Like you, Mathieu, and like many men of our generation, he acquired important positions without the necessary qualifications. He came to my house recently. To talk. We spent a few pleasant hours together. He complained as much as he could about his health. Business is going well. He seems to be sailing from one success to the next, from a pink plate, a collector’s item, that he managed to locate in a flea market to a phenomenal profit that he made selling a property in record time, which has given him the motivation to do it all over again. His visit is light, voluble, and centred on his diverse and numerous satisfactions. He is the focus of interest when he visits, even at my house. I am pleased that this is how it is.
While he likes being shown affection, his first concern is to be centre stage. He knows how to improvise in public, shake hands, say the right thing. A politician’s soul is a permanent fixture. He is a sociable man, who gets noticed. I am quite different, rather timid. I stammer in public, and often in private too.
We cannot expect that the help we offer someone will ever be returned. We cannot hope for recognition or gratitude. Is this a question of duty or moral family obligations? I don’t have an answer to that never-ending question.
When I think about him quietly, I remember how we used to surround that beautiful blond child with the curly hair. We are repeating the scenes from long ago. We are returning to what we were before. My brother no longer looks at me menacingly and he hides his desire to win the nomination to the provincial party. I will again distribute his flyers door-to-door.
I made a qualitative leap, the way philosophy conceptualizes this. When we met, I moved from the material world to the intellectual world. I do not talk of material things with you. I think of you as far removed from material questions. I accord you the right not to understand reality; this is a mistake I make. I become sure that reality is just nonsense, a source of embarrassment, unproductive pettiness. These thoughts crowd in; they are intuitions. You are detached from the world; you exist through ideas and books. Your interests converge in reading and drawing. You sketch formless creatures, larvae and miniature monsters, cheerful intra-uterine characters. You talk a lot, endlessly. I haven’t known young men who can speak. You tell me what you’re reading. I am silent. Silence is my difficult world; it is where I get lost. The words that do come are accompanied by long hesitations, as though I were inept. I feel a fierce admiration for you. I wonder at your ability not to see that I lack everything, your capacity to remove yourself from emotional space and exist only in language. You have found a balance that lets you push worries and considerations, all the tedious obligations that can ruin entire days, out of your mind. I want to acquire the same ability to disregard these banalities. I can’t. Through osmosis I try hard to detach myself from the objects that surround me. I am caught by the unbearable smell of dirty dishes, unclean clothing, stinking bedclothes and towels, the monthly rent that was left unpaid and that the landlord wants.
I took a dangerous and clumsy leap out of my usual activities. Matter is stronger than my imagination, or my desire to live in a condition of weightlessness. Two weeks were all it took. I give up. I wash, I scrub, I polish and I move away from the world of the mind. It is sad to say. My first attempt to reject reality ends in a clear failure. I tell myself that I am entangled in materiality. How many times in the past years have I admitted: I am my own servant? I have to follow through, telling it like it is. I am your servant; I am the woman who waits on the couple that we are.
Time belongs to you. You behave like a dictator. Your authority is arbitrary and despotic. I have to beg you to come when supper is ready. I call you two or three times, like your mother used to, to get you to sit down across from me. My mother-in-law’s shadow looms large. I see her again. My words repeat hers. I have an enlarged image of what you are slowly becoming. I don’t realize that I am responsible for my fantasies. I suffer them. Remember the colleague from my work, the one from France? We saw him before and after he got married. He’s very thin, medium height, and quite good-looking. He has set ideas. You compete in the area of high rhetoric. You agree on the fact that contemporary art doesn’t measure up.
At the college where I teach I have coffee with him every Friday morning. We meet in the lounge where the coffee machine sits on a counter along with Styrofoam cups, stir sticks and packs of sugar and dried milk substitute. The garbage can is right there. Vinyl armchairs and low tables inhabit the large space with the blank walls. This lounge is for teachers of literature and philosophy, mainly men. This fall the administration hired two women. My colleague is affable, elegant, relaxed. From the day the two new recruits arrive, he talks about them. His words are neutral and objective; he is interested in them. Women have taught literature before. All of them left after one year. They were very different from these new ones. One very pretty blond woman, small and lively, always hung around the head of department and didn’t talk to anyone else. I don’t know why she left. I used to talk with the women who came the year after. They left teaching in order to get married. The youngest one, a French woman, wore expensive clothes that were conventional and old-fashioned. Another, a former nun, an absolute stereotype of the eternal, obedient student, would fold her hands across her fat, round belly. A tiny cross hung over her roundcollared blouse. She wore pleated skirts, alternating a grey one with a navy blue one, and polished shoes with Cuban heels. She was seeing a Franco-Ontarian monk who was in the process of leaving his order. We would talk. I would hear how condescending she was towards others in religious matters, how preachy. She spoke through the bits of communion wafers stuck in her mouth.
The two new women teachers know each other. They are both from well-heeled families. They were born in the same city, and also both studied there. One of them is unmarried; the other is married to the director of a college like ours. He considered it inappropriate to have his wife teaching under his authority. I watch the unmarried woman observe her new environment, circumspect and attentive, on the lookout for allies. She displays a certain autonomy in the face of male prejudice. She tells me that the married woman is the only girl in a large family of ten boys. She’s the youngest, and was always admired for her beauty by her brothers as well as the young people at university.
