Not a Clue

by Chloé Delaume

  Séraphine didn’t know anything about the cold snap of ’65. Daughter of Azzâm Derdega, roofer, and Françoise Derdega, née Pithiviers, teacher. Séraphine simply learned as the seasons passed that her father was crazy, taken over by sudden violent obsessions, ravaging with his shouting and bloody fists their modest little apartment in accordance with the whims of his dysphoria. Azzâm waivered harsh between concrete mutism and vociferous clamoring, didn’t like anything, not his wife or the child lodger or his friends or his coworkers. Only cheap red wine had any merit at all in his eyes and when his fat body absorbed too much he would hit his wife and his daughter until sleep came and delivered them from this manic plague.

  One night Azzâm didn’t come home. He’d fallen down, a work accident, Séraphine prayed so hard to Heaven and all its territories that her father wouldn’t come back from his coma that for decades afterward she had on her knees irritations scabs. Mother and daughter experienced seven weeks of respite, then at their conclusion welcomed home a limp-legged, paraplegic, fired Azzâm. In his wheelchair the ex-roofer knocked himself out with extremely cheap distilled products, his hands were still healthy enough for three activities: alcoholism, the Club Saint-Étienne, and abuse. From a young age Séraphine nursed an infinite distrust of men and moreover developed a strange concern about her own future.

  Azzâm was her father, an integral part at the heart of her malevolent corpuscles and genes. Azzâm being her father she saw herself as carrying a genetic disease, violence and insanity, she dreamed Rosemary’s baby and every night gave birth to little brown monsters. At the age of eleven Séraphine threw away all her dolls and swore on the head of Candy Candy that she’d never wind up a genetrix. From then on this determined her life as a woman. Séraphine saw herself as contagious legacy and forbade herself any family drive. She dreamed herself part of a couple, consulted de Beauvoir for a better and more rational justification of irreducible hysterectomy preference. At the age of twenty Séraphine combined pill, condom, and iud, begged doctors to accelerate the reign of menopause within her.

  Because she thought she was infected, because whenever a hint of anger flared up in her bosom, she saw in it a stigma of Azzâm’s growing insanity, Séraphine was not of the world. She remained just off to the side. Her choice wasn’t really a choice, not a real one, being a woman without being a mother is an act of supreme will, not a cover-up pose full of common neuroses. Séraphine didn’t ask for anything, except to never give birth to anyone. She left a lot of men in order to protect her sterility desire. She didn’t even wait for a paternal desire to be disclosed. As soon as she was part of a couple she was simply on the lookout for partner reactions toward other people’s children. Only men who showed granite indifference or pronounced disgust had any merit in her eyes, they were the only ones who were for her potential husbands. Until she was thirty-one everything went well. Almost. Insofar as the hypothesis of an eliminated familial cell put her in contact with a panel of men who always belonged to the same category. After the age of twenty-seven hardcore bachelors are still bachelors for four possible reasons: incomplete mourning, obvious egotism, Peter Pan syndrome, some other defect making them unfit for consumption. Until she was thirty-one everything went well, and then Françoise stepped on the gas.

  The night of the funeral some friends invited Séraphine to dinner, offering over nightcaps a variation on the Chinese portrait game in order to distract the newly orphaned woman. If I was a proverb I’d be a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush if I was a lie I’d be the truth if I was a question I’d just be: who.

  Mrs. White in the Lounge

  It happened at the Stalingrad Métro station. The connection between Lines 7 and 2. Séraphine’s body had been on automatic pilot for the whole trip for the last six years three weeks and five days. Twice a week, 57 steps to the entrance, stairs, hallways, platform, Corentin Cariou Crimée Riquet Stalingrad, platform stairs hallways stairs platform Jaurès Colonel Fabien Belleville Couronnes, platform stairs 208 steps, four floors, two turns of the key. The minuscule hallway, right elbow or thigh banging into the door, wounded eyes taking in the walls, 375 square feet of failure and isolation, you can get used to misery but not to mediocrity.

  When she wasn’t seeing Laurent, Séraphine didn’t go out much. Listless she didn’t move from the hollowed-out couch, a two-seater according to the boasting catalog, you’d think that all Scandinavians were gnomes. With three cushions under her temple, curled-up fetal position scratchy shelves nibbling on her toes, she surrendered to cable TV, going from one channel to the next with the greediness of a woman who’s been dumped and starts going from one set of arms to another without ever finding the rest of discovering pleasure.

