by Mia Farlane
‘Un café.’ And May had the same.
They sat opposite each other. Francine observed her in silence; perhaps she was reading her face. May tried not to think anything. Francine looked like an intellectual, May was thinking; and she was thinking that Francine had an ‘intelligent haircut’: short and neat and easy to look after. She stopped thinking and held her breath. A few seconds passed. Then Francine spoke:
‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘Thirty-one.’
‘Just!’
Meaning?
‘What sign are you?’ she then asked, and, ‘Show me your palm… Ah!’ Francine held May’s palm open like an oyster shell in one hand, while she traced above the lines with the other. ‘I see an intuitive side, and an artistic side,’ she read. And then, ‘Ah! Ah!’ Strangely enough, May could not now recall the rest. She was perhaps not paying attention. Ah-Ah, something.
Francine brought out a folder. ‘I have a few of my articles here for your university task: “Cavete, feminae” (Beware, Women), “Le Féminin au rabais”, “Le Féminin et ses enjeux”, “Le Féminin invalide: comment lui redonner sa valeur”…’ Francine started arranging the essays from most recent to the earliest. ‘I have been very busy, as you can see,’ she stated with no false humility. ‘And now you will be busy until our next meeting. You will give me your opinion.’
May took the papers, and started flicking through the titles. Francine, who had done her work, sat back and drank her coffee.
‘What do you want to do with your life?’ she now asked May, who was carefully sliding the hefty folder into her bag.
May tried to think up something she should desire.
‘What do you want to make of your life?’ Francine reworded her question.
‘I’m reading quite a bit, for the PhD.’
‘What is your deepest desire?’ Francine made the question clearer.
May sat there.
‘I’m going to give you some homework. Do you agree with this plan? You are going to look up the word “desire” and you are going to write about what it means to you. And you are going to keep a note of your dreams – but of course!’ she added at that point; not that May had disagreed with her. ‘Because if you want to understand others, you first have to understand yourself.’
Thus, unexpectedly, May had found herself a spiritual guide.
3
Absorbing Information
May woke up one delicious morning, the second week of her visit, to find someone had slid a note under the door of her hotel room:
Francine asks you to buy Le Point and to come to lunch at her apartment (call her for the code to the entrance gates).
The interview – Francine had mentioned it would be out soon. May went to a nearby bar-tabac and bought the magazine. She bought a postcard for Jansen at the same time, and a croissant for breakfast. She went back to the hotel, opened up the magazine and found the photo: ‘Francine Brion: speaking of the andro-gyne…’ Francine had her head on a very slight tilt; her eyes fixed intently on some question. Eventually, May skimmed through the interview. She read the message from Francine again. She reread it as she ate her croissant. She placed the note inside her journal, and took out her Plan de Paris. It was already eleven o’clock; beautiful outside: calm. She had the windows of her room wide open. Later, the day would begin. For now, she merely glided. She was still dreaming. She was a character in a novel, who wanders in Paris, who crosses a bridge, who drinks in a café with a newspaper before her that she doesn’t read, who flicks through the newspaper, who wanders through the pages, and hums.
Before leaving, May opened the guide at page forty-five: the sixth arrondissement; K8, Métro Saint-Michel, go south to place de la Sorbonne, turn right is rue de Vaugirard. She put the book back into her bag, not that she’d need it: Métro Saint-Michel, south to Sorbonne, turn right; south to Sorbonne, turn right, south to Sorbonne, turn right – it was easy enough to remember.
Behind the large wooden gates, there was a courtyard, which, crossed diagonally to the left, would lead, Francine had explained, to her apartment. It was like a secret. May pressed the code – 38, 64, A – and the lock clicked open. She went through the gates, and across the glare of the cobbled courtyard. If Francine had looked down then, she would have seen her. May pressed the intercom.
‘Allô.’
‘C’est moi.’
‘It’s on the third floor!’ Francine’s voice sang.
