Yann Andrea Steiner

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

Book: Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray Read Free Book Online
Authors: Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray
Tags: History, Literary Criticism, Women Authors, Jewish
American accent, another time with a Spanish accent, another time with an accent from nowhere at all, a sneezing, blowing, bellowing accent, and David just has to deal with it. The child laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs. While he is laughing the girl stops telling her story. Then she resumes. She says that one time he comes with a baseball cap that he found in the sewers of New York on his way to hear a rock concert; he doesn’t even know where this concert was or if it was really a concert, that din he heard, but the shark is the way he is, nothing to be done about it. He’s stupid, says the counselor. Stupido.
    The child asks what the shark was doing in New York.
    The young counselor says that the shark works as a cop for shoals of herrings and goes into the ports of New York and Mandalay to spy on fishermen, so that he can then report back to the herrings. It’s not very nice, says the girl, but life is like that sometimes. The child doesn’t really look like he understands.
    Then she says that one day the shark came back to the island and asked David to come, that he wanted to show him the
Sargasso prairie, where there is never any wind or waves, only a long, gentle swell. Never cold. And where sometimes the sea turns milky white from a mother whale whose mammary glands have been injured; where you can bathe in the sea of milk that comes from her mammaries and drink it and roll around in its warmth. That it’s an indescribable happiness.
    Come, David. Come. David.
    And David, finally, comes.
    And the shark cries and David can’t understand why.
    And all the animals of the island encircle David and begin to wash themselves as they do every evening, and also lick David, who is now their child.
    But what the shark wants is to go on the sand to steal David. Nothing to be done about that. We’re here, don’t be afraid, the animals tell David.
    Â 
    And David says to the shark, There you go, it’s starting all over again, nobody can ever tell what you want.
    And the shark weeps and cries out over and over that it’s not his fault.
    And here is David weeping with the shark over the horribly unjust fate handed to sharks.
    And then the light becomes illuminating, the air suddenly
echoes with liquid thunder, and the Great Half-Breed of all the oceans slowly emerges from the Atlantic Reservoir to watch the setting sun.
    Still blind and so beautiful, the Source asks who was crying out in pain, that it’s indecent, that they can’t hear themselves think in the Atlantic Reservoir.
    Â 
    And all the animals say in unison, It’s the shark who wants to eat David. Then David understands and he feels bad for the shark.
    They’re all nuts on this island, the Great Half-Breed says in French.
    Â 
    The child asks if the Source still dances in the evening. The young counselor says yes, every evening until nightfall, and not always staying in cadence, nor always the Guatemalan polka. Sometimes a tango by Carlos d’Alessio. And sometimes the slow, funereal Passacaglia whose author no one here is sure of, probably an old organist from some Germanic country, according to some.
    The child asks how long David has been on the island. The girl says two years, but she isn’t sure either.
    Then she asks him if he wants to know how the story ends.
He shakes his head no, he doesn’t want to. He stops talking. And he cries. He doesn’t want the Source to die, or the shark. Or David? asks the counselor. He says, Or David.
    And then the girl asks the child one more question. She asks what he would like David to do, kill the Source or keep her alive.
    The child stares at the ocean and the sand without seeing them. He pauses, then says, Kill the Source.
    And then the child asks, What about you? She says she doesn’t know. But maybe she’d kill her, too, like him.
    She says they don’t know why they want the Source to die.
    The child says it’s true, they don’t

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