There is no equality between us. You have mood swings at my interests. There’s an essay on psychoanalysis on my writing desk. You leaf through it; you read a passage. I wait for the criticism, which doesn’t fail to arrive. I didn’t ask for your approval. What I get is an aggressive attack. I ignore your negative remarks. Psychology makes you sick. You detest everything that has to do with the science of the psyche. You consider yourself above the banal aspects of personal relations. Weak minds study psychology. You don’t say “sick minds”; you don’t dare. People with behavioural problems or twisted minds turn to psychology. You presume that I am suffering from psychic ailments. I am silenced by your cruelty. I continue reading in spite of your protests.
I don’t understand your obduracy. I no longer go out. I am surrounded by men at work, and constantly have to prove myself. The girlfriends from my teenage years have disappeared. Not one of them has stuck with me and I have abandoned others. I am quite isolated. These are decisive years. I feel so desperate. Although I have what it takes to exist, I am heading toward dereliction. My most intense conflict begins.
You have an aversion for anything that does not concern my salaried work and the household services I provide. Your loathing and the reprimands you utter are appalling. I come from a family that can’t make enough unpleasant comments about people who have been to university. You are a member of the contemptible caste of the clergy. Your rejection of my interests is doubly alienating. In my mind I hear the vicious comments from years ago as well as your current ones. I was wrong then, and I continue to be wrong now. Twenty-nine is a dangerous age. I feel like giving it all up, foundering in madness, humiliation. The crisis I am in is the worst ever. There must be someone, some thinker, who has written on the objective difference between sensitivity and sentimentality.
I set aside my emotions and feelings; I deny them. I work harder. I let time fragment itself, discontinue. More than ever my mind is inhabited, colonized, engulfed, cannibalized. My earlier experiences are useless; my readings inadequate. I avoid family dramas. I have gotten used to being of service. Always at the service of others, like in the hymns. Serving your father, your mother, your brothers and sisters does not do away with conflict. I have experienced total subordination. This is the situation. I have to change.
At the college I am quite autonomous. Only in my profession, nowhere else, have I learnt what it means to be free. Certainty exists, and I can check it against my body, my senses and my ability to think. The society I live in allows me a freedom at work that I have not had at any other moment, or in any other place in my life. I experience my professional freedom as a strange breath of fresh air, an intelligent engagement, the wish to belong to myself.
Whether it is deliberate or not, you take up quite a lot of space. My writing is about you. What I haven’t been able to say to you, I write. You have a spontaneity that I don’t have. I am aware of your dislikes and your criticisms. You have no qualms stating what you don’t like, what bothers you, or impedes your own autonomy.
The couple that we make up is a singular entity. Our union is one of two young people who are dedicated to studies and an intellectual life. We innovate; we invent; or we claim to do so. I am happy with this. Things look promising, lasting. The show we put on works for our friends. My fantasy has not worn thin. Without my knowing, you join the party. I don’t have the slightest desire to follow you. On the contrary, I feel betrayed. It’s a common word. Sinister and gross language starts coming out of your mouth. You are heading down the grand anti-intellectual path, toward a dis-investment in thinking, turning against everything I am proud of. You are still the same person, the one with all the answers. You amass the tried and trusted commonplaces of Stalinism.
I question myself in vain. I have told you how desperate I felt when I left. I act decently. My right to exist has been put in doubt. After not even ten years with you, you have turned against what constituted the basis of our union. Questions about why and how this could happen remain without answers.
I have to exorcize the unspeakable disorder and confusion that followed upon my abandoning my home. The insults and the disdain started all over again. Without seeking out the men of my generation, I crash into them. They denounce me. They throw me face down into the dirt. I keep on writing. I confirm that this story with the Stalinist is a painful one.
***
You know this professor well: he is very precocious, weak, and melancholic. Over the years he allied himself with your politics; that’s how poorly his precociousness served him. Throughout his childhood, his adolescence, his youth he was gently rocked by songs of praises for his genius.
