Four Novels

by Marguerite Duras

  She didn’t answer.

  Mr. Andesmas said that he was afraid at that moment that she would get up and go back to the village, but that if she had done so, he would have asked her to stay. Even knowing that she would never be able to satisfy his avid curiosity about her, he wanted her near him, that afternoon. Near him, even interminably silent, he wanted her near him, that afternoon.

  If he saw her later, during the years that went by between these moments and his death, it was only by chance, when he rode through the village streets in a car. Never did she recognize him, or deign to recognize him.

  Instead of leaving, on the contrary she stays there and talks, always in this even voice, and her words are revealed from a long interior monologue, she lets them escape at times and whoever cares to hear them.

  “The music hasn’t started again for some time,” she says, “so the dancing should be completely over, even in the streets around the square where people sometimes dance because of the heat. They must have left already, but they’re taking their time, they are coming up slowly. You have to wait a little longer.”

  “Oh, I have time,” Mr. Andesmas repeats.

  “I know,” she says. “Everybody knows.”

  The spontaneous way in which Mr. Andesmas had reassured her, as well as the gentleness of his voice, softened the firmness of her resolve. The spectacle she was offering this remarkably courteous old man would be forgotten forever.

  Her voice became somewhat languid. She repeated what her child had said a moment before. But she spoke to the empty chasm.

  “I’m going to wait a little; if he comes, I’ll go down with him.”

  She hides her head in her arms, and for a few seconds her hair covers her face.

  “I’m a little tired.”

  Not only the similarity of their expressions but also her childish tone of voice would have indicated, to anyone who might have seen them one after the other as Mr. Andesmas had, that she was the mother of this little girl without memory of her sorrows.

  “Why not wait, why not rest a little more,” Mr. Andesmas said, “before going down.”

  “I have five children,” she said. “Five. And I am still young as you can see.”

  She opened her arms wide, in an embracing gesture. Then her arms fell down and she again took up her stiff, haughty position, in the sun of the plateau.

  “Oh, I understand, I understand,” Mr. Andesmas said.

  Perhaps the conversation could go on like this, on the basis of the children, of this aspect of her life as a mother; perhaps it could move in this way, cheatingly, along the byways of the present hour.

  “The little girl is the oldest?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Andesmas went on in a chatty tone of voice.

  “Shortly before her, well, a good twenty minutes before her, a dog came by. A dog, how can I describe him? A reddish dog, I think, yes, reddish brown. Does this dog belong to your children?”

  “Why are you asking me that?” she asked.

  “Well, like anything else,” Mr. Andesmas said, crestfallen. “I’ve been here since two o’clock and I’ve only seen this dog and the child. So I thought that perhaps . . .”

  “Don’t try so hard to talk,” she said. “This dog belongs to no one. He follows the children. He’s harmless. He doesn’t belong to anyone in the village, he’s everybody’s dog.”

  The shade of the beech tree was moving toward her. And while they were both silent and while she was still stiffly and with fascination examining the village square, Mr. Andesmas saw, with growing apprehension, that this shade from the tree was approaching her.

  Suddenly surprised by the coolness of this shade, realizing that it was later than she thought, would she leave?

  She notices it.

  She sees, in fact, a change taking place around her. She turns, tries to see where this coolness, this shade is coming from, looks at the beech tree, then at the mountain, and finally, earnestly, at Mr. Andesmas, seeking from him a final assurance that she still seems to be waiting for, that she wants to believe is definitve.

  “Oh, it’s really late,” she sighs. “How could it already be so late, with the sun like that.”

  “And even if Mr. Arc doesn’t come tonight,” Mr. Andesmas says cheerfully, “I’ll come back, perhaps tomorrow or at the end of the week, what does it matter?”

  “Why? No, no, he’ll come I assure you. What surprised me was how easily time just goes by. But I know he’ll come.”

  She turned back toward the valley, then again to Mr. Andesmas.

