Who You Think I Am

by Camille Laurens

  I didn’t reply. I built a fire in the hearth as best I could, and let the flames tell me my fate, they’re very good at that, they hypnotize heartache. The bruise on my arm was going a fiery color, it looked like a Turner. My body softened in the heat like wax melting.

  He was the one to get back in touch with me, well, with Claire, the next day. “Okay, Claire, I’m sorry about yesterday, but you have to understand, I won’t tolerate lies. I don’t have it in me to hurt a woman, for God’s sake! What else did she tell you? I need to be careful, her slander could damage my reputation, she’s really nasty, like I said, she can spread her garbage on Facebook and on other sites.”

  Claire: “She’s stopped messaging me, but her last message was worrying. She’s all alone in that house, it must be scary, are you sure she’s okay?”

  Chris: “Yeah, she’s just acting up, she’s lying to get your sympathy. She’s actually back in Paris, a buddy went over to see her, she’s fine but psychologically she’s in bad shape. Apparently there’s only one thing she wants, and that’s for me to call. She can wait as long as she likes. None of this is my fault, she just needs to forget me, I already forgot her” (winky face emoticon).

  With each new message from Claire, I hoped he’d snap, and if he didn’t actually admit the truth to her, at least call me, the real me, to apologize, explain, and see how I was, if I needed anything. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the profoundly human emotion experienced in romantic desire had so completely disappeared and been replaced by such total denial, and yet with each new message I was confronted with the same irrefutable fact: the link was no longer available.

  You’ll say I had it coming, Louis, and—at the end of the day—my punishment wasn’t that bad, although cruel. Just revisiting a frivolous eighteenth-century novel, nothing more. Contemporary Dangerous Liaisons, with me as both Merteuil and Tourvel, manipulator and victim, the one who dies and the one who kills. I’d toyed with fiction, and it had just come boomeranging back like a surprise twist at the end of a novel. KissChris had regained the upper hand, refusing to be my plaything. Good for him! Even I, in the brief moments of respite I had from my lethargy, could imagine the ironic account I would give of events once I was feeling better. Despite my increasing physical weakness, or perhaps because of it, I still hadn’t gauged the ravages that this abandonment—which Claire still wanted to call just rude behavior—was currently effecting.

  At first I found things to do. I explored the house, opened closets, tried on men’s clothes and women’s. I spent one night in the children’s bedroom, at the foot of the cradle. I ran away by dispersing myself about the place. I sought refuge in books. There was a remarkable collection, I remember, a peculiar mixture of holiday reading—beach books, Michelin Guides, sailing manuals—and rare or confidential works, limited editions on velum, precious sonnets, little-known contemporary authors. I read everything I could lay my hands on, using words to fill the gap left by silence, but apart from a few poems, it didn’t work very well. There was also one of those phony psychology manuals, a thing with forms and tests for identifying difficult personalities, and a book about the signs of the Zodiac. Chris was paranoid, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, obsessive around the edges with schizoid tendencies. I was Scorpio with Libra rising, with the sensitivity of Cancer, the perseverance of Capricorn, and the generosity of Leo. At least, that was how I saw myself in the comic description I would give of my misadventure, trying in vain to stimulate my urge to write.

  There was even a point when I softened toward Chris: I remembered the last thing he’d said to me, “I’m leaving at eight p.m.,” obviously he meant to say eight a.m., but some small part of him—his duty to be a man, to incarnate the law?—had driven him to this slip of the tongue, in which I detected his distress, like a child yelling insults to stop himself from crying. But it was too slight a detail to bring me back to life. Over the next few days everything slowed down. I now got up only to make tea, take a piss, or take another book from the shelves—not that I was reading them anymore. The only one I now remember is this, because it was the last status I posted on my wall—a collection by Claude Esteban:

  I have days

  I no longer need, I give

  Them to you, they might

  Grow in someone else’s care, become light,

  Silky, full of sunshine,

  Whereas I put them in a gray

  Box underground

  And see them rot, take them from me,

  Make them live,

  Let them become children who play

  The rest is a blur, I can still picture the sun coming back through the bay window, a big pebble resting on the corner of the coffee table, the tartan blanket wrapped around me, the dwindling daylight. The kettle plugged in on the bar in the American-style kitchen was now out of reach, the stereo too. I just remember sleeping with my eyes open, I’m sure of that. And telling myself that nightfall was really the day falling away, a moment identified by language as two contradictory formulations that meant the same thing. I remember savoring that discovery as the last pleasure offered to me by language.

