Маргерит Дюрас - The Impudent Ones

Then something pitiful happened: after a moment, the man lifted his head and looked at the young woman without saying anything, as if he questioned her mental state. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said at last. “We went to your place, it’s true. The Tavares Bank where your brother did business was a gang of crooks. Because we found his name, we went looking for him. At the same time, we suspected his complicity. But actually, he was the one who was robbed. He should have lodged a complaint. I don’t see what you’ve come here for…”

At the sense of relief she felt, Maud realized how afraid she had just been. When she went out, her legs could hardly carry her. With difficulty, she headed toward a small square, where she sat down on a bench.

She knew this place, not far from home, very well; on one side was a pharmacy, and on the other, a little Protestant church surrounded by a well-tended garden and nicely trimmed shrubs; the church was made of wood; its porch was topped by a frieze of veneered wood and decorated with openwork on which a Latin inscription was displayed in gold letters. The wall of a public school constituted the third side of the square. There were no children going in or out. The church door, as well, remained closed.

It was very chilly and the benches were empty. From time to time, Maud became physically aware of the cold. She remained motionless as much as possible because the slightest gesture sent shivers up her back. Besides, her walk had tired her out so much that she didn’t feel the need to make the slightest movement. She barely felt the rhythm of her respiration, which regularly broke through the stuffiness of her chest with a fresh breath.

She had nothing more to think about in regard to what had just come to such an abrupt end. She had reached, all at once, a definitive point of no return. It stopped being an issue in her mind, unless she forced herself to think about it.

Little by little, evening came. She remembered having seen it through Durieux’s window, day after day, rising from the horizon, slowly thickening the thin line of the Dior. Shades of gray and mauve and sometimes a brilliant strawberry red blended and mixed together, before all slipping into a humid grayness. Soon the countryside could hardly be distinguished, except for the bright line of the river. It was then that the powerful and radiant night tide rose, swollen with vapor. Odors rose from the plowed fields, the bushes, the clover fields, the vegetable gardens. There were walnuts not far from the house, and the scent reached Maud, glazed and intensely bitter. It was the moment when she feared standing out too vividly on the luminous backdrop of the window, which she closed with regret.

Oh yes, she certainly remembered. Her misfortune was undoubtedly enormous. She considered it without sadness and even with a kind of satisfaction. It stretched out around her, much more imposingly now than when it was right then and there—a vast region over which she had reigned.

She had done what was important. Jacques’s fate no longer depended on her will—she couldn’t do anything about it! Her mind stood still at the certainty she now had, like a serpent coiled up around itself.

Intermittently people entered the pharmacy, whose door opened with the ringing of a bell. Soon the window was intensely lit up. Time passed, and it felt good to let it go by without expecting anything from it.

However, Maud soon felt a malaise that sharpened quickly until it became painful… she was hungry. The sensation soon became very unpleasant. The memory of her child came back to her. It was quite strange but reassuring that this distant phantom was always near her in spite of her life’s worst vicissitudes.

What an idea, all the same, to denounce her brother. Preposterous! In reality, Jacques had been cheated by Tavares!… She tried in vain to hold on to her hatred, but the reasons she had given herself slid from her mind like sand running through her fingers.

The police scared Jacques. “What a joke!” she thought. And her mother, who was so upset! It wouldn’t have taken much for her to laugh out loud. What cowards, what insignificant little nobodies who didn’t even keep their crooked promises: her family!

Her torment vanished altogether. It got dark, slowly at first, as the light died down, and then brutally, with a blackness that spread and stretched out over them. Night was no longer something far away and impalpable, but something that brushed up against her skin, like the presence of a huge, peaceful beast that wanted to lick her. She felt the shadow inside herself, too, filling her throat and almost stopping her from breathing.

Tomorrow she would write, or else her mother would do it. Next, she would wait for George’s reply, or that might not even be necessary. Shame had disappeared from her conscience. It was time for her to go—to leave them behind.

In reality, she wasn’t going away feeling good about it, but feeling, instead, a sense of curiosity. How would George appear to her, now that she was going to belong to him?

Maud got up and decided to go home, reasonably. The day now stretched out behind her, like a mountain she had climbed and come back down. She walked calmly in the dark, without feeling any other burdens inside except that of the child she was carrying.

THREE DAYS AFTER MAUD’S DEPARTURE FROM HIS HOME, George received a letter from Mrs. Taneran.

Sir,

On the back of the envelope you have read my name. And perhaps you have already guessed why, before I go any further.

The few times I saw you were enough to give me a good picture of you. I address the friend you could have been and which you were not as a result of circumstances as disagreeable as they were unexpected. Believe me, sir, my own liking for you was no less than that of my older son. Right from the beginning of our relationship, Jacques hoped, in fact, that it would last and go beyond the narrow and occasional scope of the holidays. That is why, in regard to his sister, he resorted to making up a small tale about John Pecresse. He hopes you will not hold it against him.

A rare insight, and the constant concern about family interests that have always kept Jacques in a state of tension, pushed him to distance his sister from you, to keep this child from the company of a man who was to exercise an extraordinary power of seduction over her. He only succeeded, unfortunately, in slowing down the arrival of the greatest misfortune that has ever happened to me. If I had listened to him from the beginning, I might have avoided this catastrophe, but you know, a mother is always blind, especially when she isn’t supported by a father’s firm attitude. Even though her whole life is comprised of love for her children, she makes mistakes…

Do I need to elaborate on such a subject? You know my daughter well enough to discern in her a tenacity that is all the more dangerous because it rarely makes itself known: you have been the happy object of her choice.

The solitude and specific atmosphere in which she grew up are the causes of her uncommunicative and violent nature (in which the worst temptations can smolder because there is nothing to provide a distraction from them). All this has come about, even though my son and I have never stopped correcting her natural tendencies with great severity. Until she met you, these tendencies lay dormant and dangerously turned inward, in a reserve and timidity that should have frightened us even more. In a family that has had no previous incidents as shameful as this, nothing else could explain such a catastrophe.

I hope, sir, that through the gentle bliss of a situation in which her nature will finally blossom in plain view, you will be rewarded for your goodness.