He didn’t take the time to look at me. He accepted, his head down, his steps heading off in the direction of his office. We have just put an end to our marriage. He retires to his lair where his party papers lie waiting for him. He waited for me to speak again, and ask him to come to the table.
I think I should have said I refuse your Stalinism. I uttered the wrong words. I made an irreversible decision. I will collect up a few things and leave. The scene took place yesterday. It is the day after I announced that I’m leaving. I have just specified that I will be leaving at the beginning of May once the cold season is over. Again he agrees, adding that in the meantime he will show me what he’s capable of. I cannot imagine anything more cruel. That evening he instructs me that from now on he will come and go as he pleases. His authority asserts itself.
He participates at the highest level of his organization’s central committee. The purpose of my psychoanalysis is to decipher the enigmas stemming from the hardest years of my childhood, the relations with my father. I have so often postponed the attempt to unravel this silent conflict, this vipers’ nest, my father’s hostility. At the moment, I am literally and figuratively in the foyer, or the antechamber, or the waiting room, or at the door that leads to knowledge. I reject the idea of again postponing what keeps me in the analyst’s office. I will find out – against and for myself – what it is that doesn’t work with the man who engendered me.
The disaccord with Mathieu, the consummate collapse of our marriage, is something new. I refuse to share my life with a convert. My guilty conscience paralyses me. I am shaken and I tremble. All the most negative words drift by: I am to blame, at fault, punishable, bad. It is my duty to accept his new ideology, his faith in the proletarian revolution. He is on the rise and I am in a rut. We are experiencing opposite impulses. I am seeking the reasons for my constant uncertainties, my secret malaise, on the analyst’s couch. I prefer to accept a thousand restrictions rather than admit that I am suffering.
We are intellectuals who never talk about ourselves. Mathieu has repeated and I have come to believe that it is indecent to do so. One day he said: using the pronoun I is of no interest. We decide that the I does not exist and we live just as well without it. I is the sign of mean pettiness, ingrained mediocrity. We can do without the first person pronoun. This capacity of ours is a sign of mental force, of powerful intelligence. Mathieu decides and defines how things shall be for both of us. We are not to talk about ourselves. I must not say I. He has forbidden this. He sets the best example; he never slips up, I think. I manage not to say I. I conform to what he considers a priority, the foundation of our accord.
While the party is theoretically a good subject of conversation, my partner’s membership is not since the conversation loses its neutrality and impartiality.
My husband no longer talks to me. He is satisfied with the meals I serve. We frequently have sexual relations. We do so without a word. I suppose there is no more love. This is called nervous agitation. He is tense; I suffer from insomnia, fever.
The grand images of love have been torn up, shredded by our antagonistic bodies. We mime ecstasy. He won’t kill me now. He demeans what love once represented: my youth under the exhausting sign of an endless, well-behaved waiting period, the time of unappeased organs, overwhelming flows of desire. We consume love in disgrace; we destroy our own wonder.
Months have gone by. Time moves on. The appointed day arrives. We haven’t talked any further about my decision. I have to go. The painful tension remains, unchanged. I don’t tell anyone among my family or friends about the imminent break-up of our marriage. I put it out of my head, or I worry about criticism, blame, reprimands. The days have flown by; I have nowhere to go. Mathieu comes in late, after midnight. He is not concerned with where I will live. He tells me he’ll be away when I gather up my things. I am alone as I load my boxes and suitcases into my car. I feel a very physical fatigue and a tangible mental void. There is no one. Mathieu is participating in the May first celebrations. It has been a long time since I felt such darkness. The announced separation has taken place.
Love makes you desperate. This maudlin thought comes to the minds of girls who don’t want to believe. The love songs, the photo novels, the television series
– they are interchangeable. Love is a parenthesis. Times change, fragment. The objects I have put in and taken out of my car keep me busy. This resembles my general feeling, I have to function, be my own machine, my own mechanical future. The thought of an automated future preoccupies me. I don’t imagine the future as inert, an object or a thing; rather I imagine myself as a neutral function, absence itself, an operational cog. The ambient air is inhuman. Suffering is useless. I have adapted myself to the requirements of the social order. An independent woman, a functioning model of responsibility, that’s what I have become. I have inserted myself into life according to my place in society, that of a small elite of educated women. Existence is like an object. I am an object. That’s what I think about as I try to position myself, say who I am as I intend to.
I live in the home of an artist friend who rents me her place for the summer. This friend is at her cottage on the edge of a transparent river. Every object belongs to her. I move about carefully. I do not shift the table or the chairs, not even the armchair by the reading lamp. The books on the shelves remain untouched. The walls are decorated with her works. Everywhere there are paintings that she exhibits in galleries and sells to collectors. I examine them one by one. I hardly leave the dark rooms with the closed windows.
The atmosphere keeps me inside, where I exchange with the paintings, and think. The apartment has a small windowless nook once lit up by a skylight which is no longer there. That’s where the telephone is, on a wide table. I spend hours writing in this secret space where there is only one straight chair, an empty table, and bookshelves. I am safe, in the lamplight. The summer is particularly sunny, warm and light. I leave my dark den to walk in the bright streets under the blue sky. The dizzying contrast is amplified by my writing sessions. My body vibrates. I pinch my eyes shut.
