The Garden Square

by Marguerite Duras

  “Yes. And then the guests will leave and the house will be quiet till the morning.”

  “When you will start ignoring them all over again, while trying to wait on them as well as possible.”

  “I expect so. But I sleep well! If you only knew how well I sleep. There is nothing they can do to disturb my sleep. But why are we talking about these things?”

  “I don’t know, perhaps just to make you remember them.”

  “Perhaps it is that. But you see one day, yes one day, at the time it will be two hours and a half from now, I shall go into the drawing room and I shall speak.”

  “Yes, you must.”

  “I shall say: ‘This evening I shall not be serving dinner.’ Madam will turn round in surprise. And I will say: ‘Why should I serve dinner since, as from this evening… as from this evening…’ but no, I cannot even imagine how things of such importance are said.”

  The man made no reply. He seemed only attentive to the softness of the wind, which once more had risen. The girl seemed to expect no response to what she had just said.

  “Soon it will be summer,” said the man and added with a groan, “We really are the lowest of the low.”

  “Why us rather than others?”

  “They say that someone has to be.”

  “Yes, indeed, and that everything has its place.”

  “And yet sometimes one wonders why this should be so.”

  “Yes. Although sometimes, in cases like ours, one wonders whether being us or someone else makes any difference. Sometimes one just wonders.”

  “Yes, and sometimes, in certain instances, that is ultimately a consoling thought.”

  “Not for me. That could never be a consoling thought. I must believe that I myself am concerned rather than anyone else. Without that belief I am lost.”

  “Who knows? Perhaps things will soon change for you, soon and very suddenly. Perhaps even this very summer you will go into that drawing room and announce that, as from that moment, the world can manage without your services.”

  “Who knows indeed? And you could call it pride, but when I say the world, I really mean the whole world. Do you understand?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “I will open the door of that drawing room and then, suddenly, everything will be said once and for all.”

  “And you will always remember that moment as I remember my journey. I have never been on so wonderful a journey since, nor one which made me so happy.”

  “Why are you suddenly so sad? Do you see anything sad in the fact that one day I must open that door? On the contrary, doesn’t it seem the most desirable thing in the world?”

  “It seems utterly desirable to me, and even more than that. No, if I felt a little sad when you talked of it – and I did feel a little sad – it was only because once you have opened that door it will have been opened for ever, and afterwards you will never be able to do it again. And then, sometimes, it seems so hard, so very hard to go back to a country which pleased me as well as that one that I told you about, that occasionally I wonder if it would not have been better never to have seen it at all.”

  “I’m sorry, but you must see I cannot understand what it is like to have seen that city and to want to go back to it, nor can I understand the sadness you seem to feel at the thought of waiting for that moment. You could try as hard as you liked to tell me there was something sad about it, I could never understand. I know nothing, or rather I know nothing except this: that one day I must open that door and speak to those people.”

  “Of course, of course. You mustn’t take any notice of what I say. Those thoughts simply came into my mind when you were talking, but I didn’t want them to discourage you. In fact quite the opposite: I’d like to ask you more about that door. What special moment are you waiting for to open it? For instance, why couldn’t you do it this evening?”

  “I could never do it alone.”

  “You mean that being without money or education you could only begin in the same way all over again and that really there would be no point to it?”

  “I mean that and other things. I don’t really know how to describe it, but being alone I feel as if I had no meaning. I can’t change by myself. No. I will go on visiting that dance hall, and one day a man will ask me to be his wife. Then I will open that door. I couldn’t do it before that happened.”

  “How do you know if it would turn out like that if you have never tried?”

  “I have tried. And because of that I know that alone… outside of this position, perhaps, all alone in a city… I would be, as I said, somehow meaningless. I wouldn’t know what I wanted any more, perhaps wouldn’t even know who I was exactly, wouldn’t know what it was to want to change. I would simply be there, doing nothing, telling myself that nothing was worthwhile.”

  “I think I see what you mean: in fact I believe I understand it all.”

  “One day someone must choose me. Then I will be able to change. I don’t mean this is true for everyone. I am simply saying it is true for me. I have already tried and I know. I don’t know all this just because I know what it is like to be hungry, no, but because when I was hungry I realized I didn’t care. I hardly knew who it was in me who was hungry.”

  “I understand all that: I can see how one could feel like that… in fact I can guess it, although personally I have never felt the need to be singled out as you want to be – or perhaps I really mean that if such a thought ever did cross my mind I never attached much importance to it.”

  “You must understand, you must try to understand that I have never been wanted by anyone, ever, except of course for my capacity for housework, and that is not choosing me as a person but simply wanting something impersonal which makes me as anonymous as possible. And so I must be wanted by someone, just once, and even if only once. Otherwise I shall exist so little even to myself that I would be incapable of knowing how to want to choose anything. That is why, you see, I attach so much importance to marriage.”

