The Stalinist's Wife

by France Theoret

  And you, you fail the first time around. You start over again. You fail a second time. Years go by. You still haven’t got your first degree. You have a circle of fellow students who admire your intellectual qualities. You have no doubts. You just repeat calmly and without emotional outbursts. You proclaim that the life of a student is the best there is. I am focussed on what will come next, the professional life I will lead.

  I have never known failure. Where do these feelings come from, these poisonous doubts, these morbid misgivings? My successes are unsatisfactory. I make the effort to live with you. We would still be together if you hadn’t become a Stalinist.

  I complete my program, and my life as a teacher begins. A huge internal change takes place, revealing a disaster. I pass pitiless judgment on myself. I see clear. I suffer from the abnormal relations with my family. My eyes open, I dare to know. My mother has used me against my father. Not being loved by either one of them destabilizes me. The mystery of my solitude triggers a powerful psychological shock. I am daring enough to recognize it. What I know is superficial, fictional, partial. I see myself not at the summit but at the very beginning of acquiring what I have learnt. My deep malaise doubles. It is unspeakable. I feel a visceral shame at not being loved, being constantly rejected. My marriage disappointed them. When I’m with you, I regress. I express uncertainties: it seems to me that ... You refuse to listen to me. You are irritated. I can no longer overcome my vulnerability, which is as vast as it is deep. Everything is very down and becomes hellish.

  I am suffering from the emotional illness I sought to escape as an adolescent. I am providing you with the life of a kept man, who is free to study and believe in his future as an artist. The scene repeats itself over and over again. I am on the verge of a breakdown, which I conceal with proper behaviour. I am telling you this without any preamble. The dialogue took place inside me: I asked the questions and came up with the answers. We have arrived at the moment of the changes that were announced, at the final decision. Here is what I propose: One salary is enough. I can earn the money for us. You say: that’s possible. I was expecting you to protest, to refuse outright. You have the indecency to accept.

  Popular psychology is categorical on this count: a shared life is a success; separation is a fiasco. A void of family and friends establishes itself about me. Appearances count against me. I made a mistake. I’m the one who left. Everyone mouths the same psychological truths. I don’t feel that I have failed. The page is turned. You told me you’d have a child when you’re fifty. It is impossible for me to be the mother of that child. I don’t know if you thought of separating before I took the initiative. It doesn’t matter anymore. After we broke up, you said one thing and then you said the opposite. You forbade me to go to the same places you go to. You sang the praises of divorced people who continue seeing each other and keep up a friendship. Our marriage came to an end for ideological reasons.

  I say that our intellectual differences are the reason I left you. I didn’t love you enough to accept your Stalinism. That’s my business. I do not have to unveil my soul before the Stalinist I left. When we were living together you were very severe if I revealed my emotions, didn’t control my feelings. I want to bear witness to that in my letter. I control myself. I cut myself off from my own energy in order to please you. I don’t object to what you are, or say, or do. I didn’t confront you once. You commented on this much later, reproaching me for being well-behaved and responsible.

  I thought you were more intelligent than I was. I ascribed great intelligence to you. Others saw you as a genius.

  We hardly ever engaged with each other. We lived side by side. It could well be that what I am writing to you now will leave you cold. I know exactly how you reject the study of the psyche. This served to keep me quiet, confine me in stoic silence. I no longer feel humiliated at writing down what happened. The respect I have for you I maintain in this letter.

  I was possessed by such pride at finishing my education that I associated it with having complete autonomy. Our home life went in another direction. I see no difference between action and acceptance. As soon as we were under our own roof, the grand dimensions of my freedom and independence no longer existed. But I had renounced nothing. On the contrary, I kept thinking of our marriage as an abundance of blessings. The physical space of our home now belongs to you. I went out the door; I was hounded out of my home. I was of great service to you. I helped you and I hoped for help from you. I did not receive it. You did me harm. I was the object of your mental cruelty.

  When I left you I had nowhere to go.

