Free Four Novels by Marguerite Duras

There have been men who found me attractive from time to time, but so far none of them has asked me to be his wife. There is a great difference between liking a young girl and wanting to marry her. And yet that must happen to me. Just once in my life I must be taken seriously. I wanted to ask you something: if you want a thing all the time, at every single moment of the day and night, do you think that you necessarily get it?”
    “Not necessarily, no. But it still remains the best way of trying and the one with the greatest chance of success. I can really see no other way.”
    “After all, we’re only talking. And as you don’t know me or I you, you can tell me the truth.”
    “Yes, that’s quite true, but really and truly I can see no other way. But perhaps I haven’t had enough experience to answer your question properly.”
    “Because I once heard that quite the opposite was true. That it was by trying not to want something that it finally happened.”
    “But tell me, how could you manage not to want something, when you want it so much?”
    “That is exactly what I say to myself, and to tell you the truth I never felt that the other was a very serious idea. I think it must apply to people who want little things, to people who already have something and want something else, but not to people like us—I didn’t mean that, I mean not to people like me who want everything, not just a part of something but . . .I don’t know how to say it. . . .”
    “A whole.”
    “Perhaps it is that. But please tell me more about your feelings for children. You said you were fond of them?”
    “Yes. Sometimes when I have no one else to talk to I talk to them. But you know how it is, one can’t really talk to children.”
    “Oh, you’re right. We are the lowest of the low.”
    “But you mustn’t think either that I am unhappy simply because sometimes I need to talk so badly that I talk to children. That’s not true, because after all I must in some way have chosen my life or else I am just a madman indulging in his folly.”
    “I’m sorry. I don’t mean what I said. I simply saw the fine weather and the words came out of their own accord. You must try to understand and not mind, because sometimes fine weather makes me doubt everything: but it never lasts for more than a few seconds. I’m sorry.”
    “It doesn’t matter. When I sit in Squares like this it is generally because I have been for some days without talking: when there have been no opportunities for conversation except with the people who buy my goods and they have been so rushed or standoffish that I could say nothing to them except the things that go with the sale of a reel of cotton. Naturally you mind this after some time and suddenly you want to talk and be listened to so badly that it can even produce a feeling of illness like a slight fever.”
    “I know how you feel. You feel you could do without everythingelse, without eating, sleeping, anything rather than be silent. But in that town you were telling me about you didn’t have to talk to children?”
    “Not in that town, no. I was not with children then.”
    “That is what I thought.”
    “I used to see them in the distance. There were lots of them in the streets: they are left very free there and from about the age of the one you look after they cross the whole town on their own to visit the Zoo. They eat at any hour and sleep in the shadow of the lions’ cages. Yes, I saw them in the distance sleeping in the shadow of those cages.”
    “Children have all the time in the world and they’ll talk to anyone and always be ready to listen, but one hasn’t very much to say to them.”
    “That’s the trouble. It’s true they don’t despise solitary people: in fact they like almost anyone, but then, as you said, there is so little to say to them.”
    “But tell me more.”
    “Oh, as far as children go one person is as good as another, provided they talk about airplanes and trains. There is