  When the owners arrived on the day we were meant to hand back the keys, they found me half unconscious, soaked in sweat and urine. They called the police and an ambulance, because my arm was covered with bruises and they thought I’d been attacked. While they waited for the emergency services to arrive they asked me questions, I answered with a flood of ranting words while flattening my breasts with my hands as if trying to iron them: that’s what they told me later, in the hospital, where they came to see me. Very kind. I’d lost eleven pounds, my hair was falling out, I was delirious, but not so much that I forgot to say they mustn’t contact my daughters, or anyone. I didn’t tell the police anything, didn’t even mention that Chris had been there, at least I don’t think I did: apparently I was rambling. After a few days they transferred me to La Forche, and I’m still here, that’s where I’m writing from. But don’t worry, I’m fine, now, absolutely fine.

  Do you know La Forche? It’s a psychiatric clinic, there are lots of depressives here—quite a few teachers, some suicidals, mostly women, not that men don’t attempt suicide, of course they do, but they hit their target, men go the whole hog with everything. At first I didn’t understand why I was here, I wasn’t depressed, I was repressed: the vital energy had been knocked out of me, that was all. In fact I slept for days and wept for weeks, but there had been an eclipse of time, to the extent that the thread of time had snapped. If my girls had been there, if I’d had to see them soon, I’d have held it together. But they were far away, they had no idea what was going on, so I could dissolve without causing any harm, I could stop trying to fool anyone, be myself, in other words: nothing. My diagnosis was simple, I didn’t need a doctor for that, I could do that all by myself: I didn’t have a single cent of desire left, not a kopek, nada. I was a gambler who’d wagered down to the shirt on her back and lost, I was naked, no one to wrap even a sheet around me, to take my hand, never gamble your whole heart, I’d placed my bet out of overweening confidence, no, out of humility, despair, no I’d bet out of excessive pride, I’d risked it all on an uneven bet and out of loss because I’d already lost everything, I could afford to lose because it was all gone already I’d lost big-time lost in a lostissimo sort of way I thought I was queen of the lost I thought I could do this, me, queen of desire, I could become trash, could tolerate denial annihilation brutal irremediable loss bankruptcy failure suicidal downfall, I thought I could always be reborn from the ashes, rise again from the dust that I’d so thoroughly bitten, I wouldn’t die suffocated by the earth they shoveled over me. My desire was the seat of my resistance, my internal blockhouse, shelter for my body and my language, I thought it was unassailable, infallible, indestructible. I desire therefore I live, my stainless steel motto. And suddenly there I was, surrounded by my own likeness—oh yes, and like it or not, they were like me, lost, losers—there I was, disarmed, dropped like a stone at t
he bottom of a well. I couldn’t move anymore, didn’t want to. It wasn’t my pride that had suffered, it was my vital energy. I’d stopped persevering with the idea of living, with the idea I’d always had of what it meant to live. “Strange to have stopped desiring desires,” I whispered to myself. All around me I saw my twin shadows wandering around their insubstantial death with a gentle smile or a bitter sneer. We’d all reached the horizon, all understood that beyond the optical horizon was not a line but a single point, period, the end. “That’s what everyone’s looking for,” I thought, “the greatest possible sorrow so that we can each become ourselves before we die.” It was a peaceful sort of knowledge, but that may have been the drugs.

  Maybe you think I’m taking this too far, Louis, like my mother. That the “greatest possible sorrow” can’t be some guy stealing a few hundred euros and dumping you. That there are infinitely worse things: a bereavement, an illness, even divorce is more painful. You’re right, on the surface. In actual fact, the same thing has happened to everyone in this place—the depressed, the anxious, the addicts, the anorexics: we’ve all lost. Something or someone. A love, a fight, an illusion. Or just a meaning—a direction, a significance.