  I must finish with this suffocating modesty, the double language that we used. The sexual morality of our families has the appearance of perfection. No one among our fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers committed an error. There were no premarital pregnancies or even shotgun weddings. Our parents direct us, drum it into our heads, rasp it out with their failing voices: Sexuality is forbidden. They think about nothing else. I have been thinking about nothing else since puberty.

  I have just gotten married. My mother-in-law waited until my status was official to confide in me. Now you know, she starts, with authority. Her hands grip the edge of the kitchen table. And then this pious woman tells me the story of her sexual drama. It is painful; her words are shocking. She pushes out her sentences in short physical bursts. It hurts to see her so different from her normal self. She has had no sex life for twenty years. When the travelling Fuller brush salesman came by she would have to control herself. She leans into the table; her hands grip the edge. My mother-in-law reproduces the painful gestures, the gestures she made to the travelling salesman. I listened attentively. I didn’t know what to say, stupefied by what she said and by her distress.

  One Sunday afternoon we go to visit my family. My father tells my mother to offer us a beer, a clear sign that we are both adults and visitors. He is relaxed. He intends to have fun. This is not a discreet man. He wants to hear secrets, confidences, admissions. It’s not that important. Our lives are stifled by piles of secrets that aren’t really secrets. My father’s joviality embarrasses me; there will be misunderstandings. Sexuality, subject to rigid rules and linguistic censorship, is made the object of comedy and dirty jokes.

  You are engrossed in conversation with my mother. The kitchen is tiny. You are talking to her and don’t hear what my father is saying. He asks me did you shop around before you got married? Your mother and I did. I do not respond. The afternoon is spoiled. He turns sulky again. I have committed another error.

  I memorized all the admonishments against sexuality, one after the other, without ever intending to repeat them. Now my father wants his daughter to tell him if she transgressed the law of sexual conduct. He is endlessly two-faced. He says one thing and wants the other. I am almost thirty; in his eyes I am naïve. His grotesque choice of words makes me anxious. The comic, vulgar air he gives them disgusts me. I cannot get used to this. I will never give in to his vulgarity.

  We make love the first time in the narrow room where I live alone. We touch and touch each other. What is it like? Quite pleasant, we are drowning in desire. You get dressed, your face radiant. You say: I wish every day could be like this. Those are your words; they are engraved in me. The sentence has a thousand resonances. You go home. You travel for two hours in almost empty buses. I envy your experiencing the tranquillity of the long urban night. We transgress the sexual law. We have friends who talk of transgression. The word resonates in me, resembling the word aggression. I am the object of aggression in my waking dreams and my fantasies. Our friends are crazy about erotic literature. I read libertine novels. Soon I open a book by Sade.

  I have long kept my impressions of our sex life to myself. It does not resemble anything in the novels I have read or am reading. There is no romanticism, no sexual technique, or erotic proposition. Ours is an animal sexuality, sensual and repetitive.

  We are in bed. The light is on. I see you naked, with an erection. I take o
ff my pyjama. I roll onto your body and am on top of you. I like looking at your nakedness. We try many different positions. I kiss the tip of your penis for the first time. You grab my arms; you stop me; you protest. You don’t want me to take your penis into my mouth. You tell me this in shapeless, uncertain language, onomatopoeic sounds, grunts of rage, the kind you emit when you are beside yourself. You are literally without language.

  I am not allowed to move in bed; I do not have the right. We put our hands everywhere, except on our genitals. This is how it must be. We must not go beyond your silent restrictions.

  The purity of the girls and the women is the big deal. The idea of preserving this hateful purity came up whenever I wrote the first lines of a poem.

  I was reading very different writers, they did nothing for me. I recognized the insipid expression of sentimentality, hysterical and vindictive, and of good feeling. The poison of authoritarian discourse, suspect confessions, destroyed impulses – every word inscribed in my psyche – comes to the surface. I am dispossessed of a language that might express what is happening between the two of us.

  Romances lead to masochism. Death, criminality, sexual anguish, violence suffered, received, desired: my dreams and my fantasies move in macabre circles. I abolish my will, I shall follow you, I shall behave as you require. I will be nothing. Sentimentality seeks murder, destruction. That is its deep, hidden, unconscious language. Everything wants to kill. Love is war. You have me off-balance. You do not utter the words of the romantic poets. You mock the words of love, you don’t create any. Our sex life obstructs your language. You express yourself like a child, in sibilant susurrations. Your language is pathetic.

