Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray Read Free Book Online

escapes into the sea, but he says nothing. She stretches out on the waves and heads away. She barely turns around to blow him a kiss. And then he can’t see her anymore; she goes toward the
wide open sea, head lowered in the ocean. He is still watching her. Around her the sea has been forgotten by the wind. She is abandoned by her own strength; she has the grace of a deep sleeper.
    The child is sitting.
    Still he watches her.
    The girl returns. She always comes back, this girl. She has always come back. Then she asks him if he remembers her name, which she wrote on the postcard. He says a first and last name. She says that’s right, that’s her name.
    Â 
    The counselor has drifted off to sleep.
    The child stares insistently at the beach; he can hardly understand how this beach happens to be here without him ever having seen it. Then finally he no longer tries to understand; he pulls nearer the counselor. She is asleep. He gently slips his hand beneath hers so she won’t forget him. Her hand hasn’t moved. Right afterward, the child, too, falls asleep.

T HE SUN came back again the following day. Just when everyone had stopped expecting it, there it was again in the perfect sky. Below, the sea was flat, as smooth and innocent as the sky. One could see past Le Havre, Sainte-Adresse, even Cap d’Antifer.
    Â 
    In the dark room we watched the clarity of night, its transparency. You were near me. I said, Someone, just once, should talk about the beauty of Antifer. Should say how it’s alone even as it stands before God. Savage and naked along the cliffs of the very first ages, as vast as the absolute absence of even the possibility of God.

T HE GIRL returns from swimming in the sea. She, too, is nude, like the child; her body is now stretched out next to the child’s.
    They remain silent, eyes shut, for a long time.
    And then she told the child the story about the shark.
    That evening, which was the color of storms and gold, she said, the young counselor said, David heard a noise, a living sound. Someone on the island was crying, but without anger, perhaps without really knowing he was crying, perhaps in his sleep.
    David looks around. He turns and sees the entire company of the island’s animals stretched out in the golden light, a great tawny field pierced by the diamonds of their eyes. Their eyes that are all looking at David.
    I am the lost child, David cries out, don’t be afraid.
    Then the animals come up to David.

    Who’s crying? David asks.
    The Source, say the animals.
    And a very soft sound of weeping floats on the wind from the sea.
    Every evening she weeps. She’s a weeping Source. She comes from a faraway land, Guatemala it’s called, and to get here she crosses two oceans and twenty-two continents on the bottom of the sea.
    And she is 700 million years old, says an old hare, so now she’s had enough and she wishes to die, and when night comes, the Source calls out to death.
    David doesn’t answer.
    That’s why she’s weeping, you see, says a very small panther.
    Gotta put yourself in her place, says a little gray monkey.
    It’s as if she were listening, says David.
    She’s calling, listen . . . It’s the Source, the mother of us all, our great half-breed of the oceans. The great equatorial Source from the North of the earth, says the little white monkey.
    All the animals strain to hear. David does too.
    Who has come to the island? asks the Source in a small voice.
    A child, says the young Asian buffalo.
    Ah, a son of man ...

    That’s right.
    Does this child have hands? the Source asks.
    Yes, all the animals say in unison, at least two hands, it seems ...
    David shows his hands to the animals and to the Source.
    He’s picking up a stone, say the animals.
    He throws it in the air.
    He catches it.
    So then, tonight, he’s the harmonica? asks the Source.
    Tonight he’s the one, say the animals. They are happy for the