by Anne Garréta
She says she was afraid that questions would be asked; perhaps she had even hoped so, this mark on her back asking for it. She is haunted by the question she was expecting but that was not asked.
The travelers got up, they were called to board their flight, they left their small change rolling on the table among the dirty cups and saucers. You asked her, perhaps brusquely, if she was angry with you for having left that scar on her shoulder. You tried to imagine it. You would have liked for her to show you. You can’t ask her to undress in the middle of an airport. And so for her to describe it to you, but she did not see it, she cannot glimpse it, to give you an idea. She feels it like a dull burning in her back, or else a hole in her skin, opening onto nothing, with neither bottom nor edge. When you think about it, it probably looks like all the imprints teeth leave in living flesh. A taste of blood rushes to your mouth and she must have seen your jaw tense up remembering the bite. Looking at you then, did the desire that had made her beg you to inflict this pain in the middle of pleasure come back to her?
Later, you accompanied her back to the parking lot. She had planned to leave you at the end of a long hallway leading to the escalators. That’s where she would tell you to go back to the departure lounges. Through the big glass walls you can see the clouds rushing from the edges of the horizon, darkening the sky. You watch the first drops of rain fall, you see them make the first concentric waves, the first disturbances in the puddles of water abandoned by the last showers.
While you stroll together, you suddenly urge her to imagine your plane crashing: the scar that she wants to disappear, out of fear that it betray her, and you also, that scar, how it will become dear to her when the one who imprinted it on her skin will have died… The planes taking off deafen your words. You tell her again to imagine, day after day knowing it will vanish, night after night more pale in the mirror veiled by a mourning kept secret, the memory of you fading at last from her body and this palimpsest sign that she alone—who cannot see it—and you alone—who will no longer be—would have known how to decipher, will become a dead letter. But planes don’t crash, you hear her respond. Only sometimes, less often than cars crash… And if she were to die on the way back in an accident, the imprint of that inflicted bite would blend indistinctly with the wounds disfiguring her flesh, the amorous pain of your teeth on her skin would be lost in the confusion of blood and warped metal where no one would be able to read…
It was time to separate. You had left many times before, and many times she had accompanied you to this airport or another, but that had been before. Before the imposition of this stigma on her body.
You remember having stopped at the foot of the stairs to hold her back and tell her that all this could be a story in a novel recounting two lovers at the moment of departure, in an airport, at a crossroads, at the gates of a city, at the drawbridge of a castle, somewhere, in an attempt to cheat their suffering. In the novel, you say, they would separate at the top of a flight of stairs, the plane would crash, would disappear over the ocean, lost at sea far from any beacons… And she, would she recall, would she have recalled, the fiction that you would have told her, of the lover and the scar that made her renounce remorse, the secret posthumous symbol of pleasure?
[Night 12]
POST SCRIPTUM
And of course, you were in-fucking-capable of abiding by the rules you set for yourself at the start of this project. It’s no longer even a clinamen, it’s maximal deflection…
Did you really think you could lead what is referred to as a regular life and stick to metronomic typing in the sober morning hours? For as long as you held back from giving in to your inclination, which has always been to write at night, your project remained in limbo. It probably would be more honest (although insignificant) to change the title to Not One Night. But that would violate in its turn the rule whereby you decided to eschew second-guessing and crossing out, and to make it so that what was written is unwritten. So it goes, from one transgression to another, until we have eviscerated the entire body of laws…
As for writing every day or even every night, that was rather optimistic… Did you really bank on so easily curing yourself of your cardinal vice—procrastination? It didn’t even take a week for you to grow bored of yourself. Sufficient unto the day is the woman thereof? Hardly. There are so many books that you haven’t yet read, that you’re tempted to flip through… Writing and women will have to wait a little while longer yet… Chateaubriand kept you up until the small hours, and the mornings that you had dedicated to your writing task found you in bed with a man who died more than one hundred and fifty years ago. You should have engaged in writing orgies to make up for time lost from going to bed so late so that you can in good faith say you have never stopped going to bed early. You would have had to double down and simulate several nights in the space of a single one. You certainly tried, but that didn’t last either… You are possibly no longer fickle enough for such debauchery. Chalk it up to human weakness…
Better: you abandoned your project for months on end. Uncertainty contending with acedia. The danger was over. These writings, left incomplete after they failed to fulfill their purpose in a timely manner, come back to haunt you sometimes. What good would it be to pursue them? There were nights still, when, unsure whether to execute the program, you buckled down to the chore. What should have been a month’s work was disseminated over more than a year.
And as for writing simple sentences… Pious vow. Even speaking, you can’t manage it. You touch on an idea and bam! You can’t help glimpsing a vast landscape of detours and reliefs that you allow your sentences the pleasure of wrapping themselves around, threading their perspectives and winding according to their meanderings.
