The Lover (5 page)

The sound of the city is so near, so close, you can hear it brushing against the wood of the shutters. It sounds as if they’re all going through the room. I caress his body amid the sound, the passers-by. The sea, the immensity, gathering, receding, returning.

I asked him to do it again and again. Do it to me. And he did, did it in the unctuousness of blood. And it really was unto death. It has been unto death.

He lit a cigarette and gave it to me. And very quietly, close to my lips, he talked to me.

And I talked to him too, very quietly.

Because he doesn’t know for himself, I say it for him, in his stead. Because he doesn’t know he carries within him a supreme elegance, I say it for him.

Now evening comes. He tells me I’ll remember this afternoon all my life, even when I’ve forgotten his face
and name. I wonder if I’ll remember the house. He says, Take a good look at it. I do. I say it’s like everywhere else. He says yes, yes, it’s always the same.

I can still see the face, and I do remember the name. I see the whitewashed walls still, the canvas blind between us and the oven outside, the other door, arched, leading to the other room and to an open garden—the plants are dead from the heat—surrounded by blue balustrades like those at the big villa in Sadec with its tiers of terraces overlooking the Mekong.

It’s a place of distress, shipwrecked. He asks me to tell him what I’m thinking about. I say I’m thinking about my mother, she’ll kill me if she finds out the truth. I see he’s making an effort, then he says it, says he understands what my mother means, this dishonor, he says. He says he himself couldn’t bear the thought if it were a question of marriage. I look at him. He looks back, apologizes, proudly. He says, I’m Chinese. We smile at each other. I ask him if it’s usual to be sad, as we are. He says it’s because we’ve made love in the daytime, with the heat at its height. He says it’s always terrible after. He smiles. Says, Whether people love one another or not, it’s always terrible. Says it will pass as soon as it gets dark. I say he’s wrong, it’s not just because it was in the daytime, I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always
been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me. Today I tell him it’s a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life. I say I don’t quite understand what she says, but I know this room is what I was expecting. I speak without waiting for an answer. I tell him my mother shouts out what she believes like the messengers of God. She shouts that you shouldn’t expect anything, ever, either from anybody else or from any government or from any God. He watches me speak, doesn’t take his eyes off me, watches my lips, I’m naked, he caresses me, perhaps he’s not listening, I don’t know. I say I don’t regard my present misfortune as a personal matter. I tell him how it was just so difficult to get food and clothes, to live, in short, on nothing but my mother’s salary. I’m finding it more and more difficult to speak. He says, How did you all manage? I say we lived out of doors, poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for himself. Shameless, that’s what we were. That’s how I came to be here with you. He is on me, engulfed again. We stay like that, riveted, moaning amid the din of the still external city. We can still hear it. And then we don’t hear it any more.

•  •  •

Kisses on the body bring tears. Almost like a consolation. At home I don’t cry. But that day in that room, tears console both for the past and for the future. I tell him one day I’ll leave my mother, one day even for my mother I’ll have no love left. I weep. He lays his head on me and weeps to see me weep. I tell him that when I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams. My dreams were of my mother, never of Christmas trees, always just her, a mother either flayed by poverty or distraught and muttering in the wilderness, either searching for food or endlessly telling what’s happened to her, Marie Legrand from Roubaix, telling of her innocence, her savings, her hopes.

Through the shutters evening has come. The noise has got louder. It’s more penetrating, less muffled. The livid red streetlights are lit.

We’ve left the flat. I’ve put on the man’s hat with the black ribbon again, the gold shoes, the dark lipstick, the silk dress. I’ve grown older. I suddenly know it. He sees it, he says, You’re tired.

On the sidewalk the crowd, going in all directions, slow or fast, forcing its way, mangy as stray dogs, blind as beggars, a Chinese crowd, I can still see it now in pictures of present prosperity, in the way they go along
together without any sign of impatience, in the way they are alone in a crowd, without happiness, it seems, without sadness, without curiosity, going along without seeming to, without meaning to, just going this way rather than that, alone and in the crowd, never alone even by themselves, always alone even in the crowd.

