Hysteric

by Nelly Arcan

  MY REASONS FOR dying have changed depending on the men in my life. I chose my thirtieth birthday as the deadline a long time ago, but the motives haven’t been the same, they’ve gone from teaching a lesson to serving as an example, then to being obedient by removing myself — I never knew where to situate myself between tyranny and servility, before I die I’d like to be able to decide. When it comes to you, I’ll kill myself to show you you were right, and bow down before your superiority, I’ll kill myself to shut you up and impose respect. No one can get angry with a dead woman, the dead leave us breathless, around them we tread softly. I drove an enormous nail into the wall of my apartment to hang myself from. To hang myself I’ll mix alcohol and sedatives and to make sure I don’t fall asleep before I do it, I’ll get drunk standing on a chair, I’ll get drunk with a noose around my neck until I lose consciousness. When death comes, I don’t want to be there.

  To be loved by people, I needed to smile, which is why I’ll die. I’ll die to demonstrate that smiling is a way of conserving energy, like sleep. You loved me but you hated the sadness on my closed lips that lingered behind every happy moment like the smell of flesh under lavender. Of course sometimes I smiled, but the smiles of sad people are laborious, they take time to appear, like a foal just out of its mother’s belly trying to stand up; to make it, they have to fail a few times as their disconcerted mothers look on; they stumble, stagger, fall flat on their faces. On one of my birthdays when I held a new doll in my arms, my mother slapped me because she’d had enough of waiting for the happiness it should have provided. Very early on I learned that in life you have to be happy; I’ve lived under pressure ever since.

  THAT NIGHT AT Nova we were both with someone else. You were with Annie who hovered as you ignored her, and I was with Adam, whom you knew well, he was a popular blonde DJ, a rising star among Orion’s regular DJs who was also a casual fuck of mine. Annie intrigued him, no doubt because he was on the lookout for the signs of the distress you caused by abandoning her, the same way people watched for the expression on my face when the evening ended and you hadn’t even spoken to me. That night, I wasn’t in a partying mood and you must have thought I was a snob, everyone thinks I’m a snob but actually I’m bored, my thoughts are elsewhere. It’s true, when everyone’s on ecstasy, boredom can be interpreted as a lack of brotherly love.

  Adam started the conversation. He talked about the Lisbon techno festival, he’d been invited there, and you chimed in with a comment about the euro that had proudly surpassed the American dollar. That was the very moment when everything was played out between us, you declared your origins, you claimed your European identity that opposed the Americans. You needed only a few words and I could hear your commander’s voice; my life was bound to yours. Your voice was what got me, all the men I’ve ever loved had the warrior’s drawn sword in their voice, and all the men I’ve ever loved ended up leaving me; when they stop speaking, warriors become murderers.

  That night my heart wasn’t into it, as the expression goes when other people’s happiness weighs heavily on us, even if it was my birthday, at midnight I turned twenty-nine. My birthday left me cold, twenty-nine wasn’t thirty yet, no one knew at Nova and I only told you about it later, in the wee hours of the morning. Despite my lack of enthusiasm, I didn’t want to leave because I had heard your voice, and I was done for. I gazed at Annie and the childish beauty of her face troubled me. I wouldn’t have given her a day over eighteen, if she’d been an escort, she would have made a killing. She was looking at me too and probably saw some kind of superiority in the ten years I had on her. She didn’t know what to do in this four-way conversation that had quickly centred on us, she started clasping her glittery red handbag against her breasts, it was superbly kitsch, the sort of handbag I used when I went out. Her purse became a link between us, she and I must have had some connection, at least when it came to props.

