The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras

Author:Marguerite Duras
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

I think it was on the second night that it happened. I hadn’t realized the night before. I hadn’t noticed that when the door of the mirrored armoire was ajar, the entire bed was reflected in it. I was lying down when I caught sight of myself lying down in the mirrored armoire. I looked at myself. The face that I saw was smiling in a way that was both inviting and timid. In its eyes, two puddles of shadow were dancing and its mouth was firmly closed. I didn’t recognize myself. I got up and shut the door of the armoire. Then, even though it was closed, I felt as though the mirror still contained within its thickness an unknown character, at once fraternal and full of hatred, who was silently contesting my identity. I didn’t know anymore which was more closely related to me, this character or my body lying down here, familiar. Who was I, whom had I taken myself for until now? Even my name did not reassure me. I couldn’t locate myself in the image I had just come upon. I floated around her, so close, but there existed between us something like the impossibility of uniting. I found myself attached to her by a faint memory, a thread that could snap from one second to the next, and then I would plunge into madness.

What’s more, once the girl in the mirror vanished from my eyes, the entire bedroom seemed to be populated by an endless circle of companions just like her. I sensed them calling to me from all sides. Around me a silent phantasmagoria had been unleashed. With a wild quickness—I didn’t dare look, but I sensed them—a crowd of forms must have appeared, tried me on, disappeared straightaway, as though obliterated by not fitting me. I needed to find a way to grab hold of one, not just anyone, one alone, the one I had been accustomed to up to that point, whose arms had until now allowed me to eat, her legs to walk, the lower half of her face to smile. But she was mixed into the others. She disappeared, reappeared, taunting me. I, on the other hand, still existed somewhere. But it was impossible for me to make the necessary effort to find myself again. No matter how many times I remembered the recent events in Les Bugues, it was another who had lived them, who had replaced me forever, waiting for tonight. And if I didn’t want to go mad, I had to find her again, she who had lived them, my sister, and embrace her. Les Bugues became distorted in spurts of successive images, cold, foreign. I didn’t recognize them anymore. I didn’t remember them anymore. I, that night, reduced to myself alone, had other memories. And yet even those, huddled in the dark, only tried to creep into my memory, to make themselves seen, to breathe for a moment. Memories from before me, from before my memories.

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