How the French Invented Love (39 page)

What differentiates this love from what we in the United States call “open marriage” or even “polyamorous marriage”? More than anything, it was the commitment that Beauvoir and Sartre vowed to each other and honored to the end of their lives. In spite of everything—lovers, hangers-on, adopted daughters, and male associates who took control of Sartre when he became blind and
gâteux
(decrepit)—Beauvoir remained his primary partner. They were truly wedded to each other in ways that made others envious.

Colette Audry, one of Beauvoir’s colleagues when they were both teaching at the same lycée in the early 1930s, remembered a half century later: “Theirs was a new kind of relationship, and I had never seen anything like it. I cannot describe what it was like to be present when those two were together. It was so intense that sometimes it made others who saw it sad not to have it.”
¹⁴

For all their flaws, Beauvoir and Sartre offered an egalitarian model of couplehood that would have to wait two generations to become fully fashionable. Their love for each other did not die with the end of shared sex. They confirmed each other as two halves of an entity sharing a single vision. An oft-quoted definition of love written by another existentialist, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose life overlapped with that of Beauvoir and Sartre, would have provided a fitting epitaph for their tombstone: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Dominion of Desire

Marguerite Duras

H
IS HANDS ARE EXPERT, MARVELOUS PERFECT.
I
’M VERY LUCKY, OBVIOUSLY, IT’S AS IF IT WERE HIS PROFESSION. . . .
H
E CALLS ME A WHORE, A SLUT, HE SAYS
I
’M HIS ONLY LOVE, AND THAT’S WHAT HE OUGHT TO SAY . . . ALL IS SWEPT AWAY IN THE TORRENT, IN THE FORCE OF DESIRE.

Marguerite Duras,
The Lover,
1984

Girl on bicycle crossing a bridge in Vietnam built by Gustave Eiffel in 1904. Photograph by Reid S. Yalom, 2010.

T
he world of Marguerite Duras is dominated by love—fierce, relentless passion that bursts into creaturely happiness mingled with heartache. Duras’s men and women experience ecstasy, tenderness, longing, jealousy, suffering, revenge. Their lives are ravaged by love’s course. In her fiction and films, you can sense the pulse of love beating under every word.

Maria, the protagonist of Duras’s novella
10:30 on a Summer Night
, is haunted by memories of lovemaking with her husband Pierre, now painful memories because she sees him consumed with desire for her friend Claire. With Claire and their daughter in tow, Maria and Pierre are traveling in Spain on their way to Madrid, but due to a violent summer storm, they stop for the night in an overflowing small-town inn, where the only place to sleep is on a hallway floor.

Maria, sensing the frustrated desire between Pierre and Claire, imagines:

    This must have been the first time they kissed. . . . She could see them fully outlined against the moving sky. While Pierre kissed her, his hands touched Claire’s breasts. They were probably talking. But very softly. They must have been speaking the first words of love. Irrepressible, bursting words which came to their lips between two kisses.
¹

Maria drinks too much. She easily falls into wine-induced stupors. It becomes increasingly clear that she is a serious alcoholic. (Duras had her own problems with drink.) Pierre tries unsuccessfully to stop her. Despite Maria’s stubborn alcoholism and Pierre’s irresistible attraction to Claire, he still loves his wife and treats her with tender desire.

    “You remember? Verona?”

        “Yes.”

    If he reached out, Pierre would touch Maria’s hair. He had spoken of Verona. Of love all night, the two of them, in a bathroom in Verona. A storm too, and it was summer, and the hotel was full. “Come, Maria.” He was wondering. “When, when will I have enough of you?”

There is a visceral understanding between the two of them. He knows that she knows about Claire, and yet he believes that the marital bond will somehow survive.

Interwoven within the story of Maria, Pierre, and Claire is a shocking event that has just occurred in the nameless town. That very day, a man had shot and killed his youthful, naked wife and the lover lying beside her.

    “His name is Paestra. Rodrigo Paestra.”

        “Rodrigo Paestra.”

    “Yes. And the man he killed is Perez. Toni Perez.”

As the police patrol the town and wait for dawn to catch the murderer, Maria obsesses over his fate. She has heard that he is hiding on the rooftops, and suddenly decides to help him escape. Without directly expressing the parallel between Paestra’s situation and her own, Maria understands all too well how a spouse could be driven to murder out of jealousy. How she manages to deliver Paestra from the rooftops but not from his own despair; how she accepts the inevitable sexual union between Pierre and Claire; how Pierre and Maria unsuccessfully cling to their long-term love for one another—these are all themes that play out against each other in a haunting drama.

M
uch of the power of Duras’s writing lies in what she does not say. We the readers, or viewers in the case of her films, are asked to fill in the spaces. We enter into her characters’ thought processes, partake of their emotions, and add our own. However idiosyncratic her stories, they delve into a common pool of primitive emotions hidden in each of us.

The unsaid lurks behind her famously stylized language: sonorous word patterns and repetitious leitmotifs create a distinctly musical texture. It is no accident that one of her best-known novellas is titled
Moderato Cantabile
—a musical term meaning “moderately and melodiously.” Here, too, a man had killed the woman he loved, but instead of fleeing he throws himself upon her inert body and strokes her hair.

