Four Novels

by Marguerite Duras

  “But aren’t people unhappy in this country of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there are girls like me, waiting for something to happen?”

  “I expect so, yes.”

  “So what is the point of it?”

  “Of course it’s true that people are unhappy and die there and there are probably girls like you waiting hopefully for something to happen to them. But why not know that country as well as just this one where we are, even if some things are the same. Why not see another country?”

  “Because . . . and I am sure I am wrong, and I am sure you will tell me I am, but the fact is that it is a matter of complete indifference to me.”

  “Ah, but wait. There for instance the winters are less harsh than here: in fact you would hardly know it was winter.”

  “But what use is a whole country to anyone, or a whole city or even the whole of one warm winter? It’s no use, you can say what you like but you can only be where you are, when you are and so what is the point?”

  “But that is exactly the point. The town where I went ends in a big square surrounded by huge balustrades which seem to go on for ever. . . .”

  “I am afraid I simply don’t want to hear about it.”

  “The whole town is built in white limestone: imagine, it is like snow in the heart of summer. It is built on a peninsula surrounded by the sea.”

  “And the sea I suppose is blue. It is blue isn’t it?”

  “Yes, very blue.”

  “Well, I am sorry, but I must tell you that people who talk of how blue the sea is make me sick.”

  “But how can I help it? From the Zoo you can see it surrounding the whole town. And to anybody it must seem blue. It’s not my fault.”

  “No. For me, without those ties of affection I was talking about, it would be black. And then, although I don’t want to offend you in any way, you must see that I am much too preoccupied with my desire to change my life to be able to go away or travel or see new things. You can see as many towns as you like but it never gets you anywhere. And once you have stopped looking, there you are, exactly where you were before.”

  “But I don’t think we are talking about the same thing. I’m not talking of those huge events which change a whole life, no, just of the things which give pleasure while one is doing them. Traveling is a great distraction. Everyone has always traveled, the Greeks, the Phoenicians: it has always been so, all through history.”

  “It’s true that we’re talking of different things. Travel or cities by the sea are not the things I want. First of all I want to belong to myself, to own something, not necessarily something very wonderful, but something which is mine, a place of my own, maybe only one room, but mine. Why sometimes I even find myself dreaming of a gas stove.”

  “You know it would be just the same as traveling. You wouldn’t be able to stop. Once you had the gas stove you would want a refrigerator and after that something else. It would be just like traveling, going from city to city. It would never end.”

  “Excuse me, but do you see anything wrong in my wanting something further perhaps after I have the refrigerator?”

  “Of course not. No, certainly not. I was only speaking for myself, and as far as I am concerned I find your idea even more exhausting than traveling and then going on traveling, moving as I do from place to place.”

  “I was born and grew up like everyone else and I know how to look around me: I look at things very carefully and I can see no reason why I should remain as I am. I must start somehow, anyhow, to become of consequence. And if at this stage I began losing heart at the thought of a refrigerator I might never even possess the gas stove. And anyway, how am I to know if it would weary me or not? If you say it would, it might be because you have given the matter a great deal of thought or perhaps even because at some time you very much disliked one particular refrigerator.”

  “No, it is not that. Not only have I never possessed a refrigerator, but I have never had the slightest chance of doing so. No, it’s only an idea, and if I talked of refrigerators like that it was probably only because to someone who travels they seem especially heavy and immobile. I don’t suppose I would have made the same remarks about another object. And yet I do understand, I assure you, that it would be impossible for you to travel before you had the gas stove, or even perhaps, the refrigerator. And I expect I am quite wrong to be so easily discouraged at the mere thought of a refrigerator.”

  “It does seem very strange.”

  “There was one day in my life, just one, when I no longer wanted to live. I was hungry, and as I had no money it was absolutely essential for me to work if I was to eat. It was as if I had forgotten that this was as true of everyone as of me. That day I felt quite unused to life and there seemed no point in going on living because I couldn’t see why things should go on for me as they did for other people. It took me a whole day to get over this feeling. Then, of course, I took my suitcase to the market and afterwards I had a meal and things went on as they had before. But with this difference, that ever since that day I find that any thought of the future—and after all thinking of a refrigerator is thinking of the future—is much more frightening than before.”

  “I would have guessed that.”

  “Since then, when I think about myself, it is simply in terms of one person more or one person less, and so you see that a refrigerator more or less can hardly seem as important to me as it does to you.”

  “Tell me, did this happen before or after you went to that country you liked so much?”

  “After. But when I think about that country I feel pleased and I think it would have been a pity for one more person not to have seen it. I don’t mean that I imagine I was especially made to appreciate it. No, it just seems to me that since we are here, it is better to see one country more rather than one less.”

