The Ravishing of Lol Stein

by Marguerite Duras

  A moment later, the light goes out in the room.

  A taxi, probably summoned by phone, stops in front of the hotel.

  Lol gets up. It is completely dark now. She is numb, at first she has trouble walking, but she sets off at a brisk pace. When she reaches the small square she finds a taxi. It's time for dinner. She is terribly late.

  Her husband is outside in the street, waiting, beside himself with worry.

  She lies, and is believed. She tells them that she had to go all the way to the outskirts of town to do an errand, something she could buy only in the nurseries in the suburbs, plants for a hedge she was thinking of putting in to help screen the grounds from the street.

  They commiserated with her, told her how sorry they were that she had had to walk so long and so far down dark, deserted streets.

  The love that Lol had once had for Michael Richardson was her husband's best guarantee of his wife's faithfulness. It was impossible that she should ever find, a second time, a man made of the same cloth as the man from Town Beach, or, if she did, she would have to invent him, and she invented nothing, John Bedford believed.

  DURING THE DAYS that followed, Lol looked high and low for Tatiana's address.

  She did not give up her walks.

  But the light of the ball was suddenly extinguished. She can no longer see it clearly. The faces, the bodies of the lovers are covered over with an even layer of gray mildew.

  The Karls had never lived in South Tahla. It was at school that Lol and Tatiana had become fast friends, and they used to spend their vacations together in Town Beach. Their parents were barely acquainted. Lol had forgotten the Karls' address. She wrote to the alumnae association of the school: after Tatiana's father had retired, the family had moved away, they lived near the seashore now, not far from Town Beach. Since they had moved the association had lost track of Tatiana. Lol refused to admit defeat, she wrote a long, embarrassed letter to Mrs. Karl, telling her how much she would have liked to renew ties with Tatiana, the only friend she had not forgotten. Mrs. Karl wrote back a very affectionate letter and gave Lol the address of her daughter, who had been married for eight years to a Dr. Beugner, in South Tahla.

  Tatiana was living in a large house in the southern part of South Tahla, not far from the forest.

  On several occasions, Lol went out for walks in the vicinity of this house, with which she was already familiar, as she was familiar with all the houses in town.

  The house was situated on a slight rise. The grounds, which were large and well-wooded, made it difficult to see the house from the front, but from behind, by looking up the winding vista of a broad pathway, it was more easily visible, with balconies on the upper stories and a large terrace where, in summer, Tatiana could often be found. It was here, in the rear, that the main gate was located.

  It was probably not Lol's plan to rush over and call on Tatiana, she no doubt planned first to scout out the area near her house, to loiter in the neighboring streets. Who could tell? Perhaps Tatiana would come out, they would meet in this way, run into each other again, to all appearances quite by chance.

  That did not happen.

  The first time, Lol must have seen Tatiana Karl on the terrace, lying on a deck chair, wearing a bathing suit, her eyes closed against the bright sunlight. The second time as well. Once, Tatiana Karl seemed not to be home. Her deck chair was there, and a coffee table covered with brightly colored magazines. That day the sky was overcast. Lol lingered in the neighborhood, but Tatiana failed to appear.

  It was at that point that Lol made up her mind to call on Tatiana. She told her husband that she intended to go and see an old school friend, Tatiana Karl, whose picture she had happened to come across while she was straightening up some things. Had she ever spoken to him about her? She couldn't remember. No. It was the first time John Bedford had ever heard the name.

  As Lol never expressed any desire to see anyone or look up anyone again, John Bedford was somewhat taken aback by this show of initiative. He questioned Lol. She stuck to the sole reason that she had given him: she was interested in catching up on the news of her old school friends, and especially this particular one, Tatiana Karl, who, as she recalled, was the most endearing of them all. How did she know her address in South Tahla? She had happened to see her come out of a cinema in the center of town, and had written to the alumnae association.

