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She’s going on tour to Japan with the quartet. She opens the presents I hand her and finds a paperback edition of Hiroshima, Mon Amour and notebooks of blank staves. She smiles when I say I’d like her to write music, that I see her future as even greater than her current success. Her snake eyes give me a fizzing feeling in my stomach when I tell her that if she dies tomorrow I don’t want anyone to forget her. And I’ll make sure they don’t.
On the other side of the world she becomes a shadow on my computer screen. She looks like a ghost when we talk at impossible times of day, for her just as much as for me, because the time difference is so restrictive. Her body moves but her face stays motionless, she looks like a Picasso, a zombie. She calls me from one hotel room after another. In Tokyo she undresses, very slowly, in front of the camera. Her breasts look unreal on the screen. Her breasts are what I like best, her supple little breasts, softer than anything I’ve found anywhere else. She strokes her body, it’s torture and it’s wonderful. She comes, all those kilometers away from me, with her mouth open and her eyes closed, my ghost who’s very much alive. When she returns it’s December. She can’t believe a year has gone by since we met at that starchy apartment. She wants to organize a big party, with a mixture of our friends. It’s a success. In her apartment in Les Lilas, people dance till dawn. The next day she starts a fight over breakfast. She screams and shouts right in my face. She frightens me. She scratches the skin off my arm with her nails when she tries to hold me back as I jump into a taxi, to put an end to it. She doesn’t know that I’m bleeding, that I never want to see her again.
She has a cousin who works at the Paris Opera and who shows us around the workshops where they make the scenery. A little door leads onto the stage. Sarah goes through it, and I follow her, enveloped in a bitter yet powdery smell. No noise, apart from a few muffled sounds, the footsteps of stage technicians, people talking in the wings. Up on that stage, facing the silent empty seats, she looks so small. Helpless. Harmless.
64
She goes away again. She leaves me to myself, and a life I’m no longer interested in. She goes away again, delighted to be back with her fellow performers, with the subtle fear before each concert and the jokes afterward. She just leaves me there with my heart dangling uselessly. She doesn’t know that I listen to Mendelssohn’s octet on loop, at a loose end, lying on my bed, my soul suffering. She goes away again. She snaps closed bags that she’s packed in a hurry, without a single look at me, as I sit on the other side of the bed. She runs around the whole apartment looking for a particular score, a particular pair of panties. She loses everything, she gets annoyed. She can’t wait to catch her train. She leaves me to my own devices, to my responsibilities as a mother and a good teacher. She couldn’t care less.
Bed and Board is a French film – Domicile conjugal – written and directed by François Truffaut and released in 1970. Running time: 100 minutes. The cast includes Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade and Hiroko Berghauer. It’s a sequel to Stolen Kisses, released in 1968. The trilogy of Antoine Doinel’s adventures ended later, in 1979, with the release of Love on the Run.
65
Sometimes she goes mad. Mad with fury then mad with misery. She screams, throws herself at me and scratches my face, with a monstrous expression on hers. She’s worse than a witch in a fairy tale. She resents me, for everything, for stealing her time, stealing her youth, stealing her family’s love, stealing the idea she’s had since childhood of how she should live her life. She doesn’t say it but I can hear it, it rings in my ears, thief, thief, thief. She gets angry with me for silly little things, all sorts of things, but deep down, I can tell, she’s angry with me for existing, for coming into her life, she’s angry with me for being a woman. She resents me because she can’t suddenly just love me in peace. She flies into blazing tempers, unforgettable tempers. Her little body is transformed. She looks like an animal, a furious animal, she roars, flushed red all over. And in the heat of the moment she forgets the Venetian love, the hidden kisses, the endless fondling. The remedy for these mad paroxysms is always the same. I wait for a momentary lull and force her to undress. Once she’s naked, I try to concentrate on what I need to do. She carries on shouting while I push her under the shower, with her hair hanging over her eyes. She lets herself be maneuvered, quietens a little when the water starts to flow over her. I soap her, starting with her feet, easing my hands up over her calves, trying to stop the spasms in her legs. I stand on tiptoe and hold the shower over her head, getting water everywhere, I’m soaked, the floor’s soaked, the bathmat’s soaked, she moans under the flow of hot water, her anger starts to subside, she lets me turn off the water to massage her head with shampoo, gently and then more firmly, my jaw hurts from clamping my teeth together, I talk to her inside my head, I say you’re going to calm down for goodness’ sake, aren’t you, you’re going to stop, I talk to her in the shower, I say come on it’s over my love it’s over, it’s okay, you see, it’s going to be okay, I take her out, I move her body around as best I can, I rub her briskly, I roll her up in a towel and sit her on the side of the bath, she’s still sniveling a bit but the storm has passed, I turn on the hairdryer and, slowly, patiently, I brush her hair till it’s dry. She lets herself be led over to the bed where she collapses, where I anoint her body with cream, slowly, trying not to wake the wild animal with a sudden move or a misunderstood word. She lets herself be buried under the duvet, her face swollen from too much crying. I close the door to the apartment without a sound, and I go out into the street and howl at the top of my lungs, my fists balled, like a wolf on the night of a full moon, I howl until my throat burns, I howl for this vanishing love.
66
Hiroshima, My Love is the screenplay of Alain Resnais’ film, written by Marguerite Duras, published by Gallimard. First published: 1960. When the film was released and Duras heard that the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs opposed its selection for the Cannes Film Festival, she wrote in an open letter: “We wanted to make a film about love. We wanted to depict the worst conditions of love, the most frequently criticized, the most reprehensible, the most unacceptable conditions.” The connection between love and death that lies at the heart of Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a recurring theme in Marguerite Duras’ work. As in The Lover, the book that won her the Goncourt Prize, love is doomed to fail.
She looks at me. Her eyes are hard, behind her glasses. Hard but thoughtful. She looks at me, Marguerite does. Marguerite Duras, on the poster for the exhibition we went to together. It says exhibition on the poster. It says 15 October–12 January, near the glasses worn by Marguerite, who looks at me tenderly. It’s all about that, it’s all about Sarah drifting between the lines of Marguerite’s writing. That was the winter before. It says portrait of a writing process on the poster. It says Duras Song on the poster. That was the name of the exhibition. She looks at me thoughtfully. What are you thinking, Marguerite? Do you remember last winter, when she and I wandered the streets? Are you singing, Marguerite? It says Duras Song on the poster. Duras dreams up her enduring song, a midwinter night’s dream-song.