Маргерит Дюрас - The Impudent Ones

At the stomping of the horse in the yard, she realized that George was about to go out. She bumped gently into the door panel as she slid the palm of her hand over the rough door. A footstep could be heard in the room and George appeared. “You were going down to Semoic?” she inquired.

“No, I was just getting ready to come and see you. How did you…”

She didn’t answer and he immediately understood the reason for her late-night escapade. Her goal achieved, she lost interest in what would follow. She headed to the back of the room, near the empty fireplace. On a little table, a lamp was burning low. She looked all around her like someone who doesn’t recognize anything and wants to escape. At that point he took her lightly by the arm and pushed her back onto an easy chair. She allowed him to do it without saying anything, then once again scrutinized the apartment.

At her right stood a narrow couch with a broken edge on which some old, dog-eared books, clearly read more than once, had slipped from a bookcase. A stairway went up from the room itself, as in English country homes, and part of the ceiling, lower than the rest, must have represented the bedroom. A few dissimilar but good-quality pieces of furniture gave the place a surprising look of luxury, although each piece seemed to have been chosen for its own beauty and not in relation to the whole.

George was leaning against the entrance door. He didn’t speak but contemplated this young girl who came to him so naturally, as if he had transported her with his gaze. The light of the lamp grew brighter. His shirt was partly open; he was breathing irregularly as he forced himself to keep calm. His dark eyes, fairly close together, and his broad forehead gave his face a determined look. “I’ll bring in the horse and then I’ll be right back,” he said at last.

She said sweetly that he shouldn’t go out of his way for her. She understood from his look that he was giving her time to get away if she wanted to. But as soon as he went out, she was seized with the same impatience to see him as before. The horse went by close to the wall. There was a moment of profound silence, during which she wrung her hands with irritation while repeating in a tortured voice, “What can he be doing? What on earth can he be doing?”

When he came back, she calmed down right away. He sat on the couch with his hands behind him; she sensed he was still giving her the freedom to decide on their fate, and this extreme sensitivity annoyed her.

“I came because I’ve had enough,” she said suddenly. “Again today, they’ve been unbearable.”

“I realize that,” he replied.

“We’re leaving next week—did you know that?” she added.

He didn’t flinch. Next week? He suddenly felt the strength to change the course of events… “I doubt it,” he muttered. She eyed him suspiciously.

“That poor schoolteacher Briol,” Maud continued. “If you had seen the trouble he goes to in order to entertain my family… it was painful. What’s extraordinary is that people bend over backward to please them, while…” Whenever she talked about her family, she always let herself get caught up in her own words. “While in fact they don’t count, they’re nobodies, you know, what people call nobodies…” She punctuated her comments with excessive gestures. He wasn’t surprised that she had come so far to tell him things like that.

At Uderan, too, the two of them hadn’t stopped talking about Jacques since the affair with the young waitress, but tonight it seemed as if she kept repeating a lesson poorly learned. (Even though they were upset with Jacques, they didn’t betray him and stood by passively when the Pecresses were unjustly criticized in town.) “Quiet, my dear. Calm down,” said George.

As soon as he came in, she had understood. George’s irritation, his persistence in always wanting to leave her, had mysteriously stopped. A storm had passed over this man, but now he was there before her, perfectly calm. With short sentences he tried to calm her, even though he didn’t believe she was truly angry.

He had struggled in order not to come to this point, but from the moment he felt vanquished, he was grateful for her victory, yielding to a gentleness full of abandon and appreciation; it showed as much in his eyes as in his drained voice, in his closed hands. “I wasn’t expecting you,” said George. “Every evening, and from morning onward, I wait patiently for the time to come and see you.”

The familiar tone of his voice drew her closer to him. From now on they understood each other totally—from the simple beginning of their gestures, which became unnecessary to complete, to their most banal words, which they no longer deemed necessary to finish. An adorably full silence began to be possible. They had ceased being two.

All at once he got up. She guessed he was going to approach her. As short as this instant was, she could not stand the imminence of his approach. For a second, as she returned to an individual state again, her modesty reappeared intact, along with a self-defensive instinct that frightened her. She closed her eyes. She just had the time to hear herself pleading inwardly with herself to be weak, and very quickly gave in to this voice, succeeding in detaching herself from her will, like a leaf in the wind being torn away from the tree and allowing itself to be carried off, accomplishing finally its desire to die.

• • •

When she woke up, a bit of daylight had begun, laboriously, to show. It was true, they had forgotten to close the shutters.

She remained completely motionless for a time, unable to make a move. Between the sheets she felt her naked body, which she was no longer ashamed of, and which became a living form, like her face. In the past, she had used her body to counter unhappiness, requiring it, for example, to carry her out of the house, to laugh, to console her, or to weep comforting tears…

However, this particular morning, her body stayed in total harmony with her spirit, inert. Nothing was making an effort in this complicity and she thought very calmly of violent things.

George slept beside her; hair sprung from his bare arms, which he had wrapped around his head. He was handsome, as such, and the forearms of his tanned skin were marked by sunburns and all the traces and scars left behind by swimming, hunting, and other adventures. His sleep was childlike—confident and peaceful.

He appeared to Maud full of both strength and innocence. He had resisted, and now he rested, with abandon, at her side.

How would they see each other after this encounter? She avoided touching him; she watched him sleep. Yet she felt the need to roll up against him and go back to sleep, to gradually lose consciousness again beside him, on condition that he didn’t move or ask her any questions.

She couldn’t resist putting out her hand and stroking his shoulder, perhaps to bring him back a bit into reality. But instead she drifted off again into her dreams; he didn’t move.

Did he still love her? She kept herself at the surface of her sleep, light and annoying, like an irritating fly. He sensed that she was there, at his side, for he grunted and murmured something incomprehensible and sank into sleep once again. What brought her suffering, she would have to endure alone.

It was now almost day. She arose and got dressed. Once she had made this first effort, she was in a hurry to get it over with. She had no trouble letting herself out, for everything had been left open in the rush of the night before. The road seemed long, she was shivering, and a stabbing pain in her lower body prevented her from running.

As she left the cypress lane, she looked back and considered George’s home, drab in the early morning. Was she dreaming? She thought she saw a human form briskly leave the road. She pushed aside the suspicion that came to her, as she would have done a bad omen one conjures up without thinking about it again. When she caught sight of Uderan, she could not repress a strange smile.