They took me back to the same warehouse at the Champs de Mars. They asked me what I wanted to do. I said I didn't care. Then they told me to go home.
It was midnight. I climbed over the garden wall. It was a beautiful night. I lay down on the grass to die. But I didn't die. I was cold.
For a long time I called my mother. . . . About two in the morning there were lights in the shutters.
They pretended I was dead. And I lived in the cellar of the drug store. I could see the people's feet, and at night the vast sweep of the Champs de Mars Square.
I went mad. Out of spite. I spit in my mother's face, it seems. I have only hazy memories of this period while my hair was growing out. Except the memory of spitting in my mother's face.
Then, little by little, I could tell the difference between day and night. I could tell that the shadow reached the corner of the cellar walls about half past four, and, once, that winter was over.
At night, late, they sometimes let me go out wrapped up in a cape. Alone. On my bicycle.
It took my hair a year to grow back. I still think that if the people who shaved my head had remembered how long it takes for
hair to grow back, they would have thought twice about shaving me. It was by a lack of the men's imagination that I was disgraced.
One day my mother came to feed me, as she was accustomed to doing. She told me the time had come for me to leave. She gave me some money.
I left for Paris on my bicycle. It was a long way, but the weather was warm. Summer. When I reached Paris, the morning of the second day, the word Hiroshima was in all the newspapers. It was extraordinary news. My hair was now a decent length. No one was shaved.
*Riva's mother was either Jewish [or separated from her husband].
PORTRAIT OF THE JAPANESE
He's a man of about forty. Tall. With a fairly “Western” face.
The choice of a Western-looking Japanese actor should be interpreted in the following way:
A Japanese actor with pronounced Japanese features might lead people to believe that it is especially because the protagonist is Japanese that the French actress was attracted to him. Thus, whether we liked it or not, we'd find ourselves caught again in the trap of “exoticism,” and the involuntary racism inherent in any exoticism.
The spectator should not say: “How attractive Japanese men are,” but “How attractive that man is.”
This is why it is preferable to minimize the difference between the two protagonists. If the audience never forgets that this is the story of a Japanese man and a French woman, the profound implications of the film are lost. If the audience does forget it, these profound implications become apparent.
Monsieur Butterfly is outmoded. So is Mademoiselle de Paris. We should count upon the equalitarian function of the modern world. And even cheat in order to show it. Otherwise, what would be the use of making a Franco-Japanese film? This Franco-Japanese film should never seem Franco-Japanese, but anti-Franco-Japanese. That would be a victory.
His profile might almost seem French. A high forehead. A large mouth. Full, but hard lips. Nothing affected or fragile about his face. No angle from which his features might seem vague (indecisive).
In short, he is an “international” type. What makes him attractive should be immediately apparent to everyone as being that quality found in men who have reached maturity without succumbing prematurely to fatigue, without having resorted to subterfuge.
He is an engineer. He is involved in politics. Not by chance. The techniques are international. The game of political coordinates is too. He is a modern man, wise in the ways of the world. He would not feel out of place in any country in the world.
He coincides with his age, both physically and morally.
He hasn't “cheated” with life. He hasn't had to: he is a man who has always been interested in his own existence, and always sufficiently interested not to “trail in his wake” a nostalgic longing for adolescence, which so often makes men of forty those false young men still looking for what they should really do to appear sure of themselves. If he isn't sure of himself, it's for good reason.
He's not really a dandy, but neither is he careless about his appearance. He is not a libertine. He has a wife he loves, and two children. And yet he likes women. But he's never made a career as a “lady's man.” He believes that that sort of career is a career of contemptible “substitution” and most suspect. That anyone who has never known the love of a single woman has never really known what it is to love, has perhaps never even attained real manhood.
It's for this very reason that his affair with the young French woman is a real love affair, even though it's a chance adventure. It's because he doesn't believe in the virtue of chance affairs that he can live this one with such sincerity, with such violence.
PORTRAIT OF THE FRENCH WOMAN
She's thirty-two.
She's more seductive than beautiful.
She too might be called in a certain way “The Look.” Everything about her—her words, her movements—is manifest in her expression.
This look is not self-conscious. She looks for the sake of looking. Her look doesn't define her conduct, it always exceeds it.
No doubt all women have beautiful eyes when making love. But love throws this woman's soul into greater confusion (the choice of the term is voluntarily Stendhalian) than it does with most women, because she is “more in love with love itself” than most women are.
She knows people don't die of love. In the course of her life she's had a wonderful opportunity to die of love. She didn't die at Nevers. Since then, and till now at Hiroshima, where she meets this Japanese, she carries within her, with her, this vague yearning that marks a reprieved person faced with a unique chance to determine her own fate.
It's not the fact of having been shaved and disgraced that marks her life, it's the already mentioned defeat: the fact that she didn't die of love on August 2, 1944, on the banks of the Loire.
This is not in contradiction with her attitude at Hiroshima with the Japanese. On the contrary, this has a direct bearing on her attitude with the Japanese. . . . What she tells the Japanese is this lost opportunity which has made her what she is.
The story she tells of this lost opportunity literally transports her outside herself and carries her toward this new man.
To give oneself, body and soul, that's it.
That is the equivalent not only of amorous possession, but of a marriage.
She gives this Japanese—at Hiroshima—her most precious possession: herself as she now is, her survival after the death of her love at Nevers.
Hiroshima Mon Amour Page 7
