Marguerite Duras

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

Ho Chi Minh City

March 1997

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, “I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight.

I’m fifteen and a half, there are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just the one season, hot, monotonous, we’re in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.

I’m at a state boarding school in Saigon. I eat and sleep there, but I go to classes at the French high school. My mother is a teacher and wants her girl to have a secondary education. “You have to go to high school.” What was enough for her is not enough for her daughter. High school and then a good degree in mathematics. That was what had been dinned into me ever since I started school. It never crossed my mind I might escape the mathematics degree, I was glad to give her that hope.

I’ve often been told it was because of spending all one’s childhood in too strong a sun. But I’ve never believed it. I’ve also been told it was because being poor made us brood. But no, that wasn’t it. Children like little old men because of chronic hunger, yes. But us, no, we weren’t hungry. We were white children, we were ashamed, we sold our furniture, but we weren’t hungry, we had a houseboy and we ate. Sometimes, admittedly, we ate garbage—storks, baby crocodiles—but the garbage was cooked and served by a houseboy, and sometimes we refused it, too, we indulged in the luxury of declining to eat. No, something occurred when I was eighteen to make this face happen. It must have been at night. I was afraid of myself, afraid of God. In the daylight I was less afraid, and death seemed less important. But it haunted me all the time. I wanted to kill—my elder brother, I wanted to kill him, to get the better of him for once, just once, and see him die.

Now I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me. I knew it the same as other people, but, strangely, in advance. Just as the space existed in me for desire. At the age of fifteen I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face. Even my mother must have seen it. My brothers did. That was how everything started for me—with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings around the eyes, in advance of time and experience.

I’m fifteen and a half. Crossing the river.

I’m wearing a dress of real silk, but it’s threadbare, almost transparent. It used to belong to my mother. One day she decided the color was too light for her and she gave it to me. It’s a sleeveless dress with a very low neck. It’s the sepia color real silk takes on with wear. It’s a dress I remember. I think it suits me. I’m wearing a leather belt with it, perhaps a belt belonging to one of my brothers. I can’t remember the shoes I used to wear in those days, only certain dresses. Most of the time I wore canvas sandals, no stockings. I’m speaking of the time before the high school in Saigon. Since then, of course, I’ve always worn shoes. This particular day I must be wearing the famous pair of gold lamé high heels. I can’t see any others I could have been wearing, so I’m wearing them. Bargains, final reductions bought for me by my mother.

It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it’s the fact that she’s wearing a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon.

The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat.

On the ferry, look, I’ve still got my hair. Fifteen and a half. I’m using make-up already. I use Crème Tokalon, and try to camouflage the freckles on my cheeks, under the eyes. On top of the Crème Tokalon I put natural-color powder—Houbigant. The powder is my mother’s, she wears it to go to government receptions. That day I’ve got lipstick on too, dark red, cherry, as the fashion was then. I don’t know where I got that, perhaps Hélène Lagonelle stole it for me from her mother, I forget. I’m not wearing perfume. My mother makes do with Palmolive and eau de Cologne.

On the ferry, beside the bus, there’s a big black limousine with a chauffeur in white cotton livery. Yes, it’s the big funereal car that’s in my books. It’s a Morris Léon-Bollée. The black Lancia at the French embassy in Calcutta hasn’t yet made its entrance on the literary scene.

Between drivers and employers there are still sliding glass panels. There are still fold-down seats. A car is still as big as a bedroom.

Inside the limousine there’s a very elegant man looking at me. He’s not a white man. He’s wearing European clothes—the light tussore suit of the Saigon bankers. He’s looking at me. I’m used to people looking at me. People do look at white women in the colonies; at twelve-year-old white girls too. For the past three years white men, too, have been looking at me in the streets, and my mother’s men friends have been kindly asking me to have tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis at the Sporting Club.