Writing

by Marguerite Duras

  The precision of the moment of death relates to coexistence with humans, with colonized populations, with the fabulous mass of strangers in the world, of people alone, of universal solitude. Life is everywhere. From bacteria to elephants. From earth to the divine heavens or to those already dead.

  I had never organized anything around the death of that fly. The smooth, white walls, its shroud, were already there, and made its death into a public event, something natural and inevitable. The fly had clearly reached the end of its life. I couldn’t keep myself from watching it die. It had stopped moving. There was that, and also knowing that one cannot recount the fly’s existence.

  That was twenty years ago. I had never talked about that event as I’ve just done, not even to Michelle Porte. What I also realized—what I saw—was that the fly already knew that the icy chill passing through it was death. That was the most terrifying thing. The most unexpected. It knew. And it accepted.

  A solitary house doesn’t simply exist. It needs time around it, people, histories, “turning points,” things like marriage or the death of that fly, death, banal death—the death of one and the many at the same time; planetary, proletarian death. The kind that comes with war, those mountains of wars on Earth.

  That day. The one dated by a meeting with my friend Michelle Porte, seen by me alone, that day, at no specific hour, a fly died.

  The instant I looked at it, it was suddenly three twenty-something in the afternoon: the noise of its outer wings stopped.

  The fly was dead.

  That queen. Black and blue.

  That one, the one I had seen, had died. Slowly. It had struggled up to the last spasm. And then it had succumbed. It lasted maybe five to eight minutes. It had been long. It was a moment of absolute terror. And then death headed off for other skies, other planets, other places.

  I wanted to run away, and at the same time I told myself I had to look toward that noise on the ground, just so I could hear, for once, that flare-up of green wood, an ordinary fly dying.

  Yes. That’s right. The death of that fly has become this displacement of literature. One writes without knowing it. One writes by watching a fly relinquish its life. One has a right to do that.

  Michelle Porte went into hysterics when I told her the exact time the fly had died. And now I’m thinking that maybe it wasn’t because I had recounted that death so laughably. At the time I lacked the words to express it because I was watching that death, the agony of that black and blue fly.

  Solitude always goes hand-in-hand with madness. I know this. One does not see madness. Only sometimes can one sense it. I don’t believe it can be otherwise. When one takes everything from oneself, an entire book, one necessarily enters a particular state of solitude that cannot be shared with anyone. One cannot share anything. One must read the book one has written alone, cloistered in that book. There is obviously something religious about this, but one doesn’t immediately experience it that way. One can think about it later (as I’m thinking about it now) because of something that might be life, for instance, or a solution to the life of the book, of the word, of shouts, silent screams, the silently terrible screams of everyone in the world.

  Around us, everything is writing; that’s what we must finally perceive. Everything is writing. The fly on the wall is writing; there is much that it wrote in the light of the large room, refracted by the pond. The fly’s writing could fill an entire page. And so this would be a kind of writing. From the moment that it could be, it already is a kind of writing. One day, perhaps, in the centuries to come, one might read this writing; it, too, will be deciphered, translated. And the vastness of an illegible poem will unfurl across the sky.

  But even so, somewhere in the world people are writing books. Everyone does it. That’s what I believe. I am sure this is the case. That for Maurice Blanchot, for example, this is the case. He has madness spinning around him. That madness, too, is death. Not for Georges Bataille. Why was Bataille preserved from free, mad thought? I couldn’t say.

  I’d like to say a little more about the story of that fly.

  I can still see it, that fly, on the white wall, dying. At first in the sunlight, then in the muted light refracted off the tiled floor.

  One could also not write, forget a fly. Only watch it. See how it struggled in its turn, terrible and accounted for, in an unknown sky, made of nothing.

  There, that’s all.

  I’m going to speak of nothing.

  Of nothing.

  All the houses in Neauphle are lived in: not so constantly in the winter, of course, but still they are lived in. They aren’t reserved for summer, as is so often the case. All year long they are open, lived in.

  What counts in that house in Neauphle-le-Château are the windows overlooking the garden and the road to Paris in front of the house. The one on which the women in my books pass by.

  I slept a lot in the room that became the living room. For a long time I thought a bedroom was too conventional. Only when I started working there did it become indispensable like the other rooms—even the empty ones on the upper floors. The mirror in the living room belonged to the previous owners. They left it for me. I bought the piano immediately after the house, for almost the same price.

  Alongside the house, a good hundred years ago, there was a path for the livestock to come drink from the pond. The pond is now in my garden. There are no more livestock. And so the village has no more fresh milk in the morning. For the past hundred years.

  When we make a film here, the house looks like that other house, the one it once was for the other people before us. In its solitude, its grace, it suddenly shows itself as another house that might still belong to other people. As if something as monstrous as the loss of this house could even be imagined.

