by Nelly Arcan
HYSTERIC
OTHER BOOKS BY NELLY ARCAN
Putain
À ciel ouvert
L’enfant dans le miroir
Paradis, clef en main
Burqa de chair
TRANSLATED BY
DAVID HOMEL AND JACOB HOMEL
ANVIL PRESS · VANCOUVER
Copyright © 2004 by Nelly Arcan
Translation Copyright © 2014 by David Homel and Jacob Homel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages in reviews. Any request for photocopying or other reprographic copying of any part of this book must be directed in writing to access: The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.
Anvil Press Publishers Inc.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Arcan, Nelly, 1973–2009
[Folle. English]
Hysteric / Nelly Arcan ; David Homel, Jacob Homel translators.
Translation of: Folle.
ISBN 978-1-77214-024-8 (epub)
1. Arcan, Nelly, 1973-2009. I. Homel, David, translator. II. Homel, Jacob, translator. III. Title. IV. Title: Folle. English.
PS8551.R298F6413 2014 C848’.603 C2014-900727-2
Printed and bound in Canada
Cover design by Rayola Graphic Design
Interior by HeimatHouse
Represented in Canada by the Publishers Group Canada
Distributed by Raincoast Books
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for our translation activities.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling. More than a portrait of an affair gone wrong, Hysteric is a chronicle of life among the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structured by text messages, missed cell phone calls, the latest DJs and Internet porn. When the writer’s aunt read her tarot cards, no predictions for her future ever appeared. This tale, an astounding feat of literary realism, shares the story of a woman who loses her identity in a man in hopes of finding love. Told in the same voice that made her first novel Whore an international success, Nelly Arcan manages to answer the challenges she set down for herself in her previous books.
When we saw each other the first time at Nova on Saint-Dominique Street, it was already too late: our story would be a calamity. If only I’d known, like people say, not knowing what exactly they should have known and not understanding that knowing ahead of time only makes it worse, if only we could have read my aunt’s tarot cards to discover what colour hair my rivals would have, the ones waiting just around the corner, and if the year of my birth could have told us that you’d never leave my thoughts after Nova. . . That night on Saint-Dominique Street, I loved you immediately, forgetting I had programmed my own end at the age of fifteen, not thinking that not only would you be the last love of my life, but that you might not even be there to watch me die. When we got to know each other better that became a problem; between us, there was the injustice of your future.
Today, I realize I loved you because of your French accent, I heard the race of poets and thinkers come from the other side of the world to fill our schools, that accent so particular, bevelled by your years of living in Quebec, that made you different from everyone else, from Quebeckers and French people alike, that made you a bearer of the Word like my grandfather said of his prophets. If my grandfather had been there at Nova on Saint-Dominique Street, he would have pushed me in your direction to give calamity a helping hand; my grandfather believed in the beauty of victims. He lived his life resisting the earth and the threat of failed crops, my grandfather was born in 1902, he was a farmer, he needed the sky to be on his side to feed his family, yet he firmly awaited the apocalypse — that was his great paradox.
Your accent added perspective to our encounter. When I was a girl, my father always read the same book twice, the second time out loud. During the second reading, the story would take on solemnity, every word was weighted, as if a message was reaching him from far away. When my father read out loud, he would pace the living room, arms outstretched and book held aloft like an adversary, he was like my grandfather, he was searching for the text between the lines and discovering God.
When you spoke to me that night with your accent, it meant that before dying I’d be spoken to as no one had ever done before; it meant that in your mouth, life would take on new meaning. At the time I didn’t know that from the beginning to the end of our love, you’d speak to me the way you said you would, the way no other man had, but not the way I expected, not the way women pine for, infatuated, insatiable women straining to hear themselves in their lovers’ mouths. Neither did I know that I would speak to you endlessly in a way you had never known, and because I insisted on telling you everything, making you carry my world on your shoulders, trying to trap you, you would leave me.
There was more than just your accent, all six feet of you, of course, your giant’s hands and your eyes so dark no one could make out your pupils. When I was a girl, I loved a boy for his strange name, Sébastien Sébapcédis. I never came across the name again. My grandfather always told me that people’s reasons for falling in love were childish and senseless and that was why feelings are so unstable and we should have faith in God instead.
Our story was born out of the misunderstanding of small details and it had a tragic end, but that wasn’t the first time in the history of love. Cinderella’s prince hunted her all across his kingdom with a glass slipper and by that he admitted that waltzing with her all the way to midnight wasn’t enough to remember her face. Knowing that much, anyone could predict the relationship wouldn’t go anywhere. When parents learn to be honest with their children, they will tell them that nothing good ever arose from the encounter between the prince and Cinderella’s feet, and that the tragic part of their story came from the fact that it ended there, with the many children they had. When parents are honest, they will tell their children that in fairytales the boredom of life is hidden behind the mask of procreation.
