The Ravishing of Lol Stein

by Marguerite Duras

  "Tatiana," she whispers.

  "Tatiana was there yesterday. You were right. Admirable Tatiana."

  Tatiana is there, like another person, Tatiana, mired within us, the Tatiana of yesterday and the one of tomorrow, whoever she may be. I plunge myself deep into her warm and muzzled body, an idle hour for Lol, the resplendent hour of her oblivion, I graft myself upon her, I pump Tatiana's blood. Tatiana is there, so that I can forget Lol Stein in her. She slowly becomes bloodless beneath me.

  In the evening breeze, the rye rustles round the body of that woman who is keeping watch on a hotel where I am with someone else, with Tatiana.

  Lol, close beside me, moves even closer, closer to Tatiana. The way she would like to. As the train stops at the various stations, the compartment remains empty. We are still alone in it.

  "You want me to take you to a hotel after we get there?"

  "I don't think so. I did want you to. But I don't any more."

  This is all she has to say. She takes my hands, which I had withdrawn, and places them on her body again. I say, I beg:

  "I can't bear it, I must see you every day."

  "I can't bear it either. But we have to be careful. Two days ago I came home late. I found John out in the street, he was waiting for me."

  A moment of doubt: did she see me at the window that last time, and the time before that? Did she see that I saw her? She mentions the incident quite casually. I don't ask her where she was coming from. She tells me.

  "Sometimes I go out rather late. That night was one of those times."

  "And did you do it again?"

  "Yes. But that time he wasn't waiting for me. But that makes it all the more serious. Anyway, as far as our seeing each other every day, it's out of the question, because of Tatiana."

  She snuggles up against me again, closes her eyes, is silent, attentively silent. She is the picture of contentment beside me. My eyes, my hands can detect nothing in any way out of the ordinary about her. Not the slightest trace of any difference. And yet, and yet. Who is there now, so near and yet so far, what marauding thoughts and ideas prowl through her mind, again and again, by day, by night, in every light? even right this minute? At this very moment when, holding her in my arms in this train, I might be tempted to think she was no different from any other woman? Around us, the walls: I try to scale them, catch hold, slip back, start over again, perhaps, perhaps, but my reason remains the same, undismayed, and I fall.

  "I want to try and tell you something about this happiness I feel by loving you," she says. "I've been wanting to tell you for several days."

  The sunlight coming through the train window falls on her. Her moving fingers punctuate her sentence, then settle back down on her white skirt. I cannot see her face.

  "I don't love you and yet I do. You know what I mean."

  I ask:

  "Why don't you kill yourself? Why haven't you already killed yourself?"

  "No, you're wrong, that's not it at all."

  She says that to me without any trace of sadness. If I'm wrong, I'm less wide of the mark than the others. I can only be wildly wrong about her. She knows it. She says:

  "It's the first time you've been wrong."

  "Are you glad?"

  "Yes. Especially in that way. You are so close to ... "

  She tells me how happy, how concretely happy she is because she's in love. In her day-to-day existence with a man other than me, this happiness can coexist without creating the slightest problem.

  When will it all end, in a few hours or in a few days? It won't be long before they take her back. They will comfort and console her, surround her with affection in her house in South Tahla.

  "I'm not telling you the whole truth, I admit. At night I dream of telling you. But when morning comes, the urgency is less great. I understand."

  "You mustn't tell me everything."

  "You're right, I shouldn't. See, I'm not lying."

  For the past three nights, ever since her trip to Town Beach, I've been dreading another trip she might take. The fear was still with me in the morning. I haven't told her that I've followed her when she goes out on her walks, that I drive past her house every day.

  "There are times during the day when I manage to picture what it would be like without you, I still know you, but you've disappeared, you're no longer there. I don't do anything rash, I go out walking, I sleep, sleep very well in fact. I feel good without you since I've known you. Maybe it's at times like these, when I manage to convince myself that you're gone, that ..."

  I wait. When she really tries, she manages to continue. She is really trying. Her closed eyelids flutter imperceptibly, in time to the beating of her heart: she is calm, today she enjoys talking.

  "... that I'm better, the woman I ought to be."

  "And when would the suffering begin again?"

  She is surprised.

  "But . . . it wouldn't."

  "Hasn't it ever happened to you?"

  Her tone is different, she is hiding something.

  "You see, that's odd, isn't it. I don't know."

  "Never, are you sure? Not once?"

  She is searching.

  "When work around the house doesn't go right." A plaintive whine creeps into her voice. "Don't ask me any more questions."

  "It's all over."

  Again she grows calm, she is solemn, she is thinking, after a long moment of reflection this is the thought that she shouts out:

  "Oh, how I'd like to show you my ingratitude, show you how ugly I am, how impossible it is to love me. I'd like to offer you that."

  "You have offered it to me."

  She lifts her head slightly, astonished at first, then suddenly grown old, deformed by some intense emotion which strips her of all her grace and delicacy and renders her coarse and sensual. I picture her nakedness next to mine, complete, for the first time oddly enough, in a rapid flash, just long enough to ascertain whether I would be able to bear it if that moment should ever come. Lol Stein's body, so distant, and yet so inextricably wedded to itself, solitary.

