Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

The Women in the Middle of Duras’s The Lover, Part 1

Place d'Alma (site of Princess Diana's crash)

Smack in the middle of The Lover are two character sketches, both of foreign women in Paris during the War.  Their appearance made Chris stop reading, shooting me a glance over the book's edge to ask: What are these doing here?

What are they doing there?  The book never tells, and the characters never appear again.  I find them representatives of a female figure who reappears throughout Duras's work--tragic, bored, found fascinating by others, isolated from her homeland as the last strains of a dying colonialism play out.   Anne-Marie Stretter of The Vice-consul, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, L'Amour, and India Song is the best known Duras character of this type.  In the Indochina of The Lover, this figure is The Lady from Savanna Khet whose lover shot himself in Vinh Long's public square.

The War is the end of Duras's family story in The Lover.  With her brother's death, the others are dead to her.  This is why Paris of World War II figures so much in the story--a story ostensibly about Indochina and her Chinese lover.  And even in this Paris, this haunting--hunted?--female figure is found, caught in a simple character sketch.  As a reader, I live for moments like this one--a portrait taken from so many angles, the figure/person denies me immediate access like a Picasso portrait, yet I can still graze up against something precise :

Marie-Claude Carpenter.  She was American -- from Boston, I seem to remember.  Very pale eyes, grey-blue.  1943.  Marie-Claude Carpenter was fair.  Scarcely faded.  Quite good-looking, I think.  With a brief smile that froze very quickly, disappeared in a flash.  With a voice that suddenly comes back to me, low, slightly grating in the high notes.  She was forty-five, old already, old age itself.   She lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, near the place de l'Alma.  Her apartment was the huge top floor of a block overlooking the Seine.  People went to dinner there in the winter.  Or to lunch in the summer.  The meals were ordered from the best caterers in Paris.  Always passable, almost.  But only just enough, skimpy.  She was never seen anywhere else but at home, never out.  Sometimes there was an expect on Mallarmé there.  And often one, two, or three literary people, they'd come once and never be seen again.  I never found out where she got them from, where she met them, or why she invited them.  I never head anyone else refer to any of them, and I never read or heard of their work.  The meals didn't last very long.  We talked a lot about the war, it was the time of Stalingrad, the end of the winter of '42.  Marie-Claude Carpenter used to listen a lot, ask a lot of questions, but didn't say much, often used to express surprise at how little she knew of what went on, then she'd laugh.  Straightaway after the meal she'd apologize for having to leave so soon, but she had things to do, she said.  She never said what.  When there were enough of us we'd stay on for an hour or two after she left.  She used to say, Stay as long as you like.  No one spoke about her when she wasn't there.  I don't think anyone could have, because no one knew her.  You always went home with the feeling of have experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spent a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers, too, of having lived thorugh a space of time without any consequences and without any cause, human or other.  It was like having crossed a third frontier, having been on a train, having waited in doctors' waiting rooms, hotels, airports.  In summer we had lunch on a big terrace looking over the river, and coffee was served in the garden covering the whole roof.  There was a swimming pool.  But no one went in.  We just sat and looked at Paris.  The empty avenues, the river, the streets.  In the empty streets, catalpas in flower.  Marie-Claude Carpenter.  I looked at her lot, practically all the time, it embarrassed her but I couldn't help it.  I looked at her to try to find out, find out who she was, Marie-Claude Carpenter.  Why she was there rather than somewhere else, why she was from so far away too, from Boston, why she was rich, why no one knew anything about her, not anything, no one, why these seemingly compulsory parties.  And why, why, in her eyes, deep down in the depths of sight, that particle of death?  Marie-Claude Carpenter.  Why did all her dresses have something indefinable in common that made them look as if they didn't quite belong to her, as if they might just as well have been on some other body?  Dresses that were neutral, plain, very light in color, white, like summer in the middle of winter.