There was the China Sea, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, the morning when you woke up and knew from the absence of vibration that you were advancing through the sand. But above all there was the ocean. The furthest, the most vast, it reached to the South Pole. It had the longest distance between landfalls, between Ceylon and Somalia. Sometimes it was so calm, and the weather so fair and mild, that crossing it was like a journey over something other than the sea. Then the whole boat opened up, the lounges, the gangways, the portholes, and the passengers fled their sweltering cabins and slept on deck.
Once, during the crossing of the ocean, late at night, someone died. She can’t quite remember if it was on that voyage or another that it happened. Some people were playing cards in the first-class bar, and among the players was a young man who at one point, without saying anything, laid down his cards, left the bar, ran across the deck, and threw himself into the sea. By the time the boat was stopped—it was going at full speed—the body couldn’t be found.
No, now she comes to write it down she doesn’t see the boat, but somewhere else, the place where she was told about it. It was in Sadec. It was the son of the district officer in Sadec. She knew him, he’d been at the high school in Saigon too. She remembers him, dark, tall, with a very gentle face and horn-rimmed glasses. Nothing was found in his cabin, no farewell letter. His age has remained in her memory, terrifying, the same, seventeen. The boat went on again at dawn. That was the worst. The sunrise, the empty sea, and the decision to abandon the search. The parting.
And another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean, night had begun as before and in the lounge on the main deck there was a sudden burst of music, a Chopin waltz which she knew secretly, personally, because for months she had tried to learn it, though she never managed to play it properly, never, and that was why her mother agreed to let her give up the piano. Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat, of that she was sure, and she’d been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliancies. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.
As later she had seen the eternity of her younger brother, through death.
Around her, people slept, enveloped but not awakened by the music, peaceful. The girl thought she’d just seen the calmest night there had ever been in the Indian Ocean. She thinks it’s during that night too that she saw her younger brother come on deck with a woman. He leaned on the rails, she put her arms around him, and they kissed. The girl hid to get a better view. She recognized the woman. Already, with her younger brother, the two were always together. She was a married woman, but it was a dead couple, the husband appeared not to notice anything. During the last few days of the voyage the younger brother and the woman spent all day in their cabin, they came out only at night. During these same days the younger brother looked at his mother and sister as if he didn’t know them. The mother grew grim, silent, jealous. She, the girl, wept. She was happy, she thought, and at the same time she was afraid of what would happen later to her younger brother. She thought he’d leave them, go off with the woman, but no, he came back to them when they got to France.
She doesn’t know how long it was after the white girl left that he obeyed his father’s orders, married as he was told to do the girl the families had chosen ten years ago, a girl dripping, like the rest, with gold, diamonds, jade. She too was a Chinese from the north, from the city of Fushun, and had come there with relations.
It must have been a long time before he was able to be with her, to give her the heir to their fortunes. The memory of the little white girl must have been there, lying there, the body, across the bed. For a long time she must have remained the queen of his desire, his personal link with emotion, with the immensity of tenderness, the dark and terrible depths of the flesh. Then the day must have come when it was possible. The day when desire for the little white girl was so strong, so unbearable that he could find her whole image again as in a great and raging fever, and penetrate the other woman with his desire for her, the white child. Through a lie he must have found himself inside the other woman, through a lie providing what their families, Heaven, and the northern ancestors expected of him, to wit, an heir to their name.
Perhaps she knew about the white girl. She had native servants in Sadec who knew about the affair and must have talked. She couldn’t not have known of his sorrow. They must both have been the same age, sixteen. That night, had she seen her husband weep? And, seeing it, had she offered consolation? A girl of sixteen, a Chinese fiancée of the thirties, could she without impropriety offer consolation for such an adulterous sorrow at her expense? Who knows? Perhaps she was mistaken, perhaps the other girl wept with him, not speaking for the rest of the night. And then love might have come after, after the tears.
But she, the white girl, never knew anything of all this.
Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It’s me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, It’s me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she’d begun writing books, he’d heard about it through her mother whom he’d met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he’d been grieved for her. Then he didn’t know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death.
Neauphle-le-Château–Paris
February–May 1984
The Lover Page 9