  She goes on talking about her happiness.

  "The sea was in the waiting-room mirror. At that time of day the beach was deserted. I had taken a very slow train. All the bathers had left the beach and gone home. The sea was the way it used to be when I was young. You were not in the town at all, even before. If I believed in you the way others believe in God I could ask myself: why you? Does it have any meaning? Yet the beach was empty, as empty as if God had not yet finished making it."

  I in turn tell her about what happened two nights before in my room: I had studied my room closely, and I had moved various objects around, as though surreptitiously, according to the vision she would have had of them if she had come, and also according to her place among them, Lol moving among the unmoving objects. I pictured them being moved about into so many different positions that I became upset, it was as though some sort of unhappiness came and lodged in my hands because of my inability to decide what the exact position of these objects should be in relation to her life. I gave up the game, gave up trying to fit her, alive, into the death of things.

  I continue to hold her as I tell her all this. I have to hold her forever, not let her go. She stays. She talks.

  I understand what she wants to tell me: what I have been saying about the objects in my room has happened to her body, what I just said reminded her of it. She has taken it for walks through town. But that's no longer enough. She is still asking herself where this body ought to be, where exactly to put it, so that it will cease to be a burden to her.

  "I'm at least a little closer to knowing than I was before. For a long time I used to put it somewhere else than where it ought to have been. Now I think I'm getting closer to the place where it will be happy."

  By her face and by her face alone, as I touch it more and more urgently, roughly, with my open hand, she experiences the pleasure of love. I was not mistaken. I was looking at her from so close up. The full warmth of
her breath burned my mouth. Her eyes are dead, and when they open again I see upon me for the first time the gaze of someone who has lost consciousness. She moans weakly. She says:

  "Tatiana."

  I reassure her.

  "Tomorrow, I'll see her tomorrow."

  I take her in my arms. We gaze out at the countryside. We come to a station. The train grinds to a halt. A small village nestles around a town hall, which has been recently repainted yellow. She begins to recall specific places.

  "This is the next to last station before Town Beach," she says.

  She is talking, talking to herself. I listen attentively to a slightly incoherent monologue, of no importance to me. I listen to her memory beginning to function, to take hold of the shapes which she juxtaposes one beside the other like some game, the rules of which have been lost.

  "There used to be a wheat field there. Ripe wheat." She adds: "What extraordinary patience!"

  It had been in this same train that she had departed from Town Beach forever, in a compartment like this one, with her family around her wiping the beads of perspiration from her forehead, offering her something to drink, making her stretch out on the compartment seat, her mother calling her my pet, my love, my beauty.

  "The train used to pass this wood much farther away. There wasn't ever any shadow on the field, and yet there was bright sunlight. My eyes hurt."

  "What about the day before yesterday? Was the sun shining?"

  She didn't notice. What was it she saw the day before yesterday? I don't ask her. At present she is experiencing a mechanical series of successive recognitions of places, of things, these places and things, she can't be mistaken, we really are on the train to Town Beach. She is erecting a scaffolding which, it would appear, is temporarily necessary for her, a woods, a field of wheat, patience.

  She is completely preoccupied by her effort to recognize things. This is the first time she has deserted me so completely. And yet, every once in a while, she turns her head and smiles at me like someone who has not forgotten, though I must not let myself believe it.

  The distance is growing shorter and shorter, is forcing her to hurry, at the end she talks almost without interruption. I don't hear it all. I'm still holding her in my arms. When someone is vomiting, you hold him tenderly. I too begin to pay attention to these indestructible places, which at this moment in time are becoming the sites of my arrival on the scene. Now the hour of my entering Lol Stein's memory is at hand.

  The ball will be at the end of the trip, it will fall like a house of cards, as this trip is presently falling. She is seeing her present memory for the last time in her life, she is burying it. In the future it will be today's vision she will recall, this companion beside her in the train. This trip, in the future, will be like the town of South Tahla is for her now, lying in ruins beneath her footsteps of the present. I say:

  "I love you, so very much. What's to become of us?"

  She says that she knows. She doesn't know.

  The train is moving more slowly through a sunny countryside. The horizon is growing brighter and brighter. We are going to arrive at a region where the light will bathe everything, at an auspicious hour, the hour when the beaches empty, about noon.

  "When you look at Tatiana the way you did the other evening, without seeing her, I have the feeling I'm remembering someone I'd forgotten. Tatiana at the ball. And then I'm a little bit afraid. Maybe I shouldn't see you together any more, except ..."

  Her words had come in a rush. Perhaps her sentence was left suspended because of the noise of the brakes beginning to be applied: we're in Town Beach. She gets up, goes to the window, I get up too, and together we see the seaside resort come into view.

  It sparkles in the midday light.

  There is the sea, calm, in different iridescent tints depending on the make-up of the bottom, a weary blue.

  The train descends toward the sea. Suspended in the sky above is a layer of light purple haze, which the sun is in the process of burning away. We can see that there are very few people on the beach. The majestic curve of the gulf is colored by a broad circle of bath houses. The tall, white, regularly spaced street lights give the square the proud look of some broad boulevard, a strange height above sea level, urban looking, as though the sea had made inroads on the town since she was a child.