Our married colleague’s beauty causes problems. Her triumphant femininity is bothersome. It is her second nature, she deploys her charm toward every man individually, and seduces all of us as a group when we have meetings. She is too pretty, flirtatious, dressed in rich clothes. Her perfume floats in the corridors, which is not normal at all. She wears bright contrasting colours. Her clothes of undefined style come across as Sunday best. Her taste resembles my cousins’ who don’t have money and find cheap imitations of chic clothing. This new teacher, who lives in Outremont, wears the originals.
My French colleague talks about her and the dreadful influence she is having. It all starts with an intransigent expression of his bitterness. She’s too visible. She’s not discreet enough for our environment. He thinks this woman is bringing a light touch to the college which is inappropriate to our ethics, a sense of futility that is incompatible with the spirit of our teachers. He deplores the solid support she benefits from. The departmental assembly does not have the power to fire her. She has friends in the highest places. He utters short dry phrases. His face is tense. My other colleagues are more discreet. They don’t assume the right to make comments about others. I start thinking that I’ve been listening to this man for too long. I feel an affinity with the unmarried woman as someone who loves life and detests the conformism and the predictable, dogmatic and stereotyped views of our beautiful colleague.
Clothes that are too feminine bother men. If we believe the remarks we hear about appearances, then women have too much body, too much shape, too much exterior surface. I forget his unpleasant comments. Calm returns.
We take our Friday break. The panoramic windows look out over a white countryside and a cloudy sky. It is the dead of winter. He talks about the gyp
systyle dress and shawl that are irritating him. I watch him rip up the Styrofoam cup and squirm on the vinyl armchair until it squeaks. He is displaying an unusual level of nervousness. No one in the college has yet allowed themselves to get angry or raise their voice. I tell him the gypsy look is very recent. I bite my lips. I promise myself not to listen to another negative comment about her. He is sitting there watching the snow fall. His face is tense. Women are lowering the standard of education, he says, speaking the way someone does who prepares their sentences carefully and waits for the right moment. He gets up and leaves.
This desiccated little man pains me. He doesn’t have the poise necessary to express his hostility and disdain when we are in a meeting. A little too much femininity was all it took. He didn’t say: a woman like her lowers the standard. He made a general statement. I think my university diplomas protect me from men’s rapaciousness, from their vulgar greed, their insatiable appetite for privilege. The predator’s instinct is awake.
The following week we meet for coffee again, and he repeats the phrase: women lower the standard. I hear him. I get up and leave. I do not meet him again on a Friday.
I feel confused about what happened with him, and upset about not telling you what went on that winter. I don’t trust myself and am afraid. I chose you as a partner. An intellectual life for a woman is beyond the norm. I never knew what I represented for you. I was your wife; I was not your equal.
Long after our separation you told me you never wanted to get married. Everybody in your family – your father, your mother, your brothers – are religious and practice their religion. You lived in a bungalow with four narrow rooms. There were religious signs, crosses, holy images, statues, lights, reliquaries all over the place. I counted thirty-two of them. I told you the number. You were angry, furious. You forbade me to ever mention that number again. Your parents are believers, pious and moralizing. They insist that sexuality must be supervised. When they assumed that we were having sexual relations, they set the date for our wedding.
One Friday we’d hitchhiked up into the Laurentians to go camping. The tent we borrowed was tiny. When we sat on our sleeping bags in the middle of it, our heads touched the canvas roof. The rain that started in the middle of the night lasted a day and a half more. I was shivering with fatigue and discomfort, disappointed with our adventure in the woods. We struck camp and headed back into town. You proposed a stop in the suburb where you lived. We had no plausible explanation. You have to get married, they said.
I was in a better position to refuse the marriage since I was living alone. I wanted to live with you and get married. You may claim that you made a mistake in getting married, but I consented to our union. I have a clear memory of peacefulness, of a serene and joyful period in the happy days after our wedding.
The night before the ceremony my father criticizes you behind your back. We’re all seated around the table with my mother. The young man I’d been seeing before you had just saved his fiancée from certain death. As smoke billowed into the basement where they lived, he slipped out through the only window, the only escape route. Then he pulled the girl out through the tiny opening. My father compares the two of you. My future husband has no physical strength or courage. I am hurt, and don’t answer back. An image returns. My father is standing there in front of me. I am five years old.
Religious law consecrates his authority. I am afraid of my father. I tell my mother, who laughs at me. He’s dangerous, I tell her. Pop psychology teaches us that we women choose partners who resemble our fathers. I was absolutely lucid about wanting a husband who did not resemble my father. I gather that the constant complaints and the vicious remarks you make about your colleagues are a sign of boundless egotism. My father and you share the attribute of having a high opinion of yourselves and very little respect for others.
I don’t know what kind of memories you have of that man I met when I was a teenager. I don’t know what kind of connections you may have maintained. For a long time I thought he had limited intellectual faculties, that he was one of those people I avoid in daily life.
