Four Novels. Marguerite Duras

you are already doing something outside your job, and you go to this Dance Hall, since in fact you are doing everything you can to be able to leave your present job one day, then surely you could also make a short journey while waiting for your life to take the turning you want it to?”

      “I did not mean anything more than I said: that sometimes things seem very long.”

      “All you need to do is change your mood just a fraction and then you could take a little voyage for eight days or so.”

      “On Saturday when I come back from dancing I cry sometimes as I told you. How does one make a man desire one? Love cannot be forced. Perhaps it is the mood that you were talking about which makes me so undesirable: a feeling of rancor, and how could that please anyone?”

      “I meant nothing more about your mood than that it prevented you from taking a holiday. I wouldn’t advise you to become like me, a person who finds hope superfluous. But you must see that from the moment you decided it was best to let that old woman live out her days, and that you must do everything they ask of you, so as one day to be free to do something quite different, then it seems to me that as a kind of compensation you could take a short holiday and go away. Why, even I would do it.”

      “I understand, but tell me what would I do with a holiday? I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I would simply be there looking at new things without them giving me any pleasure.”

      “You must learn, even if it is difficult. From now on as a provision against the future you must learn that. Looking at new things is something one learns.”

      “Yes, but tell me again: how could I ever manage to learn how to enjoy myself in the present when I am worn out with waiting for the future? I wouldn’t have the patience to look at anything new.”

      “It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. It wasn’t very important.”

      “And yet if you only knew, I would so much like to be able to look at new things.”

      “Tell me, when a man asks you to dance with him, do you immediately think he might marry you?”

      “Yes. You see I’m too practical. All my troubles come from that. But how could I be anything else? It seems to me that I could never love anyone before I had some freedom and that can only come to me through a man.”

      “And another question: if a man doesn’t ask you to dance do you still think he might marry you?”

      “I think less then because I am at the Dance. When I dance I get carried away by the movement and the excitement and at those moments I think a man might most easily forget who I am, and even if he did find out he would mind it less under those circumstances than at any other time. I dance well. In fact I dance very well and when I am dancing I feel quite different from my usual self. Ah, sometimes I don’t know what to do any more.”

      “But do you think about it while you are at the Dance Hall?”

      “No. There I think of nothing. I think before or afterwards. There it is as if I were asleep.”

      “Everything happens, believe me. We think that nothing will ever happen but it does. There is not a man among all the millions who exist, not a single one, who hasn’t known the things you are waiting for.”

      “I am afraid you don’t really understand what it is I am waiting for.”

      “I am talking, you see, not only of the things you know you want but also of the things you want without knowing. Of something less immediate, something of which you are still unaware.”

      “Yes, I follow what you are saying. And it is true that there are things I don’t know of now. But all the same I would so like to know how those things happen.”

      “They happen like anything else.”

      “Just as I know I am waiting?”

      “Exactly. It is difficult to talk to you of things you know so little. I think that those things either come about suddenly, all at once, or else so slowly that one scarcely notices them. And when they have happened and are there they don’t seem at all surprising: it feels as if they had always been there. One day you will wake up and there it will all be. And it will be the same for the gas stove: you will wake up one day and not even be able to explain how it came to be there.”

      “But what about you? You who are always traveling and who seem, if I have understood you, to attach so little importance to events.”