The Lover (9 page)

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The Lady, they called her. She came from Savanna Khet. Her husband was posted to Vinh Long. For a year she wasn’t seen there. Because of the young man, the assistant administrator in Savanna Khet. They couldn’t be lovers any more. So he shot himself. The story reached the new posting in Vinh Long. The day she left Savanna Khet for Vinh Long, a bullet through the heart. In the main square in broad sunlight. Because of her young daughters and her husband’s being posted to Vinh Long she’d told him it had to stop.

It goes on in the disreputable quarter of Cholon, every evening. Every morning the little slut goes to have her body caressed by a filthy Chinese millionaire. And she goes to the French high school, too, with the little white girls, the athletic little white girls who learn the crawl in the pool at the Sporting Club. One day they’ll be told not to speak to the daughter of the teacher in Sadec any more.

During recess she looks toward the street, all on her own, leaning against a post in the schoolyard. She doesn’t say anything about it to her mother. She goes on coming to school in the black limousine belonging to the Chinese in Cholon. She watches it go. No one will break the rule. None of the girls will speak to
her. The isolation brings back a clear memory of the lady in Vinh Long. At that time she’d just turned thirty-eight. And the child was ten. And now, when she remembers, she’s sixteen.

The lady’s on the terrace outside her room, looking at the avenues bordering the Mekong, I see her when I come home from catechism class with my younger brother. The room is in the middle of a great palace with covered terraces, the palace itself in the middle of the garden of oleanders and palms. The same distance separates the lady and the girl in the low-crowned hat from the other people in the town. Just as they both look at the long avenues beside the river, so they are alike in themselves. Both isolated. Alone, queenlike. Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death, as they both call it, unto the mysterious death of lovers without love. That’s what it’s all about: this hankering for death. It emanates from them, from their rooms, a death so strong its existence is known all over the town, in outposts upcountry, in provincial centers, at official receptions and slow-motion government balls.

The lady has just started giving official receptions again, she thinks it’s over, that the young man in Savanna Khet is a thing of the past. So she’s started giving evening parties again, the ones expected of her so that people can just meet occasionally and occasionally
escape from the frightful loneliness of serving in outposts upcountry, stranded amid checkered stretches of rice, fear, madness, fever, and oblivion.

In the evening, after school, the same black limousine, the same hat at once impudent and childlike, the same lamé shoes, and away she goes, goes to have her body laid bare by the Chinese millionaire, he’ll wash her under the shower, slowly, as she used to wash herself at home at her mother’s, with cool water from a jar he keeps specially for her, and then he’ll carry her, still wet, to the bed, he’ll switch on the fan and kiss her more and more all over, and she’ll keep asking again and again, and afterwards she’ll go back to the boarding school, and no one to punish her, beat her, disfigure or insult her.

It was as night ended that he killed himself, in the main square, glittering with light. She was dancing. Then daylight came, skirted the body. Then, with time, the sunlight blurred its shape. No one dared go near. But the police will. At noon, by the time the tourist boats arrive, there will be nothing left, the square will be empty.

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My mother said to the head of the boarding school, It doesn’t matter, all that’s of no importance. Haven’t you noticed how they suit her, those little old frocks, that pink hat, and the gold shoes? My mother’s drunk with delight when she speaks of her children, and that makes her more charming than ever. The young teachers at the boarding school listen to her with passionate attention. All of them, says my mother, they all hang around her, all the men in the place, married or single, they hang around, hanker after the girl, after something not really definite yet, look, she’s still a child. Do people talk of disgrace? I say, how can innocence be disgraced?

My mother rattles on. She speaks of blatant prostitution and laughs, at the scandal, the buffoonery, the funny hat, the sublime elegance of the child who crossed the river. And she laughs at what is irresistible here in the French colonies: I mean, she says, this little white tart, this child hidden till then in outposts upcountry and suddenly emerging into the daylight and shacking up in front of everyone with this millionaire Chinese scum, with a diamond on her finger just as if she were a banker’s wife. And she weeps.