  “Especially in summer, especially in June,” she adds.

  Mr. Andesmas had noticed it.

  “Anyway, didn’t Valérie promise you that he’d come?”

  Mr. Andesmas didn’t answer right away. Throughout his life, it had always been easy to take him by surprise. And the slowness of his movements and of his speech, which had increased with age, caused the woman to misunderstand.

  “I asked you, Mr. Andesmas,” she went on, “if Valérie hadn’t promised you that my husband would come this evening?”

  “It’s Valérie who brought me here,” Mr. Andesmas finally said. “Yes, she is the one who made the date with Mr. Arc. Yesterday, I think. For the last year she has been taking care of my appointments.”

  The woman rises, moves closer to Mr. Andesmas, abandons her observation of the valley, sits down, there, almost at the old man’s feet.

  “So, you see,” she said. “You have to wait longer.”

  Mr. Andesmas took the woman’s rebuke to heart. She came even closer, hauled herself toward him while sitting, like an invalid, and her voice was as loud as if she were talking to someone who was deaf.

  “And you trust Valérie?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Andesmas said.

  “If she told you that he had promised her he would come, believe me, it’s only a matter of patience. I know him just as you know Valérie. He’ll keep his word.”

  Her voice suddenly became more womanly, it emerged from a well of gentleness.

  “You see, when he makes life difficult for people, it’s because he can’t do anything else. It’s when it is beyond his power to do anything else. It’s only in this case that he could wrong you. That’s how he is, without any ill will, but sometimes it happens that he can’t help looking as if he had ill will.”

  “I understand,” Mr. Andesmas uttered.

  “I know you understand. Isn’t Valérie like that?”

  She was completely curled up. Her slenderness was covered by her hair and her arms. She said with an effort:

  “Who, in such a case, wouldn’t act that way? Who? Neither you years ago, nor I today.”

  Mr. Andesmas recounted later that he was tempted—but was he sure about his past, this old man?—to be cruel to this woman so as to protect himself from the cruelty that she, he knew it, would show him. But was this the right, the real reason? Wasn’t it rather because this woman, who a moment before had been so fiercely resolved not to let any of her feelings show, was now sitting at his feet so dejectedly, in such complete surrender of her whole body; dominated by her feelings which had suddenly become so tyrannical that they crushed her, there, in front of him, the wife of Michel Arc?

  In the old days, when his strength would have allowed him to subjugate her in this way, the old man remembered he would have done so.

  He was cruel. It was he Mr. Andesmas, who was the first to bring up Valérie again.

  “Do you know my daughter Valérie?” he asks her.

  “I know her,” she says.

  She straightened, calmly raised herself up out of her silence. She spoke about Valérie as she had spoken about Michel Arc a moment before. Mr. Andesmas’ cruelty hadn’t reached her.

  “I’ve known her for a year,” she stated. “You came here a year ago, didn’t you, nearly to the day? It was a Monday. An afternoon in June. The first time I saw Valérie Andesmas, your child, was on the day you arrived.”

  She smiled fr
om deep in her well of gentleness at the memory of that afternoon.

  Mr. Andesmas also smiled at the thought of that afternoon.

  There they are, together, facing the memory of Valérie a year before, a child.

  Smiling, they do not speak.

  Then, Mr. Andesmas asks her:

  “Your little girl must be about the same age now as Valérie was last year?”

  She graciously objects to this remark:

  “Let’s not talk about my little girl. It’ll take her a long time to grow up, a long time.”

  Again she is back in last year’s month of June which Valérie passed through as a child.

  “People said that you had already been here, long before, years ago. They said that you had just retired from business.”

  “Well! That was quite a few years before,” Mr. Andesmas says, “but she wanted to live near the sea.”

  “First you bought that big house behind the town hall, then you bought land. And then this house. And more land. They said that you had already come here years ago with Valérie’s mother.”

