May 6, 1978. I write our friends have gone with Mathieu. “These are friends that the wind carries off.” They have left an empty space around me. Popular psychology says that people avoid separated couples. It happened to me: my family pulled back, so did my friends. I made a mistake, an error. I committed a crime. There is no exact word. The loss of shared friends affects me. I refuse to weigh myself down over their disappearing. A separated woman is at fault unless her husband is a monster and recognized as such. They have abandoned me; some have refused to see me again. We are in a quiet revolution. My families and friends compare me to the society that once was, the one that didn’t change, that isn’t changing, that will not change. On this day in May, I note the coldness and dread of their absence. I write it down. Tomorrow, will I feel that this absence is preferable to the desultory friendships directed at the couple? Some people preferred Mathieu. His professional and social status is higher than mine.
June 30, 1978. It is summer vacation, and I see Mathieu at his place, in the house I left. The rooms are stuffed with worn-out furniture, wardrobe doors, broken picture frames, tarnished mirrors. I make my way between assorted tables and chests of drawers, a warehouse full of uninteresting objects. The smell of dust hangs in the air despite the open windows. On the stove is a saucepan with the leftovers of a stew, on the counter are dirty dishes. The kitchen is full of odd chairs. Mathieu wanted me to pick up the last volume of Sartre’s collected works. The evening draws on. A soft summer light has entered the place. We are sitting near the open door. The night moths come in and flit about the ceiling light.
This is what I wrote down: Let him talk about his Stalinist group. The party is planning huge pan-Canadian projects and has assigned him a high position. He already is or soon will be a member of the central committee. What he has to say about his new titles gets confused with the titles he already holds and those he wants. Numerous promotions are in sight, promising immense and prestigious responsibilities within the organization. He describes the correct line for cultural production. I mention Zhdanov. He respects Zhdanov as a forerunner, he says. He informs me that Zhdanov’s ideas have been criticized. The party has moved on, now references to China and the “Hundred Flowers” are in vogue. He talks to me like the pupil I once was, looking down on the state of my knowledge which is not up to date.
I read Yawning Heights by Alexander Zinoviev. I don’t talk about it. I absolutely want to avoid arguments, which is impossible. Again Mathieu shows how necessary his party membership is. His mood makes him resort to the vehement language of the missionary. His voice swells with certainties and wily remarks. Language is a tool for use by those who dominate, he says, and that’s why he’s contributing to the party that will win.
Again he rails against my psychoanalyst and my publications. He attacks me. He accuses me of celebrating the most outdated subjectivism. Books refer to books; they refer to thoughts and ideas, to impersonal art. The party confirms his perspective on this. He goes on and on in his role as Master though I am no longer his wife. It is understood that we never were and never will be equals.
I listen to him as I did before. He assigns me the role of the pupil who receives his instruction. I am inferior to him. His furious language assails me and cows me. Mathieu looks at me without seeing, caught up in his solipsism. His face is icy, his words pure repetition and redundancy. I know his words and his obsessions. He adds a hysterical note, a shrillness that confronts cold sectarian language. He is beside himself. It is almost midnight when I get into my car. It is late. I feel distraught from his shouting, his affect, his sharp tone, the desiccated words. He resembles a puppet with his frail body and his yelping. He’s performing the role of the man in charge with important titles and positions. He is a miserable conglomerate, a caricature of what is most obnoxious in men.
I am so overwrought that my driving is dangerous. We didn’t have any alcohol. I hold the steering wheel with both hands, my belly and thighs are tense. I drive aggressively, aware of what I’m doing but with my mind elsewhere, invaded by utter confusion. I am trembling for fear of an accident, of dying, of hitting a pedestrian or a moving vehicle, scraping along the parked cars, or running a red light. The trip is endless; the streets are empty; the night is clear. Montreal is peacefully asleep, street for street. The summer softness slips over my bare arms. Cars are as scarce as people on foot. My hands jerk. I drive in fits and starts, my throat in spasms. I am in pieces, divided against myself. I park near my house. I can’t sleep.
