The Sweetness of an Afternoon Nap

22

Moto riding in Cambodia, by Suzi Kim, 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 or browse all chapters here.

When I drop Asher at home Steph is back from his meeting so I decide to head out on my own. I only really have today to look around as tomorrow I leave for the coastal town of Sihanoukville to run the writing workshop set up by my friend Rob. A fellow baby boomer, Rob moved there a few years ago from Australia, married a Cambodian woman called Sopheak and began making a living as a freelance blogger. In one day he may be asked to write articles on money matters, DIY washing machine repairs or travel tips to places he has never been. All possible if you have a decent enough internet connection and a quiet room away from the extended Cambodian family — his wife’s mum, dad and grandma, sister and cousin and all their brood. The last time I’d seen Rob was a decade before when he’d attended one of my Bali retreats.  After his first marriage ended and his grown-up kids had left home, he was wondering what to do with his life. Cambodia soon gave him his answer.

           Mr Larry isn’t around so I wave down a moto (motorbike) rider from the end of the street. I’m used to riding pillion in Indonesia. It’s quicker and easier to get about and there’s a certain unspoken intimacy to be had in clutching a complete stranger around the waist as he manoeuvres our way through traffic and narrow laneways. There’s always the back bar to hold onto if it all gets too close for comfort, and in all my moto travelling the drivers have always been perfect gentlemen.

        My rider’s name is Vang and I ask if I can engage him for the next few hours to ferry me to the different locations I want to visit. He agrees and we head off through the back streets of the well-off residential areas, towards the French Cultural Centre, where Ellie has suggested I’m sure to pick up some useful info about MD. It’s a brilliant idea and it takes only ten minutes to arrive outside a four-story, sixties-style building on a busy main street. In front, a Morris column (colonne Morris) — a cylindrical structure like those built in Paris in the 1800s to display theatre posters and advertising — marks the spot. Behind the column, an entrance way leads into a large courtyard area shaded by tall trees and bamboo. Café tables are scattered about, many occupied by Francophile westerners with their lap tops out, partaking in le petit dejeuner, dejeuner or coffee and snacks all day long. Leading off the courtyard in different directions are a cinema and gallery as well as a language school. I work all this out by reading various signs (written in French of course) and when I find out there is a library I get really excited. Following my nose I arrive at what I think might be the library entrance, where a smart young European woman sitting behind a desk, speaks to me in French. 

         ‘La bibliothéque est fermé,’ she says in a stern and unfriendly voice. Is it stern? Or is that just my imagination?  She could have said, ‘ I’m sorry, the library is closed today.’  I’m taken aback and can’t even stutter out a ‘merci.’ Not that she requires a response. In fact I’m getting the feeling she would rather I just went away.  But I do want to ask her a couple of questions and I do want to ask in French, only my brain doesn’t want to co-operate. I’ve gone blank on the verb ‘to have’ and there’s no time to search for it in my memory bank, so I resort to…

         ‘Do you have any books on Marguerite Duras? 

         ‘ Bien sûr,’ she replies with that self-satisfied inflection of impatience that goes hand in hand with the expression, ‘of course.’

         I try again.

         ‘ Connaissez – vous, s’il vous plait, la place… de…    de….  ah…  would you happen to know the whereabouts in Cambodia of the rice concession her mother, Marie Donnadieu bought with money she had to borrow from the Indian chettis?’ I know I’ve overstepped the mark but I had to give it a shot.

             ‘La bibliothéque est fermé,’ she repeats, ‘pour deux semaines.’

             She turns away to answer a call using exactly the same tone. Like most receptionists, she is a busy woman. I understand. I peer longingly past her, conjuring up all the shelves of books they must have on MD then remember, they would all be in French anyway. If I was staying in town for a few days, chances are I might end up meeting someone here who could help me, but for now I slink away feeling somewhat embarrassée, un peu vaincue. I’m grateful to find Vang out front by the Morris column waiting to whisk me away into the beeping, burping traffic.

