All My Sacred Thoughts

13

Photo by Digital Sennin, 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).

After nightfall, I decide that an evening on the famously rowdy Bu Vien Backpacker St is not for me, so I spend the night in my hotel room. I savor a take-away roast duck dinner piled high with mint and bean sprouts and then spread out on the desk, spending time writing up my notes and looking through the photos in my scrapbook.

        Next morning I arrive at the travel office with so much time to spare I end up in an adjacent pancake café keeping an eye out to make sure the bus doesn’t leave without me. It doesn’t, and soon I am on board with another motley crew of young, mostly European backpackers, budget travellers and adventurers plus a portly, elderly couple from New Zealand who tell me they love adventure. They look like slow movers so it’s a good thing we will be on the slow boat, although something tells me they are ready for anything.

        Our guide Mr Thao, in his late twenties, is a younger, shorter version of our Halong guide, Mr Tip, but has the same world-weary sense of humour and confident authority. Standing in the aisle to give his introductory spiel, he tells us we will visit an orchard on a delta island, a muslim village, and a floating market before continuing on to our floating hotel near the Cambodian border. I notice he hasn’t mentioned Sadec, but rather than be a demanding westerner before the trip has even begun, I decide to clarify it with him later.

        Before long we are on the edge of town. To our left, centuries old rice paddies are being bulldozed for huge housing developments. Tall, unfinished apartment buildings sit in the middle of nowhere as earthmovers crawl around them like giant centipedes, churning the fields into clay mush. Soon there will be malls and schools and all the infrastructure of a modern community, though you wonder how communal it will be.

        Further on, it’s a relief to get beyond the city’s industrial sprawl. The semi-rural landscape introduces me to a phenomenon I haven’t seen before — the hammock café. I wonder why no one has duplicated this back home. It is such a sensible invention. Rows of hammocks hang under open-air thatched roof structures, small tables for refreshments placed in between. Decorated with fairy lights and occasional potted plants, there are many of these cafes along the way for exhausted workers to sip fresh coconut drinks and catch forty winks. You get the feeling in this country that sleep is a luxury, to be snatched where and whenever possible. Everyone is busy making a dollar, using up every patch of spare land or water. Even along the roadside where there is barely any room, farmers have laid out blue tarps for drying golden incense, one of the many cottage industries of this area. Farmers don’t make a lot of money, Mr Thao tells us.  Much of it is subsistence industry. On a typical day the delta farmer is busy drying incense by the roadside, checking his newly planted rice seedlings, ferrying corn to the market in his long boat and fishing for the family supper on the way home. And as MD and her mother found out, to carve out an existence in a place where you experience the jungle as a living organism advancing on you every day, is no easy task.                      

        The pleated curtains of the bus slide about on their wires. They are made from deep blue satin and the little buttons keeping them in place have come unfastened in all the jiggling and jolting. The TV screen is playing a Vietnamese soap opera, but no-one is watching. No-one else is scribbling either or attempting to, only me, fishing on the page, hoping to catch a big one. Beside me sits a young Italian backpacker, his handsome looks hidden behind his smart gold-rimmed glasses. Dark curly hair, olive skin, the muscled forearms of youth. Good manners too, respect for his elders, ready with a nice smile and a hello.  I get the feeling he doesn’t speak much English so I am relieved of the duty of making polite conversation. He settles into reading his Italian novel and I carry on writing, and thinking…

        Somewhere he has a mother who is proud of him, who has taught him well, who has watched him step out into the world, worried for his safety. Then I ponder — if the mother is the child’s first love, what happens if the mother is unhappy like MD’s mother, like mine? Of course every mother says the birth of their child was the happiest day of their life, but days turn into months and months turn into years and the child (and parent) will experience every emotion before they grow up and fly the coop. While I thought I’d done a good job of hiding my depressive tendencies from my kids, one day my daughter, not long after having her first child, said to me out of the blue —  ‘you were a sad mother.’ She didn’t say it in an accusatory way, it was more of a observation.  She went on to add, ‘yeah sad in parts, happy in other parts, cynical as well, I remember you crying, but then I cry a lot now too.’ I wasn’t upset or offended, more shocked to know my cover had been blown. I thought I’d done such a good job of keeping my melancholy habit to myself.

