The Lover (The Lover #1)

by Marguerite Duras

The woman writer takes upon herself her highest responsibility and “quest”: enwording the most otherly man. One of the pleasures of loving the Chinese man is to write him down. She may be loving him to have something to write.

Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.

I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it.

Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire.

He’s trying to assume the warped image of a young drifter. That’s how he likes to see himself, poor, with that poor boy’s look, that attitude of someone young and thin. It’s this photograph that comes closest to the one never taken of the girl on the ferry.

The river has picked up all it’s met with since Tonle Sap and the Cambodian forest. It carries everything along, straw huts, forests, burned-out fires, dead birds, dead dogs, drowned tigers and buffalos, drowned men, bait, islands of water hyacinths all stuck together. Everything flows toward the Pacific, no time for anything to sink, all is swept along by the deep and headlong storm of the inner current, suspended on the surface of the river’s strength.

she’s cross because it’s not her sons who are head of the class in French. The beast, my mother, my love, asks, What about math? Answer: Not yet, but it will come. My mother asks, When? Answer: When she makes up her mind to it, madame.

she’s still straight out of her Picardy farm full of female cousins, thinks you ought to wear everything till it’s worn out, that you have to be deserving, her shoes, her shoes are down-at-heel, she walks awkwardly, painfully, her hair’s drawn back tight into a bun like a Chinese woman’s, we’re ashamed of her, I’m ashamed of her in the street outside the school, when she drives up to the school in her old Citroën B12 everyone looks, but she, she doesn’t notice anything, ever, she ought to be locked up, beaten, killed. She looks at me and says, Perhaps you’ll escape. Day and night, this obsession. It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.

The sons are wildernesses, they’ll never do anything. The salt land’s a wilderness too, the money’s lost for good, it’s all over.

that’s why the mother lets the girl go out dressed like a child prostitute. And that’s why the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money.

Her mother won’t stop her when she tries to make money. The child will say, I asked him for five hundred piastres so that we can go back to France. Her mother will say, Good, that’s what we’ll need to set ourselves up in Paris, we’ll be able to manage, she’ll say, with five hundred piastres. The child knows what she’s doing is what the mother would have chosen for her to do, if she’d dared, if she’d had the strength, if the pain of her thoughts hadn’t been there every day, wearing her out.

I’m still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I’ve never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.

We’re too old now, we don’t go bathing in the river any more, we don’t go hunting black panther in the marshes in the estuary any more, or go into the forest, or into the villages in the pepper plantations. Everything has grown up all around us. There are no more children, either on the buffalos or anywhere else. We too have become strange, and the same sluggishness that has overtaken my mother has overtaken us too.

She died, for me, of my younger brother’s death. So did my elder brother. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. They don’t mean anything to me any more.

They’re dead now, my mother and my two brothers. For memories too it’s too late. Now I don’t love them any more. I don’t remember if I ever did. I’ve left them.

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 could say she doesn’t love him. She says nothing. Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness.

He calls me a whore, a slut, he says I’m his only love, and that’s what he ought to say, and what you do say when you just let things say themselves, when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes, and then everything is right, and nothing’s wasted, the waste is covered over and all is swept away in the torrent, in the force of desire.

He can only express his feelings through parody. I discover he hasn’t the strength to love me in opposition to his father, to possess me, take me away. He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money.

suffers and is exasperated at having to put up with this indignity just for the sake of eating well, in an expensive restaurant, which ought to be something quite normal.