When she saw the diamond she said in a small voice, It reminds me of the little solitaire I had when I got engaged to my first husband. I say: Mr. Dark. We laugh. That was his name, she says, it really was.

We looked at each other for some time, then she gave a sweet, slightly mocking smile, full of so deep a knowledge of her children and what awaited them later on that I almost told her about Cholon.

But I didn’t. I never did.

She waited a long while before she spoke again, then she said, very lovingly, You do know it’s all over, don’t you? That you’ll never be able, now, to get married here in the colony? I shrug my shoulders, smile. I say, I can get married anywhere, when I want to. My mother shakes her head. No. She says, Here everything gets known, here you can’t, now. She looks at me and says some unforgettable things: They find you attractive? I answer, Yes; they find me attractive in spite of everything. It’s then she says, And also because of what you are yourself.

She goes on: Is it only for the money you see him? I hesitate, then say it is only for the money. Again she looks at me for a long while, she doesn’t believe me. She says, I wasn’t like you, I found school much harder and I was very serious, I stayed like that too long, too late, I lost the taste for my own pleasure.

It was one day during the vacation in Sadec. She was resting in a rocking chair with her feet up on another chair, she’d made a draft between the door of the sitting room and the door of the dining room. She was peaceful, not aggressive. She’d suddenly noticed her daughter, wanted to talk to her.

It happened not long before the end, before she
gave up the land by the dike. Not long before we went back to France.

I watched her fall asleep.

Every so often my mother declares, Tomorrow we’ll go to the photographer’s. She complains about the price but still goes to the expense of family photos. We look at them, we don’t look at each other but we do look at the photographs, each of us separately, without a word of comment, but we look at them, we see ourselves. See the other members of the family one by one or all together. Look back at ourselves when we were very young in the old photos, then look at ourselves again in the recent ones. The gulf between us has grown bigger still. Once they’ve been looked at the photos are put away with the linen in the closets. My mother has us photographed so that she can see if we’re growing normally. She studies us at length, as other mothers do other children. She compares the photos, discusses how each one of us has grown. No one ever answers.

My mother only has photos taken of her children. Never anything else. I don’t have any photographs of Vinh Long, not one, of the garden, the river, the straight tamarind-lined avenues of the French conquest, not of the house, nor of our institutional whitewashed bedrooms with the big black-and-gilt iron beds, lit up like classrooms by the red streetlights, the green metal
lampshades, not a single image of those incredible places, always temporary, ugly beyond expression, places to flee from, in which my mother would camp until, as she said, she really settled down, but in France, in the regions she’s spoken of all her life and that vary, according to her mood, her age, her sadness, between Pas-de-Calais and Entre-Deux-Mers. But when she does halt for good, when she settles down in the Loire, her room will be a terrible replica of the one in Sadec. She will have forgotten.

She never had photos taken of places, of landscapes, only of us, her children, and mostly she had us taken in a group so it wouldn’t cost so much. The few amateur photos of us were taken by friends of my mother’s, new colleagues just arrived in the colony who took views of the equatorial landscape, the coconut palms, and the coolies to send to their families.

For some mysterious reason my mother used to show her children’s photographs to her family when she went home on leave. We didn’t want to go and see them. My brothers never met them. At first she used to take me, the youngest, with her. Then later on I stopped going, because my aunts didn’t want their daughters to see me any more on account of my shocking behavior. So my mother has only the photographs left to show, so she shows them, naturally, reasonably,
shows her cousins her children. She owes it to herself to do so, so she does, her cousins are all that’s left of the family, so she shows them the family photos. Can we glimpse something of this woman through this way of going on? The way she sees everything through to the bitter end without ever dreaming she might give up, abandon—the cousins, the effort, the burden. I think we can. It’s in this valor, human, absurd, that I see true grace.

