The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras

 
     
    You wouldn't have known her, you'd have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears.
     
    *
     
    You may have paid her.
    May have said: I want you to come every night for a few days.
    She'd have given you a long look and said in that case it'd be expensive.
    And then she says: What is it you want?
    You say you want to try, try it, try to know, to get used to that body, those breasts, that scent. To beauty, to the risk of having children implicit in that body, to that hairless unmuscular body, that face, that naked skin, to the identity between that skin and the life it contains.
    You say you want to try, for several days perhaps.
    Perhaps for several weeks.
    Perhaps even for your whole life.
    Try what? she asks.
    Loving, you answer.
    She asks: Yes, but why?
    You say so as to sleep with your sex at rest, somewhere unknown.
    You say you want to try, to weep there, in that particular place.
    She smiles and says: Do you want me, too?
    You say: Yes. I don't know that yet and I want to penetrate there too, and with my usual force. They say it offers more resistance, it's smooth but it offers more resistance than emptiness does.
    She says she has no opinion on the subject. How should she know?
    She asks: What other conditions?
    You say she mustn't speak, like the women of her ancestors, must yield completely to you and to your will, be entirely submissive like peasant women in the barns after the harvest when they're exhausted and let the men come to them while they're asleep. So that you may gradually get used to that shape molding itself to yours, at your mercy as nuns are at God's. And also so that little by little, as day dawns, you may be less afraid of not knowing where to put your body or at what emptiness to aim your love.
    She looks at you. Then stops looking at you and looks at something else. Then answers.
    She says in that case it'll be even more expensive. She tells you how much.
    You accept.
    Every day she'd come. Every day she comes.
    The first day she strips and lies down where you tell her to on the bed.
    You watch her go to sleep. She doesn't speak. Just goes to sleep. All night you watch her.
    She'd come at night. She comes at night.
    All night you watch her. For two nights you watch her.
    For two nights she scarcely speaks.
    Then one night she does. She speaks.
    She asks if she's managing to make your body less lonely. You say you can't really understand the word as applied to you. That you can't distinguish between thinking you're lonely and actually becoming lonely. As with you, you add.
    And then once in the middle of the night she asks: What time of year is it?
    You say: Not yet winter. Autumn still.
    And she asks: What's that sound?
    You say: The sea.
    She asks: Where?
    You say: There beyond that wall.
    She goes back to sleep.
    Young. She'd be young. In her clothes and hair there'd be a clinging smell, you'd try to identify it, and in the end your experience would enable you to do so. You'd say: A smell of heliotrope and citron. She answers: Whatever you say.
    One evening you do it, as arranged, you sleep with your face between her parted legs, up against her sex, already in the moistness of her body, where she opens. She offers no resistance.
     
     
    Another evening you inadvertently give her pleasure and she cries out.
    You tell her not to. She says she won't anymore.
    She doesn't.
    No woman will ever cry out because of you now.
    Perhaps you get from her a pleasure you've never known before. I don't know. Nor do I know if you hear the low, distant murmur of her pleasure through her breathing, through the faint rattle going back and forth between her mouth and the outside air. I don't think so.
    She opens her eyes and says: What joy.
    You put your hand over her mouth to silence her. Tell her one doesn't say