These are the last days of January. They plan to cross the US-Mexican border at Laredo, continue through Mexico, crossing mountains on dangerous roads where armed gangs ransom their prey. My father insists, keeps on repeating, the way he always hammers on his ideas: you’ll never go on a trip like this, you’re not brave enough. Your mother and I are off on an adventure. He keeps on putting me down, and orders my mother to serve me another glass of vodka. She puts up a mild protest, and pours me a shot. He raises his surly voice: go on, that’s what she likes.
We’re sitting around the old laminate table they once bought at a second-hand shop. A ceiling light that belongs in a bedroom lights up the narrow kitchen of their rented apartment. The gaudy curtains clash with the colour of the walls and cupboards. Everything is improvised. They live amid bric-a-brac, just like in American movies where the poor huddle in front of their televisions. But they’re not poor. They don’t care; that’s why they still don’t have a place of their own.
I have dressed carefully; I dress up whenever I go see them, with matching shoes and jewellery. I’ve had my hair done. They are in their usual worn-out clothes. I have to honour them with my distinction. That’s what I owe them, and that’s what I do. One vodka follows the next. My father is trying to get me drunk. I don’t drink much, and am not used to it. My parents have been weaned after many years of drunkenness. When they left the empty village in the Laurentians and set up in a distant suburb of Montreal, they turned the page, putting a stop to their unreasonable consumption. My father wants to see me drunk. I am a separated woman, a future divorcee. He wants to add to my degraded image. He orders me to drink. I drink, concentrating on staying lucid.
The two of them, sitting opposite me, don’t partake. They’ve had one glass. They keep pouring me drinks. The alcohol removes inhibitions. With what I think is serene clarity, I can see where this game will lead. My father wants to see his daughter drunk. He’s setting a trap; he’s planned this. I am aware of what is going on. It’s something new, unwritten; that’s how blind I’ve been. The fear I’ve always felt for him fades, disappears. I am the butt of an unpleasant joke. My filial relationship is revealed as a theatre of cruelty that bans all good feeling. The respect I owe them remains intact. My visceral fear evaporates under the effect of the alcohol. The role-playing continues. He openly scorns me without my answering back. My father’s hostility calls for a cool mind. As soon as I’m with them, I talk to myself. I am double. I am riven. My internal voice reassures me: I will withstand the vodka. I drink it without pleasure. Again my mother says: That’s enough. Her husband forces her to pour me another glass. The afternoon is dreary.
A month later my parents have not reached Mexico, settling for northern Florida instead. My father was hospitalized in Saint Augustine, where he died. Something wasn’t right between him and me. He never accepted me. There was no affinity.
I am back in that distant suburb, accompanying my mother who needs to choose father’s coffin. We wander through the enormous finished basement where the coffins are stocked, from the cheapest to the most luxurious. The funeral home employee keeps insisting: He’s heavy, Monsieur Aubert. You have to think about its solidity, the pallbearers are going to lift it up. You wouldn’t want the bottom to give out. This is pathetic and petty. Only one coffin ends up fulfilling the requirements for size and solidity.
I find the employee’s comments on my father’s obesity offensive. I cannot respond on behalf of my mother. She would offend me in turn. The rituals will start in two days’ time. We are in my car. My usually so talkative brother is silent. I will drive fifty kilometres in silence if he keeps on like that. I’ve made an effort. The misunderstandings with my father were constant. My brother’s silence bothers me. I am in an altered state, torn between what will happen with the visitors and my psychological confusion, icy sadness. I could say anything. I ask my passenger: do you think papa enjoyed his life? He says: yes, yes, yes. He falls silent. I am at peace. I manage to forget myself, to put myself in my father’s shoes, according to Catholic principles. My new woman friend comes to the funeral home along with two young women who were there when we first met. I am moved by their thoughtfulness, their generous gesture.
Mental images emerge and unfold. With the analyst I talk about the humiliations I suffered at the hands of my father without ever rebelling, without even understanding that I was the object of his displeasure. I am used to not understanding immediately. I’ve been conditioned from birth to accept my father’s humiliating aggressions.
