I can’t scar over, I’m aware of the amputation. Mathias wasn’t transplanted onto me. He was never a foreign body to me, no needles, no thread, not even any anesthesia, he grew in my inside, between my heart and my lungs, a germinal root. He pulled himself out violently, extracted himself abruptly, a pit inside my chest, grief took his place, and ever since it’s been going gangrene. There’s a piece missing from me, and as hard as I try, a man is just a prosthesis, nothing can take the place of the fullness and life in my arid gapingness, nothing now, nothing ever. For four years seven months everyone keeps harping on and on: oh, Esther you’ll see in a whole lifetime there are two or three true loves, it’s really unusual to have just one, you’ll laugh about Mathias when the arms of the right one are around you, sweetie. I don’t even make the effort to nod my head anymore. I’ve stopped being polite, docile, and conciliatory. When I was a teenager I had my true love, my first love in the revised version, then I had Mathias. I’ve known enough men before and even since to know that they were always pretty good cuttings but that between my heart and my lungs nothing would ever grow again. I’m not idealizing anything. Mathias is a bastard, a selfish, deceitful, conceited, seductive, pretty cowardly bastard. Mathias is the most common kind of boy there is. But it was my story. My love story. There are people who are made to experience a first love and then a true love and then it’s done. There’s a supply, but afterward it’s too bad if there wasn’t enough time, if it was just six years, you should’ve done your best, should’ve paid attention or enjoyed it better. Get the most out of it, right. Should’ve gotten the most out of it. I didn’t really know how to. Because of the root that was growing so thick between my heart and lungs. Usually roots grow under graves, and if the bushes or brambles they generate surprise gravediggers and gawkers with their vigor it’s because they usually go draw their sap from the remains of lovers separated by ancestral hatred, King Marc or Canon Fulbert. My pounding thorax constituted as rich a fertilizer as two juicy rotting bodies. I couldn’t know that my lair held so much fertile compost, that my lair would flood the root to the point of saturation and overflowing trough. Mathias gave it a quick chop for fear of drowning.
I left David the day before yesterday. I understood that my love had a harelip and would always taste like a non-birthday, there’s no point in insisting. Behavioral analysis I notice conditioning. My heart is a slobbering dog. Once I’ve made up my mind, I attack, and I finish. Once I finish, I need to suffer, not too much but a little. Since I chased after him I fantasized a lot, I even crystallized a little, I crystallize so fast it’s incredible. So. The first three weeks, the man has to be distant, letting me scamper around an ominous little basset hound begging for my treat separation anxiety. Then. At the end of this time period if nothing balances out, if no declaration or promise of commitment brings about a major change, if the pain is still there, in the end that’s what it is, if the pain is still there I get ready to leave. Every detail aggravates me, any lack of tact or mistake is transformed into a character flaw deemed unacceptable. The resulting contempt will gently irrigate the hollow left in my breast by the previously uprooted shoot. I can hold on for months, reverse the trend even if it means resorting to unparalleled sneakiness. Whether he’s become friendly, a little in love, or head-over-heels hypnotized, there’s no change in the ending. I leave him brutally, without even worrying about making up an excuse. From this fact I arrive at similar conclusions: no one cares about me, not enough to impede my departure, to struggle for a compromise, to take me back by force or by subtle strategies. No one wants to, no one can. I will never again be anyone’s, the one who was my destiny already used up all our time. Our time, six years. I’m so tired of noticing all the bodies and souls yet to come, all these checkmates, spontaneous combustions, the seed is already dead, already dead in my abyssal fissure.
I can’t get better I’m not sick. I’m handicapped, it’s completely different. A lot of times I would have preferred meeting Mathias later, later around thirty years old or even thirty-five. Seeing the root grow in my unbroken chest, when it was scratched maybe, barely scratched but just about sterile up until then. My rib cage would have ripped fervently open, never one night would his hand grasp the blooming stem outside, never would his knotted fingers pull so persistently, pull so too hard. I’ll end up an old maid because I knew love too soon, I’ll end up an old maid because I couldn’t manage the flow of my sprinkler, the sap in my root turned out hemophiliac, that’s why my wound won’t coagulate.
