The father said he’d sooner see him dead.
We bathed together in the cool water from the jars, we kissed, we wept, and again it was unto death, but this time, already, the pleasure it gave was inconsolable. And then I told him. I told him not to have any regrets, I reminded him of what he’d said, that I’d go away from everywhere, that I wasn’t responsible for what I did. He said he didn’t mind even that now, nothing counted any more. Then I said I agreed with his father. That I refused to stay with him. I didn’t give any reasons.
It’s one of the long avenues in Vinh Long that lead down to the Mekong. It’s always deserted in the evening. That evening, like most evenings, the electricity breaks down. That’s what starts it all off. As soon as I reach the street and the gate shuts behind me, the lights go off. I run. I run because I’m afraid of the dark. I run faster and faster. And suddenly I think I hear running behind me, and suddenly I’m sure that someone’s after me. Still running, I look around, and I see. It’s a very tall woman, very thin, thin as death, laughing and running. She’s barefoot, and she’s running after me to catch me. I recognize her, she’s the local lunatic, the madwoman of Vinh Long. I hear her for the first time, she talks at night, during the day she sleeps, often here in the avenue, outside the garden. She runs, shouting in a language I don’t understand. My fear is so great I can’t call out. I must be eight years old. I can hear her shrieks of laughter and cries of delight, she’s certainly playing with me. My memory is of a central fear. To say it’s beyond my understanding, beyond my strength, is inadequate. What’s sure is the memory of my whole being’s certainty that if the woman touches me, even lightly, with her hand, I too will enter into a state much worse than death, the state of madness. I manage to get into the neighbors’ garden, as far as the house, I run up the steps and fall in the doorway. For several days I can’t say anything at all about what happened.
Quite late in life I’m still afraid of seeing a certain state of my mother’s—I still don’t name it—get so much worse that she’ll have to be parted from her children. I believe it will be up to me to recognize the time when it comes, not my brothers, because my brothers wouldn’t be able to judge.
It was a few months before our final parting, in Saigon, late one evening, we were on the big terrace of the house in the rue Testard. Dô was there. I looked at my mother, I could hardly recognize her. And then, in a kind of sudden vanishing, a sudden fall, I all at once couldn’t recognize her at all. There, suddenly, close to me, was someone sitting in my mother’s place who wasn’t my mother, who looked like her but who had never been her. She looked rather blank, she was gazing at the garden, a certain point in the garden, it looked as if she was watching for something just about to happen, of which I could see nothing. There was a youthfulness about her features, her expression, a happiness which she was repressing out of what must have been habitual reticence. She was beautiful. Dô was beside her. Dô seemed not to have noticed anything. My terror didn’t come from what I’ve just said about her, her face, her look of happiness, her beauty, it came from the fact that she was sitting just where my mother had been sitting when the substitution took place, from the fact that I knew no one else was there in her place, but that that identity irreplaceable by any other had disappeared and I was powerless to make it come back, make it start to come back. There was no longer anything there to inhabit her image. I went mad in full possession of my senses. Just long enough to cry out. I did cry out. A faint cry, a call for help, to crack the ice in which the whole scene was fatally freezing. My mother turned her head.
For me the whole town is inhabited by the beggar woman in the road. And all the beggar women of the towns, the rice fields, the tracks bordering Siam, the banks of the Mekong—for me the beggar woman who frightened me is inhabited by them. She comes from everywhere. She always ends up in Calcutta wherever she started out from. She’s always slept in the shade of the cinnamon-apple trees in the playground. And always my mother has been there beside her, tending her foot eaten up with maggots and covered with flies.
Beside her, the little girl in the story. She’s carried her two thousand kilometers. She’s had enough of her, wants to give her away. Go on, take her. No more children. No more child. All dead or thrown away, it amounts to a lot after a whole life. The one asleep under the cinnamon-apple trees isn’t yet dead. She’s the one who’ll live longest. She’ll die inside the house, in a lace dress. She’ll be mourned.
She’s on the banks of the rice fields on either side of the track, shouting and laughing at the top of her voice. She has a golden laugh, fit to wake the dead, to wake anyone who listens to children’s laughter. She stays outside the bungalow for days and days, there are white people in the bungalow, she remembers they give food to beggars. And then one day, lo and behold, she wakes at daybreak and starts to walk, one day she goes, who can tell why, she turns off toward the mountains, goes up through the forest, follows the paths running along the tops of the mountains of Siam. Having seen, perhaps, seen a yellow and green sky on the other side of the plain, she crosses over. At last begins to descend to the sea. With her great gaunt step she descends the slopes of the forest. On, on. They are forests full of pestilence. Regions of great heat. There’s no healthy wind from the sea. There’s the stagnant din of mosquitoes, dead children, rain every day. And then here are the deltas. The biggest deltas in the world. Made of black slime. Stretching toward Chittagong. She’s left the tracks, the forests, the tea roads, the red suns behind, and she goes forward over the estuary of the deltas. She goes in the same direction as the world, toward the engulfing, always distant east. One day she comes face to face with the sea. She lets out a cry, laughs her miraculous birdlike coo. Because of her laugh she finds a junk in Chittagong, the fishermen are willing to take her, she crosses with them the Bay of Bengal.
