Marguerite Duras
The Boa
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This short story by Marguerite Duras (translated from the French by Jean Stewart) originally appeared in the April 1955 edition of The London Magazine.
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It was in a big town in one of the French colonies, round about 1928.
On Sunday afternoons the other girls at Mlle Barbet’s pension used to go out. They were the ones who had ‘acquaintances’ in the town. They would come back in the evening glutted with visits to the cinema, the Pagoda Teashop and the swimming-pool, with motor-jaunts and tennis-parties.
But I had no acquaintances. I stayed with Mlle Barbet all the week and on Sundays too.
We used to go to the Botanical Garden. It cost nothing, and it enabled Mlle Barbet to charge my mother extra for ‘Sunday outings’. So we used to go to watch the boa swallow his chicken. All week he got none: only dead meat and sick fowls. But on Sundays he had his real live chicken, because people liked watching that better.
We used to go and see the caymans too. One cayman, twenty years earlier, a great-uncle or maybe the father of one of those that were there in 1928, had snapped off the leg of a soldier in the Colonial army. He had severed it at the groin and thus wrecked the career of the poor soldier, who had been playfully tickling the animal’s jaws with his leg, not realizing that when a crocodile plays, he plays ruthlessly. Since that day a fence had been set round the caymans’ pond and now one could safely stand watching them, as they slept with half-closed eyes and dreamed powerful dreams about their ancient crimes.
And we used to go and watch the indecencies of the gibbons, and the black panthers from the mangrove marshes, who lay dying of drought on the cement floor, and, refusing to look at the faces of men who revelled sadistically in their horrible suffering, gazed out through the iron bars at the green estuaries of Asiatic rivers, swarming with monkeys.
If you got there too late, you found the boa drowsing on a bed of chicken’s feathers. But you stayed a while in front of his cage. There was nothing more to see, but you knew what had just been happening, and everybody stood there in front of the boa, brooding deeply. Such peace after such a deed; that faultlessly accomplished crime amidst the snowy warmth of those feathers, which made the chicken’s innocence uncannily real. That spotless murder, without a trace of blood spilt, without remorse. Order after catastrophe: peace on the scene of the crime.
Coiled up on itself, black, gleaming with a purer dew than morning dew on mayblossom, admirable in form, with a plump, tender, muscular roundness, like a column of black marble that has suddenly collapsed from its thousand-year-old weariness and coiled up on itself, suddenly despising its own weight and pride, with an undulating slowness through which ran shivers of repressed power, the boa was assimilating the chicken, digesting it with a sovereign ease as perfect as the absorption of water by the parched sands of the desert, a transubstantiation accomplished in a holy hush. Amidst this awe-inspiring inner silence the chicken was becoming part of the boa. With dizzying delight the biped’s flesh flowed into the reptile’s flesh, within the long smooth tube. The creature’s very shape was bewildering, round and without visible hold on the outside world, and yet more prehensile than any talon, hand, claw, horn or tooth, and yet again naked as water, more naked than anything else in all the multitude of species.
Mlle Barbet, being old and far gone in virginity, cared little for the boa. But on me its effect was considerable. The sight of it set me dreaming, and might have led me, had I been endowed with a livelier and better-furnished mind, with a more scrupulous soul, with greater and more generous heart, to the rediscovery of a creative deity and of the absolute division of the world between the forces of evil and of good, both eternal, to whose conflict all things owed their origin; or, on the other hand, to revolt against the disgrace attached to crime and the prestige conferred on innocence.
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When we went back to the pension, always too soon for my liking, a cup of tea and a banana were waiting for us in Mlle Barbet’s room. We ate in silence. Then I went up to my room again. After a few moments Mlle Barbet would call me. I would not answer immediately. She persisted: ‘Come and have a look. …’
I had to go, otherwise she would have come to fetch me. I went back into her room. I always found her in the same place, in front of her window, smiling, in her pink petticoat, with her shoulders bare. I took up my stand in front of her and looked at her, as I was obliged to do, as I was expected to do every Sunday after she had been kind enough to take me to see the boa.