Maybe if Mathias had passed his exams everything would’ve been different. I don’t really believe it but I think about it a lot. It would be easier to try to forget if he wasn’t anywhere except some nights in the sepia dream. But Mathias is everywhere quite regularly. We’re aware of randomness that doesn’t exist and overstitched hangs on when someone gets hit with their fate. It’s a little like Mathilde and her abortion. The week after the extraction of the incongruous fetus there was nothing broadcast on the radio but programs about children, single mothers, sudden infant death, and other maternal-affiliated topics. Perused magazines offered the same themes, and when she climbed stairs two at a time out of breath from the street teeming with pregnant women and screaming carriages, she found the TV movies interspersed with pregnancy tests when the commercials came on. The first two years following the root’s transplant only the echoes of our formerly shared friends interfered with my daily routine. And then very quickly it became intolerable. I often wonder how young women rejected by so-called public men do it, I feel so assaulted by an interview of even a few lines, by a tiny photo or a short article, if Mathias was a musician today, a popular singer, broadcast on the airwaves plastering the Métro walls, I don’t dare imagine my arteries disheveled by frosty blood can’t help but freeze my heart, my heart a panicked iceberg, behind the ventricles I fear the submerged part will melt. I can’t stop the slope of my curve, my exponential curve, my love for Mathias, so when I see him I listen to him I hear him so much in the media, as the one who knows his skin, his freckles, and his smell, how can I ignore him, and how, especially, can I not tell myself every time he needs me, he needs to be with me, I have so many things to say, to tell him, I know him by heart and even uprooted, I feel his pain, I glimpse his desires, I examine bumps, I see him hurting himself, I’m sure if I was with him I could help him preservation.
A few days ago. It was late, really late. TV rerun. Mathias was on the set, his hair kind of short in deliberate cowlicks, I imagine his fingers plunging into a jar of gel then goo-coated pinching tugging his locks into rebellion. I imagined him behind his buttoned shirt, impeccably conceited, heart pounding a little, slight arrhythmia, I wasn’t imagining that, I knew about that. I knew heart beating like a pebble, a big pebble stuck in a tin can that a kid would shake to make noise, the noise of panic trying to be musical, as if the percussion could be symphonic without brutal skinning of nearby eardrums. I was on the couch. I undid the buttons on my shirt, I was choking, suffocating, the crater was on the move. Close-up Mathias, three-quarter shot Mathias and suddenly from the screen the screen ripped open the screen cracked letting spill onto me a braid of veins the root escaping from Mathias’s plexus splitting the screen my flesh the root the more–than–umbilical cord looming in my breast and taking back its super-connected place that I was the root a bridge an arc of the covenant everything went back to normal I certainly saw the smile released the smile relieved as the corners of Mathias’s mouth were I told him I love you I shouted I love you my thorax gasped snorted rhizomes. I know it’s true, that it really happened. The screen closed back up, there’s no trace left except inside me, deep inside me, the returning root got my heart pregnant, I can feel it quivering and drawing nourishing strength from me. Gregory says it’s just the effects of the thc but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Dance Card
(Tango in Paris)
Mathias forgot because you always have to forget when you dance. Mathias forgot, n
ow he’s nothing but ballet leaps. Mathias without his now-a-distant-memory brain is a lighter body, a body devoted mechanical steps on the wood floor. Mathias slides. Mathias lets himself be carried, carried away would be accurate. Mathias doesn’t have any organs anymore, his body has become an image in motion, Mathias is a motion that’s fleeting, not perpetual, ricochet rebound series, an image then another image, Mathias is nothing but a series of images captured in flight all the better to be frozen. The Parisian paneling that lets the grand ball stay intimate makes the distilled notes of the band reverberate. It’s a strange band among its instruments neither strings nor brass but a lot of winds. Music escapes and makes Mathias dance. Mathias snaps his fingers and wiggles to the beat, doesn’t actually know the score. What the band’s playing can be summed up in four sampled notes. Four wrong quacking notes whose rhythm increases as dawn mists over. All the participants know the melody, they join in on the chorus as they shake their hips. The name of the piece is Before the Cock Crows, You’ll Do So Three Times. Every night denial Mathias prances around as it plays.
