by André Aciman
It was November 1972, and I felt good about myself. A dark cloud would race over me each time I’d think of my ex traveling in Munich and Frankfurt or wherever her jaunt through Germany took her every weekend. But I knew I had to be good to myself, so I bought myself a few things that I didn’t really need, took time off from various obligations, made new friends, spent a bit, and learned to be alone again. Good things awaited me that year. I knew I was going to start graduate school, though I hadn’t yet decided where. I was long past the insecurities of 1971. I’d also met a slightly older woman with whom I could have a Rohmerian conversation and uncover the intricate folds and mainsprings of the human psyche, particularly in matters of love. Never again the tiresome psychobabble I was so frequently subjected to in the school cafeteria when one girl or another would use me as her confidant and lament the state of her relationship with her boyfriend, when all I wanted was something else.
I came out of the movie theater that first time in 1972 feeling at once chastened and awed. Once again, here was a man who had said no to a woman because he was honest enough to know that no man needs to say yes simply because a woman’s taken off her clothes. His masculinity was never threatened, never questioned. He could speak frankly, because nothing he said might diminish or hurt him.
That he chickens out and slinks away without explaining himself to Chloé or saying goodbye—well, that’s another side that doesn’t quite jibe with the candor I so admired and envied in Rohmer’s men. It might turn out that the famed Rohmerian encounter is itself a delusion, a mask, a fiction that ends no less accidentally than it started. Frédéric slips away down Chloé’s stairway while she’s waiting for him naked in bed; Jean-Louis leaves Maud’s apartment very early in the morning after she snubs his indecision, Adrien drives away when it seems that Haydée is almost ready to be his lover, and Jérôme, having found the ultimate substitution in Claire’s Knee, drives off in his motorboat after getting what he wanted. It is not only that their sexuality is dispassionate; it is almost entirely incorporeal.
Behind the ease with which people touch and make themselves available for sex, what struck me was the implicit difficulty behind sex. There was a sort of reluctance on the part of each film to let sex happen as easily as the story clearly seemed to promise.
* * *
Which raises the issue of what these men are truly like behind their perfectly fulfilling personal and professional lives. Are they asexual? Is sexuality being put indefinitely on hold? Are human relationships simple formalities? In their relationships, theirs is a world where nothing is really staked—not the heart, not the psyche, not the ego, and certainly not the body, which is another reason why they talk so freely, and why rejection is neither anticipated nor feared. If it happens, it rolls off their shoulders, because in the eighth arrondissement, or in Annecy, or in Clermont-Ferrand, passions are so rarefied and etherealized that there is not even room for ego or pride or what the French call amour-propre. Amour-propre, that bête noire of La Rochefoucauldian psychology, which loves nothing more than to hide its wiles, the better to keep us under its thrall, is still very much there, just hidden. As La Rochefoucauld knew so well, sometimes our ego lets us catch a glimpse of its own machinations simply to flatter what we mistake to be our ability to penetrate its guile. Thus, Rohmer’s men do not know insecurity and self-doubt; they have no amorous or material worries, and everything comes easily to them. And though Frédéric’s former classmate whom he runs into one day blithely admits to suffering from a form of afternoon anxiety syndrome (angoisse de l’après-midi), most likely, as he claims, caused by luncheons, Frédéric counters by saying that he keeps his “anxiety in check—if anxiety it is—by running errands.” Both men, it turns out, have managed to keep their masculine poise and egos intact.
* * *
Twenty years after my last viewing of this film, on my computer screen at home, the girl I’d once dated during my senior year in college dropped by my office. “I knew you’d put me off if I simply called and said I wanted to see you again,” she said, “so I decided to drop by during your office hours. These are your office hours, aren’t they?” I could tell she had already called and asked my secretary. “May I sit down?” She sat down. “And by the way, just to ease your mind, I want nothing.”
“Did I say you wanted something?”
“No, but I know how your mind works. So, no surprises, no thirty-year-old bugaboo waiting to make its grand entrance to call you da-da. I simply wanted to see you.”
I took this in. “To see me.” I repeated her words, with a touch of intentional incredulity, if only to give myself time to come up with what sort of attitude to strike.
“Nice to see you too.”
“I’ve thought about you,” she said.
“I have too. On and off.”
“More off than on, right?”
I smiled, guiltily.
There was, it occurred to me, nothing to say. I’d have to make conversation. She told me what she’d done over the years. I told her about my life. It seemed to me that all she’d done was bum around Europe, while I ended up giving her the impression that my life had been an unerring, straight path. I decided to take her out to lunch somewhere near my office.