  The next girl who captivated Adam after Annie was Isabelle, his ex, probably because she was ignoring him, dancing too close to another man with her eyes on his, and a look on her face that invited a kiss. Isabelle was like Nadine, but more sadistic, she publicly insulted everyone instead of drowning them in compliments the way Nadine did, her cruelty gave her extra charm. Adam wasn’t very different from us, he always followed the same patterns and ended up losing his way in love, that night his obsession made him forget his DJ aura and reputation and the line of groupies with their pussies at the ready. Adam was like me, he was like you, he searched for the seeds of his undoing in the opposite sex. We watched him watch Isabelle and my lack of jealousy surprised you, my calm demeanour that you must have considered snobbishness misled you, you saw me as untouchable and that was sexual motivation enough.

  You told me that when you met an ex like Nadine at a party like this one at Nova, you always acted this way, but you didn’t explain what this way meant. Listening to you talk about her should have sent me running for the door, but the lordly arrogance of your fine speech made me want to stand up to you, and consider your masculine beauty that much deeper, though normally I didn’t think men were beautiful. Your beauty sought words to pull me in and you talked a lot, too much really to have wanted to seduce me. You told me how careless you were in love unless you loved a woman even more careless than you, you told me about the talent women have of losing interest in men who are too interested in them, you talked about Annie’s blind trust that let you cheat on her constantly and your project for a novel about porn sites. You said things that later I would regret hearing but that night I listened with eager ears and even encouraged you, those years of research you did on the web to make your novel feel authentic and your preference for Girls Next Door over Porn Stars. You told me very surprising things that I could have written, except they came out of your mouth with no poetry, you were talking naked.

  I made an effort that night and would many other nights, you and I had the same interests, we shared the same neuroses, our reflections were concerned with similar things. You told me that in porn films, women’s faces were ritualistically covered in sperm, not because women required material proof of their powers of seduction, but because they deserved a good lesson. According to you, this sullying wasn’t meant to reassure, it meant casting the woman’s faults onto her body and putting her in her place. I answered that men usually didn’t tolerate obedience when they believed they were punishing, I told you that women had their ways of getting what they wanted while pretending to have lost the battle.

  That night we said so many things like that and we were happy because we’d discovered our soul mate, with that kind of levity we soon became accomplices, we were a prototypical couple and our friends would be inspired by us. Together, we’d go far. Only a few months after Nova we were at war and everything we said that night turned against us, it would be an understatement to say we didn’t know just how much we’d been speaking the truth. We started a war and you won it, not because you were better armed, but because for me it’s still not over, winning means dropping it, winning means forgetting and leaving the other person with the feeling of being incomplete.

  Later I figured that at Nova you must have had the same opinion of whores and ex-whores like me that everyone else had, with a whore you can say anything, in love whores don’t need to go step by step because they like it any old way, right here and now, in love whores invite honesty and they know that chivalry, whatever its form, still has a cock, whores know how to listen to human nature and know pain the way kids from poor countries know hunger, having seen and heard it all, having done everything with everyone, they’re like big brothers, they tolerate any kind of familiarity.

  THE PARTY REACHED its climax when DJ Maus started to play at midnight, there were more than a thousand people in the loft. Not knowing techno I couldn’t tell the difference between Maus and Nivok who had just finished his set dragging his CDs behind him, but Maus was a woman and seeing a woman at work replaces the work itself, it’s all a matter of lighting. People wer
e saying all sorts of things about her, that she liked threesomes, her ingénue’s face attracted the cameras and that’s what made her money. You told me she was very close to Nadine, in fact every DJ in Montreal was close to Nadine and the whole techno scene with them, you were sorry you’d been close to her like everyone else since you weren’t everyone else. That night was the first time I let you talk about her so much; at Nova you took advantage of the indulgence that comes when people first meet.

