The Scent of Roasted Peanuts

12

Street vendor in Saigon, 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.)

  I must be at the wrong end of Cholon. It’s too hot to be walking around aimlessly and I need to find the tour company my friend Sonia recommended for my trip up the Mekong. The tour she her partner were on had stopped in at Sadec where the beginning of The Lover is set. Some people on her boat had continued on to Phnom Penh, which is where I am headed next.

        I hail a taxi to take me to the backpacker district where she mentioned all the travel agents are. I’ll book my Mekong trip, find a hotel there, then come back and pick up my luggage from The Rainbow Hotel. I’m aware I’m giving up on Cholon but I concede that MD’s Chinatown is long gone anyway. I should know that trying to re-create the past never works. There is no going back.  Real time moves on at such a hectic pace, history becomes a fantasy.  What am I looking for anyway? What drives ordinary people to travel a few thousand miles to stand outside a house where their beloved icon once lived? Is it simply that you hope some of their qualities will rub off on you, or is it more that you are so truly grateful for all they have given you that you want to mark it in some way? How lucky we are that our world is small enough that we can geographically pay our respects to our admired ones. Even if we can’t meet them, there’s the possibility that we can sit in a café where they sat, stand in a street or neighbourhood where they may have walked and feel that we are only a few degrees away from their hallowed presence.  Like visiting a café in Casablanca that Edith Piaf used to frequent, or a beach in Essaouira where Jimi Hendrix once spent the weekend.  On my first trip to Morocco I stumbled across such places. Piaf’s favourite bar, Le Petit Poucet, looked a bit tired and tatty the day I visited. If you weren’t in the know you may not have sensed its glorious past. Unlike the fresh white colonnades and potted palms at Rick’s Café, the piano bar made famous in the 1942 movie Casablanca. There, you felt like you might rub shoulders with a legendary character and yet the café is a replica, a re-creation of a set that existed only on a movie lot in Los Angeles. Does it matter? Maybe these places are a touchstone on the inner journey, a recognition that the road to greatness, while paved with pitfalls and booby traps, is worth taking.

        The taxi finds its way along the wide motorbike-choked avenues. When I see droves of young westerners pounding the pavement, I know we are close. I jump out of the cab and follow my nose, past pancake parlours, expresso cafes and pizza bars, and there on the corner, right next to a dozen other companies selling identical trips on side-walk blackboards, is the one Sonia mentioned. I wonder if I should shop around for a better deal but decide that would take far too long. I walk in through the open shop front, take a seat at the counter and explain where I want to go. A speedy young Vietnamese man in a white, open necked shirt pushes some photocopied brochures towards me and taps one with his pen.

        “This one? Overnight, stay in floating hotel, arrive Phnom Penh next day.

         ‘Yes, I guess so. Overnight to Phnom Penh, via Sadec?’

          He nods.

         ‘You want the fast boat or slow boat?” he asks.

           Slow boat, I decide, imagining the fast boat to be a kind of hi-speed hovercraft that gets you there so quickly you miss everything. It seems very cheap, only $40 US, but there’s no time to ‘um and ah’. I hand over the money and the deal is done.

        ‘Bus leaves outside this office tomorrow morning at 8 am sharp. No arrive, no money back.’

       ‘Ok,’ I agree as I stuff the ticket into my wallet and find myself back on the street. It was a very quick transaction but I’m sure it’s fine. After all they came recommended and if it doesn’t work out it’s only forty bucks.

