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The
Lover/L'Amant
(excerpts)
Watercolour: "Lust" -2006-
by Carolyn Coalson
"Throughout our affair, for a year and a half,
we'd
talk like this, never about ourselves. From the first
we knew we couldn't possibly have any future in common
so we'd never speak of the future, we'd talk about day-to-day events, evenly hitting the ball back and
forth.
I tell him his visit to France was fatal. He agrees.
Says he bought everything in Paris, his women, his acquaintances, his
ideas. He's twelve years older than
I, and this scares him. I listen to the way he
speaks, make mistakes, makes love even__ with a sort of theatricality
at once contrived and sincere.
I tell him I'm going to introduce him to my family.
He wants to run away. I laugh.
He can only express his feelings through parody. I discover
he hasn't the strength to love me in opposition to
his father, to possess me, take me away. He often weeps
because he can't find the strength to love beyond his fear..."
.....I wanted to kill my elder brother, I wanted to
kill him, to get the better of him for once, just once, and see him
die. I wanted to do it to remove from my mother's sight the object of
her love, that son of hers, to punish her for loving him so much, so
badly, and above all, as I told myself too, to save my younger
brother, my younger brother, my child, save him from the living life
of that elder brother superimposed on his own, from that black veil
over the light, from the law which was decreed and represented by the
elder brother, a human being, and yet which was an animal law, filling
every moment of every day of the younger brother's life with fear, a
fear that one day reached his heart and killed him.
One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a
public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said,
"I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when
you were young, but I want to tell you I think you are more beautiful
now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer
your face as it is now. Ravaged."
I often think of the image only I can see now, and
of which I have never spoken. It's always there, in the same silence,
amazing. It's the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I
recognize myself, in which I delight.
Very early in my life it was too late. It was
already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty five
my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I do not
know if it's the same for everyone, I never asked. But I believe
I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they
are going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of
life. My aging was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one
by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger,
the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in
the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process
with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a
book. And I knew I was right, that one day it would slow down and take
its normal course. The people who knew me at seventeen, when I went to
France, were surprised when they saw me again two years later at
nineteen. And I have kept it ever since, the new face I had then. It
has been my face. It's got older still, of course, but less,
comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with
deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed,
as some with fine features have done. It's kept the same contours, but
it's substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.
Marguerite Duras
"The Lover"
*Marguerite (Donnadieu) Duras, April 4, 1914 - March 3,
1996.
The French writer and film director Marguerite Duras, celebrated for the screenplay of Alain
Resnais' film Hiroshima Mon Amour, published her novel The Lover in
1984. It told the
story of Duras disturbed childhood in French Indo-China and of how she had been sold as a child mistress to a
wealthy indigene by her own mother. The book made her
a national celebrity, earned her a fortune and winner of the Prix Goncourt.
Source: The Spectator, UK.
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