by Nelly Arcan
Outside, my eye fastened to the slit between your closed drapes, I watched you live without me for a half hour or so. It was my last chance to observe the spectacle of your existence far from mine. Spying on you, I thought that’s how people live, that’s what life is like, I had no doubt I would have to die because I could never live the way you did, I understood that evening that my body moved through my life without my soul, it had never left the void from which I was expelled at birth.
After half an hour I rang your doorbell. When you saw me through the pane of glass, you hesitated, then you opened up and said you weren’t expecting me. When I walked into your room, I knew you’d confess: actually, you were expecting me.
We talked for more than two hours, mostly about my problems, my hateful and unstable personality; according to you, I had to be cured before I could expect anything out of life. We talked about our incompatibility and divergence of opinion; to be happy together, we needed to be more alike. For two hours you held my hands tightly in yours and I agreed with everything you said, if I had been you, I wouldn’t have tolerated me for more than two months, I would have left me long before. . . My upcoming death at the age of thirty was what kept me alive this long.
Your cat Oreo was sleeping soundly on your desk chair as we talked and since I didn’t want to cry as I looked into your eyes, I focused on Oreo as our conversation went on its mechanical way, but we’d have to abandon our decorum sooner or later when it was time for me to leave.
You kept going back to the idea of friendship as I poured tears onto your shirt. My friendship was important to you, for you friendship was the logical end of failed love stories, we could correspond by email for a while and eventually see each other as friends, it was up to me to decide when I was ready for that. We could be friends and talk like old pals about our recent conquests and our careers, then maybe look back on our past and laugh about it and admit we weren’t made for each other, for you friendship was a kind of dumping ground. I waited for you to love me again or maybe kill me; since you were so grand, I expected something grandiose from you.
A scream silenced your talk of friendship. That was my answer. Turning you into a friend was worse than never seeing you again, it was like descending into pathos, destroying all over again what had been perfectly destroyed already, drilling holes into it and shaping it into a pile of shit, sullying beauty through derision; I’d be letting you win from beginning to end.
When I screamed you pulled away from me, both of us thought of Annie screaming in the pre-dawn light outside Nova. You said the same words you had then, you talked about the individual weight I had to bear, the burden that can’t be shared with anyone, and then I left.
Josée had been waiting for me in La Fontaine Park for two hours. I gave her my car keys and asked her to swing over to Mount Royal Avenue and then Saint-Dominique Street so that I could see Bily Kun one last time, and the after-hours loft.
YOUR FATHER LOOKED to the sky to find exploding stars, hoping to discover the secret of their death. He was fascinated by the beauty of their disembowelled corpses in space, their matter undone, their gases like flesh and blood creating many-coloured rings destined to dissolve at the whim of stellar winds. He would discuss such things with your mother and you at the dinner table, of a life much greater than what stars could live with their atoms that sought only to fuse with neighbouring atoms. He said that the task of atoms in the heart of stars is to marry, and enter into composition with one another to form new atoms that would also seek new forms until they found an irreducible atom, one of iron. Your father said that by searching for a Whole, stars necessarily moved toward a final pollution, they hastened their own end; when it came down to it, your father was a poet, a man in love.
After fusion, when atoms inevitably strike the iron heart of stars, the stars explode in spectacular fashion and give birth to white dwarves or black holes, the shock waves that start in the belly of stars and send them shattering into the space of light years is called the “Iron Catastrophe.” My grandfather would have been happy to meet your father, as they chatted together, they would have concluded that God was a core of iron.
I think men are like that, they die once they’ve spent their resources, they fall apart from searching for people who resemble them, in the end, all they meet is catastrophe.
I think this letter has reached some sort of end as well; it circled our story and finally collided with its core. I tried to understand our love and reach within it, and only hurt myself more. Writing serves no purpose but to shipwreck on the reefs; writing means losing parts of yourself, you understand far too intimately that you’re going to die. My explanations don’t explain anything, they conceal instead of revealing, they drive full force into a wall.
This letter is my corpse. It’s already starting to rot, it’s giving off its miasma. I began writing it the morning after my abortion, a month ago.
Today is our anniversary: exactly one year since we met.
Tomorrow, I turn thirty.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nelly Arcan was born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Her first novel Putain (2001); English: Whore (2004), drawing on her experience working in the sex trade in Montreal, caused a sensation and enjoyed immediate critical and media success. It was a finalist for both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina, two of France’s most prestigious literary awards. Three more novels followed establishing her as a literary star in Quebec and France: Folle (2004), also nominated for the Prix Femina, À ciel ouvert (2007), and L’enfant dans le miroir (2007). Paradis, clef en main, her fourth novel, was completed just days before she committed suicide in 2009 at the age of thirty-six.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
David Homel is a writer, journalist, filmmaker, and translator. He is the author of six novels, most recently, Midway (Cormorant, 2010). His novel The Speaking Cure won the J.I. Segal Award of the Jewish Public Library, and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Best Fiction from the Quebec Writer’s Federation. He has also written three children’s books, including Travels with my Family, which was co-authored with his wife, Canadian children’s author Marie-Louise Gay. He has translated several French works, receiving two Governor General’s Literary Awards for translation. Homel was born and raised in Chicago and currently resides in Montreal.
Born, bred and raised in Montreal, Jacob Homel has translated or collaborated in the translation of a number of works, including Toqué: Creators of a Quebec Gastronomy, The Last Genêt and The Weariness of the Self. In 2012, he won the J.I. Segal Translation Prize for his translation of A Pinch of Time. He shares his time between Montreal and Asia.