Маргерит Дюрас - The Impudent Ones

Maud noticed she hadn’t been targeted in this flood of reproach. Her mother always avoided speaking about any of her children in particular.

In braking, the taxi skidded on the slope of the street. The noise woke up the concierge. When Mrs. Taneran went by the concierge’s apartment, the woman, still half-asleep, poked her head out. “Oh! It’s you? People have come by several times looking for Mr. Jacques.” Mrs. Taneran approached her; she had regained her friendly look. The other woman hesitated and then spoke: “Yes, the police… Oh! I’m sure it’s nothing…”

Mrs. Taneran stopped, seized with emotion. “Oh, my Lord,” she said. Then she caught herself and tried to explain: “Of course, who else could it be?” She had the force of will to resist leaving the concierge too rapidly, while the other woman desperately stretched out her neck in order to learn something more.

The five flights were hard to climb. Henry and Maud followed their mother, whose shortness of breath betrayed her exhaustion. From time to time she stopped and turned toward Henry. “Do you know what that means? It’s certainly connected with the Tavares Bank…”

Henry refused to respond to anything. He lowered his head and tightened his mouth, and his eyes fled the gaze of his family; he had the kind of closed look of which people say, “You won’t get anything out of him.” And, in truth, whatever happened in his family, Henry Taneran proudly acted as if he were a disinterested party. The pleasure he took when people asked for his advice was such that he made it last right up to the limits of their patience.

Old Mr. Taneran appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a flannel bathrobe. No one had warned him of his family’s arrival, and he seemed quite surprised. Mrs. Taneran didn’t even give him time to open his mouth. “What’s this story about the police? The concierge doesn’t seem to know…”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t try to find out either. Your son’s affairs don’t concern me… How are you doing?”

His words came out so naturally that he must have prepared them in advance. His wife stretched out her ravaged face to him. He rubbed her cheeks against his unshaven cheeks as he embraced her, and did the same for Maud and Henry. Then he grabbed the suitcases his wife was carrying and set them down.

“Thank you,” she said. “I certainly thought of writing you, my dear Taneran, but I had to sell the property. I had your authorization with me, you know. A good sale? Yes. But couldn’t I wait until tomorrow to talk about it?” She dropped into a chair and removed her hat. “You really don’t know anything?”

“My dear wife…”

She stopped him with a gesture and added softly, “Everything’s okay?”

“Yes, thank you. I spent my whole time working, and you know that I like my work. However, I decided to leave for Auch in July this year. My dear, it certainly looks as if we will never take our holidays together. I’m so sorry…”

Almost at the same time, they said, “See you tomorrow,” and then he withdrew.

By the looks she was sending their way, her children understood that she was sinking little by little into a deep pit of anxiety. As he fled her, Henry was the first to say in an uncertain voice, “It can’t be much. Don’t get so upset…”

Maud sat down along the wall of the dining room, facing her mother. The bags were strewn in the middle of the room. Henry came and went, from one room to another…

Mrs. Taneran looked at her daughter with empty eyes. She didn’t say anything, aware that her children couldn’t calm her down. At a certain point, however, she thought she knew the answer and cried out, “Henry, it’s that woman, surely, if it’s not about the Tavares Bank…”

“Are you crazy! That’s over,” responded Henry from his room.

Mrs. Taneran shook her head and sank back into scratching her brain for an answer. She plunged silently into terrifying hypotheses, surfacing with difficulty, but feeling more reassured about things. Maud was thinking, “The police?” How easy it was for her to imagine Jacques between two agents, with a face that reminded her of the one he had worn a certain night at the inn.

It was a face disfigured by fear and on which shame was perhaps still written, in small, pale patches around his eyes and mouth—one that could be Jacques’s at the time of his death. A face feebly dangling above true sadness and bringing back for the first time his childhood face—a childhood emerging at last and stunned by death’s proximity. All that emanated from this face—the undying vanity, the perpetual lament arising from his pleasure-seeking, and an ugliness enveloped in beauty—would one day be shattered.

“MAUD, GO TO BED.”

Mrs. Taneran wanted to wait for the return of her son alone. The look on her daughter’s face didn’t bode well. “I know you all detest each other. You’re never happier than when misfortune strikes one of the others. Now that it’s about saving him… If I wasn’t there, poor boy!” She went from anger to worry, like someone who suffers and seeks the position in which she will suffer the least.

“They’re going to take him away. You’ll see that they came to take him away.” She moaned, sometimes like a little girl, sometimes in the tragic way of a mother who is trembling for one of her own… “Nothing will have been spared me in this life, nothing. What’s going to happen, Maud?”

“Mother, it’s all the same to me.”

“I know, dear. You unfortunately have other things to think about.” Her mother was so used to her worries that only the most urgent ones counted for her. The others, with more distant deadlines, allowed one to breathe a little before envisioning them.

Maud approached her mother. She hadn’t kissed her since the morning. In the train, they avoided each other because of Jacques and Henry. Mrs. Taneran began to stroke her daughter’s head. Her fingers, a little numb, sank into her hair, lifting up the smooth, shiny mass. Her hand played with her round forehead, the slightly receding chin, and the broad cheeks of her child, while her anxious mind did not settle down. “You don’t know him, Maud, but at heart he’s a good boy. With me I would even say that he’s the nicest of the three of you, the most attentive…”

The naïveté of her mother always astonished her. But her mother’s caresses felt good on Maud’s face. After being deprived of her mother’s attention for so long, she welcomed it like a spring breeze. “He may be very likable, Mother. That congeniality hides him from you. But he’s so rotten that he’s as light as a branch of deadwood…”

Mrs. Taneran’s hand stopped instantly. They separated, with each one maintaining her position. And Maud, brutally, felt that she became the prey of an unnamed despair, in which this woman forever rejected her.

Mrs. Taneran shuddered. Was it possible to pronounce such a judgment so coldly? She, the mother, could suffer. But her illusions remained, despite her grief, indefinitely. It was because she believed in her son that she lived in a dreamworld, inaccessible to any contradictions of reality.

At certain moments, she hated Maud. Brutally, this child disfigured the object of her love. And what remained for Mrs. Taneran in confronting this particular form of suffering, without the freshness of her faith? “Be quiet—aren’t you ashamed? Just think of the fact that someone could come and take him away tomorrow. That dirty Tavares, that filthy toad…”

“If Jacques left Paris for a time,” Maud shot back, “it was surely because of this business. You thought it was something else, just like us, didn’t you? That he was weeping for his wife, that he was going to mourn for her in the country?”