. Then paces the floor again. All of a sudden she stretches. Her renascent reason frightens her. She tries to kick something away. What? Shadows.

  RIVA COMES TO THE QUAY ALONG THE LOIRE AT NOON

  Riva, like a flower, reaches the top of the stairway leading down to the quay.

  A round, full skirt. The beginning of the thighs and breasts.

  RIVA GOES OUT, AT DAWN,

  ON THE QUAYS OF THE LOIRE

  They let me go out. I'm terribly tired. Too young to suffer, they say. The weather is lovely, they say. Eight months already, they say. My hair is long. No one's passing. I'm not afraid any more. There. I don't know what I'm getting myself ready for. . . . My mother frets about my health for that purpose. I fret about my health. You shouldn't look too long at the Loire, they say. I'll look at it.

  People are crossing the bridge. Banality is sometimes striking. This is peace, they say. They are the people who shaved me. No one has shaved me. This is the Loire that takes my eyes. I look at it, and can't take my eyes off it. I think of nothing, nothing. What order.

  RIVA RETURNS TO PARIS, BY NIGHT

  What order. I have to leave. I'm leaving. In a re-established order. Nothing more can happen to me except to exist. All right.

  It's a nice night. I'm leaving the Loire. The Loire is still at the end of every road. Patience. The Loire will disappear from my life.

  *Not in chronological order.

  *Bracketed sections in the Appendices refer to action omitted from the film.

  NEVERS

  (As a reminder)

  RIVA HERSELF TELLS OF HER LIFE AT NEVERS

  At seven in the evening the cathedral of St.-Etienne tolled the hour. The drug store closed.

  Raised in the war, I didn't pay too much attention to it, although my father talked to me about it every night.

  I helped my father in the drug store. I was a druggist's assistant. I had just finished my studies. My mother* was living in the south of France. Several times during the year, over the holidays, I went to visit her.

  At seven in the evening, winter and summer, during the black night of the occupation or during the sunny days of June, the drug store closed. It was always too soon for me. We went up to the rooms on the second floor. All—or almost all—the movies were German. I wasn't allowed to go to the movies. At night, beneath the windows of my room, the Champ de Mars loomed even bigger.

  There was no flag on the town hall. I had to think back to my early childhood to remember the street lamps lighted.

  They crossed the border between northern and southern France.

  The enemy arrived. Germans crossed the Champs de Mars, singing, at fixed hours. From time to time one of them came to the drug store.

  Then they imposed a curfew too.

  Then came Stalingrad.

  Men were shot along the ramparts.

  Other men were deported. Others fled to join the Resistance. Some remained here, growing rich and afraid. The black market was in full swing. The children of St.-. . . working-class suburb were starving to death, while at the “Great Stag” people ate goose liver.

  My father gave medicines to the children of St.-. . . . I took them to them twice a week, on my way to my piano lesson, after the drug store was closed. Sometimes I was late getting back. My father was watching for me behind the shutters. Sometimes at night my father asked me to play the piano for him.

  After I had finished playing, my father fell silent, again prey to despair. He was thinking of my mother.

  After I had finished playing, in the evening, terror-stricken by the enemy, my youth rose up and overwhelmed me. I didn't say anything to my father about it. He said I was his only consolation.

  The only men in the city were German. I was seventeen years old.

  The war was interminable. My youth was interminable. I couldn't get away from the war, or from my youth.

  My mind was already confused by different standards of morality.

  For me Sunday was a holiday. I raced through the city on my bicycle and went to Ezy to get the butter necessary for my growth. I rode along the Nièvre. Sometimes I stopped under a tree and fumed about how long the war was. While I grew up hating the enemy. And the war. I always enjoyed seeing the river.

  One day, a German soldier came to the drug store to have his burned hand bandaged. We were alone in the store. I bandaged his hand as I had been taught, filled with hate. The enemy thanked me.

  He came back. My father was there and asked me to take care of him.

  I bandaged his hand again in my father's presence. I kept my eyes lowered, as I had been taught.

  And yet, that evening, I felt especially fed up with the war. I said so to my father. He didn't reply.

  I played the piano. Then we turned out the lights. He had asked me to close the shutters.