  In the center of Town Beach, as white as milk, an enormous bird poised for flight, its two equal wings trimmed with balustrades, its overhanging terrace, its green cupolas, its green shutters lowered against the summer sun, its rodomontades, its flowers, its angels, its garlands, its gold, its milk-whiteness, as white as snow, as sugar: the municipal casino.

  It moves slowly by to the high-pitched, drawn-out squeal of the brakes. It stops, completely visible now.

  Lol laughs, jokes:

  "The Town Beach casino, how well I know it!"

  She leaves the compartment, pauses in the corridor, reflects.

  "Promise me we're not going to stay in the station waiting room."

  I laugh.

  "I promise."

  On the station platform, and in the street, she takes my arm, my wife. We are leaving our night of love, the compartment of the train. Because of what has happened between us, we can touch each other more easily, more intimately. I now know the full power, the sensitivity of this gentle face—which is also her body, her eyes, her seeing eyes are too—drowned in the sweetness of an endless childhood which floats just on the surface of the flesh. I say to her:

  "I know you better since our train ride together."

  She knows what I mean by that, she slows down, overcomes what seems to be a temptation to turn back.

  "You are now part of this trip which people have kept me from taking for ten years. How stupid they were!"

  As we leave the station she looks in both directions, hesitating which way to go. I start walking, taking her with me, in the direction of the casino, the better part of which is now concealed by the intervening buildings of the town.

  Nothing is happening within her except a recognition of the sites, a formal, still very pure, unruffled recognition, a trifle amused perhaps. Her hand is in mine. The memory itself goes back beyond this memory, back beyond itself. She was perfectly normal once upon a time, before she went mad at Town Beach. What am I saying?

  I say:

  "This town is not going to serve any purpose for you."

  "What would I remember?"

  "Come here the way you came to South Tahla."

  "Here is the way I came to South Tahla," Lol says again.

  The street is wide and descends with us toward the sea. Some boys in bathing suits and brightly colored beach robes are walking up the street. Their complexions are all the same hue, their hair is slicked down by the salt water, they look as though they all belong to the same large family, to which they are going home. They bid each other good-bye, and each goes his separate way, after having agreed upon a time to meet later at the beach. Most of them disappear inside small, furnished one-story bungalows, leaving the street emptier and emptier, the farther we go up it. Women's voices shout first names. Children answer that they are coming. Lol stares with curiosity at her youth.

  Without realizing it, we've arrived in front of the casino. It was there, off to our left a hundred yards away, set in the midst of a lawn which we had been unable to see from the station.

  "What do you say we go to the casino?" Lol says.

  A long corridor crosses it from side to side, one end of which opens onto the sea and the other onto the main square of Town Beach.

  The municipal casino of Town Beach is deserted except for a woman in the cloakroom just at the entrance and a man dressed in black who is pacing the floor, his hands behind his back; he yawns.

  Long dark curtains with a floral design on them cover all the exits, they stir constantly in the breeze that sweeps the corridor.

  Whenever there is a gust of wind, one catches a glimpse of deserted rooms with closed windows, a gambli
ng room, two gambling rooms, the tables covered with large sheets of metal painted green and padlocked shut.

  Lol sticks her head into every opening and laughs, as if she is enjoying this game of exploring the past. Her laugh is contagious and starts me to laughing too. She is laughing because she is looking for something she thought was here, something she therefore ought to find, but doesn't. She walks ahead, retraces her steps, lifts a curtain, pokes her head inside, says No, that's not it, no question about it, that's not it. She calls upon me to confirm her lack of success each time another curtain falls back into place, she looks at me and laughs. In the muted light of the corridor her eyes are shining, bright, clear.

  She examines everything. Not only the posters announcing coming events, the gala evenings and the contests, but the display windows full of jewelry, dresses, and perfumes as well. Someone other than myself might have been taken in by her at this particular moment. I find myself the spectator of a display of gaiety both unexpected and irresistible.

  The man pacing the floor comes over to us, bows to Lol, and asks her if he can be of any service, if she needs anything. Lol, taken aback, turns to me.

  "We're looking for the ballroom."

  The man is pleasant and helpful, he says that at this time of day the casino is, of course, closed. This evening at half past seven. I explain as best I can, say that all we want is a quick look, because we came here when we were young, just a peek in is all we'd like.

  The man smiles sympathetically and asks us to follow him.

  "Everything is closed. You'll have a hard time seeing."

  He turns into a corridor perpendicular to the one from which we have just come: that is what we should have done. Lol has stopped laughing, she slows down but continues to follow behind, dragging her heels. And then we are there. The man lifts a curtain, we still can't see, and he asks us whether we remember the name of the ballroom, since there are, in fact, two in the casino.

  "La Potinière," Lol says.

  "Then this is it."

  We go in. The man lets go of the curtain. We find ourselves in a fairly large room. Tables are set in a circle around the dance floor. At one end there is a stage with a red curtain, which is closed, and at the other end a promenade with a border of green plants. A table covered with a white tablecloth is there, long and narrow.