  We are visiting friends. She is a psychologist. We’ve had food, and wine, we’ve laughed. Everything is fine. We carry on into the afternoon, there is an easy flow of conversation between the four of us. The psychologist describes female orgasms and asks me about this. I answer what I can. We do not pursue the conversation.

  None of that interests you. Not the gestures, or the erotic language in film, or the sciences of psychology and sexology, or the literature of transgression.

  American cinema doesn’t fare any better. One evening with a couple of writer friends we watch a Hollywood film about swinging. We have some beer. The husband subtly suggests that we might swap partners at the end of the evening. The wife doesn’t move, she seems willing. You gesticulate, you get up and pretend you haven’t understood. You rush our departure. We have to go. You are furious with me and accuse me. You have lost an evening for a lousy movie.

  ***

  For as long as I can remember I have wanted to get married. Everything led me toward love and life as a couple: the fairy tales, the sentimental novels, the romances, the conversations among young girls, the first social evenings, troubling confidences, sartorial disguises. Like most girls, I like high heels and lipstick. Nobody pushes me toward this reality, I am taken there by the times. I am stuck in the only rut there is, the call from beyond that makes a young adult leave her family of origin for an embryonic family, in development. Girls can easily find a taker if they accept the first one who comes along. They so want to be kissed that they’re on the lookout for any opportunity, mouths with black teeth, dwarves with pockmarked faces. Is the ugly, rather stupid, boy the one meant for me? Do I have to accept the first one who shows up, who steals kisses and soils the purity of the tender virgin? It’s the chaos set off by exacerbated senses. My prince will arrive under my father’s roof. Proliferating nonsense.

  It is February 14. I am eighteen. I’ve been out with a young man at a dressy evening. He takes me home in his car, stops in front of the house. I suppose that he is going to kiss me. I shudder at the thought of the usual ritual. He is neither handsome nor ugly. He is clumsy, hesitates when he speaks, and spouts a lot of foolish truisms. He is not very intelligent. Something about him is reminiscent of a mental retard. In his hands he has a red box in the shape of a heart. He gives me the chocolates and asks me to marry him. Existence is meaninglessness in its raw state.

  Later, I have another boyfriend. My father considers him sluggish, uncommunicative, too young. He says this in his colourful joual dialect. He denigrates his children’s sexuality, considers it pathetic. The young man is an honest person. We progress toward a mutual attachment, going without much trouble or pleasure where others go in passion. Destiny opens up in its soft version, in a long ripple. Peace of mind seems assured. As time passes, I can see myself going crazy if I stay with him. I feel agitated, I lose my inner calm. I have the terrible task of breaking up with him. I hurt his feelings. I hurt myself by hurting him. I am berated by everyone. This vague story, boringly placid, ends with fantasies of disgust and violence. I cut to the quick.

  I continue to believe that existence consists of facing obstacles and overcoming them. With your exceptional intelligence and your reading, you would understand that you were not my destiny but an alter ego. At your side I sought to acquire my independence. My marriage to an intellectual is an ideal, the beginning of a new achievement, an as yet unwritten conquest. The love I have for you is the crowning fulfilment of dreamy longings. In retrospect, this is how I see our existential experiment. I remember the sovereign expression of my waking dreams, the fantasies of an immense immaterial wealth. From the moment you arrive I feel completely fulfilled. My love for you transforms my humiliations.

  I attend a university reception. You do not come along. I am wearing an elegant suit, the one I wore on our wedding day. Students, the sons of the middle class, surround me. I am the centre of their attention. A beautiful new suit is enough. The young men are looking for fiancées from well-to-do families who have fewer diplomas than they do. They distrust emancipated women and their morals, which are too lax. The breadth of your intelligence continued to fascinate me at the moment I left you. I do not wish to diminish it. My letter has to do with my relationship with you. I’m finishing up. Countless lyrical figures come to mind. I resist. I continue my work of decoding the fundamental opacity. What I have to write to the end pains me. Your cruelty worked against my spirit.

