Sadec Sighting

17

       

Photo by Nam Hoang, Unsplash.

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 here or browse all chapters here.

It’s impossible to know if we are on the fast boat or the slow boat. Even at top speed our craft can hardly be called fast, although when it gets to full throttle the nose sticks out of the water like a speedboat. It’s hot and stuffy but river water splashes in through the windows cooling us down.  We settle in with our books and crosswords and it feels like being in a big car on the water. Each side of the river is densely populated and jam packed with shop houses, factories, landing docks, and brick works, their large beehive kilns clumped together like wasp nests. I get talking to the elderly New Zealand couple, Eva and Bill, and tell them something of my journey in search of MD landmarks and how I had hoped we would be stopping at Sadec. Eva’s portly size takes up most of their bench seat while Bill’s tall frame fits in neatly beside her. They hadn’t heard of MD’s writing or her life here, but straightaway Bill pulls out a map of Vietnam with his big farmer hands

         ‘Always carry a map,’ he says, ‘I like to know where I am at all times.’

From her crochet bag Eva also pulls out a battered copy of Lonely Planet Vietnam.

        ‘It’s a bit out of date, but still useful.’ 

They set to work like helpful librarians, donning their spectacles and tracing indexes with their thumbs.

        ‘Sadec, page 519, oh yes,’ Eva says, ‘there’s a brief mention. ‘Ah the film, The Lover, yes, I do remember something about that. It says here the French villas used in the filming are across the river from the market.’

        Bill chimes in. ‘Well, by my calculations, according to the map scale and time travelled, that’s probably the Sadec market right there.’ He points to a fine colonial open-air building with a triangular shaped roof on the water’s edge. In front, a rabble of striped awning and blue tarps shield vendors from the sun, and in front of them, a confusion of boats coming and going, loading and unloading fresh produce from the delta. My elderly helpers are so caught up in their new challenge they’ve forgotten all about me, so I settle back in my seat, swivelling to look on the other side for the French villas Eva mentioned, seeing nothing but my own annoyance. If I’d been more thorough when buying my boat ticket I’d be stopping here for a good look around. 

        Bill calls out to our guide Mr Thao, who, slumped in a seat at the front hasn’t spoken a word to us since we set sail.

        ‘Mr Thao, Mr Thao, is this Sadec?’

His sleepy head pops up, looks out the window to the left, then replies,

        ‘Yes, yes, Sadec — famous for flowers.’

        ‘I knew it,’ Bill says to his wife, who has put away her Lonely Planet and carried on crocheting. She nods, in an aren’t-you-clever kind of way as he turns to me.

        ‘Sadec, confirmed sighting.’

        ‘Thank you,’ I say, ‘well at least I can say I have seen it…’

         He is back into his sudoko while I rifle around in my bag for my printed copy of the New York Times article, to see what the journalist has to say about Sadec.  Not too much it seems. He met a schoolteacher there who told him there was no documented evidence of where the Donnadieu family lived or at which school MD’s mother taught. The only definite locations belonged to the Chinese lover. But the house he lived in was now a police headquarters and they banned anyone taking photos. All that was left to do was see the Lover’s tomb but paying your respects to a character in a novel who, according to Adler’s research, MD didn’t even like, seems a bit lame. Unlike the handsome Tony Leung Ka-fai who played him in the movie, in real life the Chinese lover was not so attractive. Marguerite was so repulsed by him, for a long time she wouldn’t let him near her. Once, according to her diaries, when she did let him kiss her, she hated it so much that she spat him out and kept spitting all night. * Adler tells us that in reality the affair was a ploy encouraged by the mother to extract money from the rich Chinese man. With all MD’s mother’s savings lost on the failed rice fields and debts mounting, he was their only way out. While the mother condoned the affair, there could be no sex. If he wanted sex, he would have to marry her. Despite her dislike of his person, Marguerite loved his money, his silk suits, his diamond rings, his Leon Bollé car, besides it was a way to raise her status in the family. In exchange for the sexless affair, the lover supported the family financially with regular gifts of piastres and outings to fancy restaurants.Now MD became the breadwinner, she was the one who would save her family from poverty and solve all the problems of the mother she dearly loved, despite the beatings she is said to have received from her regularly.

         I look out to the left of our boat and see an old Vietnamese woman squatting on some landing steps leading into the river. She is as skinny as the Hanoi guava seller and looks old enough to have been around in MD’s time. Perhaps she was taught by MD’s mother, perhaps she passed the ten-year-old Marguerite on the street or sold her some watermelon. She is washing a basin full of dishes, rinsing them clean in the muddy waters of the Mekong. Arthritic but lithe, old enough to have seen it all, and still smiling. The expression on her face as she performs her simple task is timeless. My impulse is to take a photo, but I don’t want to intrude on the intimacy of the moment. Like MD and her ‘absolute photograph’, I capture it in my mind’s eye instead.

