The Malady of Death Read online

  THE MALADY OF DEATH

  by

  MARGUERITE DURAS

  translated from the French by Barbara Bray

  GROVE PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

  Copyright © 1986 by Marguerite Duras Translation copyright © 1986 by Barbara Bray All rights reserved.

  First Printing 1986

  ISBN: 0-394-53866-8

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-49427

  First Evergreen Edition 1986 First Printing 1986 ISBN: 0-394-62175-1

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-49427

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Duras, Marguerite. The malady of death.

  Translation of: La maladie de la morte. 1. Duras, Marguerite—Translations, English. I. Title.

  PQ2607. U8245A2 1986 843' .912 83-49427 ISBN 0-394-53866-8

  Grove Press, Inc., 196 West Houston Street New York, 10014

  5 4 3 2 1

  You wouldn't have known her, you'd have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears.

  *

  You may have paid her.

  May have said: I want you to come every night for a few days.

  She'd have given you a long look and said in that case it'd be expensive.

  And then she says: What is it you want?

  You say you want to try, try it, try to know, to get used to that body, those breasts, that scent. To beauty, to the risk of having children implicit in that body, to that hairless unmuscular body, that face, that naked skin, to the identity between that skin and the life it contains.

  You say you want to try, for several days perhaps.

  Perhaps for several weeks.

  Perhaps even for your whole life.

  Try what? she asks.

  Loving, you answer.

  She asks: Yes, but why?

  You say so as to sleep with your sex at rest, somewhere unknown.

  You say you want to try, to weep there, in that particular place.

  She smiles and says: Do you want me, too?

  You say: Yes. I don't know that yet and I want to penetrate there too, and with my usual force. They say it offers more resistance, it's smooth but it offers more resistance than emptiness does.

  She says she has no opinion on the subject. How should she know?

  She asks: What other conditions?

  You say she mustn't speak, like the women of her ancestors, must yield completely to you and to your will, be entirely submissive like peasant women in the barns after the harvest when they're exhausted and let the men come to them while they're asleep. So that you may gradually get used to that shape molding itself to yours, at your mercy as nuns are at God's. And also so that little by little, as day dawns, you may be less afraid of not knowing where to put your body or at what emptiness to aim your love.

  She looks at you. Then stops looking at you and looks at something else. Then answers.

  She says in that case it'll be even more expensive. She tells you how much.

  You accept.

  Every day she'd come. Every day she comes.

  The first day she strips and lies down where you tell her to on the bed.

  You watch her go to sleep. She doesn't speak. Just goes to sleep. All night you watch her.

  She'd come at night. She comes at night.

  All night you watch her. For two nights you watch her.

  For two nights she scarcely speaks.

  Then one night she does. She speaks.

  She asks if she's managing to make your body less lonely. You say you can't really understand the word as applied to you. That you can't distinguish between thinking you're lonely and actually becoming lonely. As with you, you add.

  And then once in the middle of the night she asks: What time of year is it?

  You say: Not yet winter. Autumn still.

  And she asks: What's that sound?

  You say: The sea.

  She asks: Where?

  You say: There beyond that wall.

  She goes back to sleep.

  Young. She'd be young. In her clothes and hair there'd be a clinging smell, you'd try to identify it, and in the end your experience would enable you to do so. You'd say: A smell of heliotrope and citron. She answers: Whatever you say.

  One evening you do it, as arranged, you sleep with your face between her parted legs, up against her sex, already in the moistness of her body, where she opens. She offers no resistance.

  Another evening you inadvertently give her pleasure and she cries out.

  You tell her not to. She says she won't anymore.

  She doesn't.

  No woman will ever cry out because of you now.

  Perhaps you get from her a pleasure you've never known before. I don't know. Nor do I know if you hear the low, distant murmur of her pleasure through her breathing, through the faint rattle going back and forth between her mouth and the outside air. I don't think so.

  She opens her eyes and says: What joy.

  You put your hand over her mouth to silence her. Tell her one doesn't say such things.

  She shuts her eyes.

  Says she won't say it again.

  She asks if they talk about it. You say no.

  She asks what they do talk about. You say they talk about everything else. Everything except that.

  She laughs and goes back to sleep.

  Sometimes you pace the room, around the bed or along the walls by the sea.

  Sometimes you weep.

  Sometimes you go out on the terrace in the growing cold.

  You don't know what's in the sleep of the girl on the bed.

  You'd like to start from that body and get back to the bodies of others, to your own, to get back to yourself. And yet it's be- cause you must do this that you weep.