  It is not your lack of intellectual production, your life at a standstill that caused me to leave. You prowl around my writing desk. You are aggressively sarcastic about those of our friends who write, or paint. You are harshly critical. You claim to make impartial judgments. I am not interpreting your behaviour; I am describing what goes on when we are at home.

  I did not struggle against your constant and indefinite postponement of artistic work. This is incompatible with my accepting who you are. I left you when you became a member of the party. Your Stalinism is the ultimate tool for you to impose yourself on me and the intellectuals. Every sign of your moral rigidity is present in what you say. This second avant-garde, the one that comes after your formalism, fixes the rigidity of your power.

  I have never seen you with a book on politics, not in the past, not in the present. No such book has ever appeared on your desk, or on your bookshelf. That is the source of my astonishment, my stupor. You have always proclaimed the need for intensive preparation, beyond any doubt, in the practice of the arts. You claim membership in a political party and its leadership, without having read a single book.

  Who are you, Mathieu? You call for crimes and murders now. You deploy insults and threats. The brilliant future is to be bought with deaths and concentration camps. I keep silent, carrying out my responsibilities until I understand what is going on. I don’t understand. I don’t read books on politics. I have hardly any points of reference.

  The assiduous work at my writing desk leads to a new ritual. My literary attempts are taking shape. I am keeping my papers rather than throwing them in the waste basket. My pages record emptiness, nothingness, absence, infinite negation: refusal. Such are my attempts at independence and autonomy. They have something of an eternal new beginning. I can’t see what is coming, unless it is an announced break with the great formalist statements.

  This,
my letter, is not the place to lay out the goals that brought me to writing. I publish little. It is my duty to take risks. Being born a woman means having to give oneself permission to act and to think.

  Men my age had access to positions of power and prestige. I am fighting against their abusive power. I am uncovering their double language, their treachery, their childish unease at my not admiring and valuing them as the chosen Sons. They try to pass as youthful. They have never roused my maternal instincts. The hardest years of my life were those of my youth when I moved from childhood to adult life, while the eternal geniuses are cunning men who have stayed young.

  Nothing has changed. He is short and obese. I can hear maternal women saying: You mustn’t focus on someone’s physical appearance. He has been getting fatter and fatter; his eyes are disappearing in his podgy face. A moustache has been sprouting above his almost non-existent lips. He plays the clown in public, surrounds himself with admirers, trots out the language of a high school student, and bursts into belly laughs.

  The man speaks fast, with such an abrupt rhythm and flow that it is hard to believe that his words originate in his brain. Everything is uttered as though by machine gun. Listen to him: how sociable, how voluble. What he says is of little interest. He repeats anecdotes he’s heard elsewhere, embroiders on them, plays one against the other. He grows more and more excited, frantic, hysterical.

  A professor, a poet, an essay writer, a prolific literary critic, the man swells up with the books he devours and regurgitates. He reads a dozen books a month, writes as many critiques, publishes a collection of poetry or a novel every year, appears on various radio shows, travels via writers’ networks from New York to Paris to Rome, pricey capital cities where life pulsates. He lives in the country, so it is good to grapple with the life of the cities. Where does one learn to speak so rapidly, so loudly, so confidently, breaking up the flow with Rabelaisian laughter? It is impossible to remember what he says. His optimism frightens me. Feeling so violently satisfied at being among other people strikes me as unlikely. It is impossible to decipher what he thinks about literature from his writings. He is a little boss-man who directs traffic with a blast of a whistle and a shot across the bow. He writes with the same speed; the sentences must out. There are deadlines. He ingests; he regurgitates immediately. There is no time for it to be any different. This is literature for the gut, time that is for money and clients, poems and novels delivered to the enormous letterbox at his home on the side of the road. There, he plays the role of the man of the book. Wherever he goes, except in New York, Paris and Rome, he is the jovial centre of attention. Others greet him, are deferent, circumspect, full of admiration, on their guard.