Back with a Breakthrough!
25
Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap or browse all chapters here.
25
Despite the fans buzzing above, the large upstairs room of the Living Room Café is hot, and after a slice of lemon cake and a tall glass of iced tea, I feel sleepy. I’m tempted to put my head down on the table and nod off, though I know it would be impolite. Oh, for a hammock café now! On writing days when sleep threatens to overtake me, I have a rule not to give in immediately to its irresistible pull. Knowing the gold is often just around the corner from the give-up point, I always challenge myself to keep going for another few hundred words.
Today I decide to Google further than page one. It pays off. On page six I find an article about an exhibition of photographs in Phnom Penh that took place some years before. I scroll through a number of stark black and white images —the ruins of the grand Bokor Palace Hotel, built in the 1920s in the south west of Cambodia. MD gets a mention as does the name of the nearby area, Prey Nop, where it says she lived with her mother and brothers on their agricultural concession. I bring up a Cambodian map and find that Prey Nop is close to Sihanoukville, where I am headed next! Bingo, a positive lead! If not the bungalow MD’s mother built, maybe I can locate the land they farmed. I check Adler and she confirms it. Of course, Prey Nop! I must have read this name before but skimmed over it or not realized its importance. I shoot an email off to Rob and ask him if he knows anything about it. He gets back almost immediately saying that he doesn’t but he will ask Erika, a local expat who knows everything and everyone. And by the way — bookings for the workshop are slow but he is still keen to go ahead.
Now the café feels even hotter. Most of the customers have left,and I want to tell someone of my exciting discovery but remind myself not to get too carried away. This too could turn out to be a dead end. The smiling young trainee waitress comes by to ask if I would like anything else.
‘No thank you,’ I trill, ‘everything is perfect, just perfect.’
I pack up my computer and notebook and head downstairs to pay. I drop some notes in the tip jar for the lovely staff. If not for café training programs like this one, these young people would still be picking through rubbish on garbage dumps.
In 1928 when MD’s mother and her children set out to claim their purchase of land in the wilds of Cambodia, they had no idea what they would find. Until now they had lived only in colonial towns or cities, with access to all the conveniences of colonial life. The drive in their battered old Citroën on primitive roads through jungles, plains and swamps, took them a day and a night. They were headed for the Gulf of Siam, an area renowned for smugglers and pirates — no more towns or villages, just plantations and oceans of mangroves. On arrival they found ‘a landscape of rivers, lagoons, muddy earth and foaming seas, surrounded by a forest that sheltered tigers.’ * While MD’s mother carried the stress and burden of their risky undertaking, during the six months they spent living there, the young Marguerite felt a sense of peace and contentment she hadn’t known before. With their brutal older brother Pierre away in France and their mother busy with the workers setting up the farm, MD and Paulo would follow the path from their bungalow through the rice fields to a small bridge over a river. * In the nearby shallow cove Paulo began teaching Marguerite to swim. She wasn’t so keen because of her fear of things lurking beneath the surface. In the rainy season all sorts of animal carcasses floated downstream from the jungle: birds, squirrels, even tigers. Paulo had no fear at all and would dive in and swim around until she gave up and joined him. They wouldn’t come home until dark, tearing the leeches from their toes, much to their mother’s dismay. At the end of their six months stay they still came on weekends, making the long round trip many times over the years. *
Outside the Living Room Café, Vang extricates himself from the group of chatting, smoking drivers and asks where I’d like to go next. My final destination is a day spa that Ellie has recommended after I told her of the pain in my shoulder from my lopsided luggage carrying. It didn’t take much to convince me that a massage would be a good idea and Vang knows where it is. Street 240, tucked away behind the Royal Palace, is home to a row of colonial era French villas and sixties shop houses that have been converted into niche businesses. Tastefully restored to enhance their Indochine mystique, the boutiques sell ethically sourced high-end home wares, bespoke jewellery, raw silk fashion, chocolate, fancy wine — everything for the discerning tourist, the homesick expat and the hip local.
Bliss Spa is a two-storey nineteenth century French villa with charming white walls and painted pale blue shutters. The inner courtyard which doubles as the reception area has the requisite faux-Buddha-frangipani-white-pebble look. I’m offered a seat and a glass of ginger tea and while I’m waiting I notice the decorative floor tiles beneath my feet. The graceful fleur de lis patterns are stunning, highlighted in different colour palettes — at one time deep browns, yellows, red and greens; at another, greys, blacks, white and blues. I look down the hallway and notice other patterns — mosaic designs, eight pointed stars, four petal flowers — all similarly enticing, so much so that I want to prostrate my entire body on the floor and embrace them. Surely this is not a normal reaction. If I believed in past lives, perhaps this would be an indication that I had lived in such a house before. Or am I just a lover of beauty? I suddenly understand the expat dream of arriving here, falling in love with a ruined villa with its cracked and worn tiles, setting up a business, dealing with the bureaucratic nightmare to keep it going — all because they want to live in a house with scrumptious French tiles. When academics speak of the colonialist desire for the ‘exotic other’, I think my ‘exotic other’ in this instant are exotic tiles, and though I’ve never read her description of them, I know the young Marguerite would have spent hours staring at the same tile designs I’m salivating over now.*
The spa assistant motions that my masseuse is ready and leads me to a room along the corridor where I’m invited change into a sarong and lie down on the massage table. My face fits comfortably in the little hole and while I usually keep my eyes closed, this time I open them. A delightful kaleidoscope of tiled patterns greets my gaze, and my eyes get the best massage.
