The Lover by Marguerite Duras Read Free Book Online

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 alongtogether 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 inSadec 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, notnearly 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