        Leaving the travel agent behind I walk further along the strip. I’m hungry for brunch but there are too many touristy places on the main drag for my liking. Following my nose and rumbling tummy I turn into a narrow alleyway. It’s busy with local people coming and going and others sitting outside their small houses or businesses. Street sellers with baskets slung on their shoulders are selling specialties to housewives at their front doors and old women in conical straw hats are coming back from market shopping. The scent of mint and wild basil hits my nostrils. The sound of sizzling woks frying up fresh greens, beef and pork takes over from the incessant putter and beep of the busy street I just left behind. This feels more like it.  I even pass some slatted shutters that open directly onto the laneway like those MD describes in her Cholon scenes. I turn a narrow corner and come across a woman squatting in front of a single gas burner.  Whisking prawns, spring onions, thin carrot straws and mung bean sprouts about in a large wok, she pours the rice-flour batter in and rolls it around. She then serves up the most delicious looking pancake with accompanying greens and broth to an elderly gentleman sitting at a low dining table.  I order one too and sit down on my tiny chair to wait, drinking in the atmosphere. It may not be in Cholon but it is laneway living as MD described it. * I catch the scent of peanuts roasting and ask if I can add some as a garnish to my late breakfast. I eat my pancake mouthful by delicious mouthful, marveling at my not-Cholon, Cholon moment.

        After the meal I thank the chef and continue on my way. I come out at a quiet street and not far along, next to a tiny shophouse temple, I find a skinny, several stories tall, modern hotel. The smiling young man and woman behind the cramped reception desk both speak English and the price is right: $15 a night.  They show me a light airy room with a free ADSL cable popping out of a sizable desk. I love a room with a desk! I tell them I’ll take it, that I will be back soon with my bags.

         ‘Sure, take your time,’ the young man says, ‘we’ll be here!’

         I take another cab back to The Rainbow Hotel and ask the driver to wait while I pick up my luggage and settle my bill. The reception staff seem genuinely sorry to see me go.  I could have been an alien from outer space when I landed there less than twenty-four hours ago but now I almost feel like one of them. For a second I experience the mysterious nostalgia you can have for a place you know you never want to return to. I leave a tip and bid goodbye to the smiling staff and elderly Taiwanese guests milling about in the foyer.                     

 

        It seems to me that nostalgia is just a few steps away from melancholia. Our longing to return to the past, combined with its certain impossibility, produces the tinge of sadness that we can never have what we once had again. It’s a delicious conundrum and plenty of us indulge it. My fascination with colonial buildings here and at home is always accompanied by a dreamy fantasy of what once was.  But my imaginings of how grand life must have been— people gliding about slowly in a light filled gossamer realm (just like in MD’s film, India Song) has little to do with reality. Unless you were at the top of the hierarchy,  day to day living in colonial times was harsh. MD captures it perfectly in The Sea Wall when she describes how white the ‘white’ areas of the colonial city really were. For the rich, in order to set themselves apart, white was the order of the day — spotless white uniforms, white dinner jackets, white silk dresses, white shoes, and so on. White that could never be soiled, that must be laundered every twenty-four hours.

        Of course this all took place in the haut quartier or the upper area. Poor whites, like MD’s family, lived in the lower district, between the haut quartier and the ‘native’ suburbs where trolley cars carried the low paid multitudes to and from their jobs. In the mornings the ‘native’ conductors started the day in a crisp uniform. Due to the rising temperatures, by 10 am they had discarded most of it and spent the rest of the day half naked, sweat dripping from the copious amounts of green tea they drank to help them cool off. The trolleys MD describes in The Sea Wall were cast offs from a cooler European climate, and when they first arrived in the colonies, conductors and passengers alike smashed the glass partitions to create a cross flow of air. No white person from the higher or lower quartier, however convenient it might be, would risk losing face by riding the trolleys.   But it wouldn’t have stopped MD and her brothers, who thumbed their noses at such conventions.

        My middle-aged driver speaks reasonably good English, so I ask if it is possible to go back via Dong Khoi St, known in MD’s time as Rue Catinat. I’d read about Saigon’s most elegant street with its old colonial buildings, cafes and hotels made famous by other novelists like Graeme Greene, in his novel The Quiet American. The tree-lined street leading down to the Saigon River is home to a number of notable landmarks:  the Notre Dame Cathedral, the grand Post Office, the Opera House, the Majestic Hotel, the Grand Hotel (formerly Saigon Palace Hotel), the Hotel Continental. I’m on the lookout for the site of the old Eden Cinema that featured in a few of MD’s works which by 1996 when biographer Laure Adler visited, had been turned into a moped parking lot. When the NY journalist came searching for it ten years later, all that remained was the Dong Khoi Video Store at the back of an arcade.  I ask the driver if he knows anything about it.