  At around 1:00 a.m. her muscles finally moaning, her brain would certify it had nothing left to empty out. So she’d get up, splash cold water on her face, stare at her blackheads in the mirror hanging over the antique sink, scrutinize the cracks and crevasses left by time on the enamel and her skin, sometimes shed a tear for appearance’s sake, close the plastic folding door behind her, bump into the door of the main room, push the coffee table out of the way, move the chair, and then sit down at her desk.

  Until nine o’clock or even later, stubborn, she’d correct all kinds of documents, slashing extra lines, assigning to the syntax conventional rhythm, getting the misconjugated verbs into step, emailing back the sanitized pages. Once in a while a cornered client would add to his order a short advertorial folder, a translation, or an outsourced article. Séraphine efficiently accomplished all these tasks, her unusual hours represented a real advantage to a lot of people: urgently sent out in the evening, the work was completed overnight and unfailingly received the next morning. A number of deadline-strangled editors called on her for this very reason.

  Séraphine wasn’t really an insomniac. Her fear of brightness had simply brought her, as time passed, to live an inverted existence. A respectable border between the world of the living and her own. Séraphine was fully aware of her state. She’d cared for it, pampered it. She’d been dead for a long time.

  The Métro car was packed, like always. Poverty clung to her skin. Not her own, she wasn’t poor, just not really well-off, her income just about fit within the statistics. Average. Like her whole existence. Sometimes Séraphine would think to herself I’m the Pasionaria of averageness. Besides, she’d never aspired to anything else but the gentle, straight, and reassuring line of horizontality. Seven years earlier, dropping the confessing letter Forgive me, daughter anvil suicide heart Azzâm is not your father shame dissolved in double asphyxiation, once the initial shock passed she added 1.8 children to her life plans. Not aiming too high crawling too low: none of that for Séraphine, she avoided taking hits she’d had Azzâm for that, Séraphine actually avoided everything, her late mother’s defeated aspirations bewildered her memory with aromas of ch4. Therefore averageness in Séraphine’s eyes remained the purest incarnation of epicureanism. If she’d held a driver’s license, you can bet Séraphine would’ve rented a little house in the suburbs, she could have even gone as far as getting a mortgage for one. With her saddlebags firmly wedged into the fold-down seat Séraphine is thinking about the yard she won’t own, ever, she’s thinking about it right now.

  In the packed subway car Séraphine thinks she’ll never have anything, it’s too late for the yard, the gravel driveway, the little fireplace, the children’s room. Séraphine turned thirty-eight, she has nothing but all this poverty slicing through her though foreign to it, penetrating and contaminating her with its despair on display, this poverty, its arrogant rags demanding pity, the Romanian singer’s hand please for the music hanging on with its bony grayness, Séraphine really wants to smack the Romanian singer, tear off her bun, thinning hair greasy scalp, bang her head her temple muffled noises bouncing bouncing against the steel bar smeared with fingerprints, the singer’s blood mixing with the thick film commuter fingerprints, for too long Séraphine has endured the massacred covers of
La Vie en rose between two Métro stations by this damn Romanian singer, when Laurent held me close and held me fast with the magic spell that he cast, it was la vie decompose. Séraphine now knows, Line 2 after the transfer that for six years three weeks and five days she’d be fertilizing her too-late with big shovelfuls of one-day.

  There was a before-Laurent. An above-average before. Almost a little too above for Séraphine. An English teacher answering to the name of Christian, with whom Séraphine shared a nice life and an apartment. A big apartment (800 sq. ft.), bright, with perfectly square white walls, near Montparnasse. A modern building, spotless windows, and tile. For a few years Séraphine lived in peace but without delight, it’s the price to pay if you want to banish suffering. Christian was almost twenty-eight and Séraphine just thirty when some friends showed up at their place weighed down with a portable baby seat. All night long Christian went completely gaga over the creature, went into deep ecstasy over its blissfully gummy smiles, spitty foam dribbling cutely, the miniature size of the various parts of its body, its piercing cries and other incredibly touching rumblings, going so far as to ask the creators of the masterpiece to let him change its diapers. The whole next week Séraphine didn’t sleep much, in other words not at all.

