Маргерит Дюрас - The Impudent Ones

Thus, even though she didn’t consider turning back, her brother’s attitude took on a different meaning in the new order of things she had just discovered. Circumstances alone had defined the man he was, hard and abnormal, capable of all kinds of base acts. She finally grasped the weakness of his defenses against her, against an imaginary danger that possessed him.

Suddenly dogs barked joyfully in the distance and she recognized the twin voices of the Pecresses’ griffons. The pale light of a storm lantern appeared at the top of the path joining Uderan to the Pecresse property. If they were looking for her, she had ample time to flee. The idea that someone was worried about her touched her a little. Tears filled her eyes and traced fresh furrows on her cheeks. They weren’t happy either, over there. No one had ever been happy in her family. They lived in disorder, and their passions gave the simplest events a tragic, singular twist, which increasingly took away the hope of ever possessing happiness.

After making one another suffer, they sought one another out and brought each one back, by will or by force. This final remorse alone demonstrated that they held each other in a certain regard, and that one’s absence would leave a void in the home. These thoughts touched her at first, but it didn’t take long for her to resist her emotions.

No, she wouldn’t go back. It was totally useless now that she understood how their attachment manifested itself. Jacques took pleasure in humiliating his victims; then he did his best to reassure them, so that he would not completely lose them. No, she would never, ever go back.

But hadn’t they called her? The specter of her mother passed through her mind, so tender in her memory, warm like the thought of summer’s return when one is still in winter. Maud didn’t move, but she couldn’t prevent a few tears from falling.

Soon, moreover, the light of the lamp disappeared from the Uderan grounds. A fairly long time passed before it reappeared on the plateau. Those searching for her were probably coming back below the road, along the Dior.

“We’ll see if she’s at Uderan or somewhere on the road,” Mrs. Taneran must have said. “If she’s elsewhere, too bad…” They wouldn’t look for her at George Durieux’s, she knew that much.

Her courage returned all of a sudden. She knocked on the door. As no one answered, she pushed it open and stood without moving on the doorstep, immediately seized by the desire to flee.

In the light that blinded her, she could not pick out anyone at first. After a few seconds, someone noticed her and gave a little cry of surprise. At that point, George came up to her. In his mind, he quickly calculated the immensity of the distress that must have brought her back to him. He had always hoped she would come back, but embarrassed for the moment, he set those reasons aside. As she didn’t say anything, he feared she would escape before he could reach her.

“Come and sit down, come,” he said quietly. The authority of his voice was concealed by the familiarity of his tone.

Once Maud was in the light, he realized that she was beautiful and that people would find her so, despite her strange attitude. He had often picked up wounded animals when he was hunting in the woods. Their expression was identical to Maud’s: a lost, surprised look, with mysterious intensity. It was as if they wanted to communicate an infinitely valuable discovery as they were losing consciousness, and understood the life they could have lived had they been aware of the evil that threatened them and had just killed them.

George felt proud of Maud’s beauty. Even though, in his cruel and thoughtless ways as a man, he might have killed her too, he felt joy to have conquered her again, and he introduced her with confidence. “Miss Grant, you know, from the Uderan estate.”

Maud did her best to try to please him. She stayed quiet and wore a smile on her face like a mask, without it touching her eyes. Now that she found herself at George’s, at the end of her mad dash to get away, she felt good. The guests didn’t interest her; she barely saw them, in fact, but waited patiently for their departure…

THE AFTERNOON WAS THE BEST PART OF THE DAY.

In front of her, the landscape rose in a broad, slow movement right up to the crest of Uderan, and the house looked as if it were staggering under the assault of this wave of land. As she was getting up, Maud caught sight of Uderan in the foreground of this landscape, and beyond it, the Dior valley and the Pecresse home, of which only the roof appeared. The Pardal was below the wave, so to speak, and not visible to her.

She held in her hands a book she wasn’t reading. If perchance someone passed by the gap at the end of the lane of cypress trees, she automatically withdrew from the window, emotionless, and hid behind the wall for a moment; then she took her regular place again…

When George had left, at the beginning of the afternoon, there was no one left but the old servant, who made monotonous noises in the kitchen, downstairs on the main floor. Sometimes she spoke to herself, and it was reassuring to hear her, even if Maud knew the woman was complaining about her. But the woman soon left too, closing the door with the turn of a key, and Maud very clearly heard the muffled sound of her footsteps moving alongside the wall…

The heat stagnated around the house, like a pond. In the beginning, Maud had tried to stay in the main room downstairs, but she quickly gave up and went back upstairs. She desperately needed to see this landscape, which, though partly obscured, reached a distant horizon, and beyond the Dior River, a land flat and full of light, abounding in poplars. On certain days, the heat was such that it literally rose like smoke from the wheat fields and glowed in a huge, vertical expanse of shimmering color through which the landscape seemed to weep.

From time to time, Maud was seized with fleeting anxiety. Someone was knocking on the door downstairs or else the dogs were barking. She woke up from her torpor. The feeling of approaching danger had become a kind of unnerving distraction for her in this undisturbed calm. When she succeeded in reading a little or in concentrating briefly on one thing or another, she found herself afterward in a state of profound stupefaction. The reasons for her flight seemed childish to her. She hadn’t been duped, but she liked to imagine that she had been. A hope took hold in her, and she would easily have laughed or cried out if she hadn’t been so alone. Generally she didn’t read for very long, having a hard time following the thread of the story; the effort quickly discouraged her, despite her typically determined will.

For more than two weeks, no one had come to ask about her. When George went to town, the farmers didn’t show any curiosity toward him. A knowing silence surrounded them. He had learned from them, however, that Uderan had been put up for sale and that several buyers were interested. But they were careful not to say anything about Maud.

He left her alone during the day and came back from Semoic only at dinnertime, staggering from tiredness and sometimes a little drunk. The dinner took place without him speaking a word to her, acting indifferent to her presence, and barely looking at her when she spoke to him.

One evening when he returned, George found Maud in the room downstairs. Crouched on the sofa, she was looking for a book on the shelf and was embarrassed to be found there by him; she normally didn’t come down until he called for her at mealtime.

They had been unhappy since her return and avoided each other. Maud found as much instability in George’s life as in her own. In the beginning, she hadn’t tried to discover the secret behind his behavior toward her. In fact, she couldn’t imagine any other way of doing things: if he showed pleasure from having her with him, he would lose her. Thus, he observed total discretion, and even if he suffered, that only proved that the experience wasn’t completely in vain and bore at least some bitter fruit.