The Rainbow Hotel, Saigon

10

Photo by Anna Cruz, 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).

My plane lands with a bump on the tarmac at Tân Son Nhát Airport just seven kilometres from the centre of Ho Chi Minh City. In the Vietnam War when Saigon was home to the US military, this was one of the busiest military airbases in the world. The only good thing about wars is that eventually they end. People’s lives are devastated, their towns and lands destroyed, but somehow recovery begins.  In the early 70s in Australia when I took part in the moratoriums to end the horrors of the Vietnam War, I had no idea of what pre-war Vietnam looked like. On our television screens all we saw were napalm strikes, helicopters crashing, children maimed and burned.  After the war when Vietnamese refugees began arriving in their thousands, Australians got to know Vietnam a little. They say the best way to experience a culture is through food, and decades later we all know how to order phõ (classic noodle soup), chå giò (spring rolls), and bành xéo (Vietnamese pancake). And what person in Australia now can live without bàhn mì? But while most Aussies have a fond affection for the Vietnamese people who joined our ranks, how much we really know about their history and culture is another matter.

        At the taxi desk, just past luggage pick up, I tell the girl in my best French accent that I want to go to Hotel Arc en Ciel. Barely nodding she takes my money and writes me a pink ticket. I walk out into the afternoon heat and hand it to a taxi official who beckons a waiting driver. He’s a friendly guy, less grumpy than his Hanoi counterpart and takes my bags with a toothy smile. It’s only seven kilometres to the city and my attempt at conversation doesn’t go far, but after negotiating the usual airport chaos, we are on our way.

At first the traffic on the multi lane highway is not too bad, and I can tell we are getting closer to the city proper when we encounter the swarms of motorbikes — some over a block long.  When we manage to get past them and turn into a wide tree-lined boulevard, I have the feeling Cholon must be close. The driver it seems, is not so sure — as soon as we head in one direction, he loses confidence and doubles back again. The sky is darkening with huge rain clouds when he finally stops to ask for directions, never a good sign! After wild gesticulations and confident nodding with random street folk we drive off again, the opposite way to their pointing. I keep repeating: ‘Arc en Ciel, Arc en Ciel’, which just seems to make him more confused. He slows to a crawl searching for numbers, up one side of the shop house street, back down the other, until we both see it at the same time — a neon rainbow above a hotel front.

        ‘Yes,’ I say triumphantly, resisting an urge to pat him on the back, ‘that must be it.’ I leap out asking him to wait while I go in to make sure. It’s another skinny facade, brightly lit, with a smattering of middle-aged Chinese people hanging about in the lobby.

        ‘Is this Hotel Arc en Ciel?’ I ask the Chinese girl behind the desk, sounding out the words in my clearest French accent.

        ‘Rainbow Hotel, Rainbow Hotel’, she repeats, pointing to the sign at the counter that indeed says Rainbow Hotel.

It appears nobody here speaks English or French and I’m not sure what to do.

        ‘Marguerite Duras’ I say, ‘Cholon, Arc en Ciel’. More blank looks. Even though I know arc en ciel means rainbow, I don’t think it can be the right place. This doesn’t look like the Cholon I am searching for; there’s no bustling Chinese marketplace, just a big wide empty street with an ominous sky ready to crack open with thick fat rain. A huge thunderclap electrifies the air and it starts to bucket down. Not the kind of weather anyone wants to be out in. I run back out to get my bags and tell the driver I will stay. He gives a toothy smile and is on his way.

        The room they show me is once more windowless and has a mouldy smell, so I ask for another. The balcony room is a little more expensive, hardly more luxurious, but I don’t mind. At least it looks out onto the street, which for now is a watery blur.

        Rainbow Hotel, I have worked out, is definitely not Hotel Arc en Ciel. The girl at the taxi service desk must have made the mistake and I added to the confusion by not giving her the address, assuming she knew what I was talking about. Rainbow Hotel is a budget hotel for Taiwanese tourists, so they speak Mandarin and little English. This is underlined when I go downstairs to their restaurant and order ‘chicken soup with noodle’ from the picture on the menu. There’s no one else there and the staff are eager to please. The young male waiter comes back looking crestfallen to tell me there’s no chicken. I look at the pictures again and go for the fish. A girl comes back to let me know the fish is off too and pronounces a word that sounds like ‘beef’. I repeat what she says, then she repeats it again and offers to write it down. She writes Pig. I laugh, settle for pork noodles and by the time it arrives we have broken the language barrier with our smiles.

            The meal is delicious, the best I’ve had in Vietnam so far, but back in my room I feel foolish and let down. I don’t know how I expected to walk onto a movie set of The Lover.  There’s no scent of burnt sugar, roasted peanuts or small fires burning, no fish cooking on outdoor braziers, no crowds of people walking up and down the small streets of a local housing settlement. MD’s Cholon was a noisy place filled with the cries of vendors, the clacking of wooden clogs, people calling out to each other, day and night.

         In The Lover, Cholon is where on a half-day school holiday, not long after their first meeting, the Chinese man takes the girl to the apartment he keeps in the settlement built by his father. Small and simply furnished, with slatted shutters that face the noisy street, there’s just a bed, a chair, and a tall ceramic rain jar for washing. When he tells the girl he loves her, she doesn’t answer back. She is aware of her power and she knows that in this moment her childhood is over. When he takes her, she feels a little pain — then pleasure and desire. He weeps, asks her why she has come with him. She tells him about her family, that they have no money. He knows she doesn’t love him, but he is smitten. He says he will give her money anyway. She doesn’t really care, for now she has tasted desire, she wants to taste it again.

