The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras Page A

such things.
    She shuts her eyes.
    Says she won't say it again.
    She asks if they talk about it. You say no.
    She asks what they do talk about. You say they talk about everything else. Everything except that.
    She laughs and goes back to sleep.
    Sometimes you pace the room, around the bed or along the walls by the sea.
    Sometimes you weep.
    Sometimes you go out on the terrace in the growing cold.
    You don't know what's in the sleep of the girl on the bed.
    You'd like to start from that body and get back to the bodies of others, to your own, to get back to yourself. And yet it's be- cause you must do this that you weep.
     
     
    And she, in the room, sleeps on. Sleeps, and you don't wake her. As her sleep goes on, sorrow grows in the room. You sleep, once, on the floor at the foot of her bed.
    She goes on sleeping, evenly. So deeply, she sometimes smiles. She wakes only if you touch her body, the breasts, the eyes. Sometimes she wakes for no reason, except to ask if the noise is the wind or high tide.
    She wakes. She looks at vou. She says: The malady's getting more and more of a hold on you. It's reached your eyes, your voice.
    You ask: What malady?
    She says she can't say, yet.
    Night after night you enter the dark of her sex, almost unwittingly take that blind way. Sometimes you stay there; sleep there, inside her, all night long, so as to be ready if ever, through some involuntary movement on her part or yours, you should feel like taking her again, filling her again, taking pleasure in her again. But only with a pleasure, as always, blinded by tears.
     
     
    She'd always be ready, willing or no. That's just what you'll never know. She's more mysterious than any other external thing you've ever known.
    Nor will you, or anyone else, ever know how she sees, how she thinks, either of the world or of you, of your body or your mind, or of the malady she says you suffer from. She doesn't know, herself. She couldn't tell you. You couldn't find out anything about it from her.
     
    You'd never know anything, neither you nor anyone else, about what she thinks of you or of this affair. However many ages may bury both your forgotten existences, no one will ever know. She is incapable of knowing.
    Because you know nothing about her you'd say she knows nothing about you. You'd leave it at that.
    She'd have been tall. With a long body made in a single sweep, at a single stroke, as if by God Himself, with the unalterable perfection of individuality.
    For she'd have been unlike anyone else.
    The body's completely defenseless, smooth from face to feet. It invites strangulation, rape, ill usage, insult, shouts of hatred, the unleashing of deadly and unmitigated passions.
    You look at her.
    She's very slim, almost frail. Her legs have a beauty distinct from that of the body. They don't really belong to the rest of the body.
    You say: You must be very beautiful.
    She says: I'm here right in front of you. Look for yourself.
    You say: I can't see anything.
    She says: Try. It's all part of the bargain.
    You take hold of the body and look at its different areas. You turn it round, keep turning it round. Look at it, keep looking at it.
    Then you give up.
    Give up. Stop touching it.
    Until that night you hadn't realized how ignorant one might be of what the eyes see, the hands and the body touch. Now you find out.
    You say: I can't see anything.
    She doesn't answer.
    She's asleep.
     
     
    You wake her up. Ask her if she's a prostitute. She shakes her head.
    You ask her why she accepted the deal and the paid nights.
    She answers in a voice still drowsy, almost inaudible: Because as soon as you spoke to me I saw you were suffering from the malady of death. For the first few days I couldn't put a name to it. Then I could.
    You ask her to say the words again. She does. Repeats them: The malady of death.
    You ask her how she knows. She says she just does. Says one knows without knowing how.
    You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: