Everyday for two weeks I said “we’re through,” she always found a way to disarm me, I started crying again and we didn’t break up. One night, I started in again over the phone, but then “fine, I think you’re right, we’ll never make this work.” And she wouldn’t change her mind this time. I didn’t know what to do with my days, much less with my life. I didn’t know where to take Léonore on walks. I wrote: We didn’t dare, we weren’t able to strip bare one before the other. There. That’s what I believe. We were in a hurry to get dressed again. Now that’s that. We’re happy. I’m afraid you won’t like the reason I love you. I love you because you’re gentle, gentle, gentle. Because you throw pebbles for your dog on the beach. I never loved having anyone take care of me the way I loved having you take care of me. I love you in a way that no one has ever loved you. That’s right, no one. I’m sorry, I don’t have the right to say this. It’s probably not true. But I admit that I often think things like this. You’re going to tell me you know all this. Well then, fine, you at your place, me at mine. Each in her own home and the hell with it. I wasn’t worthy of you or you of me. We didn’t give each other the means, we keep them for others or for ourselves. Sweetheart, help me allow myself to get near you. Guide me, take my hand. Let’s stop. Tell me you love me, catch me. I should never have let you walk on the beach alone. That’s all. You’re aware, my love, that it’s difficult to be with you. You take back everything you give. Oh my goodness, what babbling. And all of it for a story that’s coming to an end. Don’t you think we should have managed better than others? What an admission of weakness and how I blame myself. And how I blame you, too. I love you. Everything I could never say to you, and still can’t, it’s all lost. Maybe I’ll be able to tell you them some day, a long time from now. That evening, I read the letter to her over the phone. She told me she’d think about it. She came to get me at the train station, we went off, it was wonderful. The letter upset her. She just called me back, everything is going well, she loves me, she’s glad she’ll see me this afternoon, no, no, I was wrong to worry, there’s nothing wrong, the line was busy, the call waiting signal sounded, it must have been someone leaving a message on the machine, she was playing tennis, she’d just walked in, no, no, there’s no problem, she’s looking forward to seeing me, she’s in a hurry, she’s got to meet someone, she’ll come right after. Aside from a few minor worries from time to time, it all went like that, she would look at the real estate ads and call me. We even went to look at a house. We took the freeway to get there. I saw a dead dog on the shoulder. I couldn’t get rid of the image. I tried to block it out, I didn’t dare mention it. After the house tour, we had a dinner invitation, I had to talk about it, I was forced to say “there’s an image I can’t get out of my head. —What is it? What, what, what? —There was a dead dog on the side of the road when we arrived. —The freeways, especially that one.” We changed topics. She said to me “the day you don’t love me anymore, tell me, it’s not worth it.” But she still went off to Île de Ré alone, without me, to see her cousin. When she called I heard her cousin’s voice “Marie-Christine,” in the tone you use when calling from the next room for something that belongs to you and that you need. Jean, with whom I had dinner yesterday, said to me “it’s crazy how pretty the name Christine is and how ugly Marie-Christine is.” She left, she wanted to be far away from me, to get some distance, she needed some rest, far away from me. I wrote her. “Marie-Christine, let’s be clear. You said you’d write, well, here’s my answer. I’m bored with you, it’s no fun, I never laugh, but worst of all, we don’t share. The conversations we have don’t interest me. When you came back from tennis the other day (your tournament), your skin was ———— and ————. And yet, I let myself be seduced by you, you weren’t like that, you’re never vivacious for long, you need easy targets to shine.” And me with my dreams. We’d have a house. We’d share it. Léonore would have been with us. Pitou my heart would have watched over her. “Most of all, there’s a cruelty in you. You fan suffering when you see it, you’re incapable of real friendship, of real consolation, in short, of real love. I know now, after this letter, that you won’t call me again. I’ll be rid of your lack of love.” At the same time, I took notes, for myself, in my notebook: She is: not attractive, ————, ————, hollow chested, I don’t like talking