The Living Days Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE LIVING DAYS

  “Beautifully written, visceral, and ecstatic. Unafraid, as angels might be, to bear witness to the force of entropy pulling us all toward death.”

  —PRETI TANEJA, author of We That Are Young

  “Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation is perfect in its power and precision. A magnificent gem.”

  —JENNIFER CROFT, translator of Flights

  “The finest Mauritian novelist at work today, Ananda Devi has long been the francophone voice of the outcast, the oppressed, and the derelict. This fluid translation of one of her darkest works gives the reader a glimpse at her profound talent and her unique ability to synthesize political rage with poetic lyricism.”

  —ADAM HOCKER, Albertine

  THE LIVING DAYS

  ANANDA DEVI

  Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

  Published in 2019 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition 2019

  Copyright © 2013 by Editions Gallimard, Paris

  English-language translation copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey Zuckerman Simultaneously published in the UK by Les Fugitives, London, 2019.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This book is supported in part by the Institut français, Paris.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing November 2019

  Edited by Cécile Menon and Angeline Rothermundt (Les Fugitives)

  Cover design by Sukruti Anah Staneley

  Text design by Drew Stevens

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Devi, Ananda, author. | Zuckerman, Jeffrey, 1987- translator.

  Title: The living days / Ananda Devi ; translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman.

  Other titles: Jours vivant. English

  Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York, NY : Feminist Press, 2019. | English translation of a French novel.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019015923 (print) | LCCN 2019019394 (ebook) | ISBN 9781936932719 (E-book) | ISBN 9781936932702 (pbk.)

  Classification: LCC PQ3989.2.N547 (ebook) | LCC PQ3989.2.N547 J6813 2019 (print) | DDC 843/.92--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015923

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for The Living Days

  Title page

  Copyright

  Contents

  The Living Days

  About the author and translator

  More translated literature from the Feminist Press

  About the Feminist Press

  Also available from the Feminist Press

  Unreal City,

  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

  I had not thought death had undone so many.

  ………………………….

  “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

  “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

  —T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land: The Burial of the Dead

  London, 2005

  Three narrow stories, three uneven hallways each three paces long: nothing more than a mousehole, a gingerbread house from which she would never escape again, inside which she could not breathe for much longer. Even so, she would go on watching, patient as an ailing she-wolf.

  She only had to glance out the window to see how she might slip and fall. The gleaming surfaces, the mirror-smooth roads, the featureless faces could all pull her far away from herself, so far she would have no way of returning. There were so many ways to get lost.

  The day was slick over Portobello Road.

  She sat in this armchair so faded she no longer remembered what color it once was, even though she clearly recalled the day she bought it, as lighthearted, as energetic as if she had been spreading her wings for the first time. Maybe this armchair had only ever had the colors bestowed on it by her gaze that day?

  With lowered eyes she considered her hands. Or rather, the paths traced on her hands, fierce furrows that left no space untouched: the surface of an unknown planet, her hands. And the strangeness of their posture at rest. Her palm formed a hollow, like a bowl, her fingers curled inward, but not gracefully: sharply, contorted by thick bones, with a far darker color than the rest of her wholly pale skin.

  These hands had become talons, but talons incapable of grabbing or crushing any prey. Not that she would have wanted to crush anything. Caress, yes; stroke, yes; trace curves, yes: gentleness, after all, was what she had once represented in her distant youth.

  Gentleness had shaped Mary; sweet, sweet Mary Rose as her parents had called her, and her sisters had mimicked them mockingly as if they wanted to blot out their timid, delicate sister. Who, as a small child, had been like a porcelain doll, then, as she grew up, more like a stork, slender, slightly hunched over, eternally indecisive, smiling that smile that conveyed to everyone around her the terror flitting just beneath her surface.

  Her smile, her soft lower lip, her eyes so pale that they nearly disappeared, the precocious groove between her brows, had ensnared her as she grew up. She had been reduced to a talcum-and-lavender Mary, her hands always at work on bows for presents, bouquets of flowers, small decorative trinkets, lacework and knitting and crochet, all that, yes, a very good girl, upright and sensible, but not a girl to ride or screw or fuck, as we might so crudely put it these days, but why not, those words say exactly what they mean, why bother with coy euphemisms, really, what’s the point?

  She was fifteen during the war. Fifteen was the age when girls had to take whatever they could get, kissing all those dashing boys in their tight army uniforms, luring them with their bodies, their hair, their embraces, their desires, why pretend when time is so short, why act as if this whole little game wouldn’t end this way, with sex in all its forms, indoors, in cars, in the countryside, in fields of wheat, among trees, clouds, storms, as bombs fell, sex ripping apart cheap clothes and ruining set hair and straining sweet skin? How good it must have felt to claim some right to them, to have some hold on those handsome, sturdy, rugged men from the countryside, to relish that energy all too quickly gone as their trains bore them away to their inescapable fates! And parents pretended not to see anything because that was what being patriotic meant at that time, putting your tongue in a boy’s mouth, putting your hand on his crotch to tell him to come back, telling him to fight but also to take care of himself, telling him not to lose hope at the worst, when fear broke out and flesh split apart and bones jutted out of wounds and faces were half gone, promise me you’ll come back, all right I will, and the memory of a kiss, the red trace of a kiss, the swelling of a kiss would not disappear, not even when their eyes were opened to the pointlessness of war at the exact moment so many other eyes were closed for having seen it up close.

