The Lover (4 page)

I don’t know who took the photo with the despair. The one in the courtyard of the house in Hanoi. Perhaps my father, one last time. A few months later he’d be sent back to France because of his health. Before that he’d go to a new job, in Phnom Penh. He was only there a few weeks. He died in less than a year. My mother wouldn’t go back with him to France, she stayed where she was, stuck there. In Phnom Penh. In the fine house overlooking the Mekong, once the palace of the king of Cambodia, in the midst of those terrifying grounds, acres of them, where my mother is afraid. At night she makes us afraid too. All four of us sleep in the same bed. She says she’s afraid of the dark. It’s in this house she’ll hear of my father’s death. She’ll know about it before the telegram comes, the night before, because of a sign only she saw and could understand, because of the bird that called in the middle of the
night, frightened and lost in the office in the north front of the palace, my father’s office. It’s there, too, a few days after her husband’s death, that my mother finds herself face to face with her own father. She switches the light on. There he is, standing by the table in the big octagonal drawing room. Looking at her. I remember a shriek, a call. She woke us up, told us what had happened, how he was dressed, in his Sunday best, grey, how he stood, how he looked at her, straight at her. She said, I wasn’t afraid. She ran toward the vanished image. Both of them died on the day and at the time of the bird or the image. Hence, no doubt, our admiration for our mother’s knowledge, about everything, including all that had to do with death.

The elegant man has got out of the limousine and is smoking an English cigarette. 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. She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t say, Leave me alone. So he’s less afraid. He tells her he must be dreaming. She doesn’t answer. There’s no point in answering, what would she say? She waits. So he asks,
But where did you spring from? She says she’s the daughter of the headmistress of the girls’ school in Sadec. He thinks for a moment, then says he’s heard of the lady, her mother, of her bad luck with the land they say she bought in Cambodia, is that right? Yes, that’s right.

He says again how strange it is to see her on this ferry. So early in the morning, a pretty girl like that, you don’t realize, it’s very surprising, a white girl on a native bus.

He says the hat suits her, suits her extremely well, that it’s very … original … a man’s hat, and why not? She’s so pretty she can do anything she likes.

She looks at him. Asks him who he is. He says he’s just back from Paris where he was a student, that he lives in Sadec too, on this same river, the big house with the big terraces with blue-tiled balustrades. She asks him what he is. He says he’s Chinese, that his family’s from North China, from Fushun. Will you allow me to drive you where you want to go in Saigon? She says she will. He tells the chauffeur to get the girl’s luggage off the bus and put it in the black car.

Chinese. He belongs to the small group of financiers of Chinese origin who own all the working-class housing in the colony. He’s the one who was crossing the Mekong that day in the direction of Saigon.

•  •  •

She gets into the black car. The door shuts. A barely discernible distress suddenly seizes her, a weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly. Everywhere, too, there’s a very slight deafness, or fog.

Never again shall I travel in a native bus. From now on I’ll have a limousine to take me to the high school and back from there to the boarding school. I shall dine in the most elegant places in town. And I’ll always have regrets for everything I do, everything I’ve gained, everything I’ve lost, good and bad, the bus, the bus driver I used to laugh with, the old women chewing betel in the back seats, the children on the luggage racks, the family in Sadec, the awfulness of the family in Sadec, its inspired silence.

He talked. Said he missed Paris, the marvelous girls there, the riotous living, the binges, ooh là là, the Coupole, the Rotonde, personally I prefer the Rotonde, the nightclubs, the “wonderful” life he’d led for two years. She listened, watching out for anything to do with his wealth, for indications as to how many millions he had. He went on. His own mother was dead, he was an only child. All he had left was his father, the one who owned the money. But you know how it is, for the last ten years he’s been sitting staring at the river, glued to
his opium pipe, he manages his money from his little iron cot. She says she sees.

He won’t let his son marry the little white whore from Sadec.

The image starts long before he’s come up to the white child by the rails, it starts when he got out of the black car, when he began to approach her, and when she knew, knew he was afraid.

From the first moment she knows more or less, knows he’s at her mercy. And therefore that others besides him may be at her mercy too if the occasion arises. She knows something else too, that the time has now probably come when she can no longer escape certain duties toward herself. And that her mother will know nothing of this, nor her brothers. She knows this now too. As soon as she got into the black car she knew: she’s excluded from the family for the first time and forever. From now on they will no longer know what becomes of her. Whether she’s taken away from them, carried off, wounded, spoiled, they will no longer know. Neither her mother nor her brothers. That is their fate henceforth. It’s already enough to make you weep, here in the black limousine.

Now the child will have to reckon only with this man, the first, the one who introduced himself on the ferry.

•  •  •

It happened very quickly that day, a Thursday. He’d come every day to pick her up at the high school and drive her back to the boarding school. Then one Thursday afternoon, the weekly half-holiday, he came to the boarding school and drove off with her in the black car.

It’s in Cholon. Opposite the boulevards linking the Chinese part of the city to the center of Saigon, the great American-style streets full of streetcars, rickshaws, and buses. It’s early in the afternoon. She’s got out of the compulsory outing with the other girls.

It’s a native housing estate to the south of the city. His place is modern, hastily furnished from the look of it, with furniture supposed to be ultra-modern. He says, I didn’t choose the furniture. It’s dark in the studio, but she doesn’t ask him to open the shutters. She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire. But she doesn’t know it. She agreed to come as soon as he asked her the previous evening. She’s where she has to be, placed here. She feels a tinge of fear. It’s as if this must be not only what she expects, but also what had to happen especially to her. She pays close attention to externals, to the light, to the noise of the city in which the room is immersed. He’s trembling. At first he looks at her as though he expects her to speak, but she doesn’t. So he
doesn’t do anything either, doesn’t undress her, says he loves her madly, says it very softly. Then is silent. She doesn’t answer. She could say she doesn’t love him. She says nothing. Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her. It’s up to her to know. And she does. Because of his ignorance she suddenly knows: she was attracted to him already on the ferry. She was attracted to him. It depended on her alone.