  “Yes, I do see, but in spite of all that, and with the best will in the world, I cannot really see how you hope to be chosen when you cannot make a choice for yourself?”

  “I know it seems ridiculous, but that is how it is. Because you see, left to myself, I would find any man suitable: any man in the world would seem suitable on the one condition that he wanted me just a little. A man who so much as noticed me would seem desirable just for that very reason, and so how on earth would I be capable of knowing who would suit me when anyone would, on the one condition that they wanted me? No, someone else must decide for me, must guess what would be best. Alone I could never know.”

  “Even a child knows what is best for him.”

  “But I am not a child, and if I let myself go and behaved like a child and gave in to the first temptation I came across – after all, I am perfectly aware that it is there at every street corner – why then I would follow the first person who came along, the first man who just wanted me. And I would follow him simply for the pleasure I would have in being with him, and then, why then I would be lost, completely lost. You could say that I could easily make another kind of life for myself, but as you can see I no longer have the courage even to think of it.”

  “But have you never thought that if you leave this choice entirely to another person it need not necessarily be the right one and might make for unhappiness later?”

  “Yes, I have thought of that a little, but I cannot think now, before my life has really begun, of the harm I might possibly do later on. I just say one thing to myself and that is, if the very fact of being alive means that we can do harm, however much we don’t want to, just by choosing or making mistakes, if that is an inevitable state of affairs, why then, I too will go through with it. If I have to, if everyone has to, I can live with harm.”

  “Please don’t get so excited: there will be someone one day who will di
scover that you exist both for him and for others – you must be sure of that. And yet you know one can almost manage to live with this lack of which you speak.”

  “Which lack? Of never being chosen?”

  “If you like, yes. As far as I am concerned, I should be so surprised if anyone chose me, that I should simply laugh, I believe, if it actually happened in the end.”

  “While I should be in no way surprised. I am afraid I would find it perfectly natural. It is just the contrary – the fact that no one has chosen my yet – which astonishes me, and it astonishes me more each day. I cannot understand it, and I never get used to it.”

  “It will happen. I promise you.”

  “Thank you for saying so. But are you saying that just to please be, or can people tell these things? Can you guess it already just from talking to me?”

  “I expect such things can be guessed, yes. To tell you the truth, I said that without thinking much, but not at all because I thought it would please you. It must have been because I could see it.”

  “And you? How are you so sure the opposite is true of you?”

  “Well, I suppose it is because… Yes, just because I am not surprised. I think it must be that. I am not at all surprised that no one has chosen me, while you are so amazed that you have not yet been singled out in the way that you want.”

  “In your place, you know, I would force myself to want something, however hard it might be. I would not remain as you are.”

  “But what can I do? Since I don’t feel this same need, it could only come to me… well, from the outside. How else could it be?”

  “You know you almost make me wish I was dead.”

  “Is it me in particular who has that effect, or were you just speaking in general?”

  “Of course I was only speaking in general. In general about us both.”

  “Because there is another thing I would not really like, and that is to have provoked in anyone, even if only once, a feeling as violent as that.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And I would like to thank you too.”

  “But for what?”

  “I don’t really know. For your niceness.”

  II

  The child came over quietly from the far side of the park and stood beside the girl.

  “I’m thirsty,” he announced.

  The girl took a thermos and a mug from the bag beside her.

  “I can well imagine,” said the man, “that he must be thirsty after eating those sandwiches.”

  The girl opened the thermos. Still-warm milk steamed in the sunshine.

  “But as you see,” she said, “I have brought him some milk.”

  The child drank the milk greedily, then gave the mug back to the girl. A milky cloud stayed round his lips. The girl wiped them with a light and assured gesture. The man smiled at the child.

  “If I said what I did,” he remarked, “it was only to try and make myself clear. For no other reason.”

  Completely indifferent, the child contemplated this man who was smiling at him. Then he went back to the sandpit. The girl’s eyes followed him.

  “His name is Jacques,” she said.

  “Jacques,” the man repeated.

  But he was no longer thinking of the child.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he went on, “how traces of milk stay round children’s mouths when they have drunk it? It’s strange. In some ways they are so grown up: they seem to talk and walk like everyone else, and then when it comes to drinking milk, one realizes…”

  “He doesn’t say ‘milk’, he says ‘my milk’.”

  “When I see something like that milk I suddenly feel full of hope, although I could never say why. As if some pain was deadened. I think perhaps that watching these children reminds me of the lions in those gardens. I see them as small lions, but lions all the same.”

  “Yet they don’t seem to give you the same kind of happiness as those lions did in their cages facing the sun?”

