Hysteric

by Nelly Arcan

  We talked a lot at Nova and maybe too much, between us information created confusion. People who talk too much don’t weigh what they’re saying, you said so yourself when you were talking about your job, you said that journalists with tight deadlines and forced to produce masses of copy end up making mistakes; you said that writing every day for a paper was a little like driving drunk. Among other things that night, you told me you often spent the evening jerking off, you said you had written articles for Le Journal about Internet porn and to write them, you’d had to do a lot of research. Choosing photos to illustrate the story meant filing through hundreds of images. You were also writing a novel on the subject and I thought one more guy who wants to publish.

  AT THE TIME I didn’t react. Years of prostitution had taught me that when you’re up against someone too strong, it’s better to keep quiet. In any case, everyone knows ours is the communication age and that communication means jerking off on the Internet to new images, the latest primitive fashion, in front of whatever we might prefer, orifices under the armpits or ten-year-old girls just dying to suck cock. I didn’t properly hear you that night because your accent masked what you were saying.

  That night I didn’t react because hearing a man speak is very different from watching him act. Telling me on the first night that it took you years to discover everything about Internet porn sounded abstract in your French accent. I figured it was just a style, what mattered was the work you put into it, the journalist’s deadening routine and the disgust it must contain, and not the obsession or, worse, the mission.

  When I saw you jerking off in front of your computer the first time, your features straining toward the screen where a young brunette was having trouble sucking a cock made enormous by the smallness of her mouth, when I saw you that first time when the sound of your great joy woke me as you imagined it was your cock her mouth was sucking, nothing could have consoled me from loving you because you’d warned me from the start: you put everything on the table at Nova. In front of the world’s porn sites where you sit, perhaps at this very moment, I picture you with your hard-on jerking off three times a day as you watch the comedy of shaved pussies beckoning you with eyes in which you love only yourself, your cock in your left hand because your right is busy running the mouse over girls who might have died the next day, who knows.

  THERE WAS A TIME when we lived only for each other, when having other people around got on our nerves. I remember your little cat Oreo was so jealous it got sick, for weeks it wouldn’t eat and its fur fell out in patches. Your roommate Martine, who had to feed it when you weren’t there, stuck reproachful Post-its on your door so you’d know it was your fault. Early on, you decided to move the cat to my place.

  Back then, for entertainment we would calculate the time it took before we lapsed into needy panic, we added up the number of hours before the calls for help would come the way other people count how long they can spend at the bottom of a pool without breathing. The result was four hours, more or less, that was our limit, any more and we couldn’t stand it. You were always the first to phone when we decided to return to our separate apartments. I never answered the first call, I waited for the second and when it came, I never answered after the first ring. I remember the second call followed the first by no more than ten minutes and when I picked it up your voice was trembling with anxiety. Back then your worrying comforted me, in those days I figured I might live past thirty.

  Then the time you could spend without seeing me and without anxiety increased, a little more each occurrence, I remember the figure doubled on a regular basis: after two months it was twelve hours, after three months, twenty-four hours, after four months, forty-eight hours, in the end you only wanted to see me from a distance that was greater each time, you could go three weeks without panicking.

  During a time that lasted three or four months at most, we loved each other; these days, love has a shorter shelf life like all the rest. We live in an era when love is abundant, pages and pages of it in the fashion magazines, written in block letters in my aunt’s tarot cards, love spilling over the classifieds, prescribed by doctors, becoming a right for homosexuals who display their cocks once a year in the streets of Montreal, love taking on new forms at three o’clock in the morning in the washrooms of bars, the love of famine victims on TV and the love of Buddhists for their vermin, even love among the dead buried side by side in cemeteries.

  EVEN THOUGH YOU were French, you talked with a Quebec accent stronger than what most Quebeckers had, and since you weren’t born here you felt no shame. Being regarded with contempt by the Anglos and an object of mockery for the “French from France,” as they say here to double the distance, leaving ownership of the French language to the French — all that meant nothing to you. You could always return to the land of your origins, and that made you love Quebec more.

  You spoke my language knowing you would never feel the rejection the colonized feel, knowing too that assimilation would never reach the deeper layers of your self; the country of your origins would forever protect you from the need to be acknowledged. You liked to say plotte, slut, slack, fun, pitoune, se crosser, you said you didn’t give a fuck, all those words I spent years unlearning you threw back in my face, you said you had a blonde and not a girlfriend. No one ever explained why in Quebec all girlfriends are blond, maybe long ago blonds had supremacy over brunettes the way White women used to over Blacks, Asians, and Natives — everyone else. I wonder if a day will come in Quebec when blond women colour their hair dark, I wonder if a time will come when men in Quebec will stop saying ma blonde to refer to the woman they love, if a time will come when they realize that dark-haired ones are often more beautiful. They say that hair keeps growing after death, that’s what the barber says in The Man Who Wasn’t There, hair takes a long time to understand it’s growing on a dead body. One day my grandfather told me that at the moment of death, the soul doesn’t always leave the body because God doesn’t necessarily know what to do with it, sometimes God needs time to deliberate before delivering his verdict, sometimes he hits something that can’t be readily decided about the guilt of men through the journey of their lives on Earth.