  But not Mary. At fifteen she was a good girl, so timid that the word itself seemed to have been invented for her, a wallflower, truly, the soft, pale, fragrant flower that sank into the wallpaper during parties
while other mouths greedily lunged forward to claim what had been promised them. Wallflower—what a nice, insipid, even stupid word, there weren’t any flowers on the walls, they were only on her dress, flowers aplenty, that horrible muslin dress chosen by her father for her fifteenth birthday, with such delight in his eyes as he offered it to her that she could not possibly dream of saying “I don’t want it,” the joy in his eyes was that of giving a gift, and the dress, even if it was ugly, gathered in all the wrong spots to emphasize her lack of breasts, not a tight skirt that would hug her hips, no, a hideous floating, flowery, gathered dress was what she had to wear, and it doomed her to becoming the wallpaper flower that nobody invited to dance despite her sandy blue eyes, despite her charming lips, despite her smile which promised the brightest of gifts: she sighed and sipped the punch that went to her head and she watched the other girls dancing and she sighed again.

  But, by some miracle, that evening, the last one before the big day, that wasn’t how it ended, was it, Mary Grimes? Oh, you’re looking away, you’re hiding those hands that are nothing like the ones you had at fifteen, those weren’t talons, no, not those hands with soft palms, pink nails, hands ready to be grabbed, tapping a rhythm you liked so much on your knees, why would you look away from the memory of your greatest glory?

  Fifteen years old during the war, one last party before the men sail off, and you, too, preparing to go, to abandon that house with green shutters you and your family live in, that claustrophobia of dead souls, that illusion of warmth which turns to ice as soon as the door opens onto other silences. Only when he’s drowned in booze would your father offer you this dress, otherwise he’d never think to do it. Only in those rare moments when the day’s heat has finally escaped the rafters would your mother stop fixating on her swollen ankles, and only then does she remember sweet, sweet Mary. You know this is how it’s always been in the English countryside, and especially in the village of Benton-on-Bent, on the river Bent, a name that had not yet acquired the sexual connotations it would hold much later and which for you merely evoked bends carved deep by habit.

  And so, that night, she wore her wallflower dress, knowing as soon as she put it on that this would be her sole role, and she set aside her dreams as she walked out with a maturity at odds with her youth. Not tonight, she told herself with a weary smile, tonight won’t be the night.

  But that was not how it came to be. Amid the gentle swaying of bodies, as a prelude to coupling, someone noticed Mary Grimes, sitting down, tapping her feet, that orange punch slowly getting her drunk. He walked up to her. In the semiobscurity, and because he stood in front of the light in the village hall, she hadn’t been able to see his face. Just a vague outline of youth, of virility, a hand with bits of black under the nails offered to her and into which she put her own, thinking all the while that, for just a bit, they would float up to the ceiling. He had taken her outside, beneath a moonless sky, because it was the last night for lovers and it was the least the night could do to be wholly black. He took her far off, under the trees, and she, trembling but sure of herself, certain that it was the last chance for both of them, realizing with this lucidity so at odds with the moniker of sweet that had always been bestowed upon her, that he had seen everyone pairing off and had abruptly realized that he had spent too much time drinking and not enough summoning up courage and that soon there would be no girl left for his last living night, whereupon he noticed her muslin dress with pink flowers and maybe that was a sight that had delighted him, this flowery field waiting, maybe he had shrugged at this consolation prize, but all the same he had made his way toward her and she was now following him under the trees, far off under the trees with no worry other than how to do it.

  In a nook even darker still, he stopped and did all the things she had lived out only in her dreams. This astonished her. She wondered how he had known, before she realized that it was a dream that everyone shared, the dreams of the body and not of the imagination, and it was the body that drove the young man to press Mary against the tree trunk and to lift up her chin, to bring his lips to hers, to open her lips with his tongue, with a little force, to explore this innocent mouth until her tongue began to tryst with his. These were the dreams of bodies that made these meetings between two people who had never seen one other before (she still hadn’t seen his face) so easy, and of bodies that, standing at first, their clothes still in place, then lying on the ground, their clothes elsewhere, pressed together against one another with so much tamed fury.

  For most of that time she kept her eyes shut.

  Afterward, they were both delighted and disappointed. Their emotions gave way to reason once more, which confronted them with just how long their bodies had been anticipating these actions and just how swift the act itself had turned out to be. But they clung to each other with the determined tenderness of youth still under the illusion that it was wonderful, and they kissed for a long while.