  On the square, a young German with a bandaged hand was leaning against a tree. I recognized him in the darkness because of the white spot his hand made. It was my father who closed the window. I knew that for the first time in my life a man had listened to me play the piano.

  The man came back the next day. Then I saw his face. How could I keep from looking at him again? My father came toward us. He pushed me aside and told the enemy soldier that his hand didn't require any further attention.

  That evening my father asked me expressly not to play the piano. At dinner he drank much more wine than usual. I obeyed my father. I thought that he'd gone a little crazy. I thought he was either drunk or crazy.

  My father was in love with my mother, really in love. He still loved her. He suffered terribly at being separated from her. Now that she was no longer here, he had begun to drink.

  Sometimes he went to see her, leaving me in charge of the drug store.

  He left the following day, without mentioning the previous day's incident again.

  The day after he left was a Sunday. It was raining. I was going to the farm at Ezy. As usual, I stopped under a poplar tree, beside the river.

  Not long afterward the enemy stopped under the same poplar tree. He was also riding a bicycle. His hand was all better.

  He didn't leave. The rain was falling, a heavy rain. Then the sun came out, while it was still raining. He stopped looking at me, smiled, and asked me to notice how sometimes, in summer, the sun and the rain can be together.

  I didn't say anything. And yet I looked at the rain.

  Then he told me that he had followed me here. That he wouldn't leave.

  I left. He followed me.

  For a whole month he followed me. I didn't stop any more beside the river. Never. But he was always there, every Sunday. How could I ignore the fact that he was there for me?

  I said nothing about it to my father.

  I began to dream of an enemy, at night, during the day. And in my dreams morality and immorality were so intertwined that soon I couldn't tell one from the other. I was twenty.

  One evening, in the St.-. . . . suburb, while I was turning a corner, someone grabbed me by the shoulders. I hadn't seen him come. It was night, half past eight, in July. It was the enemy.

  We met in the woods. In barns. In the ruins. And then in rooms.

  One day my father received a poison pen letter. The debacle was beginning. It was July, 1944. I denied everything.

  It was under the same poplar trees bordering the river that he told me he was leaving. . . . He was leaving the next morning by truck for Paris. He was happy because it was the end of the war. He talked to me about Bavaria, where I was to join him. Where we were supposed to be married.

  There was already some sporadic shooting in the city. People were ripping down their black curtains. Radios were blaring day and night. Fifty miles away, German convoys lay stranded in gullies.

  I excluded this enemy from all the others.

  It was my first love.

  I couldn't see any difference at all now between his body and
mine. All I could see was an extraordinary similarity between his body and mine.

  His body had become mine, I was no longer capable of distinguishing it. I had become the living denial of reason. And how I would have swept aside all the good reasons they might have given as arguments against my lack of reason, swept them aside like so many houses made of cards, yes, like so many imaginary reasons. And may those who have known what it means to lose control of themselves throw the first stone at me. My only allegiance was to love itself.

  I had left a note for my father. I told him that the poison pen letter had told the truth: that for six months I had been in love with a German soldier. That I wanted to follow him to Germany.

  At Nevers, the Resistance was already sniping at the enemy. The police had disappeared. My mother returned.

  He was leaving the next day. It was agreed that he would take me in his truck, under the camouflage netting. We thought we'd never have to be separated again.

  We went once again to the hotel. He left at dawn to rejoin his unit, in the direction of Saint-Etienne.

  We were supposed to meet at noon, on the quay of the Loire. When I arrived, at noon, on the quay of the Loire, he wasn't quite dead yet. They had fired on him from a garden above the quay.

  I spent all day lying on his body, and all that night.

  The next day they came to take him away, and they put him on a truck. It was during that night that the city was liberated. The bells of Saint-Etienne filled the city. I think, yes, I think I heard them.

  They put me in a warehouse at the Champs de Mars. There, some of them said I would have to be shaved. I didn't care. The sound of the scissors on my head left me utterly indifferent. When it was over, a man about thirty years old led me into the street. There were six of them around me. They were singing. I didn't feel anything.

  My father, behind the shutters, must have seen me. The drug store was closed for reasons of family disgrace.