  “They give me a certain happiness, but you are right, not the same one. Somehow they always make you feel obscurely worried, and it is not that I particularly like lions: it would be untrue to say that. It was just a way of putting things.”

  “I wonder if you attach too much importance to that city, with the result that the rest of your life suffers by comparison? Or is it just that, never having been there, I can hardly be expected to understand the happiness it gave you?”

  “Perhaps, yes, it is probably to someone like you that I should most like to talk about it.”

  “Thank you. It was kind of you to say that. But you know I didn’t want to imply that I was particularly unhappy – more unhappy, I mean, than anyone else would be in the same position. No, I was speaking of something quite different, something which I am afraid could not be solved by seeing any country, anywhere in the world.”

  “I’m sorry. You see, when I said that I should like to talk most about that country to someone like you, I did not mean for a second that you were unhappy without knowing it, and that telling you certain things would make you feel better. I simply meant that you seemed to me to be a person who might understand what I was trying to say better than most people. That’s all, I assure you. But I expect I have talked too much about that city, and it is natural that you should have misunderstood.”

  “No, I don’t think it is that. All I wanted was to put you right, in case you had made the mistake of thinking I was unhappy. Of course there are times when I cry, naturally there are, but it’s only from impatience or irritation. I am not old enough yet to be profoundly sad about my life. That stage is yet to come.”

  “Yes, I really do see, but don’t you think it is just possible that you might be wrong, and find no objection to it?”

  “No, that would not be possible. Either I shall be unhappy in the same way as everyone else is, or I shall avoid being so to the best of my abilities. If life is terrible, I want to find out by myself, for my own sake, until the end and as completely as possible. And then I shall die as I mean to and someone will care. The only thing I ask for is a commonplace fate. But please tell me more of how you felt in that city.”

  “I am afraid I will tell it badly. I had no sleep and yet I was not tired, you understand?”

  “And?…”

  “I did not eat and I wasn’t hungry.”

  “And then?…”

  “All the minor problems of my life seemed to evaporate as if they had never existed except in my imagination. I thought of them as belonging to a distant past and laughed at them.”

  “But surely you must have wanted to eat and sleep in the end? It would have been impossible for you to go on without feeling tired or hungry.”

  “I expect so, but I didn’t stay there long enough for those feelings to come back to me.”

  “And were you very tired when they did come back?”

  “I slept for a whole day in a wood by the roadside.”

  “Like one of those scary tramps?”

  “Yes, just like a tramp with my suitcase beside me.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, I don’t think you can, yet.”

  “I mean, I am trying to understand, and one day I will. One day I shall understand what you have been saying to me completely. After all, anybody could, couldn’t they?”

  “Yes. I think one day you will understand them as completely as possible.”

  “Ah, if only you knew how difficult the things I was telling you about can be. How difficult it is to get for yourself, completely by yourself, just the things which are common to everyone. I mean above all how hard it is to fight the apathy which comes from wanting just the ordinary things which everyone else seems to have.”

  “I expect it is just that which prevents so m
any people from trying to achieve them. I admire you for trying to overcome these difficulties.”

  “Ah, if only willpower were enough! There have been men who found me attractive from time to time, but so far none of them has asked me to be his wife. There is a great difference between liking a young girl and wanting to marry her. And yet that must happen to me. Just once in my life I must be taken seriously. I wanted to ask you something: if you want a thing all the time, at every single moment of the day and night, do you think that you necessarily get it?”

  “Not necessarily, no. But it still remains the best way of trying and the one with the greatest chance of success. I can really see no other way.”

  “After all, we’re only talking. And as you don’t know me or I you, you can tell me the truth.”

  “Yes, that’s quite true, but really and truly I can see no other way. But perhaps I haven’t had enough experience to answer your question properly.”

  “Because I once heard that quite the opposite was true: that it was by trying not to want something that it finally happened.”

  “But tell me, how could you manage not to want something when you want it so much?”

  “That is exactly what I say to myself, and to tell you the truth I never felt that the other was a very serious idea. I think it must apply to people who want little things, to people who already have something and want something else, but not to people like us – sorry, I mean not to people like me who want everything, not just specifically but… I don’t know how to say it…”

  “In principle.”

  “Perhaps, yes. But please tell me more about your feelings for children. You said you were fond of them?”

  “Yes. Sometimes, when I have no one else to talk to, I talk to them. But you know how it is: you can’t really talk to children.”

  “Oh, you’re right. We are the lowest of the low.”

  “But you mustn’t think either that I am unhappy simply because sometimes I need to talk so badly that I talk to children. That’s not true, because after all I must in some way have chosen my life or else I am just a madman indulging in his folly.”