Then, then she starts to be seen near the rubbish dumps on the outskirts of Calcutta.
And then she’s lost sight of. And then later found again behind the French embassy in the same city. She sleeps in a garden, replete with endless food.
She’s there during the night. Then in the Ganges at sunrise. Always laughing, mocking. She doesn’t go on this time. Here she can eat, sleep, it’s quiet at night, she stays there in the garden with the oleanders.
One day I come, pass by. I’m seventeen. It’s the English quarter, the embassy gardens, the monsoon season, the tennis courts are deserted. Along the Ganges the lepers laugh.
We’re stopping over in Calcutta. The boat broke down. We’re visiting the town to pass the time. We leave the following evening.
Fifteen and a half. The news spreads fast in Sadec. The clothes she wears are enough to show. The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter. Poor child. Don’t tell me that hat’s innocent, or the lipstick, it all means something, it’s not innocent, it means something, it’s to attract attention, money. The brothers are layabouts. They say it’s a Chinese, the son of the millionaire, the villa in Mekong with the blue tiles. And even he, instead of thinking himself honored, doesn’t want her for his son. A family of white layabouts.
• • •
The Lady, they called her. She came from Savanna Khet. Her husband was posted to Vinh Long. For a year she wasn’t seen there. Because of the young man, the assistant administrator in Savanna Khet. They couldn’t be lovers any more. So he shot himself. The story reached the new posting in Vinh Long. The day she left Savanna Khet for Vinh Long, a bullet through the heart. In the main square in broad sunlight. Because of her young daughters and her husband’s being posted to Vinh Long she’d told him it had to stop.
It goes on in the disreputable quarter of Cholon, every evening. Every morning the little slut goes to have her body caressed by a filthy Chinese millionaire. And she goes to the French high school, too, with the little white girls, the athletic little white girls who learn the crawl in the pool at the Sporting Club. One day they’ll be told not to speak to the daughter of the teacher in Sadec a
ny more.
During recess she looks toward the street, all on her own, leaning against a post in the schoolyard. She doesn’t say anything about it to her mother. She goes on coming to school in the black limousine belonging to the Chinese in Cholon. She watches it go. No one will break the rule. None of the girls will speak to her. The isolation brings back a clear memory of the lady in Vinh Long. At that time she’d just turned thirty-eight. And the child was ten. And now, when she remembers, she’s sixteen.
The lady’s on the terrace outside her room, looking at the avenues bordering the Mekong, I see her when I come home from catechism class with my younger brother. The room is in the middle of a great palace with covered terraces, the palace itself in the middle of the garden of oleanders and palms. The same distance separates the lady and the girl in the low-crowned hat from the other people in the town. Just as they both look at the long avenues beside the river, so they are alike in themselves. Both isolated. Alone, queenlike. Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death, as they both call it, unto the mysterious death of lovers without love. That’s what it’s all about: this hankering for death. It emanates from them, from their rooms, a death so strong its existence is known all over the town, in outposts upcountry, in provincial centers, at official receptions and slow-motion government balls.
The lady has just started giving official receptions again, she thinks it’s over, that the young man in Savanna Khet is a thing of the past. So she’s started giving evening parties again, the ones expected of her so that people can just meet occasionally and occasionally escape from the frightful loneliness of serving in outposts upcountry, stranded amid checkered stretches of rice, fear, madness, fever, and oblivion.
In the evening, after school, the same black limousine, the same hat at once impudent and childlike, the same lamé shoes, and away she goes, goes to have her body laid bare by the Chinese millionaire, he’ll wash her under the shower, slowly, as she used to wash herself at home at her mother’s, with cool water from a jar he keeps specially for her, and then he’ll carry her, still wet, to the bed, he’ll switch on the fan and kiss her more and more all over, and she’ll keep asking again and again, and afterwards she’ll go back to the boarding school, and no one to punish her, beat her, disfigure or insult her.
It was as night ended that he killed himself, in the main square, glittering with light. She was dancing. Then daylight came, skirted the body. Then, with time, the sunlight blurred its shape. No one dared go near. But the police will. At noon, by the time the tourist boats arrive, there will be nothing left, the square will be empty.
• • •
My mother said to the head of the boarding school, It doesn’t matter, all that’s of no importance. Haven’t you noticed how they suit her, those little old frocks, that pink hat, and the gold shoes? My mother’s drunk with delight when she speaks of her children, and that makes her more charming than ever. The young teachers at the boarding school listen to her with passionate attention. All of them, says my mother, they all hang around her, all the men in the place, married or single, they hang around, hanker after the girl, after something not really definite yet, look, she’s still a child. Do people talk of disgrace? I say, how can innocence be disgraced?
My mother rattles on. She speaks of blatant prostitution and laughs, at the scandal, the buffoonery, the funny hat, the sublime elegance of the child who crossed the river. And she laughs at what is irresistible here in the French colonies: I mean, she says, this little white tart, this child hidden till then in outposts upcountry and suddenly emerging into the daylight and shacking up in front of everyone with this millionaire Chinese scum, with a diamond on her finger just as if she were a banker’s wife. And she weeps.
