Four Novels by Marguerite Duras

Author:Marguerite Duras
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Two

NO ONE HAD TO identify himself. The manager vouched for her guests.

Six policemen rushed through the dining room. Three others walked over to the circular corridors surrounding it. They were going to search the rooms off these corridors. They were just going to search these rooms, the manager said. It wouldn’t take long.

“I was told he’s on the rooftops,” Maria said again.

They heard. She had spoken softly. But they weren’t surprised. Maria left it at that. The confusion in the dining room had reached a new peak. All the waiters came from this village and knew Rodrigo Paestra. The policemen also came from the village. They questioned one another. The waiters stopped serving. The manager intervened. Be careful not to say anything bad about Perez. The waiters went on talking. The manager shouted orders that no one heard.

And then, little by little, everything having been discussed by the waiters, the customers slowly regained their wits and asked for the rest of their meal. The waiters went back to work. They spoke to the customers. All the customers listened carefully to what the waiters were saying, watched the police coming and going, worried, gained or lost hope as to the outcome of the search, some were still smiling at Rodrigo Paestra’s naivete. Some women talked about how horrible it is to be killed at nineteen, and to be left like Rodrigo Paestra’s wife, alone, so alone, that night, in the town hall, a mere child. But all were eating, more or less heartily, in the midst of the confusion, eating the food brought in by the waiters in the midst of anger and confusion. Doors slammed in the corridors, and the policemen crossed the dining room, with Tommy guns, wearing boots and belts, unalterably serious, giving off a nauseating smell of wet leather and sweat. At the sight of them, children always start to cry.

Two of the policemen must have gone to the corridor, on the left of the dining room, where Maria had just been.

Judith, in a state of terror, stopped eating her fruit. There were no longer any policemen in the dining room. The waiter who had been taking care of them came back to their table shaking with anger; he was muttering insults against Perez and paying tribute to Rodrigo Paestra’s lasting patience; and Judith, pieces of orange dripping between her fingers, was listening all the time.

They must have reached the balcony at the end of the circular corridor where Maria had just been. It wasn’t raining any more, and Maria could hear their footsteps fading away in that corridor alongside the dining room, through the noise of streaming rain on the skylight, of which no one in the dining room seemed to be aware now.

Everything was quiet again. The quiet of the sky. The quiet streaming of the rain on the skylight punctuated by the policemen’s steps in that last corridor—once the rooms, the kitchens, the courtyards will have been searched—will they forget him? Some day? No.

If they reached the balcony, then it was certain that Rodrigo Paestra was not on the rooftops.

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