The Lover (8 page)

After my mother’s death he’s left alone. He has no
friends, never has had, sometimes he’s had women who “worked” for him in Montparnasse, sometimes women who didn’t work for him, at least to begin with, sometimes men, but then they did the paying. He lived a very lonely life. And more so as he grew older. He was only a layabout, he operated on a very small scale. He inspired fear in his immediate circle, but no farther. When he lost us he lost his real empire. He wasn’t a gangster, just a family layabout, a rummager in closets, a murderer without a gun. He didn’t take any risks. Layabouts all live as he did, without any loyalty, without any grandeur, in fear. He was afraid. After my mother’s death he leads a strange existence. In Tours. The only people he knows are waiters in cafés, for the racing tips, and the bibulous patrons of backroom poker games. He starts to look like them, drinks a lot, gets bloodshot eyes and slurred speech. In Tours he had nothing. Both houses had been sold off. Nothing. For a year he lived in a furniture warehouse leased by my mother. For a year he slept in an armchair. They let him go there. Stay for a year. Then they threw him out.

For a year he must have hoped to buy his mortgaged property back. He gambled away my mother’s furniture out of storage, bit by bit. The bronze Buddhas, the brasses, then the beds, then the wardrobes, then the sheets. And then one day he has nothing left, that does happen to people like him, one day he has the suit on his back and nothing else, not a sheet, not a shelter. He’s alone. For a year no one will open their
door to him. He writes to a cousin in Paris. He can have a servant’s room in the boulevard Malesherbes. And when he’s over fifty he’ll have his first job, his first wages ever, as messenger for a marine insurance company. That lasted, I think, fifteen years. He had to go into the hospital. He didn’t die there. He died in his room.

My mother never talked about that one of her children. She never mentioned the rummager in closets to anyone. She treated the fact that she was his mother as if it were a crime. She kept it hidden. She must have thought it was unintelligible, impossible to convey to anyone who didn’t know her son as she did, before God and only before Him. She repeated little platitudes about him, always the same ones. That if he’d wanted to he could have been the cleverest of the three. The most “artistic.” The most astute. And he was the one who’d loved his mother most. The one, in short, who’d understood her best. I didn’t know, she’d say, that you could expect that of a boy, such intuition, such deep affection.

We met again once, he spoke about our dead brother. He said of his death, What an awful thing, how dreadful, our little brother, our little Paulo.

There remains this image of our kinship: a meal
in Sadec. All three of us are eating at the dining-room table. They’re seventeen, eighteen. My mother’s not with us. He watches us eat, my younger brother and me, then he puts down his fork and looks at my younger brother. For a very long time he looks at him, then suddenly, very calmly, says something terrible. About food. He says he must be careful, he shouldn’t eat so much. My younger brother doesn’t answer. The other goes on. Reminds him the big pieces of meat are for him, and he mustn’t forget it. Or else, he says. I ask, Why are they for you? He says, Because that’s how it is. I say, I wish you’d die. I can’t eat any more. Nor can my younger brother. He waits for my younger brother to dare to speak, just one word, his clenched fists are poised ready over the table to bash his face in. My younger brother says nothing. He’s very pale. Between his lashes, the beginning of tears.

It was a dreary day, the day he died. In spring, I think it was, April. Someone telephones. They don’t say anything else, nothing, just that he’s been found dead, on the floor, in his room. But death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened, it was too late now for him to die, it had been all over since the death of my younger brother. The conquering words: It is finished.

She asked for him to be buried with her. I don’t
know where, in which cemetery. I just know it’s in the Loire. Both in the same grave. Just the two of them. It’s as it should be. An image of intolerable splendor.

Dusk fell at the same time all the year round. It was very brief, almost like a blow. In the rainy season, for weeks on end, you couldn’t see the sky, it was full of an unvarying mist which even the light of the moon couldn’t pierce. In the dry season, though, the sky was bare, completely free of cloud, naked. Even moonless nights were light. And the shadows were as clear-cut as ever on the ground, and on the water, roads, and walls.