  Among her close friends Séraphine included the attentive ear of Laurent Wedinton, a young organizer of cultural evenings, who had been supporting her in everything for more than a year, hoping to charm her with his understanding, a precious quality indeed since Séraphine was extremely temperamental and no one ever thought she was in the right. For several months Laurent had been peppering his comments with the tiniest bits of criticism concerning Christian, delicately inserting epigraphs detailing the couple’s incompatibilities, their opposing wants, their diverging ways of operating, and the little cracks he suspected were actually chasms. Laurent was brilliant and knew Séraphine was aware of his value. When a tearful Séraphine confided her infant trauma to him, Laurent maneuvered expertly, understanding that he surely had the trigger event in his grasp. He let Séraphine go off to the baptism and come back nauseous: promoted to the role of godfather, Christian spent three days acting monomaniacal, raising his eyebrows and his voice when his beloved got up from the table when the story of the birth was imparted. It was the brink of the breakup. All Séraphine could see in Christian was the doubt-defect duo, every lasting look boomeranged back with the shame-ridden mass. Everything about him annoyed her including his perpetually poorly rinsed toothbrush. At night she’d get up saying she had work to do, unable to tolerate the heavy breath irrigating her neck and beating her ears with pallid snoring. She’d get a poncho and curl up on the red couch, chatting in a low voice on the phone for hours, noticing that like her Laurent never slept.

  One morning she ended up making her decision. Laurent had finally told her he loved her, with a sudden love that had struck him from the first moment he set eyes on Séraphine’s pout and all the rest. A man who remembers the outfit worn and the first exchange of words can never lose the war. Séraphine swooned, convinced like never before that the right one had finally come along. Before even the tiniest kiss, Laurent talked about relationships, describing Séraphine just as he needed to in order to melt away the most suspicious of guards. The dreamed-of Woman with a capital W my angel, an absolutely lovely intimate wedding my love, hills and lands to conquer my beloved, masks and bergamasques, open vowels so open you can feel the air moving fans of fine silk. Laurent was well aware that behind every mother or whore schizophrenia in every woman there persists a Madame Bovary. What Laurent wanted he always got. [Here we can point out a perfect textbook case. A number of readers and practitioners are wondering about the respective advantages and disadvantages of so-called traditional novels versus autofictional novels.

  Fiction Autofiction

  Advantages — —

  Disadvantages — —

  As the Omniscient Narratrix, it is my honor to enlighten you with this very eloquent example that I’ve caught right here in midair.

  In the case of a so-called traditional novel the conceptions and descriptions of the characters are based on real people. The names may be disguised or completely replaced, the defining features skewed at will in service to the plot. Thus those concerned balk at seeing themselves unfavorably but they always soften complimentary hyperbole. A good reputation goes better with dropped pants. Lawsuits are avoided and horses kept in the barn.

  In the case of an autofictional novel the conceptions and descriptions of the characters are stripped of imaginings, smoke-free mirrors of real people. The names are reproduced, the defining features emphasized raw and pure. Thus, those concerned are disgusted to see their fundamental darkness but sometimes soften at a bawdy wink. The pitcher goes to the well so often it ends up spitting it out. Lawsuits can’t be avoided, even without a palace Panurge presides over justice. A Bartleby quote is therefore more valuable than a Meinhoffed saying. But the reader may be reassured: in either case everyone gets in a fight with everyone else.

  You’ve probably noticed that once the tendency petered out autofiction couldn’t retain its market shares. Please refer now to the table. You’ll notice that the so-called traditional novel has more advantages than an autofictional novel. Is this however any reason for the genre’s decline? Discuss. (200 words)]

  Laurent was sincere, that’s what made it worse. What Laurent wanted he so wanted the masks and bergamasques gaping cavernous vowels his soul behind this chosen landscape never admitted it was sad, disguised, and fickle. Séraphine dismissed Christian two days later. The unfortunate boy didn’t really understand, was speechless, concluded there’s nothing I can do my heart is suffering but it doesn’t matter I want you to be happy. Such self-denial comforted Séraphine in the choice made: he had to be weak and not very motivated to let her run off into unknown arms, obviously Christian wasn’t made for her, no skull and skin remorse could get a toehold when faced with such self-effacement.

