Writing by Duras Marguerite

Author:Duras, Marguerite [Duras, Marguerite]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2014-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

I saw the sky and sunlight streaming through the trees; mutilated, black trees, also killed in the fields. I saw that the trees were still black. And then there was also the village school. And I heard children singing “I’ll never forget you.” For you. Alone. At the origin of all this there was now that someone, and that child, my child, and my little brother, and someone else, the English child. The same. Death baptizes as well.

Here, we are far removed from identity. He’s a corpse, a twenty-year-old corpse who will go on to the end of time. That’s all. His name is no longer worth telling: he was a child.

That’s all we need to know.

We can remain here, at this particular point in the life of a twenty-year-old child, the last man to die in the war.

Any death is still Death. Any child of twenty is a child of twenty.

It’s not entirely the death of just anyone. It remains the death of a child.

Anyone’s death is Death in its entirety. Anyone is everyone. And this anyone can take the horrible form of an ongoing childhood. They know these things in villages; the peasants taught them to me with the brutality of an event that became that event, of a child of twenty killed in a war at which he was playing.

Perhaps that is also why he remained intact, the young English corpse; why he remained stuck in that terrible, horrible age, the age of twenty.

I became friendly with the people of the village, especially the old woman who looks after the church.

The dead trees are there, crazy, frozen in their fixed chaos; the wind wants no part of them. They are complete, martyred, black with the dark blood of trees killed by fire.

He became sacred for me—me, the passer-by—he, the young Englishman who died at twenty. Each time I wept for him.

And then I regretted not having known the old English gentleman who came every year to shed tears over the child’s grave, not having talked to him about the child, about his laugh, his eyes, his games.

The dead child was taken in charge by the entire village. And the village adored him. This child of war will forever have flowers on his grave. One thing remains unknown: the exact date when it all stopped.

In Vauville, the memory of the beggar woman’s song comes back to me. That very simple song. The song of the insane, of all the insane, everywhere; those who went insane from indifference. The song of easy death. Of those who died of hunger. The memory of those who died on the road, in the trenches, half devoured by dogs, tigers, birds of prey, giant rats from the marshes.

The hardest thing to endure is the lacerated face, the skin, the sunken eyes. Eyes emptied of sight, with no gaze left. Staring. Looking at nothing.

He is twenty years old. The age, the number of his age stopped at death; what he has become will always be twenty years old.

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