Everybody’s Connected
I’m Mathias Rouault’s blog. Through me he speaks every day, records his reflections. I’m the underling and have no say in the matter, I’m his interface and I keep to my role. Mathias thinks that through me he pours his heart out to the world and feverishly consults my statistics every day in order to count the visits, evaluates as precisely as possible the number of internet users who’ve come to read the journal I know he wishes was all but unmissable. He adds one link after another in order to ensure reciprocity, recognition, maximum coverage.
I live on the site that bears his name. The home page opens on a big picture of him. It offers five sections: biography, bibliography, media,universe, and me. The universe section has an epigraph including his connections with the community that is. Sometimes, since I’m the one spending hours wandering the wired world and am well-informed, I’m surprised by the acrobatics Mathias manages to perform within me, the inconsistencies can really add up. The universe section offers a range of paragraphs, each an apologetics accompanying photos of the powerful so-called friends, or friends of the previously mentioned powerful. Today, however, Mathias used my mouth to remark:
Paris is an alkaloid. I wish I were already on Methadone.
Here’s a picture of Patrick Bouvet saying: “When I write, I stand up.”
Round 2
(The Dice Are Still Loaded)
I’m making a record of every word, everything that Mathias says. It makes me feel like we’re still talking, he used to talk to me a lot, Mathias talks a lot, the answers don’t matter, he doesn’t need them. I record every TV show he’s on, and every radio broadcast he’s invited to. I play the tapes over and over, I replace the reporters’ questions with my own, more intimate, more precise, more pertinent, obviously more pertinent, I know him so well I know what to do, what Mathias is waiting for, what he needs.
Every day I read the blog Mathias writes on his site. Via the address he put under contact, I send him emails from all kinds of identities. He only answers the ones that are signed by girls. He shares a lot with Lain Iwakura, tells her about his nights, his doubts, and his desires. I can tell he’s on the verge of falling in love, it twists my heart, and the rest of my plumbing too.
Mathias never talks about me. To anyone. It’s like our love never existed. In one of his books I thought I recognized myself, my beauty marks form a kind of dark star on my right shoulder blade. But he often says he’s a ladies’ man, that all the bodies get mixed up together, that all his heroines are a jumble of us all, retouched puzzles, tender little monsters, nocturnal reconstructions, and I cry about feeding his fictional shadows, deleted as I am in this fantasy fog.
Dance Card
(Take This Waltz)
Mathias nods to his partner, extends his hand, three little steps. To the question Your previous works were radically different, what is the source of this sudden reversal Mathias bends in a bow and straightens back up, three little steps. Mathias elegantly follows up with the obligatory steps: reappropriation of narration, the desire to communicate with a larger group. About-face, stop, three little steps. He says writers have to be interested in the world around them and not spend their time navel-gazing. Change of partners, arabesque, and three little steps. He says the worst things about women writers of autofiction. The pathos of exposing your ovaries is straight out of Barnum, it would a better idea to get medical attention. That the truth of their texts should be explored, autofiction’s just a nice word for autobiographies by women who lie. Easy leap, about-face, three little steps. He says there should be no feminine form for the word author. That would be an insult to women writers if we cut into the dictionary to alleviate its excision. To the question but there are feminine forms for other professions, we say actress, waitress, stewardess, as soon as there is any power, whether it’s real or symbolic, the feminine doesn’t have a space maybe something should be done about that with a swift movement Mathias extracts his clammy hand, nods to his partner, smiles, three little steps.
Round 3
(The Dice Are Still Loaded)
Mathias confides to Lain:
Solitude has never been so very truly my own. I wanted so badly to become someone, I didn’t know that someone is still one, singular inscription among the several, a sharpshooter perched above the collective, a hermit yet an exhibit in his panoptic-subjected Cave No one sees me as someone who. It’s pretty comfortable, sometimes it’s entertaining, flattering. But I’m really not sure anymore if it’s bearable. I’m becoming a fictional character in everyone’s eyes. I pronounce answers that seem to come from nowhere, well not so nowhere after all. My mouth vomits out words programmed by a script, a lot of the time I feel like I’m nothing but an interface. Behind me, who or what, I really don’t know. Sometimes I mechanically brush off my sleeve, it always seems like some confetti has landed there. I can’t work anymore. I think in the end writing doesn’t really interest me that much.