When she was old, too, grey-haired, she went to the photographer’s, alone, and had her photograph taken in her best dark-red dress and her two bits of jewelry, the locket and the gold and jade brooch, a little round of jade sheathed in gold. In the photo her hair is done nicely, her clothes just so, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. The better-off natives used to go to the photographer’s too, just once in their lives, when they saw death was near. Their photos were large, all the same size, hung in handsome gilt frames near the altars to their ancestors. All these photographs of different people, and I’ve seen many of them, gave practically identical results, the resemblance was stunning. It wasn’t just because all old people look alike, but because the portraits themselves were invariably touched up in such a way that any facial peculiarities, if there were any left, were minimized. All the faces were prepared in
the same way to confront eternity, all toned down, all uniformly rejuvenated. This was what people wanted. This general resemblance, this tact, would characterize the memory of their passage through the family, bear witness at once to the singularity and to the reality of that transit. The more they resembled each other the more evidently they belonged in the ranks of the family. Moreover, all the men wore the same sort of turban, all the women had their hair scraped back into the same kind of bun, and both men and women wore tunics with stand-up collars. And they all wore an expression I’d still recognize anywhere. My mother’s expression in the photograph with the red dress was the same. Noble, some would say. Others would call it withdrawn.

They never speak of it any more. It’s an understood thing that he won’t approach his father any more to let him marry her. That the father will have no pity on his son. He has no pity on anyone. Of all the Chinese immigrants who hold the trade of the place in their hands, the man with the blue terraces is the most terrible, the richest, the one whose property extends the farthest beyond Sadec, to Cholon, the Chinese capital of French Indochina. The man from Cholon knows his father’s decision and the girl’s are the same, and both are irrevocable. To a lesser degree
he begins to understand that the journey which will separate him from her is a piece of good luck for their affair. That she’s not the marrying kind, she’ll run away from any marriage, he must give her up, forget her, give her back to the whites, to her brothers.

Ever since he’d been infatuated with her body the girl had stopped being incommoded by it, by its thinness. And similarly, strangely, her mother no longer worried about it as she had before, just as if she too had discovered it was plausible after all, as acceptable as any other body. The lover from Cholon thinks the growth of the little white girl has been stunted by the excessive heat. He too was born and grew up in this heat. He discovers this kinship between them. He says all the years she’s spent here, in this intolerable latitude, have turned her into a girl of Indochina. That she has the same slender wrists as they, the same thick hair that looks as if it’s absorbed all its owner’s strength, and it’s long like theirs too, and above all there’s her skin, all over her body, that comes from the rainwater stored here for women and children to bathe in. He says compared with the women here the women in France have hard skins on their bodies, almost rough. He says the low diet of the tropics, mostly fish and fruit, has something to do with it too. Also the cottons and silks the clothes here are made of, and the loose clothes
themselves, leaving a space between themselves and the body, leaving it naked, free.

The lover from Cholon is so accustomed to the adolescence of the white girl, he’s lost. The pleasure he takes in her every evening has absorbed all his time, all his life. He scarcely speaks to her any more. Perhaps he thinks she won’t understand any longer what he’d say about her, about the love he never knew before and of which he can’t speak. Perhaps he realizes they never have spoken to each other, except when they cry out to each other in the bedroom in the evening. Yes, I think he didn’t know, he realizes he didn’t know.

He looks at her. Goes on looking at her, his eyes shut. He inhales her face, breathes it in. He breathes her in, the child, his eyes shut he breathes in her breath, the warm air coming out of her. Less and less clearly can he make out the limits of this body, it’s not like other bodies, it’s not finished, in the room it keeps growing, it’s still without set form, continually coming into being, not only there where it’s visible but elsewhere too, stretching beyond sight, toward risk, toward death, it’s nimble, it launches itself wholly into pleasure as if it were grown up, adult, it’s without guile, and it’s frighteningly intelligent.