The Lover. Marguerite Duras
nor her cries. It’s over, I don’t remember. That’s why I can write about her so easily now, so long, so fully. She’s become just something you write without difficulty, cursive writing.
She must have stayed on in Saigon from 1932 until 1949. It was in December 1942 that my younger brother died. She couldn’t move any more. She stayed on – to be near the grave, she said. Then finally she came back to France. My son was two years old when we met again. It was too late for us to be reunited. We knew it at first glance. There was nothing left to reunite. Except for the elder son, all the rest was over. She went to live, and die, in the department of Loir-et-Cher, in the sham Louis XIV chateau. She lived there with Dô. She was still afraid at night. She bought a gun. Dô kept watch in the attics on the top floor. She also bought a place for her elder son near Amboise. With woods. He cut them down. Then went and gambled the money away in a baccarat club in Paris. The woods were lost in one night. The point at which my memory suddenly softens, and perhaps my brother brings tears to my eyes, is after the loss of the money from the woods. I know he’s found lying in his car in Montparnasse, outside the Coupole, and that he wants to die. After that, I forget. What she did, my mother, with that chateau of hers, is simply unimaginable, still all for the sake of the elder son, the child of fifty incapable of earning any money. She buys some electric incubators and instals them in the main drawing-room. Suddenly she’s got six hundred chicks, forty square metres of them. But she made a mistake with the infra-red rays, and none of the chicks can eat, all six hundred of them have beaks that don’t meet or won’t close, they all starve to death and she gives up. I came to the chateau while the chicks were hatching, there were great rejoicings. Afterwards the stench of the dead chicks and their food was so awful I couldn’t eat in my mother’s chateau without throwing up.
She died between Dô and him she called her child, in her big bedroom on the first floor, where during heavy frosts she used to put the sheep to sleep, five or six sheep all around her bed, for several winters, her last.
It’s there, in that last house, the one on the Loire, when she finally gives up her ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing, that I see the madness clearly for the first time. I see my mother is clearly mad. I see that Dô and my brother have always had access to that madness. But that I, no, I’ve never seen it before. Never seen my mother in the state of being mad. Which she was. From birth. In the blood. She wasn’t ill with it, for her it was like health, flanked by Dô and her elder son. No one else but they realized. She always had lots of friends, she kept the same friends for years and years and was always making new ones, often very young, among the officials from up-country, or later on among the people in Touraine, where there were some who’d retired from the French colonies. She always had people around her, all her life, because of what they called her lively intelligence, her cheerfulness, and her peerless, indefatigable poise.
I don’t know who took the photo with the despair. The one in the courtyard of the house in Hanoi. Perhaps my father, one last time. A few months later he’d be sent back to France because of his health. Before that he’d go to a new job, in Phnom Penh. He was only there a few weeks. He died in less than a year. My mother wouldn’t go back with him to France, she stayed where she was, stuck there. In Phnom Penh. In the fine house overlooking the Mekong, once the palace of the king of Cambodia, in the midst of those terrifying grounds, acres of them, where my mother’s afraid. At night she makes us afraid too. All four of us sleep in the same bed. She says she’s afraid of the dark. It’s in this house she’ll hear of my father’s death. She’ll know about it before the telegram comes, the night before, because of a sign only she saw and could understand, because of the bird that called in the middle of the night, frightened and lost in the office in the north front of the palace, my father’s office. It’s there, too, a few days after her husband’s death, that my mother finds herself face to face with her own father. She switches the light on. There he is, standing by the table in the big octagonal drawing-room. Looking at her. I remember a shriek, a call. She woke us up, told us what had happened, how he was dressed, in his Sunday best, grey, how he stood, how he looked at her, straight at her. She said: I wasn’t afraid. She ran towards the vanished image. Both of them died on the day and at the time of the bird or the image. Hence, no doubt, our admiration for our mother’s knowledge, about everything, including all that had to do with death.
The elegant man has got out of the limousine and is smoking an English cigarette. He looks at the girl in the man’s fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly comes over to her. He’s obviously nervous. He doesn’t smile to begin with. To begin with he offers her a cigarette. His hand’s trembling. There’s the difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling. She says she doesn’t smoke, no thanks. She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t say Leave me alone. So he’s less afraid. He tells her he must be dreaming. She doesn’t answer. There’s no point in answering, what would she say? She waits. So he asks, But where did you spring from? She says she’s the daughter of the headmistress of the girls’ school in Sadec. He thinks for a moment, then says he’s heard of the lady, her mother, of her bad luck with the concession they say she bought in Cambodia, is that right? Yes, that’s right.
He says again how strange it is to see her on this ferry. So early in the morning, a pretty girl like that, you don’t realize, it’s very surprising, a white girl on a native bus.
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