Only two people were directly involved in The Square; two couples, essentially, in Moderato Cantabile. In Ten-thirty on a Summer Night, two groups of three are involved. Paestra, his wife and her lover; Maria, her husband Pierre, and Claire. And in both cases, the theme is murder. Paestra has already killed the lovers when the novel begins; at the end, Maria knows the love she and Pierre had shared is dead. Paestra’s lonely vigil on the rooftops deflects, as it were, Maria’s lonely vigil on the balcony; as he waits for his inevitable capture and death at dawn, so she waits for the inevitable moment of consummation of desire for which Pierre and Claire are waiting. At ten-thirty on that summer night, the three vigils come together in Maria’s perception. She sees Paestra’s figure dimly outlined against the chimney tops as the silhouettes of Pierre and Claire, entwined, appear on the balcony over her head. Her bid to save Paestra is a “barrage” against her fate, a useless, heroic struggle against fate. Here, more visibly than in Moderato Cantabile, in the baroque setting evoked, outer and inner events fuse, merge, and develop with a poetic inevitability. Death, love, desire, and violence mold the most banal of events: a man’s infidelity to his wife. Extraordinarily moving and pure is the account of Maria’s suffering, free from personal animosity with regard to Claire, humble in its recognition of the overwhelming authority of sexual desire. That, in time, all lovers are bound to live emotionally the modulations of suspense, is an abstract and commonplace statement. The story of Maria’s night of anguish and revelation is told in an atmosphere of intoxication and nightmare, visually reconstructed as in a film, each moment sharply etched in darkness or light, without any recourse to explanation, extraneous comment, or moral judgment. More markedly than in Moderato Cantabile, the intensely subjective yet quasi-impersonal vision of intoxication shapes the strange sequence of events that fills Maria’s night.
Mr. Andesmas (1962), like Ten-thirty on a Summer Night, is a story of suspense, but a suspense that evolves toward a disengagement from the passion of living—and thereby from time—that human relationships reveal. Thematically, the narrative is built on two contrasting moods and tempos: the gay mood of the village dance with its leitmotiv “When the lilac blooms my love . . .” the empty hours of solitary waiting on the terrace of the house above, punctuated by three encounters: the passage of a dog; the arrival of a child “not like the others” then the arrival of her mother, whose fate, like Valérie’s—the daughter Mr. Andesmas cherishes, with the singleness of mind typical of old age—is being sealed that afternoon. “There are moments here,” the epigraph says, “when the light is absolute, accentuating everything, and at the same precise, relentlessly shining on one object.” The object, Valérie, is in this case absent, except as she appears in the mind of others. Her father and Michel Arc’s wife—the woman abandoned for her sake—both vicariously live two distinct moments of Valérie’s fate, and simultaneously suffer their own. Like Anne and Maria, Mr. Andesmas and Michel Arc’s wife are dispossessed; they are like the child whose hands let go of her possessions, then pick them up again. But in this instance, the story being recounted indirectly, it is suggested by Mr. Andesmas himself, and differs from the others. He will not, like the child, like Michel Arc’s wife, close his hands again over some other treasure. Mr. Andesmas, in the slow hours of his solitude, passes into the realm of extreme old age and in part, lives his own removal from a duration inwardly apprehended; he in fact lives a form of his own death. The thematic pattern of the story, its clarity and serenity, offer a striking contrast to the tormented, baroque design of the two preceding works.
Seen in relation to one another, these four short novels of Marguerite Duras, published over a seven-year period, offer a remarkable range and variety in mood and situation. They share, too, a unique, elusive, poetic quality, the hallmark of Duras’s originality. All the characters she describes are, in a sense, living vicariously events which they both retell and relive in another key; someone else’s story, always relived in different modes, yet always the same. Desire and love, as in all romances, well up within them and fatally encounter the hard boundaries of a reality that inevitably circumscribes, limits, modifies, and destroys. As storyteller, within the limitations she sets herself, Marguerite Duras establishes, in terms of form and style an ever fluid interchange and relationship between the inner aspiration and the outer bounds, between the self and the desired other. Each story suggests a mode of being “in love,” and culminates in a recognition of the nature of human bonds. This recognition emerges from the depths of experiences suffered, and fully accepted by the central characters, possessed and esthetically dominated by the writer.
THE SQUARE
TRANSLATED BY
SONIA PITT-RIVERS & IRINA MORDUCH
One
THE CHILD CAME OVER quietly from the far side of the Square and stood behind the girl.
“I’m hungry,” he announced.
The man took this as an opportunity to start a conversation.
“I suppose it is about tea-time?”
The girl was not disconcerted: on the contrary she turned and smiled at him.
“Yes, it must be nearly half past four, when he usually has his tea.”
She took two sandwiches from a bag beside her on the bench and handed them to the child, then skillfully knotted a bib around his neck.
“He’s a nice child,” said the man.
The girl shook her head as if in denial.
“He’s not mine,” she remarked.
The child moved off with his sandwiches. It was afternoon and the Park was full of children: big ones playing marbles and hide-and-seek, small ones playing in the sand pits, while smaller ones still sat patiently waiting in their prams for the time when they would join the others.
“Although,” the girl continued, “he could be mine and, indeed, is often taken for mine. But the fact is he doesn’t belong to me.”
“I see,” said the man. “I have no children either.”
“Sometimes it seems strange, don’t you think, there should be so many children, that they are everywhere one goes and yet none of them are one’s own?”
“I suppose so, yes, when you come to think of it. But then, as you said, there are so many already.”
“But does that make any difference?”
“I should have thought that if you are fond of them anyway, if you enjoy just watching them, it matters less.”
“But couldn’t the opposite also be true?”
“Probably. I expect it depends on one’s nature: I think that some people are quite happy with the children who are already there, and I believe I am one of them. I have seen so many children and I could have had children of my own and yet I manage to be quite satisfied with the others.”
“Have you really seen so many?”
“Yes. You see, I travel.”
“I see,” the girl said in a friendly manner.
“I travel all the time, except just now of course when I’m resting.”
“Parks are good places to rest in, particularly at this time of year. I like them too. It’s nice being out of doors.”
“They cost nothing, they’re always gay because of the children and then if you don’t know many people there’s always the chance of starting a conversation.”
“That’s