‘See,’ Mlle Barbet would say softly, ‘it’s beautiful lingerie.’
‘I see, I see,’ I would say, ‘yes, it is, it’s beautiful lingerie.’
‘I bought it yesterday; I love fine lingerie,’ she would sigh, ‘I love it more and more.’
She would stand very straight so that I could admire her, looking down at herself amorously. Half naked. She had never shown herself thus to anybody but me in all her life. It was too late. She was over seventy-five and she would never show herself to anybody else but me. I was the only person in the whole house to whom she showed herself, and it was always on a Sunday afternoon when all the other boarders had gone out, and after our visit to the Zoo. I had to look at her just as long as she chose.
‘How I do love it,’ she would say, ‘I’d rather do without my food.’
A dreadful smell came from Mlle Barbet’s body. There was no mistaking it. The first time she showed herself to me I recognized the horrible smell that hung about the house, I understood its secret at last – a smell that underlay the scent of carnations with which she deluged herself, that exuded from the cupboards, mingled with the damp air of the bathroom, hung stagnant and heavy, twenty years old, about the corridors of the pension and, at siesta time, was wafted out of Mlle Barbet’s black lace blouse as she took her regular after-dinner nap in the drawing room.
‘Fine lingerie is very important. You must learn that. I learnt it too late.’
‘Yes, I understand.’
‘It’s too late,’ she moaned.
I did not answer. She waited a moment, but I could give no answer to this.
‘I’ve wasted my life,’ she said, and after a pause added. ‘He never came.’
She was devoured by longing for the man who had never come. The pink slip, incrusted with ‘priceless’ lace, covered her like a shroud, puffed her out like a pudding, constricted at the waist by her corset. I was the only person to whom she exposed this wasted body. The others would have told their parents. But even if I had told my mother it would have made no difference. Mlle Barbet had accepted me in her house as a favour, because my mother had begged her to. Nobody else in the town would have agreed to take in the daughter of a teacher in the Native School, for fear of lowering the tone of their houses. Mlle Barbet had a certain kindness. She and I were accomplices. I told nothing. She did not tell how my mother wore the same dress two years running and sold her jewels to pay my fees. And so, since nobody ever saw my mother and I never spoke about my Sunday timetable – those free outings that went down on the bill – and as I had never complained, I was in Mlle Barbet’s good books.
‘Luckily you’re there. …’
I held my breath. And yet she had a certain kindness. And her reputation had spread through the town, faultless, as virginal as her life. I kept telling myself that, and that she was old. But it made no difference. I held my breath.
‘What a life!’ she sighed.
To make an end of things I told her that she was rich, that she had fine lingerie and that the other things were perhaps not as important as she thought, that one couldn’t go through life regretting. … She did not answer me, but heaved a deep sigh and put on her blouse again, the black lace blouse that, all week, bore witness to her respectability. Her gestures were slow. When she buttoned the sleeves of her blouse I knew that it was all over, that I had a week’s peace in front of me.
Then I would go back to my room and out on to the balcony. I could breathe again. I was in that state of negative excitement which I always felt after those two successive entertainments, the visit to the Zoo and the contemplation of Mlle Barbet.
The street was full of sunshine and the tamarisk trees with their gigantic shadows cast great sheaves of green perfume into the houses. Some soldiers of the Colonial army were passing by. I smiled at them in the hope that one of them would make a sign to me to go down, and ask me to follow him. I stayed there a long time. Occasionally a soldier would smile at me, but none of them made any sign.
When evening came I would go back into the house that was heavy with the stench of regret. It was terrible. No man had made a sign to me yet. It was terrible. I was thirteen and I thought it was high time I got out of it all. Once in my room, I shut the door, pulled off my blouse and looked at myself in the glass. My breasts were white and clean. They were the only thing in my life that gave me any pleasure to look at, in that house. Outside the house there was the boa, here there were my breasts. I began to cry. I thought about my mother’s body, which had been used so much, which had suckled four children and smelt of vanilla, like everything else about my mother in her patched dresses. I thought about mother, who used to tell me that she would rather die than see me have a childhood as terrible as her own, that to get a husband you had to be well equipped to face life, and if you had no dowry you had to have studied, learned to play the piano and speak a foreign language and behave properly in a drawing room; and that Mlle Barbet was better fitted than herself to teach me these things. I believed my mother.
