Surrender to the present post.
Bonjour. I am Frida. This is where I write about anxiety, art, trying to make art, anxiety associated with trying to make art, and other highly marketable stuff like that.
In a great twist of literary-amorous fate, Marguerite shares her grave with Yann Andrea, her final lover, a writer thirty-eight years her junior. Mademoiselle certainly wasn’t ageist. (at Cimetière du Montparnasse) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiFeTJFIzlZ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
In Sadec I rented a motorbike of course, everything was really far apart, I had scoured the internet for places Marguerite had been to and lived in and marked them with a pen on a map but there were no smartphones, no staked-out trails, no translation apps. Today there are organised tours and homestay packages, but back then there were only three hotels and a lot of gesticulation. I’d lived in Saigon for long enough to get by on my halting Vietnamese, but I still spent a lot of time driving somewhat aimlessly along riverbanks looking for addresses I was only half sure existed. It was at one of these times that I found myself accosted by this gang of river kids, who were reassuringly playing with a machete down by the water near what I hoped would turn out to be the site of Marguerite’s mother’s house, “built on a raised strip of land, clear of the garden, the snakes, the scorpions, the red ants, the floodwaters of the Mekong.”
It wasn’t, but I did get this photo of the boys, which they (quite aggressively) demanded and into the formation for which they organised themselves in three seconds flat. The leader was the tiny one in the centre, showing only his face and making V-signs with both his hands. After I pressed the shutter they all came running up to me, as coordinated as any Broadway dance-troupe, to see the photo on the back of my camera. Obviously, the only thing on the back of my faux-arcane film camera was light blue Japanese hipster plastic. I smiled awkwardly and drove off, and the boys went back to playing with the machete. (at Sa Đéc) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiFdc6Io0J8/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
I was twenty-two (and a half) at the time and took all the photos on a Diana F+ “lomography” camera (think Instagram filter before Instagram was born) that I had absolutely no idea how to use. This is a good example of how most pictures came out: lots of feeling, zero focus. No wonder I liked it.
Obvs, I sported a hat just like fifteen and a half year-old Marguerite had done, although mine was not “a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon,” but a simple straw hat adorned with red plastic roses that I had bought on the beach in Mui Nei after passing my teaching course.
The river was the same, though. It was not black like the stagnant river I drove past on my motorbike every morning in Saigon, black and swollen, puffy, like dark chocolate toffee that’s just been poured out onto a baking sheet to cool. No, the Mekong River was huge and flat, light-brown like coffee with too much milk, the coffee of twelve year-olds, the coffee of people who really do not like coffee at all.
“My mother sometimes tells me that never in my whole life shall I ever again see rivers as beautiful and big and wild as these, the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great regions of water soon to disappear into the caves of ocean. In the surrounding flatness stretching as far as the eye can see, the rivers flow as fast as if the earth sloped downwards.”
The Mekong was indeed beautiful and big and wild. Life was, too. I had come to Vietnam because I’d graduated from university in London and had heard (I shudder to think from whom) that only “failed novelists” became journalists. Naturally, I wouldn’t be that. I was twenty-two! And a half! I smoked pink cigarettes and read Marguerite Duras in French! Non, merci. Instead, I would teach and eat baby crocodiles and not come home until I’d finished my novel. (at The Past) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiFc9qAI-xL/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=