In July I travel to Paris and Provence. I start searching for a place to stay for the upcoming year. The apartment I’ve been in is not available. I keep on wandering. I change my address a second time, move my things from one place to another. I grit my teeth, live up to the requirements of a professional life. I take care not to make mistakes.
By the end of the summer I am living with a recent acquaintance, a woman whose kitchen and bath I share like a student. I prepare my teaching, correct student assignments at the table in front of the window through which my view is obstructed by a staircase. The lamp is always on.
My former vulnerability returns, the feeling I had before I was married. At night the streets become inhospitable again. I avoid going out after nightfall, or only to places that are very busy. The fear comes back despite my best efforts. Simple glances make me seize up. I feel a growing unseemly fear that I will think only about this: I’m afraid that some awful thing might happen. I shudder in horror when a man follows me down a street illuminated by streetlights. The street does not belong to me. I am inhibited by just thinking about how unable I would be to deal with some incident. I cannot control my fears. This mental scenario is triggered whenever I go out anywhere except for work and shopping. In the summer I was able to travel alone. I went to visit friends. I had company without having to ask for it. Now my car is a necessity of the first order.
My provisional lifestyle makes it necessary for me to go out, get away from my landlady and her invasive lovers. I start frequenting the bars on Saint-Denis near the National Library early on Friday evenings. Sitting at a table with my notebook open, I have a quarter of red wine, gazing vaguely toward the interior of the bar, learning to master a new activity. I accord myself the right to be there. I am equal to the men. I practise imitating them. I’ve come to relax after a week at work. I do not accept any company; that’s my right. It happens that a man approaches me
, invites himself. I become awkward, inhibited, my heart in my throat, I leave, unable to defend my space.
I’m afraid of the men’s aggressiveness, which of course causes me to make mistakes. I always address people I don’t know formally. That’s not the done thing after so many revolutions: the students, the FLQ , the counter-culture, the women. My contemporaries don’t accept the distancing of formal address. I formally request that they leave me in peace in front of my quarter litre of red wine. Some man I don’t know bursts out that I have no business being there. He raises his voice. People turn to look at us. I leave, embarrassed by the scene. I change bars; I move around. The fear, the silent distress, the whole range of negative emotions repeats itself. My encounters with men are not free.
One Friday in October I am seated at a table when two women at the next table acknowledge me. They’re having beer, I’m having wine. Without any preamble, the older one tells a story of many years of hard work, great privations, physical distress, humiliations. She is small and thin. The brilliant clarity of her words fascinates me. She knows where she’s from. She talks about her horror of work, of the whole working world, including mine, before she even asks what I do. The other woman doesn’t say a word. She’s happy. That is visible on her round face.
When I see them the next week, the talkative woman goes on about the best life there is. She and her partner don’t work and she encourages me to do the same. This is the only way for a woman to recover her dignity. She thinks that my status as a teacher is of no interest. Men make war on us. When it’s not physical, it’s a war to break us down psychologically. They’re both relaxed, full of energy, while I’m confused, with limp ideas.
The older lesbian plans to start offering therapy. She has no education, she admits. Her vast experience is enough. Anybody can call themselves a therapist, it’s not illegal. There’s no hurry, she says. She has the impression that these are her first good days. Her partner nods.
The fall is filled with the demands of my work and the psychoanalysis that goes on and on, ad nauseam. My words are stuck; my spirit jammed. I leave the analyst’s office exhausted, on the verge of tears. I am stressed and afraid that mistakes or disasters will crop up at work. I prioritize preparing my classes. I’m plagued by the feeling that I am a beginner again. I observe myself. I insist on strict self-control. I do not make any mistakes. Every day is a declension of my perfect solitude.
I have old and new connections in the literary circles where I cannot disclose the details of my daily life: the timetables, the strains and conflicts at the college, the renovation projects. The literary world operates beyond economic laws. The formalist poet that I consider a friend does not need to earn her living. She owns her time. It is understood that the gesture of writing cannot be compared to menial labour. My friend comes from a well-to-do family, which I tend to forget. I don’t think about it. I know so little about what it means to be born into and be part of Montreal’s bourgeoisie. She has convictions that are out of the ordinary, worthy of the avantgarde. For instance, she asserts that the text forbids us the real. I wonder whether that comes from some personality trait or if this emphatic confidence is due to her background.
The writer refers to the concept of excess in the work of Georges Bataille, associating writing to endless conversation. She reproaches me for not expending my intellectual powers. She thinks I go home too early, just when the informal discussions start up, and go on into the night. I feel the visceral urge to leave. Extravagant desires, crazy nights bring on punishments that include faux pas and setbacks. I cannot relax.