  John Bedford had grown used to seeing his wife, all these years, fully contented with him alone, with no need of any outside contacts. The notion of Lol exchanging small talk with anyone, no matter who, was inconceivable, and even, apparently, somewhat distasteful, for anyone who really knew her. Still, it would appear that John Bedford did nothing to try and prevent Lol from finally acting the way other women did. It was something that had to happen sooner or later, and it confirmed how vastly improved she had grown over the years, it was something he had devoutly desired, John Bedford doubtless remembered, or, by then, did he really prefer that she remain the way she had been for ten years in Uxbridge, in that irreproachable promise of something different? I suspect that he had a moment of panic: what he had to be afraid of was himself. He had to pretend that he was pleased by Lol's initiative. He was delighted, he told her, by anything that would take her away from her daily routine. Didn't she realize that? And what about her walks? Would he have the pleasure of meeting Tatiana Karl? Lol promised that he would, sometime within the next few days.

  Lol bought herself a dress. She put off her visit to Tatiana Karl for two days, the time it took her to make this difficult purchase. She decided on a white, summer dress. The dress, according to everyone in her house, suited her perfectly.

  In secret, not allowing her husband or the children or the maids to see, she spent hours that day primping and preening. Her husband wasn't the only one, they all knew that she was going to pay a visit to an old school friend who had once been very close to her. They were surprised, but they carefully refrained from saying anything. When she was on the point of leaving the house, they complimented her on her appearance, and she felt obliged to offer certain additional information: she had chosen that white dress so that Tatiana Karl would be able to recognize her more readily, more easily. The last time she had seen Tatiana had been at the seashore in Town Beach, she could remember it very clearly, it was ten years ago, and during that vacation she had, at the request of a friend, worn nothing but white.

  The deck chair was in its usual position, as were the table and the magazines. Tatiana Karl was perhaps in the house. It was a Saturday afternoon, about four o'clock. The sun was shining.

  This is what I surmise:

  Once again, Lol circles the house, no longer in the hope of running into Tatiana, but to try and control to some extent that impatience welling within her, impelling her to run: she must not give these people the slightest hint of her impatience, these people who are as yet unaware that their peace and tranquility is about to be shattered forever. In the course of the past few days, Tatiana Karl has become so dear to her that, if her attempt were to fail, if she were not able to see her again, the town would become unlivable, stifling and deadly. She had to succeed. For these people, the next few days are going to be—more specifically than a more distant future would be—whatever she cares to make of them, she, Lol Stein. She will invent the necessary circumstances, then she will open whatever doors have to be opened: they will pass through them.

  She circles the house, until it is slightly past the time she has set for the visit.

  In what lost universe has Lol Stein acquired this fierce will, this method?

  Perhaps it would have been preferable for her to arrive at Tatiana's in the evening. But she has decided that she ought to show a certain discretion and abide by the customary visiting hours of the upper middle-class to which both she and Tatiana belong.

  She rings the bell at the gate. It is as though she can feel the blood rising in her cheeks. Today she must be beautiful enough for it to be visible. Today, in keeping wi
th her desire, they must see Lol Stein.

  A maid came out onto the terrace, looked for a moment, and went back inside. A few seconds later, Tatiana, in a blue dress, appeared on the terrace in turn and looked.

  The terrace is about a hundred yards from the gate. Tatiana is trying to make out who it is who has dropped in this way unannounced. She fails to discern who it is and gives the order to open the gate. Again the maid disappears. The gate opens with an electric click that startles Lol.

  She is inside the fence, on the grounds. The gate closes behind her.

  She advances up the path. She is half way up it when two men come out and join Tatiana. One of them is the man she is looking for. He sees her for the first time.

  She smiles at the group and keeps on walking slowly toward the terrace. Flower beds come into view on the lawn, and on either side of the path hydrangeas are withering in the shade of the trees. They are already turning purple, is probably her only thought. The hydrangeas, Tatiana's hydrangeas, at the same time as Tatiana now, she who from one moment to the next is going to shout my name.

  "Lola, is that really you?"

  He looks at her. She discovers the same intrigued expression she had seen in the street. It really is Tatiana, here is Tatiana's voice, tender, suddenly tender, with its old modulations, her sad, childlike voice.

  "But, is it Lol! I'm not mistaken?"