On the couch, I gaze up at the high ceiling and recount specific episodes. My words are broken, muffled by the pain of so many ugly experiences. What I say doesn’t interest the analyst. She doesn’t respond in any way; she must be asleep in her armchair. What I am trying to formulate is brand new material. I have not talked to anyone about my father. I consider myself an adult. It was a mistake to be stoic and impassive.
I thought I couldn’t say what had gone on, that I didn’t have the right, that the simple fact of opening my mouth and saying here, this is what it is, constituted an attack, a crime against the man who engendered me. For the first time in my life, in the analyst’s office, I describe the recurrent scenes of insult, deceit, and abuse of power – and of how he tricked me out of sums of money. Did I never have any self-esteem? There is no response whatsoever from the analyst. She is silent. I am suffocating. I was reasonable with him. She demands that I be reasonable with her. What becomes of a woman who was not loved by her father? I don’t dare ask her. I know that I am not allowed to do this, that she’ll sanction my misdemeanour in her way, adding further silences to my confusion, my incomprehension.
There is one constant. I made the mistake of never confronting my father. He became a character who terrorized me, that’s how often we clashed. I have no memory of spending any peaceful moments with him. I avoided him. I took care not to cross him and I showed him respect. It was not enough, it did not suffice. Right to the end, he picked fights with me, I suffered his attacks. He had every right over me.
I didn’t have the right to rebel and so I didn’t. I cultivated indifference. I learnt the story of his birth, his education, his youth, how he met my mother. I heard fragments of conversations from which I forged a complete account. I did the same with my mother.
My father comes from a background that is more permissive than my mother’s. He likes to have fun, amuse himself. He had a golden, leisurely time in his youth that lasted until he was thirty. He enjoyed a freedom he never provided for any of his children. The popular notion that parents give their children what they themselves never had does not hold. My mother’s family, which was ultramontane, puritan and authoritarian, was headed by an unforgiving paterfamilias. My mother ran away when she was sixteen. She rebelled, becoming a fugitive who then submitted to her husband. The great teenage rebel returned to the ranks, to be broken by a querulous husband.
My father’s ideas, which were retrograde and reactionary on the topic of women, increased my wordless anxiety. Whenever he invented insults, outrageous attacks, I refused to react. Our last meeting is representative of the fixed roles we played, the utter lack of affection.
I was polite, caring, and full of deference toward him. I always greeted him first; I listened whenever and however long he spoke. Popular psychology would say we were fated not to get along. The pathos kills me. My father possessed the symbolic aura attributed to the authority he wielded. I accorded him that authority until and after he died. His death is a relief.
I say that my father is dead. My psychoanalyst does not listen. I have been stretched out on her couch for more than a year.
My wanderings from one place to another ever since my separation will end in July. I hire workers to do renovations. I have to set up the kitchen and find new furniture. Classes are almost over. I still have literary analyses to correct and end of year meetings to attend. I establish a strict routine that includes my sessions with the psychoanalyst, the supervision
of the renovations, shopping and deliveries, meetings with my publisher, the search for a cottage on a lake, and visits to my mother.
I move, I function, I follow a circumscribed course of action. My days are fragmented. I am like a machine, an object in the process of completing its race toward a home and an address with its name on it. The days abolish any time for thought.
I live on the third and top floor, and I reach this place via a first exterior staircase and a second interior one. I enter my new apartment which consists of seven rooms, laid out in the classic Montreal design. The rectangular room with the balcony overlooking the street is my office. The classic double living room has been turned into a spacious dining room where I will write in the winter. My bedroom which is off the double room has a window that looks out on the alley. The corridor leads from the entrance to a small bedroom on the right with a skylight and a central space that serves as a living room. The large traditional kitchen and the bathroom lie beyond. I’ve had the walls repaired and painted and the hardwood floors sanded. The dimensions of the rooms are pleasant; the ceilings are high and without decorations, the original doors made from humble materials. There is no stained glass in the windows. The grey stone façade has straight lines.