  The place inside where we put the fruit, vegetables, and salted butter to keep them cool … There was a room like that … dark and cool … I believe that’s what a storeroom is; yes, that’s it. That’s the word. You stock up for the war by putting things under cover.

  The first plants here were the ones on the window sills at the entry. The rose geranium that came from the south of Spain. Pungent like the Orient.

  We never throw out flowers in this house. It’s a habit, not a rule. Never, not even dead ones; we leave them there. There are some rose petals that have been in a jar for forty years. They are still very pink. Dry and Pink.

  The problem all year round is dusk. Summer and winter alike.

  There is the first dusk, the summer kind, when you mustn’t turn the lights on indoors.

  And then there is true dusk, winter dusk. Sometimes we close the shutters just not to see it. There are chairs, too, which we put away for the summer. The porch is where we stay every summer. Where we talk with friends who come during the day. Often just for that, to talk.

  It’s sad every time, but not tragic: winter, life, injustice. Absolute horror on a certain morning.

  It’s only that: sad. One does not get used to it with time.

  The hardest thing in this house is fear for the trees. Always. Every time. Every time there’s a storm (and there are a lot of them here), we are with the trees; we worry about those trees. Suddenly I can’t remember their name.

  Dusk is the time when everyone around the writer stops working.

  In the cities, the villages, everywhere, writers are solitary people. Everywhere, always, they have been.

  All over the world, the end of light means the end of work.

  As for myself, I’ve always experienced that time not as the moment when work ends, but when it begins. A sort of reversal of natural values by the writer.

  The other kind of work writers do is the kind that sometimes makes them feel ashamed, the kind that usually provokes the most violent political regrets. I know that it leaves one inconsolable. And that one becomes as vicious as the dogs used by their police.

  Here, one feels separated from manual labor. But against that, against this feeling one must adapt to,
get used to, nothing is effective. What will always predominate—and this can drive us to tears—is the hell and injustice of the working world. The hell of factories, the exaction of the employers’ scorn and injustice, the horror they breed, the horror of the capitalist regime, of all the misery stemming from it, of the right of the wealthy to do as they please with the proletariat and to make this the very basis of their failure, never of their success. The mystery is why the proletariat should accept. But there are many of us, more of us each day, who believe that it can’t last much longer. That something was attained by all of us, perhaps a new reading of their shameful texts. Yes, that’s it.

  I won’t push the point; I’m leaving. But I’m only saying what everyone feels, even if they don’t know how to live it.

  Often with the end of work comes the memory of the greatest injustice of all. I’m talking about the ordinariness of life. Not in the morning, only in the evening does this come, even into the houses, to us. And if one isn’t that way, then one isn’t anything at all. One is nothing. And always, in every case, in every village, this is known.

  Deliverance comes when night begins to settle in. When work stops outside. What remains is the luxury we all share, the ability to write about it at night. We can write at any hour of the day. We are not sanctioned by orders, schedules, bosses, weapons, fines, insults, cops, bosses, and bosses. Nor by the brooding hens of tomorrow’s fascisms.

  The Vice-Consul’s struggle is at once naive and revolutionary.

  That is the major injustice of time, of all times: and if one doesn’t cry about it at least once in life, then one doesn’t cry about anything. And never to cry means not to live.

  Crying has to happen, too.

  Even if it’s useless to cry, I still think we have to cry. Because despair is tangible. It remains. The memory of despair remains. Sometimes it kills.

  To write.

  I can’t.

  No one can.

  We have to admit: we cannot.

  And yet we write.

  It’s the unknown one carries within oneself: writing is what is attained. It’s that or nothing.

  One can speak of a writing sickness.

  What I’m trying to say isn’t easy, but I believe we can find our way here, comrades of the world.

  There is a madness of writing that is in oneself, an insanity of writing, but that alone doesn’t make one insane. On the contrary.

  Writing is the unknown. Before writing one knows nothing of what one is about to write. And in total lucidity.

  It’s the unknown in oneself, one’s head, one’s body. Writing is not even a reflection, but a kind of faculty one has, that exists to one side of oneself, parallel to oneself: another person who appears and comes forward, invisible, gifted with thought and anger, and who sometimes, through his own actions, risks losing his life.

  If one had any idea what one was going to write, before doing it, before writing, one would never write. It wouldn’t be worth it anymore.

  Writing is trying to know beforehand what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward; that is the most dangerous question one could ever ask oneself. But it’s also the most widespread.

  Writing comes like the wind. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself.

  The Death of the Young British Pilot

  The beginning, the opening of a story.

  It’s a story I’m going to tell for the first time. The story of this book.

  I believe it’s a direction that writing takes. That’s it—this writing addressed to you, for instance, about whom I know nothing yet.

  To you, reader:

  It takes place in a village very near Deauville, a few miles from the sea. The village is called Vauville. In the département of Calvados.

  Vauville.

  It’s there. It’s the name on the road sign.

