Маргерит Дюрас - The Impudent Ones

It was extraordinary: Maud hadn’t thought about that yet. Without waiting any longer, she opened up with what was tormenting her. “It’s impossible, don’t even think about it; I’m expecting a child.”

Mrs. Taneran stopped, her eyes bloodshot, and looked at her daughter without seeing her; she pulled her hat off her head and threw it down; then, covering her eyes with her hands like someone seized by vertigo, she gropingly sought the embankment and collapsed. A minute went by, then two minutes, and Maud became fearful. The state of dejection she had lived in for weeks now brusquely stopped. She thought she saw frightening signs on her mother’s face. Maud took her in her arms and began to kiss her dress and her arms, as if this explosion of love could pull her mother from an ending she suddenly found so appealing. But it was purely Maud’s imagination, for Mrs. Taneran, having passed through a series of emotions in a few seconds, including terror, despair, and the desire to give up living, quickly recovered. She came back to reality, gently, strangely, the way sick people recover their health. She took Maud in her arms and then held her away from her and considered her with unspoken tenderness. And she forgot the role that she was supposed to play.

“Don’t cry. I’ve just been suffering from dizzy spells lately. The blood rushes to my head and makes me suffocate… So, you’re expecting a child? This marriage with John Pecresse, you can be sure it’s not my idea… It’s Jacques’s. I know he did it for the good of all of us, but still it’s been hard for me to accept… What could I have done? I knew you were at Durieux’s place, but he never wanted me to go there for fear I would raise suspicions…”

She took a small breath before adding, “He’s more cautious than I am, of course. Now what will become of us? I’ve already received and considerably dipped into the fifty thousand francs. Yes, I had to repay the furniture! And then Jacques had debts…”

She didn’t stop caressing Maud, who wept like a fool; she stroked her shoulders, her arms, her hair… “We’re going back to Paris, don’t worry! Durieux will come and get you. I’ll come back here alone. For the moment, that’s all there is to do.” They set out again.

At the bend leading to the national highway, two silhouettes of the same height suddenly appeared. Maud recognized her brothers. They were losing patience. “You think it’s funny to make us wait in these conditions…,” started Jacques.

His mother cut him off. She explained to her sons that they were going back to Paris. They accepted without trying to understand, happy to leave, exhausted from having gotten up so early in the morning. “We just have enough time,” said Mrs. Taneran.

Maud began to walk on the left embankment, a little apart from the others. On the road, their footsteps rang out with a strange sound in the surrounding silence. Soon a crossroad appeared. There was a white cross and a sign: La Rayvre. Beyond it, the road sped down a steep slope.

AT FIRST GLANCE, ONE MIGHT HAVE TAKEN THEM FOR ORDINARY travelers coming home from holidays. They endured their private time together in silence. The joggling of the train soon put them to sleep in the confident, relaxed attitude of people who have had their fill of scenery for the year, and who only have eyes for their neighbors. When the Bordeaux train passed below Uderan, Maud and her mother barely gave a last glance at the house.

They didn’t arrive until eleven o’clock at night at the Austerlitz station in Paris. It was a beautiful night. The taxi that took them home went up the rue des Écoles and the boulevard Saint-Michel, whose facades were all ablaze with lights. Maud, who was sitting on the fold-up seat, noticed her older brother’s look of false annoyance. As they approached a large café, he knocked on the partition and stopped the car. It was then that their first argument broke out, partially obscured by the noise of passing cars, and shortened by the implacable ticking of the meter.

“Stop, taxi.” The shock was so unexpected that Mrs. Taneran was thrown toward the front by the brakes. Her mouth puffed up as if to say something, but no sound, no word, was able to come out. Jacques had already placed his foot on the running board. He acted as if he were getting out but then turned back toward his mother, and with a quick word, in the style of a consummate con artist, asked, “Do you have a thousand francs? I won’t be home late…”

Maud preferred to look elsewhere, for example, at the café whose light shone right into the taxi. As always in these cases, her nerves tightened, and she breathed with more and more difficulty as the oppression grew. Time stood still for a moment, ebbing with the slowness of a nightmare. Mrs. Taneran was debating within herself. In the crimson light, she appeared to be crying. “Sometimes you just don’t think! On the very night of our arrival!”

She repeated, “No, no,” getting up partway from her seat, then falling back down. Her big black hat had hit the roof of the car; she held it in one hand and straightened it with the other. On this particular night, the hat gave her a look of ridiculous solemnity.

Jacques’s voice was barely audible, but scathing. He whispered again, “I’m telling you to give me a thousand francs…, at least a thousand francs.” His hand reached out in the dark, like a beggar. Mrs. Taneran articulated several “nos,” as well as words like “forget it” and “it’s no use insisting,” phrases that revealed more and more panic and became less and less convincing. Her short sentences fell to the ground.

“You just took in fifty thousand francs, and you refuse to give me a bill? Is that it?” He had almost yelled, but without compromising himself, without drawing the attention of the taxi driver, who didn’t even turn around. His silent cry and its veiled threat had a great impact on the Taneran family circle. Mrs. Taneran stopped quibbling and reminded him right away, with a seared voice, “You’re not the only one in the family…”

Henry Taneran joined in, daring to budge a little in the back of the car by rolling his distraught eyes as if he were asking for help. Jacques continued methodically. “And you think that’s how it’s going to be?” he insisted. “I accepted, or rather we accepted, Henry and I, that you bring her back”—he pointed at Maud—“and now you’re treating us on the same level as her? What’s that supposed to mean?” Henry hesitated to join in with his brother, who kept repeating like a refrain, “And you think that’s how it’s going to be?”

The scene didn’t last more than two minutes. The click of Mrs. Taneran’s old purse could be heard. A hand stretched itself out, then disdainfully crumpled the bills and pocketed them. Soon Jacques was no more than an elegant silhouette disappearing into the night light, his right hand thrust into the pocket of his jacket…

The driver turned around at last, and it was Maud who reminded him of the address. In front of her, her mother squirmed about like a madwoman, talking to herself and struggling against a danger that she alone seemed to perceive. Her hardened voice broke from time to time, turning into a sob of helplessness that left her eyes dry. “You won’t end up with a thing, did you hear me, not a thing. And I’ll leave for elsewhere… Oh! I’m an unlucky mother…”

Maud, leaning toward the front, gazed at the small halo of light that preceded the car. Henry, sitting beside Mrs. Taneran, took on his usual attitude in these cases: an exasperated look. The rest of the trip was calmer. Mrs. Taneran became attentive to the moving of the taxi again. She recovered little by little from her emotions as they got closer and closer to home. Besides, the children always kept from bringing up again any of the words she spoke in such moments. They felt a certain mistrust for her fits of anger, which they found cowardly, because her outbursts came only after the danger had passed.