The Stalinist's Wife

by France Theoret

  From time to time he raises his voice with grating humour. Enver Hoxha’s Albania is his imaginary green paradise, the chosen land among all idyllic lands, the model of success, the model for our collective future. When he gets tired of this exemplary country, he becomes a Pol Pot adherent, a disciple of the Khmer rouge. The revolution underway in distant Cambodia lets him wax poetic. He undoes and redoes the name Pol Pot and the developing classless society: Long live Pol Pot, Long live free Cambodia. He marches down the hallways of the college, chanting slogans. I study his carefully styled hair, his pullovers in fashionable colours that match his trousers and his socks. He waves his long delicate hands at chest height.

  I am double. I have read André Glucksmann’s political essay La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes. In it the philosopher attacks the Soviet Union, the gulag, the blindness of Stalinist parties for the great dissident books and the work of Solzhenitsyn. The young teacher does not address me, Louise Aubert. He talks; he expresses himself; he performs angry outbursts wherever he likes and in the face of whoever is there. He insults others behind their backs, resorts to intimidation. I grasp the meanings of his words. My words fade into nothing before such aggression and ill will. Then I forget until the next episode that does not fail to take place, with variations for the sake of entertainment.

  No one takes a stand against the statements proffered by this dandy. On the contrary, he is attractive to our older colleagues who wish to be well-regarded. He acquires a certain reputation among the most senior people. He is admitted to the group of the most authoritative voices in the departmental meetings. He is already one of them.

  Weeks after the union meeting I find words to respond to the threat of concentration camps. I wonder whether my colleague knows Mathieu.

  I need to exercise neutrality, self-effacement. An attempt at self-imposed conformity keeps me on the periphery. My status as a separated woman is known.

  I approach my writing desk. This is not a natural thing; it shouldn’t be seen that way. What is troubling is the mad voice that takes over my mind. The voice protests, snickers, takes hold. This does not happen when I do the work I have to do. Only when I am free does such a scenario develop. My nerves are literally wracked by internal noise and din. The ongoing ruckus whirls through my head, hammering and wrecking my ideas. I am seated at my desk. I have gone rigid, my legs heavy, and my face burning with powerlessness and distress. Time doesn’t pass. My hands go dry. When I face the page, the ban on writing manifests itself. I struggle; I fight. Something happens, an encounter between a brutal taboo and formal thought.

  I get up and walk over to the mirror to see if my face is still intact. Once I forget about my face, I can write. I compose in search of synthesis. There is no point writing without finality. I have given up any position of dominance. While I want women to access power through their experience, the gesture of writing means something else. I am breaking with my professional life. I am not moving toward power, and even less so toward my inner depths. Literary work begins in emerging chaos. These are the best hours. It is vital for me to touch the heart of the chaos, the knot, the loss of my face in words.

  Mornings and evenings I write in my notebooks, at the desk looking out beyond the façade of the house, or in the dining room that serves as a second workspace, or in my bed. I take the notebooks with me to the country in the summer. I have made notes on Mathieu, simple sentences. There are few. They are short. If I were to line them up they wouldn’t cover half a page of these thick notebooks. The notes resemble the tiny pieces of a palimpsest. A story will emerge if I recount each one of the fragments in neutral emotionless words.

  I recall each event that is attached to the short notes I made. I relive each moment with stupefying intensity. My notebooks say nothing about the torment of which Mathieu was the source. I conclude that after attempts at reconciliation it is better not to see him again. I have to forget him, which is impossible. My letter, my last attempt to make myself known and say who I am, does not resolve what we have become. Mathieu did suggest we might maintain friendly relations.

  More than a year after the separation, I begin an appeal that is followed by such brief meetings. I imagine that there are still friendly, respectful connections. There must still be special moments and conversations – we were together for twelve years. On September 29, 1977 I take the first step toward forestalling the immense loss that definitive silence would entail. Last night, I didn’t feel well, I phoned Mathieu. I shouldn’t have done that. I hear that immediately in his tight voice, full of reproach. He says he has his life and I have mine. He is on break with full pay, is busy with party politics, and refuses to write even one word of a doctoral thesis in the service of the bourgeoisie.

  Mathieu seems to be more Stalinist than before. Such a thing is impossible. According to studies I’ve done in linguistics, there are facts that exist and others that don’t. He is a Stalinist or he isn’t. I have to find the answer. The first possibility is as follows: Mathieu didn’t have the orthodox language down pat when I left him; he does now, which creates the impression that every word he utters refers to some doctrine. The second possibility: yesterday as I was listening to him he emphasized words and expressions, underlining how they referred conceptually and directly to orthodox thinking. I know Stalinist language better, which allows me to grasp what he is talking about.

  In the spring when I read Glucksmann’s La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes I was convinced by Glucksmann’s thinking and the intellectual consequences it implies. I needed to respond. I felt torn, broken, with no access to my language. I have no words, not those of my earlier journal, the yellow notebook, in which I wrote that the facts presented by Glucksmann oblige us to think the gulag now and in the future.

