Heat, Torpor, Aircon

21

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.

It’s not easy to find accounts in MD’s experiences in Cambodge but one description she wrote in her notebooks tells of an event that took place in the village near their rice farm — the night she witnessed a lokhon or local dancer perform her crude imitation of classical Khmer dance. All day the tam tam drum had been sounding, calling the people of the surrounding district to come. After dark they gathered to enter a small smoke-filled bamboo hut where on a tiny platform surrounded by dim lamps a bare shouldered girl, poorly made up and dressed in ‘tarnished fake gold’, offered the beauty of her youth. The only accompaniment came from the hoarse voice of an old Cambodian woman crouched in the darkness, her monotonous song following a rhythmic beat. The girl is self taught, an imitator, a crude and garish version of a trained royal court dancer, but the village is transfixed as her spirit and grace echo the mournful notes of the old lady’s keening.  Just as she gives herself so tirelessly to the dance, the girl must sacrifice her body to the night. At daybreak she picks up her fatigued bones to walk with her old singer to another settlement, sleeping in ditches along the way. * There must have been many moments of village life like this that MD and her brothers witnessed during their stays at the rice farm. To them it was ordinary, just part of life, the only one they had ever known.

        We are all up early and I’m keen to get out and explore the city. Ellie and Steph have work to go to, Miro has gone off to his French kindergarten so Asher agrees to take me sightseeing. His mum and dad suggest we start with Wat Phnom in the centre of town. The name, Wat, meaning temple and Phnom, meaning hill — it had its origins in the fourteenth century after a wealthy widow Daun Penh, found some bronze Buddha statues in the trunk of a koki tree washed up in a flood. Believing it was her duty to build them a new home, she engaged the help of villagers to create a fake hill with a small shrine on top where the Buddhas could be housed. Later it was added to and rebuilt many times and one king raised the hill even higher. It was visited by pilgrims as they travelled the holy routes from India to Sri Lanka, across to Burma and Angkor Wat and on to Borobodur in Indonesia. And so that’s how the city got its name —Phnom Penh: the hill of the Lady Penh.

        Our faithful tuk tuk driver Mr Larry lets us out in the park at the bottom of the hill. He so wants to be our driver for the day and looks disappointed when we tell him we will find our own way home. I feel a little guilty but Asher assures me it’s ok.

        ‘They all act like that,’ he says. ‘It’s their job, that’s just what drivers do.’

         We wander into the shady park where a weary looking elephant finely dressed in mirrored silks is offering rides to tourists. A water sprinkler sprays rainbows across a nearby lawn, bringing forth the dank tropical smell of damp earth. When I tell Asher we have to climb the stairs to the temple, he is suddenly tired. I revive him with a juice from the soft drink vendor and we head up, step by slow step. Magnificently sculpted cobra-shaped nagas and lions guard us on either side until we arrive at the top, where amongst a busy flutter of tiny yellow and brown feathers, people are paying a couple of dollars to release finches from their cages. Somehow I am roped in and before I know it I have a clutch of tiny birds in my hand. I begin throwing them to the four winds, realizing as I do, they are probably trained to fly right back to do it all again. Asher gives a world-weary commentary on the principle of compassion as we take our shoes off to enter the small temple, the sweet perfume of incense almost bowling us over. His parents would have explained how the setting free of animals brings merit to those who practice it, although in this case he isn’t convinced. Once inside he continues, giving his commentary on the vivid murals covering every inch of the temple walls and ceiling around us.

         ‘So these are the Jataka tales,’ he says, waving his arm about, ‘you know, how the Buddha lived in his various reincarnations before he became enlightened.’

         ‘Oh, how fantastic,’ I reply, more impressed by his knowledge than the paintings.

         ‘Sometimes he was a rabbit, sometimes an elephant. It’s cool. Over there,’ he says pointing to another wall, ‘ you have the stories from the Ramayana. It’s a bit too complicated for me to go into now, but my favourite character is Hanuman the monkey king. He gets up to lots of mischief, but he helps people too.’ 

