Маргерит Дюрас - The Impudent Ones

The Old Tenant Farm was as far from Semoic and The Pardal as Uderan itself. But unlike Uderan, no road went by, except for the main road, which turned fifty meters from there toward the village of Rayvre. There were shortcuts to get there from The Pardal, so few farmers took the Old Tenant Farm road to the village.

John must have waited for years for someone to pass by their farm. Their only neighbors, those from Uderan, had not come for a long time, and the silhouette of the pinewood rose before him, untamed. However, his mother still hoped to marry him off according to her own ideas.

John was looked on as a simpleton whom one could easily lead on, a good match for an able young woman, in short, if his mother had not been so vigilant. He was unhappy at home and worked as hard in the fields as an ordinary pieceworker. He could have had workers. But even if the Pecresse family spent their energy in hard labor, they hung on to their money. People soon said that John was stingy and a bit of a driveler.

His mother, who was not lacking in good sense, finally began to worry. John exceeded her hopes, and she wouldn’t have been unhappy if he had been a little more at ease with the girls. To encourage him, she hired a young servant girl, because, all things considered, she would have preferred to see him embroiled in some low-class affair than to see him marry below himself or, indeed, be bitter toward life.

But John refused to touch the servant who slept beside his room. He refused to fall, even once, into the trap that he knew his mother had laid for him.

Three years passed. John was approaching thirty. The servant had stayed. The Pecresses led a laborious and well-to-do, although sad and monotonous, life in the presence of their only son, who seemed to give himself over to this chaste and solitary existence as fervently as if it had been a reprehensible passion.

This state of affairs lasted until one summer evening when, on the edge of the Dior River, where John often spent time, he met a stranger. Immediately he felt like the guilty man who, one fine day, after a long, exhausting journey, arrives in a village where his crime is unknown.

The young woman was cutting bulrushes with a small, brilliant machete. Two long black braids hung from her head down to the tall grass. Her dress of faded red stood out against the dark green of the river like the color burst of a piece of fruit against the foliage. She looked like the young woman of a fictional tale who might have wandered from her home at dusk, haunted by dreams. As soon as she saw the young man, the vision changed. She straightened up, arched her back, and called out to him casually, with an almost vulgar self-assurance. He couldn’t see her face very well, for the shadows blurred its features, but he picked out its calm and mindlessly cheerful expression. He saw someone unafraid and used to talking to one and all, like vagabonds for whom all passersby are friends.

What John experienced for an instant was memorable. It was as if he awoke to the inordinate beauty of love.

Naturally, he answered her ineptly. The young woman, disconcerted, looked at him for a moment and then got back to work. John moved away but looked back quickly with each step, like someone afraid of being followed. He sat down on an alder stump and continued to consider her with a stupid look on his face, in which all human emotions jostled together, although not a single one of them succeeded in coming to the fore and taking over.

Both terrified and touched, he couldn’t move. At a certain point, she began to sing. He couldn’t believe his ears. The song seemed to flow in his veins like poison. Each musical phrase, undulating or piercing, astonished his flesh and turned it into something painfully sensitive.

Like a child waking up, he didn’t really understand what was happening. The spectacle of his existence passed through his mind, incomprehensibly. He felt that he was being born to an unknown state of being. He thought of his chastity with horror. It paralyzed him and he felt himself stagger under its weight.

No one passed by. Only the train from Bordeaux shook the silence, followed by trails of smoke; the light that flashed from its doors streaked the sky with red glimmers.

The young woman moved away, with a bundle of bulrushes on her back and her small machete in her hand. She went in the direction of Semoic. John found himself alone on the bank of the Dior and stayed there until night closed in on him.

The next evening found him in the same place on the alder stump. He felt weakened by lack of sleep and hunger, having neither eaten nor slept since the day before. However, his nerves, like reins, held him back from making the sinuous approach of a man toward a woman.

As soon as she was once again singing and calmly taking the road back to Semoic, he was afraid. Maybe she would never come back. Thrown suddenly out of his dream, out of his fear, he found himself upright and desperately brutal.

He ran and caught up with her, and she recognized him and smiled. But he was unable to look at her face as he told her with a harsh, unsteady voice that she had no right to come and cut the bulrushes in his meadows on the Dior. He became indignant, but his inflamed voice burned only himself. Whoever might have seen these two silhouettes on the road—hers bent over under the bundle of reeds and his gesturing wildly with his two arms—would have taken them for master and slave. And that is what she subsequently became in his hands.

She appeared again the next day, and at the end of a week she gave herself to him at the same place where they had first seen each other, at the bend in the Dior at the edge of the alder woods.

Their love was complicated in the beginning, at least for him, by a sense of romantic fiction and disillusion. She let her family return home and she stayed in Semoic. She didn’t miss her previous wanderings. She earned a good living by offering her services from farm to farm to do washing, harvesting, grape picking, and such.

Their affair lasted for three years. John cheated on his mistress whenever the occasion presented itself, in particular with his servant. He found his mistress cost him a lot of money, but he didn’t think seriously of leaving her. He felt at ease in regard to many things with her. But he had waited for love too long and remained disappointed. He gained weight and turned into a half-wit.

The evening the Tanerans arrived, John felt intimidated. An event of this kind had never happened at the Pecresse home, where they never received anyone. He insisted that they dine in the dining room and not in the kitchen as they were used to doing, in the manner of true farmers. It was a lot of effort, but his mother could find nothing to say about it. As the servant girl moved about with her usual sluggishness that night, John spoke harshly to her, making her cry. He put on the hunting garb he usually wore only on Sundays.

When everything had been prepared according to his wishes, he waited for the Tanerans to come back from their walk over to Uderan. He had barely seen them in the morning. They had surprised him by their simple and natural deportment, and he had enjoyed talking with them. They were supposed to have lunch with the Deddes, their tenant farmers, and the day seemed long to John Pecresse. As it went by, his exuberance grew, without his really knowing why.

They came in one after another, the brothers first, and then Mrs. Taneran and Maud, dazzled by the light, all of them wearing, like a family look, an identical expression of fatigue and disdain on their faces. They no longer appeared as the travelers they had been in the morning, happy to arrive and cheerfully carrying their suitcases, talkative and youthful.

The Pecresses were feeling quite moved. The Tanerans made no attempt at conversation. They took their places on the chairs backed up against the dining room wall. No noises entered the room except those of the kitchen, which one could make out just below, near the stable of the previous home. They were hungry. Jacques yawned with boredom and a feeling of well-being.