YOU LOVED ME TOO, but not from the start, because with you, love came after fucking or stalled there where it began, the time before in Nadine’s hands for instance who instinctively knew how to jerk you off, or between her thighs, a dark-haired girl at home in her body and a lot hotter than a blond, you told me one day without realizing I was neither dark-haired nor blond. Somewhere it was established that a man has to fuck a girl at least ten times to fall in love with her and a lot more than that to call her baby in public, every week in the fashion magazines someone is announcing that fucking is what really makes a couple. You ended up loving me after a month or two, and when I went blond so I could exist in your theories about women, I was happy you still wanted to fuck me.
It’s true you ended up loving me, but the lag between your love and mine that was there from the start made yours seem like a labour; to love me, you had to put your shoulder to the wheel, you had to convince yourself. With you, work was important, in love like with everything else, you told me yourself the night we split up. That night you said that from now on you wanted to put all your energy into your
career and that’s why you needed to concentrate and spare yourself the weight of me in your life, you thought in terms of expenditure of energy, you used to say I wore you out.
You weren’t the first man who ever said that. People have told me I’m hard to get along with and I always wondered what being hard to get along with meant. I knew it wasn’t a compliment, it was a bad sign, even if behind the barrier of my attitude lay the attraction of my mystery. For me, being hard to get along with were words of farewell, it was a way of saying that the mystery was going to stay a mystery, for me it was a way of quitting. Now when I think of my life, I see that I became a whore to be easy to get along with, it’s true that the whore’s trade demands immediate openness, on the Internet people wrote that all the time, that I was open. Often they used the expression “open-minded.” In that trade, the mind has to open before the rest.
We did have some good times together. A month or two after we met at Nova, we began to love each other simultaneously. There were magnetic moments when we didn’t bother finishing our sentences because we knew what we meant: that was the phase when we saw ourselves in the other. For a short while we agreed about everything, even how men and women can’t understand each other. I remember the book you read that said men came from Mars and women from Venus, I remember their basic misunderstandings were explained in great detail and for you, those explanations made us a typical couple; our sexes reacted as expected.
Then something happened that wasn’t an accident but the result of a series of events, I think you can call that wear and tear. Just before you left me, I got pregnant without telling you and then got an abortion; that was the first time I hid my thoughts from you. Before you left, I wanted to do something for myself. I suppose that in the panic of your leaving, I forgot the ridiculous outcome of those fairytales that end with children, I also forgot I didn’t have long to live. I suppose that out of revenge, you had to make me pay for that child or I would be forever bound to you, my god I hate how men are strong enough to be unconcerned, my god I’d like to be a man, to not have to say those things.
SOMETHING IN ME has always been absent. I say that because my aunt could never see my future in her tarot cards, she could never tell me anything about what was to come, even when I was a child not yet ravaged by puberty. I suppose for some people, the future never really begins or only after a certain age. Every time I went to her place, the cards told her nothing. With me, the cards were only cards, I had a way of unmasking them. She was kind, my aunt never admitted as much, but I know she thought that when they came up against me, her cards lost their third dimension, suddenly she saw the filth of the stiff laminated paper and the cliché images of the figures, she saw nothing more than a mute assemblage of lines and colours. She gazed upon their shape and couldn’t tell the difference between them and the calendar on the wall, her cards and the calendar told her no more than information about space and time to which nothing could be added. In her eyes, it wasn’t just my life losing its meaning, but the very matter of all futures. My existence made her doubt her own, she must have been sorry that her tarot couldn’t represent doubt, inertia, and the frozen time of people waiting for death.
The day I turned fifteen, I decided to kill myself when I hit thirty, and maybe my decision threw its shadow across her cards, for they had no defense against the self-determination some people have.
As time went by, the fear of not seeing anything disturbed my aunt and kept her from concentrating. She blamed herself; maybe with me, she understood the distress of men who can’t get it up in bed. It was very embarrassing for her but for me it was logical, it meant my whole life had been a misunderstanding about who I was. At my birth something must have happened. According to the information she received my mother was expecting a boy and once I was in her arms, screaming my lungs out for her to listen to me and not let go, she still didn’t believe I was a girl. Maybe that’s why my earliest memories are blue, in some photos in the big family album, my room is covered in blue wallpaper. It seems to me that in other pictures, the dolls I’m holding in my arms look off-kilter.
