Four Novels Read Free Page B

wild desire for the man outside circling the garden railings—until she vomits up both the wine he poured and the “strange food” served at her table—is a fine example of a controlled musical interweaving of themes, of a formal simplicity and dignity that envelops and protects Anne’s “fall.”
    The Diabelli Sonatina, in the narrative pattern, seems to emphasize, by contrast, the gravity and depth of the relationship between Anne and Chauvin, who between them play out the variations inherent in the shaping of the initial episode, the crime they have witnessed. Unlike the girl and the man in The Square, they do not speak in carefully constructed sentences and coherent paragraphs. They speak in snatches, hesitantly, restating fragments of the theme, their exchange of words revolving around a hidden center, which is their urge to relive the passion of the couple that has died. In their five encounters in the bar, Anne and Chauvin, like two musical instruments, must repeat and relive, in a kind of purity and eternity, the movements inherent in the initial design, until they confront the stark, sexual, destructive nature of their desire and the design is totally interiorized and completed: “‘I wish you were dead,’ Chauvin said. ‘I am,’ Anne Desbaresdes said.” Relinquishing the very core of her former life, her relation with her child, Anne has re-enacted to the end the tragic modulations of absolute passion which Marguerite Duras holds within the formal confines of melody and rhythm.
    The strange, acute, yet different modes of perception reached through intoxication—another form of alienation—give Ten-thirty on a Summer Night (1960) its strange double structure. The poetic intensity and incongruity of vision that shape Maria’s encounter with Rodrigo Paestra underscore the contrapuntal development of her suffering as she witnesses the desire magnetically and visibly drawing Pierre toward her friend, Claire. A number of events, held in suspense, coincide to give the story its unique pattern. Maria’s acute apprehension of each moment of time imposes a distinctive tempo on the story. Suspense is an atmospheric component of the storm that hangs over the small Spanish town, halting all normal plans and activity. Suspense is inherent in the outer situation Maria discovers, the hunt for Rodrigo Paestra, who has killed his wife and his wife’s lover. It is because her life is held in suspense that Maria has the power to sense the suspense loose in the small town and feels the urge to intervene in Paestra’s fate and, vicariously, to partake of it.
    Only two people were directly involved in The Square; two couples, essentially, in Moderato Cantabile. In Ten-thirty on a Summer Night, two groups of three are involved. Paestra, his wife and her lover; Maria, her husband Pierre, and Claire. And in both cases, the theme is murder. Paestra has already killed the lovers when the novel begins; at the end, Maria knows the love she and Pierre had shared is dead. Paestra’s lonely vigil on the rooftops deflects, as it were, Maria’s lonely vigil on the balcony; as he waits for his inevitable capture and death at dawn, so she waits for the inevitable moment of consummation of desire for which Pierre and Claire are waiting. At ten-thirty on that summer night, the three vigils come together in Maria’s perception. She sees Paestra’s figure dimly outlined against the chimney tops as the silhouettes of Pierre and Claire, entwined, appear on the balcony over her head. Her bid to save Paestra is a “barrage” against her fate, a useless, heroic struggle against fate. Here, more visibly than in Moderato Cantabile, in the baroque setting evoked, outer and inner events fuse, merge, and develop with a poetic inevitability. Death, love, desire, and violence mold the most banal of events: a man’s infidelity to his wife. Extraordinarily moving and pure is the account of Maria’s suffering, free from personal animosity with