        ‘Oh, you mean Eden Mall,’ he says, ‘no cinema since long time, soon they will knock mall down too. We already passed, you want go back? For antiques, souvenirs?’

        ‘No, don’t worry,’ I reply. It doesn’t sound so appealing. ‘Maybe I will come back later,’ I tell him, knowing I probably won’t.

         Life was tough for MD’s mother supporting three children on a low teacher’s salary and it’s said that she sometimes took a job playing piano for the silent movies at Eden Cinema. The young Marguerite went with her and slept on the floor beside the piano while her mother played. In The Sea Wall, the movie theatre features when the young teenager Suzanne, travels to the colonial city with her mother who is going to have a diamond valued — one given to Suzanne by her older admirer, Monsieur Jo. While her mother is out seeking buyers, Suzanne takes a walk alone (something never done by young ladies), into the haut quartier. Attired oddly in a borrowed dress and man’s hat (as in The Lover), she attracts attention and becomes self-conscious. Coming across the entrance to the Eden Cinema * she buys a ticket and goes in. In the middle of the day, the darkened cinema offers Suzanne a place of refuge. She feels the cinema hall to be ‘more consoling… more generous and charitable than all the charitable institutions… a night in which to console yourself for all your shames… all your despair (and) the frightful filth of adolescence’. *

While it’s quite melodramatic ( as teenagers often are) I find great solace in MD’s description of adolescence. Whether she was exaggerating (given what we know of her childhood, probably not) her amplification gives expression to a universal experience of the teen years. Years later in The Lover, when the young girl says she wants to write, it’s transformative. She may well have said — I promise to rewrite this scenario again and again, which over the course of her life, is exactly what she did. It’s a strong statement from the character/writer and helps us understand why MD would reinvent, rewrite, re-explore these themes over and over in her writing. On the screen, an impossibly romantic love story plays out.  Suzanne is entranced. So was Marguerite. Her love of cinema never waned and she would go on to write and direct nineteen films.    

        Two photos from MD and Marj’s early 30s are so interchangeable it is astounding. In one, Marguerite stands alone in a field of grass that stretches to a distant horizon. She has her head to one side, looking down, eyes lowered, a coquettish smile on her face: happy, contented. It’s probably taken the same day as the photo by the fire with her husband and her lover, for she is wearing the same white blazer, pencil skirt and hairstyle; curls swept back from the forehead. What makes this photo doubly extraordinary is that only a year or so before, she had given birth to a son fathered by her husband Robert Antelme. It was a tragedy that no-one could have foreseen, for after a difficult pregnancy and a long and arduous labour, her baby was born dead. At first Marguerite blamed herself and retreated from all her friends and colleagues. Later she blamed the war and the nuns in the hospital, who hadn’t even allowed her to see the child, let alone hold him. MD later wrote more than one account of this sad event — a dialogue between herself and the nuns who ‘looked after’ her. When she begged them for time with her dead son they admonished her for suggesting such a ridiculous thing, and told her that the good Lord had called him home. *

        Marj’s photo comes from a happier time. The war over, husband Chas came through unscathed and a month after he arrived home from Europe, Marj was pregnant with baby Phillip. In a photo taken a few years later she also stands in a paddock, her husband and child beside her, looking out over a plot of rural land that today is a thriving suburb of Melbourne. The story that goes with the photo, told to me many times, is that the bulge under her jacket is me and that this is where they will build their dream house. It would remain a pipe dream as they didn’t end up buying their first and only house until after I left home.