  I talked to an analyst here, of course. His name’s Marc, but I can change that. He’s very good-looking. He insisted on trying to explain that desire and love aren’t the same thing. Desire wants to conquer and love wants to keep hold, he says. According to him, desire means having something to win, and love something to lose. But I don’t see any difference, all desire is love, because at the time when I want the object of my desire, when I strain toward it, I know that I’ll lose it, that I’m already losing it by pursuing it. My desire is both vital power and crazy melancholy—crazy enough to tie up, crazy enough to lock away. I feel as if I’ve always been like this, that in a way it’s a terrifying strength: I can’t lose anything, I can’t lose, because everything’s already lost. So I can confront anything, there are no risks because there’s nothing at stake, because I have nothing to lose.

  But back there at Cap Blanc-Nez, I had violent proof of my own presumptuousness: I certainly did have something to lose, and the loss of it was life-threatening. I’d lost a sense of loss, I was lacking in lack and I wasn’t even trying to find it anymore. With his contempt, Chris had excluded me from the circle, he’d made me ashamed to be alive. Exiled, driven out of the garden of delights. No man left to touch me, no book left to write. I’m talking about desire, Louis. I’d never been afraid of it before, or ashamed, I was its equal. Desire makes us aware of the void, that much is true, of the powerful chaos all around us and within us, but we’re aware of that void the way a tightrope walker is aware of the rope, feeling our way like an acrobat reaching his leg forward onto it, we’re a hair’s breadth from disaster and falling, from mortal terror, and yet there we are, all aquiver with inflated presence, ten times our usual selves, huge, moving through the chaos, held by the single thread of whatever connects us to the other person, our companion in the void, our twin tightrope walker. When are we ever more alive? Happier? Freer? I’m talking about desire, about the impatient slowness of desire. The act itself is different, we’re already on our way back to the world, in a position of control, of know-how, it’s the same with a book, with what we publish, what we make public, that’s what’s left of the vast chaos that was a desire for this particular book, the plans for it, the dream of it. A book doesn’t keep all the promises of that desire, it is one of its end results. But it translates the pleasure that came after the surge of desire, its epiphany. If a book doesn’t have that, it doesn’t have anything. The sexual act is the same: the anxiety of desire abates, the hunger, the voracity is calmed, but what desire wants—making love—doesn’t gratify it, not completely, there’s something left, a lack, and it’s on that lack that desire builds again. René Char says that a poem is “the love realized by desire that has stayed as desire.” I think that’s what a book should be, in an ideal world, and also a meeting: something took place, the desire was there, its searing presence, love happened, sometimes it’s perfect, the book is beautiful, vibrant, alive—and yet nothing is possessed, there’s nothing to hold in your hand, in your arms, and desire sets its aim at the next moment, already straining in the waiting process, in the acute scalding languor, the chaotic but structured, total but fragmented languor that identifies it, hovering above a fear of the void. “No one possesses nothing…Perhaps our fundamental exercise constitutes loving and writing empty-handed.”

  There are lots of suicide attempts here. Lots of people who suddenly lost it, at home, at work, or wherever, following what others often see as a minor incident—a cigarette turned down, a disappointing memo, a taunt. Heckled teachers. Broken hearts, too, of course. Inconsolable breakups. People who can no longer even find a word for what they’ve lost—can’t find the right word—without resorting to images and silence. After a few weeks, it didn’t take long, Marc suggested I run a writing workshop for the residents, he thought it would help everyone: them to symbolize their pain, as he put it; me to reconnect with the urge to write, to become a writer again. Because I couldn’t write a single line, it was just as impossible as asking an injured bird to fly, I’d had my wings clipped. I agreed.

