The Garden Square

by Marguerite Duras

  “But do you know what that is called?”

  “No. All I know is that I must persist in this slavery for some time longer before I can enjoy things again, things as simple as eating.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I must stay where I am for as long as I have to. Please don’t think that I lack goodwill, because it is not that. It is just that it is not worthwhile trying to make me hope less – as you put it – because if I tried to hope less than I do, I know that I would no longer hope at all. I am waiting. And while I wait I am careful not to kill anything, neither a person nor a dog, because those are serious things and could turn me into a nasty person for the rest of my life. But let’s talk a little more about you: you who travel so much and are always alone.”

  “Well, yes, I travel and I am alone.”

  “Perhaps one day I will travel too.”

  “You can only see one thing at a time and the world is big, and you can only see it for yourself with your own two eyes. You can only see little of it, and yet most people travel.”

  “All the same, however little you can see, I expect it is a good way of passing the time.”

  “The best, I think, or at least it passes for the best. Being in a train absorbs time as much as sleeping. And a ship even more: you just look at the wakes following the ship and time passes by itself.”

  “And yet sometimes time takes so long to pass that you feel almost as if it were something which had been dragged out of your own insides.”

  “Why not take a little trip for eight days or so? For a holiday. You need only want to. Couldn’t you do that? While still waiting of course?”

  “It’s true that waiting seems very long. I joined a political party, not because I thought it would make things move faster for me, but I thought it might make the time pass more quickly. But even so it is very long.”

  “But that is it exactly! Since you are already a member of a party, and you go to this dance hall, since in fact you are doing everything you can to be able to leave your present job one day, then surely you could also make a short journey while waiting for your life to take the turning you want it to?”

  “I did not mean anything more than I said: that sometimes things seem very long.”

  “All you need to do is change your mood just a fraction, and then you could take a little voyage for eight days or so.”

  “On Saturday when I come back from dancing I cry sometimes, as I told you. How can you make a man desire you? Love cannot be forced. Perhaps it is the mood that you were talking about which makes me so undesirable: a feeling of rancour, and how could that please anyone?”

  “I meant nothing more about your mood than that it prevented you from taking a holiday. I wouldn’t advise you to become like me, a person who finds too much hope superfluous. But you must see that from the moment you decided it was best to let that old woman live out her days, and that you must do everything they ask of you, so as one day to be free to do something quite different, then it seems to me that as a kind of compensation you could take a short holiday and go away. Why, even I would do it.”

  “I understand, but tell me, what would I do with a holiday? I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I would simply be there looking at new things without them giving me any pleasure.”

  “You must learn, even if it is difficult. From now on, as a provision against the future, you must learn that. Looking at new things is something one learns.”

  “Yes, but tell me again, how could I ever manage to learn how to enjoy myself in the present when I am worn out with waiting for the future? I wouldn’t have the patience to look at anything new.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. It wasn’t very important.”

  “And yet if you only knew how much I would like to be able to look at new things.”

  “Tell me, when a man asks you to dance with him, do you immediately think he might marry you?”

  “Yes. You see I’m too practical. All my troubles come from that. But how could I be anything else? It seems to me that I could never love anyone before I had some freedom, and that can only come to me through a man.”

  “And another question: if a man doesn’t ask you to dance, do you still think he might marry you?”

  “I don’t think so much then, because I am at the dance hall. When I dance I get carried away by the movement and the excitement, and at those moments I think a man might most easily forget who I am, and even if he did find out he would mind it less under those circumstances than at any other time. I dance very well, and when I am dancing, my current position is not visible. I become like everyone else. I myself even forget who I am. Ah, sometimes I don’t know what to do any more!”

  “But do you think about it while you are at the dance hall?”

  “No. There I think of nothing. I think before or afterwards. There it is as if I were asleep.”

  “Everything happens, believe me. We think that nothing will ever happen, but it does. There is not a man among all the millions who exist, not a single one, who hasn’t known the things you are waiting for.”

  “I am afraid you don’t really understand what it is I am waiting for.”

  “I am talking, you see, not only of the things you know you want, but also of the things you want without knowing. Of something less immediate, something of which you are still unaware.”

  “Yes, I follow what you are saying. And it is true that there are things I don’t think of now. But all the same, I would so like to know how those things happen. Could you tell me, please?”

  “They happen like anything else.”

  “Just as what I know I am waiting for?”

  “Exactly. It is difficult to talk to you of things you know so little. I think that those things either come about suddenly, all at once, or else so slowly that you scarcely notice them. And when they have happened, when they are there, they don’t seem at all surprising: it feels as if they had always been there. One day you will wake up and there it will all be. And it will be the same for the gas stove: you will wake up one day and not even be able to explain how it came to be there.”