        We circumambulate slowly, our bare feet enjoying the coolness of the polished tiles and our eyes in awe of the multitude of tall to teeny Buddhas arranged around a large, golden Buddha in the centre — the original collection has obviously been added to over the centuries. LED halos flash, fairy-lights surge on and off and a great sea of burning candles adds to the drama. If it is a little overwhelming, just outside is another more homely figure for people to pray to. Looking more like a ventriloquist doll or a kitchen god than a Buddha, this must be the Lady Penh. With her eye-glasses and beatific smile framed by a large neon halo, she looks quite mumsy. Her jewel-adorned bust sits on a low altar surrounded by a jumble of rice bowls, hands of bananas, fluorescent cakes and money notes. To her left and right sit large tubs jammed full of bright magenta and mustard coloured incense sticks for people to offer. On guard behind her stand several small, dark-coloured buddhas, their necks slung with cheap costume jewellery. Tea pots and teacups, garlands of jasmine and spangled gold hangings add to the chaos as older Cambodian women fuss about with offerings before kneeling on the straw mat to pray. I find a spot among them to plant a couple of incense sticks in the sand box. I offer my usual wishing well prayer, it’s not very profound but it’s all I ever seem to come up with — please keep all our family members safe, happy and healthy, same for my friends, and their friends and so on…oh hell, the same for whole world for that matter, amen.  Asher leans against a nearby wall waiting patiently. The seen-it-all-before expression on his face is priceless.

           I wonder how much he will remember of all this when he is older. Will the memories surface later in life as they did for MD? Even several years after writing her famous novella she recalls how ‘deliriously happy’ she was while working on The North China Lover. ‘I stopped the work I was doing. I wrote the story (that) wasn’t quite there in The Lover, I hadn’t given them enough time.’ * In one interview she wondered aloud ‘ I sometimes think the whole of my writing originates from there — between the paddy fields, the forests and the solitude.’ *

       Would MD have visited this temple when her family moved here after Hanoi? She must have been familiar with comings and goings at Buddhist temples in all the towns they lived — different rituals practiced on the phases of the moon and special times of the year, elaborate offerings being made, blessings given. I’ve seen a photo of a thirteen year old Marguerite, standing barefoot in a terraced garden, a round bellied Buddha statue behind her and a temple dragon atop a wall. Still a girl, not yet a woman, she is comfortable and unselfconscious, confident and at home in her surroundings. She would have been around the same age, when lost in the mountains with her younger brother, they came across pagodas where she said the men (monks I presume) possessed a great sense of calm and equilibrium. And the Vietnamese girls at her school, she observed, had a ‘collective grace’, which she believed gave them a ‘receptivity to nature’ that came from the everyday experience of heat, rain and swimming in rivers. * It’s easy to recognize this quality in MD as well when you observe the sensibility to nature in so many of her works. In one section of The Lover she describes the briefness of dusk descending ‘like a blow’, the lightness of moonless nights, inky black shadows of apple trees in a ‘still as marble’ garden, and the ‘supernatural light that follows rain’. *  I could go on endlessly making lists of her transcendent descriptions of nature. Such observations have the presence and mastery of the finest haiku, and it’s hard not to imagine MD the girl, stalking the barefoot worlds of her future writer self .   

        My mother Marj was a great lover of haiku. When I was clearing out her house I was upset that I couldn’t find the two illustrated, hardcover haiku books I remember always being on her shelves. Somehow miraculously, one of them turned up later in a box of books I had stowed in my garage. Published by Tuttle in 1969, it’s a beautiful book with exquisite haiga illustrations. The only disappointment is that the translations are presented as rhyming couplets, a total anathema in my mind to the essence of haiku. Inside the front cover, barely noticeable, is a small black and gold sticker that says, Bookshop of Margareta Webber, Melbourne. In the front Marj has scribbled:

I bought the companion bk. where?

 Can’t find it now.

Did I loan it to B?

Margareta Webber sold out years ago, beautiful shop!

 Jan— keep forever!’

When I did a search on Margareta Webber, I found that from 1931 to 1973 she did indeed have a bookshop on the fourth floor of an office building in Little Collins St. Decorated with antique rugs and pottery, it was well known among the literati of the time who could enjoy the offer of a free coffee or sherry she served to her customers. It was the first bookshop in Australia to have a children’s section and I wonder if my mother ever took me there on our trips to the city for specialist doctor and dentist appointments.  I guess not, as I’m sure I would have remembered it although it wasn’t far from the tiny laneway café we always stopped in at for cappuccinos and hot chocolate. The red neon letters ‘Gaggia’ on the front of the expresso machine shone like a beacon in the dimly lit laneway as we sat down at the one small outdoor table in the midst of raincoat clad office workers rushing by on their lunch hour. Marj could easily have composed a haiku for this moment that I’m recalling many decades later. And why I have never made the connection between my mother’s love of haiku and her understanding of Buddhism, I don’t know, but there in the commentary section of that newly recovered volume of haiku, I learnt through her underlinings, including this one that perhaps she was a student of Buddhism too.

 ‘…at last we glimpse the possibility of liberation from the limitations of our selves and the world into boundless peace, happiness and freedom.’  *

         As we head back down the stairs I ask Asher if he has a favourite bookstore he’d like to visit. Instead of answering, he begins telling me a long story about how he lost his entire pack of Pokemon cards in a schoolyard arrangement gone wrong. I sympathise with him and tell him what a pity, I could have brought him a new pack from Australia.

