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

inside the door she sees the lights are still on in the big playground. As soon as she turns out of the corridor she sees her, waiting for her, worried already, erect, unsmiling. She asks, Where’ve you been? She says, I just didn’t come back here to sleep. She doesn’t say why and Hélène Lagonelle doesn’t ask. She takes the pink hat off and undoes her braids for the night. You didn’t go to class either. No, she didn’t. Hélène says they’ve phoned, that’s how she knows, she’s to go and see the vice-principal. There are lots of girls in the shadowy playground. They’re all in white. There are big lamps in the trees. The lights are still on in some of the classrooms. Some of the pupils are working late, others stay in the classrooms to chat, or play cards, or sing. There’s no fixed time for them to go to bed, it’s so hot during the day they’re allowed to do more or less as they like in the evening, or rather as the young teachers on duty like. We’re the only two white girls in this state boarding school. There are lots of half-castes,most of them abandoned by their fathers, soldiers or sailors or minor officials in the customs, post, or public works department. Most of them were brought up by the Assistance Board. There are a few quadroons too. Hélène Lagonelle believes the French government raises them to be nurses in hospitals or to work in orphanages, leper colonies, and mental homes. She also thinks they’re sent to isolation hospitals to look after people with cholera or the plague. That’s what Hélène Lagonelle thinks, and she cries because she doesn’t want any of those jobs, she’s always talking about running away.
    I go to see the teacher on duty, a young half-caste herself who spends a lot of time looking at Hélène and me. She says, You didn’t go to class and you didn’t sleep here last night, we’re going to have to inform your mother. I say I couldn’t help it, but from now on I’ll try to come back and sleep here every night, there’s no need to tell my mother. The young woman looks at me and smiles.
    I’ll do it again. My mother will be informed. She’ll come and see the head of the boarding school and ask her to let me do as I like in the evenings, not to check the time I come in, not to force me to go out with the other girls on Sunday excursions. She says, She’s a child who’s always been free, otherwise she’d runaway, even I, her own mother, can’t do anything about it, if I want to keep her I have to let her be free. The head agrees because I’m white and the place needs a few whites among all the half-castes for the sake of its reputation. My mother also said I was working hard in high school even though I had my freedom, and that what had happened with her sons was so awful, such a disaster, that her daughter’s education was the only hope left to her.
    The head let me live in the boarding school as if it were a hotel.
    Soon I’ll have a diamond on my engagement finger. Then the teachers will stop making remarks. People will guess I’m not engaged, but the diamond’s very valuable, no one will doubt that it’s genuine, and no one will say anything any more, because of the value of the diamond that’s been given to this very young girl.
    I come back to Hélène Lagonelle. She’s lying on a bench, crying because she thinks I’m going to leave. I sit on the bench. I’m worn out by the beauty of Hélène Lagonelle’s body lying against mine. Her body is sublime, naked under the dress, within arm’s reach. Her breasts are such as I’ve never seen. I’ve never touchedthem. She’s immodest, Hélène Lagonelle, she doesn’t realize, she walks around the dormitories without any clothes on. The most beautiful of all the things given by God is this body of Hélène Lagonelle’s, peerless, the balance between her figure and the way the body bears the breasts, outside itself, as if they were separate. Nothing could be more extraordinary than the outer