by Nelly Arcan
I WONDER WHAT you would have said last March if you’d known I was pregnant with your child. Whether your voice would have taken on a different tone, whether it would have become more French, whether you would have put more distance between us, in your confusion you would have stuttered the way you sometimes did in front of men of authority. Getting a woman pregnant when you don’t love her any more is like impotence, you don’t talk about it, you keep it hidden. The slightest thing made you ill at ease, kids who were too cocky and stared at you in the subway too long or dogs that licked your crotch as you walked by them in the street. One day you told me that kids embarrassed you because they didn’t feel embarrassment, in your whole life, you had never sat one on your lap. My first book made you ill at ease because it admitted too much and was written from the gut and when you saw someone crying in public, that made you ill at ease too. Your unease was so strong that you talked about it all the time, you often said you admired Quebeckers for being so free and easy, with their ability to handle delicate situations, you thought they were unpretentious and spontaneous. According to your French ideas, Quebeckers were much closer to their instincts and to the earth and didn’t hold themselves back with all kinds of manners, Quebeckers had a village mentality and pooled their resources, but the women fell for Frenchmen too easily because behind their wild side, they dreamed of belonging to a higher social class.
Before I left the abortion clinic, the nurses told me I would experience bleeding over the next two or three days. By bleeding, they meant the expelling of the remains that hadn’t been scraped off during the operation and I imagined the baby could still be present; they say there have been cases of hard-headed fetuses that cling to their mothers, and that these fetuses went far in life, they achieved great things. Faced with the massive wave of abortions in their countries, Western fetuses may have developed camouflage techniques within their mothers’ bellies, perhaps they assume a form undetectable by technology and escape the doctors’ vigilance. According to science, even the most primitive organisms have the intelligence to survive, they will make the necessary efforts to adapt to the most hostile environment, I wondered whether in spite of myself I would survive in a world without you.
At the clinic I asked questions. I wanted to know why a woman didn’t bleed immediately after an abortion, it seemed to me that it wouldn’t take long before the wound started to cause pain. The nurses tried to explain that between the body and the soul, there was a lag due to the shock created by the incursion of the outside world, and in this case, the uterus took three days to understand it had nothing left to feed, and gave up the fight and let go. They told me that by clinging to life the body didn’t always go in the same direction we did. For several weeks, disorderly waves of hormones would rush through me; following the unexpected disappearance of the baby, my body would lose its way in pain, it would act in irrational ways and let itself go, it would show everyone the door. It needed time to accept the new state of affairs, and that’s why I should take good care of it with painkillers and hot-water bottles. I said I understood because errors in perception due to my resistance had already occurred. In the weeks after you left, I would wake up at night thinking I was at your place; I reached for you and the memory of your absence kept me awake until dawn. I often wrestled with the sheets and migrated to your side of the bed, once I raised my arms to the sky and begged to be taken up. Between reality and me, there was a great age difference.
As they walked me to the door of the clinic, the nurses told me not to worry because the remains were nothing more than my period, but they could have an emotional effect and weigh upon my conscience. For three days, in my apartment, I waited for the remains, I waited three days and they arrived as promised. In the solitude of my new life, I took them as a sort of visitation, they were like company, for me our story went on dying on a daily basis. In my apartment I spoke to you out loud, among other things I criticized the way you rejected me. I wondered if one day our story would finally end and, when I died, whether I’d still be attached to its settings. In horror films they say that ghosts seek to settle the unresolved parts of their lives, they have a sense of earthly justice even from the great beyond. If I can, I will return to your room and make you pay, I will frighten all the women who sleep in your bed and force myself upon your thoughts by twisting your channels, reconfiguring your networks so they all lead to my memory, and you will regret the day you were born.
THAT NIGHT, WHEN heavy cramps started dropping small black tumours of blood between my legs, I was sitting in front of the television. I was watching an X-Files episode in which agents Mulder and Scully climb aboard a ghost ship from the Second World War and find, strangely enough, that all the passengers have been dead for millennia. On the ship, Scully and Mulder turn one hundred years older in twenty-four hours, and if they hadn’t been found the next day, they would have died of premature old age. They searched the captain’s logbook and understood, given the cool-headedness their jobs required, that the ship had drifted into a zone of the globe never discovered by geographers, a sort of black hole in the centre of the Atlantic. There in the middle of nowhere, Scully and Mulder were forced to admit that the Earth contained a black continent forbidden to human beings. To try and explain it, they carried out calculations and came up with the names of particles, they thought of the world in terms of elements, and weapons made to destroy anyone who would expose the secrets of those particles; matter could turn malevolent out of self-defense.
For the first time, I wanted to keep something that had come out of my body. I had heard that women desperate over the loss of their baby project their feelings onto dogs or cats or even dolls, sometimes they put them in carriages and walk them through the park and with perfect strangers, they discuss how much they look like the father.