I would eat my dinner opposite Mlle Barbet and go back to my room so as not to be there when the other boarders returned. I thought about the telegram I was going to send my mother next day to tell her I loved her. And yet I never sent that telegram.
So I stayed two years at Mlle Barbet’s, for the price of a quarter of my mother’s salary and the weekly contemplation of that septuagenarian virginity, until the wonderful day when my mother, faced with the impossibility of keeping up my fees, came in despair to take me away, convinced that owing to my interrupted education she would have me on her hands to the end of her days.
It went on for two years. Every Sunday. Once a week, for two years, I was privileged to witness first a violent devouring, dazzlingly precise in its timing and form, and then one of another sort – a slow, shapeless, dark devouring. It went on from my thirteenth to my fifteenth year. I was bound to witness both, on pain of being inadequately educated, ‘ruining my own life and my poor mother’s’, failing to find a husband, and so on.
The boa devoured and assimilated the chicken, and regret devoured and assimilated Mlle Barbet, and these two devourings, which succeeded one another so regularly, assumed for that very reason a new significance in my eyes. Had I only beheld the first, had I only watched the boa devouring the chicken, perhaps I would have harboured against the boa a horrified resentment for the agonies he had made me endure, in imagination, in the chicken’s place. And similarly had I only watched Mille Barbet, no doubt she would merely have given me, besides an intuition of the calamities that oppress mankind, the equally ineluctable sense of some disequilibrium in the social structure and of the multiple forms of subjection that derive therefrom. But as it happened I saw them, with very rare exceptions, one after the other, on the same day and always in the same order. Because of this succession, the sight of Mlle Barbet sent me back to the memory of the boa, the handsome boa which, in broad daylight, in perfect health, devoured its chicken, and which, by contrast with her, took its place in some radiant order of luminous simplicity and native grandeur. On the other hand Mlle Barbet, after I had seen the boa, represented the supreme horror, black and miserly, stealthy and secretive – for you could not see her virginity being eaten away, you could only see the results and smell the smell of it – a horror which was cruel, hypocritical and cowardly and above all, futile. How could I remain indifferent to the succession of these two exhibitions and the link between them? I clung to it as though under some spell, gasping with despair at not being able to escape from the closed world of Mlle Barbet, that monster of darkness, into the other world of which, thanks to the boa, that monster of daylight, I had some vague foreknowledge. I imagined that world spreading out firm and free like a sort of huge botanical garden where, amidst the coolness of lakes and fountains, in the dense shadow of tamarisk trees alternating with pools of intense sunlight, there took place the interchange of flesh between innumerable creatures, devouring one another, absorbing one another, mating in serene orgies, serene as all things are in the full sunlight, calm, reeling with the intoxication of their own simplicity. And I stood on my balcony, I stood at the junction of these two conflicting ethics and smiled at those soldiers of the Colonial army, the only men who were always there round the boa’s cage because it cost them nothing either, and they had nothing either. And so I smiled at them, like a bird learning to fly, without understanding, thinking that was the way to find the green paradise of the criminal boa. Thus the boa, besides frightening me, inspired me, as nothing else could do, with daring and shamelessness.
