Marguerite Duras
I remember the face of the young girl on the cover of Duras’s The Lover, and I remember liking that girl with Greta Garbo eyebrows. I didn’t know then it was the author in her youth. I was in the Librería Gandhi in Chimalistac, Elena Poniatowska’s neighborhood in Mexico City, before an appointment with Elena. To be more exact, it was Norma Alarcón who had an appointment with Elena; I was tagging along. So this was when I first met the great Elena and this was also when I first met Marguerite. I would later read Duras’s other books that retell the same story as in The Lover, books written before and after. And like Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, it would aim to tell again a story from youth, but with revisions, as if with age we come closer to the bull’s-eye of being admitted the truth. The science writer Jonah Lehrer claims we never revisit a memory without altering it. If this is true, then perhaps all memory is a chance at storytelling, and every story brings us closer to revealing ourselves to ourselves. I promise to revisit what goes unsaid here in my next collection. The critic and Washington Post Book World editor Marie Arana prompted my writing this for a February 2005 publication. I felt like I’d been waiting forever to tell this story; it leapt like a dolphin from my heart to the page.
I was thirty the summer I met Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. This was in Mexico City, 1985. I was supposed to be finishing my book of poetry. The truth, I was fleeing the man who had created and then destroyed me. In a few months Mexico City would be destroyed too, by earthquake. In a few years, Emiliano Zapata* would rise from the dead in Chiapas. But this was before. Without knowing what lay ahead I boarded a bus south to San Cristóbal and disappeared into the fury of jungle and fury of story that is Duras’s novel.
The story begins in a second-class bus just like the one I was riding that day, but in colonial French Vietnam. A young girl crosses a river, and then crosses color and class lines in love. I’d done much the same in my disastrous affair.
I read through several landscapes, and finally on the perilous mountain road beyond Tuxtla Gutiérrez I found myself at the book’s finale, when the lover, unlike my lover, declares his love for her. After all and everything. After their lives were almost over. He still loved her, he would always love her, he said.
Then it was as if I’d been poured back into the shell of my body. And I became aware of the heat of the bus seat sticking to my back and thighs, and the hoarse grinding of the bus gears as it lurched us forward, and the snoring of my bus companions, and the drowsy jungle scent.
To say I was overwhelmed at that moment wouldn’t be precise. At that moment with events quivering before and after me, and me in that nowhere and everywhere called my life, I was, as one would say in Spanish, “emotioned.” I had read the novel in Spanish, the language of my lover, the language of my father. And now the last sentence, in Spanish, reverberated inside me like a live thing. I wanted to slide the dusty bus windows down and shout in that language to all the savage beauty of the world—“He said he would love her until death, did you hear? ¡Hasta la muerte!”