        Mr Thao gets on the microphone to let us know we are coming into the town of My Tho, the gateway to the Mekong Delta where we’ll be stopping for a special snack. As if on cue our bus pulls in at a roadside fruit stall, and Mr Thao herds us off the bus towards a makeshift bamboo structure where a vendor is preparing something delicious from the baskets she has carried there on a pole across her shoulders. In one basket sits a large aluminum cooking pot with small bowls and spoons surrounding it, in the other basket are some of the extra ingredients she adds as she makes up the bowls for her customers. There’s room for a few of us to sit on the tiny stools she has set out, which she also carries. Others stand as she serves up our bowls.  I’m lucky to be sitting close and low as she hands the first one to me. The bowl feels as warm as her smile. Chunks of silken tofu float in a hot ginger syrup with some strips of jelly on top. I take a sip and then a mouthful. It slides down my throat, delicious and refreshing. It hits the spot. I’m sure MD would have tasted this delight. Perhaps it too was one of the dishes she loved to eat from local vendors. Definitely more tasty than the French style stodgy apples and meat cooked by her mother that she continually refused.

         ‘Tofu with ginger, tàu hū nuóc duòng — it’s my favorite breakfast dish,’ Mr Thao tells us as he slurps his up almost in one gulp. ‘And Bà here has the best. That’s why I brought you here. But don’t tell anyone, ok.’

        I can’t say I liked the taste of ginger as a kid but my dad’s mother, Nana Dean, loved it.  You could never go wrong if you bought her a ceramic jar of preserved ginger as a gift. It was imported from China and had a cork plug sealed with wax that usually had some sticky juice leaking out of it. You could use the jar later for pens or pencils or as an ornament on the shelf. The only other time ginger was seen in our house was on Christmas day, on the plate of assorted nuts, muscatels and glazed cherries we were allowed to munch on all day long. I didn’t touch the preserved ginger or the glacé cherries.  I don’t think Marj ever cooked with it, certainly not in the sixties when she was feeling the constraints of country town living.

Walking around town I notice

some houses have immaculate lawns

as if trimmed by nail scissors

            ~

Old ladies

all their days

sweeping leaves

    ~

Young woman

every day

the ironing board

MC 1984

       She told me she knew something wasn’t right when we lived in Rochester, a flat,  flood plain town set among lush irrigated dairy allotments, only eighteen miles from the Murray River. It was Chas’s second posting as high school principal and felt like we were leaving behind the quiet old-fashioned way of life for the modernity of the sixties. As he did in each new house we moved to, my dad set to, greening the barren front and back yards with kikuyu cuttings and within a couple of months we had lush lawns to play all our ball games on. We made friends quickly. The Sharp girls, lived over the back fence and the Wellmans had a wonderful old wide verandah homestead down by the Campaspe River. They had a daughter my brother's age and another a bit younger than me, so family get-togethers at their place were always memorable. I don't remember them ever coming to ours, in fact I don't remember our family ever entertaining, except for grandparents at Christmas and evening meetings of Rotary or Lions when we got out the good tea cups and I offered the old men sweet biscuits on a floral plate.
         

Things were rocky between Marj and Chas in those years.

It is v. difficult

to live with a

man who knows

EVERYTHING

All my sacred thoughts

things, ideas, actions

dashed to bits

put down often in front of guests

his lies, lack of manners

I'm left for dead

MC  1991

        My father was drinking heavily and one night after I’d gone to bed, I remember hearing them arguing in the bathroom. I don't know why Marj was taking a bath so late but he'd come home drunk and accused her of spending too much time out with her women friends. One friend in particular, Betty, may have been a little too threatening. She was intelligent, lively, witty and with her Marj could share her love of poetry and swap notes on the writings of Simone de Beauvoir.