I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune—those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The
air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.

On the paths of the yard the shadows of the cinnamon-apple trees are inky black. The whole garden is still as marble. The house too—monumental, funereal. And my younger brother, who was walking beside me, now looks intently at the gate open on the empty road.

One day he’s not there outside the high school. The driver’s alone in the black car. He says the father’s ill and the young master’s gone back to Sadec. He, the driver, has been told to stay in Saigon to take me to school and back again to the boarding house. The young master came back after a few days. Again he was there in the back of the black car, his face averted so as not to see people looking at him, still afraid. We kissed, without a word, kissed there outside the school, we’d forgotten. While we kissed, he wept. His father was going to live. His last hope was vanishing.

He’d asked him, implored him to let him keep me with him, close to him, he’d told him he must understand, must have known a passion like this himself at least once in his long life, it couldn’t be otherwise, he’d begged him to let him have his turn at living, just once, this passion, this madness, this infatuation with the little white girl, he’d asked him to give him time to love her a while longer before sending her away to France, let him have her a little longer, another year perhaps, because it wasn’t possible for him to give up this love yet, it was too new, too strong still, too much in its first violence, it was too terrible for him to part yet from her body, especially since, as he the father knew, it could never happen again.

The father said he’d sooner see him dead.

We bathed together in the cool water from the jars, we kissed, we wept, and again it was unto death, but this time, already, the pleasure it gave was inconsolable. And then I told him. I told him not to have any regrets, I reminded him of what he’d said, that I’d go away from everywhere, that I wasn’t responsible for what I did. He said he didn’t mind even that now, nothing counted any more. Then I said I agreed with his father. That I refused to stay with him. I didn’t give any reasons.

It’s one of the long avenues in Vinh Long that lead down to the Mekong. It’s always deserted in the evening.
That evening, like most evenings, the electricity breaks down. That’s what starts it all off. As soon as I reach the street and the gate shuts behind me, the lights go off. I run. I run because I’m afraid of the dark. I run faster and faster. And suddenly I think I hear running behind me, and suddenly I’m sure that someone’s after me. Still running, I look around, and I see. It’s a very tall woman, very thin, thin as death, laughing and running. She’s barefoot, and she’s running after me to catch me. I recognize her, she’s the local lunatic, the madwoman of Vinh Long. I hear her for the first time, she talks at night, during the day she sleeps, often here in the avenue, outside the garden. She runs, shouting in a language I don’t understand. My fear is so great I can’t call out. I must be eight years old. I can hear her shrieks of laughter and cries of delight, she’s certainly playing with me. My memory is of a central fear. To say it’s beyond my understanding, beyond my strength, is inadequate. What’s sure is the memory of my whole being’s certainty that if the woman touches me, even lightly, with her hand, I too will enter into a state much worse than death, the state of madness. I manage to get into the neighbors’ garden, as far as the house, I run up the steps and fall in the doorway. For several days I can’t say anything at all about what happened.

Quite late in life I’m still afraid of seeing a certain state of my mother’s—I still don’t name it—get so much
worse that she’ll have to be parted from her children. I believe it will be up to me to recognize the time when it comes, not my brothers, because my brothers wouldn’t be able to judge.