        There wasn’t a lot of intimacy in the photos I pulled out from the stash of slides of my parents’ overseas trip in the mid 70s. Landscapes and landmarks revealed nothing about what kind of time they were having.  For Chas, travelling around Europe in a campervan was a chance to return to places he had known during the war, but for Marj, whose mental condition wasn’t great —living in such close proximity for weeks on end, never sleeping a wink because of Chas’s heavy snoring — it was a living hell. It's fortunate there is no photo to capture the worst moment of their trip when driving in the UK, Marj attempted to throw herself out of the moving vehicle. Chas took the situation in hand and had Marj committed to a nearby psychiatric clinic. However her treatment was cut short when back in Australia, Marj’s mother, Jeanie, fell onto her electric heater and was severely burned. I can’t imagine Marj’s state when she was given the news but thankfully they were able to get home in time to say goodbye to my grandmother before she died. Sometime later Marj continued psychiatric treatment in Melbourne, including beginning electric shock therapy which in those days was still quite primitive. She said it was so awful, she pretended to be better so they would release her early.

The thing I most want

I cannot have

so all has been a farce

what's the point

in being born?

in ending up alone?

being so far away

from one’s children

being kept in a HELL box?

MC 1986

         Meanwhile MD was drinking six to eight litres of wine a day, and that was after vomiting up the first two glasses. In the early 1980s when she was in her late sixties, her health was so bad, those closest to her convinced her to undergo a radical detox.  She went kicking and screaming to a clinic where for three weeks doctors and nurses swapped her alcohol for milk.  The change to her body was so great she began having visions and hallucinations of her childhood in Indochine. When the treatment was over she had to learn how to write again, shaping the letters as she did when she was a young girl. *

        Marj wasn’t hospitalised again for her mental condition until much later in life and carried on being cared for by her local GP and various psychiatrists in Melbourne. She didn’t have much faith in doctors, none of them seemed to be able to cure her maladies (physical or mental) of which there were many. Only one woman psychiatrist from Melbourne understood Marj’s creative side and encouraged her to write and paint daily. To my mother she was a saint, someone who finally listened and took her complaints seriously, unlike the local docs who just thought Marj was just a bit mad. Arriving at the doctors surgery she would bring a long list of all her ailments, not just to jog her own memory but to ensure the docs didn’t either brush them off either.

41 yrs of depression.

Many pills –

Now Nardil for a long time, 30 yrs –

doesn't help

Lithium, Prozac = Hepatitis

one terrible life of

HELL

1995 —2 good days

1996 —1 good day

at times unbearable

no support

no rels

after marriage much

stress worry

violence (mental

cruelty) anxiety

They say it could be

Chemical imbalance

Can you help?

MC 1997

        The afternoon wears on as our guide announces because we are running late we won’t be visiting the Cham Village. No one seems to mind but as we pass the jetty leading to the village, I notice a group of six or seven older Vietnamese women having some kind of gathering. They wear floral patterned pyjama suits, headscarves and conical hats with name tags pinned to their chests. Their boats jammed together like a raft, they hop lithely from one to the other before perching like river birds in a close huddle. I have no idea what they are doing — perhaps it’s a Vietnamese version of the Country Women’s Assocation, or maybe they are divvying up the takings from a day’s work on the river. I get the feeling that they relish the independence and freedom of their older age on the river. You can be sure they would know every canal in the delta like the map of wrinkles on their ageing hands.

        MD never worried about being old. She addresses this brilliantly in the opening of The Lover when she writes of a man who has known her for years saying ‘I prefer your face as it is now, ravaged.’ * I agree with him. There is something very sexy about the older photos of MD and it was those I began collecting first. But then I’ve always admired images of older writers, the more wrinkled the better. They are sexy in the way all people are when captured in the act of doing what they love. They remind us that there is no age limit to art. Perhaps my idolization of MD is just that. It’s not that I want to be her or live her life but rather in the end, be a bit like her—a wrinkly old lady with something interesting to say.

        Marj hated being old, she complained about it endlessly, she didn’t think it had any redeeming features, except to allow you to watch your kids and grandkids grow up. Compared to me she had a reverse life cycle — happy in her early years, unhappy in her later years. Mine seemed to go the other way. An astrologer I consulted during my late thirties predicted I would be much happier later in life.  Easy enough to say, I guess — you are hardly going to tell someone their life is going to be shit from here on in. Thankfully in my case I have noticed it to be true. But things certainly got worse before they got better. It’s a common story and somehow reassuring to notice that not many people on the planet get to escape being confronted by a kind of ground shaking, life questioning, soul searching crisis. Whether it happens early in life, later on, or more than once, it’s often associated with a multitude of catalysts beyond our control, like illness, violence, death, divorce, natural catastrophe, war, poverty, family dysfunction, displacement, even lengthy house renovations gone wrong!