  “But what about you? You who are always travelling and who seem, if I have understood you, to attach so little importance to events.”

  “But the same things can happen anywhere without any warning, in places like trains, and the only difference between the things which happen to me and those you want for yourself is that in my case they are without a future: there is nothing one can do with them.”

  “Oh, but it must be very sad to live as you do, always with events which can have no future! I think that from time to time you must cry too.”

  “But no, one gets used to it like everything else. And gracious me, everyone has cried at least once, every single one of all the millions of people on earth. That proves nothing in itself. Perhaps I should also explain that as far as I am concerned the tiniest thing can cheer me up. I like waking up in the morning, for instance, and quite often I find myself singing while I shave.”

  “Oh, but surely singing proves nothing, as you would put it yourself?”

  “But you must understand, I like being alive, and I should have thought that was the one point on which no one could make a mistake.”

  “I don’t know what it feels like. Perhaps that is why I understand you so badly.”

  “Whatever the cause of your unhappiness – and I really can find no other word for it – you must, you really must, show a little goodwill.”

  “But I am worn out with waiting and yet I go on waiting. It is more than I can do to wash that old woman, and yet I go on washing her. I do all the things which are really too much for me. What more do you ask?”

  “By goodwill I mean that you could, perhaps, wash her as you would wash anything else – a saucepan for example.”

  “No, I tried t
hat, but it was no good. She smiles, she smells bad. She is human.”

  “Alas. What can you do?”

  “Sometimes I don’t know myself. I was sixteen when this life began for me. At the beginning I didn’t pay much attention, and now look where I am. I am twenty and nothing has happened to me, nothing, and that old woman never manages to die and is still there. And nobody has asked me to be his wife. Sometimes I even think I must be dreaming, that somehow I must be inventing so many difficulties.”

  “Why not work for another family? One where there are no old people? Find a place with some advantages – although naturally I know they could only be relative.”

  “No, they would always treat me as something apart. In my kind of work changing jobs means nothing, since the only real change would be for such jobs to be abolished. If I did manage to find a family such as you describe, I wouldn’t really be able to put up with them any better than I do with my present one. And then just through changing and changing, without really changing anything, I would end by believing in – I hardly know what – some sort of fate, and that would be worse than anything. No, I must stay where I am right up to the moment when I can leave for ever. Sometimes I believe in it so much. I can hardly tell you how much. As much as I know I am sitting here.”

  “Well, then, while staying where you are, you could still take that little journey. I believe you could.”

  “Yes, perhaps. Perhaps I could make that journey.”

  “Of course you could.”

  “But, from all you said, that city you talked about must be very far away. Immensely far.”

  “I reached it by little stages, taking fifteen days in all, stopping off here and there for a day at a time. But someone who could afford to do so could reach it in one night on the train.”

  “You can be there in a night?”

  “Yes, and already it is full summer there. Of course I couldn’t be certain that someone else would find it as beautiful as I did. I suppose it is quite possible that someone else might not like it at all. I imagine I didn’t see it with the same eyes as a person who found nothing there but the place itself.”

  “But if one knew in advance that another person had been happy there, I think one would look at it with different eyes. We’re only talking, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  They were silent. Imperceptibly the sun was sinking ,and once more a memory of winter lay over the city. It was the girl who started the conversation again.

  “What I meant,” she began, “was that something of that happiness must remain in the air. Don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I would like to ask you something more. Could you tell me more about those things we were discussing – the things that could take place in a train for example?”

  “Not really. They happen, that’s all. You know, few people would put up with a commercial traveller of my status.”

  “But I am only a maid and I still hope. You mustn’t talk like that.”

  “I am sorry. I explained myself badly. You will change, but I don’t think I will, or rather I don’t think so any more. And whichever way you look at it, there is nothing to be done about it. Even if I could have wished that things had been different, I can never forget the commercial traveller I have become. When I was twenty I wore white shorts and played tennis. That is how my life started. I mean a life can begin anyhow – a fact we do not appreciate enough. And then time passes and we discover that life has very few solutions; and things become established until one fine day we find they are so established that the very idea of changing them seems absurd.”

  “That must be a terrible moment.”

  “No. It passes unnoticed as time passes. But you mustn’t be sad. I am not complaining about my life, and to tell you the truth I don’t think about it much. The least thing amuses me.”

  “And yet you give the impression of not having told the whole truth about your life.”

  “I assure you I am not someone to be pitied.”

  “I too know that life is terrible. I am not as stupid as that. I know it is as terrible as it is good.”

