The Ravishing of Mrs. Dalloway

I remember reading. I was in a terrible state, yet I still wanted more.

The first time it happened in my lit class in high school, when I picked a book from the list at random.

Never an easy read, Duras gave off a perfumed scent of dusty rose colored danger mixed with tiny beads of sweat on a girl’s upper lip, and if one really had a clean palate that day, the faintest whiff of gin, behind the precipice and the hesitation. Or perhaps it was whisky.

The book was The Lover.

I read The Little Horses of Tarquinia when in Paris for the first time with a lover. It was about a married woman contemplating taking a lover while on vacation on the Mediterranean, I always pictured it being set in Italy, with her husband and child, there is the beach, the heat, the hotel with nothing to do but to get drunk. An alcoholic herself, the book was also a testimony on how Duras drank.

The second time I was there with the same lover, he bought me the huge illustrated biography of Duras as a birthday present. The volume weighed almost five kilos. The flight home was a nightmare.

The large coffee table book is one of my most beloved treasures.

I read Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night as I was falling terribly in love with the man who would become my lover. I remember nothing of the novel. There was possibly a park bench. A rainstorm. A man and a woman who meet. The woman is sad because her marriage is nearly over. And the affair. There is always an affair.

I always took a book of hers on my trips. Never an easy read, sometimes the ravishing of the place overtook me, and I could not read my book. I bought different books from local bookstores, and sometimes CD’s, back when one still bought them.

I was sixteen, a virgin for one more year, and oblivious to the fact that Duras would be dead in two years. The Lover hit me like a ton of pastel mosaic tiles, like a gallon of tar and feathers the color of vanilla ice cream. I, too, wore a felt hat, once my grandfather’s. Only it wasn’t pink. It was gray.

I, too, was a writer.

But I was a stranger to that kind of passion. However impassive the girl likes to represent herself in the story. Or perhaps I am getting it mixed up with the early version, how she wrote about what happened with her Chinese lover in her journals, when it was still raw and unpolished in her mind.

But it is, at times, almost uncannily similar to the finished work. A remarkable talent in writing.

I have not read The Lover in years. The last time I was in any contact with the story was when I was reading the journals she wrote about that time, when she was living her adolescent years in Indochina.

That was when I bought my first Bill Evans album. It was Waltz for Debby, and I will always connect the pieces to the streets of Paris, the August heat, the bottomless pit that was the desire our affair in its early stages, and The Little Horses of Tarquinia.

After The Lover, I devoured in quick succession some of her other translated works. The books, The Lover notwithstanding, were hard to come by. I wasn’t adept in reading in a different language yet. There was no way I was able to read any of them in the original French. There still isn’t.

According to his own testimony, Yann Andrea, her last lover, and companion for many years, never called her by her first name during their time together. It was always vous, never ever tu. Except once.

In my essay on The Lover, I mimicked her long and meandering sentences, and my teacher remarked on it.

Considering how hard alcoholics tend to want to hide their dependency from others, Duras’ alcoholism defied these characteristics of an abuse problem: she was honest to the point of confessional in how much she drank a day.

I would browse the vast Marguerite Duras section in the bookstore, and envy terribly all the people who could just pick up a book and read it, fluently, in French.

She was once a great beauty. But, like it is written at the beginning of her book, alcoholism and the roughness of passing years destroyed her face. I have a destroyed face.

Hiroshima, Mon amour. The Ship Night. Writing. No More. There were a few other works translated in Finnish, to be found on the topmost shelf in the bookstore, according to the publishing house. I had to ask for the salesperson to help me.

When I learned about passion, it was hard for me to relate to it in a warm, humorous way. Sometimes it still is. The ravishing can be an extremely serious affair.

It is with age that I have come to smile at my younger self, sometimes. How very serious, the game of love. How very humorless, sober, pretentious even, and rigid, how ill-informed and naïve the participants. But I am amused by it, now that I don’t hate myself anymore.

In her extremely famous series of books, sometimes cited as the Animal Trilogy, Katherine Pancol writes how there is a sense of joy and hilarity in both the parents, when they overhear the daughter finally have sex all night long with the young man she has been in love with for the duration of all three books.

When the parents of my first boyfriend walked in on us, kissing, horizontal in bed and with our sweaters off but otherwise fully clothed, they threw a raging fit and threw me out of the house, calling me a slut. I was never to enter the house again, and I never did. We were both fifteen at the time.

But I am glad it at least happened to someone in a novel. However far-fetched. Or perhaps not at all.

In the end, the woman doesn’t begin the affair she contemplates. There is an overwhelming sensation of promise and seduction and unadulterated, naked, palpable lust on the pages. But something stops her. 

The young girl in her faded pink fedora, leaning on the railing with her elbows, on the ferry. The romance of that image, with the backdrop of exotic trees and the murky water of the river, and the intense late night friendship with the other girl in the dormitory, that almost becomes a love affair.

There one finds the secret solace, the warmth, the acceptance, even while in the throes of the first love affair with a man.

Are not all true friendships between girls love affairs?

I believe it was Jemima Kirke who said that any woman who claims to have only men as her best friends is either full of it or missing out on something spectacular. Only another woman can really know what it’s about.

Desire shakes us to the core. The aftershocks sometimes last years, sometimes a lifetime. A woman knows.

The young girl in the pink fedora, standing on the deck. How those moments come to define our lives.

I was not a girl, but a woman, and I wore not a fedora, but a burgundy skirt with large buttons down the front. Afterwards, I sat with my girlfriend on the bench in sunlight, reliving the moment again and again.