The Malady of Death

T
HE
M
ALADY
OF
D
EATH

by

MARGUERITE
DURAS

translated from the French by Barbara Bray

GROVE PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

Copyright © 1986
by
Marguerite Duras Translation copyright © 1986
by
Barbara Bray All
rights reserved.

First Printing
1986

ISBN:
0-394-53866-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:
83-49427

First Evergreen Edition
1986
First Printing
1986
ISBN:
0-394-62175-1

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:
83-49427

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Duras,
Marguerite. The malady of death.

Translation of: La maladie de la morte.
1. Duras, Marguerite—Translations,
English. I. Title.

PQ2607. U8245A2 1986 843' .912 83-49427 ISBN 0-394-53866-8

Grove Press, Inc.,
196
West Houston Street New York
,
10014

5 4 3 2 1

You wouldn't have known her, you'd have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears.

*

You may have paid her.

May have said: I want you to come every night for a few days.

She'd have given you a long look and said in that case it'd be expensive.

And then she says: What is it you want?

You say you want to try, try it, try to know, to get used to that body, those breasts, that scent. To beauty, to the risk of having children implicit in that body, to that hairless unmuscular body, that face, that naked skin, to the identity between that skin and the life it contains.

You say you want to try, for several days perhaps.

Perhaps for several weeks.

Perhaps even for your whole life.

Try what? she asks.

Loving, you answer.

She asks: Yes, but why?

You say so as to sleep with your sex at rest, somewhere unknown.

You say you want to try, to weep there, in that particular place.

She smiles and says: Do you want me, too?

You say: Yes. I don't know that yet and I want to penetrate there too, and with my usual force. They say it offers more resistance, it's smooth but it offers more resistance than emptiness does.

She says she has no opinion on the subject. How should she know?

She asks: What other conditions?

You say she mustn't speak, like the women of her ancestors, must yield completely to you and to your will, be entirely submissive like peasant women in the barns after the harvest when they're exhausted and let the men come to them while they're asleep. So that you may gradually get used to that shape molding itself to yours, at your mercy as nuns are at God's. And also so that little by little, as day dawns, you may be less afraid of not knowing where to put your body or at what emptiness to aim your love.

She looks at you. Then stops looking at you and looks at something else. Then answers.

She says in that case it'll be even more expensive. She tells you how much.

You accept.

Every day she'd come. Every day she comes.

The first day she strips and lies down where you tell her to on the bed.

You watch her go to sleep. She doesn't speak. Just goes to sleep. All night you watch her.

She'd come at night. She comes at night.

All night you watch her. For two nights you watch her.

For two nights she scarcely speaks.

Then one night she does. She speaks.

She asks if she's managing to make your body less lonely. You say you can't really understand the word as applied to you. That you can't distinguish between thinking you're lonely and actually becoming lonely. As with you, you add.

And then once in the middle of the night she asks: What time of year is it?

You say: Not yet winter. Autumn still.

And she asks: What's that sound?

You say: The sea.

She asks: Where?

You say: There beyond that wall.

She goes back to sleep.

Young. She'd be young. In her clothes and hair there'd be a clinging smell, you'd try to identify it, and in the end your experience would enable you to do so. You'd say: A smell of heliotrope and citron. She answers: Whatever you say.

One evening you do it, as arranged, you sleep with your face between her parted legs, up against her sex, already in the moistness of her body, where she opens. She offers no resistance.

Another evening you inadvertently give her pleasure and she cries out.

You tell her not to. She says she won't anymore.

She doesn't.

No woman will ever cry out because of you now.

Perhaps you get from her a pleasure you've never known before. I don't know. Nor do I know if you hear the low, distant murmur of her pleasure through her breathing, through the faint rattle going back and forth between her mouth and the outside air. I don't think so.

She opens her eyes and says: What joy.

You put your hand over her mouth to silence her. Tell her one doesn't say such things.

She shuts her eyes.

Says she won't say it again.

She asks if
they
talk about it. You say no.

She asks what they do talk about. You say they talk about everything else. Everything except that.

She laughs and goes back to sleep.

Sometimes you pace the room, around the bed or along the walls by the sea.

Sometimes you weep.

Sometimes you go out on the terrace in the growing cold.

You don't know what's in the sleep of the girl on the bed.

You'd like to start from that body and get back to the bodies of others, to your own, to get back to yourself. And yet it's be- cause you must do this that you weep.

And she, in the room, sleeps on. Sleeps, and you don't wake her. As her sleep goes on, sorrow grows in the room. You sleep, once, on the floor at the foot of her bed.

She goes on sleeping, evenly. So deeply, she sometimes smiles. She wakes only if you touch her body, the breasts, the eyes. Sometimes she wakes for no reason, except to ask if the noise is the wind or high tide.

