by Anne Garréta
An unexpected uproar pulled me from my lethargic, mesmerized meditation. The show must have been coming to a close, but the rumble that usually accompanied the finale had never taken on such proportions. I got up from the couch and started toward the hallway. On the threshold, I paused for a moment and glanced over my shoulder to glimpse my reflection in the mirror.
I tried to see from the wings what was causing all this commotion. On the stage, at the bottom of the large staircase at the back, was a confused cluster of bodies, some of them almost naked, others in work overalls or in evening wear. Arms, heads, and ostrich feathers were sprouting out of the crowd. Rumbles and indistinct murmurs traveled through the chaotic hall. A firefighter, jostling me, raced onto the stage; the rest of the troupe rushed from the dressing rooms, carrying me in its throng, packing me into the mass. In order to reassure the audience, a stage manager grabbed a microphone to announce that the show had been momentarily interrupted, and to beseech all those who had no business being on the stage please to clear away. Ebbing, the circle moved aside and, in the interstice between a heap of feathers and the imposing stature of a stagehand, with heartrending terror I saw A***’s body, which I recognized even before having truly discerned it, sprawled and immobile on the ground, with two men trying to place it on a stretcher.
While everyone else evacuated the stage, I approached and followed the stretcher into the wings. They brought the body to the dressing room where a doctor, summoned for the emergency, came bursting in shortly after. I stood next to the lifeless body that in my terror I didn’t dare touch—I knew already, obscurely, that a gruesome misfortune I was afraid to name had taken place. Next entered a small group of dancers who came upon hearing the news. The doctor, leaning over the body, straightened up. Seeing that I was watching him, he pronounced his conclusion volubly. Apparently, a break in the cervical spine had provoked an instant and probably painless death.
A murmur rose from the back of the room; the doctor was already on his way out. Some of the dancers, still half-naked, approached the body. They had seen A*** trip, fall headfirst, and violently hurtle down the entire flight of stairs, helpless to resist or direct the fall. At the foot of the stairs, the dislocated body, following a scream that had sprung forth from every mouth, had remained still in the silence of death that preceded the general tumult.
The show was suspended only briefly. They replaced A*** off the cuff with another member of the troupe. The presenter reassured the spectators of the fate of the victim of this regrettable accident, and they redid the finale (which A***’s fall had interrupted) in its entirety. Mourning isn’t much suited to venal celebrations. The show was performed two times each night for successive batches of clients, and the second performance of that night went on as usual, quite naturally and without mishap.
I remained in the dressing room with A***’s body, and the director came to convey his condolences to me and to assure me that he would take care of all the formalities and cover the costs until the insurance money came through. He left, and I found myself again head to head with the cadaver still spread upon the stretcher that had served to transport it, which the two stagehands had set up on a trestle in the middle of the room.
For three hours I stood before this vision of a beloved body I knew to be dead, without the fact resounding in me sufficiently to shift my sentiment or my gaze. To my right, in the mirror on top of the vanity table, was the body’s reflection. From my view, due to a frightening effect of perspective, the body’s image was foreshortened, from the soles of the feet in the foreground up to the head, which was lost in the distance in a virtual space that swallowed up my gaze, stumbling up against the base of the chin, boring into the gaps of the nostrils, and fading along the line of the eyebrows beyond which the forehead faded away. It was as if this sprawled body in the mirror was looming over my gaze.
A halo of lamps, the sole source of light, framed the mirror and bathed the painting taking shape there in a pale shadow; the reflection was melting A***’s body and my face at its side into one single lividity.
III
From then on I didn’t get out of bed until dusk; in the night, my infernal refuge, I indulged in roving fantasies.
