Free The Lover by Marguerite Duras

roundness of these breasts proffered to the hands, this outwardness held out toward them. Even the body of my younger brother, like that of a little coolie, is as nothing beside this splendor. The shapes of men’s bodies are miserly, internalized. Nor do they get spoiled like those of such girls as Hélène Lagonelle, which never last, a summer or so perhaps, that’s all. She comes from the high plateaus of Da Lat. Her father works for the post office. She came quite recently, right in the middle of the school year. She’s frightened, she comes up and sits beside you and stays there without speaking, crying sometimes. She has the pink-and-brown complexion of the mountains, you can always recognize it here where all the other children are pale green with anemia and the torrid heat. Hélène Lagonelle doesn’t go to high school. She’s not capable of it, Hélène L. She can’t learn, can’t remember things. She goes to the primary classes at the boarding school, but it’s no use. She weeps up against me, and I stroke her hair, her hands, tell her I’m going to stay here with her. She doesn’t know she’s very beautiful, HélèneLagonelle. Her parents don’t know what to do with her, they want to marry her off as soon as possible. She could have all the fiancés she likes, Hélène Lagonelle, but she doesn’t like, she doesn’t want to get married, she wants to go back to her mother. She, Hélène L. Hélène Lagonelle. In the end she’ll do what her mother wants. She’s much more beautiful than I am, the girl in the clown’s hat and lamé shoes, infinitely more marriageable, she can be married off, set up in matrimony, you can frighten her, explain it to her, what frightens her and what she doesn’t understand, tell her to stay where she is, wait.
    Hélène Lagonelle is seventeen, seventeen, yet she still doesn’t know what I know. It’s as if I guessed she never will.
    Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge oftheir fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers.
    I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.
    I am worn out with desire.
    I want to take Hélène Lagonelle with me to where every evening, my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out. I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.
    A pleasure unto death.
    I see her as being of one flesh with the man from Cholon, but in a shining, solar, innocent present, in a continual self-flowering which springs out of each action, each tear, each of her faults, each of her ignorances. Hélène Lagonelle is the mate of the bondsman who gives me such abstract, such harsh pleasure, the obscure man from Cholon, from China. Hélène Lagonelle is from China.
    I haven’t forgotten Hélène Lagonelle. I haven’t forgotten the bondsman. When I went away, when I left him, I didn’t go near another man for two years. But that mysterious fidelity must have been to myself.
    I’m still part of the family, it’s there I live, to the exclusion of everywhere else. It’s in its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance, that I’m most deeply