The buzzer went, and May pushed open the door. She made her way up the narrow wooden stairs. It was refreshingly cool, silent and dark, like the inside of a turret. One. Two. Three. Francine had left the door ajar. May took off her sandals, and stepped barefoot into a carpeted sitting room. ‘Come through,’ Francine called out.
May went into a small kitchen, where Francine was sitting at a table, closing down her laptop computer.
‘I have just finished a section. C’est parfait,’ she said.
May said nothing. She half smiled. She looked out of the open windows at the apartments opposite, with their window boxes of geraniums, and at the yard she had just crossed.
‘I could sense you were arriving.’ Francine shut the lid of the laptop, and disconnected the plugs. ‘I knew you were about to press the bell. I could feel that you were thinking about me.’
‘Yes, I was.’ Well, that was true. Then May added, ‘Of course, because I was coming to see you.’
‘Mm.’ Francine cleared the papers off the table.
May went to take off her jacket, and put down her bag. She sat neatly on the low sofa in the sitting room.
‘How are you?’ Francine asked her from the kitchen.
‘Very well, thank you,’ May replied. She sat looking at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to the left and right of her: Marguerite Yourcenar, Monique Wittig, George Sand… Nina Bouraoui, Michèle Causse, Jocelyne François, Violette Leduc…
‘Come and talk to me. You can come and help.’
May got up. Francine was pulling a bowl of buckwheat out of the fridge. ‘Do you like artichoke?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ Francine poured the boiled wheat into a frying pan. ‘I’ll give you this.’ She handed her a wooden spoon.
May stirred, while Francine stood on the bench to reach down some bowls. ‘You have to be a gymnast in this kitchen,’ she said.
May smiled, but again only slightly. Stir, stir: weakly; Francine had not really given her anything to do; she’d simply given her something to seem to be doing, which was kind of her; she’d given her something to hold on to: May was grateful.
Francine stepped down carefully from the bench to the stool to the floor, and placed the two bowls on the table. ‘I received a call this morning,’ she told May. ‘From an ex-lover. She congratulates me on the magazine interview. Ah, Sophie! She is living in Canada now, but somehow she manages to find out about the interview! She calls to pick me up on one of my comments. Note, she’s very, very sharp, very intelligent, this woman. It’s her intelligence that I was so attracted to, moreover. We met at a protest.’
Arms linked, in their thick coats, their hats and boots, banners held high, Les Féministes Révolutionnaires! May pictured Francine, a dot among thousands, progressing towards the Assemblée Nationale.
‘I’ve done ten lifetimes of protests. I leave marches to the young now. But the young women of today are asleep. Vivement le retour de la droite! That might wake them up. No, I am quite serious,’ Francine raged prophetically.
‘I’ve been on marches,’ May defended herself. ‘I used to go on lots of marches. I marched last year in the LGP.’
Francine made no comment.
May had not, it was true, noticed much passion on that particular march. The Lesbian and Gay Pride being, after all, a mere celebratory event, a publicity job at best. She and Jansen had sauntered nonchalantly in the procession, towards Hyde Park. They had slipped out of the crowd, at one point, for coffee, at Starbucks. London Cleaners were right behi
nd the festivities, sweeping up handouts and dropped flags. The afternoon had hardly had a militant feel about it. No, that day could not be held up to Francine as an update on May’s political action CV.
‘I’ve read the interview,’ May stated.
Francine waited for more.
‘And I found it very clear… You say what you mean, you include yourself in what you say.’
Francine waited.
‘I loved what you said about “Beware, Women”. The examples.’
‘Which ones?’ Francine set two cloth mats on the table.
‘It’s hard to say. There were so many. I could go and get it. I’ve made notes.’
‘You’ll show me later.’ Francine took the spoon from May, and switched off the stove. ‘Are you hungry?’ May hovered. ‘Sit down. I’ll serve you.’ She started piling May’s bowl with vegetables and buckwheat.