A***’s presence was stolen from me by images. While we were together, I was jealous of all that had engrossed A***. I hated the television, detested those frivolous parties and their cortèges of ostentatious, superficial people. All the time stolen from me by those hours spent shopping, at the jeweler’s, the hairdresser’s, all of that dissipated time. Although, to be fair: some moments of pure pomp had fascinated me as well, the times I watched A***’s body mutate into an image. What price did I pay for them, in suffering? When we lived together, I always interrupted my eternal, languishing reverie to spy on the slow ceremony of applying makeup in the bathroom—the brushstrokes that highlighted the cheekbones, the sharp line of the pencil, the superimposition of different colors on the eyelids to intensify the socket. But I would lose myself in the distance of the gaze, closing myself off in mere vision. Little by little, my gaze, isolated in the mirror—a living enclave—became petrified in the glass facade formed around that face.
Everything stole A***’s presence from me: the infinitely expanding circle of high society friends, A*** playing the role of social butterfly no matter where we went. I salvage crumbs of A***’s presence, captured fragments snatched from the brutal dissipation of that life. From this debris, I recreated an entirely other life, the one I would have liked to live in A***’s company if it had not been for the seduction of anything and everything that sparkled. The time we spent together was dedicated to this imaginary, deflected, and diverted reconstruction of every act, gesture, and word, with the secret intention of thus being able to appropriate and incorporate A***. The strange sensation of never being able to grasp or embrace A*** except in the painting I was reconstructing from those idealized fragments of real life. The strange temptation to recreate a life in which I had felt only barely included: it seemed as though none of A***’s words or gestures had been for me. I was the shadow of a body that ignored me; I was also the source of light that produced that shadow. All that came back to me was a projection of myself. A*** was merely a parasite interposed between my consciousness and my unfailing tendency to diffract the real.
The one I loved I saw as dead, had to imagine as dead, had to think of in the past tense in order to bring about my own satisfaction from this living cadaver, a fulfillment that the real being had unconsciously refused me, for I was incapable of enjoying reality. I knew this was a morbid exercise, and had often been afraid that A*** would notice the crumbling happening underground; I was mining a life. How could I have only derived pleasure from my vision of A*** by imagining that all I saw already belonged to death? How could I have seen A***’s death as a side effect of my happiness in our life together? Before, I was mourning the present; today I mourn a past that was never present. I mourn a funereal existence, devoted to the vampirization of the flesh that made me feel an agonizing impotence because I was not able to take possession of it except through murder and mummification. Like a parasite, I fed on the images that stole A***’s presence from me, images that, in this henceforth deserted world, are incapable of restoring to me even one iota of A***’s presence.
All those who captivated me thereafter always irremediably betrayed or disenchanted me. The spark they held in my eyes would pass too quickly, consumed, vanished, leaving me as nothing but a heap of dismal flesh, enlivened by a furious access of pettiness or hysteria.
I appear to myself in the guise of the hero of that 1950s novel entitled, for reasons I no longer remember, La Chute. A pure soul, all grandeur in a heroic mask, suffering and cheaply acting out the sublime in a chaotic confusion of good intentions and pious lucidities. However, something of my true self remained: the intimate sensation I derived from these passions, soon shattered by the aftertaste of falling out of love.
The strange sensation of always feeling as if I we
re at the dreadful edge of some imminent break…This sentiment is the very foundation of all that is intractable in me: a sort of inebriation, bitter from drawn-out solitude, the inevitable tendency toward a final disenchantment with all idylls. And I can’t explain why, or how. I’ve never expected much from those I love. I would have given all, conceded all, pardoned all the wandering of anyone who accorded me the space and time for my discreet tenderness. So much did I fear smothering those I cherished that I never made a fuss, which was doubtless the reason for my repeated falls and defeats. I carry my silence—this constant withdrawal into a suffering that I thought of perhaps mistakenly as immoderate and obscene—as a cross that has never promised any redemption, a calvary without deliverance, an involuntary sacrifice made in vain.