        Afterwards she says she feels sad. He tells her that’s what happens when you make love in the afternoon when the sun is high. That it goes away after nightfall. She doesn’t agree, says the sadness comes from her, has been with her since she was young. She feels it as a comfort — a fulfillment of her mother’s prediction, the one she shouts at her while she tells her to never expect anything good from anyone. *

        In the evenings after their lovemaking, she and her lover go out to a Chinese restaurant as big as a department store. Chinese orchestras play on the balconies and waiters call the orders up and down several floors to the kitchens below. The restaurant of my hotel hardly compares.

        According to MD her mother tolerated the affair with the Léo, the Chinese lover, as long as she could believe that nothing sexual had taken place. For sex, he would have to marry her, but until then it was her daughter’s duty to her mother to get what she could from him. When MD’s family members first realised how rich the Chinese lover was, they started making their own plans. * In their fantasies he could pay off the mother’s considerable debts, buy every family member a car, purchase a sawmill for the younger brother, a studio for the older brother. Such dreams never eventuated. Instead over a two year period Léo regularly took the whole family out to restaurants and night clubs in his chauffeur driven limo. He paid for everything. But they never thanked him, not once.

        It’s a very long time since Duras wrote it and even longer since she lived it, I remind myself, if indeed she did. There seems no doubt that there was an older Chinese man in her life, but how much of their affair was orchestrated by her mother and whether it was ever consummated, * is difficult to know. The reading public of the time didn’t seem to care for such quibbling and from the beginning took it as a true account of Duras’ early life. The Lover sold out on the first day of its release and after a couple of months sales had leapt to 450,000 copies. MD herself, who in the beginning had insisted it was fiction, went along with the myth she had created, giving interviews on television and to international magazines about her life and writing, referring to herself in third person.

       I unpack the Adler biography from my luggage to see what she has to say. It takes me a while but it’s worth the search. Adler says that in The Lover, Marguerite was rewriting or re-dreaming her adolescence.  That for MD ‘the subject of The Lover is writing.’ Wow. At once brilliant and revelatory, her thesis explains why on every reading I discover something new. ‘The Lover’ she says, ‘is an experimental construction site designed to awaken the reader’s imagination’. *

        Oh, this is fabulous!  There’s more. ‘True to her method of putting the reader in the position of actor, assembler and decoder, she was offering a variety of possible interpretations.’ *

Of course! Had I not read this before? Did I have to land in this damp room in the wrong hotel in the middle of a monsoon downpour to find this passage? I feel renewed and validated.  I’m not just a mad fan chasing down some airy-fairy romantic notion in a country I have little or no knowledge about, with no map, no compass, just intuition and an ability to act on impulse. For me MD represents the essence of everything that excites me about writing, theatre, film, creativity, love, life. Nothing is fixed, everything is in a state of movement, a state of grace, open to interpretation. How exhilarating!

       The rain eases, the light is fading. There’s nothing else to do but settle down under the ceiling fan and keep reading.  Laure Adler, I decide, is my perfect travelling companion. Thank goodness I insisted on bringing her along. I open her up to the beginning again, to remind myself of how she and MD first met.

        During a difficult summer in a rented house, Adler had come across a worn and battered copy of The Sea Wall. Inspired by the determined qualities of the young girl character, the book helped her make some positive decisions about her own future, and when she returned to Paris, she sent a letter to MD telling her so. Within two days MD called and asked her to come to her apartment in Rue Saint Benoit. Having never met her before and feeling somewhat intimidated due to MD’s reputation as a ‘difficult’ person, Adler was struck by MD’s mischievousness and jovial energy. MD was warm and hospitable. She ‘laughed at everything, at everyone, and occasionally at herself’. MD loved to talk, and they continued to meet and chat on the phone regularly until the circumstances of their lives intervened.  Following the international success of The Lover, MD was caught up in the making of her own myth and they never regained their special intimacy. Adler continued reading MD’s works and in 1992, asked if she could write her biography. MD was non-committal, referring her back to her books and promptly talking about something else.  Realising she would have to search elsewhere, they met again once the work of the book had begun, but by now MD’s memory wasn’t clear and her emotions fluctuated. Adler carried on interviewing friends and colleagues and mining the notebooks and papers left behind after MD died in 1996. Two years later, Adler’s biography, Marguerite Duras, was published in France by Gallimard, with the English translation, Marguerite Duras, A Life, coming out in Great Britain in 2000. In her preface, Adler admits to the hugeness of the task.  ‘There is on the one hand, the life (MD) lived, and, on the other, the one she recounted. How is it possible to untangle fact from fiction — who was Duras really?’*  I can hear MD scoffing and repeating her famous line, ‘the story of my life does not exist’.  Like most fans who find any detail about MD’s life fascinating, I know the question of ‘the truth’ in this case to be irrelevant and yet here I am on a quest, to find that field of feeling, to immerse myself in the Durasienne atmosphere. When I read this bit, ‘Duras speaks secretly in us… She is able to give us emotions drawn from the darkest and most hidden areas of the psyche,’ * I remember again why I’m here.

________________________

*The Lover p 49.

* Wartime Notebooks p 27, 28.

*Adler p 346.

*Adler p 347. 

*Adler p 5.

*Adler p 4.