‘Thanks, that’s enough.’ May was not hungry. What she wanted was a cigarette, although she’d never smoked.
‘Oh the wine!’ Francine went over to the fridge. ‘I’m going to have a little wine. Do you want some wine?’
‘No, thank you. I prefer water,’ May replied.
‘No? Not even a little? You must learn how to relax. You are so tense. Look at the way you are holding your feet.’ It sounded like an accusation.
May looked under the table at her feet: her toes were curled tightly inwards like claws. She uncurled them and placed her feet back on the floor.
Francine was now focusing on May’s face. ‘You block your vital energy,’ she explained, ‘when you do that. You don’t realize! Your energy cannot move freely through you. You are far too reserved,’ she continued. ‘You should allow yourself to let go of the reins. A little wine would do you good.’ Francine started eating. ‘Bon appétit.’
‘Bon appétit.’ May took a tiny mouthful. She wondered how she was going to finish all this food. Then she decided she’d say something. ‘Water is better for your health,’ she said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous! A little wine is very good for your health. To deny yourself absolutely: that is an excessive reaction.’
After lunch – buckwheat with vegetables, yoghurt, then coffee – Francine washed the dishes while May dried; like two nuns in a chapel, May thought, silently preparing for some ritual, one washed, the other dried, in intimate silence.
‘That’s very good.’ Francine took the tea towel from May, and wiped her hands. ‘And now, ma belle, I am going to have to throw you out. It’s late.’ Francine got some chocolat noir from a shelf, and snapped off a couple of large flat squares: ‘For your journey back to your hotel.’
May didn’t want the chocolate.
Francine handed her the little package wrapped in silver tinfoil: ‘Voila!’ She kissed her on the left cheek, and then on the right.
‘I’m returning to London on Sunday,’ May announced. ‘I’m leaving in less than a week. And then non-life will start up again; I have to go back to teaching.’
‘You lack imagination,’ Francine said. Very kindly, but it was also a challenge: May had failed to imagine something. ‘In any case,’ Francine went on, ‘you will come back to Paris to visit me many times – I’m not about to die, after all – and we shall discuss your thesis on my ideas.’ She smiled then, as if only kindness, and not intelligence, were important. ‘I’ll be in Le Finistère for the next few days,’ she said, ‘for the eclipse on the eleventh. Finish reading the articles while I’m away, and call me on Saturday. We shall see each other again before you leave.’
May went to a telephone box after breakfast the following morning, and rang Jansen, who took down the number and called her straight back.
‘How’s it going?’ Jansen asked.
‘She thinks I’m stupid.’
‘Oh, “she thinks you’re stupid”? What makes you think that?’
‘Because I am stupid.’
‘May, you’re not stupid; you know you’re not stupid! You’ve got a Master’s degree that you got in your early twenties, and now you’re going to go on and do a PhD; you can’t be that stupid.’
‘Yeah, and I’m working in a primary school.’
‘Yes. So what?’
‘What am I doing working in a primary school? I get an MA in French Literature and then I go and teach English in a narrow-minded private school. Is that intelligent?’
‘It’s a job, May. What am I doing working as a chauffeur? Do you think I’m stupid because I work as a chauffeur?’
‘No, I don’t. Obviously.’
‘Well then,’ Jansen said, as if she had proved something.
‘Because you’re not stupid, and anyway it’s only temporary.’
‘You could do something else if you wanted to; you might decide, after you’ve got your PhD, that you want to do something completely different for a while. Like I am.’
‘Hm.’
‘You’d lose your long holidays though. When I started in HR at People First I only had three weeks a year – and they’d have kept it like that, but it was only because of the “working time directive” that they increased it to four.’
‘She made some suggestions about my PhD topic,’ May said, ‘that she thinks I ought to change: because it’s already been done and my topic’s too broad, she said. She’s far more interested in cross-dressing than in gender anyway, so she’s given me some ideas for me to work on.’
‘Yeah.’