  I phoned the man who was my partner for so many years with the assumption that he knows me better than anyone else. I told him what is not working out. It was like a monologue. In response, I got a speech he’d learnt by heart, an avalanche of lifeless abstractions, his intangible truths. My mind turned off. I am not able to defend what I am, what I think, what I believe.

  Mathieu is a man of convictions. Mine do not fit with his. His voice alone pushes aside my reality. I no longer have access to my hidden ideas that have disappeared behind an amalgam of feelings and emotions. This is where my irrational confusion originates. I made a mistake phoning him and aggravated what I

  call the pain of living, my internal turmoil.

  March 26, 1978. I saw Mathieu. My grey notebook tells me that this was the first time I met him after I left. He’s at my door, his car parked in front. He’s promised to return the books by Antonin Artaud and Jean Paul Sartre that I asked for. Mathieu’s hands are empty. He says he’s in a rush, that he only remembered my request for the works of Artaud after the party meeting. He runs from meeting to meeting. His activities take up all his time. I insist. I repeat that I want him to bring my books. I am standing in front of him. He raises his voice. He may be on a study break but he has better things to do than write a thesis. He’s a true son of the working class; his father is a factory worker. He speaks at amazing speed. He declares that his membership in the proletarian party, the most powerful in terms of membership, allows him to identify his enemies, the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. The hour of the working class has come. When we are in power, we, the communists, flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood of the proletarians, we will have the duty of sacred hate. The heroic hatred that the party maintains deepens our vision of the future. We shall vanquish. The proletariat holds the truth. If I don’t say what he says, he subjects me to the horror of his discourse. I am speechless, unable to respond.

  Once the door is closed I think about Mathieu’s political hatred that is addressed to the entire country and to me. His language, more emphatic than it ever was before, consists of ready-made phrases provided by the party. I, Mathieu Lord, son of a worker. He bases what he says on his class origins. With this new code he justifies his d
emands for persecution and aggression. According to him capitalism will be overturned tomorrow, and the party’s takeover of power in the name of the proletariat is imminent. His language is hurtful, touches me through its intonations, exaggerations, outrageousness. What he says is directed at me.

  The day after, March 28, 1978, I see Mathieu again. He’s having a coffee in my kitchen. He has brought the books by Artaud but not the ones by Sartre which he says are his, which is not true. I am hesitant and stuttering again. I have grown smaller. He says I am undergoing bad psychoanalysis. It’s too long; I don’t need it. He urges me to give it up. Only the bourgeois and the petty bourgeois have psychological problems; the working class doesn’t. He knows the psychoanalysis will weaken me, drag me down into powerlessness. If that’s what I want I should just keep up the sessions. However I am not to speak his name on the couch. I must not talk about him. He says he is not involved. If I’m weak it’s not his fault. He orders me to forget him.

  I told my mother I was in psychoanalysis. She was furious: you’ll be talking about us. Mathieu has the same reflex. My mother never went to university, which is not the case for Mathieu. I am desperate. My mother is furious. Mathieu is too. He adds interdiction to his anger. He orders me to give it up.

  I want his approval. I want him to think well of his ex-wife. I tell him I’ve read The Origins of the Family by Engels. I cite a passage by heart on how the oppression of women pre-existed the institution of private property. He instructs me to reread this. That is not how Engels is to be understood. He repeats his expressions from earlier, you don’t understand. My reading and my judgment are put into question. He sends me back to the Book. He puts on his arrogant, superior tone. I feel destabilized, desperate. Our separation has intensified the effect of his physical presence and his language when we are face to face. In vain, I make exceptions because of his party membership. I feel distraught. A profound disgust erodes my speech and takes away my will.

  April 21, 1978. Mathieu calls me. I have just published a book. It mentions how aggressive he was about the grey notebook. He shouts out his hatred for what I’ve written. He states that my words are hateful. He’s had this word in his mouth ever since he joined up with the Stalinists.

  He repeats the hatred he feels for what I write. He speaks in my place: he declares that I am full of hate. Mathieu goes on and on, transforming what I have written into a flood of words that have not been heard before. He is fearlessly crude and at war with me and everyone else.

  My reaction is physical: shivers, spasms, tremblings, hiccups, teeth gnashing. He pours a flow of vulgarities over me, the like of which I have never heard before. The word hatred, satanically ugly, doesn’t exist in my everyday lexicon. Even hardened people fear it, abhor it, formulate their invective in other ways. The evocation of physical and mental death cannot be any more obvious. Hatred proclaims the end, the taste for blood and systematic cruelty. Hatred: the word has a mortal violence about it that makes me vulnerable.

  I do not want to hear Mathieu’s rage. I will never be able to return it. In the past he wanted to censor me, forbid me to write, remind me that he is the Master of language. Now he is cursing me.

  I published general impersonal allusions, short sentences, not even a paragraph on the marriage of intellectuals. After undergoing so much unhappiness, shame and self-censorship, I managed to express sober and factual generalities. He calls for the depersonalization of a writer and their art, the elimination of subjectivity, the strictest formalism. He cannot bear the slightest expression of individuality. He continues to refuse the first person, which represses what is real.

