Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray

B EFORE anything else, at the beginning of the story told here, there was a screening of India Song at an art cinema in the city where you lived. After the film there was a panel discussion in which you participated. Then after the panel we went to a bar with some young graduate students, one of whom was you. It was you who reminded me later, much later, about that bar, a fairly elegant, attractive place, and about the two whiskeys I had that evening. I had no recollection of those whiskeys, nor of you, nor of the other young grad students, nor of the bar. I recalled, or so I thought, that you had walked me to the parking lot where I’d left my car. I still had that Renault 16, which I loved and still drove fast back then, even after the health problems related to alcohol. You asked me if I had lovers. I said, Not anymore, which was true. You asked how fast I drove at night. I said ninety, like everyone else with an R16. That it was wonderful.

    It was after that evening that you began writing me letters. Many letters. Sometimes one a day. They were very short letters, more like notes; they were, yes, like cries for help sent from an unbearable, deathly place, a kind of desert. The beauty of those cries was unmistakable.
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    I didn’t answer.
    I kept all the letters.
    At the tops of the pages were the names of the places where they’d been written and the time or the weather: Sunny or Rainy. Or Cold. Or: Alone.
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    And then once, a long time went by with no word at all. Perhaps a month, I don’t remember how long it lasted.
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    And so in my turn, in the void left by you, by that absence of letters, of cries for help, I wrote to find out why you had stopped writing. Why so suddenly. Why you had stopped writing as if violently prevented from it, as if by death.
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    I wrote you this letter:
    Yann Andréa, this summer I met someone you know, Jean-Pierre Ceton. We spoke about you. I never would have guessed
you knew each other. And then there was your note under my door in Paris after Navire Night . I tried to call you, but I couldn’t find your phone number. And then there was your letter from January – I was in the hospital again, sick again from who knows what; they said I’d been poisoned by some new medication, so-called antidepressants. Always the same old song. It was nothing, my heart was fine. I wasn’t even sad. I had reached the end of something, that’s all. I started drinking again, yes, over the winter, in the evening. For years I’d been telling my friends not to visit on weekends; I lived alone in that house in Neauphle that could easily have held ten people. Alone in fourteen rooms. You get used to the echoes. That’s all. And then one time I wrote you to say that I’d just finished the film called Her Name Venus in Deserted Calcutta . I don’t remember exactly what I told you, probably that I loved it the way I love all my films. You didn’t answer that letter. And then there were the poems you sent me, some of which struck me as very beautiful, others less so, and I didn’t know quite how to tell you that. That’s it. Yes, that’s it. That your letters were your poems. Your letters are beautiful, the most beautiful I’ve ever read, so beautiful they hurt. I wanted to talk to you today. I’m still recuperating but I’m writing. I’m working. I think the second Aurelia Steiner was written for you.

    That letter, I felt, didn’t require an answer either. I sent news. I recall a sorrowful, discomposed letter. I was discouraged by some upset that had occurred in my life, some new, recent, unexpected solitude. For a long time I knew almost nothing of that letter. I wasn’t even sure I’d written it that summer, the one when you suddenly appeared in my life. Nor from which place in my life I’d written it. I didn’t believe it was from this place near the sea but neither could I imagine any other place.