My mother had instilled in us an almost sacred feeling about money. Without it, one was miserable.”
For this reason, when Marguerite Duras met Léo at the age of 15, she did not notice how “ugly” he was or his “pockmarked” face. She also didn’t care about her pathological jealousy. She tried to ignore that he was a “ridiculous” guy and even ignored his origin, because Léo was indigenous and the relationship between a white French woman and an Annamite man was frowned upon in the Indochina of the 1920s.
Marguerite was dazzled by Léo because “he was extraordinarily rich.” “Every time I saw him I managed to get him to talk about his fortune. “He had more or less fifty million in real estate scattered throughout Conchinchina, he was an only child and had a considerable amount of money.”
From that first love relationship emerged the novel that brought Duras worldwide fame and earned him the Goncourt Prize, The Lover (1984). Now, fiction is detached from reality because the Cuadernos de la guerra and other texts (Tusquets) that Duras wrote between 1943 and 1949 have come to light in Spanish, among which the autobiographical writings about childhood and youth in Indochina stand out, the passage through the resistance during the Nazi occupation of France or the outlines of other novels such as Pain (1985) or A Dam Against the Pacific (1950).
They are texts that Duras bequeathed in 1995 before his death to the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine and that Tusquets now publishes in Spanish. Writings of high literary quality where Duras remembers that mother “who used to not tolerate me, although she loved me with a deep love.” That mother who is part of Duras’ novels. A woman quite deranged by widowhood, financial ruin and her illness: “Mom hit me frequently and it was generally because her ‘nerves were loose’, she couldn’t do anything else.”
Much worse was the mistreatment of his older brother, who “was studying in France and returned to Indochina when I was 14 years old. By virtue of a strange emulation, he also acquired the habit of hitting me. “There was always someone hitting me.” But also, “with my brother the insults and rudeness came home. His usual insults, in addition to being worms, were ‘you piece of pig’, ‘you’re not even worth being spat on’, ‘garbage’ and ‘filthy whore’, which they gave me, I don’t know why, right in my heart.” .
The Duras family does not fare too well in these autobiographical texts, in which the author does not have mercy on herself either: “In addition to lacking charm and being dressed in a way whose ridiculousness is difficult to express, I was not distinguished by my beauty. She was short, rather poorly made and skinny; She was riddled with freckles, weighed down by two red braids that reached mid-thigh, and sunburned. She (…) she had a look that my mother described as ‘poisonous.’”
Duras left Indochina in 1931 and settled in France. In 1939, she married Robert Antelme. Both joined the Resistance during World War II. The Nazis captured Robert who was imprisoned in a concentration camp in June 1944. When the camps were liberated, Marguerite was in Paris, she had already begun to become intimate with Dionys Mascolo, who would become her lover. But in April 1945 the writer was awaiting the possible return of her husband or perhaps the arrival of the news of his death.
The second of the notebooks that Tusquets is now publishing, titled Presses du XX Siècle, contains a text about those days of uncertainty where the author records her anxiety, her sleeplessness, the painful wait for the man she loved. “Red sun over Paris. Six years of war end. Big deal, big story, it will be talked about for twenty years. Nazi Germany has been crushed. The executioners crushed. Him too, in the gutter. I am broke. I have something broken. Dry as dry sand.”
Marguerite felt at times that Robert was going to return. Others imagined him “dead for fifteen days.” For fifteen nights, fifteen days, abandoned in a ditch, with the soles of his feet in the air. On him, the rain, the sun, the dust of victorious armies. For fifteen days. His open hands. Each of his hands, dearer than my life. Known to me. Known this way only by me.”
“It is not an ordinary wait,” Duras wrote in the intimate pages of his private notebooks. The author felt that she was also going to die with that husband whom she imagined lifeless in a ditch: “I close my eyes. If he came back we would go to the sea. It’s what I would like the most. I think I’m going to die anyway. If he comes back I will die too. If they rang the doorbell: ‘Who is it?’ ‘It’s me, Robert.’ “The only thing I could do would be open it and then die.”
That unusual wait and the reflections that Duras wrote down those days in her notebook were the genesis of another of the writer’s most notable novels, El dolor, which was published in 1985. A shocking and stark book with a happy ending. Robert returned from Nazi hell.