  And she, in the room, sleeps on. Sleeps, and you don't wake her. As her sleep goes on, sorrow grows in the room. You sleep, once, on the floor at the foot of her bed.

  She goes on sleeping, evenly. So deeply, she sometimes smiles. She wakes only if you touch her body, the breasts, the eyes. Sometimes she wakes for no reason, except to ask if the noise is the wind or high tide.

  She wakes. She looks at vou. She says: The malady's getting more and more of a hold on you. It's reached your eyes, your voice.

  You ask: What malady?

  She says she can't say, yet.

  Night after night you enter the dark of her sex, almost unwittingly take that blind way. Sometimes you stay there; sleep there, inside her, all night long, so as to be ready if ever, through some involuntary movement on her part or yours, you should feel like taking her again, filling her again, taking pleasure in her again. But only with a pleasure, as always, blinded by tears.

  She'd always be ready, willing or no. That's just what you'll never know. She's more mysterious than any other external thing you've ever known.

  Nor will you, or anyone else, ever know how she sees, how she thinks, either of the world or of you, of your body or your mind, or of the malady she says you suffer from. She doesn't know, herself. She couldn't tell you. You couldn't find out anything about it from her.

  You'd never know anything, neither you nor anyone else, about what she thinks of you or of this affair. However many ages may bury both your forgotten existences, no one will ever know. She is incapable of knowing.

  Because you know nothing about her you'd say she knows nothing about you. You'd leave it at that.

  She'd have been tall. With a long body made in a single sweep, at a single stroke, as if by God Himself, with the unalterable perfection of indi
viduality.

  For she'd have been unlike anyone else.

  The body's completely defenseless, smooth from face to feet. It invites strangulation, rape, ill usage, insult, shouts of hatred, the unleashing of deadly and unmitigated passions.

  You look at her.

  She's very slim, almost frail. Her legs have a beauty distinct from that of the body. They don't really belong to the rest of the body.

  You say: You must be very beautiful.

  She says: I'm here right in front of you. Look for yourself.

  You say: I can't see anything.

  She says: Try. It's all part of the bargain.

  You take hold of the body and look at its different areas. You turn it round, keep turning it round. Look at it, keep looking at it.

  Then you give up.

  Give up. Stop touching it.

  Until that night you hadn't realized how ignorant one might be of what the eyes see, the hands and the body touch. Now you find out.

  You say: I can't see anything.

  She doesn't answer.

  She's asleep.

  You wake her up. Ask her if she's a prostitute. She shakes her head.

  You ask her why she accepted the deal and the paid nights.

  She answers in a voice still drowsy, almost inaudible: Because as soon as you spoke to me I saw you were suffering from the malady of death. For the first few days I couldn't put a name to it. Then I could.

  You ask her to say the words again. She does. Repeats them: The malady of death.

  You ask her how she knows. She says she just does. Says one knows without knowing how.

  You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's like to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that's what he's doing.

  Her eyes are still closed. It's as if she were resting from an immemorial weariness. While she sleeps you've forgotten the color of her eyes, as you have the name you called her by the first evening. Then you realize it's not the color of her eyes that will always be an insurmountable barrier between you and her. No, not the color—you know that would be somewhere between green and gray. Not the color, no. The look. The look.

  You realize she's looking at you.

  You cry out. She turns to the wall.

  She says: It's going to end, don't worry.

  *

  With one arm you lift her and hold her up against you, she's so light. You look.

  Strangely, her breasts are brown, the areolas almost black. You eat them, drink them, and nothing in her body flinches, she offers no resistance, none. Perhaps at one point you cry out again. Another time you tell her to say a word, just one, the one that's your name, you tell her what it is. She doesn't answer, and you cry out again. And it's then she smiles. And it's then you know she's alive.

  The smile vanishes. She hasn't said the name.

  You go on looking. Her face is given over to sleep, it's silent, asleep, like her hands. But all the time the spirit shows through the surface of the body, all over, so that each part bears witness in itself to the whole— the hand and the eyes, the curve of the belly and the face, the breasts and the sex, the legs and the arms, the breath, the heart, the temples, the temples and time.

  You go out again onto the terrace facing the black sea.

  Inside you there are sobs you can't explain. They linger on the brink of you as if they were outside, they can't reach you and be wept. Facing the black sea, leaning against the wall of the room where she's sleeping, you weep for yourself as a stranger might.

  You go back into the room. She's asleep. You don't understand. She's sleeping, naked, there on the bed. You can't understand how it's possible for her not to know of your tears, for her to be protected from you by herself, for her to be so completely unaware of how she fills the whole world.

  You lie down beside her. And, still for yourself, you weep.