I open a new burgundy notebook and write: I have to finish with Mathieu who has finished with me. No preceding sentence introduces this one; the next one doesn’t refer to it. Sometimes I have reasonable ideas. I have to keep them that way. The morning goes by. I am still, seated at my desk inside the cottage while the sun is shining. My desire for an explanation is waning. Another stage is beginning. What happened is a story that is now part of my memory. There is no point believing in future meetings. I give up on plain words and the most basic signs of recognition. It’s almost lunchtime; I haven’t budged.
The things of life don’t have enough of an existence. I lived side by side with a man who remains an enigma. Mathieu has no presence; he takes on the colour of whomever he frequents. I remember so few words of love, insignificant fragments, from cold empty years. I decide to initiate no further conversations. He is stuck in his ideological language. What influence can I have given my sole and silent desire for autonomy and freedom. I exercise no power, and so I am of no interest. If one day he changes, if he comes to believe in a calm, friendly relationship, it will come after this year-long episode of my making gestures, taking steps toward him after our break-up. In September 1977 I phoned him in the hope of understanding our separation. I left him because of his ideas. This reason is terrifying.
When I left, I felt the lack of love, the love I was giving him and no one else. My most basic feelings were decomposing.
I wanted to examine more closely what our shared life once was. His verbal aggressions, his knife-edge language, his constant refusals no longer allow any illusions. I have dealt with my perceptions. They are still there, part of my make-up, embodied through what took place. I have no desire to repress my secret sensuality which was shattered by fanatical shrieking.
Mathieu had the habit of opposing what I am and what I do. His Stalinism is the ultimate break. He is beyond attack in that his working class narrative proffers a grandiose, apodictic version, at the very limits of language. His circle of militants is large and prolix. I watch myself. That doesn’t stop. Ideological language does not pass.
Our break-up is consummated a second time. I have to acknowledge that. I attempted a rapprochement based on our former friendship and ideas about mutual respect. I phoned him and we saw each other for several hours. He insulted me; he screamed his hatred of me. I can sense his desire for murder.
Today, August 6, 1978, I have spent the whole day sitting at my desk, writing in the first pages of the burgundy notebook. The weather is so clear, so hot that I can’t resolve a single problem. I ask myself endless questions. I am in search of one simple concrete fact to remind me that we loved each other. My notebooks do not mention a single one. A day will come when I will be certain that I was mistaken in my love for Mathieu.
I dream about him. My dreams are close to nightmares. This is nothing new; the absence of words of love is intolerable. When I wake up, I spend long moments regaining my mental composure. I drive away the nightly images without regard for my useless pain. These sterile nightmares are making me passive. I remain seated, motionless, forced to reason with myself. He doesn’t have to say one word to express that he doesn’t want to see me anymore. I have to accept that. I am not at all comfortable on this chair, from which I don’t move until nightfall.
It is inevitable that his words, omnipresent in my nights, should destroy my fragile equilibrium. On August 18, 1978 I make a dry note: Mathieu’s negative ideas. Experimental fiction, that’s not
for you, he told me. Because you don’t realize that there’s nothing to say, and that this nothing is what makes up literature. In his view, if I keep on writing I will have to take recourse in metaphor. It is best to embed factual observations in a vast ensemble, a global metaphor. The insignificance of reality, with its empty and dangerous repetitions, is redeemed by primacy and poetic amplitude, and ideas that have dropped from the sky. I can no longer find the avant-garde formalist I left. Mathieu doesn’t want me to write. He cries out his hatred; he makes negative comments. He continues my retrograde education.
I put away my things. I leave the rented cottage after having spent every day writing. I completed prose poems in which he makes no appearance whatsoever. I am pallid, my skin excessively white. The mirror reflects the image of a face that is too pale. The city and my psychoanalyst await me.
