The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras

Author:Marguerite Duras [Duras, Marguerite]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Google: BbocAQAAIAAJ
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 1986-09-14T14:00:00+00:00

4

THE FIRST TIME SUZANNE TOOK A WALK IN THE HAUT-QUARTIER, therefore, was to a certain extent the result of Carmen’s advice.

She had never imagined that there would come a day which would be as important to her life as this one, when alone and for the first time, at the age of seventeen, she set out to explore a great Colonial city. She did not know that a rigid order reigned there and that the categories of the inhabitants were so differentiated that you were lost if you could not manage to be classified in one of them.

Suzanne tried to walk in a natural way. It was five o’clock. It was still hot, but already the torpor of the afternoon was over. The streets, little by little, were filling with white people looking rested from their siestas and their evening shower baths. People looked at her. They turned to look, they smiled. No young white girl of her age ever walked alone in the streets of the fashionable district. The young girls you met there passed in groups, dressed in sports clothes. Some of them had tennis rackets under their arms. They turned to look. They smiled. When they turned, they smiled. “Where does that poor creature come from? How did she happen to stray here?” Even women were rarely encountered alone. They, too, walked in groups. Suzanne passed them. They were surrounded with the smell of perfume and of expensive cigarettes, the fresh odors of money. She thought all the women were beautiful, and their summery elegance seemed to flaunt itself at everything unlike them. Especially she was impressed by the way they walked. They walked like queens, and they talked, laughed, moved absolutely in accord with the general movement, which was that of an extraordinarily easy way of life.

Insensibly a feeling had come over her from the very moment she had entered the avenue which went in a direct line from the trolley tracks up to the center of the Haut-Quartier. It became more pronounced, augmenting until, by the time she had reached the center of the fashionable district, it was an unpardonable reality: she was ridiculous and everyone saw it. Carmen had been wrong. Not everyone could walk in these streets, on these sidewalks, among these lordlings and these children of kings. It was not for everyone to move about with the same ease. All these people seemed to be going to a specific place; they were in a familiar setting and among people like themselves. But she—she had no place to go, there was no one like her, nor had there ever been, not on this stage.

She tried to think of something else.

They still noticed her.

The more they looked at her the more she was convinced that she was something scandalous, an object of complete ugliness and stupidity. It had been enough for one person to notice her, the thing spread like wildfire. Everyone she passed, now, seemed to be forewarned, the entire city was forewarned

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