  Once more silence fell between the man and the girl. The sun was sinking even lower.

  “Although I only took the train in small stages,” the man said, “I don’t think it can be very expensive.”

  “I spend very little money,” said the girl. “In fact the only expenses I have are connected with dancing. So you see, even if the train was expensive I could still afford the journey if I wanted to. But I am afraid that wherever I was I would feel I was wasting my time. I would say to myself: what are you doing here instead of being at that dance hall? For the moment your place is there and nowhere else. Wherever I was I would think of it. If it interests you, the dance hall is in the fourteenth. A lot of soldiers go there and unfortunately they never think of marrying, but there are other people too and one never knows. Yes, it’s on Rue de la Croix-Nivert, and it’s called the Croix-Nivert Dance Hall.”

  “Thank you. But you know they also have dances in that city, and if you did decide to make the journey you could go to them. And no one would know who you were there.”

  “Are they held in the gardens?”

  “Yes, in the open air. On Saturdays they last all night.”

  “I see. But then I would have to lie about what I am. I know you will say that it’s not my fault that I have to do the job I do, but it still makes me feel as if I had a crime to conceal.”

  “But since you want to change so much, surely concealing it would only be a half-lie?”

  “I think I could only lie about something for which I was responsible, but not about anything else. And although it sounds strange, I feel almost as if I had chosen that particular dance hall and that what I want must happen there. It’s a small one, but it suits me as I really have no illusions about what I am or what I might become. I would feel strange and out of place anywhere else. If you were to come there we could have a dance or two while waiting for someone else to ask me. I mean if you would like to, of course. I dance well and I’ve never been taught.”

  “I dance well too.”

  “Don’t you find that strange? Why should we dance well? Why us rather than anyone else?”

  “Us rather than the people who dance badly you mean?”

  “Yes, I know some. If you could only see them. They have no idea at all. It’s double Dutch to them…”

  “But you’re laughing.”

  “What else can I do? People who dance badly always make me laugh. They try, they concentrate and there’s nothing to be done about it: they simply can’t manage.”

  “It must be because dancing is something which cannot entirely be learnt, you know. Do the ones you know hop or shuffle?”

  “She hops and he shuffles with the result… I can hardly describe it to you. And yet it’s obviously not their fault.”

  “No, it’s not their fault. And yet it’s difficult not to feel that somehow there is a certain justice in the fact that they can’t dance.”

  “We may be wrong.”

  “Yes, we may be, and after all it doesn’t matter so much whether one dances well or badly.”

  “No, it’s of no great importance. Yet all the same it’s as if we had a secret strength concealed in us. Oh, nothing very much of course… And yet don’t you think I’m right?”

  “But they could just as easily have been good dancers.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but then there would be something else, although I can’t imagine what, which we would have and they would not: I don’t know what it would be, but it would be something.”

  “I don’t know either, but I think you’re right.”

  “I must admit, I love dancing. It is probably the only thing I do now which I would like to go on doing for the rest of my life.”

 
“I feel the same. I think everyone likes dancing, even people like us, and perhaps we would not be such good dancers if we didn’t enjoy it so much.”

  “But perhaps we don’t know exactly how much we do enjoy it? How could we know?”

  “I don’t think it matters. If it suits us so well we should go on not knowing.”

  “But the dreadful part is that when the dance is over I start remembering. It’s Monday and I mutter ‘old bitch’ as I wash her. I don’t think I’m a nasty person, but of course I have no one to reassure me on this point and so I can only believe myself. When I say ‘bitch’, she smiles.”

  “I can tell you that you are not a nasty person.”

  “But when I think about them my thoughts are so evil, if you only knew, just as if it was all their fault. I try to reason with myself, but I can never manage to think in any other way.”

  “Don’t worry about those thoughts. You are not a nasty person.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I do. One day you will be very giving, with yourself and with your time.”

  “You really are nice.”

  “But I didn’t say that out of niceness.”

  “But you, what will happen to you?”

  “Nothing. As you can see, I am no longer very young.”

  “But you, you who once thought of killing yourself – because you did say that.”

  “Oh that was only laziness at the thought of having to go on feeding myself: nothing serious really.”

  “But that’s impossible. Something will happen to you or else it will only be because you don’t want anything to happen.”

  “Nothing happens to me except the things that happen to everyone, every day.”

  “You say that, but in that city?”

  “There I was not alone. And then, afterwards, I was alone again. I think it was just luck.”

  “No. When someone is without any hope at all, as you are, it is because something happened to him: it’s the only explanation.”

  “One day you will understand. There are people like me, people who get so much pleasure from just being alive that they can get by without hope. I sing while I shave – what more do you want?”