  A PRETTY DARK-HAIRED girl was with you at Nova, her name was Annie. I was with a blond guy, a DJ, DJ Adam, you hated him because Nadine had a thing for him and because he was bigger than you. When I think about it, the fact that Adam was with me that evening must have made me more interesting because his job made him an almost unbeatable rival when it came to women. Everyone knows that women, especially women from the Plateau Mont-Royal, prefer DJs over journalists, it’s an exposure issue, the concentration of groupies’ adoring looks.

  That evening you told me you couldn’t cheat on Annie because she wasn’t your girlfriend. Later you confided that she was the exact opposite of Nadine who spread herself among men and never played favourites in a spirit of pure nymphomania, a new cock in her bed every night, contrary to Nadine, Annie was crazy about you and that if you had wanted her, she would have made you the man of her life, Annie thought like Cinderella. You told me that during the three years you had been together without ever being a real couple, she broke down every time someone told her you were going out with someone new. I should have understood you were talking about me too and that by loving you like crazy I would push you into loving another woman. That night you foresaw my future much better than my aunt’s tarot cards, you told me that loving you with real love would mean ending up in the category of good girls, accommodating women ready to receive your stories about the irresistible appeal of other women, you showed me the way to lose you.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER Nova, we went to the Eastern Townships to the cottage my grandfather left me. We stopped twice on Highway 10 to fuck, and to make things easier, we opened the roof of my New Beetle. Sitting on top of you I watched the drivers fly past on the highway and worried that when they saw the top of my head sticking out of the Beetle’s roof, they’d be distracted by their imaginations and end t
heir days in a fiery crash.

  At the cottage, we fucked from morning to morning for an entire week in the lapping of the waves and the thought of the nearby lake; I remember, for the first time in my life, I cried out with pleasure and it wasn’t fake. For the first time with a man, I preferred humiliation to seduction. That you were the last man in my life didn’t stop me from having a lot of first times with you, at least on my side; for the first time I wanted to be sullied and beaten. For the first time it seemed my love gave you the right and even the obligation, if you had wanted to kill me in my grandfather’s cottage, I would have lent you a hand.

  For seven days, we weren’t apart a single second. At night you would wake me up to tell me you had dreamed about me, you had caught me with another man, in your dreams that night, you discovered I had a whore inside me. You made me happy when you told me you rarely dreamed and that you had never spent more than two days in a row with a woman. By that you meant that together we had beaten your record, that in your life, I had set a precedent. At the cottage we watched the mosquitoes looking for an opening in the screens that would let them reach the single light bulb under which our love was born. I wondered if the neighbours, hidden in the darkness of their years of marriage, could see our particularly bestial aspect.

  That week, I gave you the little my clients had left me, I let you hold my gaze as long as you wanted and lick my ear hole, I let you pull my hair and spit in my mouth, I let you come in my pussy after you went up my ass and after those stations, I agreed to suck you off and swallowed everything. With you I had moments of pure numbness as those who feel approaching death have, what happened between us went far beyond the routine of lovers who discover they share the same favourite authors and political opinions. You brought me to the ground zero of autonomy, the strict minimum that allowed me to move and speak, with you I grew pliant. I lost weight; I cared nothing for myself as the love growing between us took over, I often felt I was leaving my body as you brought me closer to yours. You gave me what was no longer possible to give, a real reason for living, that week, your arms were my whole life.

  That week, you followed me wherever I went in the single room of the little yellow cottage with its pointed roof that rose between the trees. When you wanted me to go a certain way, toward the bed for instance, you grabbed the back of my neck and steered me there. To keep you from tiring of the game, I resisted a little, I mentioned the dirty dishes and the curtainless windows that would have given the neighbours full value for their money. In fashion magazines, they say that women shouldn’t obey the first stirrings of their men’s dicks in the name of their desire, they say that women should represent a challenge by expressing their own will and reticence, at least during the first phase of the relationship. Between us those phases disappeared into my lack of being as I bent attentive to the sound of your voice and kneeled down to kiss your knees, closing my eyes, and you possessed me entirely.

  For the principle of it, we stepped out to breathe the country air, barely managing to keep our balance on the big rocks that stood between us and the water, missing the beauty of the Appalachians that surrounded the lake and the sun that set behind the summit of the mountain famous in the region because its perfect roundness made it look like the breast of a giantess lying on the horizon, we missed everything because we were too busy kissing. At the beginning, you photographed me from every possible position with your digital camera held high, all six feet of you and I looked very small with my eyes raised toward the lens, you called me Smurfette. If my aunt had read those photos instead of her tarot cards, she would have told me it was already too late, the damage had been done, the signs that you would leave me were visible on my face transformed by love. The proof was there in those pictures: in every one, my hands are clasped as if twisted together.