At ten, the fragile boy, already dressed in college uniform and carrying a big, heavy leather briefcase in his right hand, waits for the train that will take him to Montreal’s central station. He’s on his way to the prestigious Jesuit college. This child has genius; he is a genius. He receives the best training available in the Catholic province where education is in the hands of the religious communities. The boy grows up quiet and thoughtful. He already has a room of his own, and his own writing desk. His parents are pleased with their serious, docile son. The boy acquires many merit awards at college. His confidence in his intellectual abilities is justified. It is unshakeable in the area of literature where he rakes in all the prizes. The university opens its doors to him. He publishes in the student paper with well-thought-out enthusiasm. His fellow students read his text, isolate him, turn their backs on him. He reads the paper. What he suspected since the beginning of term turns out to be true. The ideas he put forth are uniformly religious. A Jesuit would not write anything different from what he has published. He thinks like a priest; he defends the morality of Catholic Jesuit civilization. His critical mind finds what is happening to him abominable. He longs, with all his intellectual capacities, to become a writer. This is a gross misunderstanding. Although he garners one academic success after the other, his bright mind doesn’t fool him. He has every right, and he will receive the recompenses he wants, the prestigious titles that are his due. He stamps his feet, impatient. He mutters and moans, the first time ever. His exceptional talent is not receiving recognition. Instead, he is becoming the laughing stock of sad-sack scribblers, pitiful pen-pushers, his fellow students. That’s what genius is for: to find a solution to outstrip these arrogant apprentice-journalists. He will turn himself into a great poet. He mustn’t write what he thinks; he must avoid ideas. He underlines words in the papers. He organizes them into elliptic free verse. The poetry disilludes modern vocabulary. The student presents his poetry, which obtains the approval of the editorial committee. Next come the enthusiastic responses of eager women devotees. They edge up to and surround the new poet. He has found his way back to all kinds of acclaim as well as the brand new happiness of being born to poetry. The university publishing house awaits his first collection.
He is very young and very promising. His career as a professor is in sight. The institutions protect him. He is a chosen son, the heir of the best and most courteous among them. In spite of its daring language and a modern veneer, his poetry is reminiscent of classical work. The traditional base is definitely not absent, says the assembly of professors as they prepare to co-opt the young man, aged twenty-one and a brilliant graduate. He doesn’t yet have the ultimate diploma that is required. Not to worry. He’ll have the opportunity to study in Paris, and do the university’s blue and gold banner proud with an exceptional thesis. His future is laid out, structured, certain. The royal way will not lead him astray. He is already a professor, a poet, and will soon be a literary critic, an essayist, a novelist. Prose is the ocean where dangers lurk. The profound depths of Jesuit thought pose a risk along the way. He is seasick; he pukes; he vomits despite himself, tossed about by the conservative ideas that he has been made to swallow, and must regurgitate differently if he wants to be accepted by his colleagues, friends, and enemies. The first thing his pen produces is clerical thought, unchanging eternal ter
ms that were once inscribed in his fragile mind. Tireless, he corrects his writing, huffing over the expressions that betray him. Ever since his early adventure with his mediocre fellow students at the student paper, he has been doing nothing but hemming in his religious streak, its outdated drivel. He has learnt his lesson and applies what he learnt by adding words to his poetry, and reducing ideas in his prose. This simplified method is very efficient. His genius, which is not really blossoming, remains latent, held in check by recurrent necessities. He conceals his stagnating passivity. His desire to punish and destroy billows into resentment. The genius has not kept his word. He projects himself into representations of masculinity. He sees himself in everything he reads.
The future goes on. As long as there’s life there’s hope. The horizon is broad in an under-inhabited country. He defends his cohort, his generation. He is no longer considered meteoric, the Exception, the promising Son from whom one expected victory laurels. A secret debate, a Gordian knot, begins to show up in his writing. He cannot overcome his intellectual fatigue, the pain of the past that stems from having to dissimulate his most quintessential ideas. His duplicity is suffocating him. The one-time genius knows that his less-endowed colleagues are more successful. His sullenness grows more intense as he compares. Former scribblers have turned into serious competitors. There are moments when the professor becomes unpredictable, when his conservatism leads him to support Stalinists for quite obscure reasons. He has a hard time sleeping.