I like the layout, the breath of the light, the calm, and the bareness of the walls. Having so much space seems a luxury. I move around in the white rooms that are virtually empty. The material breathes. The triplex is located on a busy street where Montreal displays its urbanity at the cost of green spaces. My large bright apartment is a haven. The tension lets up; the silences without music or radio are unwritten.
I spend the summer working on short texts and sharing the cottage in the Laurentians with the family of a colleague. We alternate our use of it. I haven’t finished setting up my apartment. When I’m at the cottage I think about the city. Both the apartment and the greenery demand my attention. In this second summer since my separation internal turbulences still lie in wait for me. I break the excitement that unsettles me; I put an end to it.
I become my full self when a number of exacting tasks, hours filled to overflowing, line up one after the other, a series of duties that keep me out of breath, panting. Material things require rapid attention. But as soon as I fulfil my mandatory tasks and deal with my demanding timetable, I lose a large part of my mental faculties and am invaded by an invisible mass, an obscure burden. My head and my brain go under. I consist only of pieces; my intelligence is split by macabre visions.
Though I carry out each one of my responsibilities, I derive no pleasure from this. Still, my search for solitude is deliberate and sovereign. I am where I have wanted to be. The time is mine; I have a limited number of free hours.
Such confusion, such indecipherable mental disorder paralyses me. I am absent and in limbo, in transition and transformation. Something in my own brain is attacking my integrity. I am in the grip of a serious psychological disorder; I am powerless. I can state clearly: My culture is making me sick. I don’t want to believe the false statement that my culture is making me sick. Still, the illness comes from the outside. I have such a feeling of absence and non-existence that a free life, without concrete, material finality, sends me back to guilt.
I was born to live in dependence, like the other women of similar origin. You’re all the same, say the men. I rebel. In my mind I protest. My silence is complicit. The women who hear this don’t move. I don’t know what they think about the insult addressed to us. I told myself terrible tales in order to conform with what was expected of us. I was hostile to confidences, to shameful imaginings, to the unveiling of morbid fantasies. The only thought is this one: who am I and what am I doing that I should be invaded and submerged by stories of alienation that outrage my will. I have so wanted to become a woman who creates her own future. No one cared. My decisions have not affected the pathological ties I have with my family. I have been living with changes for the past year. What is happening to me moves from quick to slow and inversely from slow to quick while everything within me is slow. This phenomenon, normally imperceptible and silent, is exhausting.
The woman friend who talks about herself phones me often. She stimulates me, and drags me away from the solitude of the bare walls. We begin to talk regularly by phone, which I accept as she is so focused on her own desire for change. Her unclear erotic desires, undecipherable and without a love object, are a constant topic. I try to make her understand that she needs to seize the right moment to make love. My friend considers this idea unreasonable. I repeat it. She keeps trying to identify the true nature of her orientation and goes on about that, without my daring to ask any indiscreet question. I don’t know if she’s thinking about erotic gestures, or if she has fantasies.
The woman, who will soon be thirty, is searching for what will be the object of her love. She rarely utters the word love, which I find surprising. She seems to know nothing about the mythology perpetuated in romances and novels, the masquerade of femininity that defined the delirious world of my youth. She has managed to avoid the saccharine hotchpotch of melodrama and emotion in those stories that are aimed at young girls.
We continue dissecting desire in and of itself. The main idea is expressed in language similar to written text. She comes back to this. Where the majority of people proceed without endless questions, she demands a certain congruence between what she says, what she does, and what she reads. I suggest that she set off immediately in search of a man or a woman with the goal of making love. She rejects this. She’s not pleased. I am becoming too light, too superficial for her taste. What I say makes no sense. She objects. She says I don’t know how to listen or that I’m incapable of grasping the richness proposed by the condition of desire. She tirelessly inventories attitudes of desire. There is a certain beauty to listening to the infinite variations on the theme of desire that remains desire.