  When I went there for the first time, it was on the advice of friends, shopkeepers in Trouville. They had told me of the lovely chapel in Vauville. And so I saw the church that day, that first time, without seeing anything of what I’m about to relate.

  The church is in fact quite handsome, even beautiful. To its right is a small cemetery from the nineteenth century, noble, opulent, reminiscent of Père-Lachaise in Paris, very ornate, like an immobile celebration, frozen in the middle of the centuries.

  On the other side of the church is the body of the young British pilot killed on the last day of the war.

  And in the middle of the lawn, there is a grave. A light gray granite slab, perfectly polished. I didn’t see that stone right away. I saw it after I learned the story.

  He was an English child.

  He was twenty years old.

  His name is engraved on the slab.

  At first they called him the Young British Pilot.

  He was an orphan. He was in a boarding school in the suburbs north of London. He had enlisted like so many young Englishmen.

  It was in the last days of the world war. Perhaps the last: it’s possible. He had attacked a German battery. For fun. Since he had fired on their battery, the Germans responded. They fired on the child. He was twenty years old.

  The child remained a prisoner of his airplane. A single-seat Meteor.

  Yes, that’s right. He remained a prisoner of the airplane. And the plane fell onto a tree in the forest. It was there—or so the villagers believe—that he died, during the night, the last of his life.

  For a whole day and night, in the forest, all the inhabitants of Vauville kept vigil over him. As before, in ancient times, as they would have done before, they kept vigil with candles, prayers, songs, tears, flowers. And then they managed to pry him out of the plane. And they pried the plane out of the tree. It was long and difficult. His body had remained prisoner of the twisted steel and the tree.

  They brought him down from the tree. It was very long. By the end of the night, it was done. Once the body was down, they carried it to the cemetery and immediately dug his grave. And the next day, I believe, they bought the light gray granite slab.

  That is the beginning of the story.

  The young Englishman is still there, in that grave. Under the granite slab.

  The year after his death, someone came to see the young British soldier. He had brought flowers. An old man, also British. He came there to cry over the child’s grave and to pray. He said he’d been the child’s teacher in a boarding school north of London. It was he who spoke the child’s name.

  It was also he who said the child was an orphan. That there was no one to notify.

  Every year he came back. For eight years.

  And beneath the granite slab, death lingered on and on.

  And then he never came back again.

  And no one was left on Earth to remember the existence of that wild child—crazy, some said: that crazy child, who had won the world war single-handedly.

  Then there were only the villagers to remember and tend the grave, the flowers, the gray stone slab. I think that for years no one knew the story, apart from the people of Vauville.

  The teacher had spoken the child’s name. His name was engraved on the tomb:

  W. J. Cliffe.

  Every time the old man talked about the child, he wept.

  On the eighth year, he did not come back. And he never came back again.

  My younger brother had died during the war with Japan. He died without any grave at all. Thrown into a mass pit on top of the previous corpses. And this is something so terrible to think about, so horrible, that it cannot be endured, and one cannot know just how horrible without having lived through it. It’s not the heap of bodies, not at all; it’s the disappearance of that body in the mass of other bodies. It’s his, his own body, thrown into the trench, without a word. Except a prayer for all the dead.

  It wasn’t the same for the young British pilot, since the villagers had sung and prayed on their kne
es on the ground around his tomb and stayed there all night. Even so, it brought me back to that mass grave on the outskirts of Saigon where Paulo’s body lies. But now I think there’s more than that. I believe that one day, much later, and later still, I don’t know for sure, but I already know, yes, much later, I will find—I already know this—something material that I will recognize as a smile frozen in the sockets of his eyes. Paulo’s eyes. Here, there’s more than Paulo. For the death of that young British pilot to become such a personal event, there is more to it than I believe.

  I will never know what. No one will ever know.

  No one.

  It brings me back to our love as well. There is the love of one’s little brother and there was our love, ours, his and mine, very strong love, hidden, culpable, a love for every moment. Still lovely even after your death. The young English corpse was everyone and it was also he alone. It was everyone and he. But “everyone” does not make you cry. And then the desire to see the dead child, to verify without ever having known him if that had indeed been his face, that hole at the end of his eyeless body; that desire to see his body and how his face looked in death, ripped apart by the steel of the Meteor.

  Could any of it still be seen? The thought is almost unbearable. I never thought I could write it. That was my business, not the reader’s. You are my reader, Paulo. Because I’m telling you, I’m writing it to you, it’s true. You are the love of my entire life, the keeper of our rage against our older brother, throughout our childhood, your childhood.

  The grave stands alone. As he was alone. It has its age of death … how can I say it … no one knows … the state of the lawn, the little garden. The proximity of the other cemetery was also part of it. But honestly, how can I say that? How can one bring together the infant who was six months old when he died and whose grave is in the upper part of the lawn, and that other child who was twenty? They are still there, both of them, and their names, and their ages. They are alone.

  And afterward I saw other things. Always, afterward, one sees things.