Four Novels by Marguerite Duras Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t really think I could go on living without them.”
    “I think I would like them too. I can see myself at the bar with my husband, listening to the radio. People would talk to us and we would make conversation. We would be with each other and with the others. Sometimes I feel how nice it would be to go and sit in a café but if you are a single young woman you can hardly afford to do so.”
    “I forgot to add that sometimes someone looks at you.”
    “I see, and comes over?”
    “Yes, they come over.”
    “For no reason?”
    “For no particular reason, but then the conversation somehow becomes less general.”
    “And then?”
    “I never stay longer than two days in any town. Three at the most. The things I sell are not so essential.”
    “Alas.”
    The wind, which had died down, rose again scattering the clouds, and once more the sudden warmth in the air brought thoughts of approaching summer.
    “But the weather is really wonderful today,” the man said again.
    “It is nearly summer.”
    “Perhaps the fact is that one never really starts anything: perhaps things are always in the future?”
    “If you can say that, it is because each day is full enough for you to prevent you thinking of the next. But my days are empty, a desert.”
    “But don’t you do anything of which you could say later that at least it was something to the good?”
    “No, nothing. I work all day, but I never do anything of which I could say what you have just said. I cannot even think in those terms.”
    “Please don’t think I want to contradict you, but you must see that whatever you do, this time you are living now will count for you one day. You will look back on this desert as you describe it and discover that it was not empty at all, but full of people. You will not escape it. You think this time has not begun, and it has begun. You think you are doing nothing and in reality you are doing something. You think you are moving towards a solution and when you look round you find it’s behind you. In just this sense I did not fully appreciate that city I mentioned. The hotel wasn’t first class, the room I had reserved in advance had already been rented, it was late and I was hungry. Nothing was awaiting me in this city, except the city itself, and imagine for a moment what an enormous city, completely preoccupied with its own affairs, can be for a weary traveler seeing it for the first time.”
    “No, I can’t imagine.”
    “All you find is a bad room overlooking a dirty, noisy courtyard. And yet thinking back I know that this trip changed me, that much of what I had seen before making it was leading up to it and illuminated by it. You’re well aware that only after it’s all over does one know he has visited this or that town.”
    “If that is the way you understand it, then perhaps you are right. Perhaps it has already started, perhaps it started on that particular day when I first wished it would start.”
    “Yes, you think that nothing happens, and yet, don’t you see, it seems to me that the most important thing that has happened to you is precisely your will not to live yet.”
    “I understand you, I really do, but you must also try and understand me. Even if the most important part of my life is over, I can’t know it as yet and I haven’t the time to understand it. I hope one day I will know, as you did with your journey, and that when I look back everything behind me will be clear and fall into place. But now, at this moment, I am too involved to be even able to guess at what I might feel one day.”
    “I know. And I know that probably it is impossible for you to undertand things you have not yet felt, but all the same it is hard for me not to try and explain them to you.”
    “You are very kind, but I am afraid that I am not very good yet at understanding the things I am told.”
    “Believe me that I do understand all you have said, but even so, is it absolutely necessary to do all that work? Of course I