        I heard the raised voices, a bang, a crash, heard Marj cry out. I don't know if he hit her, but I froze in my bed, completely incapable of any response. I knew I should intervene, but I also knew this part of their life was off limits to me. Parent’s bathrooms and bedrooms were not places you barged into uninvited, as I had discovered one Saturday afternoon when I innocently went looking for a hair brush on Marj's dressing table. Finding the curtains strangely drawn, and a lumpy, two body shape under the blankets of one of their twin beds, I knew I had crossed an invisible line. My father's voice growled out at me from the lump telling me that I was never to enter their bedroom without knocking again.
        Another time they had an argument in the kitchen during dinner. I can't remember what it was about. Chas hurled a plate at the wall and stormed out, off to the pub I guess. I do remember wishing he wouldn't come back, but he did, and the next morning at breakfast they laughed sheepishly and made jokes for our benefit about the dent in the wall. There was also the fist-through-the-back-door incident, which was scary at the time, but on reflection seems highly theatrical as the thin ply door splintered spectacularly beneath my father’s blow. The most dramatic event by far was a classic father-son confrontation when my brother, Pip, studying for his final matriculation year with the promise of freedom in sight, said the one thing we all thought, but dared not say. Our dad had just arrived home from his regular after- school, pre-dinner wind-down session at the pub and a tense conversation between them was underway.

        'You’re nothing but a drunk,' * Pip remarked as he sipped his malted milk at the kitchen table. Then it was on — man to man, a coming of age moment for my brother and a severe ego bruising for my dad.  From the kitchen to the living room to the back porch to the sleep out, they grappled and wrestled, throwing punches hither and thither, with Marj, me and my little sister Sally, trying to drag them off each other. How it ended I'm not quite sure. Perhaps this was the moment dad screeched off in the two-tone green Chevy and we all hoped he would never come back. But he did and life went on as before.
        On the day Marj later described to me, she was getting ready to go to a Mothers Club meeting up at the school. Putting on her hat and gloves (the expected dress code of the time), she found herself on the floor, not able to get up, as if struck by a strange kind of vertigo. I don't know what she did then, if she called for help or just crawled into her bed. It was in this town that she finally did start getting some treatment from a local GP who seemed to know about matters of the mind. She never wore her hat and gloves to the Mothers Club meeting again.  

Darling Daughter     

I'm sorry to the depths of my heart that I got this disease. My mum and rels didn't have it. It's worse now. I am every day vv unhappy

It all started at the church altar, being wed as your Pa stank of spirits. 3 days and nights drinking before the wedding and drinking on the honeymoon, it was such a flop.

Then the stress of going back teaching against my will as we had no money (all gone on whisky).

The depression came on in Shepp and apart from a few remissions has been in me ever since.

This makes me sad, sorry and ashamed, no confidence, no joy in living.

Although now your pa is vv good mostly, he is out all the time.

He tells me, your kids know you've been MAD for years.  But don't blame him.

I like many men. My dad was sweet, gentle, good at sport, vvv good with gardens, he left school at 12 years. I come from working class stock and proud of it. I was 'IN' with the bluebloods at Ballarat; yacht club, dancing, rowing. I saw through them. You know my oldest friend Twee was in the Brighton yacht club.

What I'm trying to say is once I was ME and not this putrid vegetable.

Love

your  Mum

MC 1985

        MD’s mental state, also fragile, was part of the reason in the late 60s she swapped the exhausting and solitary process of novel writing for making films. Her first experience with film had come a decade earlier when she was approached by director Alain Resnais to write a screenplay about Hiroshima. MD took up the challenge, sending daily scenes while he was filming in Japan. Set in post-war Hiroshima city and released in 1959, Hiroshima Mon Amour is the story of an intense affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect. Told in one long conversation, it explores time and memory, past and present — both favourite themes of Resnais and Duras. It was shown to unanimous critical acclaim, earning MD an Oscar nomination for best screenplay, and is credited with being the first truly ‘modern film’ of the French New Wave Cinema. MD said she never would have written it if she hadn’t been commissioned. It was a perfect vehicle for her and paved the way for her own film-making career. *

         The first film she wrote and directed, Destroy She Said, was released in 1970. Based on her novel of the same name, it is set in a country hotel and follows the relationships of a young woman and three other guests. It didn’t have much impact on the general public but received some attention from the intellectual set. Like all the films MD went on to make, it was too experimental for mainstream audiences, but she wasn’t bothered. Subverting the rules of conventional movie making, she used the process for her own ends, following her intuition and improvising with imagery and sound. More often than not words and dialogue of the soundtrack were brought to the fore, silences emphasised, sometimes imagery completely ignored as she insisted that ‘films were meant to be listened to not looked at!’

