Four Novels by Marguerite Duras Page B

know that I would no longer hope at all. I am waiting. And while I wait I am careful not to kill anything, neither a person nor a dog, because those are serious things and could turn me into a nasty person for the rest of my life. But let’s talk a little more about you: you who travel so much and are always alone.”
    “Well, yes, I travel and I am alone.”
    “Perhaps one day I will travel too.”
    “You can only see one thing at a time and the world is big, and you can only see it for yourself with your own two eyes. It is little enough and yet most people travel.”
    “All the same, however little you can see, I expect it is a good way of passing the time.”
    “The best, I think, or at least it passes for the best. Being in a train absorbs time as much as sleeping. And a ship even more: you just look at the furrows following the ship and time passes by itself.”
    “And yet sometimes time takes so long to pass that you feel almost as if it was something which had been dragged out of your own insides.”
    “Why not take a little trip for eight days or so? For a holiday. You need only want to. Couldn’t you do that? While still waiting of course.”
    “It’s true that waiting seems very long. I joined a political party, not because I thought it would help my personal problems but I thought it might make the time pass more quickly. But even so it is very long.”
    “But that is it exactly! Since 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