Read Online The Lover by Marguerite Duras - Free Book Online Page A

recognize you, then greets you with a light handshake. Hello, how are you? Dead a long time ago now. Thirty years, perhaps. I can remember her grace, it’s too late now for me to forget, nothing mars its perfection still, nothing ever will, not the circumstances, nor the time, nor the cold or the hunger or the defeat of Germany, nor the coming to light of the crime. She goes along the street still, above the history of such things however terrible. Here too the eyes are pale. The pink dress is old, the black wide-brimmed hat dusty in the sunlight of the street.
    She’s slim, tall, drawn in India ink, an engraving. People stop and look in amazement at the elegance of this foreigner who walks along unseeing. Like a queen. People never know at first where she’s from. And then they think she can only be from somewhere else, from there. Because of this she’s beautiful. She’s dressed in old European clothes, scraps of brocade, out-of-date old suits, old curtains, old oddments, old models, moth-eaten old fox furs, old otterskins, that’s her kind of beauty, tattered, chilly, plaintive and in exile, nothing suits her, everything’s too big, and yet it looks marvelous. Her clothes are loose, she’s too thin, nothing fits, yet it looks marvelous. She’s made in such a way, face and body, that anything that touches her shares immediately and infallibly in her beauty.
    She entertained, Betty Fernandez, she had an “at home.” We went sometimes. Once Drieu La Rochelle was there. Clearly suffering from pride, he scarcely deigned to speak, and when he did it was as if his voice was dubbed, his words translated, stiff. Maybe Brasillach was there too, but I don’t remember, unfortunately. Sartre never came. There were poets from Montparnasse, but I don’t remember any names, not one. There were no Germans. We didn’t talk politics. We talked about literature. Ramon Fernandez used to talk about Balzac. We could have listened to him forever and a day. He spoke with a knowledge that’s almost completely forgotten, and of which almostnothing completely verifiable can survive. He offered opinions rather than information. He spoke about Balzac as he might have done about himself, as if he himself had once tried to be Balzac. He had a sublime courtesy even in knowledge, a way at once profound and clear of handling knowledge without ever making it seem an obligation or a burden. He was sincere. It was always a joy to meet him in the street or in a café, and it was a pleasure to him to greet you. Hallo how are you? he’d say, in the English style, without a comma, laughing. And while he laughed his jest became the war itself, together with all the unavoidable suffering it caused, both resistance and collaboration, hunger and cold, martyrdom and infamy. She, Betty Fernandez, spoke only of people, those she’d seen in the street or those she knew, about how they were, the things still left for sale in the shops, extra rations of milk or fish, good ways of dealing with shortages, with cold and constant hunger, she was always concerned with the practical details of life, she didn’t go beyond that, always a good friend, very loyal and affectionate. Collaborators, the Fernandezes were. And I, two years after the war, I was a member of the French Communist party. The parallel is complete and absolute. The two things are the same, the same pity, the same call for help, the same lack of judgment, the same superstition if you like, that consists in believing in a political solution to the personal problem. She too, Betty Fernandez,looked out at the empty streets of the German occupation, looked at Paris, at the squares of catalpas in flower, like the other woman, Marie-Claude Carpenter. Was “at home” certain days, like her.
    He drives her back to the boarding school in the black limousine. Stops just short of the entrance so that no one sees him. It’s at night. She gets out, runs off, doesn’t turn to look at him. As soon as she’s