  “I can’t feel as you do and yet I do understand what you are saying and I think you are right to say it. What you really mean is that since we are alive anyhow it is better to see things than not to see them. It was that you meant, wasn’t it? And that seeing them makes the time pass quickly and more pleasantly?”

  “Yes, it is a little like that. Perhaps the only difference between us is that we feel differently about how to spend our time?”

  “Not only that, because as yet I have not had the time to become tired of anything, except of waiting of course. I don’t mean that you are necessarily happier than I am, but simply that if you were unhappy you could imagine something which would help, like moving to another city, selling something different, or even . . . even bigger things. But I can’t start thinking of anything yet, not even the smallest thing. My life has not begun except, of course, for the fact that I am alive. There are times, in summer for example when the weather is fine, when I feel that something might have begun for me even without there being any proof of it, and then I am frightened. I become frightened of giving in to the fine weather and forgetting what I want even for a second, of losing myself in something unimportant. I am sure that if at this stage I started thinking of anything except the one big thing, I would be lost.”

  “But it seemed to me for instance that you were fond of that little boy?”

  “It makes no difference. If I am I don’t want to know it. If I started finding consolation in my life, if I was able, to however small a degree, to put up with it then I know I would be lost. I have a great deal of work to do, and I do it. Indeed I am so good at my work that each day they give me a little more to do, and I accept it. Naturally it has ended by them giving me the hardest things to do, dreadful things, and yet I do them and I never complain. Because if I refused it would mean that I imagined that my situation, as it stands, could be improved, that it could be made somehow bearable, and then, of course, it would end up one day by becoming bearable.”

  “And yet it seems strange to be able to make one’s life easier and refuse to do so.”

  “I suppose so, but I must do whatever they ask. I
have never refused anything although it would have been easy at the beginning and now it would be easier still since I am asked to do more and more. But for as long as I can remember it has always been like this: I accepted everything quite quietly so that one day I would be quite unable to accept anything any more. You may say that this is a rather childish way of looking at things, but I could never find another way of being sure that I would get what I wanted. You see, I know that people can get used to anything and all around me I see people who are still where I am, but ten years later. There is nothing people cannot get accustomed to, even to a life like mine, and so I must be careful, very careful indeed, not to become accustomed to it myself. Sometimes I am frightened, because although I am aware of this danger, it is still so great that I am afraid that even I, aware as I am, might give in to it. But please go on telling me about the changes you see when you travel, apart from the snow, the cherries and the new buildings?”

  “Well, sometimes the hotel has changed hands and the new owner is friendly and talkative where the old one was tired of trying to please and never spoke to his clients.”

  “Tell me, it is true isn’t it that I must not take things for granted: that each day I must still be amazed to be where I am or else I shall never succeed?”

  “I think that everyone is amazed, each day, to be still where they are. I think people are amazed quite naturally. I doubt if one can decide to be amazed at one thing more than at another.”

  “Each morning I am a little more surprised to find myself still where I am. I don’t do it on purpose: I just wake up and, immediately, I am surprised. Then I start remembering things . . . I was a child like any other: there was nothing to show I was different. At cherry time we used to go and steal fruit in the orchards. We were stealing it right up to the last day, because it was in that season that I was sent into service. But tell me more about the things you see when you travel?”

  “I used to steal cherries like you, and there was nothing which seemed to make me different from other children, except perhaps that even then I loved them very much. Well, apart from a change of proprietor in a hotel, sometimes a radio has been installed. That’s a big change, when a café without music suddenly becomes a café with music: then of course they have many more customers and everyone stays much later. And that makes an evening to the good.”

  “You said to the good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, I sometimes think: if only we had known. . . . My mother simply came up to me and said, ‘Well, you must come along now.’ And I just let myself be led away like an animal to the slaughterhouse. If only I had known then, I promise you I would have fought. I would have saved myself. I would have begged my mother to let me stay. I would have persuaded her.”

  “But we don’t know.”

  “The cherry season went on that year like all the others. People would pass under my window singing and I would be there behind the curtains watching them, and I got scolded for it.”

  “I was left free to pick cherries for a long time. . . .”

  “There I was behind the window like a criminal and yet my only crime was to be sixteen. But you? You said you went on picking them for a long time?”

  “Longer than most people. And yet you see. . . .”

  “Tell me more about your cafés full of people and music.”

  “I like them very much. I don’t really think I could go on living without them.”

  “I think I would like them too. I can see myself at the bar with my husband, listening to the radio. People would talk to us and we would make conversation. We would be with each other and with the others. Sometimes I feel how nice it would be to go and sit in a café but if you are a single young woman you can hardly afford to do so.”

  “I forgot to add that sometimes someone looks at you.”

  “I see, and comes over?”

  “Yes, they come over.”

  “For no reason?”