‘She’s going away this afternoon, for a few days. She wants me to write a page about her interview in Le Point, what I thought about it, and she’s given me some more stuff to read, and a list of authors.’
‘Oh, yeah; show it to me when you get back.’
‘You don’t want to hear about it right now?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘I could just tell you the titles perhaps?’
‘All right, if you want to.’
‘Are you interested though, or “not really”?’
Jansen sighed.
‘Okay, I won’t tell you the titles.’
‘It’s not that I’m not interested, May. I just don’t think there’s much point over the telephone. I’m more interested in hearing about how you are.’
‘I’m missing you.’
‘I miss you, too,’ Jansen said. ‘Only five more days.’
Francine went to Le Finistère, where she would have a better view of the eclipse on the Thursday, and May spent this time café-crawling, and reading the last of the articles, ‘On Re-evaluation’. It would definitely be useful for a PhD on Francine’s work: there was a concise summary of all her writing and, at the end, a bibliography of every single thing Francine had ever had published – her feminist tracts, the essays in Le Torchon brûle – everything was included.
On Wednesday, May went to the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information in the Pompidou Centre. She sat at a long table in the reference section on the first floor, and with a couple of enormous dictionaries open in front of her attempted to gain some clarity on her PhD topic.
Gender portrayal in French lesbian literature was what she had had to begin with.
Brion’s translation of cross-dressing – Francine had suggested something more precise – in twentieth-century French lesbian literature. ‘You would want to look for both literal and figurative instances in the novels I mention,’ Francine had told her. ‘Rather than focusing on where “the material represents the abstract”, my essays approach the subject from a new angle: “the abstract representing the material”. That is far more interesting; that is where you impress your readers.’ May’s palms were sweating. Perhaps if she narrowed down her area:
Looking in particular at novels written between… 1930–1980: Jeanne Galzy, Célia Bertin, Eveline Mayhère, Anne Huré, Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir, Christiane Rochefort, Gisèle Bienne, Monique Wittig… She could also include (another recommendation from Francine) some reference to feminist articles/publications – Le Torchon brûle, Tout – that might be a good idea
. Plus all of Francine Brion’s writing, as it relates to the above.
May had established her – crater-like – subject area; she had read some books. Now, what was the premise of her PhD? What was its central question? For some reason, that was where she couldn’t think. Her mind refused; it blurred out of focus. Her throat hurt. She looked around at the real students in the library: a slender man in his mid- or early twenties sat at the other end of the table, copying out real notes from a book he would no doubt refer to in his essay or his thesis; a chic nouveau-punk stood next to a photocopying machine, pulled a card out of her wallet; some people were wandering among the shelves in search of information needed for real university papers due in this week or next month, for real courses on which they were enrolled. May had been in the library for nearly an hour.
Cross-dressing (to be defined, because everything always needed defining – or didn’t it?); and the central question was…
She’d go and get a coffee. Perhaps if she relaxed her mind, the perfect idea would surface.
However, standing alone, the following day, in front of the statue of Charles Baudelaire in the Jardin du Luxembourg (the eclipse barely noticeable through the clouds), May admitted to herself – and the sky seemed to agree – that she would probably never write the PhD, it was all beyond her; even to write the proposal was beyond her; she might never even write the proposal… although she would still want to see Francine of course, because Francine was a piece of walking history, she was a font of knowledge; and it was natural that May would want to get to know her, if only a bit. All the same – and was this a problem? – it was less natural for May to want to think about doing the PhD, if she was honest; just as one would be fairly unlikely to want to become an astronaut if one was afraid of flying (for example). And yet, May tried to remain positive, although it was more probable that she would not do the PhD, there was always the possibility that she would. She was unsure. She was unsure, and while she was unsure – she put the ‘CE-approved’ safety glasses back into her bag – she should at least allow herself to continue visiting Francine; since, in the worst-case scenario – May began walking back towards the exit – she’d learn something.