  There are mostly women in my workshop. That’s how I met Claire, “clear as Claire can be,” she says when she introduces herself. Her husband abandoned her and went off with her younger sister or her niece, I’ve forgotten. She couldn’t take it, lost her self-confidence. She leaves, then comes back. She stays here. Her anger will save her, I think. Or her laughter. There’s also Josette, she was raped. And Catherine, she’s sixteen, her boyfriend posted pictures of her naked on Facebook, she was hounded on the Net, she threw herself off a bridge. Then there’s Michel, who spends his time studying etymology, mostly Hebrew, the meaning of words, their origins. Apparently when he was little he was adopted, and his birth mother was identified only as X, but then his adopted parents sent him back to the orphanage. He never says anything except to tell us the meaning of a word. He doesn’t go anywhere without his dictionary—“which has x’s all the way through it,” as Marc said the other day, it was a good point. He comes to the workshop too. Each of them tells his or her story, or someone else’s, or the one they’re dreaming of.

  In the early days I was dead. Impossible to write even a sentence, the words sounded like something falling to the floor. I helped the others get started, encouraging them to reinvent life through language, but I couldn’t do it myself. I was emptied, empty, old. I couldn’t find help anywhere. It went on quite a long time, Louis, so you can see why I didn’t give you much news. And then two things happened. First, we decided to put on a play. It was Claire’s idea, in a former life she was a renowned specialist in Marivaux and the eighteenth century. We made up our minds to put on Les fausses confidences, do you know it? Almost everyone in the group got involved, except the most depressed. And it was in that work on the voice, in gestures and those bodies moving about the stage that a flicker of a flame came back to life. Not just in me, I know that, even though any kind of fire is always precarious here.

  The second thing was Christian showing up—Chris to his nearest and dearest, he said. He’s a video maker, he was doing a documentary about La Forche. A serious project, fully immersive. He came to the workshop regularly, not as a documentary maker, but as a participant. He never asked to film those sessions, he wanted to be part of the group. One day he admitted that he’d had depression a few years earlier, because a woman with whom he’d had the beginnings of a relationship had committed suicide. That day he wrote a really beautiful text, it was called “The First Time,” I’ve kept it, I often reread it. He explained that he could make love to a woman only once, that he put all of himself into it, all his tenderness, his virility. And afterward he couldn’t do it again, it became impossible, physically impossible. He didn’t know why. So he’d run away, or become sufficiently obnoxious for the woman to leave him before realizing his
failing. Women didn’t understand, that first night had been so intense. He’d pulled the wool over people’s eyes for a long time by constantly changing partners, until this woman’s suicide. And then he was lost, only his work kept him going, he wanted to do well.

  To celebrate the end of filming, which went on for weeks, he gave a little party at La Forche. I hadn’t danced for an eternity—since Cap Blanc-Nez. When Chris came to ask me to dance, I thought I wouldn’t know how to put one foot in front of the other, even for a slow song, but I was actually afraid I would have forgotten how to touch a man’s body. Claire was dancing with Marc, take me now baby here as I am, hold me close, try and understand. Catherine was spinning slowly by herself, singing under her breath, desire is hunger is the fire I breathe, love is a banquet on which we feed. Josette was DJing, come on now try and understand the way I feel when I’m in your hands, Take my hand come undercover, They can’t hurt you now can’t hurt you now. There was a smell of vetiver hanging in the air, the fragrance my father used to wear, I smelled it when he twirled me in his arms, Chris didn’t talk at all, I could feel his heart beating, Because the night belongs to lovers, Because the night belongs to lust, Because the night belongs to lovers, Because the night belongs to us. Then Michel walked through those of us who were dancing saying that what was always translated in Ecclesiastes as “vanity,” “vanity of vanities,” hevel havalim, specifically meant the condensation from our mouths in winter. Thank you, Michel, I said. At the end of the dance I went outside with Chris and he lit a cigarette. The air was freezing, a few snowflakes fell on the daffodils by the bench. “Vanity of vanities,” Chris cried, and we laughed at the condensation. It was very cold, but we were alive in the cold. Chris did it again, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Vanity of vanities,” I did too, and then we laughed, oh my how we laughed, we laughed like crazy.