To top off the measure of your unreliablity, beyond the promises (but was it promises that the ante scriptum made? Predictions, announcements, engagements? And who did they bind? In breaking them, what were you perpetrating? An imposture, a crime, a swindle?) that you didn’t keep, the constraints you diverted, the contracts (subject to what jurisdiction? Made with whom? Yourself? A reader, silent, who isn’t even a person, at best the signifier of one, and admittedly, less than a signature? Quid of their consent? It will be deemed to have been tacitly granted… These contracts of writing and reading are a quasi-legal fiction upon which are founded our most serious uses of discourse…) that you broke unilaterally, not to mention the clauses you kept secret?
One in particular, which should suffice to send the entire construct teetering: in the series of nights, there is one, at least one, that is a fiction. And you won’t tell which.
Look for the fiction.
A most delightful twist, it came to you at the start. For if one of these exercises of memory is fake, and no one knows which, how is one to read them? The status and the interpretation of each are indefinitely suspended; the approach of the entire series is uncertain. How will you henceforth (re)read them, reader? As fables or as true stories? And what lesson shall you draw on the nature of desires exemplified within them?
But it’s a twist whose deliberation compelled you to think twice. How would you construct such a fiction?
Would it suffice for you to reread and examine the sequences of authentic recalling to identify their turns and to be able then to replicate their form and movement? Old method to gain credence. Wouldn’t too sharp a reproduction betray your own hand? The imitation might veer off into pastiche. It could also happen that this section might end up resembling each of the others, none alike, in a kind of family resemblance.
You could also turn to the chimera and stitch back together fragments of memory of different origins. Give to your creature the desire of one, the body of another, the voice of a third.
Mixing the places, the times, superimposing the faces, cutting out the qualities and the vices. Smoothing the whole, splice by splice, to rig out an apparently seamless fable.
You could also, since your memory is equally made up of cultural and literary figur
es, instead of letting the telling reveal the emblem that gives the key (as in musical notation rather than locks) of such an exercise of memory, you could elect one among the many common places of the rhetoric of desire and to this figure entrust the direction and the substance of your story.
After which, it all comes down to inventing the incidental qualities required to clothe and cloak that find. Leave it then to some carefully balanced combination of method and chance. Method, for chance practically never crops up unalloyed in stories. Generating randomness exceeds the forces of the human mind: it takes machines. The animal exudes sense and determination like it pisses, like it speaks, like it breathes. Irrepressible rhythm… How easily one falls into step… Chance, for method betrays itself through too much consistency, too much saturation, and the excess of signification leaves the suspicion of premeditation from which one must protect oneself if one wants to be believed and exonerated on account of one’s naïveté.
But do we really know, between improbable coincidence and implacable consistency, which one signals and betrays fiction?
In any event, prudence called for crafting fiction out of these diverse methods, mixing their means and their strategies: impurity would be your principle.
There remained, once the cycle of these exercises had more or less been carried out (lingering well below the number you had set, these thirty days or nights, for really, once the reason that had driven you became null and void, what did it matter that there were thirty nights or thirteen or twenty-one? Since the point had been to go against your ideal of literature, against your aesthetic ambition of the integrally calculated work, why not let oneself be led by pleasure, or one’s absence of pleasure, to continue, to start up again, to advance…), there remained the most delicate question to deliberate: What to do with this little heap of sentences? Was it really reasonable to imagine publishing them?
If you were to publish these exercises, didn’t you risk, no matter the precautions, hurting such or such a person who would recognize herself—rightly or wrongly—under some initial?
Hadn’t you taken care that these stories be abstract enough to prevent a positive identification of their subjects? You even pushed precaution to the point of scrambling the initials designating them. That was simple: put in the chronological order of their event in your life, these memories offered you a sequence of letters to which you applied a very classical cryptographic method. (Thus, their reference, though kept secret, is no less objective. To encrypt is not at all, in the first place, to feign; quite the opposite, isn’t the cipher strategically destined to insure the authenticity—as much as the secret—of the message?) Then, doesn’t the clause you used to throw fictional suspicion on each of your stories seal the indetermination of them all?
Finally, if such or such a person, formally recognizes herself under one or another initial and in this ink-mirror does not find her reflection flattering, wouldn’t she have herself to blame for having had the curiosity to read a book published under your name, in which she knew she ran the risk of encountering herself? Will she accuse the book or her desire to see herself figured in it, and find herself there, bared, even though forewarned… And to those who might object to the memory you have kept of them, you will respond that this memory stems from you just as much as from them: why didn’t they leave you a nicer one? But that is very much hypothetical. You don’t think you have really mistreated the characters of your memories. And as for those you did mistreat, who can say that they didn’t deserve it…?
[P.P.S.:] One of my close readers remarked to me: Quid of those who will not find themselves in these nights? Doesn’t omission risk hurting, too? My only excuse in this case—if it is to be dragged out—would be to invoke my laziness, its vagrant rovings through my memory.]