  At the height of the party Annie appeared out of the crowd and drew you aside, she wanted to talk. Two of her friends whom I’d already seen at one of Orion’s after-hours, Adèle and Jacynthe, were there, they were observing the scene and whispering in each other’s ears. I was already scared of losing you but I managed a wide smile and went to the bar to get a drink and leave you two to talk. When I came back an hour later, you looked at me with relief, you and I were afraid that Annie’s intrusion would break our budding connection. She was still holding her glittery red bag against her breasts as if wanting to hide her wound from you. Annie wasn’t like me, she knew how to spare you her pain, she protected you from herself, she did whatever was necessary to hold herself back. You two stopped talking; my return cut your conversation short. I can’t say Annie looked angry, she didn’t look like she blamed you, she didn’t even look at us, she stared at the floor and your feet as if expecting something from them, but it was easy to read her pain, she was a woman men liked but never chose. After a few minutes of silence, Annie melted back into the party with her girlfriends, bearing that profound sadness of women who have known love only in half-measures.

  THE NIGHT RAGED on without her in the bass throb of techno and we found more and more to like about each other. Adam was still questing for Isabelle’s attention, sometimes he came and chatted with us a few minutes and quickly kissed me on the cheek, but it was just to show Isabelle that he had a life too. Since the beginning of the evening we’d been facing the middle of the dance floor where a growing crowd was dancing with speed-inspired energy. You suggested we go out and get some fresh air and I said yes, then you didn’t want to, out of fear, maybe, that we’d interrupt our togetherness by leaving the place where we enjoyed each other’s company so much and letting the air of the summer night come between us.

  You took me by the arm and dragged me off the dance floor, leading me toward a wall newly covered in mirrors where multicoloured dots jumped and swirled, projected by the lighting system. In front of the mirror I didn’t see a mirror but an extension of the party in a room I wasn’t familiar with. For a moment I thought they had torn down the loft’s wall to use the space of the neighbouring loft, then I caught sight of myself, Nelly. Despite your attention, I collapsed into myself, I slipped from your hands, the mirror grabbed me and the thread between us was broken. That night at Nova without wanting to I displayed the corruption that has been in me since birth and has turned me into a monster unable to appear in my aunt’s tarot cards, I always thought my problem was one of apparition. That corruption, you came to know it well, it exhausted you because it clung to you so you might counterbalance it with your love, so you might give it a little of your beauty.

  That night my hair was its natural colour, neither dark nor blond, it was part of the corruption too, but had nothing to do with any of this, it was just the tip of the iceberg as people say when they want to warn adventurers so they will understand that some things flourish in the depths where they thrive in secrecy and take on monstrous proportions. I examined my colourless hair in the mirror and lingered over the redness of my cheeks and nose, soon there was nothing there but parcels of ugliness that broke into a variety of tones moving toward the infinitely small. I wanted to be alone and redo my make up and my hair. Looking at myself too closely, I let the critic take over, I gave substance to imperfection.

  WHEN OUR STORY first began, you thought I was full of myself because I would look at my reflection in every mirror, then you understood I was weak and you stopped loving me, your cock needed me to be imperious. To be weak meant being weak before a witness, it meant inspiring other people’s desire to lash out the way we beat misery out of mendicants, in hopes of curing our disgust at the source, lashing out is a way of conquering the causes of our problems. One day when I was inconsolable because you wouldn’t fuck me, you made me see that I should go into isolation during my petty crises, and you sent me home. Each time I’d sit in front of the phone, cycling through the numbers on my call display looking for you, but most of the time you wouldn’t call until the next day, or the day after that, and your voice would have changed: it talked over my head. Since you weren’t there to see me be weak, I had to punish myself, the refusal to give into self-pity commanded it, the urgency to give substance to suffering as well: on my temple the blue of your contempt, on my shoulder the yellow of my fall. Often I’d use wine bottles or door handles, I’d carve crosses on my arms and thighs with razor blades, I made myself cry out of every pore; like prisoners I marked the passage of time. Your words never came to cover the wounds you couldn’t not see; behind your calm façade, there must have been fear. From that point of view, I was the stronger one.