         In 1946 MD became pregnant again to her lover Dionys Mascalo, and gave birth to a healthy boy, Jean. Nicknamed Outa, he slotted right into Marguerite’s busy life of political activism, writing, intellectual discussions, drinking and cooking in her Paris apartment in Rue St Benoit. A photo taken there shows MD playing with toddler Outa on a sofa.  In her mid thirties — a cigarette in one hand, an open book nearby — her girl-like looks belie her strong maternal instincts, as she reaches out to stroke her son's head. So happy to have birthed a healthy child, MD admits to spoiling Outa.   She was protective and possessive and even as a child treated him like an equal.  With her love and attention, the support of her husband and lover, all her friends and hired help, * Outa thrived and grew up to become a photographer and worked as assistant director alongside MD on all her films.

        Marj’s lifestyle was far more conventional in comparison, although drinking and smoking was something they definitely had in common. Chas smoked forty a day or more and, as we know, loved a drink. Marj smoked and drank in moderation but could keep up with the boys when she wanted to.  They had a lively social life in each country town we lived in, enjoying staff parties, barbecues with friends and golf club dos.  A photo taken at a friend’s farm in the fifties confirms this. There we all are, sitting in a white wrought-iron setting on a lush lawn under a giant willow tree, the party in full swing. Marj, wearing a shirt-maker dress and cats-eye glasses, sits holding a glass of amber beer in a gesture towards the camera. Multi-coloured cocktail onions perch on toothpicks amongst cheese cubes and Jatz crackers, while snags sizzle on the barbeque as adults get happy and kids run amok, taking advantage of a moment of anarchy. By nightfall we will be asleep in the back of the car cozily clad in our matching pyjamas and dressing gowns, until one sozzled adult decides it’s time we all went home.

Strange that a life that seemed happy enough, even rich at times, has become now mainly one big void.

One spends so much time alone inside the head. One is alive because the daily functions are performed.

But one is SO alone.

When a snatched day happens with friends, it is so cosy, safe, warm, relaxed, but there is always the knowledge — this will not last — this is not your home, your life, it is their laughter. Yours will go when you leave your friends. This is not YOUR life. This is the happy, carefree, relaxed way they live.

But as you plod on, as you have done for years, you know if you sink, it is only your loss. If you go to the bottom of the ocean and fail to rise to the surface today they will say:

— how sad

and tomorrow

—which horse won the last race?

MC 1990

        I like my new hotel. My room is six stories up and I can plug in my mini Acer laptop into the thick blue ADSL lead poking out of a hole carved in one edge of the unusually spacious desk. The tiny keypad is annoying but I can Google and check my emails, even Skype if I want to.  I don’t want to, not yet. I’ve hardly been away for a second. What’s the point of travelling all these thousands of miles when you can just talk to someone as if they are in the next room?

         When I left Australia in the mid seventies to go travelling with my friend Ruth, it would have been a good couple of weeks before my parents received postcards telling them I’d arrived. I remember sending some from Chinatown in San Francisco and I tried to send a letter or card weekly after that. Marj kept most of them and when I was packing up her house after she went to the nursing home, there they were, floating randomly in drawers and cupboards, among her to-be-filed piles of newspaper cuttings, photos, lists, poems, SOS notes, bills, sketches, un-posted letters. Emptying out those drawers, wardrobes and under-the-bed stashes was like glimpsing her life’s work. Piling it into bags ready to carry home, I promised myself that one day, I would sort through them all.

        The regret I have for never publishing Marj’s poems while she was alive lingers along with all the other mother-daughter guilts I have carried around for years. It somehow just seemed too big a task, and yet I know every writing class I teach is a class for her, every aspiring writer’s book I help birth, is her book. One Christmas, thirty or so years ago, I did print out copies of around twenty of her poems in a small booklet to give out to family members and friends. After one of her more darkly humorous poems. I called it, Have You Done Your Jams?

Have you done your jams?

