Read Online Four Novels by Marguerite Duras - Free Book Online

you were talking, but I didn’t want them to discourage you. In fact quite the opposite. I’d like to ask you more about that door. What special moment are you waiting for, to open it? For instance why couldn’t you do it this evening?”
    “Alone I could never do it.”
    “You mean that being without money or education you could only begin in the same way all over again and that really there would be no point to it?”
    “I mean that and other things. I don’t really know how to describe it, but being alone I feel as if I had no meaning. I can’t change by myself. No. I will go on visiting that Dance Hall and one day a man will ask me to be his wife. Then I will open that door. I couldn’t do it before that happened.”
    “How do you know if it would turn out like that if you have never tried?”
    “I have tried. And because of that I know that alone . . . I would be, as I said, somehow meaningless. I wouldn’t know any more what it was to want to change. I would simply be there, doing nothing, telling myself that nothing was worthwhile.”
    “I think I see what you mean: in fact I believe I understand it all.”
    “One day someone must choose me. Then I will be able to change. I don’t mean this is true for everyone. I am simply saying it is true forme. I have already tried and I know. I don’t know all this just because I know what it is like to be hungry, no, but because when I was hungry I realized I didn’t care. I hardly knew who it was in me who was hungry.”
    “I see all that: I can see how one could feel like that: in fact I can guess it, although personally I have never felt the need to be singled out as you want to be; or perhaps I really mean that if such a thought ever did cross my mind I never attached much importance to it.”
    “You must understand: you must try to understand that I have never been wanted by anyone, ever, except of course for my capacity for housework; and that is not choosing me as a person but simply wanting something impersonal which makes me as anonymous as possible. And so I must be wanted by someone, just once, and even if only once. Otherwise I shall exist so little even to myself that I would be incapable of knowing how to want to choose anything. That is why, you see, I attach so much importance to marriage.”
    “Yes, I do see and I follow what you are saying, but in spite of all that, and with the best will in the world, I cannot really see how you hope to be chosen when you cannot make a choice for yourself?”
    “I know it seems ridiculous but that is how it is. Because you see, left to myself, I would find any man suitable: any man in the world would seem suitable on the one condition that he wanted me just a little. A man who so much as noticed me would seem desirable just for that very reason, and so how on earth would I be capable of knowing who would suit me when anyone would, on the one condition that they wanted me? No, it’s impossible. Someone else must decide for me, must guess what would be best. Alone I could never know.”
    “Even a child knows what is best for him.”
    “But I am not a child, and if I let myself go and behaved like a child and gave in to the first temptation I came across—after all I am perfectly aware that it is there at every street corner—why then I would follow the first person who came along, the first man who just wanted me. And I would follow him simply for the pleasure I would have in being with him, and then, why then I would be lost, completely lost. You could say that I could easily make another kind of life for myself, but as you can see I no longer have the courage even to think of it.”
    “But have you never thought that if you leave this choice entirely to another person it need not necessarily be the right one and might make for unhappiness later?”
    “Yes, I have thought of that a little, but I cannot think now, beforemy life has really begun, of the harm I might possibly do later on. I just say one