Four Novels by Marguerite Duras Read Free Book Online Page B

am not trying to give you any advice, but don’t you think that someone else would make a little effort and still manage, without quite so much work, to have as much hope for the future as before? Don’t you think that another person would manage that?”
    “Are you frightened that one day, if I have to wait too long and go on working a little more each day without complaining, I might suddenly lose patience altogether?”
    “I admit that your kind of will power is a little frightening, but that’s not why I made my suggestion. It was just because it is difficult to accept that someone of your age should live as you do.”
    “But I have no alternative, I assure you. I have thought about it a great deal.”
    “Can I ask you how many people there are in the family you work for?”
    “Seven.”
    “And how big is the house?”
    “Average.”
    “And rooms?”
    “Eight.”
    “It’s too much.”
    “But no. That’s not the way to think. I must have explained myself very badly because you haven’t understood.”
    “I think that work can always be measured and that, no matter what the circumstances, work is always work.”
    “Not my kind. It’s probably true of the kind of work of which it is better to do too much than too little. But if in my kind of work there wastime left over to think or start enjoying oneself then one would really be lost.”
    “And you’re only twenty?”
    “Yes, and as they say I’ve not yet had time to do any wrong. But that seems beside the point to me.”
    “On the contrary, I have a feeling that it is not and that the people you work for should remember it.”
    “After all, it’s hardly their fault if I agree to do all the work they give me. I would do the same in their place.”
    “I should like to tell you how I went into that town, after leaving my suitcase at the hotel.”
    “Yes, I should like to hear that. But you mustn’t worry on my account: I would be most surprised if I let myself become impatient. I think all the time of the risk I would run if that should happen and so, you see, I don’t think it will.”
    “I did not manage to leave my suitcase until the evening. . . .”
    “You see people like me do think too. There is nothing else for us to do, buried in our work. We think a great deal, but not like you. We have dark thoughts, and all the time.”
    “It was evening, just before dinner, after work.”
    “People like me think the same things of the same people and our thoughts are always bad. That’s why we are so careful and why it’s not worth bothering about us. You were talking of jobs, and I wonder if something could be called a job which makes you spend your whole day thinking ill of people? But you were saying it was evening, and you had left your suitcase?”
    “Yes. It was only towards the evening, after I had left my suitcase at the hotel, just before dinner, that I started walking through that town. I was looking for a restaurant and of course it’s not always easy to find exactly what one wants when price is a consideration. And while I was looking I strayed away from the center and came by accident to the Zoo. A wind had risen. People had forgotten the day’s work and were strolling through the gardens which, as I told you, were up on a hill overlooking the town.”
    “But I know that life is good. Otherwise why on earth should I take so much trouble.”
    “I don’t really know what happened. The moment I entered those gardens I was a man overwhelmed by a sense of living.”
    “How could a garden, just seeing a garden, make a man happy?”
    “And yet what I am telling you is quite an ordinary experience and other people will often tell you similar things in the course of your life. I am a person for whom talking, for example, feeling at one with other people, is a blessing, and suddenly in that garden I was so completely at home, so much at my ease, that it might have been made specially for me although it was an ordinary public garden. I