A new episode of depression is lying in wait for him. The novel he has been reading is upsetting him. The woman author tells the story of a young genius, a young professor and artist whose talent doesn’t blossom. He sets his own history against that of the protagonist. His memories are painful. He has not dealt with the predicament of being born for glory and earning crumbs. He has been waiting for this novel for years, and now it is in his hands. In the past he compared its writer to Anne Hébert and Gabrielle Roy, the great women writers of the land. It is obvious he was mistaken. He will re-establish order in the literary institution. This has been one of his functions since his early twenties. This story about the precocious professor whose genius remains latent is a blow. Male pride, as in the expression coined by mothers of long ago and still in use today, has been undermined. There will have to be a response. This university character, if he exists, may be a rival. Whatever the case may be, the critic will surprise his ideological enemies, past and present. He supports his paper rival and presents his readers with one discourse among the many that he keeps hidden. They’re only ideas, he thinks. The literary critic is a turncoat. He doesn’t see why he should not defend the Stalinists who were the source of one of his deepest moments of depression in the seventies. Ideas have no weight. He swipes and snipes at the book. You have to rewrite what you once were. That’s the least you can do. Everyone is responsible for creating and managing their persona, sorry, their multiple moving, changing personae. That’s modernity for you. The son of the Jesuits, still young, and a serious reaper of praises and prizes, leaps to the defence of a paper character.
***
My books are about the man who was my lover and my husband. What I write about you among the other selected men of your generation will remain in the dark if I don’t act on the courage of my thinking.
Who chooses whom? The young man makes the first move; he invites you to dance, for a ride in his car, just a conversation. I hope for someone who likes reading and studying, an intellectual. He will be pale because of sleepless nights, and have the frail body and arms of someone not suited to heavy labour.
The young men approach the girls. We await them, in the strong sense of the term, motionless, passive and patient. Our eyes are wide open; we have to be aware. I am a fool for love, to the point that I lose all sense of reality. My senses keep me alert, a signal comes through like a bell tolling: that can’t be the one you’re looking for; you’re making a mistake. A voice snickers: there’s no man for you. A potent voice, a great superego, instructs me in how to put myself down: the other girls with a background like mine have already been married for five, six, or ten years. They are determined women. I despair of your ever arriving. I am torn between my studies and my yearning for love. Longing for love means throwing yourself at a guy. In my imagination I have developed a sentimentality I find frightening. I am hostage to the fictional love stories I tell myself. My mind has been usurped.
Being young … I have no idea what that means. I moved from being a child to being an adult. You met a responsible adult. This aspect of my personality, which I mask, makes me part of the previous generation.
I loved you exclusively, with every fibre of my being, without limitations or calculations. My love comprises an odd story made up of sentimental songs, photonovels, young girls’ whispered secrets, Hollywood movies and ballads with religious motifs, shop windows, engagement ceremonies, fairy-tale weddings, very beautiful and very young heroines, men who kiss your hands, cigarette smoke, rings on fingers.
I cannot find words severe enough to protest against the uninterrupted flow of romances and the ideology of love. The madness of love holds me in its clutches. Young girls from poor families turn love into their only wealth, their moment of glory when they land in front of the altar, vestal virgins decked out in their wedding gowns, princesses with tiaras. I was one of them. It is the most common, the best-known, trap. By the time I meet you I am exhausted from waiting. You talk to me about books. You are loved, before I even know who you are or where you come from.