She wakes. She looks at vou. She says: The malady's getting more and more of a hold on you. It's reached your eyes, your voice.

You ask: What malady?

She says she can't say, yet.

Night after night you enter the dark of her sex, almost unwittingly take that blind way. Sometimes you stay there; sleep there, inside her, all night long, so as to be ready if ever, through some involuntary movement on her part or yours, you should feel like taking her again, filling her again, taking pleasure in her again. But only with a pleasure, as always, blinded by tears.

She'd always be ready, willing or no. That's just what you'll never know. She's more mysterious than any other external thing you've ever known.

Nor will you, or anyone else, ever know how she sees, how she thinks, either of the world or of you, of your body or your mind, or of the malady she says you suffer from. She doesn't know, herself. She couldn't tell you. You couldn't find out anything about it from her.

You'd never know anything, neither you nor anyone else, about what she thinks of you or of this affair. However many ages may bury both your forgotten existences, no one will ever know. She is incapable of knowing.

Because you know nothing about her you'd say she knows nothing about you. You'd leave it at that.

She'd have been tall. With a long body made in a single sweep, at a single stroke, as if by God Himself, with the unalterable perfection of individuality.

For she'd have been unlike anyone else.

The body's completely defenseless, smooth from face to feet. It invites strangulation, rape, ill usage, insult, shouts of hatred, the unleashing of deadly and unmitigated passions.

You look at her.

She's very slim, almost frail. Her legs have a beauty distinct from that of the body. They don't really belong to the rest of the body.

You say: You must be very beautiful.

She says: I'm here right in front of you. Look for yourself.

You say: I can't see anything.

She says: Try. It's all part of the bargain.

You take hold of the body and look at its different areas. You turn it round, keep turning it round. Look at it, keep looking at it.

Then you give up.

Give up. Stop touching it.

Until that night you hadn't realized how ignorant one might be of what the eyes see, the hands and the body touch. Now you find out.

You say: I can't see anything.

She doesn't answer.

She's asleep.

You wake her up. Ask her if she's a prostitute. She shakes her head.

You ask her why she accepted the deal and the paid nights.

She answers in a voice still drowsy, almost inaudible: Because as soon as you spoke to me I saw you were suffering from the malady of death. For the first few days I couldn't put a name to it. Then I could.

You ask her to say the words again. She does. Repeats them: The malady of death.

You ask her how she knows. She says she just does. Says one knows without knowing how.

You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's like to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that's what he's doing.

Her eyes are still closed. It's as if she were resting from an immemorial weariness. While she sleeps you've forgotten the color of her eyes, as you have the name you called her by the first evening. Then you realize it's not the color of her eyes that will always be an insurmountable barrier between you and her. No, not the color—you know that would be somewhere between green and gray. Not the color, no. The look. The look.

You realize she's looking at you.

You cry out. She turns to the wall.

She says: It's going to end, don't worry.

*

With one arm you lift her and hold her up against you, she's so light. You look.

Strangely, her breasts are brown, the areolas almost black. You eat them, drink them, and nothing in her body flinches, she offers no resistance, none. Perhaps at one point you cry out again. Another time you tell her to say a word, just one, the one that's your name, you tell her what it is. She doesn't answer, and you cry out again. And it's then she smiles. And it's then you know she's alive.

The smile vanishes. She hasn't said the name.

You go on looking. Her face is given over to sleep, it's silent, asleep, like her hands. But all the time the spirit shows through the surface of the body, all over, so that each part bears witness in itself to the whole— the hand and the eyes, the curve of the belly and the face, the breasts and the sex, the legs and the arms, the breath, the heart, the temples, the temples and time.

You go out again onto the terrace facing the black sea.

Inside you there are sobs you can't explain. They linger on the brink of you as if they were outside, they can't reach you and be wept. Facing the black sea, leaning against the wall of the room where she's sleeping, you weep for yourself as a stranger might.

You go back into the room. She's asleep. You don't understand. She's sleeping, naked, there on the bed. You can't understand how it's possible for her not to know of your tears, for her to be protected from you by herself, for her to be so completely unaware of how she fills the whole world.

You lie down beside her. And, still for yourself, you weep.

Then it's almost dawn. Then there's a dark light in the room, of indeterminate hue. Then you switch some lights on, to see her. Her. See what you've never seen before, the hidden sex, that which swallows up and holds without seeming to. See it like this, closed up around its own sleep. And also to see the freckles strewn all over her from the hairline right down to where the breasts begin, where they give under their own weight, hooked onto the hinge of the arms, and right up to the closed lids and the pale half-open lips. You think: They're in the places of the summer sun, the open places, the places on view.