Dolors's Reviews > The Lover

Who is “L’amant”(*)? The characters in this story are nameless. A puzzle of personal pronouns draws an anonymous canvas that perspires with alienation and the dense humidity of a foreign land, that mourns the loss of youth and innocence, that invokes the image of photographs never taken, the sound of words never uttered and the mirage of a future that never existed. Only the condensed ardour that clouds up the windows of a small hotel room, where two slippery bodies abandon themselves to contorting passion, defies reality and the passage of time.

But who is “The Lover”?
Is “The Lover” the fifteen-years-old tomboy standing in front to the ferry hiding her prematurely wrinkled face under the shadow of a man’s fedora hat?
She never expected to fall in love with him. She was only worn out with desire. And her dysfunctional family of European colonizers needed the money.
Is “The Lover” the wealthy Chinese man of twenty-seven years of age from Cholen who adores the girl from the distance, concealed behind the tainted windows of his father’s black limousine?
He undresses her with trembling fingers and weeps in the exile of his illegitimate love. He is ashamed of his weakness. She kisses his fragility and ruins the rest of his life.

At first I thought “The Lover” was she.
Then I realized it was he.
And finally I understood it was much more.

“The Lover” is a movable portrait of a first person narrator who is visiting a succession of her younger selves. Memories are her brushstrokes and life-consuming longing the color in which she paints her pictorial story. The awakening of first love and the discovery of erotic pleasure arrive hand in hand with the heartbreak of a certain separation, the sentence to life imprisonment by familial duty and the ruthlessness of intransigent tradition. The cultural distance between the local people and the colonizers in French Indochina become the backdrop of a love story that is condemned by history before it even started and the detached irony that drips from the narrator’s voice can’t disguise the desolation that is eating her alive underneath a carefully studied, impassive poise.

“The Lover” is a cascade of musical notes delivered in fluid movements, a whirlwind of words repeated like a mantra in breathless cadence and staccatto punctuation . “The Lover” is more than a semi autobiographical memoir and less than an interior monologue. It is the rawness of impressionistic paragraphs capturing in Polaroid snapshots the obsession of a crazed mother, the chauvinistic abuse of an elder brother and the alternating urgency and resigned languidness that leaves a permanent scar on the features of a young woman.

Yes. The tale has been told countless times before.
But never like this.
Never the vessel set sail in the Mekong River amidst deafening heat, chirping jungles and melting sky annihilatating all color.
Never the salty tears drowned the sob in torrents of silence and immobility while Chopin’s notes tinted the breath of the wind onboard.
Never the throbbing heartbreak was replaced by incandescent prose that palpitated to the rhythm of the distant voice of China.
Never the fate of two lovers who never spoke to each other, would be sealed with only two words.

(*) I read Marguerite Duras’ novella in Catalan translated from the French by Marta Pessarrodona.