Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray Page B

eighties. You also had a very small piece of luggage, a black canvas bag.
    You crossed the courtyard, skirting the hedge. You cut over in the direction of the sea and disappeared into the vestibule of Roches Noires without once having raised your eyes to me.
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    It was eleven in the morning, then, early in the month of July.
    The year was 1980. The summer of wind and rain. The summer of Gdansk. Of the weeping child. Of the young camp counselor. The summer of our story. Of the story told here, that first summer of 1980. The story of the very young Yann Andréa Steiner and the woman who wrote books and who was old and alone like him that summer, a summer vast as all Europe.
    I had told you how to find my apartment, which floor, which hallway, which door.

    You never returned to the city of Caen. It was July ’80. Twelve years ago. You are still here in this apartment, here for the six months of vacation I’ve taken annually since that illness that dragged on for two years. That coma of horror. A few days before they were to “pull the plug,” as the doctors in my ward had unanimously decided, I opened my eyes. I looked around: people, the room. They were all there (so I’ve been told); I looked at those people standing there in their white smocks, who smiled at me in a kind of madness, a mad and silent happiness. I didn’t recognize their faces but I knew these were the shapes of human beings – not of walls or instruments, but of people with eyes to see. And then I closed my eyes again. Only to open them later on, to see the same people, with, I’ve been told, an amused look on my face.
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    There was a pause.
    And then there were knocks at the door, and then your voice: It’s me, it’s Yann. I didn’t answer. The knocks were very very soft, as if everyone around you were sleeping in that residential hotel and that city, on the beach and on the sea and in every hotel room on a summer’s morning near the seashore.
    Still I didn’t open immediately. I waited a bit longer. You said again, It’s me, Yann. Just as gently, calmly. I waited some more. I made no sound. For ten years I had been living in a
very strict, almost monastic solitude, with Anne-Marie Stretter and the Vice-Consul of France in Lahore and she, the Queen of the Ganges, the beggar of the Tea Road, the queen of my childhood.
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    I opened up.
    One never knows a story before it’s written. Before it has suffered the fading of the circumstances that led the author to write it. And especially before it has suffered, in the book, the mutilation of its past, its body, of your face, your voice, and it becomes irrevocable, fated. And I also mean that in the book it has become external, been carried away, separated from its author for all eternity, lost to him.
    And then the door closed on you and me. On this new body, tall and thin.
    And then there was the voice. The incredibly gentle voice. Distant. Regal. It was the voice of your letter, the voice of my life.
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    We spoke for hours.
    Always about books we spoke. Always, for hours. You mentioned Roland Barthes. I reminded you how I felt about him. I said I would give all of Roland Barthes’s books for my tea roads
in the Burmese forests, the red sun, and the dead children of the beggar women along the Ganges. You already knew this. I also said that I could never bring myself to read him, that for me Roland Barthes was false writing and that falseness was what had killed him. Later I told you that Roland Barthes, one day, in my home, had kindly advised me to “return” to the “so simple and so charming” style of my early novels, like The Sea Wall , The Little Horses of Tarquinia , and The Sailor from Gibraltar . I laughed. You said we would never speak of him again. And I divined that your curiosity about that brilliant author was sated.
    We also spoke, as one always does, of that eminent fact, writing. Of books and more