Hysteric

by Nelly Arcan

  At first I was afraid your caresses would awaken my habit of sucking and grabbing your cock to make you come faster so I could get my money. I was afraid you would drift away and be replaced under my closed eyelids by the aurora borealis I kept hidden to paper over the faces of my clients when they tried to get too close. I was afraid I would frighten you with my assembly-line reflexes, I was afraid I was still a whore. Then I understood you spent your share of time in the factory too, you had learned about women through pornography, for you pleasure was involved with absence. You and I shared the same market codes, all we knew was loss but we had come through all right, for a while we really did make love. Often at night we separated in our sleep and when we awoke all alone on the far edge of the bed, we clung together again; apart, we weren’t worth much.

  Your roommate Martine probably got sick of our weekend excesses, since her room faced yours. Martine didn’t really do drugs, she smoked weed, she and I got along fine. I figured she was on my side until I found pictures of her in an evening gown on your computer. You had photographed her splendidly outfitted for a gala where one of her glass sculptures was on view, you wanted Martine as a memory so you named a file after her. Normally she wasn’t very feminine, she didn’t wear much make up. She made a living as a glassblower and craftswomen weren’t your thing, when it came to girls you preferred more glamour. You photographed her to record her rapid transition from tomboy to femme fatale. In the photos I saw the kittenish effect of dark eyeliner, her body burst through the black swathing of a low-cut satin dress, on one of the pictures she stuck out her tongue, and was about to run it over her lips, with her arms raised above her head. From that day on, she changed categories, she became dangerous.

  By Sunday morning we were completely over Friday night and the July sun bore witness to our recovery as it followed us on our rollerblade attempts over the rough cobblestones of Old Montreal where you turned darker and my blond hair took on reddish tones. I was awkward on my blades, and you could have helped me. Sunday nights were the only ones we spent at my place, in my three-room apartment, total luxury you said because of the exposed stone walls and high ceilings. You said my apartment was designed for productivity, and by that you meant that since my Internet wasn’t high speed, it discouraged you from using it and sent you to bed earlier, better to face the work that awaited you on Monday morning. When we returned on Sunday afternoons from our excursions in the fresh air, we didn’t have the energy to go out in the evening for a drink, we watched TV lying on the sofa and we fucked. For once we were satisfied, completely empty. Often you would fall asleep on me and I didn’t dare wake you, even in sleep you imposed, you stayed on top.

  When it came to fucking, you always took the initiative, you always chose the time, no doubt depending on your erection. One afternoon when we were watching The Simpsons on TV, I rolled your shirt up over your chest without you asking me to and when my hands began to tremble as they tried to unbutton your pants, I decided to put my finger in your navel to tickle you. I suppose that was a way to pass the torch to you, to point out the way toward me, it became a classic between us, my starter’s pistol. There was always lint in your navel but not in mine, we agreed it was the product of testosterone and that your navel lint was a sign of coming baldness, the more there was down there, the less hair on your head.

  At your place we took over the whole apartment, even the common space like the living room. When your roommate Martine walked in and saw us on the sofa, she shrunk back, our love was that striking. She collected just about everything and in her room were hundreds of Barbie dolls still in their pink boxes. The Barbies all had different colour hair and wore different clothes but their bodies were the same from box to box, sculptures set on legs that drove men mad with their preadolescent slimness, I’m sure the idea of cloning came from the doll industry. Once she told me I looked like a Barbie doll and the next week, she wanted to mold my body with strips of plaster and make a glass dress. Martine was an artist, she had vision.

  I often wondered if she thought I faked my pleasure when we fucked, I wondered, when I wasn’t there, whether behind closed doors she noisily gave herself pleasure with her finger to impress you. You admitted that when I wasn’t there, she called me Kitty, it was affectionate, she would say Is your Kitty going to come over tonight and Is your Kitty still mad? The way she said it, you swore there was no contempt, Martine was a nice girl. But I always suspected the contrary, women being nice is just a male point of view, women never attack frontally and rivalry can very well be expressed vocally, noisy pleasure and a piercing cry was like having a big cock, it’s impossible to suppress a moaning woman so other women have to retreat. To mark my territory within hers, I cried out more than I needed to and ended up awakening your suspicions. Once she caught me going through her things, I don’t remember what I was looking for, some proof of the relationship between you and her. After that she thought I was hysterical, and we were never in the same room together again.

  SOMETIMES I FELT that on those late Friday nights, you would have preferred to jerk off to pussy pictures to calm your nerves, but you didn’t do it out of love for me. When we did coke, we had no desire to touch though we still wanted each other. At the very end you stopped all niceties, you asked me to go into the living room because you couldn’t do it with me there, you needed every molecule of your living space to make those faces you made without the light of day or your girlfriend’s eyes falling heavily upon you, you needed to imagine me far from you to wrest pleasure from your body. Once I listened to the sounds you made from behind the door and I felt like killing you with a kitchen knife. After I got to know you I developed new respect for my former clients: at least they wanted me to participate.