My new publisher suggested an idea for a novel, the story of a guy who acts like a complete bastard then takes an overdose on his thirtieth birthday. He ends up in a kind of mystical no-man’s-land, he has conversations with all kinds of beings, he’s allowed to return to earth for his birthday ten years earlier. He remembers everything and he has to change his choices. He has a very adult view of the world, analyzes everything, it’s a lot easier when you hold all the cards. So the whole if-I’d-only-known thing. He goes so far as to use his memory to become a geopolitical consultant. My publisher thinks it’s a really good storyline, that it’s an opportunity to address all the syndromes that are typical of today’s thirty-year-olds and to talk about redemption too. Personally it sounds to me like a remixed version of Peggy Sue Got Married.
There’s a noticeable shift in the work of popular writers right now. Every single one wants to make amends, the things they’re working on have the distinct aroma of narcissistic masochism. It’s the Age of Great Repentance. The great race for tearful self-criticism has begun, different strategies are happening on TV sets, I made a business out of my life, did I have a choice maybe, still it’s nothing more than still another mise-en-abyme, it doesn’t open up any cracks, nothing grinds the machine to a halt, it doesn’t serve much of a purpose, not sure it’s a paradigm shift, a way to be seen as horribly human and certainly touching, maybe there’s still time for me too, I beat the forty-five thousand–copy hurdle, they’re still reprinting, I’ll be on the cover of a trendy magazine on Monday, but I’ve never felt so depressed in my whole life, I don’t know why, it doesn’t make any sense, all the coke and Prozac must be ripping apart my neurotransmitters.
I’m sorry I’m telling you all this, I’m unloading a little too much but still more and more in every email. I have to go anyway, I’m pretty late, they’re expecting me at Mathi’s, I should already be there. My publisher’s launching a new woman writer, maybe you’ve heard of her, Béatrice Lanvin, a pr
etty blonde, I don’t remember the title but you couldn’t’ve missed it, she’s the one in a thong with a teddy bear on the cover. I bet Eugène 200 euros that I’d take her home tonight, you know how I hate to lose. Paris will always be Paris …
Hugs
MR
I went to the Castle because I wished to live deliberately
(Lost Illusions at the back of the courtyard on the right)
Her interview was so dumb, the girl’s a century and a half behind. Why do you choose to suffer? But of course books are merchandise, no one can deny it, she refuses to be assimilated with a means of production, she can be so stubborn, not to mention stupid. You find your subject, you wear out your wits over it with toiling at night, you throw your very life into it: and after all your journeyings in the fields of thought, the monument reared with your lifeblood is simply a good or a bad speculation for a publisher. She imagines it’s still possible to avoid the system, if you listen to her, you’d think she lives in Asterix’s village with her friends the outcast poets. Your work will sell or it will not sell; and therein, for them, lies the whole question. During the meal Jean said to her: it’s a personal opinion but under twenty thousand copies you’re not a writer, she admitted to Eric that it made her cry all night long. A book means so much capital to risk I explained to her your struggle is cute but utterly ridiculous be a missionary but not a crusader, and she told me she hated that kind of point of view. The better the book, the less likely it is to sell. We’re all the product of marketing, writers should be forced to go to business school, it would help us avoid hearing that kind of nonsense. Every man of talent rises above the level of ordinary heads; his success varies in direct relation with the time required for his work to be appreciated. What I really like is when she goes off on her Word tangents, like literature has to stay pure and sharp, it can’t be confused with cultural entertainment. And no publisher wants to wait. Of course when you read her books it’s such a colossal pain in the ass that you have to see that she’s doing it in good faith, that’s the worst part. To-day’s book must be sold by to-morrow. She won’t last long, with all that yapping she’s really burned herself out the last few months. Acting on this system, publishers and booksellers do not care to take real literature, books that call for the high praise that comes slowly. Did you see Eugène’s article on Thursday, he called it Clotilde Mélisse Just Discovered the Comma.
Not a Clue Page 13