  YOU WANTED TO take pictures of me naked in the wilderness of the woods but my dyed hair and my boob job destroyed the natural effect you were after. I was afraid the photos would disgust you one day, or worse, make you laugh. I asked you to delete them but you wouldn’t. As soon as your back was turned, I erased them myself, and I wonder if you’ll ever notice.

  In the woods we wrestled like children, I tried to hurt you and you made sure not to hurt me. Together we went beyond my grandfather’s property heading east and I showed you the swampy streams that empty into Lac des Araignées three kilometres farther on. I told you how my father and I tried to canoe on those streams when I was little, and how we had to return on foot because the canoe bogged down and the bottom was so thick and slimy that both my rubber boots got stuck in it. I told you that no one had ever explained why it was called Lac des Araignées and that tourists wouldn’t visit the place because of the name, you figured it must have come from its shape seen from above. Two months later my father confirmed your hunch, seen from a plane the lake looks like a tangle of spiders because of all the streams flowing into it.

  That day coming back to the cottage, we spotted the tracks of an animal in the sand at Baie des Sables and you photographed them for your family in France, this was the first time in five years you could send them a folklore image. Judging from the width of the trail, it could only have been a bear, and we wondered whether bears are afraid of water. If a bear was hiding in the bush that was criss-crossed by the streams we were following, and it charged us, we wondered if we could escape by diving into the water. When I told you I had never seen bears outside of the zoo, you didn’t believe me.

  That week, we were supposed to visit my parents and friends, we had planned to go for a drive and admire the hills of the Eastern Townships from the height of Mount Megantic, but each day made you a little less interested. For a time that didn’t last long enough, the fact that I had family was intolerable to you. The fact I had a past that didn’t include you and friends who had seen me with other men ripped me from your possession and deprived you of your rights. At the time the game hadn’t been decided, and love put you at a disadvantage. That week, you bit my fingers because you thought I had bad intentions, by hurting me you stayed a step ahead of my betrayal, and I hated myself for loving it, it made me feel like betraying you so you would bite me again.

  At the cottage, you didn’t want me to work on my ma thesis or even read the Céline novels you had brought in your suitcase, maybe because when you were a child, you suffered because your mother loved her dog Bicho more than you, and your father was busy searching the depths of the cosmos for the treasure of life that was living under his roof. Human pettiness and dullness weighed heavily upon your father though he found joy in the stable, immemorial presence, the flashes of cosmic life brought to his eye by overwhelming energy like the solar storms or the great red spot made of gases that he would watch moving across Jupiter’s face like a monstrous cyclone. One day you told me it wasn’t until he was sick, lying in a hospital bed, that your father noticed you had grown six-feet tall. You told me that ever since you were born, your father spent all his time in front of a powerful telescope he had paid a fortune for, and by throwing himself entirely into the fireworks set off by nova and supernova, he neglected everything else, starting with you, which is why, as an adult, you demanded total attention from everyone and took up so much space.

  When we were at the cottage and in the weeks that followed, one after another you removed the activities that gave me a voice in society. That wasn’t so important because at the time I wasn’t doing much, not even writing, I was working on a ma thesis that drove my director crazy because of the syntax problems that made my theoretical demonstration of President Schreber’s madness come crashing down, that German magistrate who had recorded the minutes of his delirium. For my director, the disruption of language went hand in hand with mental problems — she was a follower of Lacan. She alone knew that when it came to the publishing market, I was an imposture. Being published meant I owed something. Every time I couldn’t find the right words and stopped before the end of a sentence, people were astonished, they demanded the missing wor
ds, every time I put a subjective where an objective voice should go, that was noted, they pointed out that I was a published author. Being a published author brought heavy responsibilities regarding language, and proper articulation was a must.

  THAT SUMMER MY girlfriends all picked up on your presence, your tall beauty impressed them. They were happy for me, even Josée who was normally so critical of the men I let into my life. She said I deserved love because in the past I’d had everything but, I’d had money and time for pleasure, trips down south and tanned skin, evenings out in restaurants and taxi rides, a body resculpted and my own personal coiffeur at GLAM. I’d had an easy life but missed out on what’s essential: being part of a couple in love, with that butterfly feeling in your stomach, projects for the future in a loft on the Plateau and sharing the housework. My girlfriends were great fans of fashion magazines; when they saw I was happy they let down their guard, for them love couldn’t coexist with the desire to die. My girlfriends were normal, most of them had lived as a couple for years, some of them had kids to go with the man, they had careers and lovers too. We were outsiders, the two of us, I’d been a whore and you were a freelancer.

  You were three years younger than I was but you towered over me, when you moved through a room, you automatically put me in a corner. With a single hand you could mask my face entirely and when you encircled my waist with both hands, your index fingers touched. Our disproportion excited you, it thrust you forward, it made you look grander.