  Mr. Andesmas lowers his head, suddenly overcome. Does the woman notice?

  “Am I mistaken?”

  “No, no, you’re not mistaken,” Mr. Andesmas says weakly.

  “You’re very rich. That was known very quickly. And people came to sell you land. They say you buy carelessly. You’re so rich that you buy land without looking at it.”

  “Rich,” repeated Mr. Andesmas, in a murmur.

  “One can understand and admit it, you know.”

  He buries himself a bit deeper in his armchair and gives a grunt. But the woman goes on, imperturbably.

  “You’re going to buy the pond too?”

  “The pond too,” Mr. Andesmas murmured.

  “So Valérie will have a large fortune at her disposal?”

  Mr. Andesmas agrees.

  “But why are you talking to me about my money?” he sighs.

  “It’s about Valérie that I’m talking to you,” she says smiling, “you’re mistaken. Why are you buying so much land, more and more, in this completely careless way?”

  “Valérie wants to own the whole village.”

  “Since when?”

  “A few months ago.”

  “She won’t be able to.”

  “She won’t be able to,” Mr. Andesrias repeats. “But she wants to.”

  The woman put her arms around her knees again and delighted in pronouncing the name.

  “Ah, Valérie, Valérie.”

  She sighs with pleasure, deeply.

  “Ah, I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Michel Arc’s wife continues. “The moving vans stayed in the square all night. They had arrived before you. No one had seen you yet. And the next day, when I was standing at my window as I often do, looking at the square, it was close to noon, all at once I saw Valérie.”

  She gets up suddenly and stays there, standing, very close to Mr. Andesmas.

  “It was just before school let out, I remember. I was watching for my children. Valérie appeared in the square. I was probably the first one to see her. How old was Valérie then?”

  “Nearly seventeen.”

  “That’s right, yes. I was afraid I’d forgotten. So she crossed the square as I was telling you. Two men—they saw her after me—stopped to look at her walking by. She walked, the square is wide, she walked, crossing it, crossing it. She walked endlessly, your child, Mr. Andesmas.”

  Mr. Andesmas raised his head and along with the woman he contemplated Valérie’s walk, a year earlier, in the light of the village square, when she didn’t yet know the splendor of her bearing.

  “Indifferent to the stares?” Mr. Andesmas asked.

  “Oh, if you only knew!”

  The tune burst forth in the chasm of light.

  Just when one might have thought they were no longer dancing, they were dancing again.

  But neither Michel Arc’s wife, nor Mr. Andesmas, remarked upon it.

  “Indifferent to the stares, as we were saying,” the woman went on. “We were looking at her, the two men and I. She pushed aside the curtain of the general store. We no longer saw her during the time she was in there, and yet not one of the three of us moved.”

  The shade of the beech tree now reaches the chasm. It begins to sink down into it.

  “In the general store,” Mr. Andesmas repeated.

  (He started laughing.)

  “Oh, I know!”

  “Because of the moving vans that had stayed in the square all night, I knew that the people who had bought that big house behind the town hall were going to arrive, any day. Already the name Andesmas had been mentioned. You had bought that house a few months earlier. Everybody knew that the two of you were alone, a child and father, already old, they said.”

  “Very old, they said?”

  “Yes, in the district they were saying that you had had this child very late, from a late marriage. But you know, seeing Valérie so tall, so blond as you know, I didn’t immediately make the connection between your arrival and her existence. Such boldness, I told myself, how beautiful she must be.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Andesmas moaned, “I know, I know.”

  “How beautiful she must be, I told myself, but is she as beautiful as one can imagine from her walk, from her bearing, from her hair?”

  She takes her time, desregarding the old man’s waiting. Then she goes on in a voice that has become clear, loud, almost declamatory.