  The end began three or four months after Nova. It started when your ex-girlfriend Nadine came back into your life and you got exasperated and threatened to leave me. It started when I started being afraid, when I understood how much stronger you were. They say no one is exempt, they say couples obey absolute rules and even God can’t do anything about it, my grandfather once said that Evil arose from the imponderable in God’s work, today I know he was talking about love.

  When you left me, you said you felt my fear and feeling it made you lose the thread of our love. For you, feeling fear meant suffering from hypothetical events, it meant not being able to face life, it meant bending before you needed to and staging your own unhappiness. As far back as your memories went, your mother was never afraid of anything because she believed only in established facts. She didn’t suffer from imaginary things the way I did, she wasn’t alarmist like my grandfather, she waited until the day you were leaving for Quebec to announce the news to your father; she lived one day at a time. When my fear came so did doubts about my solidity, you were looking for a woman who could face anything, you were searching for your mental equivalent with crisis-proof confident nerves, you were looking for a man.

  One evening when Josée went out with us, she said no to the cigarette I offered because she thought she was pregnant, maybe just a few weeks. She wanted to take another test before telling her boyfriend, she feared the worst because as it was he could hardly stand living with her. All evening long she held her stomach with one hand, sometimes two, in the early stages children take the form of cramps. They say if a woman is attentive she can tell the difference between the beginning of her period and the work of the egg as it tries to attach itself to the walls of her uterus, they say if she’s attentive she can tell on which side of her uterus the ovum is taking root, in certain cases of extreme attentiveness she can visualize the scene within her belly like the inside of a space ship where everything is moving in weightlessness.

  When we got home that night we quarrelled, I wondered if one day you’d want to have a child with me, and you wondered if one day I’d have the nerve to get pregnant and not tell you. For men of your generation, you said, women’s ability to negotiate reproduction by themselves was a nightmare because it could stall
a burgeoning career, you said that Josée was probably a traitor, she must have been plotting. I told you that out of selfishness men turned legitimate desires into evil intentions against them, men had this gift of believing that if a woman blinked it was because of them, in any case our culture had decided that women were physically built for this kind of thing, having babies and crying on station platforms as their men went off. I told you that if having children seemed childish to you, it was probably because babies were too much like puppies in your mind, the kind of dog your mother preferred over you. I said that individualism had needed four million years of evolution to develop, and those years cared nothing for the sad stories of poor sons abandoned by their mothers. We fought for the first time and for the first time I cried. Little by little, from that night forward, you understood my tears were your punishment, that night I taught you that suffering can be a weapon. When you saw me cry, you lay your head on my stomach and I suppose with that gesture you became a father. Three months later, I was pregnant.

  FROM THE BEGINNING everything was determined, who knows why I stopped taking the pill just as you were getting ready to leave and why I got pregnant immediately. Who knows why women can procreate in pain, in my case no descendants had been predicted, with my aunt reading my tarot cards all the time, I would have known. My grandfather always said I was part of the last generation, after me there would be no more fathers or mothers or children, he said the apocalypse would strike first at reproduction, causing life to grow in the perfect environment of laboratories, leading to the propagation of beings without imperfection, everything calculated down to eye and hair colour and muscle mass and IQ, everyone would sleep with everyone else without a good reason like money or gymnastics, without any reason at all.

  I knew you were going to leave me, I wanted to do something so I got pregnant, at the time I had four months to live. I conceived the child without really believing in it, too many obstacles stood between it and birth, today I’m amazed that life could have taken root in the middle of all that drinking and drugs and especially the way you had of coming on my face. I suppose when you weren’t paying attention you must have come in my pussy at least once. I wonder if the need to see your sperm had some relation to your need to see your snot in a handkerchief or your shit before you flushed the toilet.

  I’m not sure the child died during the abortion. Just before we split up, I was drinking so much and taking so many tranquilizers that given the combination, the child probably sank definitively into its little sac before they arrived to scrape it out of me. The doctor seemed to talk a little too much with the nurses after the operation in the little room next door before coming to get me; maybe she spotted some anomaly in the ruins. Maybe when she went to extract it, at the end of her instrument she didn’t feel the usual beat of life striving to escape death, and she wondered whether her role compelled her to warn me of some problem in my reproductive system. She may have hesitated and then never informed me that further examinations would be necessary to make sure my uterus did not operate like a carnivorous plant. When my mother was pregnant with me, her doctor discovered a two-kilogram fibroma that was crushing her womb; between me and it, there must have been a terrible battle.

  I waited till the last legal minute for the abortion, that was a way of clinging to you as long as possible after you left, without knowing it you had a foot in the door for three long months. I suppose since the beginning of time, women have used their terrible ability to make fathers and babies interchangeable; maybe that ability makes them lose interest in the father once the child is born. For the first time in our story, you were the lesser of us, for the first time my evil intentions weighed heavy upon you. From that point on I could see the top of your head, you couldn’t slip away because I held the key to the cage.

