Sailing on the Marguerite

8

The misty waters of Halong Bay

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).

The wooden junk The Marguerite, is as magnificent as I’d hoped with cabins and dining area downstairs and an upper deck with lay back deck chairs. My cabin is perfect: twin beds, a shower, toilet, an air conditioner, which drips onto the TV so neither works properly, but who needs them anyway.

          While we settle in, our young, all male crew, guided by their petit elder captain, hoist the yellow sails for our course through the chalky seas. The view from the deck is not all blue skies like Mr TF’s brochure but misty, foggy even. I don’t know how we will even be able to see the 1,600 limestone islets at this rate, and yet once I adjust my expectation, I decide this is the only way to see it. Mysterious floating shapes loom all about us. The mess of tourists we fought our way through to get on board has been transformed into a peaceful flotilla of charming wooden sailing vessels from another age steaming slowly into a strange mystical world. On board, we explore the narrow walkways and stairs between the decks, smiling our hellos and making our way to the dining room where our sumptuous lunch awaits us.  

        The dining room and bar are at the back of the boat with windows looking out on all sides to the drifting, shape-shifting view. Two large tables have been set so we claim our places and start getting to know each other — where are you from, how long have you been travelling and so on. I am chatting away to a Belgian couple and it’s getting very interesting, I tell them of my pilgrimage to MD. ‘Do you know her writing?’ I ask tentatively. ‘Bien sûr,’ they reply and are about to elaborate when we are drawn to voices being raised at an unset table the Lovers have claimed for themselves. Their low-talking, eye-gazing, finger-stroking bubble has been burst by the staff who insist they must sit at a table already set. Miss Costa Rica applies her knock down stare that would intimidate a giant, but not the tiny maître de. Mr Tip is called in and explains if they don’t move they don’t eat, simple as that. Meanwhile we all watch, intrigued for the outcome. I hadn’t realised it would involve me. As I am the only single in the party, Mr Tip tactfully explains I will have to move to the other table where the numbers are odd, so the Lovers can sit here. I bid my new friends adieu, take my mineral water and sit down with a young Israeli family of five and do the get-to-know-yous all over again.

        After lunch, it’s drizzling rain so I opt for a bit of alone time in my cabin. Sitting on the bed, I take out my scrapbook and move pictures of Marj and MD around. I have a pouch at the back where I can store extra pics and cuttings and I always travel with a glue stick and small pair of scissors, which often get confiscated when I don’t remember to stow them in my luggage. There’s no particular order, I’m just working intuitively, making associations, responding to texture, shape and shade as if it was a collage. I don’t usually write in the scrapbook but there’s no hard and fast rule about that either.  I notice that there are no pictures of Marguerite in jodhpurs, which seem to be one of Marj’s favoured outfits as a young woman. In the thin grey photo album from the vinyl suitcase, I found a trove of small black and white snaps taken with a box brownie camera and held in place by gold paper corners.

We slept in tents on the plateau and

creeping out early as the morning sun

a sea of white capped waves

lapping and breaking on steep cliffs

enticed us to step right in

What a deathly wish that would be!

As sun threw out its rays

sea melted away

leaving pockets of mist

lying low

in the oval valley

MC 1981

         The snaps show Marj hiking along a bush track with other jodhpur clad girlfriends, small canvas packs on their backs; sitting on a beach in swimsuits and big sombrero hats; standing in front of the lemon tree (a favoured place for photos), wearing a plaid skirt just below the knee and twin set. It’s the late 1930s and these must be her college days, filled with friends and laughter, romance even. My father Chas is there too, his athletic body sporting white shorts and singlet, playing cricket with other male friends at a picnic by a river, while the girls in floral cotton sundresses get out the picnic rug and make tea.

Let us make a waning moon

From a piece of golden felt

Hang a twinkling little star

People see it from afar

And say

Look — moon’s up!

MC  1983

        Among MD’s photos there is a lemon tree too. It could almost be the same back yard except for the tall buildings behind it. Standing next to another young woman in her look-alike skirt and cardigan, she holds a black and white cat in her arms, stroking its tummy. She had been back in France since 1933, studying law and politics for three years at University. There she met and fell in love with a handsome but tormented fellow student, Jean Lagrolet, who introduced her to theatre and American literature. Conrad soon became her favourite. They too would take long walks out in the countryside with study notes stuffed in their pockets, but MD had no plans to become a lawyer, she always knew she wanted to write. She loved student life, she loved men and she loved sex, and had no qualms about being unfaithful. As things with Jean became more difficult, she fell in love with his good friend and fellow law student, Robert Antelme, who was known and respected for his great wisdom and generosity. Although their relationship was more intellectual than physical, Marguerite regarded him as the most important man in her life and it was at her suggestion in September 1938 that they married in a town hall registry office. War was looming and after the simple ceremony, which no friends or photographer attended, Marguerite went home to her Paris apartment and Robert returned to his barracks in Rouen to continue his military training.