  Then it's almost dawn. Then there's a dark light in the room, of indeterminate hue. Then you switch some lights on, to see her. Her. See what you've never seen before, the hidden sex, that which swallows up and holds without seeming to. See it like this, closed up around its own sleep. And also to see the freckles strewn all over her from the hairline right down to where the breasts begin, where they give under their own weight, hooked onto the hinge of the arms, and right up to the closed lids and the pale half-open lips. You think: They're in the places of the summer sun, the open places, the places on view.

  She sleeps.

  You switch the lights off.

  It's almost light.

  It's still almost dawn. These hours are as vast as stretches of sky. It's too much, time can't find a way through. Time has stopped passing. You tell yourself it would be best for her to die. You tell yourself that if now, at this hour of the night, she died, it would be easier. For you, you probably mean, but you don't finish the sentence.

  You listen to the sound of the tide starting to rise. The stranger is there on the bed, in the white expanse of white sheets. The whiteness makes her shape look darker, more present than an animal presence suddenly deserted by life, more present than the presence of death.

  You look at this shape, and as you do so you realize its infernal power, its abominable frailty, its weakness, the unconquerable strength of its incomparable weakness.

  You go out of the room, go out again onto the terrace facing the sea, away from her smell.

  A fine drizzle is falling, the sea is still black under a sky bleached of light. You can hear it. The black water goes on rising, gets nearer, moving, always moving. Long white rollers run across it, a long swell that crashes in a turmoil of white.

  The black sea is a heavy one. There's a storm in the offing, as there often is at night. You stand for a long while, watching.

  It occurs to you that the black sea is moving in the stead of something else, of you and of the dark shape on the bed.

  You finish your sentence. You tell yourself that if now, at this hour of the night, she died, it would be easier for you to make her disappear off the face of the earth, to throw her into the black water, it would only take a few minutes to throw a body as light as that into the rising tide, and free the bed of the stench of heliotrope and citron.

  *

  Back into the room you go again. She is there, sleeping, abandoned in her own darkness, her magnificence.

  You realize she's so made that it's as if at any moment, at her own whim, her body could cease to live, could just thin out around her and disappear from sight, and that it's in this threat that she sleeps, exposes herself to your view. That it's in the risk she runs, with the sea so close and empty and black still, that she sleeps.

  *

  Around the body, the room. Probably your room. But it's inhabited by her, a woman. You can't recognize it anymore. It's emptied of life, without either you or your like. Occupied only by the long, lithe streak of the alien form on the bed.

  She stirs, her eyes half open. She asks: How many paid nights left? You say: Three.

  She asks: Haven't you ever loved a woman? You say no, never.

  She asks: Haven't you ever desired a woman? You say no, never.

  She asks: Not once, not for a single moment? You say no, never.

  She says: Never? Ever? You repeat: Never.

  She smiles, says: A dead man's a strange thing.

  She goes on: What about looking, haven't you ever looked at a woman? You say no, never. She asks: What do you look at? You say: Everything else.

  She stretches, is silent. Smiles. Goes back to sleep.

  You come back into the room. She hasn't moved in the white expanse of the sheets. You look at her whom you've never approached, ever, either through others like her or through herself.

  You look at the shape suspected through the ages. You give up.

  You stop looking. Stop looking at anything. You shut your eyes so as to get back into your difference, your death.

 
When you open your eyes she's still there. Still there.

  You go back towards the alien body. It's sleeping.

  You look at the malady of your life, the malady of death. It's on her, on her sleeping body, that you look at it. You look at the different places on the body, at the face, the breasts, the mingled site of the sex.

  You look at where the heart is. The beat seems different, more distant. The word occurs to you: more alien. It's regular, it seems as if it would never stop. You bring your body close to the object that is her body. It's warm, moist. She's still alive. While she lives she invites murder. You wonder how to kill her and who will. You don't love anything or anyone, you don't even love the difference you think you embody. All you know is the grace of the bodies of the dead, the grace of those like yourself. Suddenly you see the difference between the grace of the bodies of the dead and this grace here, this royalty, made of utmost weakness, which could be crushed by the merest gesture.

  You realize it's here, in her, that the malady of death is fomenting, that it's this shape stretched out before you that decrees the malady of death.

  *

  Out of the half-open mouth comes a breath that returns, withdraws, returns again. The fleshly machine is marvelously precise. Leaning over her, motionless, you look at her. You know you can dispose of her in whatever way you wish, even the most dangerous. But you don't. Instead you stroke her body as gently as if it ran the risk of happiness. Your hand is over the sex, between the open lips, it's there it strokes. You look at the opening and what surrounds it, the whole body. You don't see anything.