        While Marj and MD’s lives were directly impacted by life-changing events notably the first and second world wars, I feel my post-war generation cohort has definitely had an easier ride. And yet very few have managed to avoid experiencing a dramatic life crisis.

        I called my crisis of being, 'my descent'. For that's exactly what it felt like. The cause was fairly mundane, just a regular run-of-the-mill marriage break-up — they happen every day, only the consequences can be devastating. They say divorce is worse than death, for where death has an end, divorce has an ongoing mess of issues that may take years to be resolved. I'm using the terms marriage and divorce, for though my partner and I had never married, these terms may just as well apply. Perhaps that was part of the problem, although I don't think so. It felt like marriage, especially after we had children.

        My descent began in January 1988 when I drove down the freeway from Newcastle to Sydney to begin life as a single parent. My four-month-old son and four-year-old daughter slept soundly in the back seat, not even my loud wailing stirred them. By the time I got to Sydney I was able to feel a glimmer of elation at the possibility of a new era, free from the turmoil of the past year. You see my partner was having a relationship with a younger woman. I'd known about it and had jokingly encouraged it, for within our generally happy partnership things between us had plateaued and I wanted something to change. Since getting together six years before, we'd had a blurry kind of open relationship agreement. After all we were part of the 70s generation who criticised the ownership principle of coupledom and thought romantic love was a capitalist plot. While in theory, the idea of non-monogamy had always appealed to me (I did after all write a famous song, Monogamy Shbedogamy)* I had rarely acted upon this agreement and since having children preferred to be monogamous.

        The trouble was, while I'd hoped his fling would help spice things up between us, it became far more serious.  Falling in love was a definite no-no in my rules, but he wanted the freedom to follow his desires while still being there for me and the kids. I tried to work with the situation hoping his lover would get sick of it and fall by the wayside. When she didn't, I gave my partner the ultimatum — it's me or her. Ultimatums weren’t in his frame of reference and when he declared he didn't want to give her up (or me for that matter) I packed up the car and the kids and took off. In a split second bargain we agreed my daughter would live with him, , but for now she was staying with my son and me in Sydney as we prevailed upon friends with spare rooms until I found somewhere to live.

        Thus began a routine that would last for years of us both driving the two hours up and down the freeway between Newcastle and Sydney to spend time together as a family. This was of prime importance to us, so according to school and work situations we worked out various combinations. At first, we had one kid each, then at times he or I looked after both for a solid period of time. In between we always made sure to spend a few days together every week or ten days as we had before, only we were a couple no longer. And if I had thought our physical separation would end the pain, I was wrong. Now I experienced the more excruciating torture of being together, knowing we were not together. And if I railed against it and tried to institute more conventional boundaries it never worked. In the end we were willing to endure the discomfort and concentrate on giving the kids the love, attention and family times they deserved.

        Not long after I moved out, the affair with the younger woman fell apart, but I wasn't rushing back. I was enjoying my independence. My son was in day care four hours a day, I was working on a screenplay, * spending time with friends, and reclaiming the part of my identity that had gone missing in domestic life. My partner and I would occasionally break our separation rule and experience the kind of passion we hadn't known for years. Slowly we were rebuilding our trust and I envisaged that we would be together again. Until one night he told me that there was another woman on the scene, that it had been going on for some time but that he was committed to me and the kids and he was sure we could work it all out.

        Double whammy! I reeled from this one as if I had been hit by a semi-trailer full of lead balls with the words engraved upon them: you fool, what an idiot, everyone knows but you, how pathetic, how could you trust him, how stupid, you deserve it, you are shit, you are lower than shit, and so on.

        Now my descent was fast tracked. I was on an escalator to the hell realms. If before I had been trying to understand — why me? Why this pain? Why can I never be happy in love? Why is there always another woman?  — now I felt completely worthless.

        I'd been reading Linda Schierse Leonard’s book, The Wounded Woman * and exploring the ideas of Joseph Campbell and Marie-Louise von Franz on archetypes and fairy tales.  Every night when the kids were asleep I would sit at my lamplit desk in my little Coogee flat, the sound of surf pounding the beach below. I was scouring my books for clues, for answers, for leads, on this question of —why the pain, why must I suffer?

                MD was there on my desk too. She wasn't giving me any answers either, but her words were a comfort, validating my experiences,  reminding me that pain and despair are part of life, and can lead to unimaginably exquisite moments of beauty and revelation.