         Over the next ten years MD gathered a loyal team around her including her son Outa and his actor father Dionys Mascolo. Her old farmhouse at Neauphle-le-Chateau became a studio commune and in case she wanted to shoot a scene on the spur of the moment, she insisted that her young cinematographer, Bruno Nuytten and the whole crew live in with her. MD loved and nurtured all her actresses who included the talented and sought-after Delphine Seyrig and the brilliant Jeanne Moreau, and it was she who gave actor Gerard Depardieu his first film work.  She had seen him perform as a bit-part actor and was drawn to his strange, rough energy. His appearance as a washing machine salesman in her film, Natalie Granger, * is brilliant and his role in Le Camion (The Lorry) as the listener/reader to MD’s narration is totally captivating. Her actors and crew worked hard and played even harder, drinking on into the wee hours. MD’s stamina was extraordinary — at more than twice their age she was always last to bed, rising well before the others to cook and write the daily scenes.   Bruno Nuytten, who went on to become an award winning cinematographer and director, said he learned everything there was to know about film from MD.

 They made five films together including India Song, which he described as the highlight of his cinematography career. ‘Marguerite would tell me what she wanted in her words, and I would try to give it to her with the technical means I had at my disposal. There were no preconceived ideas about what it was possible to do or not to do.’ *

A photo from this time shows MD in her element, cigarette in hand, squeezed into a small space, squatting next to her young camera crew, intently watching the action. Another on a wet sand beach when the tide is out, waiting around in between takes, MD rugged up against the wind in her plaid skirt, boots and greatcoat. Others show her laughing and joking, giving direction to her actresses in between takes. Their admiration and respect and the spirit of camaraderie between MD and her youthful entourage is implicit in their body language. She is the quintessential creative mother, the chief of her tribe, the head of the creative commune. They are all in love with her and she with them. Every young actor, writer, filmmaker wanted to be part of this spontaneous movement, this radical invention of a new form of cinema.

         Marj was also enjoying the company of younger colleagues. We’d moved to another town, she had a new doctor, a new diagnosis (manic depression) and new drugs, which seemed to work for a while.  Chas got her a job as full-time librarian at his high school and she took part in the social life at staff parties as much as he did. Snapped at one such party with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she is in bliss, chatting with young lively, fresh-from-uni, teachers — finally, some colleagues who were her intellectual match. They too enjoyed her company, particularly her black sense of humour and tendency to theatrics. Years later when I was telling one of them how often Marj told us she wished she could die, he said

‘Oh she was always saying that, she was very theatrical, that was just Marj.’

    I wondered then if we, her kids had been the victims of a theatrical ploy.  Were her complaints just over-dramatised and had we fallen for it, hook, line and sinker?  Perhaps the pleas for help scrawled in caps at the end of chatty news in the letters she sent us, or on lists and notes she left around the house were an exaggeration too. 

 Darl, I often feel I can't go on— yet there's no way OUT of this HELL. If ya hear of a helpful method to make life bearable — goodo. Some years back you said I was a BURDEN to you. I'm sorry more than you know, I am a Burden. If Multiple Schlerosis had hit me instead, it would have been better? I didn't pick this sickness out of a HAT!”

MC 1987

____________________

* My brother Pip’s memory of what he said to our dad and the sequence of events is a bit different to mine, but the vibe is definitely the same.

*Cahiers du Cinema, http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/hiroshima-mon-amour.shtml MD’s screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amour was nominated for an Academy Award in 1959.

* https://www.afcinema.com/Bruno-Nuytten-A-return-to-the-very-first-shocks-to-the-retina.html?lang=fr