  “The curtain closed on her hair. And I asked myself who in the town had brought her, who would join her any minute, now. The two men also seemed astonished and we looked at one another questioningly. Where did she come from? We kept asking ourselves what man owned this blondness, and only this blondness, since we had not yet seen her face. One just couldn’t imagine so much useless blondness. Well? She took a long time to come out.”

  She comes closer, sits down right next to the old man and this time they look at each other but only while she is speaking, exactly.

  “Then,” she said, “she finally reappeared. The curtain was moved aside. We saw her as she crossed the whole square in the opposite direction. Slowly. Taking her time. Taking the time of those who were looking at her, as if it had been owed her from time immemorial, without realizing it.”

  “Without realizing it,” Mr. Andesmas repeated.

  Once again they were banished into that moment when she had seen, completely, fully, forever, the beauty of Valérie Andesmas.

  She stopped talking. Mr. Andesmas had sunk back into his armchair. Again, from crackling of the wicker armchair under his hands, he noticed that he was trembling.

  “Mrs. Arc,” he asked, “if this house has been for sale so often, as I have been told, there must be a reason?”

  She smiled, nodded.

  “You certainly say anything that comes into your head,” she said.

  She added, suddenly, seriously:

  “But there must be a reason, I suppose, yes.”

  The forest fills with sunlight. All its shadows drown in the chasm of light, too long now for the hill to contain them.

  “I have known none of the owners of this house,” she says, “but it’s true that it passes from hand to hand regularly. There are houses like that, everyone knows that.”

  She explores its surroundings very quickly and, again, looks at the chasm of light.

  “It’s isolation probably, in the end,” she says.

  “In the end, it’s possible.”

  “Because,” she goes on, “at first, couples, for example, might enjoy it!”

  “Ah, probably, probably,” Mr. Andesmas murmurs.

  “And also this light, in summer, so harsh.”

  “It isn’t any more now,” he says. “Look.”

  It isn’t any more. The mist rises thicker, from the woods and the fields. The sea is softly multicolored.

  “Michel Arc had planned to buy it, you see, at the beginning of our marriage,” she continues. “
But your predecessors were living in it. Afterward, Michel Arc no longer mentioned it. I only saw it once, three years ago when I took the children to the pond. In the summer.”

  “Nobody had thought of a terrace? This is the first time.”

  “Oh, not at all, Michel Arc had thought of it.”

  “Only he?”

  “The others? How would I know? Even though you might think, when you see this plateau, that it calls for a terrace, why had no one thought of it before you? If you know why, tell me, Mr. Andesmas.”

  “Money?”

  “No.”

  “Time?”

  “Well, perhaps, Mr. Andesmas, time to build it before leaving this house because of its isolation which, as we were saying, becomes unbearable in the end. Don’t you think so?”

  Mr. Andesmas does not answer.

  She turns.

  For a brief moment she at last sees this bulk, abominably final. He no longer is even tempted to express himself. And at that point, she probably feels a certain interest in so much past existence. Mr. Andesmas realizes this from her half-closed eyes which linger on him. Later he said he had recognized this to be the woman’s greatest virtue, this ability at such a moment, even for just a few seconds, to forget about herself and take an interest in his immense, cold and burned-out life.

  “Her mother left you,” she says very softly, “and she has had other children since by different men? There was a law suit?”

  Mr. Andesmas nods.

  “A very long, very expensive law suit?” she continues.

  “I won, as you can see,” Mr. Andesmas says.

  She again gets up slowly, moves still closer to him. She touches the arm of the chair and, leaning, stands there looking at him.

  They are very close to each other: if she were to fall forward, her face would land against his.

  “You had great hopes for her probably?”

  He feels upon him the smell of a summer dress and of a woman’s loosened hair. Nobody ever comes so close to Mr. Andesmas any more, except Valérie. Is the closeness of Michel Arc’s wife more important than what she is saying?”

  “I had no ideas on the subject,” he says in a very low voice, “not yet. You understand. No ideas. That’s why I may perhaps seem helpless to you.”