The Lover by Marguerite Duras Page B

God. I realized at once, she couldn’t have sent the telegram. My younger brother. Dead. At first it’s incomprehensible, and then suddenly, from all directions, from the ends of the earth, comes pain. It buried me, swept me away, I didn’t know anything, I ceased to exist except for pain, what pain, I didn’t know what pain, whether it was the pain returning of having lost a child a few months before, or a new pain. Now I think it was a new pain, I’d never known my stillborn child and hadn’t wanted to kill myself then as I wanted to now.
    It was a mistake, and that momentary error filled the universe. The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn’t noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother’s body while he was alive, and we hadn’t noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother’s body was dead, and immortality with it. And the world went on without that visited body, and without its visitation. It was a complete mistake. And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.
    •  •  •
    Since my younger brother was dead, everything had to die after him. And through him. Death, a chain reaction of death, started with him, the child.
    The corpse of the child was unaffected, itself, by the events of which it was the cause. Of the immortality it had harbored for the twenty-seven years of its life, it didn’t know the name.
    No one saw clearly but I. And since I’d acquired that knowledge, the simple knowledge that my younger brother’s body was mine as well, I had to die. And I am dead. My younger brother gathered me to him, drew me to him, and I am dead.
    People ought to be told of such things. Ought to be taught that immortality is mortal, that it can die, it’s happened before and it happens still. It doesn’t ever announce itself as such—it’s duplicity itself. It doesn’t exist in detail, only in principle. Certain people may harbor it, on condition they don’t know that’s what they’re doing. Just as certain other people may detect its presence in them, on the same condition, that they don’t know they can. It’s while it’s being lived that life is immortal, while it’s still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, it’s not really a question ofimmortality but of something else that remains unknown. It’s as untrue to say it’s without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void. Look at the dead sands of the desert, the dead bodies of children: there’s no path for immortality there, it must halt and seek another way.
    In the case of my younger brother it was an immortality without flaw, without commentary, smooth, pure, unique. My younger brother had nothing to cry in the wilderness, he had nothing to say, here or anywhere, nothing. He was uneducated, he never managed to learn anything. He couldn’t speak, could scarcely read, scarcely write, sometimes you’d think he couldn’t even suffer. He was someone who didn’t understand and was afraid.
    The wild love I feel for him remains an unfathomable mystery to me. I don’t know why I loved him so much as to want to die of his death. I’d been parted from him for ten years when it happened, and hardly ever thought about him. I loved him, it seemed, forever, and nothing new could happen to that love. I’d forgotten about death.
    •  •  •
    We didn’t talk to each other much, we hardly talked at all about our elder brother, or our unhappiness, our mother’s unhappiness, the misfortune of the land on the plain. We talked instead about hunting, rifles, mechanics, cars. He’d get furious about our worn-down old car and tell me about, describe, the cars he’d have in the future. I knew all the makes of hunting rifles and all the brands of cars. We also talked, of course, about being eaten by tigers if we weren’t careful, or getting drowned in the river if we