I’ve known him for decades without ever having a conversation. I have an infrahuman relationship with him; he cannot speak. He has never addressed me with a sequence of four complete sentences, sentences with a subject, a verb and an object. I meet him at Christmas gatherings. More often than not I would like to disappear when he is there. He makes me feel anxious and awkward. I lose my feminine qualities, which is to say I become a fake woman or a truncated man, an un-sexed creature only just able to take up some physical space. I don’t make a fuss; I listen. People assure me that he has ideas of his own and that he insists on them. He does not need to share them, or discuss them with me. One day he stated that he was a traditional man. Another day he said he was a snob. I don’t see what anyone gains from asserting they are a snob, or defining themselves in front of others. People do that. It seems they garner more attention in society that way. It is quite common. People interviewed on TV or on the radio define themselves: Who are you Monsieur, Madame? Viewers imitate this: I am this, I am that. When I am in the same room as he is, I am nothing, a zero. I achieve selfeffacement. I wear black. I am comfortable in black. I forget about my body, my jacket and my trousers. I move without hesitation. I feel quite helpless when he is there, as he goes from the living room to the kitchen to get a glass of sparkling wine.
I may say something he doesn’t like. He’ll hold one sentence against me. I wonder if he remembers the words I said a long time ago when I thought conversations were possible. The words have disappeared, imagined words replace them. Years ago, I longed to share my ideas. There was so much tucked away inside me, so many solitary meditations. I was no longer willing to accept disdain. I came across as an oppressed woman with nothing to say, which I wasn’t. I intended to rectify that.
There is a physical repulsion between our bodies. This man has not touched my hand, brushed my arm, or ever approached me. We give each other a quick peck to say hello. My family has adopted this polite custom, civilized behaviour that I have long practiced with my friends. When the party is over, he makes me a little sign with his hand. He’s at the far end of the room – the living room or the kitchen. In his hoarse, rough voice and with a hiccup in his breathing, he repeats: that’s it, that’s it, bonjour, bonjour. I think he’s in a hurry to see us go.
Every meeting ends up in similar failure, the same internal defeat. I pay him attention. I ask him about himself, and about what he’s doing. He avoids answering me. If he deigns to do so, he responds indirectly. He says nothing precise. I’m busy, he says. Or: Keeping busy, there’s work, no shortage of that. He doesn’t ask a single question about my health, or what I do or don’t do. This is his most basic right, because I bore him. Is he interested in others? I have an astonishing idea: he’s not interested in himself or in his own life. Such a thing is possible here. You can spend your life as an employee, a labourer, someone who carries out the most basic everyday requirements. If I were able to address him … just the idea requires considerable effort and can only fail or end up in irascible expression. I have never met anyone who is so adept at discouraging goodwill. This man does not think. He does not entertain ideas on other aspects of existence. Such a way of being in the world makes for a paragon of conformity. All the common man needs to do to avoid major disappointments is adapt to his job, and be married, which he is – unless death should part him – in order to relieve his sexual drive with his wife. He is satisfied to be what has been made of us: politics, religion, work, males or females acting out their roles.
I was eighteen. I was with my godmother, in her bedroom. I was trying on clothes that were still useful. There was a finely-striped man’s shirt. It was big and long, the hem went halfway down my thighs. I wanted to see myself from head to toe. The mirror was in the living room. I stood in front of it, and looked at myself from the front and the side. I was wearing high heels. I was examining my legs, which have character thoug
h they are not classically elegant. I heard a shout behind me. It was him. He yelled. He shouted that I was a shameless slut. He ordered me back into the bedroom: get back in there. I’d scandalized him, as the priests and nuns would say. He terrorized me. I ran back to the bedroom. Loud voices make me sick.
Already then he would raise his voice and reproach me for having ideas that did not stem from the education I’d received, ideas that came from books, from meeting people in an intellectual milieu he didn’t know. It is quite remarkable how people who have no ideas are aggressive and critical of those who do. In his eyes I am dirt. He sets out to humiliate me. He harassed me over feminism. I didn’t respond. I was neutral. He continued the attack for ten years. I kept quiet, my lips shut tight, and he reduced his offensive until it petered out. People have said that he is satisfied, happy with his life. I think that social norms render men inarticulate, without language.
The essence of snobbery is trying to impress others, writes Virginia Woolf. Snobs don’t say they’re snobs. At best, they’ll claim that others say they are. This man, this specimen, has no access to language, except language that is full of mistakes. But he is a male. Equality between the sexes is not in place. Imagine a woman like him, without an idea in her head, unable to formulate three sentences that hang together: such a woman exists. Imagine her scolding a man for some political leaning. Let’s carry on with this exercise. From the far end of the room she puts on her matronly voice and tells everyone bye, bye, there, bye, bye there. Let’s consider the marks of identity. One day she states: I am a traditional woman. Years later, completely out of context, she says: I am a snob. Unless she were mentally handicapped or just plain stupid, such a woman would be constantly aware of her inferiority.
The Stalinist's Wife Page 4