to her, her friends, etc., the animals, she’s her cousin’s lap-dog, etc., when you forbid human cloning, you’re obliged to reproduce, which is good. The telephone rang. I didn’t pick up. The answering machine turned on. It was her, calling from Île de Ré. I wanted to talk to you, to chat with you on the phone, before you leave for Turin. Well, fine. Okay, listen…I don’t even know what time you’re leaving. If you get my message, try to call. If not, I’ll call you Sunday night when you’re back. I wanted to tell you that I hope everything goes well in Turin and to send you a big kiss. “These last two weeks, to tell you the whole truth, even sex with you seemed dull. Desire responding only out of habit.” She even said so herself “last week-end you seemed on auto-pilot.” I dialed her number in Île de Ré. I let it ring three times and hung up. The phone rang immediately after. It was her, “you got my message? —Yes, I just walked in this second. I called you back, but when I heard the end of your message, that because there are men in the house, ‘the two of us are out,’ you and Nadine as a couple, I hung up, and besides if all you have to say to me is ‘I hope everything goes well in Turin,’ then I’m not interested in talking to you. —I wanted to tell you I was thinking of you, that I keep seeing things here that remind me of you. —And what are you thinking about me? —I want to let some time pass, I don’t want to answer right now, I’ll tell you when I’m back.” Just then, I hear her cousin Nadine, the actress, with her voice that carries, calling from the kitchen “Marie-Christine…” Having a lesbian in the family is very practical. Handy, available, clever, not prissy. “Someone’s calling you, go ahead.” If there were five of me, I could make even more, says a woman from Austin, Texas, when asked about cloning. All these remarks annoyed her when she read the manuscript. It’s too easy, I know. Always leaning on tangential things, drawing connections, since I began writing there have always been other voices, other texts, other things, another angle from which I try to show myself. Me and something else, always. Now I have to rely on myself, what is closest, most real, nothing much, what with the incest I can’t manage to feel like I’m anything much, my body, my life, the place I live, the scene I’m acting in for myself, with my anxieties, my crying fits, my telephone calls, my intelligence, etc., all my limits, to be at the very edge of my limits, to lean on it the way I lean on the banister of the stairs to the lawyer’s office. Let everyone see my insignificance, my nothingness, me as a minimal human being, the tiny little writer that I am. Trying, with shrewd remarks, like the one about cloning, to seem a tiny bit more clever than she is. Me: “I didn’t care for you at the party at your place. I didn’t like dancing with you as much as I used to. This all developed over the past few weeks. Before my desire was sincere, urgent, directed at you. My love too. I discovered beauty in you and then it became hidden, around the end of February, and didn’t resurface. In the United States we felt pleasure and had some good moments but no happiness. There should be some happiness after a few months. For a while I truly hoped to live with you, it’s not possible with you. There really is too little love. There’s too little of everything.” Yesterday I asked her “would you rather you’d never met me?” – she said that it depended. Would it be better for a child to be born cloned or not be born at all, soon there won’t be this kind of thing at all in my books. I hope. No letters either, I hope. Just my inanity, nothing else. It’s a little utopian. “It was no passion, it wasn’t love, it was an encounter and we used up all its charm. A little passion, a little love, a little encounter, a need to seduce, you did it, it’s over. I no longer exist for you. We dreamed, you talked about the civil solidarity pact, you remember, you’d say ‘you’ll inherit everything