          Marj told me more than once that on her wedding night she knew she had made a big mistake. Husband Chas had drunk so much he passed out on the hotel bed and snored loudly until morning. His conquest of Marjorie was a success. He knew she would be his from the moment she won the Melbourne Teacher’s College popularity contest. There were other suitors of course, but Chas’s powers of persuasion were considerable, besides he was handsome, sporty, clever, and as a born leader knew how to get what he wanted. Marj may have put her misgivings aside, unlike her mother-in-law Deanie, who felt her son would have been better off with a flashy dresser or a woman who at least knew how to cook more than a boiled egg!

The year was 1943 and none of this is apparent in their wedding photo, which for all its wartime starkness has a certain hand-tinted warmth and colour. I doubt Marj ever had the dream of being a bride in white, but if she did, rationing made it impossible. Instead she wore a knee length powder-blue suit with black leather high heels, black handbag and gloves. An orchid corsage draped from her right shoulder and a flower hat with a tiny pink veil, sat perched on her head. Chas stands straight and proud in his Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) uniform, officer’s hat in hand, his other arm at Marj’s back. Many years later on the back Marj has scribbled a commentary: ‘this Collins St couturier hashed up my mother Jeannie’s suit and she hated it. Aunt Margaret wore an old hat which made Mum mad, and there I was, the bride at the altar, yearning to flee!’ Their honeymoon, if there was one, didn’t last long. Chas was shipped out to Europe with the RAAF and didn’t return for another two years.

          The rest of the day passes pleasantly with activities provided for us tourists  — a tour of a huge limestone cave, canoeing and swimming. I team up with the Belgian dad and we paddle around investigating a shrine in a sea cave where a line of various sized Buddha’s sit on a rock shelf sending their good vibrations out across the waters.  Later, kids and adults alike, leap repeatedly off the junk into the green chalky waters, until someone spots a mass of stinging jellyfish rapidly approaching us. It’s great entertainment for the crew as we swim shrieking for the ladder and scramble aboard.  Another huge meal follows before we retire and drift off to sleep to the gentle rocking and lapping against the old hull.

          Next morning I creep up on deck to watch the dawn light bring shape to the island protectors huddled around us. No longer shrouded in mist, the sheer rock walls stare down at us with stern faces, green foliage sprouting like facial hair from all their cracks and crevasses, tidal rims and small beaches appearing on their chins. A bird cries out. Smoke rises from a fisherman’s dinghy. He is cooking breakfast fish over a small brazier at the back of his boat, its rounded canopy reminding me of the children’s story of Ping the Chinese duck, left behind when his boat sailed off down the Yangtze River without him.

          Others arrive on deck to catch the morning glow, talking quietly, taking photos, meditating on the view. The Lovers are noticeably absent. Breakfast is a mere distraction and we are up on deck again as the view on all sides begins to move. The Marguerite has pulled up anchor and we are off in our seamless gliding motion, leaving our safe harbour and venturing further into the maze of rocky sentinels. Our yellow sails wave and nod to the other vessels accompanying us at a respectable distance, their tourist cargo thankfully still invisible to us. This morning’s journey is an exploration of narrow waterways where the huge limestone shapes loom and recede like the parts of our lives that have drifted off, been abandoned or locked away for too long; as if here they are again, seeking acknowledgement before they slope off into the mist of memory once more.

          I wonder if this is how it felt when MD was writing The Lover. Did the shapes of memory bump and nudge her as she remembered her fifteen-year-old self on the ferry, traversing the muddy waters of the great Mekong River, about to begin the journey from girlhood to womanhood?

         I don’t know if MD ever travelled these waters.  At the age of five she did go on a trip with her parents to Southern China, whose border lies just to the north of Halong Bay. If they stopped off for a boat ride as we have done, MD would have passed by the same rocky monoliths named by those who travelled this way centuries before — Kissing Rock, Fighting Cock, the Incense Holder; as well as frogs, chickens, dogs, elephants, beautiful maidens, whose names I’m sure have more nuance and significance in the Vietnamese language. People have lived on, fished in and defended these waters for thousands of years and are still here inhabiting floating villages like the one we arrive in at the end of our labyrinthine journey. A collection of square wooden buildings on pontoon platforms includes a school, petrol station, clinic, store and other village amenities. Small floating houses painted bright blue have red geraniums in window boxes. Yellow star flags flap on their rooftops and below the water line farmed fish in cages flap about frantically, awaiting their next feed. While to us this kind of living might seem restricted, the solidity of land must seem just as strange for those who know the water to be their home.