        ‘Oh you can get them here,’ he pipes up, ‘in the Sorya Centre.’

        ‘Is it far from here?’ I ask. ‘Does it have aircon?’

         I have a hidden agenda. After setting free the poor caged finches, I wondered if it was such a good idea. I know bird flu is not swine flu and was a few pandemics ago but I would like to get some bacterial wipes for my hands just to be sure. And getting out of the heat into some aircon might revive both of us.

        We descend the stairs in half the time it took to come up and when we get to the edge of the park, Asher steps out onto the street and signals for a tuk tuk.  An old driver promptly obliges. We get in and with all the confidence in the world, Asher tells the driver, ‘Sorya Centre please.’ 

         Heat and torpor feature strongly in MD’s Indochine writing. While temperatures may have varied slightly between the towns she lived in, her description near the beginning of The Lover is apt. — ‘ we have just the one season, hot, monotonous, we’re in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.’* It was exhausting. For days on end her mother would often sit slouched in an armchair on the verandah, doing nothing, saying nothing. Then sometimes, for no apparent reason, she would leap up and decide it was time to clean. Orchestrating the stacking of furniture on tables she would begin sluicing the house out with water. Everyone joined in — barefoot mother, kids and servants with buckets of water and bars of soap, all cleaning with gay abandon. A river of water flowed through the house from the kitchen to the living room, around the legs of the piano, out the front door, cascading like a waterfall down the front steps. * It’s a great metaphor for the manner of writing MD said she had always aspired to, which she says she finally achieved with the The Lover. She called it ‘écriture courante’ which loosely translates as ‘flowing writing’. *  It’s not surprising that The Lover is filled with images of water — rivers, lagoons, sea, ocean, monsoon.  Of her upbringing she said, ‘I cannot think of my childhood without thinking of water. My home town is a town of water.’ *

        Out in those country towns Marj was also suffering from the heat. Victorian summers were long and extreme although they lacked the humidity of the tropics. I remember her fashioning halter-neck tops out of silk scarves that Chas had brought back from the war, and getting around in short shorts, sometimes even just undies. When it really sweltered she would lie down in the dark hallway on the cold linoleum and tell us to do the same. She showed us how to fill the bathroom basin with cold water from the tap and rest our wrists in it for five minutes or so — to cool down the blood stream, she said. Did I sense her melancholy then? Her longing for relief? Or was I too caught up in the magic of childhood? Outside, the eucalyptus trees would be ready to burst into flame, their dry scented oils permeating the air as hot winds rolled in off the dusty wheat-grain plains. Us kids would be out on the yellowing lawn with the hose, turning it into a big soggy puddle, pretending to dive in, squirting each other with cold tank water and screaming in hysterics, ‘No, no, stop, stop,’ meaning, ‘do it again, do it again!’

       The Sorya Centre is a welcome oasis of cool air — several stories high and a couple of blocks long. I find my wipes in a supermarket on the bottom level among rows and rows of face whitening creams. Then we ride the escalators to Level Four, which Asher tells me, is where all the toys are. I’m beginning to suspect this may be a ruse he is trying on me, but I owe him a birthday present anyway. After a bit of walking around in circles we find a section of small stalls selling toys. I’m thankful that Asher’s request is modest and environmentally friendly, that he’s not asking for an oversized moulded plastic action toy or a play station. We find the cards and hand over some Cambodian riel, not more than three Aussie dollars, so I’m more than happy to oblige.

        ‘Where to next?’ I ask Asher in an enthusiastic tone.

        ‘I’m sorry Janu, I hope you don’t mind but I think I’ve had enough sightseeing for today.’ he says.

         I understand of course, and thank him for being my morning guide.

        ‘You’re welcome,’ he replies, ‘any time!’        

______________

* I’ve paraphrased MD’s description from Wartime Notebooks, p 278, but it’s better if you read the real thing. MD says ‘this memory has always remained a vision for me.’   

*  The North China Lover, p 1.

* Suspended Passion p 13.   

Xavier p 103-104. MD said ‘I’ve got memories... more beautiful than anything I will ever be able to write.

* The Lover p 86-87

*A Chime Of Windbells, p168, Tuttle, 1969.

* The Lover, p 8.

* The Lover, p 65.

* Practicalities, p 60

* ‘an ideal writing in which passive, receptive states allow the unconscious to surface and solicit the imagination’. Lauer-Cheenne, Julia Ann, "Ecriture courante: Theme and image in Marguerite Duras" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska - Lincoln. AAI9211475.