  During the third month I hesitated. In the emptiness of my life after you left, I wanted to create some suspense, I wanted to spring a surprise on myself, who knows if in the passage of time the baby wouldn’t lift your weight from me. During those three months it never happened, you didn’t withdraw from me for a second, maybe because you didn’t know what was happening to me, they often say that confession lightens the heart. Yet to this day I feel no unburdening from this letter, maybe because it really isn’t addressed to you.

  During the third month, at first I thought the baby and I could save each other’s lives, with a rope around our necks we would bet on how long we’d last.

  Then I started being afraid of everything. I was afraid the baby would be like you, with a past loaded with women. He would look like you, within the walls of my womb he already had your sense of independence, whether I liked it or not he would give birth to himself with the self-assertion handed down from your ancestors, he would impose his will, hammering against my belly so I would send him his meals, and at birth he would care nothing more for me. Because he came from you, this child would leave me.

  Then the opposite thought came, I was afraid he would be like me, with no future, weary with himself he would go in search of you and come up against your oversized strength that would push him away. I was afraid that your embrace, still whole in his mother’s heart, would whittle him down to nothing, I was afraid that besides your last name, I would give him your first name too.

  In the end, I was afraid he wouldn’t be like anything at all, he would have died of a broken heart before reaching term, they say that children starve themselves to death in their mother’s womb if she’s been abandoned or can’t break out of her state of shock, they sever all communication by ripping away the umbilical cord with their own hands like horses that bite into their own veins in the heat of violent excitement, they say children love their mothers that much.

  BEFORE THE OPERATION, I was informed that the contents of my uterus could not be returned to me. I was told some women ask for that to practice some special rite for children who die before they are born, but such things are not permitted by law. I was told that these women have created a religious ceremony for aborted children, one not approved by the Church. I wondered if some try to burn the contents and save the ashes. I heard at that stage the baby looks like a small piece of white cotton, I wonder if it’s possible to extract it from its sac of blood and dry it between the pages of a book like an autumn leaf. When I was little, I made bookmarks out of hosts I didn’t swallow during Mass, and when my grandfather found out, he flew into a rage. With clenched fists he declared that it wasn’t only a profane act but a shameful waste, all around the world children were dying, starved for the presence of Christ in their hearts.

  Before they took me into the room for the operation, they asked me questions, they wanted to know whether I was aware of the choice I was making. I answered that for people like me, the question of choice was irrelevant because we were guided by the voice of nothingness, and the staff responded with silence.

  On the operating table, I panicked because the doctor was an Indian woman and younger than I, who knows what methods she used, they might not be suitable for white women’s uteruses. . . In India the population has exploded among the living and the dead, they say that everyone in India has one foot in the grave, everywhere people are being born and dying in the most extravagant yet natural ways, everyone caught up in the great wheel of reincarnation. When the doctor covered her mouth and nose with her little white mask, I thought of the thousands of corpses riding the currents of the Ganges, so many they cause traffic jams. When she hovered over me I remembered the brutality of my Indian clients, and when she thrust her speculum into me, a cramp ran from my belly to my feet and forced me upward onto my elbows. I asked for a second dose of morphine and they said it was best to wait to see how things would go, the operation hadn’t even begun, and I told them I was a hardened user of heavy drugs and it took a lot to make me feel anything, to get it over with faster they gave me what I wanted. I almost asked them to halt the procedure and I think I know why, the doctor’s age was a problem, she was twenty-six or twenty-seven and
could have been my little sister and with little sisters, you have to be mature, you have to show the way and be dignified. All those thoughts, it seemed, were the sign of the child’s exceptional character, after all, the doctor could have been one of the three kings.

  During the operation I waited for the pain but it didn’t come. I thought the machine would make a clatter like old metal and that I’d hear the child being sucked into the surgical tubing, but there was none of that, not even a hum. I expected to cry but I didn’t feel like it, the morphine had played with my thoughts. Once the operation was over, the Indian woman left the room and I didn’t see her again, maybe she felt she had scared me.

  Before I left the clinic, one of the nurses wanted to know if I felt all right and when I said yes, she asked again, she didn’t want to know if I felt all right just then but in general, she was worried because no one was with me and I’d be going home by myself. Maybe she thought that when I walked out the door without the baby I’d be alone with my thoughts, and disappear into sudden emptiness like your father when he went visiting the cosmos.

  I took a taxi home and as usual put the phone next to my bed so as not to miss any calls. As usual I waited for you to phone though I’d told you, the day you left me, never to call. Maybe at the time I was hoping that my order would seem suspect to you, like an alarm, a way of reminding you that you still needed to look after me. Maybe I thought the connection between us was solid enough and you would feel, from the other end of the Plateau, that I had lost you a second time.