It appeared in my life with the force of an educative principle regularly applied or, rather, with the determining accuracy of a diapason, a standard of horror, so that I was horrified only by a certain sort of horror that might be described as moral: hidden thoughts and vices, unconfessed diseases, whatever is endured in shame and solitude, whereas I was not at all horrified by murder; on the contrary, I suffered for those murderers who were shut up in gaol, not so much as people as on account of their generous, misunderstood temperament, cut short in its predestined course. How could I fail to ascribe to the boa’s influence my tendency to recognize the fateful aspect of temperament, since the boa was to me the perfect symbol of this? Thanks to him, I vowed undying sympathy to all living species; they seemed to me to form a necessary, symphonic whole, which would be irremediably mutilated by the loss of a single one. I began to mistrust people who dared to formulate judgements on the species they considered ‘horrible’, describing snakes as ‘cold and silent’, cats as ‘hypocritical and cruel’, etc. One single category of human beings seemed to me really to belong to this concept I had formed of the natural species; obviously, it was that of prostitutes. I imagined prostitutes pursuing their prey through the jungle of great cities and devouring them with the imperious shamelessness of fateful temperaments; I felt the same admiration for them as for murderers, and I suffered for them because of the way they were misunderstood. When my mother declared that she had little hope of being able to find me a husband, I immediately had a vision of Mlle Barbet, and then I consoled myself by thinking that – fortunately, all things considered – I could always go to the brothel. I imagined it as a sort of temple of lost virginity where, in all purity (I only learned much later about the commercial side of prostitution) young girls in my own condition, who were not destined for marriage, went to display their bodies to unknown men, men of the same sort as themselves. Silence must reign in this temple of unchastity; nobody would speak there, for things were so ordered that there was no need of a single word. I imagined that girls wore masks on their faces when they went in there; no doubt so as to share in the anonymity of the natural species, in imitation of the absolute lack of ‘personality’ of the boa, that ideal prototype of the masked, naked, virginal figure. Since the whole species, which is innocent, bears the sole responsibility for a crime, the crime must spring from the body as inevitably as the flower springs from the plant. The brothel, painted green – that vegetable green that was the setting for the boa’s act of devouring and also the colour of the great tamarisk trees that poured their shade over the balcony where I stood despairing – had compartments arranged in a row, in which girls gave themselves to men, like a sort of swimming-bath in which one went to be cleansed of one’s virginity, to have the loneliness taken from one’s body. I must mention here a childhood memory which confirmed this view of things. When I was about eight my brother, who was ten, asked me one day to show him ‘what it was like’. I refused. My brother, furious, informed me that ‘girls might die if it wasn’t used, and that if you hid it you might suffocate and get some very serious illness’. I didn’t oblige him, but I spent several years in painful uncertainty, the greater because I confided in nobody. And when Mlle Barbet exhibited herself to me I took it as a confirmation of what my brother had told me. I was sure then that her body was only old because it had never been used, either to suckle children or to be shown to a man. It was like a process of erosion by solitude, which one could escape no doubt if one let one’s body be seen. That which had served any useful purpose, being looked at for instance, would be protected. A bosom at which a man had looked, which had displayed to him its shape, its roundness and firmness, was safe from such decadence. That was why I laid such great hopes on the brothel, the place of all others where one could display one’s body.
The boa confirmed this belief in an equally forcible way. I was terrified, certainly, by its act of devouring, just as I was horrified by seeing Mlle Barbet devoured by her loneliness; but the boa could not help eating the chicken as it did. In the same way, prostitutes could not help going to display their bodies. Mlle Barbet’s misfortune was due to the fact that she had eluded and failed to understand the imperious law that commands one to display one’s body. Thus the whole world, including my own life, was opening out in two directions, representing a clear alternative. On one side there existed the world of Mlle Barbet, and on the other the world of imperious command, the world of fate, the world of the natural species whose law was fate; and this was the world of the future, luminous and ardent, full of songs and shouts, whose beauty was hard to understand but to whose cruelty one had to get accustomed if one hoped to belong to it, just as one had to get accustomed to the sight of boas devouring their prey.
And I envisaged my future world, the only possible future in life, opening out before me, with the harmonious purity of a snake’s uncoiling, and I felt that, when I came to know it, it would appear to me in this fashion, in a majestically continuous development, in which my life would be continually involved and lived fully to its close amid transports of terror and rapture, without rest but without weariness.
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Marguerite Duras was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker.
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