"In ancient times, in the distant past, for thousands of years, it was women who were silent. Therefore, literature belongs to women. Literature is about them, or they are engaged in literature. It's all women. ”
Water cutters
Text/Duras
It was a summer day a few years ago, in a village in eastern France, perhaps three or four years ago, in the afternoon. An employee of the waterworks came to this house to cut off the water supply. They are a type of person who is seen differently, differently from others, that is, backward.
They lived in an abandoned railway station— through which the high-speed train passed— and was allowed to live there with the consent of the municipality. Men work odd jobs in the town for some families. They probably also received a little funding from the town government. They have two children, one four years old and one one year old and a half years old.
In front of their houses, not far away, is where the high-speed train route passes. They can't afford to pay for gas, electricity, water, and they live in extreme poverty. So on this day someone came and cut off the running water in the old station where they lived.
When someone came to see the woman, the woman was just silent and didn't say a word. Her man was not at home, only the backward woman with a four-year-old child and a one-and-a-half-year-old.
That employee was a man like all men. This man, I'll call him the Man who cuts off the water. It was the height of the summer, and he saw it; it was a very hot summer, and he knew it, because he himself lived in such a summer; and the little boy who was only a year and a half old, he saw it too.
Someone gave him an order to cut off the water, and he did. He followed his schedule: cutting off the water supply. He left the woman without water to bathe the child, and no water for the child to drink.
That night, the woman and her husband walked with their two small children to the high-speed railway and lay down on the tracks passing in front of the abandoned station. They were all crushed to death together.
Just walk a hundred meters to lie down on the tracks. Let the child quiet down, maybe even sing and coax the child to sleep. It is said that the train stopped at that time.
That's the story.
That waterworks employee had his account. He said he had come to cut off the water supply, and he did not say that he had seen the child, but the child was there, with his mother. He said she wasn't defending herself and he said she didn't ask him to continue the water supply.
That's all people know.
I jotted down the story written above, and suddenly I heard my own voice in it—she did nothing, she didn't defend herself—and it was like this. People had to learn about it through the waterworks employee.
Since she hadn't asked him not to cut off the water, there was no reason why he shouldn't cut it off. Does that have to be figured out? It's a maddening story.
I'll go on. Let me take a closer look. She did not tell the waterworks employee that she still had two children, because he had seen those two children, nor did she say that the summer was hot, because he himself lived in the summer, such a hot summer. So she let the water cutter go, leaving her alone with the two children for a while. Then she went to the village.
She found a small hotel she knew. People don't know what she said in the little hotel and the hotel hostess, and I don't know either. Whether the hostess ever said anything, I don't know. She didn't talk about death. This is what people know. Maybe she told her about it, but she was going to kill herself, killing her two children and husband, and herself, she didn't say.
The reporter didn't know what she had said to the female owner of the small hotel, so there was no special report on this matter. Based on the circumstances of the "event" at the time, my understanding is:
The woman, after deciding that the family would all die, walked out of the house with her two children first, and what her purpose was, people did not know, presumably to do something, to say something, to do something before she died, what she had to say.
In this place, I have restored the blank and silent part of the story, that is, after the water was cut off and the time she came out of the small hotel. That is, I unfolded into literature with the help of this deep silence. It is this that pushes me forward; it is this that cuts me into history, into the story, otherwise I would still be on the outside.
She might have wanted to wait for her husband to come back and tell him the news that she had decided to die. But no. She went to the village and made a trip to the small hotel in town.
If the woman had an explanation of herself, then the story wouldn't have caught my attention either.
Christina Wellman's mishandling of even two sentences excites me, for she, like this woman, has a strong nature that cannot be measured.
There is an instinctive behavior that may be probed deeply, and one can also attribute it to silence. It is difficult for a male act to be incorporated into silent silence, and it is also false and untrue to do so, because men cannot belong to silent silence.
In ancient times, in the distant past, for thousands of years, it was women who were silent. Therefore, literature belongs to women. Literature is about them, or they are engaged in literature. It's all women.
So the woman, people believe she didn't speak, because she never spoke, even though she should have said. She probably didn't say anything about her decision, no, she must have said something to replace that thing. Her decision, what she said, was the same to her as that decision, and to all who knew the story. Maybe said something about the heat. This is a word of divine character.
In this kind of moment, language can reach the most powerful height of language. Whatever she said to the little hotel lady, her words were all said. Saying all these four words, and saying these last few words before death is put into practice, is equivalent to the silence of these people for the rest of their lives. These words, no one can grasp.
Such events happen every day in life, at the time of farewell, at the moment of death, at the time of suicide, but people just ignore it. What has been said, what should have been a warning, preceded by what should have been warned, is forgotten and unknown.
The four of them lay down together on the tracks of the high-speed train in front of the old station, and the two of them each held their children and waited for the train to speed by. The water cutter had nothing to worry about.
I would like to add to the story of the water breaker that the woman, some of whom is backward, still understands a little bit about that kind of decision-making: this is something that she can never do, and it is absolutely impossible in the past, relying on someone to save her and her family from the predicament.
She has been abandoned by all people, by society as a whole. There was only one thing left for her, a dead end. She knew that. It was a terrible realization, very serious, very profound, and she had that realization. So, even if we say that this woman is ignorant and backward, after committing suicide, if anyone still talks about her, then we should look back at what people have not done.
Here, I can't help but think of her again, no doubt for the last time. I'm going to say her name, but I don't know.
The matter is over.
A few hours before death, the summer was so hot, a child was thirsty and wanted to drink a little fresh cold water, and the backward and ignorant young mother waited for the time to come, and was wandering around in circles, all this remained in the mind that could not be erased.
Source: Duras "Material Life" / Translated by Wang Daoqian / Shanghai Translation Publishing House / 2007
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