The Guava Seller.

3

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 episode here, start at the beginning here ).

3.

Despite the relentless drone of the aircon, I sleep the rest of the night soundly and wake early, too early for breakfast. After my full day of plane travel I’m ready to walk. I’m more likely to find MD’s house on foot anyway.  When I pass the front desk a new, not so friendly male receptionist is on duty. I’m not going to embarrass myself again by asking how to get to the ‘small lake’. I don’t have a map or guidebook and I didn’t Google Hanoi sights before I left, but I do have my copy of MD’s The Lover in my bag and an excellent biography, Marguerite Duras: A Life, by Laure Adler*, with post-it notes marking appropriate sections.      

        Choosing a random direction, I venture out into streets full of vendors setting up for morning selling. At low outdoor tables locals are slurping hot bowls of steaming breakfast phó, with noodles, fresh mint and bean sprouts piled high. Beside them on the narrow sidewalks all kinds of vegetables are on sale. Baby aubergines glow purple beside bunches of green Asian basil and fresh fish and eels flail about in shallow tubs. A nearby chopping block displays huge fish steaks, gutted and prepared for cooking. 

The morning air is crisp and cool and I feel a sense of exhilaration to be exploring the streets of a town where MD and her family once lived.  Unlike most walking, stalking, living, breathing, star-eating fans of great artists, I have not read every single one of her fifty-five written texts, nor do I love every work she wrote. Some I even hate. Some cause me to scream in frustration at the page or the screen. Of all her plays, films, novels, notes and essays, I have my favourites. Among them, her most famous — The Lover, the story of a fifteen year old girl’s affair with an older Chinese man, and a later version of the same story, The North China Lover. Both have a predictable and powerful effect. On reading just a few pages of her spacious prose, I feel the impulse to write. Why? MD gives you permission. Her writing says: write what you need to write, how you need to write it. Break the rules, experiment, be as repetitive as you need to be, don't adhere to the Aristotelian rules of structure, disregard all rules if that’s what is required to tell your story. And if people don't like it, that's their problem.

         Some friends I have given Duras’ books to tell me that while they think her writing is beautiful, it’s too depressing. But for me, MD’s slow, cinematic scenarios of missed and impossible moments draw me in.  Like the Buddhist teachings, they spell out the first noble truth — Suffering Exists. As a young woman, long before I found the writings of Suzuki Roshi * and Thich Nhât Hanh, * MD’s words went straight to my heart. Articulating a field of desire, despair and melancholy I recognised but couldn’t yet express, she transformed it into truth, art and beauty, introducing me to the rhythms and perfumes of an Asian terrain I longed to one day experience for myself.  

So along I trundle like any pre-Google Maps tourist out for a stroll, only my head is not stuck in a Lonely Planet Guide but a big fat biography that tells me for a brief time around 1917 - 1920, aged between three to six, MD lived in a house somewhere around here with her French schoolteacher parents and two older brothers. The family had moved from Saigon, where Marguerite and her brothers were born, so her father, Henri Donnadieu could take up his appointment as Director of Primary Education in Hanoi. MD’s mother Marie, unable to secure a teaching position, borrowed money, bought a house near a small lake and set up a private school. Three decades before, the central area of the city had been a swamp. The French colonisers turned it into an elegant urban parkland with adjoining perfumeries, cafes, fashion boutiques and grand official buildings of government and finance.

          Perhaps MD wasn't here long enough for Hanoi to claim her as their own, I ponder, as I follow my nose turning left and right a few times before ending up on the shores of a small green lake around which everyone, young, old and very old, is walking, jogging and knee bending their way in an anti-clockwise direction. Those not circumambulating are playing badminton on courts set up on any bit of extra pavement space.  A group of women perform a graceful movement sequence with red fans and a bride and groom are already out on a photo shoot in the early morning light.

I decide to join the communal constitutional for a bit. No one seems to mind or even care; they are too busy to return my stranger-in-a-strange-place smile. I want to stop and ask them about MD's house but feel it would be an intrusion, so I make a plan to widen my exploration and investigate the streets that lead off from the lake. It's a good intention but all it yields are grand old marble banks, shop houses and one or two colonial style villas that look as if they could have been MD’s residence but how would you know?

        I check my books. The only clue I can find is that they lived in a house by a small lake but is it a small house or a big house, and which lake? Hanoi, I’ve heard, has a number of them. After a fruitless search up and down several streets I know I will have to stop and ask someone.

          In front of an impressive nineteenth century bank building with tall marble columns, I come across an elderly Vietnamese woman selling guavas. With just a basket of fruit and a pair of antiquated scales, she squats on a straw mat — her tiny presence defying the grandiosity of the edifice that dwarfs her. She is as old and skinny as my mother was at the end of her life and gives me a grin as alive as the pink flesh of the guava she cuts open for me to taste. Surely she would know something about the history of this area, so I give it a try.

           'Marguereeeeete,’ I sound out, 'Marguereeete Duraaaassss…lived around here?’

          In sign language I draw circles in the air and gesture to the buildings around us. The old lady gives me a bemused look and starts to pile some guavas onto her scales, asking me with her eyes if I want a kilo or half kilo, indicating the amount with money she takes from beneath her tattered áo dài. *

             ' No, no, do you know where this is?' I dig into my bag and pull out the fat biography and open it at the page of the photo of MD and her family. A tired mother sits in a courtyard facing the camera, fan in hand, her children around her.  It’s a candid snap. Their clothing is casual; no effort was made to dress up in their colonial finery for this picture. Little Marguerite stands by her mother’s knee. She looks as if she is about to cry and timidly clutches her mother’s arm. Her older brothers, shirtless in the heat, exude a confidence you know will soon get them into trouble.

        I look to the guava seller for a response. She has given me her undivided attention, listened carefully, and although she looks up at me with the same blank look of Mr TF, I still won't give up.

          'Around here? La maison de Duras, près d'ici?’

          The old lady squints again at the photo, nodding and smiling as she goes back to her counting. I put my book away, take out my purse out and buy a kilo. It’s one of my favourite fruits after all. I'll make a meal of them later back in my hotel room. Already I can taste the sweet pink flesh with its small knobbly seeds on my tongue.

I wonder if MD liked them too.

________________________

* Laure Adler, Duras, A Life, trans, Anne Marie Glasheen, Victor Gallancz, 1998. I trust the word of biographer Laure Adler. She is an acclaimed and awarded writer who has written several other biographies of important figures including Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, François Mitterrand. But how does one encompass the life of an author who wrote her own story over and over again. Whose word should we believe or does it simply become a case of whose word do we want to believe?

* Suzuki Roshi was a Japanese Zen monk and teacher who popularised Zen Buddhism in the US. His famous book Zen Mind Beginners Mind was published by Shambala in 1970.

* Thich Nhât Hanh was a Vietnamese monk who became known in the west as the father of modern mindfulness.

* áo dài  is the traditional long silk tunic with a high collar worn by Vietnamese women over wide trousers.