And then in the elevator it occurred to me that I was living the film I’d gone to see for the first time just after she’d broken up with me in 1972. I told her about Chloe in the Afternoon. She thought she remembered the film, but vaguely. So I did not push the point. I had wanted to tell her that the similarity between Chloé’s visit and her own unannounced visit to my office seemed to suggest something beyond synchronicity, and that seeing the film in 1972 less than a month after she had gone to Germany underscored the echoing effect, as if the meaning I had intuited in the film at the time but hadn’t quite put into words was less about men and women, less about desire itself, than an announcement of a repetition to come in years to follow. I held her hand and told her how happy I was that she had shown up. We had coffee in a small coffee shop that was half empty at the time, which made me think of France, and I told her so, and it made us happy, and then it suddenly hit me.
Years ago I used to think it might be wrong to think that Rohmer’s films were about my life. I was never sure that it was right to read them in light of what I’d lived. Now I realized that these films were indeed about my life, but were more like a template for my life, and that this template would be filled in due time with moments that might once have seemed scattered but were not in the slightest scattered the moment I applied Rohmer’s vision to them. I wanted to go back to the young self I was then and tell him that I’d always known the day would come when she’d return, and on that day I’d tell her everything, where I’d been all these years, what I’d seen, done, loved, and suffered—because of her and others—and that whatever course my life took had in good part started when she fled to Germany. Better yet, I wanted my younger self to be present at this reunion and, having sat him down with us in the small café, to tell him that this moment here, between two ex-lovers who were happy to be together for a few hours and didn’t quite know if this was really now or then, was possibly the very best that life had to offer.
ADRIFT IN SUNLIT NIGHT
On an intensely bright morning in late June, I find myself roaming the streets of St. Petersburg, looking for the nineteenth century. I have always meant to roam the city. That’s what I thought you did in St. Petersburg. You shut your door, head downstairs, and before you know it, you’re wandering to places and squares you never thought you’d be passing through. A guidebook won’t help, and neither will a map, for what you want is not just the thrill of getting lost when you stray off the chart and discover corners you hardly expected to find and might actually grow to love; what you want is to drift along the streets in as flushed and jittery a state of mind as everyone does in Russian novels, hoping that some internal compass helps you find your way about a city you’ve been imagining since your bookish young teens. Stop thinking
, shut down everything, and for once go with your feet. This is supposed to be déjà vu, not tourism.
Part of me wants to visit Dostoyevsky’s city as it once was. The heat, the crowds, the dust. I want to see, smell, and touch the buildings on Stoliarny Place and hear the bustle of Sennaya Ploshchad, where hawkers, drunks, and all manner of slovenly people still come close enough to jostle you, as they did 150 years ago. I want to walk along Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg’s major artery, because it appears in almost every Russian novel. I want to get a firsthand feel for this boulevard that was once peopled by wretched waifs on one end, affluent fops on the other, and in between by a flotsam of petty, hapless, embittered, backbiting civil servants whose only task, when they weren’t drafting mindless reports or copying them forever again, was to spend their hours groveling and gossiping and feeding off one another’s blighted lives. Call this paleo-travel: searching for what’s underneath, or for what’s no longer quite there.
I want to see the building where Raskolnikov lived (5 Stoliarny Place), scarcely a block across from where Dostoyevsky himself had lived and written Crime and Punishment; the bridge Raskolnikov crossed on his way to the murder on 104 Ekaterininsky (now renamed the Griboyedova) embankment; and, a few steps away, at number 73 on the same street, the place where meek and sweet Sonia, the prostitute, lived. All these places have hardly changed since Dostoyevsky’s time, though Raskolnikov’s five-story building has four floors now. The house on Stoliarny where Gogol himself lived no longer stands, and the old wooden Kokushkin Bridge, which Gogol’s Poprishchin crosses in “Diary of a Madman,” is now made of steel.
But it is the crowd and the stultifying bleakness of Sennaya Ploshchad and the unremitting thirst that I seek. These, I realize, would matter less in the end if they weren’t inevitably linked to the angst that comes of solitude and destitution and of wearing such utterly drab clothes—a young man’s nightmare, as Dostoyevsky describes it in Constance Garnett’s translation of Crime and Punishment:
The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture …
Rag pickers and costermongers of all kinds were crowding round the taverns in the dirty and stinking courtyards of the Hay Market.
Everyone has an imagined St. Petersburg. Everyone’s life took a sudden turn because of books set in St. Petersburg. Everyone wishes to go back to that disturbing first page when a writer called Dostoyevsky prodded demons we never knew we had and, because of these demons, put loutish noises in our heads and, in the process, gave us the most twisted romance we’ve ever nursed for a city.
We come back to St. Petersburg to recover the forgotten first spark of that unsettling romance—who were we when it took hold of us, and what were we thinking when we allowed it to happen, knowing what it was already doing to us? What we want is not St. Petersburg as it looks now—though parts have hardly changed. Neither do we want to be dazzled by its avenues and palatial buildings—though you need to have seen these enough times to stop focusing on them. Our inner St. Petersburg will come from the sheer exhaustion of our aimless trundling up and down its streets and embankments, over and across this or that bridge, this park or that island, “without noticing his way” until the oppressive heat and the suffocating loneliness of it all take hold of us and we begin to recall how for a few days we too belonged in Crime and Punishment:
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in Stoliarny Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards Kokushkin Bridge.