When she saw the diamond she said in a small voice, It reminds me of the little solitaire I had when I got engaged to my first husband. I say: Mr. Dark. We laugh. That was his name, she says, it really was.
We looked at each other for some time, then she gave a sweet, slightly mocking smile, full of so deep a knowledge of her children and what awaited them later on that I almost told her about Cholon.
But I didn’t. I never did.
She waited a long while before she spoke again, then she said, very lovingly, You do know it’s all over, don’t you? That you’ll never be able, now, to get married here in the colony? I shrug my shoulders, smile. I say, I can get married anywhere, when I want to. My mother shakes her head. No. She says, Here everything gets known, here you can’t, now. She looks at me and says some unforgettable things: They find you attractive? I answer, Yes; they find me attractive in spite of everything. It’s then she says, And also because of what you are yourself.
She goes on: Is it only for the money you see him? I hesitate, then say it is only for the money. Again she looks at me for a long while, she doesn’t believe me. She says, I wasn’t like you, I found school much harder and I was very serious, I stayed like that too long, too late, I lost the taste for my own pleasure.
It was one day during the vacation in Sadec. She was resting in a rocking chair with her feet up on another chair, she’d made a draft between the door of the sitting room and the door of the dining room. She was peaceful, not aggressive. She’d suddenly noticed her daughter, wanted to talk to her.
It happened not long before the end, before she gave up the land by the dike. Not long before we went back to France.
I watched her fall asleep.
Every so often my mother declares, Tomorrow we’ll go to the photographer’s. She complains about the price but still goes to the expense of family photos. We look at them, we don’t look at each other but we do look at the photographs, each of us separately, without a word of comment, but we look at them, we see ourselves. See the other members of the family one by one or all together. Look back at ourselves when we were very young in the old photos, then look at ourselves again in the recent ones. The gulf between us has grown bigger still. Once they’ve been looked at the photos are put away with the linen in the closets. My mother has us photographed so that she can see if we’re growing normally. She studies us at length, as other mothers do other children. She compares the photos, discusses how each one of us has grown. No one ever answers.
My mother only has photos taken of her children. Never anything else. I don’t have any photographs of Vinh Long, not one, of the garden, the river, the straight tamarind-lined avenues of the French conquest, not of the house, nor of our institutional whitewashed bedrooms with the big black-and-gilt iron beds, lit up like classrooms by the red streetlights, the green metal lampshades, not a single image of those incredible places, always temporary, ugly beyond expression, places to flee from, in which my mother would camp until, as she said, she really settled down, but in France, in the regions she’s spoken of all her life and that vary, according to her mood, her age, her sadness, between Pas-de-Calais and Entre-Deux-Mers. But when she does halt for good, when she settles down in the Loire, her room will be a terrible replica of the one in Sadec. She will have forgotten.
She never had photos taken of places, of landscapes, only of us, her children, and mostly she had us taken in a group so it wouldn’t cost so much. The few amateur photos of us were taken by friends of my mother’s, new colleagues just arrived in the colony who took views of the equatorial landscape, the coconut palms, and the coolies to send to their families.
For some mysterious reason my mother used to show her children’s photographs to her family when she went home on leave. We didn’t want to go and see them. My brothers never met them. At first she used to take me, the youngest, with her. Then later on I stopped going, because my aunts didn’t want their daughters to see me any more on account of my shocking behavior. So my mother has only the photographs left to show, so she shows them, naturally, reasonably, shows her cousins her children. She owes it to herself to do so, so she
does, her cousins are all that’s left of the family, so she shows them the family photos. Can we glimpse something of this woman through this way of going on? The way she sees everything through to the bitter end without ever dreaming she might give up, abandon—the cousins, the effort, the burden. I think we can. It’s in this valor, human, absurd, that I see true grace.
When she was old, too, grey-haired, she went to the photographer’s, alone, and had her photograph taken in her best dark-red dress and her two bits of jewelry, the locket and the gold and jade brooch, a little round of jade sheathed in gold. In the photo her hair is done nicely, her clothes just so, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. The better-off natives used to go to the photographer’s too, just once in their lives, when they saw death was near. Their photos were large, all the same size, hung in handsome gilt frames near the altars to their ancestors. All these photographs of different people, and I’ve seen many of them, gave practically identical results, the resemblance was stunning. It wasn’t just because all old people look alike, but because the portraits themselves were invariably touched up in such a way that any facial peculiarities, if there were any left, were minimized. All the faces were prepared in the same way to confront eternity, all toned down, all uniformly rejuvenated. This was what people wanted. This general resemblance, this tact, would characterize the memory of their passage through the family, bear witness at once to the singularity and to the reality of that transit. The more they resembled each other the more evidently they belonged in the ranks of the family. Moreover, all the men wore the same sort of turban, all the women had their hair scraped back into the same kind of bun, and both men and women wore tunics with stand-up collars. And they all wore an expression I’d still recognize anywhere. My mother’s expression in the photograph with the red dress was the same. Noble, some would say. Others would call it withdrawn.
The Lover Page 7