          The Marguerite hangs about in the sheltered bay as we take our last up-close snaps of the limestone islets. Ahead of us is the stretch of unprotected water we must cross to get back to port. Just as we settle into our deck chairs for our last relaxing glide, crew are suddenly on deck battening down the hatches and yelling at us to go below. It seems an over-the-top response to the bit of rain that’s sprinkling down but soon we understand. A strong wind has whipped up out of nowhere. All the other vessels are heading back through the same small gap we are about to pass through. Down below we learn that with no keel these junks are completely useless in a storm. Our captain turns The Marguerite around in a manoeuvre that narrowly misses smaller junks on one side and the rock wall on the other. It’s a junk jam! In the end the crew leap onto a floating house and tie our vessel on, so the wind can’t push us into the rock. In the dining room, where we watch the drama unfold through the panoramic windows, they tell us we will have to wait out the storm for an hour or so. The captain guides our boat back into the sheltered labyrinth and we circle like a plane in a holding pattern, passing the Incense Holder again and again.  A monument of good luck, I decide ours must be doubled, even tripled for soon the wind has dropped and we sail out into the strait.

          The sky is dripping rain and the mist has closed in again as we tootle back to port. We have packed our bags, handed in our room keys and wandered the decks once more. The staff are already changing the sheets and clearing away our rubbish. I pass the Lover’s cabin, their door hangs open, their tender love nest now a plain upturned mattress airing in the Halong breeze. 

          Like any child, it's hard for me to imagine my parents feeling a lover’s passion for each other and yet in the vinyl suitcase I found airgraph letters written during the war that tell otherwise. Different to paper aerogrammes and developed for speedier delivery, airgraph letters were photographed onto microfilm and flown to their destination where they were printed and delivered. Chas writes: ‘My darling wife, Dearest, Dearest sweet… I’ve been away from you for six months now, that's approx. 180 days, which means that there were 8 hours each night when you should have been lying in my arms. 1440 hours, that means four hours more I have to hold you in my arms every day for 165 days and that’s just for the first 6 months. Work out what’s going to happen when I’ve been away 2 years!’ 

        I don’t have any of Marj’s replies. If my father kept them they are long gone.  He goes on to say, ‘I hope you are still having a good time. Make the most of your opportunities dearest, for when I get home you won’t be able to move without me dogging your footsteps.’

          She was indeed. When Chas left for the war, Marj volunteered for the WAAAFs, the Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force, and worked in a mail office in St Kilda Rd. In the evenings she and her friends would go out dancing with American troops stationed in Melbourne who were preparing to fight in the Pacific. Marj told me she would dutifully explain she was already married, but at least it didn’t stop her enjoying their gifts of nylon stockings, chocolates and cigarettes.

          MD had no such moral code inhibiting her. Passion could easily have been her middle name. The fact that she was usually cheating on the men she lived with only made her more attractive and desirable. A photograph from this time shows her warming her hands by a small fire in the woods. To her left is her husband Robert Antelme, to her right, her lover Dionys Mascolo. The men are sitting on the ground, Marguerite is squatting gracefully wearing a straight white skirt and jacket, daisy chain pinned to her blouse, one arm around a tree sapling for balance, the other hand stretched toward the fire. She looks directly at the camera, smiling as is her habit, her face relaxed and happy, her broad forehead shining; in her element, with the men she loves.

          There is such a physical likeness to Marj in this photo that I try to imagine my mother leading Marguerite’s life: joining the French Resistance, loving and living life on the run, writing her first novel at the age of twenty-nine, (the same year Marj and Chas got married), becoming a journalist for the newspaper Libres.

          Apart from the aerographs, all the suitcase has to show for Marj and Chas’s war years are a few farewell backyard snaps and a group of surveillance shots taken from Chas’s Coastal Command bomber where he sat in his navigation turret: images of vast grey oceans, coastlines of steep cliffs pounded by angry white surf, fellow bomber planes flying in formation beside his, a ship’s wreckage strewn in the sea below, a European coastal village, maybe somewhere in France. Perhaps Chas flew low over MD’s parallel life. Perhaps Marguerite looked up and noticed the insignia on the side of the plane and went on writing.

        Hanoi greets us with its noise and chaos. We enter its honking streets and get caught in a traffic jam that has us inching along at an excruciating pace towards the old quarter where we will be dropped at our hotels. We are close enough to be able to walk faster than we are driving, so most of us mutiny and ask to get off. In a minute we are on the sidewalk with bags and hurried goodbyes, heading off in all directions. I kiss and shake hands with the Belgian family and call out a goodbye to the Lovers, but with heads down attending to their luggage they don’t hear me. In my heart I wish them all the best. You do want lovers to have happiness ever after, even if you know it may be fleeting.