Wouldn’t you hurt, moreover, your own modesty and, by extension, that of those close to you (is modesty ever an individual thing?) by recounting what, with reason, morality used to demand (for, in a perfect reversal, the mores of our time tirelessly enjoin us to unveil, to disclose: cunning of morality, more subtle still than that of reason, as it dons the mask of its own subversion, just as in an earlier age it pretended to disapprove of what it furtively called to the light) that we hide or at least not publish?
Easy to parry. You’ll remember to tell your loved ones to stay away from this book. It’s a book that you intend only for your adversaries, or else for strangers. And if one or the other of your close friends or kin gives you grief over your unexpected turn to the confessional, you will remind them how often they remarked that today’s readers demand entertainment, less philosophy and more boudoir than you usually give them. They kept insisting that in order to achieve success (a legitimate ambition of theirs), you must abide by the style of the day, no matter how corrupt. Which, to the extent of your talent and your proclivities (mostly contrarian…), you have tried to do.
Weren’t you in danger, as you strove to skirt the era’s idolatry of desire, of being perceived of worshipping at the same altar? With any publication, misunderstanding (carefully cultivated and sanctioned) is the rule of the day. It might be used against you to fold you back into the flock.
To be sure, since your book belongs to the genre classically known as confessional, and strives to achieve an anatomy of desire, why would any reviewer hesitate to lump you together with that orgy of pen pushers devoutly pimping their own asses? Idolizers, fetishists, pornographers occupy the terrain, build chapels, totems. But is that any reason to cede them the entire continent of desire? Just because so many of your contemporaries have colonized the territory should you, for fear of being caught in such vulgar company, in such a bad zone, avoid it, and so yield to an ultramodern, radical, and spectacular form of censorship? (But perhaps the takeover and paving of the expanse of desire is already completed… carved out in subdivisions, devoured by the housing projects, rabbit cages, and shopping malls of the libido… Your fatal attraction to the literary conceit…)
Worse still, and don’t recoil from the possibility: what if, thinking you are resisting the pull of the dominant discourse, you were in fact practicing that very French form of resistance we call collaboration?
That is the most worrying of all. Are you not succumbing to a subtle and formidable deceit? A bit analogous to that old paradox inherent to the claim that non-being is not: the denial ironically posits the very suspicion of substance it attempts to erase… But that may be giving too much credit (gilding with metaphysics) to the pathetic little speculations of the pornocracy that this era secretes as naturally as the State secretes bureaucracy and society, in all sincerity, secretes hypocrisy. But who’s to say that your critique of desire isn’t just another tool of its empire? Are you not, unwittingly, spreading the propaganda, like an epidemic infecting every corner of our post-modern Western world, just as those who denounce its evils enhance the idol’s aura?
Can we escape from the publicity of desire? (And what do you mean by that?)
Some people still feel outraged that no car, no detergent, no commodity, no good, no object sells without advertising—which is the art of indoctrinating the multitudes into the ritual of desire (we have billboards and ads as others have muezzins, once had stained-glass windows or hymns, so that the articles we might otherwise fail to fathom might sink into our consciousness and might supplement our poor grasp of our needs and duties, for we are unable to desire the goods without a prompt, an instruction, or a particular grace)—decking it out in its frills and fetishes. Is the point really to sell you something, tempting you to acquire a good? Does it not seem to you that the commodity is a pretext for indignation, for speculation… Advertising sells one thing and only one thing. Do you truly believe it refers to a world of commodities?
Wrong.
All it talks about is itself and its wellspring: desire, pure.
Thus the legions of naked women on their knees, the orgy of spectacular bodies paraded on walls, screens, pages… You still believe that the origin and secret o
f surplus value, the dangerous supplement, stems from labor? You’re still the same old vulgar Marxists you always were… The transcendental horizon of value and its base is desire. Besides, who’s still saying you have to work? But to desire, still and always, to keep desiring, endlessly, full throttle, running on empty, in mourning, on your deathbed, amidst massacres, at the foot of a gallows, whatever…
They’ll break you in, my friend.
By way of bodies, stripped, available, offered, provoked. By way of pornography lavishly broadcast and piped through every existing network and media and those still to come. By the vindication of transgression, subversion and their rigorous discipline. By way of hysterical release of all these old Victorian, Puritan hang-ups which, for too long, and too painfully, blocked all of you…
And the high priests will keep cantillating that Thou shalt not retreat from thy desire.
And the great Chamberlain will keep swearing by their great gods that there will be no shortage of fuel or spare parts for our desiring machines.
And the great Inquisitors, after having subjected all parties to the ordinary and extraordinary question, will keep insinuating—which is to say liberally decreeing and pronouncing—that some princess from a novel of dubious canonical status, who preferred a rest to the object of her desire, god forbid, was damned by masochistic and narcissistic neurosis…
And the mendicant orders will keep decrying the distributive injustices, the scandal of good fortunes and erotic privileges, and selling nostalgia for a primitive time when desire was purer, when the deregulation of the elementary structures of the traffic in bodies had not yet debased the chaste fraternity of cum.