Three days later, August 21, 1978, I have to make every effort to distinguish reality from fiction. Anxiety is doing its work. I have nauseous, destructive views of myself. I count up my failures, my abjection, my deficits and other shortcomings, everything my existence offers as a representation of myself. My head is whirling. I am feeling bad solitude. I am drowning in destructive meanderings.
I grasp hold of a short idea to save myself. Mathieu was a support when we were living together. My mind wanders and tricks my reason, my sense of continuity. Someone, long ago, before I was born put it into my head that I need to be directed, led, driven, taught, constrained. I enter the ideal universe where Mathieu oriented me as much by his wishes as by his discourse. I was stunned by love, overwhelmed by gratefulness. I was what was required: an unfinished, incomplete, not yet formed woman, a woman that a man can compose and construct according to his male parameters. I did not exist; he made me exist according to his desires.
The analyst agrees. She corroborates my words: I created fantasies about Mathieu. After two years of silence the analyst speaks. She agrees with what I am saying. I formulate the disaster. I came to the couch in order to reveal the extent of my psychological illness. The independent woman uncovers her subjection. I told the analyst that Mathieu’s presence was a constant intellectual support. She speaks of illusions. She begins a second sentence: Those are wrong ideas; they say the opposite of what was. The great chimera, the major source of sophisticated masochistic imaginings, is playing its role. The old religious fiction destroyed me from the inside. The man is the head, the woman the body. He thinks, he decides, he orders. She acts, sacrifices herself, devotes herself, she accepts. I am not the one who moves, who deploys constant energies. I am led, guided by him.
Manic mythologizing says I am not the one who protected and helped him. He’s the one who was the pillar, the support and the guarantor of my intellectual certainties. I discover the abject expanse of this degrading chimera. I was inside one of those great French novels that recount love stories in which the man creates the woman and subjects her to his wishes.
Shame rises to my face. I blush and burn. Mathieu told me last spring that I am a traditional woman. I make the link with what the analyst has told me. He benefitted from the services of the housekeeper, the necessary ones and the superfluous ones, right until the last day. I devoted myself, I gave. I had to be helpful in exchange for a veneer of peace. I was the maid.
On October 7, 1978 I moved back into my apartment. My work started again. The analyst said what she thought. In the burgundy notebook there is one note: At the beginning of our marriage I was a conventional woman. I had a young husband that I loved, a roof over our heads, four walls to provide privacy, fresh sheets on the bed. The water from the taps moved me. The kettle in the kitchen sang. The fragrance of coffee woke me up. An orange was a proclamation of wealth. Everything I knew from before renewed itself, just from being with my husband, Mathieu. A young wife in her first home marvels at every gesture. The woman wants to believe in the happiness of the objects, old or new, that she owns. The first time she touches them, the first time she uses them is engraved in her memory. So many women have done this before her.
Tradition promises renewal.
The love songs, the photo novels, the television series, the sentimental fantasies that I was submerged in, through which I hurried in a condition of impatient waiting, they all lead to romance, they produce the ambiance. The love of books and the love of intellectual life were the most difficult to share. I aspired to loving a reader. I wanted to live with a desirable young man who loved books. Is that laughable? He was the one I was waiting for. The miracle took place. There were the sweet times of fulfilment, overflowing with elixirs and divine nectar. In the end, such stories, novels, tales, fantasies end up in a three-room apartment, “kitchen, bedroom, living-room.” She has been getting ready for such a long time. She has been waiting for her man, for her day that legitimates the family. The fairy tale occurs. The fantasy of domestic bliss prolongs itself. It lasted a few years. I woke up. The prince in my life was hungry. The ogre was setting up to devour me. He’d usurped my capacity to work. He criticizes me for being a woman who is dominated by the past. Mathieu lives like the larvae do. The teeming viscous mass of putrid sentiments and moral decay makes me livid. My blood has recoiled from my veins; my flesh has been obliterated. I am frozen.