We go to one of those Chinese restaurants on several floors, they occupy whole buildings, they’re as big as department stores, or barracks, they look out over the city from balconies and terraces. The noise that comes from these buildings is inconceivable in Europe, the noise of orders yelled out by the waiters, then taken up and yelled out by the kitchens. No one ever merely speaks. On the terraces there are Chinese orchestras. We go up to the quietest floor, the Europeans’ floor, the menus are the same but there’s less yelling. There are fans, and heavy draperies to deaden the noise.

I ask him to tell me about his father’s money, how he got rich. He says it bores him to talk about money, but if I insist he’ll tell me what he knows about his father’s wealth. It all began in Cholon, with the housing estates for natives. He built three hundred of these “compartments,” cheap semidetached dwellings let out for rent. Owns several streets. Speaks French with an affected Paris accent, talks money with perfect ease. He used to own some apartment blocks, but sold them to buy building land south of Cholon. Some rice fields in
Sadec were sold too, the son thinks. I ask about epidemics. Say I’ve seen whole streets of native compartments closed off overnight, the doors and windows nailed up, because of an epidemic of plague. He says there’s not so much of it here, the rats are exterminated much more often than upcountry. All of a sudden he starts telling me some rigmarole about the compartments. They cost much less than either apartment blocks or detached houses, and meet the needs of working-class areas much better than separate dwellings. The people here like living close together, especially the poor, who come from the country and like living out of doors too, on the street. And you must try not to destroy the habits of the poor. His father has just built a whole series of compartments with covered balconies overlooking the street. This makes the streets very light and agreeable. People spend the whole day on these outside balconies. Sleep there, too, when it’s very hot. I say I’d have liked to live on an outside balcony myself, when I was small it was my dream, to sleep out of doors.

Suddenly I have a pain. Very slight, almost imperceptible. It’s my heartbeat, shifted into the fresh, keen wound he’s made in me, he, the one who’s talking to me, the one who also made the afternoon’s pleasure. I don’t hear what he’s saying, I’ve stopped listening. He sees, stops. I tell him to go on. He does. I listen again. He says he thinks about Paris a lot. He thinks I’m very different from the girls in Paris, not
nearly so nice. I say the compartments can’t be as profitable as all that. He doesn’t answer.

Throughout our affair, for a year and a half, we’d talk like this, never about ourselves. From the first we knew we couldn’t possibly have any future in common, so we’d never speak of the future, we’d talk about day-to-day events, evenly, hitting the ball back and forth.

I tell him his visit to France was fatal. He agrees. Says he bought everything in Paris, his women, his acquaintances, his ideas. He’s twelve years older than I, and this scares him. I listen to the way he speaks, makes mistakes, makes love even—with a sort of theatricality at once contrived and sincere.

I tell him I’m going to introduce him to my family. He wants to run away. I laugh.

He can only express his feelings through parody. I discover he hasn’t the strength to love me in opposition to his father, to possess me, take me away. He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money.

Whenever I mention my brothers he’s overcome by this fear, as if unmasked. He thinks my people all expect a proposal of marriage. He knows he’s lost, done for already in my family’s eyes, that for them he can only become more lost, and as a result lose me.

He says he went to study at a business school in Paris,
he tells the truth at last, says he didn’t do any work and his father stopped his allowance, sent him his return ticket, and he had to leave. This retreat is his tragedy. He didn’t finish the course at the business school. He says he hopes to finish it here by correspondence.

The meetings with the family began with the big meals in Cholon. When my mother and brothers come to Saigon I tell him he has to invite them to the expensive Chinese restaurants they don’t know, have never been to before.