  After kissing, they talked, or rather he talked, and she loved his voice as she listened, with her eyes shut, while he talked about his life thus far and what he would do after, she heard about his childhood on a distant farm and the pimply years until his apprenticeship with the only mechanic in the neighboring county, who could fix bikes and farmers’ tractors, she heard about his yesterdays, his tomorrows, but as for his tomorrows she knew he was making them up so he wouldn’t have to consider the possibility that they might not exist, he talked of a small cottage, cotton curtains, a bit like your dress, actually (the cloth made for a bright spot on the grass nearby), some kids, he said, who’ll wake us up when we just want to sleep. She wondered whether this “we” had any particular meaning, where he was going with this dream, was he just saying anything to keep from crying about the prospect of the truck he’d be loaded onto the next morning with all the others, was he talking about a future he could see, one that he was wishing for, or was he just playing a game, was he being silly, she couldn’t be sure. And he kept going, he would have his own mechanic’s shop in front of the house, he’d have new tools, new machines that the mechanic he’d worked for didn’t even know about, soon everyone would be coming to him because he knew not only how to fix bikes and tractors but also cars, which plenty of people were starting to buy, cars, those wouldn’t be like they were now, only rich people had them, no, even we’ll have a car and it’ll be the end of the old mechanic, a surly, ill-humored man who always gave him the filthiest jobs, a cottage, curtains, a shop, kids, a wife of course who he’d want to sleep with—and die of old age beside, but that he didn’t say out loud—you know how to bake tarts, Mary, I love mirabelle tarts, I’m mad about them, I could eat them every day, and she promised to learn how to make tarts, especially with mirabelles, if he ever came back, and she wanted to ask him, when will you come back, and she worried that he might reply, never.

  They parted ways before dawn, and it was only once she had come back home, propelled toward her bedroom by a joy so unexpected that she hadn’t even felt herself falling, that she realized she hadn’t seen his face at all. She knew his first name, Howard, but not his last. When she thought of the cottage and the shop and the children, she didn’t even know what name she might use to give some substance to her fantasies. She tried a few: Smith, Black, Rogers, Ecclestone, Preston, Baulkstead, but none of them charmed her. She would have to be satisfied with his first name. She would call herself Mary Howard (and him Howard Howard). It was a name that smiled.

  She slept. In the morning she woke up knowing she would always remain Mary Grimes.

  Many young men never came back. Many young women became single mothers. Not Mary, but she never saw Howard again alive. Was he dead or did he decide not to come back to see her? She preferred the first explanation. Mary, at fifteen, had become a war widow.

  Her bedroom is on the third floor. A burgeoning mass of mold that eats up sleepless hours with silent chatter stipples the wallpaper. She wonders what that unmoving, open-mouthed profusion might say. What complaints, what rebell
ions, what papery wounds might perhaps be expressed.

  On the second floor is the bathroom, with a window that never shuts, half-clogged pipes, streaks of rust on the purple linoleum. In the bathtub, now more gray than white, the water has left traces like scratches.

  The living room–dining room on the ground floor has become a place not to live in but to dump the past in.

  Nothing has changed in this house for ages. It’s not worth the effort, any effort, to keep it tidy when one is so old and the next minute could be the last. Mary says this as a straightforward observation, without bitterness, why tempt fate, that’s the dying person’s superstition. And for this reason everything stays where it is, the curtains pockmarked by mites, the carpet reeking of urine—although it’s not actually urine, she hasn’t let herself go that far yet—the mattress on box springs sunken so deep that she has to sleep on the edge, and even the hole in the ceiling over the bed, once small but now grown to the size of a two-pound coin. A small hole that opens in the middle of the night on a great unknown. She’d rather not think about it.

  She’s now at the point of no longer caring. So used to things decaying that it’s ceased to bother her; on the contrary, they’re her own ruins. Ruins reminiscent of those of London on that spring day when, at just twenty-five, she became for the first time conscious of its corpses and promises, ruins that she gladly contemplates at a remove because nothing outside the window looks like her anymore: she’s a stranger in a strange century.

  A city of corpses and promises, yes.

  Ten years after the war, and Benton-on-Bent is adorned with a huge shell hole, just one, on the outskirts of the miraculously spared town. The village council debates whether to fill it in or to keep it as a memento of that terror; but there are far more important holes to fill.

  Mary was always doomed to her role as a good girl—soon an old girl—who took care of her parents as her father’s face became ruddier and ruddier while her mother’s enormous legs became harder and harder for her to walk with. Beached seals, she thought, stuck on a gray shore where they’d flop around until they asphyxiated. Elsewhere, the war had changed everything. Elsewhere, they were starting to rebuild, but here in the countryside, everyone went on as they always had. The countryside was now bereft of its young, healthy men. As she made her way down to the village, she unconsciously kept track of how many young men she walked past, just the same way she’d played that game of counting all the bikes on the road between the plum trees and the apple trees when she was younger. But now it wasn’t a game. She walked by teenagers, yes, but they were wan and hunched by their secret shame of not being old enough to go and get killed. And old men, too, old men everywhere, frozen and twisted, hungrily gulping down the fresh, green air those boys could no longer enjoy.