    The crowd could see that the woman was still young, and that blood was coming from her mouth in thin trickles, and that there was blood on the man’s face where he had kissed her.
²

This crime of passion, this ultimate expression of transgressive love, works its way into the imagination of others surrounding the fatal couple. Once again the murder is interwoven into a more developed story, this time that of a man named Chauvin and his former employer’s wife, Anne Desbaresdes. They meet by chance in the café where the murder had taken place and continue to meet there, though this is inappropriate territory for a bourgeois wife like Madame Desbaresdes. Their only topic of conversation is the murder, even though neither really knows anything about the parties involved. Nonetheless, they are drawn to the mystery of a love so wild it defies all rational understanding.

The murder beomes a catalyst for the mounting attraction between Anne and Chauvin, which reaches a level of erotic intensity far beyond the events themselves. A thousand other French stories are filled with similar events concerning love, adultery, and jealousy, yet Duras manages to endow these events with a unique incantatory power. Just as Racine in the seventeenth century elevated love to a level of tragic gravitas, so too Duras in the twentieth century draws her readers and spectators into the roiling underworld of all-consuming love.

M
arguerite Duras (1914–1996) was seventy when she wrote
The Lover
. At that time, she was already a much-honored author with over fifty novels, novellas, films, and plays to her credit. These included the world-famous film
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
and works of fiction such as
Moderato Cantabile
, which was often included in French and American courses on literature.
The Lover
won the 1984 Prix Goncourt and sold 750,000 copies by the end of the year. Later it was made into a much-acclaimed film.

The Lover
is set in Vietnam where Duras was born and grew up. Named Marguerite Donnadieu (meaning “give to God”), she was the third child of parents who had come from France to educate indigenous Vietnamese children. As members of the French ruling class, her family lived comfortably in what was then called Indochina, but after the death of her father, their circumstances were considerably reduced. Like Duras, the unnamed girl in
The Lover
has a bitter schoolteacher mother, a brutal older brother, and a sweet second brother who dies young. She is fifteen and a half when she meets a rich Chinese man, older by a dozen years, on a ferry crossing the Mekong River. She is returning by bus and boat from her village of Sadec (now called Sa Dec) to school in Saigon. The man has come aboard the ferry with his black limousine and white-liveried chauffeur.

    He looks at the girl in the man’s fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly comes over to her. He’s obviously nervous. He doesn’t smile to begin with. To begin with he offers her a cigarette. His hand is trembling. There’s the difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling. She says she doesn’t smoke, no thanks.
³

The man is surprised to see a white girl using the native transportation system. He asks about her family in Sadec and tells her that he lives in the big house with the large terrace and blue tiles bordering the river. He has just returned from Paris where he was a student. Would she allow him to drive her to her destination in Saigon?

Here begins the surprising history of a poor adolescent French girl with an older rich Chinese man. He has the traditional attributes of power—money and maturity—which she counters and subjugates with her youth, beauty, and skin color. Race is the subtext of this story. Being white gives her an incomparable advantage in that colonial French society, which looked down upon Asians, be they native Vietnamese or Chinese transplants. Her mother and brothers treat the man with contempt, and his father refuses the idea that his heir should marry “the little white whore from Sadec.” But before arriving at that point in the narrative, we follow the romance of the French girl and the Chinese man, and it is unlike anything we have read before.

Every day the man comes in his chauffeur-driven car to the French high school she attends and drives her back to the state boarding school in which she sleeps. But one day after school he drives her to the Chinese section where he keeps a bachelor apartment. There he tells her that he loves her.

    She says, I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d like you to do as you usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, Is that what you want. She says it is.

And so they make love at her request, and he is the one who weeps and moans, rather than she. Their lovemaking has nothing of the stereotypical.

    He’s torn off the dress, he throws it down. He’s torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed. And there he turns away and weeps. And she, slow, patient, draws him to her and starts to undress him.

         . . .

    She touches him. Touches the softness of his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love.

After he has penetrated her, he wipes the blood away and washes her as if she were a baby. Their lovemaking alternates between scenes of tenderness and passion, during which she, too, comes to experience exquisite pleasure.

For a year and a half they make love regularly in his bachelor apartment, surrounded by the noises and smells of the Chinese quarter of Cholon. In time, her family finds out, and she is beaten by her mother and older brother. Her mother screams: she is no better than a prostitute, she will never be able to marry and find her place in society. This doesn’t stop the family from taking the money that comes their way from the Chinese man. They even accept his invitation to a meal in an expensive Chinese restaurant, where they behave very badly, don’t even speak to their host as they gobble up everything in sight.

The girls in her French school stop speaking to her. She doesn’t care. “We go back to the apartment. We are lovers. We can’t stop loving each other.”

He gives her a valuable diamond ring. This curtails some of the criticism at home and at the boarding school, which looks the other way when she is absent at night from the dormitory. By now the lovers are joined in a ritualistic dance of love. He washes her body with special water set aside in large jars for that purpose. She abandons herself to his caresses, strokes his body as he strokes hers. Their silent caresses are occasionally broken by tempestuous outbursts.

    Then suddenly it’s she who’s imploring, she doesn’t say what for, and he, he shouts to her to be quiet, that he doesn’t want to have anything more to do with her . . . and now they succumb to it again amid tears, despair, and happiness.