I am often in the background. I understand the minds of the people I frequent. The times are resolutely optimistic, fanatical, full of hope. People express all kinds of desires but not enough investment in the concrete aspects of existence. Many of my contemporaries are ready to throw themselves into spontaneous, unprecedented projects. Many have dreams. Each more daring than the next. Just hearing about someone else’s success is enough to want to surpass it. The world of art and literature is fecund. Poets translate poetry should be written by everyone by Lautréamont into a bastardized and simplified line: everybody can write. I don’t agree. Since mine is not a dominant voice, since my voice is not even listened to, I let them talk. That statement comes up regularly in journals and in conversations. I read it as often as I hear it repeated.
That’s what’s happening to me. I am unable to feel enthusiastic even when I hear the most beautiful fabulations. I can’t help but imagine the concrete situation, tangible reality. I don’t connect with the young people or the countless dreamers. The people I frequent or encounter spin tales and get excited about their desires. Everything is supposedly easy, feasible, in line for success. All you need is ideas. Changing them is the easiest thing in the world. By announcing their future intentions everybody can feel superior to everybody else. Listening to the great projects I feel as though I’m at a new beginning of the world. I reject the ambient euphoria which strikes me as humbug, fakery, empty aggressive frenzy. I run my fingertips over this mad enthusiasm that negates the woman I am, the woman who left the Stalinist.
I have become sensitive to discourse. I don’t say it’s good or bad. Most people aren’t able to formulate what they want day by day. This is an era in which dreams in Technicolor predominate. The dominant ideas confirm them. They are all alike, claiming they want action while they despise it. I withdraw to my room and close the door. I am alone from early Thursday morning until the end of the day. I force myself to write. I learn how to do that, with or without inspiration. Toxic sentences burst my eardrums. Mathieu’s heavy pronouncements stay with me. The silence is not complete – the stirring in the house bothers me. I am bent over my handwriting which I find too impersonal, which I don’t like. There is so much internal movement. What I write comes from an invisible struggle. I get up from my chair, tired and determined. I will hold onto these short pages.
The discipline that I deploy in my work contrasts with the atmosphere of my social life. The ease – there is no other word – the spontaneous, improvised meetings with women. At one spontaneous event I get to know a young woman who talks a lot. We meet again at her house a little later and she tells me everyday stories from her life. She doesn’t make anything up; I believe her. What she tells me later, and over the years, doesn’t change. I liked her from the start for the way she told her story. She speaks in a detached voice. These are no confidences or secrets. No one has ever talked to me about themselves the way she does. She was born in the Villeray neighbourhood, of parents who were full of good feeling. She remembers meeting her father when she was three. He sold insurance and had to travel all over Quebec, coming home late at night and leaving again the next day. He was a stranger to her when he finally returned to Montreal for good. Her mother, the daughter of a doctor, created a mythology around her own father’s reputation. And she, too, turned this grandfather, who died before she was born, into an icon in comparison with her absent, abstract father. My friend recounts her family fable. It seems to date from the grand era of the village doctor.
She tells me about her mother interfering in her physical privacy. Her mother would choose her underwear, immaculately white corsets and bras just like her own. The girl didn’t object when her mother said: you’re too fat, like me. You have to compensate by being impeccably dressed. My friend says what she thinks. She has no inhibitions and doesn’t censor herself. She narrates the facts, detached from what caused her to leave. Through my relationship with her I understand how thick my own silences are. I cannot imagine that one day I might have that voice, that serene way of expressing myself.
The young woman isn’t thirty yet. She lives alone, her first place away from her family home. The oldfashioned downtown apartment is comfortable. The double front room where she welcomes me is decorated in various shades of pink. The plaster is cracked, the door and window frames askew. “Rrose Sélavy.” Wall hangings, silk scarves, art deco pictures are all in different
hues of pink. The paper lampshades diffuse pink light onto flea market tables. She says she lends her apartment to people she knows for romantic rendezvous.
She herself has never had a relationship. She’s the one who starts on this subject. She wonders about her sexual identity and orientation. She rejects the categories: heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, refuses the definitions, and ponders whether she is attracted to women or to men, and doesn’t know. She broods over the question of her orientation and talks about it without my daring to ask any indiscreet questions about her fantasies. I listen to her elaborate on sexual desire. She thinks love is an energy that moves the psyche before it is directed outward. Amorous desire is carried within you where it swells, reaching a state of perfection that corresponds to the heart and the intelligence. This profoundly secret desire acquires enormous dimensions; it writes itself in capital letters, reinforcing the current discourses that celebrate it. She wants the fullness of its expression.
Books are being published on the female orgasm; thinkers and writers discuss it. Jacques Lacan writes: “THE woman does not exist.” Luce Irigaray, Lacan’s critic, writes that “the women go to the market” of orgasms. Shere Hite publishes an extensive survey, a massive work of research on the sexuality of American women. Denise Boucher defines cyprin as visible, material proof of female orgasm. The good news is women can also have orgasms.
I am ashamed, and keep my head down when I see my family at Christmas. I think about only one thing: I will be accused of leaving my husband. The official event, my separation, must not exist. If someone comments, I don’t hear. The apparent indifference must be maintained. I have avoided being reprimanded: this is what I think when I get back to my rented room. My parents are leaving on a road trip through the United States to Mexico. I am in their kitchen, come to say goodbye.
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