These evenings are all the same. My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don’t look at him either. They can’t. They’re incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they’d be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society. During these meals my mother’s the only one who speaks, she doesn’t say much, especially the first few times, just a few comments about the dishes as they arrive, the exorbitant price, then silence. He, the first couple of times, plunges in and tries to tell the story of his adventures in Paris, but in vain. It’s as if he hadn’t spoken, as if nobody had heard. His attempt founders in silence. My brothers go on gorging. They gorge as I’ve never seen anyone else gorge, anywhere.

He pays. He counts out the money. Puts it in the saucer. Everyone watches. The first time, I remember, he lays out seventy-seven piastres. My mother nearly shrieks with laughter. We get up to leave. No one says thank you. No one ever says thank you for the excellent dinner, or hello, or goodbye, or how are you, no one ever says anything to anyone.

My brothers never will say a word to him, it’s as if he were invisible to them, as if for them he weren’t solid enough to be perceived, seen or heard. This is because he adores me, but it’s taken for granted I don’t love him, that I’m with him for the money, that I can’t love him, it’s impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on loving me. This because he’s a Chinese, because he’s not a white man. The way my elder brother treats my lover, not speaking to him, ignoring him, stems from such absolute conviction it acts as a model. We all treat my lover as he does. I myself never speak to him in their presence. When my family’s there I’m never supposed to address a single word to him. Except, yes, except to give him a message. For example, after dinner, when my brothers tell me they want to go to the Fountain to dance and drink, I’m the one who has to tell him. At first he pretends he hasn’t heard. And I, according to my elder brother’s strategy, I’m not supposed to repeat what I’ve just said, not supposed to ask again, because that would be wrong, I’d be admitting he has
a grievance. Quietly, as if between ourselves, he says he’d like to be alone with me for a while. He says it to end the agony. Then I’m still not supposed to catch what he says properly, one more treachery, as if by what he said he meant to object, to complain of my elder brother’s behavior. So I’m still not supposed to answer him. But he goes on, says, is bold enough to say, Your mother’s tired, look at her. And our mother does get drowsy after those fabulous Chinese dinners in Cholon. But I still don’t answer. It’s then I hear my brother’s voice. He says something short, sharp, and final. My mother used to say, He’s the one who speaks best out of all the three. After he’s spoken, my brother waits. Everything comes to a halt. I recognize my lover’s fear, it’s the same as my younger brother’s. He gives in. We go to the Fountain. My mother too. At the Fountain she goes to sleep.

In my elder brother’s presence he ceases to be my lover. He doesn’t cease to exist, but he’s no longer anything to me. He becomes a burned-out shell. My desire obeys my elder brother, rejects my lover. Every time I see them together I think I can never bear the sight again. My lover’s denied in just that weak body, just that weakness which transports me with pleasure. In my brother’s presence he becomes an unmentionable outrage, a cause of shame who ought to be kept out of sight. I can’t fight my brother’s silent commands. I can
when it concerns my younger brother. But when it concerns my lover I’m powerless against myself. Thinking about it now brings back the hypocrisy to my face, the absent-minded expression of someone who stares into space, who has other things to think about, but who just the same, as the slightly clenched jaws show, suffers and is exasperated at having to put up with this indignity just for the sake of eating well, in an expensive restaurant, which ought to be something quite normal. And surrounding the memory is the ghastly glow of the night of the hunter. It gives off a strident note of alarm, like the cry of a child.

No one speaks to him at the Fountain, either.

We all order Martells and Perrier. My brothers drink theirs straight off and order the same again. My mother and I give them ours. My brothers are soon drunk. But they still don’t speak to him. Instead they start finding fault. Especially my younger brother. He complains that the place is depressing and there aren’t any hostesses. There aren’t many people at the Fountain on a weekday. I dance with him, with my younger brother. I don’t dance with my elder brother, I’ve never danced with him. I was always held back by a sense of danger, of the sinister attraction he exerted on everyone, a disturbing sense of the nearness of our bodies.