For a few days or weeks every reader has lived on Stoliarny Place.
* * *
Dostoyevsky’s was certainly not the city that Peter the Great envisioned when he wrenched it out of the mud off the Neva River in 1703. From literally nothing he created one of Europe’s most stunning cities and made it the capital of Russia, which it remained until the fall of the Romanovs two centuries later in 1917. Peter appointed Alexandre Jean-Baptiste Le Blond to design his new city after seeing some of the architect’s magnificent creations in France and conferred upon him the title Architect-General of St. Petersburg. Simultaneously, he appointed several Italian architects to design palatial buildings like those he had seen on his travels through Europe. Petersburg was going to be Peter’s window to the West, but it was also going to rival in grandeur any city in the world.
To build this new port city on the Gulf of Finland, Peter forcibly put Swedish prisoners of war and Russian serfs to work day and night. More than one hundred thousand of them paid with their lives as they pounded piles into the slosh and drained the bogs and carried stones with their bare hands, leaving nothing but their bones underfoot. Peter couldn’t be bothered with their deaths. He had big plans. Inspired by Amsterdam and Venice, his city was going to be crisscrossed by canals, but it was also going to outdo Paris and London in splendor and magnificence. To this end, Peter forced all Russian aristocrats to build homes in St. Petersburg—and if they demurred, he’d haul them there by force. The streets were going to be wider and longer and far better planned than any in Paris, with one stately home after the other lining the lavish avenues and canal embankments, each building rising to the same height as its neighbors. Since St. Petersburg did not grow out of a previously existing town, Peter’s planners did not have to contend with narrow medieval lanes winding in absurdly circuitous paths. They were able to design a grid layout for the city, with streets and avenues intersecting at right angles, and a central plaza where the spire of the Admiralty Building—St. Petersburg’s focal point—would surge and be seen from everywhere.
From that spire, three interminable boulevards would radiate: Nevsky Prospect, Gorokhovaya Street, and Voznesensky Avenue. All three lead to train stations today, and all three are intersected by canals and three large avenues. The only other city I know that was as symmetrically and as rationally planned is Washington, D.C.—but Washington doesn’t come close.
From sketches and cityscapes drawn in the very early 1700s, St. Petersburg was already turning into a sumptuous metropolis. By the end of Peter’s reign in 1725, it could boast 40,000 inhabitants and 35,000 buildings, and by 1800 its population had swollen upward of 300,000.
Still, Peter was so barbaric in his mission to civilize Russians that he also managed to create an entire naval fleet the way he’d created the city: from nothing. In the end, and by dint of ruthless, despotic will, Russia was dragged by the scruff of its neck into the modern world, after which there was no turning back.
Instead, many turned inward. Neither the mud nor the buried bones nor Peter’s monomaniacal reign ever went away. They are seared into the city, for St. Petersburg internalized both the frightful tyranny of the tsars and the smoldering dissent it stoked. In literature, wraiths and nightmares and distorted, demonic thoughts seep into a landscape where repression and flight are forever wrangling at cross purposes. Nevsky Prospect may be one of the longest and most polished boulevards in Europe, but as so many characters in Gogol and Dostoyevsky discover, it just as easily chokes every human impulse that it stirs. Love, envy, shame, hope, and, above all, self-loathing scavenge the sidewalks. Shoo one, and it plays tricks on you; try to seize the other, and it shoves its ghost at you. Here, as everywhere in St. Petersburg, you can make out the grieving resentment that finally gives birth to either madness or revolution or both. “I am a sick man,” says Dostoyevsky’s underground man. “I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” No one is the same after reading this. No city can be whole after this. We take sneaking peeks at its subconscious, the aching
, bruised, damaged, self-hating, tormented subconscious that it lays bare before us like those defunctive tramway tracks that continue to furrow so many streets and avenues that no longer have any use for streetcars. The rails still stare at you, refusing to sink underground, the way so many things continue to show up even after they’ve been covered up here. Nothing goes away.
Take the weather, for example. On winter days, darkness descends much too soon on Nevsky Prospect, and the freezing wind sweeps in from all sides and then gathers up hellish speed down the avenues, because the brilliant city planners of St. Petersburg failed to remember that a chill wind loves nothing more than long urban canyons and thoroughfares.
Or take the river Neva itself. It floods the city and has done so three hundred times since the city was founded. In 1824, it rose thirteen and a half feet, and in 1924, twelve feet. Here is Oliver Elton’s translation of the overflowing Neva in Pushkin’s narrative poem “The Bronze Horseman”:
But the wind driving from the bay
Dammed Neva back, and she receding
Came up, in wrath and riot speeding;