I have, my aunt will say “you’re disinheriting your godchildren.” ’ I met someone in Turin. I made love to him. I don’t think we’ll see each other again but it got me away from you. Phew!” When I was writing the letter, I hadn’t yet gone to Turin, I was leaving the next day. After writing it, I wrote in my notebook: Not a word. Don’t write her a word. Don’t call her. Don’t leave a message. Hold firm. Early on she sent me two quotes from Char. The first: The air I always feel almost lacking in most human beings (she was a pulmonologist), if it blows through you, has a profusion and a sparkling ease. I live marvelously with you. That is our extraordinary luck. The second: Push your luck, seize your happiness, and take risks. After seeing you, they will get used to you. That was a long time ago. L’Escale was a long time ago. New York was a long time ago. It was a long time ago that we used to get up at night to dance together. Not a word. Don’t write her a word. Don’t call her. Don’t leave a message. Hold firm. The moments of happiness with her are moments of unhappiness. She said to me “the day you don’t love me anymore, tell me, it’s not worth it.” I promised I’d tell her, implying that it wouldn’t be long. I was that fed up. “Dinner is ready,” her mother would say, “hang on, I’m coming, I’m getting ready,” her diabetic father would answer, giving himself an injection. “Your father, your mother, your cousin, none of it’s interesting, my poor dear.” With Claude, the moments of unhappiness were moments of happiness. The last time at her place. I was thinking of Léonore. I couldn’t separate, I had promised Léonore I’d take her to see Zorro, Marie-Christine wanted to see it too. Marie-Christine Léonore Marie-Christine Léonore Marie-Christine Léonore. And I can’t get loose. Even though the goal of life is simple. I met Claude at a demonstration one day. He lived in Reims, so did I, we knew each other already, through our parents who worked together. I grabbed his shoulder, I told him it was me. He turned around, we fell in love. Love. Yesterday I was telling someone “I’m not in love with her anymore.” We agreed to meet at the movies. He got there late because of work. I was saving two seats, I made a sign when I heard noise in the dark. Afterward we went to eat crêpes in a café, everything else was closed. He wore a blue anorak. He took me home. Sometimes he came upstairs. He didn’t know what to do. One day when he was about to leave, he came up to me and said “I love you.” I told him “you shouldn’t say that.” He stayed. He slept over, he couldn’t get a hard-on, then the opposite. And then he didn’t leave. Little by little he brought all his things. A year later we moved into a bigger apartment together. Which belonged to his parents, first mistake. Maybe not the first. His mother would see me when I opened the shutters. It was the same co-op, they lived across the way. The argument began (the argument with them). I started my psychoanalysis, I started to write, we got married. My mother would cook us dinner to cheer us up. We were young, about twenty-five. I finished my psychoanalysis, I left to study for a year in Bruges, we were separated. We were planning on getting a divorce. A shame. I left Bruges, I was writing, I wanted to move to Nice. We would be separated, but I wanted to be nearby. We would be separated, but I loved him. There was the thing with my father. That was sorted out, we began to be happy. To be really happy. Everyone called us the lovebirds. He would ask me “how much longer do you think they’ll call us the lovebirds?” Until what age? Rue Bosio, Rue Blacas, the lovebirds. No longer in Montpellier. I don’t remember when they called us the lovebirds. We moved to Montpellier. First we got a place in the Citadines, then we found a permanent apartment. Where I am now. We spent six months in Italy, paradise, utterly Edenic. Léonore from one year to eighteen months. We came back early January’94. Something was no longer working, I didn’t realize it. Time passed. Léonore got bigger. Day care, nursery school, kindergarten. She’s starting elementary school next year with her parents separated. Claude left a year ago. In April. I met Marie-Christine in September. Léonore Marie-Christine Marie-Christine Léonore. I’m trying to get Léonore some help, I saw a psychologist yesterday. Who treated me like I’d been beating her for a year, I’d only just noticed the bruises, it had to stop. “She’s your daughter, she loves you”…implying “no matter what you do. Say.” Those of us who have endured incest, AIDS, etc., that’s how we’re treated, like hardship cases! Or we’re given support, that’s how they treat us. I called Marie-Christine to come and see me. She didn’t want to get her car out again this late. I called Claude who came to sleep here, I took a lot of pills, I’m groggy. I asked Claude what he thought of the title No Man’s Land. In his opinion, it’s a title for English professors. That afternoon a friend says about Marie-Christine, “she seems a bit gloomy. —No, on the contrary, she’s very cheerful, very amusing, very funny.” I was homosexual for three months and change, fifteen days, we had gotten together again more or less. But I’ll stop there. I’m going to retire. One day I’ll be a grandmother, it will be wonderful.