  "It's Lol," she said.

  Tatiana comes running down the terrace steps and over to Lol, stops before she reaches her, looks at her, her expression one of undisguised surprise but also slightly wild, changing from pleasure to displeasure, from fear to reassurance. Lol the intruder, the little girl in the playground, Lol from Town Beach, that ball, that ball, mad Lol, did she still love her? Yes.

  Lol is in her arms.

  On the terrace, the men watched them embrace. They have heard Tatiana speak of her.

  They are almost at the terrace. At any moment, the distance separating them from that terrace is going to be covered, forever.

  Before that happens, the man Lol is looking for suddenly finds himself in the direct line of her gaze. Lol, her head on Tatiana's shoulder, sees him: he almost lost his balance, he turned his head away. She was not mistaken.

  Tatiana no longer has about her that fresh-linen smell of the dormitories where, in the evenings, her laughter used to ring out in search of a friendly ear to whom she could relate the practical jokes she had dreamed up for the next day. The next day is here. Tatiana, in her golden skin, smells of amber now, the present, the present alone, which turns round and round, whirls in the dust and at last alights with a cry, the soft cry with broken wings, and Lol is the only person to notice the break in it.

  "Lord! It's been ten years since I've seen you, Lola!"

  "Yes, ten years, Tatiana."

  Arm in arm, they ascend the terrace steps. Tatiana introduces Peter Beugner, her husband, to Lol, and Jack Hold, a friend of theirs—the distance is covered —me.

  I'M THIRTY-SIX YEARS OLD, a member of the medical profession. I've been living in South Tahla only for a year. I'm in Peter Beugner's section at the State Hospital. I'm Tatiana Karl's lover.

  From the moment Lol entered the house, she never so much as glanced at me again.

  She immediately began talking to Tatiana about a photograph she had happened to come across while she was cleaning up a room in the attic recently: they were both in it, holding hands, in the school yard, dressed in the school uniform. They were fifteen. Tatiana didn't remember the picture. Personally, I believed it existed, Tatiana asked if she could see it. Lol promised to show it to her.

  "Tatiana has talked to us about you," Peter Beugner said.

  Tatiana isn't a very talkative person anyway, and that day she was even less so than usual. She hung on Lol Stein's every word, prodded her into talking about her recent life. She wanted both to acquaint us with, and learn more herself about, the way Lol lived, about her husband, her children, her house, how she spent her time, about her past: Lol was not the most talkative person in the world either, but she spoke clearly enough, rationally enough to reassure anyone who might have been concerned about her present condition—but not her, not Tatiana. No, Tatiana was concerned about Lol in a different way than were the others: that she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be completely cured of one's passion. And besides, Lol's had been an ineffable passion, that she was quite willing to admit, even today, in spite of the reservations she still has concerning the part it had played in Lol's breakdown.

  "You speak of your life as though you were reciting from a book," Tatiana said.

  "From one year to the next," Lol said with a vague smile, "I see nothing any different around me."

  "Tell me something, you know what I mean, about how we were when we were young," Tatiana begged.

  Lol racked her brain, searching for something, some detail out of her youth that might have enabled Tatiana to rediscover some vestige of that real friendship she had felt for Lol during their school years together. She found nothing. She said:

  "If you want my opinion, I think people were wrong in their judgment."

  Tatiana did not reply.

  The conversation drifted into platitudes, slowed, became dull because Tatiana was watching Lol like a hawk, watching her slightest smile, her every move, and that occupied her entirely. Peter Beugner spoke to Lol about South Tahla, and about the changes that had taken place in the town since the women had been young. Lol had followed each detail of South Tahla's development, the construction of new streets, the plans for new buildings in the suburbs, she spoke of it as she spoke of her life, in a calm, controlled voice. Then again silence set in. They talked of Uxbridge. They talked.

  Nothing about this woman betrayed the slightest hint, even fleetingly, of Lol Stein's breakdown, her strange mourning for Michael Richardson.