Was I incorrigible to always lock away my grievances, wishing my partner would do the same? In silence I endured all transgressions, from the most trivial to the most serious (and my partner never understood which were the most serious for me, accumulating them innocently and obviously, but hiding those betrayals that didn’t matter to me at all: this burglary of the truth, more than the fault concealed, was what made me suffer). And because of my attention to decorum and my fear of a vulgar lover’s tiff, I never dared to counter this extreme violence with anything of the same order. I deployed an irony that harmed only me, opening more fully the wound it was attempting to bandage.
My obsessive fear of this imminent fall was always hovering over me. How often did I imagine myself gripped with terror, collapsing, tumbling from the height of the relative safety of whatever promontory I had been occupying? A fall brought about by a purely internal and continually foreseen rending, imminently suspended on a final thread that never broke but which, taut and twisted unbearably, never ceased to tremble. The agonizing tension of always being about to crack without ever feeling the relief of chaos—for I denied myself even the obscene plenitude of annihilation.
In those moments when it seemed the dreaded, desired fall was drawing close, I don’t know if I fled. At the least I retreated from its too-pressing arrival, as far as possible from whatever was seeming to provoke it. Somehow, I escaped. Probably through desertion, an abdication that threw me back into its core: an indissoluble knot of lonely meditation and troubled absence (I often imaged asceticism as being trapped inside a bedroom in a foreign town: New York, somewhere relatively high up, a decaying skyscraper in a pool of ruins, shaken from its foundations by the rhythm of African American voices: a syncopated version of Stendhal syndrome). By distancing myself from the world, I was squandering my destiny: such was the malediction of recognizing the world’s infamy but not allowing myself to spit in its face.
The passion of my inner secret cohabited violently with the constant exhibitionism demanded of a social life, and I was unable to escape from it, to defend myself against it, or to decline its imperative invitation. My mind was too supervised and civilized for this world that had become savage, imprinted with savoir-vivre, with a restraint that has become outdated but that remains the sole condition of civility. A drama was playing out and I was the battlefield. Who has resisted the temptation, the contempt evoked by this old Europe recalling the nostalgic charm of naphthalene? With a pure soul and the face of a martyr, I jeered at it, and yet I wasn’t composed of anything better. The whole dialectic of Reason, the confused potage of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful was suddenly overthrown, tossed into the impetuous cloacum of a world that breaks through old barriers and overflows its first cradle, twisting and restless with tumults and tremblings provoked by these unseen, submarine restraints.
Moments, fragments come back to me. One morning at the Kormoran, the sight of A*** brought tears to my eyes: I was imagining this body, lost, dead, vanished. I used to love watching it move, hips and back swaying in rhythm. The memory of sweat on that body after…after what? I was watching A*** dance from within a profound paralysis, an intense solitude, letting myself be invaded by every movement, feeling the tension of this immaterial thread that linked us even from a distance. Then a sudden invasion of anguish—looking at this body and knowing it to be ephemeral.
In the end what I loved above all else: those hips, narrow and broad at the same time, those legs that I never knew how to describe except, mundanely, as slim and long. But it wasn’t this that made them desirable to me—when we made love, I couldn’t stop caressing them, my lips against the inner thighs—it was something else, always something else, this indefinable something else where desire hides itself. Perhaps I was enticed by the slow motion of the dance, before my eyes, sublimely taking the body out of its rhythm.
Ephemeral, this body was undeniably ephemeral. I was overwhelmed by despair, vague and distant; I barely discerned the cause, buried as it must have been in ancient memory, abruptly rekindled and fighting to return, to take hold and actualize itself in a vision. Ephemeral—a word that I heard pronounced as a murder, as an image before my eyes, floating, tearing the veil; a living and funereal abrasion coming to break on the surface of anamnesis.
I had hoped that at least this hour of tragedy would provide me with a confidant, some faithful shadow attached to all that I was not able to bring into the light. What I had wanted to bury came back to me; there is no way to assassinate the cadaver I have been carrying in me for eternity, no way to dull the acidic decomposition that gnaws at me, torturing my flesh every time I find myself falling in love. I constructed each love too much in my own image. Did I want to collide against the jagged edges of suffering, to touch the infinitely collapsible floor of hell? And wasn’t hell itself merely a pretext, in its essence ultimately denied?