That night I thought so much about you I almost called, I wondered what I would have said and how you would have answered. I wondered if you would have come to my house to say farewell to a part of yourself, then I remembered you didn’t like goodbyes because they turned into teary scenes too easily, they could veer into sobbing and violent fights and outsiders could get involved. At the time I thought your need to keep up appearances came from your father who saw a kind of nobility in the great distance between the stars; in their unapproachable reality he saw the first requirement of their adoration. One evening in the middle of dinner he announced that the universe was essentially composed of dark matter that escaped even NASA telescopes and that the Milky Way took two hundred million years to turn on its axis; after that, a frigid silence settled over the table.
WHEN THE REMAINS began to flow, I kneeled down and rolled up my nightgown over my hips. I set a glass bowl underneath me and spent the next two hours harvesting it all. In my entire life, I had never cared so much about garbage. I hadn’t acted that way since I was a child, when I kept a dead bird I found in the schoolyard in the freezer for months. I remember my mother eventually found it and along with the bird covered in white hoarfrost, she threw out everything in the freezer and warned me that people were wrong to take pity on birds since they carried disease. My mother distrusted beautiful things, for her beauty was a smokescreen behind which lurked an opportunist or, worse, a predator. When she saw you the first time, your beauty made her draw back, that happened to you all the time, because of it she never warmed to you.
After two hours of sitting on my glass bowl that evening, I considered the job done and covered the bowl with a lid. At first glance it looked like cherry or blackcurrant jam, but when I examined it more closely, it wasn’t like anything I had ever seen before. I could tell it came from the realm of meat, from the texture I knew it was beginning to go rank, when I shook it, it made a nasty sound, it had the weight of dead things. That night I let all the tears flow that I hadn’t cried at the clinic; for a woman too concerned with her appearance, tears don’t unburden, they disfigure. I didn’t know what to do with the contents, I didn’t pray, people who pray are pretentiou
s, they think they’re fascinating. Anyway, it doesn’t do any good to pray since the Virgin Mary is already doing it, in the prayer people say Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, pray for us poor sinners. When I was little, my grandfather might have prayed too much for me and reversed the good effects of his prayers, he exhausted Heaven, it got exasperated and cast a spell on me, which might have been why you came into my life.
That night the amount of blood in the bowl shocked me. It was the sign of fertility that had nothing to do with my inner turmoil and that disturbed me. I figured life should bend to my desires, it should be attuned to my states of mind. Once my aunt told me she couldn’t see my future in her cards because I had nothing to do with it, by some aberration of nature we followed different pathways, maybe she meant that my future would happen without me.
I thought of sending you the bowl to shock you. Sometimes killers mail people amputated fingers, ears, or dead rats to let their next targets know that the fatal error they committed has been noticed and soon it will be their turn. Sometimes, they say, the tactic brings down future victims who prefer to do the job, they shoot themselves, or so they say. The threat is a brand of voodoo since it contains its execution, and the murderers get away scot-free. That evening I started to hate you and my hatred has remained to this day. Hatred is a stable component, sometimes between nations it lives on for centuries and loses none of its power, when it encircles the enemy geographically, it exercises such pressure that the enemy collapses into itself then explodes like a supernova.
Staring at the glass bowl, I saw the abortion had borne fruit, and the baby had grown back. In the red of the blood I sought the white blotch, which is why I had to empty the bowl onto a large cutting board and search through it. The little bit of white cotton wasn’t there but still something of you remained, a substance that had wound around your sperm, which is why it was so abundant, your genes had summoned it forth. At the clinic they had lied to me, this blood wasn’t the blood of my period, it was real flesh, and when I picture it today, I see bone marrow. If I had been a little more hysterical, I would have eaten it.
That night I understood many things, the soul does not exist and people will convince themselves of just about anything to ward off death when it approaches. People used to pay ahead of time for their spot in paradise, but nowadays they plan to be frozen until resurrection dawns. If there had been life after death, the wind would have howled the day I had the abortion and the light bulbs in my three rooms would have exploded to cast darkness upon the sacrilege I had committed, the doors would have thrown themselves open then slammed shut and the contents of the closets would have cast themselves onto the floor. Since it came from you, the baby’s soul would have twisted the matter that the world is made of and I would have heard the sound of your voice.
That night, I did what little kids do with their birthday cakes, I smeared my hands in it, I drew on the cutting board with my fingers, I played tic-tac-toe and hanged man. If my grandfather had seen me, he would have died a second death.
MY GRANDFATHER USED to say that between men and women, God set aside a giant space for himself, and the space turned out to be so enormous that, since the Enlightenment, he had given up on the idea of living there, he never returned. My grandfather said, when all was said and done, God had performed the incredible feat of being overwhelmed by his own events and that was why he granted men the nuclear means to exterminate themselves. My grandfather said that despite the millions of years humanity had lived, from the deepest caves to the tallest skyscrapers, no one had solved the problem of the space between men and women, due to the human need to narrow it, it was more than probable that one sex would end up swallowing the other. In the confrontation among nations, he said, absorbing the enemy was often conceived of as cannibalism and in the near future the idea of an opposite sex could soon be nothing more than a folktale. My grandfather was always careful not to say which sex would triumph, as far as he was concerned, we were so deep into chaos that either side could win.
