Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras

Author:Marguerite Duras [Duras, Marguerite]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781935744221
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Published: 2006-07-01T03:00:00+00:00

THE WIND has risen again. And again the sky has turned dark.

Once more the ocean is an expanse of rain as far as the eye can see.

Against the wall, beneath an awning, was the child.

He looked at the sea; he didn’t play with the stones he’d gathered on the beach. He held them tightly in his clenched fists. He was wearing something red. Next to him was the young counselor. She looked at him, then at the rain, and then again at him, the child. The boy’s eyes were lighter than usual, larger, more frightening as well, because of the blinding amplitude of what there was to see.

And once after that day, I remember, the counselor went into a large white tent. She started telling a story about the sea and a child. All the children looked at the sea.

Once upon a time, said the young counselor, once upon a time there was a little boy named David. He had gone off with his parents to sail around the world on a yacht, the Admiral System.

And it happened that one day the sea became very bad.

And the sea was so bad that the Admiral System sank lock, stock, and barrel to the bottom, except for him, that little David kid. And wouldn’t you know that just then a shark was swimming by, who said to him, Come over here and get on my back, little boy. And off the two of them went over the ocean waves.

Wow! say the children.

The young counselor pauses, then goes on:

The shark went very fast along the surface of the waves, the counselor says.

And then she stops; she falls asleep. The children shout. She begins again.

The counselor tells the story slowly and very well. She wants the children to stay quiet and the children stay completely quiet.

Ratakataboom is the shark’s name, she repeats. Don’t forget that word, or else you won’t understand what happens next.

At the shark’s name, the children laugh out loud. Some of them laugh at the shark, others at the counselor.

The children repeat whatever comes into their heads. The children repeat in cadence. Boom Boom Telly. Telly Rataky Boom Boom, they say. It doesn’t matter.

Is the quiet child listening to the story of David as told by the young counselor? No one can know, but he probably is; that child listens to everything. This evening it’s almost like the first time he’s heard a story. He looks at the young counselor, but his gray eyes reveal nothing except that they are looking toward the counselor, the way they’d look toward the seagulls, the sea, beyond the beaches, beyond the sea, beyond the wind and sand and clouds, the screaming gulls and the butchered red worms. David, she narrates, the counselor narrates, and the shark too, with that name of his that he can’t pronounce...

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