Yann Andrea Steiner

by Marguerite Duras

  One day summer will be over. The memory of it sometimes comes to you in the bright light of the beach, through the transparency of the rolling waves. When summer stretches as far as the eye can see, so strong, so hurtful or dark, or sometimes illuminating; when you’re not there, for instance, and I am all alone in the world.

  I will never know if the child realized one day that on this beach, there was often someone watching him. Several times he turned toward me but it was to stare at nothing, just a whole troupe of kites. Or the wind. Or the seagulls. It’s the young counselor he’s looking at, whom he knows was assigned to him by the administrators of the holiday camp.

  It’s the first time I see the body of the child so close to me. He’s a skinny child, tall, maybe too tall for his age. Six years old, he said.

  A second kite took off like a crazy person toward the sea and then it was snatched up by the wind. The child ran as if to catch it but the kite fell down dead. The child stopped, looked at the dead kite. And he passed it by.

  Then the aria from Norma floated out again from the residential hotel. Far in the distance, Callas again cried with the child over the dead kite.

  In the midst of the bad weather there was an hour of sunshine, and warmth suddenly enveloped the beach. The wind fell and they told the children they could go out and swim, that the ocean was warm after the rain.

  The counselor didn’t follow him, wasn’t watching him anymore. She saw him without looking. The child removed his wool vest, as if he were all alone in the world; he went to drop it near her and then headed off toward the sea with the other children. He didn’t mention the death of the new kite.

  And very soon he came back up the beach, toward the young counselor.

  The child is in a white bathing suit. Thin. You can see his body clearly. He is too tall, as if made of glass, a windowpane. You can already tell what he’s going to become.

  The perfect proportions, his joints, the length of his muscles – you can see them. The miraculous frailty of his relays, his bones, the folds of his neck, his legs, his hands. You can see.

  And his head, carried like a mathematical emergence, a lighthouse, the tip of a flower.

  AND IT came. Suddenly the nights were hot. And then the days.

  And then the small children from the camps took naps under blue and white tents.

  And the child who remained silent lay there with eyes closed, and nothing set him apart from the other children.

  And the young counselor came up near him. And he opened his eyes. Were you sleeping? He doesn’t answer, just gives that same apologetic smile. Don’t you know when you’re sleeping? He smiles again, says he doesn’t really know.

  How old are you? Six and a half, he says. The counselor’s lips tremble. Can I give you a kiss? He smiles, yes. She takes him in her arms and kisses his hair, his eyes. She has removed her arms and lips from the child’s body. There are tears in her eyes; the child sees them too. He is used to it, this child, he knows that sometimes he makes people cry when they look at him. This child is used to it. Then he talks about the last few days. He says he was sad when there was the storm, the rough waves, the rain.

  “Will it come back?” he asked.

  “It always comes back,” said the counselor.

  “Every day?” asks the child.

  “Hard to say,” the counselor replies.

  SOMETIMES I see you without knowing who you are, at all, without knowing you at all. I see you far from this beach, elsewhere, distant, sometimes abroad. The memory of you is already there, in your presence, but already I can’t recognize your hands, I’ve never seen them. Your eyes remain, perhaps. And your laugh. And that latent smile, always on the point of welling up from your fantastically innocent face.

  THE WEATHER was beautiful and I went out to see. That’s when it might have happened. I might have written you only to say that it could have been that morning when I would have told you that without realizing it, perhaps, I loved you. You might have been in front of me, listening. I might also have told you that once this morning had passed, it would have been too late for me to tell you this: that I loved you, and forever. Too late. That never again would there have been so violent a need to say this to you in this palace of a northern beach, beneath this noonday sky, this rain and wind.

  And then the sun came out again, green and raw. And it turned cold.

  THE NEXT day. It’s morning.

  The seagulls skitter up the sands; they are near the child and the young counselor.

  Once more in the child’s eyes there is a vague fear of life.

  Suddenly, who knows why, all the seagulls head together toward the horizon, carried by the wind, smoothed by it, white and pure as doves.

  And then, far from shore, and again all in unison, in a very wide arc, they fly back toward the beach. But this time they are caught up in the gusts of that same wind, this time in shreds, ripped to pieces it almost seems, screeching, insane, vulgar, insolent like human persons. And then the child laughs. And the counselor too.

  The child, laughing, sees how slow the gulls are to come back to their terrain of sand. And in his eyes there is again that fear that they will never make it back, that they’ll drown. But they do make it. Here they are. Dazed. Exhausted. But alive. Those seagulls are crazy, says the counselor. And the child laughs.

  Afterward, the seagulls rest. Then they groom their plumage with their yellow beaks and then once more they yelp like dogs, like horses, enough to make you stop up your ears. They survey the skies, always and especially the disorientation of the rain that they alone know how to decipher. And already one can see the sand shuddering, the blood red of the sand worms beginning to rise toward the light of day.