I wonder if MD ever received a traditional massage during her time here. As part of a system of traditional Khmer medicine that goes back centuries, massage would have been in common usage in Cambodian families as it is in most South Asian countries. There’s always someone in the extended family who has the skill. If you were seriously ill, a Krou Khmer (traditional medicine practitioner) could also give herbs, set bones, tell fortunes, do astrology and spiritual healings. While her parents both suffered from tropical diseases, I’ve not read any accounts of MD’s own childhood illnesses. In all the freedom she and her brothers seemed to have perhaps they developed a natural immunity and although the French government banned it, her family may have had access to local folk medicine via their domestic staff.
My massage is great but it’s over too soon. On the ride home the sun dips low in the sky, sending it’s last rays through the smoky haze. Soon we are at the big green gate and as I am paying my bill and bidding Vang goodbye, I’m greeted by a skinny, spritely old man who introduces himself as Mr Pop, ‘call me Pop’. A kind of nightwatchman, he comes some evenings to sweep the paths and keep an eye on things. Ellie and Steph also have a cook who comes three times a week. They tell me they don’t really need a cook but she is the sister-in-law of a colleague’s maid, who has fallen on hard times so they are giving her a hand. At first they found the idea of having staff quite uncomfortable until they realised it was an important way of supporting the local economy. Tonight their cook has prepared a chicken curry with roti — the boys’ favourite. We sit around the kitchen table and dig in. Our dinner soundtrack is Mr Pop’s transistor radio blaring popular Khmer songs from his sentry box.
MD’s family, as poor as they were, always had domestic staff. In the early days there were ‘house-boys’, nannies, and of course a cook. Even badly paid civil servants could afford the pittance required to pay house staff. In The Sea Wall the faithful servant, the Corporal, does everything to look after the ill-mannered family on the rice farm in Cambodia. It’s he who cooks the long legged stilt birds found in the local waterways into a chewy stew that the kids can’t stomach. On their long road trips from Sadec, the Corporal lies on the bonnet of the clapped out Citroën so he can keep filling the leaking radiator. He remains the mother’s stoic assistant through all her trials and tribulations. In The Lover also, the mother’s faithful housekeeper, Dô stays by her side * even after MD’s older brother attempts to rape her, even after her wages stop. When Marie Donnadieu finally leaves the colonies and returns to France for good, Dô accompanies her, leaving her homeland behind forever.
After dinner I ask Ellie what she most likes about Phnom Penh.
‘I love how it feels like a big village,’ she tells me. ‘After the Khmer Rouge emptied the city, it was eventually repopulated by people from the provinces. They brought with them all their village ways and values. Decades later their friendliness and country habits live on.’
I ponder on this as I pack my things for tomorrow’s journey. I too love the atmosphere of this hot bustling town that still has the feeling of a river outpost, albeit a most sophisticated one. For me it’s the confluence of the three great rivers — the Tonlé Sap, the Mekong and the Bassac, that gives Phnom Penh its epic geographic status. And the name Tonlé Sap, has a special ring as I first heard it mentioned in MD’s writing. These rivers have such power that in the deluge of the monsoon period, the swelling of the Mekong actually causes the Tonlé Sap River to reverse its flow. In the wet season people living in stilt houses along its banks tie their boats up at the front door and in the dry season they have a shady area underneath the house to shelter from the hot sun.
Many of the names I’m hearing on this trip I first came across in The Lover — Tonlé Sap, The Plain of the Birds, The Cardamon Mountains, the Gulf of Siam, The Mekong. They all have a special resonance, a promise of mystery and atmosphere, that perhaps they wouldn’t if I were just reading unknown names from a map. Is it the romance of literature that gives certain places a special significance? Is that why Cambodia holds a mystical magic for me? *
Packing finished, I settle beneath the sheets under the big ceiling fan to continue my bi-lingual reading of The Lover with my English copy in one hand and my French copy in the other. I’m dreaming up a performance idea for one-on-one recitals in two languages. Will I ever do it? It doesn’t matter; it’s nice to dream.
I can feel myself drifting off to sleep. The books fall from my hands and land on the mat from Tonlé Sap with a gentle thud.
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* Cambodian artisans developed their own tile making workshops based on French designs, but now the art is dying out: https://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/how-cambodian-tile-makers-have-put-local-touch-colonial-craft
*Adler p 42 – 43.
* WN p 58.
* At the beginning of the published script of India Song, under General Remarks, MD notes: ‘The names of Indian towns, rivers, states and seas are used here primarily in a musical sense.’
* In a 1975 French Television interview MD described one of their trips to the rice farm in Cambodia. “We left Saigon with the bus early morning at 6 am. We arrived in Kep-Douane after 8-hour drive. The driver stopped in all the villages of the Mekong. As we crossed the border of Cambodia leaving Cochinchina, we paid 10 Piastre to a fat drunk white customs officer. Kep-Douane was a small seaside town. A coastal road, a few houses for the rich French colonials and especially officials in Phnom Penh. Mama and I had dinner near a jetty at the Bar de la Mer or Bar de la Corniche, I am not sure. A fish soup, bowl of steamed rice, some fruits. We were surprised, such quiet people, they spoke gently and smiled.”
[Marguerite Duras on a French Television interview, 1975] https://www.khreativa-cambodia.com/other/french-author-marguerite-duras-and-her-life-in-colonial-cambodia/
* The Lover p 23.