        And then I found a book about the Sumerian goddess Inanna,* the Queen of Heaven and Earth, who travels to the underworld to attend the funeral rites of her brother-in-law.  Her hostile sister Ereshkigal, the Goddess of Death, angry at her sisters' intrusion, insists that Inanna pass through seven gates at which she is stripped one by one of her crown, jewels and queenly clothes. Bowed and naked she enters Erishkigal's chamber to be turned into a corpse and hung on a meat hook.

        It's such a shocking image, but it totally resonated. The corpse on the meat hook was me.  Total humiliation, total loss, total grief — this is how I felt.  Like Inanna I had reached the bottom of the pit, I had grovelled around naked in the mud, and now was hanging lifeless on a hook for all to see.

        It wasn't just the fallout from the break-up that had flipped me into this state, but all my painful life experiences, my conditioning, my upbringing, my tendencies, my failings, my desires and dreams, all were brought into close scrutiny. Everything I stood for was up for grabs.  It was so liberating to have access to this story, to know that my journey was a universal path trodden not only by gods and goddesses but by countless women and men before me. Perera's commentary explained how such a descent can be a transformative experience, an initiation into the dark side of the feminine. That we may even have to descend several times to grasp her wisdom. The great liberation for me was the discovery that there is nowhere lower than this fearful place, this grovelling about in one's own perceived worthlessness. I found I could use my imagination to enjoy the lowliness of this murky cave, like a kid discovering a mud bath, horrified at first what their parents would think, then smearing it all over themselves, revelling in its warm, slimy qualities, breaking the taboo and fear of dirt and filth.

        In the story, after three days, a friend of Inanna's raises the alarm and Enki, the God of Wisdom and Culture sends a couple of fly-like creatures to enter the underworld and rescue Inanna. They use empathy to trick Erishkigal into giving them Inannna's corpse which they sprinkle with food and water and bring Inanna back to life.

        Perera explains that Inanna's rebirth and return illustrates the possibility of transforming dark states into light.  That it is only through taking a conscious journey into the dark states life inevitably throws up, that we have the chance to understand them. As Perrera says, ‘We can only endure, barely conscious, barely surviving the pain and powerlessness, suspended out of life, stuck, until and if, some act of grace with some new wisdom arrives.’

        I don't know exactly when my descent reached the lowest point. I do know I was gone a long time. I was thirty-seven when I started going down and I didn't really emerge until eight years later at the age of forty-five. During that time, I embarked on two lengthy areas of study: Tibetan Buddhism and Homeopathy. After my movie Talk came out, I gave up writing and practiced the homeopathic healing arts. I had some success handing out little white pills but after three years realised it wasn't really for me. Eventually I came back to writing theatre and began teaching, helping others write from their emotional truth, encouraging them to bring their stories into the light. My partner * and I never did get back together as a couple. But we continue to co-parent (and co-grandparent) and remain close as friends and family.  

________________

*Adler, p 62. MD said ‘I had to keep spitting, spat all night, and again the next day whenever I thought about it.’

* Adler p 344.

*The Lover p 7. MD challenges our stereotypical notions of aging even before she shocks us with the story a fifteen year old girl having an affair with an older man.

* Monogamy Shbedogamy, composed by Jan Cornall with Elizabeth Drake. Recorded at ABC studios 1980. Listen on Soundcloud here. Excerpt on YouTube here.

* Talk, feature film released 1994. Screen play by Jan Cornall, directed by Susan Lambert, producer Megan McMurchy, More here and on Ozmovies.com “… the women's talk is the film's driving force: their funny stories, frank disclosures, erotic secrets, painful confessions and irreverent observations provide the ingredients for an intimate and playful commentary on contemporary relationships and lifestyles. TALK touches lightly but poignantly on the most personal dilemmas of thirtysomethings living in the '90s.’ https://www.ozmovies.com.au/movie/talk

* Descent to the Goddess, A Way of Initiation for Women, Sylvia Brinton Perera,

* Descent to The Goddess, p36. These days such insights, displayed as bumper stickers or slogans on Instagram wellness pages risk becoming clichés. But discovered in the right time/right place can still be profound.

* The Wounded Woman, Healing the Father-Daughter Wound, by Linda Schierse Leonard. Every woman of my generation had it on her bookshelf.

* I’ve lost count of the different ways I’ve written the character of my ex partner into various works under different names, including Bruce, Mac, Georgy or just Man. He doesn’t seem to mind. I ran this one past him too and he’s ok with it. The discussion we had reminded me that for all our own flaws, foibles, projections, dramas — our relationship was/is true, that its base is a creative outlook on life, a love of the experimental and in the spirit of MD, a commitment to interrogating a life lived through art.

A rare photo of a tidy desk in my small busyoffice with my number one writing ritual — tea