        Hanging on to the back bar of the motorbike, the sting of humiliation sits tight on my skin. I’ve suffered embarrassment at the hands of the French before, but today I feel doubly ridiculous, like my trip is a total failure — here I am, almost at the end of my so-called pilgrimage and what have I found? Nada, zilch, rien, zero! A few more days online before I left might have been helpful, but as usual I acted on impulse. The $1000 payment handed out by Kevin Rudd in the Global Financial Crisis, had been my deciding factor, allowing me to add this trip on to the one I already had planned. And to let myself off the hook — I did do a bit of research, but I wish I’d done more.  I wish I was one of those very thorough people who planned things far in advance, with everything in colour-coded folders, legibly labeled with elegant forward slanting handwriting. Archives arranged alphabetically in spacious filing cabinets. Books on bookshelves lined up according to size and topic, spines straight, no slouching. Kitchen drawers divided into sections, clothing sorted, culled and stored according to seasons, underwear and casual clothing rolled and stacked. Tools hanging on their shadow hooks, not a single one out of place, car washed and polished, vacuumed front, back and boot once a week. Balcony plants regularly fertilized, pruned and re-potted. Bathroom tiles scrubbed, not a skerrick of mould in sight. Monday wash day, Tuesday iron, Wednesday mending, Thurs frying, Friday baking, Saturday clean, Sunday rest, then do it all again! Is that how the rhyme goes? Not in my house I’m afraid.  Like Marj, I tend to do things in a rush — get an idea, launch it off the cliff edge, and watch where it lands.

        The wind on my cheeks lightens my mood.  We weave in and out of cars and tuk tuks, tall mirror glass office buildings towering above us. Circling the big roundabout at Independence Monument, and heading towards the quay, we take a quick left turn to arrive at our destination, The Royal Palace.

         According to The Lover, MD’s family lived in ‘a fine house overlooking the Mekong, once the palace of the King of Cambodia.’ * In the 1920s the wide waterway was busy with all types of river craft and once a year local teams would prepare for the annual regatta, the Feast of The Waters. On Sundays, two royal elephants with gold embroidered palaquins and their mahouts, would parade along the foreshore giving rides to European children. *  Colonial life was in full swing with the French beautification of the city continuing to attract a host of French expats arriving in droves to take up jobs, set up plantations and industries and behave as if Cambodia was theirs for the taking. MD’s parents were not newcomers, they had been in the colony for 15 years, but worried about how they would handle the warmer temperatures in Phnom Penh compared to Hanoi, her father Henri had arrived first, giving Marie time to follow later with the children.  Did that year without their support spell his undoing? For it was only months after they all arrived in Phnom Penh that he was repatriated to France for the last time. At first Marie wasn’t too worried, they had both survived these tropical illnesses before.  But in the huge house  in the middle of acres of grounds she became afraid of the dark and made all her children sleep in the same bed with her. When she found a trapped bird in her husband’s office calling out in the dark of the night, she knew bad news was coming. *

          MD was only seven years old * and said she didn’t feel anything when her father died.  The children didn’t see much of him anyway, he was either busy with work or was ill. When doctors in France announced they could do no more for him, he took himself back to the property he owned in his hometown of Duras. In 1943 when MD’s first novel, Les Impudents, was published, she took Duras as her pen name. Years later MD wrote a moving piece on his death based on the account of two servants who were with him to the last. She surmised a calm moment occurring in an early winter afternoon as the mellow light of the last autumn mists rose up from valley and entered his room. A peaceful death — a sliding off into sleep that had ‘the gentle sweetness of an afternoon nap.’ *

    

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* The Lover p 35.  

* Marguerite Duras, La Vie Comme Un Roman, Jean Vallier p 30

* While I knew this to be correct, I kept reading in articles that MD’s father died when she was four. When I rechecked my references, I found the source of the misinformation to be MD herself! In an essay she wrote on her mother (Me and Other Writing p 20) she states ‘When my father died I was four years old…’ which is impossible as MD was born in 1914 and her father died in 1921. I also double checked it against a chronology of MD’s life in the compilation of The Lover, Wartime Notebooks and Practicalities by Everyman’s Library.

* Wartime Notebooks, p 272.