  Of her insanity—which had been eradicated, leveled —nothing seemed to remain, no trace except her presence that afternoon at Tatiana Karl's. The reason for her presence was a streak of color on a smooth, unbroken horizon, but only a faint streak, for, quite plausibly, she might merely have been bored with herself and come to pay a call on Tatiana Karl. Still, Tatiana was wondering why, why she was there. It was inevitable: she had nothing to say to Tatiana, nothing to tell, she seemed only to have the vaguest recollection, virtually no memory at all, of their school days together, and her ten years in Uxbridge required no more than ten minutes to sum up.

  I was the only one to realize, because of that immense, half-starved look she had given me while she had been embracing Tatiana, that there was a specific purpose behind her visit here. How was that possible? I had my doubts. In order to derive an even greater pleasure in remembering exactly how she had looked at me, I persisted in doubting. It was completely different from her expression at present. There remained no trace of it. But her indifference toward me now was too obvious to be natural. She studiously avoided looking at me. Nor did I say anything to her.

  "In what way were people wrong?" Tatiana said at last.

  Tense, not liking to be interrogated in this way, she none the less made this reply, profoundly sorry to disappoint Tatiana:

  "About the reasons," she said, "they were wrong about the reasons."

  "That I knew," Tatiana said, "I mean ... I suspected as much. Things are never as simple . . ."

  Once again Peter Beugner changed the subject. Obviously he was the only one of us who could not bear to see Lol's face when she spoke of her youth. He began talking again, talking to her about what? about how beautiful her garden was, and her lawn, he explained that he had passed by her house and seen it, and what a marvelous idea it was to have planted that hedge between her house and that street with its heavy traffic!

  She seemed to sense something, to suspect that there was more than a purely platonic relationship between Tatiana and me. Whenever Tatiana turns her attention from Lol for a moment, when she leaves off questioning h
er, it becomes more apparent: whenever she is in the presence of one of her lovers, Tatiana is inevitably affected by the always recent memory of her afternoons in the Forest Hotel. Whenever she gets to her feet, moves from one spot to another, whenever she rearranges her hair, or sits down, her movements are sensual. Her girlish body, her wound, her happy misery, cries out, calls for the paradise of her lost unity, calls endlessly, now and forever, for someone to console her and comfort her, her body is whole only in a hotel bed.

  Tatiana serves tea. Lol's eyes follow her. We are both watching her, Lol and I. Any other aspect of Tatiana becomes secondary. In Lol's eyes, and in mine, she is nothing but Jack Hold's mistress. I have a difficult time following what they are both reminiscing about now, in a bantering tone, something about their youth, about Tatiana's hair. Lol says:

  "Ah, when you unpinned your hair and let it down in the evening, the whole dormitory would come and watch. We used to give you a hand."

  It will never be a question of Lol's blondness, nor of her blue eyes, never.

  I intend to find out why, no matter what I have to do, why, why me?

  Then this happened. As Tatiana is once again arranging her hair I am thinking back to yesterday—Lol is watching her—I remember my head buried in her breast, yesterday. I have no idea that Lol saw us, and yet the way she is watching Tatiana is what prompts me to remember. It seems to me I already know a trifle more about what is going on inside Tatiana when, naked, she rearranges her hair in the room in the Forest Hotel.

  What was this unruffled ghost concealing about a love so deep, so strong, they said, that it had literally driven her mad? I was on my guard. She is soft and gentle, smiling, she is speaking of Tatiana Karl.

  Personally, Tatiana did not believe that Lol Stein's insanity could be traced back solely to that ball, she traced its origins back further, further in Lol's life, back to her youth, she saw it as stemming from somewhere else. In school, she says, there was something lacking in Lol, she was already then strangely incomplete, she had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become. In school, she was a marvel of gentleness and indifference, she changed friends with abandon, she never made the least effort to combat boredom, nor had she ever been known to shed a sentimental schoolgirl's tear. When the rumor of her engagement to Michael Richardson first became known, she, Tatiana, had only half believed it. Who could Lol have found, who could ever have captured her so completely? or at least to a sufficient degree to entice her into marriage? who could have captured her unfinished heart? Does Tatiana still believe she was wrong?