  IN THE WALL of mirrors at Nova, I stared at my reflection and when we picked up our conversation again, I was impossible to get along with. Like you I went to the very borders of honesty, maybe to justify your decision to do the same. Later, you told me you thought I was playing you for a fool that night, to resist your charm and be more desirable I’d done a sort of Woody Allen number. I told you that the closer you looked the less pretty I became, in general men thought I was a hysteric. I told you my unease made men uneasy, being impossible the way I was created a force field, everyone in my life including my parents ended up running from me, I told you that if I wanted to look at myself in the bathroom mirror I had to turn the lights off first. I wasn’t ugly at first glance — quite the opposite, actually — but my ugliness had to be acknowledged first, by that I meant that at one point it would surface and you should expect it. Like you, I unfolded my roadmap that night, I supplied you one by one with the reasons you would stop loving me, like you I believed in transparency.

  I wasn’t ugly but my beauty wasn’t sustained, it could regress at any moment and fold into itself; my beauty could shrink in a matter of seconds. For that to happen, a woman just had to stray into your field of vision, you would just have to talk to her with a certain affection, emphasizing words like pretty. The woman didn’t have to be a woman, she could be something else, a picture of a woman or your cat Oreo, my beauty was based on almost nothing, it depended on us being isolated. It withered in public, it was savage, it often showed its teeth, it had its own lair.

  My words made me impossible to get along with, so I kept quiet for the rest of that night. When it’s too late, you return to yourself, you take yourself by the hand and tell yourself about the future, you say next time the words will be different, ugliness won’t be declaimed but questioned, from now on I’ll ask what he sees before I reveal it. People say that before they got to know me, I seemed inaccessible. For them I was blessed with the grace of those who haven’t had to grovel to achieve social acceptance. For them I was a whore intact; in scandal, I remained sophisticated.

  I was weak but you were born great, even as a baby you threw your weight around, the proof was that your mother moved your father out of their room to make room for you, he retreated to an attic room lit by a dormer. After your birth your parents slept apart, you were the rooster in the henhouse, you’d awaken all Paris with your cry in the first light of dawn. With you in your cradle next to the big bed once your parents were separated, your mother felt safe, you murmured lullabies to her and she would sleep like a baby.

  IN FRONT OF the wall of mirrors at Nova we were speaking but I wasn’t listening. Nothing could reach me, not even your voice, you couldn’t compete with my life’s greatest obsession that is also its most daunting because I never found a way out of it: my reflection in the mirror. When I hang m
yself, I’ll cover my head with a pillowcase, there will be no open casket. That night, no event, not even the death knell of every skyscraper in the Western world nor the way the Americans shot themselves in the foot by aiming their weapons at Iraq, could have dulled the mirrors that reflected our meeting far beyond the walls, nothing has conquered my need to keep an eye on myself, who knows why, probably due to my distrust of beauty that will disappear beneath my skin like snails into their shells. From experience I know that when you stop feeling beautiful it affects people’s perceptions. That night I decided you didn’t understand women’s psychology, I gazed at the wall to extract my reflection from the crowd pressing around us, I wanted to see my corruption at work.

  Once my corruption shows itself, I stop seeing myself as a whole, and only as a series of details. I see corruption wherever I look, as I felt it spread I thought it had become palpable to you because you stopped speaking and your smile faded. Maybe some part of me that you missed had appeared. Later, you told you hadn’t seen anything, but watching me detailing my features in the mirror made you think you were boring me, you thought I was entertaining myself through the slow parts of your speeches; when we try to seduce someone, we think we’re the reason for everything.

  That night my flaw seemed to lodge beneath my eyes, in the circles there that weren’t just blemishes but the pain of being alive. Their colour spread across my face, purple and unforgivable. As a little girl I waited for that colour because it was already there, waiting for the day I might turn thirty. In that tone deepened by my sad appearance, my blue eyes turned grey, my blue eyes in the thrall of grey closed onto themselves, my face mottled like the back of a chameleon, disappearing. In the crowd there were only the circles under my eyes; that evening every sleepless night in the history of the world crashed down upon me. Everyone knows that faces are beautiful only if one feature doesn’t hide the rest, it’s written in every fashion magazine that beauty is about composition and balance.