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. He’s started to suffer here in this room, for the first time, he’s no longer lying about it. He says he knows already she’ll never love him. She lets him say it. At first she says she doesn’t know. Then she lets him say it.

He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why. He says, You’ve come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone. She says she can’t say, so far she’s never gone into a bedroom with anyone. She tells him she doesn’t want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually does
with the women he brings to his flat. She begs him to do that.

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. With her eyes shut. Slowly. He makes as if to help her. She tells him to keep still. Let me do it. She says she wants to do it. And she does. Undresses him. When she tells him to, he moves his body in the bed, but carefully, gently, as if not to wake her.

The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle, he may have been ill, may be convalescent, he’s hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex, he’s weak, probably a helpless prey to insult, vulnerable. She doesn’t look him in the face. Doesn’t look at him at all. She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love.

And, weeping, he makes love. At first, pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changed, slowly drawn away, borne toward pleasure, clasped to it.

The sea, formless, simply beyond compare.

•  •  •

Already, on the ferry, in advance, the image owed something to this moment.

The image of the woman in darned stockings has crossed the room, and at last she emerges as a child. The sons knew it already. But not the daughter, yet. They’d never talk about the mother among themselves, about the knowledge of her which they both shared and which separated them from her: the final, decisive knowledge that their mother was a child.

Their mother never knew pleasure.

I didn’t know you bled. He asks me if it hurt, I say no, he says he’s glad.

He wipes the blood away, washes me. I watch him. Little by little he comes back, becomes desirable again. I wonder how I had the strength to go against my mother’s prohibition. So calmly, with such determination. How I managed to follow my ideas to their “logical conclusion.”

We look at each other. He puts his arms around me. Asks me why I came here. I say I had to, it was a sort of obligation. It’s the first time we’ve talked. I tell him I have two brothers. That we haven’t any money. All gone. He knows my elder brother, has met him in the
local opium dens. I say my brother steals from my mother to go there, steals from the servants, and that sometimes the keepers of the dens come and demand money from my mother. I tell him about the dikes. I tell him my mother will die, it can’t go on like this. That my mother’s approaching death, too, must be connected with what has happened to me today.

I notice that I desire him.

He feels sorry for me, but I say no, I’m not to be pitied, no one is, except my mother. He says, You only came because I’m rich. I say that’s how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can’t say what I’d have done if he’d been different. He says, I wish I could take you away, go away with you. I say I couldn’t leave my mother yet without dying of grief. He says he certainly hasn’t been lucky with me, but he’ll give me some money anyway, don’t worry. He’s lain down again. Again we’re silent.

The noise of the city is very loud, in recollection it’s like the sound track of a film turned up too high, deafening. I remember clearly, the room is dark, we don’t speak, it’s surrounded by the continuous din of the city, caught up in the city, swept along with it. There are no panes in the windows, just shutters and blinds. On the blinds you can see the shadows of people going by in the sunlight on the sidewalks. Great crowds of them always. The shadows are divided into strips by the slats of the shutters. The clatter of wooden
clogs is earsplitting, the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign.

Outside it’s the end of the day, you can tell by the sound of the voices, the sound of more and more passers-by, more and more miscellaneous. It’s a city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night. And night is beginning now, with the setting sun.

The bed is separated from the city by those slatted shutters, that cotton blind. There’s nothing solid separating us from other people. They don’t know of our existence. We glimpse something of theirs, the sum of their voices, of their movements, like the intermittent hoot of a siren, mournful, dim.

Whiffs of burnt sugar drift into the room, the smell of roasted peanuts, Chinese soups, roast meat, herbs, jasmine, dust, incense, charcoal fires, they carry fire about in baskets here, it’s sold in the street, the smell of the city is the smell of the villages upcountry, of the forest.

I suddenly saw him in a black bathrobe. He was sitting drinking a whisky, smoking.

He said I’d been asleep, he’d taken a shower. I’d fallen asleep almost unawares. He’d switched on a lamp on a low table.

He’s a man of habit—I suddenly think of him—he
must come to this room quite often, he’s a man who must make love a lot, a man who’s afraid, he must make love a lot to fight against fear. I tell him I like the idea of his having many women, the idea of my being one of them, indistinguishable. We look at each other. He understands what I’ve just said. Our expressions are suddenly changed, false, caught in evil and death.

I tell him to come over to me, tell him he must possess me again. He comes over. He smells pleasantly of English cigarettes, expensive perfume, honey, his skin has taken on the scent of silk, the fruity smell of silk tussore, the smell of gold, he’s desirable. I tell him of this desire. He tells me to wait awhile. Talks to me, says he knew right away, when we were crossing the river, that I’d be like this after my first lover, that I’d love love, he says he knows now I’ll deceive him and deceive all the men I’m ever with. He says as for him he’s been the cause of his own unhappiness. I’m pleased with all he’s foretold, and say so. He becomes rough, desperate, he throws himself on me, devours the childish breasts, shouts, insults. I close my eyes on the intense pleasure. I think, He’s used to it, this is his occupation in life, love, nothing else. His hands are expert, marvelous, perfect. I’m very lucky, obviously, it’s as if it were his profession, as if unwittingly he knew exactly what to do and what to say. He calls me a whore, a slut, he says I’m his only love, and that’s what he ought
to say, and what you do say when you just let things say themselves, when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes, and then everything is right, and nothing’s wasted, the waste is covered over and all is swept away in the torrent, in the force of desire.