I met an unmarried man, younger than me, at the university, in a course given by a great Lacanian psychoanalyst. This man, who becomes my lover, has a sculpted body, athletic beauty that is nearly perfect. Some women look for such men. My attraction to him is beyond reason. In his arms I re-experience the extreme ardour of the weeks that preceded the end of my marriage.
We live in hiding. Our clandestine relations remain secret until I tell my woman friend that I have a lover. I introduce them. She doesn’t like him. It’s understood. She pretends not to know about his existence when we talk on the phone. Which suits me. I intend to maintain close ties with him, out of reach of troublesome others.
I occasionally think and reckon that I am copulating the way men do. My erotic life is detached from feelings. I feel a constant desire for him, in a brute, urgent, animal way. Words of love do not exist. He doesn’t utter any. We are exuberant. We don’t speak much during the day; we share the nights in silence.
Ours is a wordless sexuality of planned, ordered meetings. Our habits establish themselves according to our tacit wishes. He comes to my place on Friday evenings. We part late Sunday afternoon. He has to go; I want him to go. Sundays at five I don’t know if the week is ending or beginning.
This is not passion or love. Our encounter is epidermic. It goes on, and it renews itself. I tell myself I am making love like a man. My tense body requires appeasement. My lover has what it takes to satisfy me.
The erotic madness that I see as a passing phenomenon maintains itself beyond what I thought possible. What takes place between us does not develop. Our frantic bodies engage in a kind of aggression. The sexual fire reminds me of a discharge, an electric shock. My body is more tolerant than I am; it accepts pleasures that my head disapproves of.
In vulgar mode, I think I fuck, and so I am a man. My search for love has ended. The woman who was so attentive to love that she was dispossessed of herself no longer exists. The feverish bodies mime lovers’ passion. She’s not the one who is in charge here. My heart is not involved at all. I do not hope to share my life with my lover. On Sundays he has to go.
Almost two years later, and after a few rare disappointments the Sundays begin to get long. I start making the first moves toward a break-up. Our meetings grow more scarce and bitter; our relationship is deteriorating. The end comes after a bizarre incident in the kitchen. He hooks his muscular arm around my neck and lifts me up. His only violent gesture is followed by a pathetic offer of marriage and a bouquet of flowers delivered to my address.
I’ve done all the necessary paperwork to change my name. I am now Louise Aubert; I am no longer Louise Lord. My colleagues are getting used to my new name; they are beginning to forget Madame Lord. In September, two new women teachers arrive who show an interest in their women colleagues. This raises my hopes. A male colleague has also joined. He becomes the speaker of the group at departmental meetings. I remain outside the groups. I acquiesce to their need for solidarity; otherwise I keep my distance.
A young colleague whom I see regularly dresses in expensive pullovers, fitted trousers, fine leather shoes. He has soft hands, long well-manicured fingers, and impeccable hair. He attends the union meetings where he does not propose or defend any personal ideas. I am distant and polite when I cross his path. I do not engage in conversation. He does not utter a single idea; he is moody. What is extraordinary is that he expresses his arrogance and superiority with exclamations, groans, threatening looks. We are supposed to guess what his ideas might be. Rumour has it that he is a member of the Stalinist party.
Grumbling, he observes people’s interventions at union meetings, dissatisfied with everyone. He doesn’t approve of the radicals either: their political allegiances are not the right ones. He enters the room, his face tense; he leaves looking overwrought. I am standing beside him at the end of one of these meetings. He says: Just wait, once the proletariat takes power, that guy over there, and he points at the last man who spoke, that guy will be sent to the great Canadian north. I have no response. I can feel his condescendence, his violence and his disdain for the teacher in question. My colleague is openly talking about concentration camps. He states that henceforth camps are the sine qua non of the next proletarian dictatorship. My horror and disgust cannot be turned into language. I decode what he says and am unable to address one word to him. This young man, with the distinguished look and almost feminine gestures, is sharing his arrogant frustrations with me. No one prevented him from voicing his opinion as the militants put it. He stayed in his seat, passive among the almost one hundred teachers, waiting for what doesn’t happen. And now he’s muttering, uttering threats.
The Stalinist's Wife Page 9