“All the torments of romantic passion,” I would say to myself sometimes, ironically. It was the repetition of the same torments that astonished me in particular. Seasons blended together: summer, autumn, winter, I never had any notion of time. My passion always seemed to be solitary or, rather, disconnected, unintelligible to myself or to others. Even Christ had not been alone; at least he had suffered in company, alongside two thieves. It was not that I had chosen solitude. In fact I suffered from it, but even the idea of passion seemed ridiculous and outdated, like something profoundly external, coming from an outside that was inaccessible to me, out of my reach.
Always failing, impaling myself on this fulcrum between speaking and keeping quiet, a knot was forming that I couldn’t undo, little by little strangling my voice, cutting it off in a silence haunted by powerlessness. Rereading Stendhal and Flaubert at the time, their words, coursing through me, opened up a chasm in which my devastating powerlessness devoured me even more violently. Trying to forget through reading, I ended up forgetting everything, even reaching a state of self-oblivion, which alone is able to appease suffering: a blackout in the broken dream of this narrative. The only thing that managed to subsist in my eyes—lost and blind to everything else—was a dispossession that seized, embraced, and then released, without any more substance or intelligibility than that. It was an impossible task to set the boundaries of what I was, up to the edge where I blurred into the other—the indescribable other—so much did the meanings escape me, the words that others before me had uttered deep within an analogous attrition. I longed to reduce the impossible to the inessential, but I no longer had recourse to this principle of logic, which had suddenly become inadequate.
Inadequate, I would repeat the word to myself, my jaws clamping down on my breath, trying to choke it, to nip in the bud the inarticulate expressions that were surging and gnawing. Why give voice to the unarticulated? Because the inexpressible doesn’t articulate itself in the least; it shatters into pieces before even taking form. I felt distinctly that something was breaking under a kind of assault; an obscure combat was taking place, syncopating my breath with its blows. At the impact of that secret confrontation, shuddering with a sadness only noticeable to myself, I pretended to be imperturbable.
Thus, forever oscillating between forced tranquility and irrepressible anguish, I was disconcerting those
around me. And indeed, how was I to explain this apparent absurdity: that it is possible to have feelings, to suffer for them, and at the same time to be unable to cut oneself off from them or to have any contempt for them. These sentiments alone have wrested me from the inane inhumanity of my reclusive life spent between God, whom I wanted not to know, and an ennui that I could no longer break or abandon, as I had done too often by absorbing myself in unspeakable frivolities. These sentiments alone have been able to keep me from shamelessly abandoning myself to a life composed entirely of an empty and false legion of distractions.
What was I, truly? A drag queen of intellection, a gigolo of enamoration. A vile series of obscene appearances that had besieged my being without allowing it to escape the gradual stripping bare of its miserable suffering, despair obscurely making its way through my lonely soul. I was finally shedding my mask, my pride, through a fall and a superb defeat, a reduction to my most pure nothingness; such was my annihilation in those beloved arms.
I was swallowed up in the contemplation of this being, asleep, so close, seated and head drooping. I was looking at the bent neck, slender and dipped in shadow beneath a mass of hair. The slow rise and sure fall of breathing, the sudden jerks of consciousness that brusquely raise the oscillating head, which inevitably falls again, as if detached from the body.
I was struggling to discern in the shadows a bitter or desperate crease of the mouth. Arms crossed, folded in sleep over a resting heart, calm in its prison of ribs. That morning at the Apocryphe, while A*** was waiting for me to be able to leave the club, I was wondering what all the surroundings that besiege the sleeping senses—music, lights, voices—were becoming in A***’s dreams. What rhythmic effect was insinuating itself into A***’s sleep? I observed the circular and twitchy movement of the head, corrected in an effort of forced rigidity, straightened and then languid, surrendering to its own weight, straining the neck to the point of making me, watching, uneasy.