  “For no particular reason, but then the conversation somehow becomes less general.”

  “And then?”

  “I never stay longer than two days in any town. Three at the most. The things I sell are not so essential.”

  “Alas.”

  The wind, which had died down, rose again scattering the clouds, and once more the sudden warmth in the air brought thoughts of approaching summer.

  “But the weather is really wonderful today,” the man said again.

  “It is nearly summer.”

  “Perhaps the fact is that one never really starts anything: perhaps things are always in the future?”

  “If you can say that, it is because each day is full enough for you to prevent you thinking of the next. But my days are empty, a desert.”

  “But don’t you do anything of which you could say later that at least it was something to the good?”

  “No, nothing. I work all day, but I never do anything of which I could say what you have just said. I cannot even think in those terms.”

  “Please don’t think I want to contradict you, but you must see that whatever you do, this time you are living now will count for you one day. You will look back on this desert as you describe it and discover that it was not empty at all, but full of people. You will not escape it. You think this time has not begun, and it has begun. You think you are doing nothing and in reality you are doing something. You think you are moving towards a solution and when you look round you find it’s behind you. In just this sense I did not fully appreciate that city I mentioned. The hotel wasn’t first class, the room I had reserved in advance had already been rented, it was late and I was hungry. Nothing was awaiting me in this city, except the city itself, and imagine for a moment what an enormous city, completely preoccupied with its own affairs, can be for a weary traveler seeing it for the first time.”

  “No, I can’t imagine.”

  “All you find is a bad room overlooking a dirty, noisy courtyard. And yet thinking back I know that this trip changed me, that much of what I had seen before making it was leading up to it and illuminated by it. You’re well aware that only after it’s all over does one know he has visited this or that town.”

  “If that is the way you understand it, then perhaps you are right. Perhaps it has already started, perhaps it started on that particular day when I first wished it would start.”

  “Yes, you think that nothing happens, and yet, don’t you see, it seems to me that the most important thing that has happened to you is precisely your will not to live yet.”

  “I understand you, I really do, but you must also try and understand me. Even if the most important part of my life is over, I can’t know it as yet and I haven’t the time to understand it. I hope one day I will know, as you did with your journey, and that when I look back everything behind me will be clear and fall into place. But now, at this moment, I am too involved to be even able to guess at what I might feel one day.”

  “I know. And I know that probably it is impossible for you to undertand things you have not yet felt, but all the same it is hard for me not to try and explain them to you.”

  “You are very kind, but I am afraid that I am not very good yet at understanding the things I am told.”

  “Believe me that I do understand all you have said, but even so, is it absolutely necessary to do all that work? Of course I am not trying to give you any advice, but don’t you think that someone else would make a little effort and still manage, without quite so much work, to have as much hope for the future as before? Don’t you think that another person would manage that?”

  “Are you frightened that one day, if I have to wait too long and go on working a little more each day without complaining, I might suddenly lose patience altogether?”

  “I admit that your kind of will power is a little frightening, but that’s not why I made my suggestion. It was just because it is difficult to accept that someone of your age should live as you do.”

  “But I have no alternative, I assure you. I have
thought about it a great deal.”

  “Can I ask you how many people there are in the family you work for?”

  “Seven.”

  “And how big is the house?”

  “Average.”

  “And rooms?”

  “Eight.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “But no. That’s not the way to think. I must have explained myself very badly because you haven’t understood.”

  “I think that work can always be measured and that, no matter what the circumstances, work is always work.”

  “Not my kind. It’s probably true of the kind of work of which it is better to do too much than too little. But if in my kind of work there was time left over to think or start enjoying oneself then one would really be lost.”

  “And you’re only twenty?”

  “Yes, and as they say I’ve not yet had time to do any wrong. But that seems beside the point to me.”

  “On the contrary, I have a feeling that it is not and that the people you work for should remember it.”

  “After all, it’s hardly their fault if I agree to do all the work they give me. I would do the same in their place.”

  “I should like to tell you how I went into that town, after leaving my suitcase at the hotel.”

  “Yes, I should like to hear that. But you mustn’t worry on my account: I would be most surprised if I let myself become impatient. I think all the time of the risk I would run if that should happen and so, you see, I don’t think it will.”

  “I did not manage to leave my suitcase until the evening. . . .”

  “You see people like me do think too. There is nothing else for us to do, buried in our work. We think a great deal, but not like you. We have dark thoughts, and all the time.”

  “It was evening, just before dinner, after work.”

  “People like me think the same things of the same people and our thoughts are always bad. That’s why we are so careful and why it’s not worth bothering about us. You were talking of jobs, and I wonder if something could be called a job which makes you spend your whole day thinking ill of people? But you were saying it was evening, and you had left your suitcase?”