It was a few months before our final parting, in Saigon, late one evening, we were on the big terrace of the house in the rue Testard. Dô was there. I looked at my mother, I could hardly recognize her. And then, in a kind of sudden vanishing, a sudden fall, I all at once couldn’t recognize her at all. There, suddenly, close to me, was someone sitting in my mother’s place who wasn’t my mother, who looked like her but who had never been her. She looked rather blank, she was gazing at the garden, a certain point in the garden, it looked as if she was watching for something just about to happen, of which I could see nothing. There was a youthfulness about her features, her expression, a happiness which she was repressing out of what must have been habitual reticence. She was beautiful. Dô was beside her. Dô seemed not to have noticed anything. My terror didn’t come from what I’ve just said about her, her face, her look of happiness, her beauty, it came from the fact that she was sitting just where my mother had been sitting when the substitution took place, from the fact that I knew no one else was there in her place, but that that identity irreplaceable by any other had disappeared and I was powerless to make it come back,
make it start to come back. There was no longer anything there to inhabit her image. I went mad in full possession of my senses. Just long enough to cry out. I did cry out. A faint cry, a call for help, to crack the ice in which the whole scene was fatally freezing. My mother turned her head.

For me the whole town is inhabited by the beggar woman in the road. And all the beggar women of the towns, the rice fields, the tracks bordering Siam, the banks of the Mekong—for me the beggar woman who frightened me is inhabited by them. She comes from everywhere. She always ends up in Calcutta wherever she started out from. She’s always slept in the shade of the cinnamon-apple trees in the playground. And always my mother has been there beside her, tending her foot eaten up with maggots and covered with flies.

Beside her, the little girl in the story. She’s carried her two thousand kilometers. She’s had enough of her, wants to give her away. Go on, take her. No more children. No more child. All dead or thrown away, it amounts to a lot after a whole life. The one asleep under the cinnamon-apple trees isn’t yet dead. She’s the one who’ll live longest. She’ll die inside the house, in a lace dress. She’ll be mourned.

She’s on the banks of the rice fields on either side of the track, shouting and laughing at the top of her voice. She has a golden laugh, fit to wake the dead, to
wake anyone who listens to children’s laughter. She stays outside the bungalow for days and days, there are white people in the bungalow, she remembers they give food to beggars. And then one day, lo and behold, she wakes at daybreak and starts to walk, one day she goes, who can tell why, she turns off toward the mountains, goes up through the forest, follows the paths running along the tops of the mountains of Siam. Having seen, perhaps, seen a yellow and green sky on the other side of the plain, she crosses over. At last begins to descend to the sea. With her great gaunt step she descends the slopes of the forest. On, on. They are forests full of pestilence. Regions of great heat. There’s no healthy wind from the sea. There’s the stagnant din of mosquitoes, dead children, rain every day. And then here are the deltas. The biggest deltas in the world. Made of black slime. Stretching toward Chittagong. She’s left the tracks, the forests, the tea roads, the red suns behind, and she goes forward over the estuary of the deltas. She goes in the same direction as the world, toward the engulfing, always distant east. One day she comes face to face with the sea. She lets out a cry, laughs her miraculous birdlike coo. Because of her laugh she finds a junk in Chittagong, the fishermen are willing to take her, she crosses with them the Bay of Bengal.

Then, then she starts to be seen near the rubbish dumps on the outskirts of Calcutta.

And then she’s lost sight of. And then later found
again behind the French embassy in the same city. She sleeps in a garden, replete with endless food.

She’s there during the night. Then in the Ganges at sunrise. Always laughing, mocking. She doesn’t go on this time. Here she can eat, sleep, it’s quiet at night, she stays there in the garden with the oleanders.

One day I come, pass by. I’m seventeen. It’s the English quarter, the embassy gardens, the monsoon season, the tennis courts are deserted. Along the Ganges the lepers laugh.

We’re stopping over in Calcutta. The boat broke down. We’re visiting the town to pass the time. We leave the following evening.

Fifteen and a half. The news spreads fast in Sadec. The clothes she wears are enough to show. The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter. Poor child. Don’t tell me that hat’s innocent, or the lipstick, it all means something, it’s not innocent, it means something, it’s to attract attention, money. The brothers are layabouts. They say it’s a Chinese, the son of the millionaire, the villa in Mekong with the blue tiles. And even he, instead of thinking himself honored, doesn’t want her for his son. A family of white layabouts.