Маргерит Дюрас - The Impudent Ones

Facing the chimney stood a magnificent china cabinet, with its molding and its porcelain gleaming. The immaculate table was shining with an unreal whiteness. A gentle, acidulous odor floated in the air, that of the plonk, or cheap wine, of Lot and the musty-smelling cask treated with sulfur, vaguely reminiscent of human perspiration.

A brief moment went by before Mrs. Pecresse called everyone for dinner. She came and apologized to her guests that everything wasn’t ready and went back to the kitchen. The father must have been in the barn. He discreetly stayed in the background, like a servant. John did not yet dare to appear. Already each of the Pecresses had the same thought, without having shared it with one another. The Tanerans, for their part, found the place warm and pleasant, although rather far from the villages. But they had no precise thoughts in their minds.

Maud went out for a moment on the porch to watch the nightfall.

At the summit of the slope of which Uderan and the Old Tenant Farm occupied the middle, a few farms at The Pardal had feeble oil lamps that were twinkling. It was mild out; there were only occasional gusts of light wind. Although Maud had barely remembered the scenery until this point, she now recognized it in its entirety. All around her, she sensed the land, which rose in tiers—the fields, the farms, the villages, and the Dior—as if they were part of a permanent, harmonious order, guaranteed to outlast the humans, who only came and went in this small corner of the world. The incessant passing of creatures that inhabited the area made this eternity accessible to the soul. One felt it slowly, ardently, and sensitively unfolding, like a road forever warm with the steps of the last passersby and still with a silence forever hollowed out by the sound of steps to come and bodies on their way.

The road cut across the dark slope of the terrain. Immobile and milky white, it crossed the countryside, strangely absent, like a courier coming from afar who thinks only of his goal.

Although it was difficult to see anything, one could sense that many lives still carried on at night, now calmer and voiceless, yet existing more powerfully, perhaps, than during the day, which no longer dispersed them with its light. This was how Maud perceived The Pardal, perched on the summit of the incline, and below it the hamlet of Semoic, down by the Dior, which was murmuring with fresh and silky sounds.

Cries, distant noises, barking dogs, and the voices of young people calling to one another arrived isolated from their source and in a familiar way, as gentle to the ear as the sound of the sea.

Farmers had their supper early. They ate, no doubt, in a silence composed of tiredness and peace. They would soon go to bed, worn out by the fatigue of the day that had just gone by, and by the denser and heavier fatigue that imperceptibly swallowed up each day of their lives a bit more. And all the forms of tiredness that came together at the end of the day left certain fragrances in the air, those of the earth and of stone, which does not die, those of herds, and those of man, gentle and touching.

John Pecresse thought he would find Maud on the porch of the dining room. He came to join her there and, without saying a word, leaned up against the other side of the door. Maud was barely able to make him out now, done up in his hunting outfit, tall and a little thickset, like a man who is getting older, and not like the youngster she had known in the past. She thought about his life in this house, in the middle of this farmland that belonged to him and on which he lived with ease, without having to count the cost. He irritated her, because she felt he was always keyed up, concerned about the effect he was making, painfully forcing himself to appear something other than what he was.

John felt worried. “What effect does it have on her to be here, at my place, on the porch of the house from which one can see, far off, at least half of my lands bordering on Uderan and the Dior?” He blamed himself for the girl’s silence; the feeling of a huge emptiness already overwhelmed him when he was near her. The mistresses that he had had by chance had always found him full of a trying sentimentality, but they attached very little importance to it because they were from the country and full of common sense; they let him both speak and write to them to his heart’s content.

The Pecresse father left the stable and released his griffons, who took off like arrows in the black night. The dogs barked for quite a while, exasperated with joy and showing a childlike impatience. Even without seeing them, one could follow their pointless and disorganized comings and goings. Mrs. Taneran, Jacques, Henry, and Mrs. Pecresse also came out on the porch before dinner. Mrs. Taneran wanted to say something to Mrs. Pecresse in order to be friendly. “It feels good here; it feels better than Paris. The air is so fresh!”

Very pleased, Mrs. Pecresse agreed, answering in the same vein. Then no one said another word. Mr. Pecresse spoke to his dogs to keep them close to the house.

Maud heard Jacques yawning nervously behind her. Jacques! She thought of him suddenly with as much detachment as if he had been dead or absent for many years. For the first time in a long time, he was not in the familiar setting of their apartment. It was as if he had stopped living for a few days. He lost all interest and looked like an actor who is lifeless and superficial soon after the show.

The perspective of holidays bored Jacques. After one has taken a boat from Uderan down to the water mill of Mirasmes, what else is there to do in an area where small game is as rare as the girls? For ten years, his illusory existence had opened up new avenues of pleasure for him every day. Here, everything slipped away. The silence terrified him. He knew his mother’s plans for him, but despite the fact that he had let himself be forced into a decision he now regretted, he told himself that it did not bind him in the least.

Like fog, boredom covered Jacques’s life, and in this haze, reality faded and became elusive. He was very intelligent without ever having known the pleasures of the mind. His thought life, lazy as it was, never rose above his everyday preoccupations. It led him to his pleasures and then abandoned him, like the matchmaker who has fulfilled her duty. For a year he had given himself one reason to live: to hide the truth from his wife concerning the use of the money she had entrusted to him. He had no doubt held it against her that she was the source of his problems, without knowing it, and that had contributed to hastening the end of his love. It now spoiled his memories.

These memories, in reality, continued on in the form of payment dates from the Tavares Bank, which had to be respected no matter what. No doubt he did not love the deceased enough to suffer for a long time. Her death let him down because it no longer allowed him to hope for anything. He felt abandoned. All that was left was his empty heart and the statements from the bank.

The Pecresse father whistled for his griffons, who came regretfully into the house. The Tanerans and their hosts sat down to dinner later than usual. But even if the atmosphere picked up on account of the good food, the Pecresses remained vaguely worried and disconcerted by the Tanerans.

MRS. PECRESSE WAS A SINGULAR WOMAN. AT THE PARDAL, SHE was looked on as a woman with a good head on her shoulders, and she was respected. Having only a few friends, however, she was concerned about people’s opinion. She knew people criticized her in relation to her son, and even though she realized that the slander being spread in The Pardal was inspired by jealousy, she let herself be tormented by the unspoken worries it caused.

As soon as the Tanerans arrived, her concern grew. Although the idea of marriage had germinated in her mind prematurely, the feelings of her son for Maud Grant only confirmed it. She had never thought that there would be a link between marriage and the final acquisition of Uderan. Now this possibility arose in her mind in such an obvious way that she thought she had always foreseen it.