I have robust health and a solid body. My steps take me as far as I need to go; my arms carry heavy loads, every day if necessary, as much and as long as necessary. I have no physical weakness. I have almost limitless energy, and it is renewed after a night of deep, dreamless sleep. I start up again without difficulty. Sometimes I compare myself to a beast of burden. My resemblance to a heavily laden animal does not please me. I have the body of a servant, a labourer. The way roles are assigned, a solid and strong physique is a passport to the life of a subaltern. My body rules me with its indefatigable energy, its hardness, its robustness, its sturdiness. It seems made for rough and repeated chores.
I feel domesticated, capable of taking on another load, another task. The sum of my chores is not enough to stifle the anxiety that is choking me. I never exhaust myself enough to silence the disgust I feel at not devoting myself body and soul to sustained reflection, to fecund thought. I am torn in two by what I claim to love and want and the duties and endless responsibilities that are my lot. I am unable to exist seated at my table, facing my books, notebooks and ballpoint pens. My great physical health limits me; it is like a denial of my intellectual aspirations.
When I avoid thinking about what it means to be a woman, my days progress well. There are maladies of civilization. Most authors define what it means to be a woman. I read as much as possible. And I find different ways of thinking about what she is. The pages that are consecrated to women in general are toxic, implying an idea of normality that hems in the imagination and confines and cloisters the desire to act. I reject the definitions, the descriptions, the praise and the blame, the categories and beyond all that the models, the great influences, the icons and the oracles. The hours I have spent reading under the sign of Woman have impeded my freedom of thought.
One issue comes up constantly for those who write. The real woman plays the game of seduction; she manipulates, manoeuvres, machinates. Her femininity is a weapon she deploys in order to dominate. She is cunning in her conquest of the male. Any woman who fails at this game or who refuses to play is not feminine. What the female creature wants is to be insidiously deceitful. My religion calls for authenticity. I have studied the pitfalls of religious transparency. I am a thick and opaque bundle of fibres that I cannot decipher. I cannot claim transparency. I know nothing of the rules of seduction, and lying hampers my course of action. I watch how the others behave. I cannot stand the hysterical ones that snivel in public.
What can I do? I make no difference between destiny and fate. My successes do not interest anyone. I saw that early, at the age of twelve. I am expected to fail. I haven’t failed yet. I am expected not to finish university. I finish. I don’t have the right to make mistakes. I follow through.
In my last year of college I am close to despair. The place has become a prison. My time there seems interminable. My impatience at the thought of going to university is oppressive. I am distressed by the unspeakable idea that I am still at the college. I don’t trust the nuns, their underhandedness, their dishonesty and hypocrisy, and the vindictiveness they display in the name of morality. I have kept them at a distance. That last year, I let down my guard. A nun is teaching philosophy. She is young and obese; she splutters and swallows her words. I get excellent grades, almost perfect. But I take liberties in what I say and write, intellectual risks in accordance with the grades I have been getting. At the final exam, I get marked hard, and just barely pass. I realize that the nun has punished me, taken revenge for my irreligious and individualistic audacities; instead of getting expelled from the college, which would have been most unexpected, my punishment is the bad grade. The graduation ceremony is spoiled for me. I am shaken, edgy and tense when I see my results.
I take off the black gown. My shapeless black dress is made from some cheap material. My arms are bare. I am the only one wearing a sleeveless dress. You are with me, awkward and hesitant among the families in their Sunday best crowding around the nuns.
I feel an air of freedom over the summer. I’m about to start university. I’ve registered for anthropology. The university is a venerable and admirable institution. I have been accepted and I feel I’ve got there by fraudulent means. What is an economically disadvantaged girl doing among the country’s elite? There is so much grandeur about the university, I am inferior because I have disobeyed my father and because of my birth. The place is timeworn, the lighting yellow, the corridors narrow, the classrooms dusty. The professors, all men, speak with knowledge and rigour. There are my fellow students. I sit next to a friend from college who has also signed up for anthropology. One professor says: take a look at who is sitting to your right and your left. By the end of the year your group will be reduced by half. I switch to another discipline. My friend fails the exams.
The Stalinist's Wife Page 5