When we first met at Nova, I was set to turn twenty-nine at the stroke of midnight. The problem between us was on my side, my rendezvous with suicide set for the age of thirty. I imagine that if you hadn’t left me, if you had loved me right up till thirty, my death would have marked you for life and not because the loneliness that sets in overnight would have killed you, not because in the future you couldn’t have loved another woman without fearing your love would kill her, but because the shock of my disappearance would have made you see that I had slipped away from you, taking all my answers with me, and in your memories you would have stumbled over my corpse. People are always angry with those who take their life because they have the last word.
We never talked about my impending death. With you I learned that some things are more intimate than sex. I learned that in life, some things like despair can’t be shared, that’s a burden better kept for oneself. When we were together, you talked endlessly about your old girlfriends and I very little about my past loves. When you meet a man, you should have the right to demand that his old lovers be exiled to the past, you should have carte blanche to burn the photo albums and letters, you should be able to erase the traces of past women from his computer. My exiting at the age of thirty never came up between us; you were healthy and healthy people can’t imagine planning their own death. Healthy people don’t pursue something that will happen sooner or later, without them wanting it.
In any case, when you talk about it, you get too many people involved, I know because when I brought up the subject with my parents at the age of fifteen, I found myself in the hospital. In the room were other girls who had talked about it too, I remember one of them had even tried her luck, she swallowed one hundred aspirin. That she was still living seemed like a miracle to me, probably because the figure of one hundred impressed me, it seemed like the exact number for a fatal dose, the point of no return into nothingness, I remember quite a few of us envied her.
In the hospital, it was said that among mentally ill teenage girls in the Western world, some wanted to kill themselves by overdose and others wanted to starve themselves until they wasted away. According to the statistics, the ones who let themselves die of hunger took longer but were surer to reach their goal, which meant that dying slowly paid off in the long run. It was also said that dying of hunger provided a lot of visibility in the family, since everyone had to reorganize to keep from falling into the same black hole. As soon as I got out of the hospital, I turned to anorexia.
At the hospital, it was also said that boys killed themselves with greater efficiency than girls, who rarely succeeded because their concept of the methods of suicide was too romantic. Often, on D-Day, they would put on their prettiest dress and think ahead of time of the position they wanted to be discovered in. It was said that they were too willing to confide and people could see where they were going before they started out. Most of them wrote notes that took weeks to compose and, along the way, they changed their minds, the impulse left them, it was said that writing was like telling everyone what you were intending to do, which is why in high schools in Quebec, parents are warned about their daughters’ penchant for composition. Parents are informed that writing is suspicious at an age when girls should be listening to music and reading fashion magazines, they are told that writing can be a cry for help, it means having things to say without saying them, which indicates a communication problem. When I was hospitalized, it was in the pediatric wing. Apparently everyone — doctors, family, neighbours, friends, the entire population of the high school — had something to say to me, but I never knew what because no one told me. That something must have been poor like a poor girl, poor like a deficiency, an indigent, a mental handicap. Suicide has lost its heroic aspect in the modern era. If my grandfather were still alive, he would say that nowadays killing yourself isn’t an insult to God but a kind of flat tire, he would say that w
ithout the threat of eternal damnation at the end of the rope, suicide has become a real option.
MY AUNT LOVED me despite our missed appointments with the future. We had the same nose, big and perfectly straight, and we liked the idea that the dead have a strong enough hold on matter to seek vengeance upon the living. When she heard I was hospitalized, she came to the hospital with her tarot cards. She retreated when she saw me, suddenly she remembered I had wanted to die and that failing to see my future in her cards one more time could only do me greater harm. She decided to speak with her heart, she told me she loved me like a mother and that I was a special case; I never knew whether that meant unique or hopeless. She wanted to read someone’s cards, she didn’t want to have come in vain with her tarot, not when there were so many people in distress all around, and in a moment of compassion, she chose the girl who had taken one hundred aspirin. My aunt, suddenly inspired by her tarot cards set out in the shape of a cross where the Moon and the Sun faced each other, told her that having been saved from death was a turning point in her life; having survived was in itself a sign of great things to come, from now on there would be much tranquility and love in her life; she would be surrounded entirely by white, white walls and white coats, white would dominate her life. My aunt told her that a profession of devotion awaited her and that she would live a long life and no doubt work in a hospital setting, she told her she would probably be a doctor or maybe a midwife, she would save lives or maybe ease them out of the belly of their mothers toward the light, but whatever she did, life would be at stake. While my aunt was telling her that, the girl cried like a baby and, through her tears, confessed that when she was a child she had thought of being a nurse like her mother. A month later, we learned that after her release she tried to commit suicide by cutting her wrists with a razor blade. When she was discovered, she was wearing a white dress with a note pinned on it.