  The child watches the seagulls swallow the long blood-red worms. He smiles at them. Sometimes a seagull chokes on a worm and the child laughs.

  YES. One day it will happen. One day you will feel the abominable grief over something you call “unlivable,” in other words what was attempted by you and me during that summer 1980 of rain and wind.

  SOMETIMES it’s at the water’s edge. At nightfall, when the beach empties. After the holiday campers depart. Across the entire stretch of sand, suddenly it screams that Capri is over. That it was the city of our first love but now it’s over. Over.

  That it’s terrible, suddenly. Terrible. Each time, it’s enough to make you cry, make you run away, make you die, because Capri revolved with the earth, toward the forgetting of love.

  THERE is no more lightning. It rains all the time, except during the nights that remain lit by clouds beneath the black of the sky. People leave. The rentals are abandoned. But the counselors and the holiday campers – they stay behind. The children are under blue tents held down by piles of large rocks. And under those tents they’re still singing and telling stories. About what, they don’t even know at this point, but the children listen. Even in Chinese they would listen, in Javanese, in American. If the counselors want to make them laugh like maniacs they sing in Chinese. Then the children fall over laughing, they shout with laughter, and afterward they all sing “in Chinese” and the young counselors scream with laughter like the children.

  The children with parents and villas and automobiles come to see what’s going on where all that laughter is, and they laugh too and sing with the disenfranchised children.

  The people go home. The café sidewalks are pelted by the rain, empty. The streets are deserted. Those who persist in staying play bowls in empty sheds or bridge in hotel lobbies. The casinos are open day and night. The supermarkets are full to bursting. The cafés keep their doors shut. They refuse to serve coffee to family groups – it’s not enough money. They say their coffee machine isn’t working, and when you think about it, that’s the truth, since on rainy days they only serve alcohol. When people come with children, it’s simple: they don’t bother opening the door.

  The summer campers have deserted the beach. And when it rains, well then the children are kept shut up in the
ir temporary residence, those huge dormitory-like structures at the top of the cliffs.

  From there, from those houses, the children can see the vast expanses of beach, and far in the distance they can see still other beaches, the one in Hennequeville, and especially, down below, the remains of the rockfalls from the cliffs overlooking the sea, the endless void littered with huge black boulders that tumbled into the clay – maybe centuries ago, say the counselors, or maybe only a few nights ago.

  You ask me, “Where are we?”

  I said, “In S. Thala.”

  “And after S. Thala?”

  I said that after S. Thala it was still S. Thala. It was there. It was there, in fact, the city of every love.

  After that are the beaches of Villerville, said the counselor, and of Agatha. And after that there’s Pennedepie, the black pillars of the Dukes of Alba. That after the estuary the Seine leaves the land to blend with the oceans. All that’s left is what used to be Port of African Woods, the swamps full of eels and carp, and the warrens of young rabbits. And after that the German factory, all red brick and windows, now demolished, facing the Seine, the same as the one in Paris. The one before which you weep in one of my books, standing on the red ground glittering with the dust of shattered windows – facing that river that suddenly flows into the ocean at the speed of light, its thousand horses given free rein.

  And after that, still after that, in the alluvial Vernier marshlands, is Quilleboeuf, where Emily L. was seen by you and me for the first and last time in her life.

  The children remain in the camp houses that the towns have allocated for them. They’re on the cliffs, above the Roches Noires Hotel. They have been lent sweaters because of the chill, the rainy chill that gives children colds. And afterward they are made to sing. They sang, but not much. Many of them stretched out on the floor and went to sleep and were left there. Many of the counselors fell asleep too, on the floor just like the children.

  YOU UNDERSTAND, how could anyone resist that, resist someone so childish, who wants everything all at once? Who wants to rip up the books, burn them. And yet who fears for their disappearance. You knew the book already existed. You said to me, What is it you think you’re doing? What’s the meaning of all this? Writing all the time, all day long? You’ll be abandoned by everyone, because you’re insane, impossible to live with. A complete and utter bitch . . . You don’t even notice what a mess you make, with your drafts left scattered about the tables, stacks and stacks of them ...

  Sometimes we laugh together about your fits of rage. So sudden. And then sometimes you get afraid I’ll throw the book into the sea or the fire. Sometimes you come back at five in the morning from your treasure hunts, the times you spend contemplating those ineffable bartenders in the grand hotels on the cliff, classified as the world’s most luxurious resorts. From those marvels you are glad to return. Often I’m asleep when you come in. I hear you go into the living room to make sure the manuscript is still there, on the table, and then into the kitchen to see if there’s still coffee in the packet, and bread, and butter, and coffee!

  I’ve begun not talking to you anymore, only saying hello, quite happily. Leaving you alone. Buying you steaks. Only seeing you in the morning when you emerge hirsute from your room in search of some black coffee, and laughing to tears at your administrative demeanor, your inspections.