Such an incomplete little sentence, November 18,
1978. I would rage against Mathieu. The verb in the conditional form is a bad sign. When will I express the rage I feel, which is far from being a delicate, feminine sentiment or that of an accommodating woman? My aggressive impulse, which will not see the light, remains powerless, destroyed in its expression. Mathieu taught me to hate myself.
Time carries me off. His name disappears from my notebook. His grip on me holds fast. I forget him. I have given up my psychoanalyst despite her protestations that my cure is not yet complete. I am as well as I can be even without her support.
If I had known what Mathieu would become, I would not have married him. If I were a powerful woman, I would rage against him. People who are indoctrinated are destructive and their misdeeds boundless. I knew that. I had to rediscover that disguised as something labelled love.
I did not see him again. I did not talk to him again. June 5, 1979 I write into the burgundy notebook: What everybody lives through, is what Mathieu often said. I turned my life into something banal. I trivialized it in accordance with the demands of the person who was my husband. The lines that precede these words allude to my teenage years, to the shrill auditory hallucinations I used to suffer in crowded city buses. The passengers and the windows, the streets would disappear. My senses would fade. Sharp repetitive sounds would beat on my brain. I would go rigid, trapped by the noises coming from my head. Those episodes of auditory hallucination caused me unspeakable stress. I would lose my balance. I’d hold onto a pole, cling there. Shame kept me upright, stopped my fall. Hearing shrieking noises, I was in complete madness. The constant allusions to the madness of my family kept me quiet. I had to keep silent for my own safety’s sake. According to Mathieu, everyone suffers hallucinations. Very rarely did I tell him stories from my life. They didn’t interest him at all. He deprived me of my past, my existential learning, my desire to know life. Beyond hot meals, washed socks, ironed shirts, a clean wellmade bed, a tidy well-kept house with shining windows, he refused the rest of what I was. By emptying me of my experiences, he began to remake me.
The servile, tamed woman that once was cannot get beyond a certain form of expression. What I have written is very incomplete. I am still inhabited by my fear of the Stalinist. I am filled with disgust when I think about our story which is much nastier than my words can tell. My writing doesn’t do justice to what really was.
What if Mathieu was not the man I married. This is not banal or common, not at all; it reflects a deadly reality. The indoctrinated man was a phantom. For a long time I lived under the indoctrination transmitted by earlier generations. I escaped from a purveyor of orthodox thought.
For a long time I observed and read widely in order t
o sketch out the first approaches to the intellectual who never spent a single day doing physical labour, the professor sheltering in his safe little den.
His flight from reality is nothing new. In this case, Mathieu endorses the trivial nature of rigged admiration, the cult of personality. Through his position at the university he gains admission to the inner circle of ideologues, the coterie that lords it over the militant rank and file. His membership in the central committee satisfies his taste for power.
Militancy reinforces this aspect of his personality, the overgrown, irresponsible child with the rudimentary, susurrating language. Hatred floats to the surface of his words. Mathieu undermines how language is used, and he multiplies the deafening condemnations he spouts in the name of the working class. He renders hatred banal: the hatred of this, of that, of him, of them. I have not met anyone else who uses that word as much. Doubtless there are already followers, disciples. He assigns full rights to hatred, a promise of damnation for the present and the future. What touches me most is discovering how absolutely servile he is, since autonomy was what my life most aspired to.
I saw Mathieu again at a literary university event that was held in a room panelled in precious wood. He was moving about hectically, sidling up to the writer who was being feted, trying to attract his attention. I felt an unreasonable terror. I had been formally invited. I was wearing a name tag. He had forbidden me to go to the same places he went. I left, with fear in my belly, and the feeling that I had disobeyed his order.
I saw him once more at a concert given by a renowned pianist. He’d dyed his hair dark brown and wore dentures that swelled up his mouth. During the intermission I stood outside the concert hall, my face at the same level as his. When I walked by him to get back to my seat, he didn’t budge. He recognized me. On the way out of the hall he spoke to the tiny woman accompanying him, getting her to turn in my direction.
The Stalinist's Wife Page 11