AFTER A FEW MONTHS of true love, we grew apart. We weren’t symmetrical in our distance, I hung on longer than you did. To hold onto you I acted like you, I moved away from myself, I started drinking, in the evening when I was alone I criticized myself, I threatened to leave the woman I was. I stopped haunting your dreams; you had stopped dreaming altogether. You told me you dreamt very little, and that was why you woke up every morning in a bad mood. When you awoke you couldn’t retrieve what had moved through your mind during the night, you felt cheated, you’d lost information from memory and that depressed you.
In any case, according to the dreams you had about me at the beginning of our story, it had been proven a thousand times over that I would never really hurt you, fundamentally I was a good girl like Annie. At Bily Kun for instance I never talked to men I didn’t know and wouldn’t accept the drinks some of them offered, I always let you decide when we would leave, and when you wanted to go somewhere else, I always followed. I suppose I was faithful not out of love but cowardice. Once I went home in the middle of a night out at Bily Kun just to stand up to you but I turned around and came back, I was embarrassed when you asked me where I’d been, and I said I’d gone out to buy cigarettes, to look convincing in case you wanted one, I actually did buy a pack. That was back when you’d started talking endlessly about Nadine and her little acts of betrayal and begun fucking me by default. I wonder whether there was a link between my faithfulness and my tendency to get replaced by another woman.
During that period, our sexes recovered their differences. We each had our theories on the subject that we would refer to during our arguments, each time we offered up new variations to catch the other off guard and gain the advantage, for you it was the theory of testosterone and for me ovulation through orgasm, our disillusionment was heavy with biological determinism. Because of testosterone, you claimed, men would cheat on their women for all eternity and wage war for just as long. You said the origin of humanity’s greatest problems was to be found in men’s bloodstreams and that spilling each other’s blood was their logical but desperate attempt to vanquish it. You believed women were designed to bring the force of inertia to the battle by keeping men by the fireside, at least during the night. I described women as what they should have been. Next to your theory, mine was a little weak because you were into asserting facts and I was into mythology. I said that ova, since the beginning of human life, should have been broadcast as a sort of ejaculation, in a great voyage accompanied by waves of pleasure, this would have projected them down the Fallopian tubes toward the uterus. Having ova that moved wherever they wanted without the involvement of a woman’s will was an unforgiveable injustice that had shaped history. If reproduction had depended on women’s pleasure, women would have naturally and infinitely enlarged the circle of men at their beck and call, men would have founded their institutions from beneath and punished each other for incompetence. In the clash and competition to satisfy women, men wouldn’t have had time to make war, neither would they have tried to have more than one woman. In that case, you retorted, the human race wouldn’t have survived, the dark side of female reproduction would have hidden the mechanisms from men and the world would have ended before it got going.
When we ventured into that area, we always ended up barking, we “made each other sick.”
WHEN YOU LEFT ME, I immediately wanted to find you again. I started with those who had an influence on you. I watched everything by Woody Allen and read a novel by Céline, then felt worse. Of the two men, all I understood was that they were both chatty and only one of them liked women.
One night during that period, Josée came by my place and found me drunk in front of the TV with the sound turned off, with Carrie Bradshaw and her three girlfriends hitting the New York boutiques. Josée understood I was thinking of you and thinking of you left no room for anyone else, she understood if I was in that position, alone in my apartment imagining a new life for you, she would lose my friendship. An
d it happened: after that evening, I never saw her again. During that time all my friends faded away, they felt the loneliness no one can fight because, behind it, there was you.
During those three months, I made a fool of myself with the staff at the Boîte Noire. As springtime flowered in splendid profusion, I huddled in my apartment and watched television from morning till night because I knew if I went out I might stumble upon you skipping your way across the Plateau with a life that went on without me, and that would have finished me off. That was a time of imprecations against the four walls of the three rooms of my apartment, chain smoking, beer, television, and pills to put me to sleep. When I was young, my parents warned me against the decadent strain that ran through the family. On my mother’s side, all the men died alcoholics; in her family there was a certain tendency to drown.
I went to the Boîte Noire every day for three months, I rented all the popular American TV series, I saw every episode of The Sopranos, every one of Six Feet Under, Sex in the City, every minute of Law and Order, I saw all the films no one ever rented. From morning till night when alcohol finally knocked me out, I watched endless episodes of incomprehensible series and retained nothing. In three months I spent more than two hundred dollars on late fees, and the employees must have died laughing behind my back. Every time I showed up, the previous night’s rentals in hand, they looked at each other out of the corner of their eyes and smiled with gazes averted when their colleagues were too far off to share in the laugh. They all had their ways of making fun of me, but never to my face, the staff were people of taste, all big cinema specialists at the Boîte Noire.
You used to watch a lot of TV and rent movies too. I remember there were two things you couldn’t stand, science fiction and love scenes. You told me that one evening when I asked you why you fast-forwarded through the kisses in the movies we watched. Maybe in your mind there was a connection between the two.