  There’s only one exit at the Couronnes station. There’s only one exit and Séraphine thinks to herself as her cheeks brush against the brisk air that it’s really hypocritical, that the doors should open onto a dead end rather than a set of stairs. As she climbs deliberate brisk heel crushing the beggar woman’s fingers. She smiles to herself hearing the screams, belched insults temporarily covering sidewalk brouhaha. She crosses the street closing off her face, awkward shield against vulgarly visible lust, she buttons her coat knowing it’s useless, against being whipped by sexist remarks the whole way the Paris Water Company could better serve the area by dispensing bromine. She hardens her gaze, sharpens it as best she can. At the third dirty smile combined with priapismic remarks powerlessness frozen her heart and nerves turned to cement. Séraphine could never tolerate without stumbling because Séraphine could never understand the rite. If their poor brains stimuli seethe that’s their problem. But when their lips start to move, verbalizing reflections, ejaculating comments is more of a mystery. Sometimes Séraphine thinks that Solanas must have once spent a Right Bank vacation in France, and that it was on her street that the idea, necessary as it was, of the Scum Manifesto came to her.

  Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud unfolds canker tongue, Séraphine constantly collides with its acerbity, spongy little pus balls that make her shoes sticky. She’s been its prisoner for six years now. Six years she’s been the nice Parisian-staged-socia-fracture hostage. Two types of specimens: women who wear their mental excision on their heads or those who wear charming post-hippie skirts over their jeans. Men in jellabas or aviator jackets quizzical around cleavages no matter the season, or their iPod snuggled in the pocket of their vintage camo jacket letting the wind rush through their tousled-by-design hair. Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud twin of rue Oberkampf, cross street rue Saint-Maur. Corner of Timbaud Saint-Maur a bakery with inedible bread, a ventilation grate where the dregs of one or two homeless people sleep, corner of Oberkamf Saint-Maur a wild café reeking of hipness, parking for two-wheeled vehicles, where fifteen
or so wounded scooters and motorcycles stretch out like they’ve been skewered. Séraphine notices that every day such contact with the outside makes her skin oxidize. She blames neither the times, fatigue, or pollution. She owes the frayedness of her skin, she knows, to the opposing flows squaring off from incompatible little islands.

  Rue Saint-Maur crosses two areas that Séraphine sees as contradictory, when she reads novels about past and future civil wars Séraphine often imagines that fire and jugulars will first be opened on rue Saint-Maur. When she says Saint-Maur she expects a final silent e since in most cases tragic irony wields onomastics as a weapon but no not at all, Séraphine looked it up, the name was inherited from the ancient hamlet of Saint-Mor, Séraphine found out that from the eleventh to the nineteenth century it was a cemetery, Séraphine collided, place reserved for the plague stricken during the Middle Ages, it was assigned to both Jews and Huguenots, Séraphine got all the details: even today rue Saint-Maur deeds of sale still stipulate that any bones that are found must be placed in an appropriate wooden box and taken to the Cimetière Monumental. Séraphine thinks about all the bones in the bodies she passes by every day, all these bodies that live in indecently eroded wooden boxes, Séraphine lives in a cemetery, her dread is monumental.

  From Couronnes, behind her back, poverty tumbles down rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud before it dissolves as it meets avenue Parmentier, preserving the next parcel, purified in a gentle slope that ends up scoured, a tuft of trees and a thicket confirm its germination. Rue Oberkamf, on the right, the Colette-dressed microbourgeoisie, held up as right-thinking but oozing shamelessness, praising how picturesque the situation is. Séraphine counts all the as-they-says. The microbourgeoisie was still small before bohemian became a popular style. They say cosmopolitan, nice, reasonable, lively, even worse: working-class. Séraphine translates. They think immigrants, overcrowded, majority bankruptcy protection, teeming, even worse: poverty. Every day Séraphine sees the microbourgeoisie come hang out with the destitute. It’s not unusual to hear as evening arrives a few complaints about the scarcity of good restaurants. The microbourgeoisie that bloats the Right Bank lives here like third-world tourists, unable to assume their middle-class status because they’re too hip, too intellectual. It’s better to be envied than pitied Grandpa Pithiviers always used to say. At the Parmentier McDonald’s, Séraphine is surprised that the admen and the like pull out their gold cards without someone paying in change ever rising up out of the line to go for their throat. Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud is a haven for betting parlors where the over-term drink their compensation to forget their life and its for-rent sign. At Oberkampf at worst, the out-of-work are occasional. If you want to like this neighborhood you have to know how to really enjoy the show.