The Lover by Marguerite Duras Read Free Book Online Page A

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 hasa grievance. Quietly, as if between ourselves, he says he’d like to be alone with me for a