  You were terrifying; sometimes I was afraid of you. And those who knew us were afraid for me. I found you to be ever more sincere, but it was too late for me, I could no longer stop you. I’ve never been able to block this fear of you. You don’t know how to expend the fear of being killed by you. All my women friends and acquaintances are charmed by your gentleness. You are my best calling card. As for me, your gentleness is leading me to the death that you must dream of inflicting on me without even realizing it. Every night.

  Sometimes I’m afraid from the moment you wake up. Like all men, every day, even if only for a few instants, you become a killer of women. This might occur every single day. Sometimes you’re frightening like an errant hunter, an escaped convict. And because of that, people around me began to fear for my safety. I’ve held onto that: I’m afraid of you. Every day, for very brief moments that you don’t even notice, I’m frightened of the way you look at me.

  Sometimes your gaze alone scares me. Sometimes I’ve never seen you before. I no longer know what you’re doing here, in this popular seaside resort, in this dull, crowded season, where you are even more alone than in your regional capital.

  The better to kill you, perhaps, or to drive you away, I don’t know. I sometimes manage to feel I’ve never seen you before. That I don’t know you, to the point of horror. That I have no idea why you’re here, what you want from me, or what will become of you. Becoming is the only subject we never, ever broach.

  You must not know what you’re doing here either, with this woman who is already old, mad with writing.

  Maybe this is just normal, maybe it’s the same all over; it’s nothing, you came simply because you were desperate, as you are every day of your life. And also during certain summers at certain times of day or night when the sun quits the sky and slips into the sea, every evening, always, you cannot help wanting to die. This I know.

  I see the two of us lost in similar natures. I can sometimes be overwhelmed by tenderness for the kind of people we are. Unstable, they say, a bit nutty. “People who never go to the movies, or the theater, or parties.” Leftists are like that, you know, they have no clue how to enjoy life. Cannes makes them sick and so do the grand hotels of Morocco. Movies and theater, it’s all the same.

  THE WIND has risen again. And again the sky has turned dark.

  Once more the ocean is an expanse of rain as far as the eye can see.

  Against the wall, beneath an awning, was the child.

  He looked at the sea; he didn’t play with the stones he’d gathered on the beach. He held them tightly in his clenched fists. He was wearing something red. Next to him was the young counselor. She looked at him, then at the rain, and then again at him, the child. The boy’s eyes were lighter than usual, larger, more frightening as well, because of the blinding amplitude of what there was to see.

  And once after that day, I remember, the counselor went into a large white tent. She started telling a story about the sea and a child. All the children looked at the sea.

  Once upon a time, said the young counselor, once upon a time there was a little boy named David. He had gone off with his parents to sail around the world on a yacht, the Admiral System.

  And it happened that one day the sea became very bad.

  And the sea was so bad that the Admiral System sank lock, stock, and barrel to the bottom, except for him, that little David kid. And wouldn’t you know that just then a shark was swimming by, who said to him, Come over here and get on my back, little boy. And off the two of them went over the ocean waves.

  Wow! say the children.

  The young counselor pauses, then goes on:

  The shark went very fast along the surface of the waves, the counselor says.

  And then she stops; she falls asleep. The children shout. She begins again.

  The counselor tells the story slowly and very well. She wants the children to stay quiet and the children stay completely quiet.

  Ratakataboom is the shark’s name, she repeats. Don’t forget that word, or else you won’t understand what happens next.

  At the shark’s name, the children laugh out loud. Some of them laugh at the shark, others at the counselor.

  The children repeat whatever comes into their heads. The children repeat in cadence. Boom Boom Telly. Telly Rataky Boom Boom, they say. It doesn’t matter.

  Is the quiet child listening to the story of David as told by the young counselor? No one can know, but he probably is; that child listens to everything. This evening it’s almost like the first time he’s heard a story. He looks at the young counselor, but his gray eyes reveal nothing except that they are looking to
ward the counselor, the way they’d look toward the seagulls, the sea, beyond the beaches, beyond the sea, beyond the wind and sand and clouds, the screaming gulls and the butchered red worms. David, she narrates, the counselor narrates, and the shark too, with that name of his that he can’t pronounce...

  The sea is milky blue. There is no wind to carry the story of David as told by the girl. She is stretched out on some tent canvas, staring up at the sky, and she says whatever comes into her head and then she laughs. And the children laugh and listen with all their might.

  The weather is so calm that bands of swallows come in turn, swirl above the beach, beautiful as gray velvet, as if mad for children, for the flesh of children. As for the children, well, it makes them laugh ...

  The shark scolds David for crying, the counselor continues. He reminds David that he was the one who gobbled up David’s father and mother, and that it’s not very tactful of David to be crying in front of him.

  The young counselor suddenly seems to drop off to sleep. The children shout.

  You finish that story now, or we’re going to beat you up, shout the children.

  The island comes into sight, the counselor says, laughing.

  She has forgotten; then she remembers. She says:

  But it’s an equatorial island! says David.