Marguerite Duras - Yann Andrea Steiner

Table of Contents

BEFORE anything else, at the beginning of the story told here, there was a screening of India Song at an art cinema in the city where you lived. After the film there was a panel discussion in which you participated. Then after the panel we went to a bar with some young graduate students, one of whom was you. It was you who reminded me later, much later, about that bar, a fairly elegant, attractive place, and about the two whiskeys I had that evening. I had no recollection of those whiskeys, nor of you, nor of the other young grad students, nor of the bar. I recalled, or so I thought, that you had walked me to the parking lot where Id left my car. I still had that Renault 16, which I loved and still drove fast back then, even after the health problems related to alcohol. You asked me if I had lovers. I said, Not anymore, which was true. You asked how fast I drove at night. I said ninety, like everyone else with an R16. That it was wonderful.

It was after that evening that you began writing me letters. Many letters. Sometimes one a day. They were very short letters, more like notes; they were, yes, like cries for help sent from an unbearable, deathly place, a kind of desert. The beauty of those cries was unmistakable.

I didnt answer.

I kept all the letters.

At the tops of the pages were the names of the places where theyd been written and the time or the weather: Sunny or Rainy. Or Cold. Or: Alone.

And then once, a long time went by with no word at all. Perhaps a month, I dont remember how long it lasted.

And so in my turn, in the void left by you, by that absence of letters, of cries for help, I wrote to find out why you had stopped writing. Why so suddenly. Why you had stopped writing as if violently prevented from it, as if by death.

I wrote you this letter:

Yann Andra, this summer I met someone you know, Jean-Pierre Ceton. We spoke about you. I never would have guessed you knew each other. And then there was your note under my door in Paris after Navire Night. I tried to call you, but I couldnt find your phone number. And then there was your letter from January I was in the hospital again, sick again from who knows what; they said Id been poisoned by some new medication, so-called antidepressants. Always the same old song. It was nothing, my heart was fine. I wasnt even sad. I had reached the end of something, thats all. I started drinking again, yes, over the winter, in the evening. For years Id been telling my friends not to visit on weekends; I lived alone in that house in Neauphle that could easily have held ten people. Alone in fourteen rooms. You get used to the echoes. Thats all. And then one time I wrote you to say that Id just finished the film called Her Name Venus in Deserted Calcutta. I dont remember exactly what I told you, probably that I loved it the way I love all my films. You didnt answer that letter. And then there were the poems you sent me, some of which struck me as very beautiful, others less so, and I didnt know quite how to tell you that. Thats it. Yes, thats it. That your letters were your poems. Your letters are beautiful, the most beautiful Ive ever read, so beautiful they hurt. I wanted to talk to you today. Im still recuperating but Im writing. Im working. I think the second Aurelia Steiner was written for you.

That letter, I felt, didnt require an answer either. I sent news. I recall a sorrowful, discomposed letter. I was discouraged by some upset that had occurred in my life, some new, recent, unexpected solitude. For a long time I knew almost nothing of that letter. I wasnt even sure Id written it that summer, the one when you suddenly appeared in my life. Nor from which place in my life Id written it. I didnt believe it was from this place near the sea but neither could I imagine any other place. Only long afterward did I seem to remember the space of my room around that letter, the black marble fireplace and the mirror, the very one I was facing. I wondered if I should send you that letter. I wasnt even sure I had sent it until you mentioned receiving a letter like that from me two years earlier.

I dont know if I saw that letter again. You spoke of it often. You had been struck by it. You said it was remarkable, that it said everything about my life and work without ever mentioning them directly. And all this in a kind of indifference, a distraction youd found horrifying. You also told me that I had mailed it from Taormina. But that it was dated from Paris, five days earlier.

Years later, that long letter of mine was misplaced. You said youd put it in a drawer in the large chest in the Trouville apartment and that I was the one, afterward, who must have moved it. But that day you had no idea what was going on in the house or anywhere else. You were in the parks and the bars of the grand hotels in Mont Canisy, in search of handsome bartenders from Buenos Aires and Santiago hired for the summer. While I was lost in the erotic labyrinth of Blue Eyes, Black Hair. It was only long afterward, when I wrote the story of you and me in that book, that I found the letter in the large chest that it must never have left.

IT WAS two days after I wrote that rediscovered letter that you phoned me, here, at Roches Noires, to say you were coming to visit.

Your voice on the telephone was slightly altered, as if by fear, or intimidation. I didnt recognize it. It was... I dont know how to say it yes, thats it: it was the voice I had been inventing for your letters just when you called.

You said, Im coming.

I asked you why.

You said, So we can get to know each other.

At that time in my life, for someone to come see me like that, from far away, was a terrifying prospect. Its true, Ive never spoken about my solitude in that period of my life. The solitude that came after The Ravishment of Lol Stein, Blue Moon, Love, The Vice-Consul. That solitude was the deepest Ive ever known but also the happiest. I didnt experience it as solitude but as luck, a decisive freedom that Id never had in my life until then. I ate at the Central always the same thing: steamed prawns and a Mont Blanc. I didnt go swimming. It was as crowded at the seashore as it was in town. I went in the evening, when my friends Henry Chatelain and Serge Derumier came to visit.

You told me that after that phone conversation youd tried calling several days in a row but that I wasnt home. Later I told you why. I reminded you that I went to Taormina, to the film festival, where I was to see my very dear friend Benot Jacquot. But that Id be back soon, back at the seashore, to write my weekly chronicle of summer 1980 for Libration, as you knew.

Again I asked, Why are you coming?

You said, To talk to you about Theodora Kats.

I said Id abandoned the book about Theodora Kats, which for years Id thought I could write. That I had hidden it for the eternity of my death in a Jewish place, a tomb I held sacred, the vast, fathomless tomb off-limits to traitors, those living dead of the fundamental betrayal.

I asked when youd be here. You said, Tomorrow morning, the bus arrives at ten-thirty. Ill be at your door by eleven.

From my bedroom balcony I waited for you. You crossed the courtyard of the Roches Noires hotel.

I had forgotten the man from India Song