SCENES

      from Mauve Desert

      tr. Susanne de Lotbinère-Harwood

       I

       Time begins again between Kathy Kerouac and Mélanie. Faces make an effort and lips and the gaze’s slant can be seen obliquing their way through words. The heat is high, the pool water blinding.

      – It’s vague, an effort suffices, or a few words said, or else seeing you in front of this television set.

      – It’s vague! And yet there are words for saying what you’re feeling.

      – You look at Lorna and see nothing else around.

      – My gaze is wide.

      – Vague. You don’t see me.

      – I see what I love, what is reason to live. You’re the centre core of my existence. You have no idea what goes on inside me. Do you think my thoughts are free of your face, of all those memories that settle in our memory over the years?

      – Anything to avoid the present, right? But don’t worry, I’m leaving. You’re both too present and too absent. You exist too strongly inside me because you never talk to me. I’m forced to imagine your tenderness, to invent dialogues in which you tell me of your love, your esteem, your appreciation. But I’m weary of these fantasies. I don’t want to spend my life in emotional disorder. I want the horizon very clear before me.

      – A girl does not go out into the desert to feed on the sun and the horizon. A girl must not go as far as where the eye is misled.

      – My gaze will be vigilant. I’m alert in the questioning state.

      – The sun, the heat, the solitude will overcome you.

      – The heat originates inside me. I know how to be alone. If only you could imagine in my eyes the splendour of existing!

      – You mean that your gut wants to speak.

      – I’m saying that my eyes are speaking about existing.

      – Your eyes are so full of arrogance and pride that they will necessarily mislead you. Don’t you know that …

      – No, I don’t know anything. I’m leaving because you don’t teach me anything. You watch that television. Your attention turns only to Lorna. No, you don’t teach me anything.

      – You know, eyes, oh! you’ll know soon enough.

      – What about eyes?

      – Eyes that seek to get ahead of the horizon. Impatient eyes will always be disappointed.

      – I will be bright and patient.

      – There is no outsmarting them. Eyes need to think and when they’re thinking, we must yield. Eyes cause the faces they penetrate to crack. You too will yield.

      – I’m not afraid of death.

      – Mélanie, you mustn’t think about death. Death is something somewhere invented by men to forget and to elude reality.

      – Don’t be ridiculous. Death is an encounter for everyone.

      – I’m saying that men invented death because they think about it. They cultivate it raucously.

      – Have you never thought about death?

      – I became mortal the day I gave birth to you. Death does not come toward us, it’s we who in time quite naturally go toward death.

      – Why are you talking to me like this now?

      – I’ve always wanted you to be able and whole.

      – I am.

      – Yes, because that’s how I wanted you to be.

      – You’d like to be everything, wouldn’t you? Everything to me, everything to Lorna, everything to your customers. You’d like perfection to begin with you. You’d like to wipe the slate clean, make believe. Reinvent the world and the law.

      – I want peace, the end of massacres and forgetting.

      – You are merely a mother.

      – You think a daughter can dictate things to her mother that could make her ‘easy’! A mother is never ‘easy.’ A mother makes all the difference in a life.

      – A mother makes a difference if she has taught her daughter well. A mother who doesn’t teach her daughter deserves to be forgotten in front of her television set. An ignorant mother is a calamity.

      – I taught you through my gestures and my courage.

      – It was Lorna who taught me how to swim, how to know the desert. All you wanted to teach me was how to cry. I learned about fear from looking at you. You seem afraid of everything. But what is a life if one is afraid of everything?

      – I guess you can go now. We have nothing more to say to each other. Take this silver comb. It will bring you luck and happiness.

      – Happiness! It’s your looking for happiness that bothers me.

      – I’m looking for contentment, well-being, daily wellness.

      – Comfort. You’re looking for convenience, facility.

      – Mélanie, you should leave or keep quiet because you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re violently confusing words, you’re appropriating them as though they were sugar cubes you were placing on your tongue and waiting for them to take effect. Forgive me if I’ve been unable to teach you. I believed that I had. Despite your refusal to talk, your constant running away. I thought my affection was enough, that my voice somewhere inside you could reach the hard knot you have for a soul.

      – What becomes knotted in the heart is knotted with the silence of others. You know, your voice, your beautiful voice never really spoke to me. Your voice just superimposed itself on the mediocrity which in this Motel precludes all hope. I’m leaving but you know I’ll be back. I’ll come back because I know you’ll be expecting me. You see, our eyes are dry. That’s a good thing. Never cry for me. Never do that because then your tears would join with mine and we would be carried away, yes, I believe we’d both be carried away by a single wave.

       II