Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray Page A

Only long afterward did I seem to remember the space of my room around that letter, the black marble fireplace and the mirror, the very one I was facing. I wondered if I should send you that letter. I wasn’t even sure I had sent it until you mentioned receiving a letter like that from me two years earlier.
    I don’t know if I saw that letter again. You spoke of it often. You had been struck by it. You said it was remarkable, that it said everything about my life and work without ever mentioning them directly. And all this in a kind of indifference, a distraction you’d found horrifying. You also told me that I had mailed it from Taormina. But that it was dated from Paris, five days earlier.
    Years later, that long letter of mine was misplaced. You said you’d put it in a drawer in the large chest in the Trouville apartment and that I was the one, afterward, who must have moved
it. But that day you had no idea what was going on in the house or anywhere else. You were in the parks and the bars of the grand hotels in Mont Canisy, in search of handsome bartenders from Buenos Aires and Santiago hired for the summer. While I was lost in the erotic labyrinth of Blue Eyes, Black Hair . It was only long afterward, when I wrote the story of you and me in that book, that I found the letter in the large chest that it must never have left.

I T WAS two days after I wrote that rediscovered letter that you phoned me, here, at Roches Noires, to say you were coming to visit.
    Your voice on the telephone was slightly altered, as if by fear, or intimidation. I didn’t recognize it. It was . . . I don’t know how to say it – yes, that’s it: it was the voice I had been inventing for your letters just when you called.
    You said, I’m coming.
    I asked you why.
    You said, So we can get to know each other.
    At that time in my life, for someone to come see me like that, from far away, was a terrifying prospect. It’s true, I’ve never spoken about my solitude in that period of my life. The solitude that came after The Ravishment of Lol Stein, Blue Moon, Love, The Vice-Consul . That solitude was the deepest I’ve ever known but also the happiest. I didn’t experience it as
solitude but as luck, a decisive freedom that I’d never had in my life until then. I ate at the Central – always the same thing: steamed prawns and a Mont Blanc. I didn’t go swimming. It was as crowded at the seashore as it was in town. I went in the evening, when my friends Henry Chatelain and Serge Derumier came to visit.
    You told me that after that phone conversation you’d tried calling several days in a row but that I wasn’t home. Later I told you why. I reminded you that I went to Taormina, to the film festival, where I was to see my very dear friend Benoît Jacquot. But that I’d be back soon, back at the seashore, to write my weekly chronicle of summer 1980 for Libération , as you knew.
    Again I asked, Why are you coming?
    You said, To talk to you about Theodora Kats.
    I said I’d abandoned the book about Theodora Kats, which for years I’d thought I could write. That I had hidden it for the eternity of my death in a Jewish place, a tomb I held sacred, the vast, fathomless tomb off-limits to traitors, those living dead of the fundamental betrayal.
    I asked when you’d be here. You said, Tomorrow morning, the bus arrives at ten-thirty. I’ll be at your door by eleven.

    From my bedroom balcony I waited for you. You crossed the courtyard of the Roches Noires hotel.
    I had forgotten the man from India Song .
    You looked like a Breton, tall and thin. To me you looked discreetly elegant; you didn’t know this about yourself, that’s still plain. You walked without looking at the tall residential building. Without glancing toward me. You were carrying a large wooden umbrella, a kind of Chinese parasol made of glazed canvas that very few young people still carried in the