I’ve just waxed down

Fifteen pots of plum

Twelve of raspberry

Done the washing

Done the ironing

Done the dusting

And ‘til twelve noon I’ll be busy

On the fridge

Thursdays

 I do all the plug-holes

Fridays

Ask Our Lord for forgiveness

Saturday

I belt the old man up with a pick.

MC 1983

I tempered it with children’s limericks, just a sample of the dozens she sent to the grandkids in weekly letters bulging with cuttings and drawings.

I had to go to Uluru

To find a special cockatoo

I’d found I’d only packed one shoe

What on earth would I do

(With just one shoe at Uluru)

I’ll leave the solution up to you

                 ~

A woman with a sick kangaroo

Bandaged it and put it in the bed

No room for her husband

He came home

And had to sleep in the shed

                 ~

Willie, Willie don’t be late

I’ll meet you at the garden gate

Bring your rubbers and a coil of rope

And I will bring a telescope

MC 1985

And some of her lyrical poems such as: 

End Of August

Thundery ink clouds

Quick sharp showers

Black hills wet with deciduous green

Peppercorn, burnt oak, naked trees of Britain

Then the wattle:

Hard yellow, lemon yellow, silvery yellow

And the young willow fronds coming up all along the creek

People still hug fires

No one is out

Except the little paper boy

And the blossom of course

Everywhere the blossom

MC 1984

        I imagine another performance piece, perhaps connected to the bedroom scenario, where a young woman labors under the weight of large striped and plaid plastic Hong Kong bags she must carry from one side of the stage to the other. As soon as she arrives she has to load up again. She carries them on her back, her side, her front, her head, her legs, her shoulders, inventing all sorts of ingenious ways of ferrying the stuff across. It goes on for a long time until in one crossing a bag begins to leak letters, papers, drawings and jottings which fall out onto the floor in a trail behind her. She notices them as if an oddity at first, then becomes curious and follows the trail, starting to read them one by one. As she reads she sifts and sorts, offers bits to the audience to read, asks them to read aloud, invites them to come sifting and sorting with her. While the audience is busy with their tasks, she continues her ferrying and crossing but her mood is lighter and her movements, more jerky and alive, cause her one by one to accidentally drop the bags, tear and empty them until the stage is knee deep in paper. Together the performer and the audience make something with them, a huge collage, a giant book, a sculpture. The woman is noticeably happier. She says at the end,

        ‘Mmm, that’s marvellous, I feel so light, I could almost fly.’

________________

* MD loved Bánh Xėo, Vietnamese pancake. Here, in her own words, is her recipe. ‘It’s difficult. It requires very gentle heat and time. The secret is patience. The dish must be made in a skillet set over a diffuser. Brown some ham or unsalted fatty pork. Cut into tiny pieces. You may also add half a clove of garlic, grated. When the pork is browned, add very finely minced leeks. Add pepper. Do not salt. When the leeks and the pork are well-mixed, cooked, add the black mushrooms soaked in boiling water (washed very well first), rice vermicelli, and bean sprouts. Before the eggs, add the nuoc-mâm (fish sauce) a generous draft, but careful the nuoc-mâm is quite salty. Add no salt or very little. Taste. It has happened that I have ruined this dish, and I didn’t understand why. The eggs must have overcooked. It has also happened that I have been successful beyond what I had thought possible, I don’t know why this is either.’ From La Cuisine de Marguerite (Benoît Jacob, 2014).

* In 1977 MD’s play Eden Cinema, based on The Sea Wall was published. A New York production in 1986 starred Brooke Shields.

* The Sea Wall, P 152

*When she requested to see him, they lied that his body had already been disposed of. Wartime Notebooks p 281-285 and Me and Other Writing p 90-94.

* MD’s draft of an ad appears in her notebooks: ‘Seeking lady with childcare experience and excellent references (preferably around 40 years old) mornings nine to noon for housework and four to six pm to take the baby out, except Sundays. In return: furnished maids room with electricity, 4000 francs, breakfast and midday meal.’ WN p 250.