Marie-Christine won’t read this book, like Claude, she doesn’t want to. “It kills things,” apparently. Claude didn’t read Sujet Angot either. No one around me reads anymore. In fact, I’m Indian, one of the untouchables. I touch garbage and normally the dead. In India, the untouchables touch the dead. I only touch garbage. No one wants to touch it with me. My manuscript, I’m alone with it for months, months and months and months. Even after it’s published, people who care for me don’t want to read it, “it kills things,” apparently. After the article “Christine Angot Tells it Straight” appeared in Le Monde, 9/24/98), the Minister of Culture proposed me for the Order of Arts and Letters, the medal. Arts and letters, the letters are splitting, I tried to keep the letters straight, and I felt dizzy all day when I was writing this No Man’s Land. Well yes, of course, I know what you’re thinking: you say to write is to touch garbage, that you’re an untouchable, an Indian, but still, it has something sensational about it, but still, it’s finery. Being a writer is a kind of regalia. When I was little, I would wrap my arms around my mother’s neck and she would say “my most beautiful necklace.” Yeah, sure, a necklace of garbage. There was a game when I was little, when you had a golden bracelet “c’est de l’or?” – is it gold? If it was gold-plate, you said “non, c’est de l’ordure,” no, it’s shit, I don’t know if you know it. Which goes to show you what my father made of me and my mother, of our relationship, which was beautiful before we knew each other. Not dross at all, on the contrary. When Léonore was born, I had a premonition of all this. That two women were garbage showing itself. That’s why I called her Léonore, to be sure. Mon or, mon amour, mon or. My gold, my love, my gold. Lé-o-nore. Nonor, my golden love. To be sure. To be sure; sure, sure, sure. So that it would be a gold-plated bracelet and all you’d have to do is scratch it a little, with your fingernail, and it would give like butter when you stick your finger in it, it wouldn’t be gold at all. you’d have to answer “no, it’s garbage.” Stick your fingers in as if it were a lump of butter. “Penetrate the piano like a lump of butter,” Duchâble’s piano teacher used to say to him. In his adolescence, he found the image revolting. Léonore and I would be pure gold. I’d take her on walks in her stroller to the Peyrou park in Montpellier. Madame Gasiglia, the pediatrician asked, with an e or without the e. What do you think? With an e, because it’s a girl. For Christmas this year, Marie-Christine is going to Peru, to visit friends who have a mine, but copper. Last Christmas she bought me the Cartier trinity ring. One day, during an argument, I threw it on the ground and almost threw it in the Lez, a river. I still don’t know what I’m going to do for Christmas. Her, she’s going to Lima, then to the Andes with 4X4s and horses and chauffeurs and friends. She’ll cross the copper mines and mountain passes at five thousand meters. There will be endless hairpin turns. Among her friends will be Nadine Casta, NC, or Gisela Orjeda, GO, like I wanted to be instead of having to retire too young. But I’ll be a grandmother one day and it will be wonderful. And my granddaughter, if it’s a girl, Léonore can name her whatever she’d like, everything she touches is gold. By then maybe I’ll be a Commande
r of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Christmas
After homosexuality, it was insanity. It was Christmas that made me go crazy. We were back together again. Her trip to Peru had been canceled. We were supposed to go to Rome. She would spend a family Christmas with her cousin as always. We were going to leave after. I can’t say: I was insane for three months. For three months, I thought I was condemned to be insane. It’s been much longer than that. Or else it’s the others who are insane. And that’s a crazy thing to say. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’ll just tell this anecdote, I’m not Nietzsche, I’m not Nijinsky, I’m not Artaud, I’m not Genet, I’m Christine Angot, I have the means that I have and I make do with them. There will be an anecdote, too bad, an account of a trigger, it will be Christmas time, it will be descriptive. I’ll describe my insanity through a sudden insight. I was barely conscious of it until the previous page. It was worse.
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