  I can hear his brutality, his ugly rattling voice. I have been wiped out, and no longer possess my reason. I have a clear image of a paroxysm, a scene that has been played before. In another place. My old fear, so ancient, takes hold of my psyche.

  Mathieu succeeds in instilling his own affect in me. I try to console him. I literally put myself in his place. I am in the process of nullifying myself. I disavow my freedom of thought. I express extreme, exhausting alienation. Madness may follow on this dispossession of self. The fact that I have taken on Mathieu’s hatred, in my name and my body, terrifies me. The psychological violence can kill me or make me lose my mind, which is the same thing. I have to rub out this hatred. I can’t. My scapegoat attitude is wrong. I have nothing else. My ex-husband is unleashing obscenities, a verbal excess I have never experienced before.

  May 1, 1976. I left the house. May 1, 1978, the anniversary of this date, I note that I no longer regret this. A laconic statement.

  I see my past with Mathieu like this: I did what I considered honest. I proved my love for him a thousand times. I put the whole of my strength, my energy, my care, my hours into this. I failed. His cold heart rejected any sign of tenderness. He used me.

  Images come back to me. On my knees in church, I

  pray that that He will show me the way. The husband I will have one day is already a shining star. I am in the habit of walking straight from point A to point B. The wind penetrates my woollen coat. At the counter of a jewellery store there is a fourteen carat gold medallion with the inscription “ + than yesterday – than tomorrow.” The Real Woman wears the authentic prayer for love on her gold chain.

  The old foundations of my Catholic education instruct me to look ahead, toward the future and hope. My old religion links sovereign good with the idea of a better future. Like the others, I will be saved by the doctrines, the beliefs and their ideals. Evil will be expiated. A new time will come in which I will have a smooth future, that is neat and tidy. I will become a future child who has learnt nothing, who is just a gigantic stomach. I give up what makes me a hopeful human being.

  I intend to unfold my own language. That is my immediate project. So far I have not had access to any power whatsoever. Given my birth and the will of those who preceded me, all I can do is never give up, as the saying goes.

  Although it is no longer a question of the old authoritarian religion, hope remains: believe or die. Doctrines call for people to believe in a future that sings. The unhealthy notion that the future will bring recompense is not dying out, nor is the idea of a rebirth. That is what I was taught. I continue to revere the ideology of progress; I apply myself to this and I live for the future, in spite of my defeat with Mathieu.

  In the spring of 1976 he did not want to talk about my leaving. I had to accept this refusal. I write it into my wounded memory. On the anniversary, May 1

  1978, I write he rejected the idea of talking about it. Tears come to my eyes. I repress them mercilessly. I have to get tougher. From now on our marriage is a corpse, an embarrassment, an empty parenthesis, an undefined past that I left feeling more dispossessed than when I entered.

  In my grey notebook, on May 3, 1978, I say the equilibrium I felt when I was with Mathieu has been destroyed. If it were possible to have a decent conversation, I would establish links between what happened during our marriage and today. I keep thinking that no one else knows me better. And the opposite is true as well. No one knows Mathieu better than I do. I think about that.

  I refuse to believe that I counted for nothing when I was with him. If he doesn’t want to talk, it’s because he has nothing to say. That strikes me as tautological. Redundancies and statements of the obvious make up his daily rhetoric. Who else but Mathieu would get bogged down in his habits? Who else but Mathieu would dictate the rules of our living arrangements? I was alone in keeping our marriage alive. Our union represented a harbour, a moment of rest, who knows, maybe even less than that, something like plain practicality or convenience. There is nothing to say, though I keep trying, in vain, to sum it up.

  He rejected my request for a conversation about the life we shared. I didn’t insist. My repeated overtures make me seem to be imploring, begging, praying, pleading with him. It is impossible to make him do what he refuses. What destructive power Mathieu wields to reduce me to the condition of a beggar, a mendicant starved for affec
tion.

  The break-up and the final distance have been a test for my mental stability. I grew up with the project of sharing my life with the man I would marry. It was the only vision for the future, and was shared by my family, my social milieu, and the entire society. I devised the unique goal of gaining access to a profession. My mother, the self-proclaimed victim of my father, treated me like a child when I announced my decision to work after I got married. When she discovered that I had left the marriage, she assured me that my life was over. You will never get another man, she said. Having a marital status is an obligation for the people of my background. It is the unwritten law, the condition for being accepted as a complete woman.

  I turned my back on my origins and the ways of my ancestors. My identity has been overturned. I am a deviant, a rebel, a cursed woman, held responsible for the errors committed by her husband, is what one of the many nuns in the family told me. My life was laid out from the start, its path marked by an ensemble of authorities and romances for young girls.

  Mathieu’s family does not want to hear from me. My pious mother-in-law, a gentle woman of rigid moral standards, is dead. I accept that the others don’t want to see me. My family reproaches me for depriving them, removing from them a branch of the genealogical tree. Every day I discover dizzying consequences of my separation.