by Nelly Arcan
In front of the wall of mirrors I thought you were starting to run from me, looking around, maybe, to see whether Annie was still there. You didn’t say much about her that night, except that you were the man of her life and couldn’t do anything about it, to some degree it was flattering. Between you and women there was no symmetry and you weren’t the only one like that, I was part of it and Annie was too. . . Such is human nature, the loved look elsewhere and that fact is proven each day, my grandfather solved the problem by looking only at God. They say God sees and hears everything, his omniscience forces him to embrace all men, coming from him, it isn’t love but the impossibility of doing anything else; to truly love he would need to escape the responsibilities brought on by total vision, maybe he would have preferred to be a man and abandon his fellows.
In front of the mirror, at one point you looked at your watch and I thought I’d lost you forever. You walked away and when you came back, a fresh beer in your hand, I was happy to see you smile.
MY AUNT’S TAROT cards were impressive, the size of a datebook. Their size was a source of embarrassment since she couldn’t read them when I was around, strength didn’t flow from size. Once she asked me to leave the room so she could interpret them better, and when I came back, she shrugged, my absence hadn’t worked. Their sheer size was an accusation, the giant cards mocked her, she was myopic with me; sometimes she took her glasses off and stuck her face against the cards, other times she held them at arm’s length, but there was nothing but plasticized cardboard with meaningless symbols. The cards displayed figures with well-known names, the Magician, the Pope, the Empress, the Fool, the Lovers, Death, the Devil or the Hermit. I liked the Hanged Man because he was hanged by his feet, the world showed itself to him wrong side up and he had to identify everyone by their shoes, he represented dead ends, impasses, he inspired pity. According to my aunt, gloomy representations like Death weren’t always harmful, it depended on the other cards, the Sun could appear just to shine light on disaster.
She placed four cards in the shape of a cross in front of me, then a fifth in the centre; the central card was the most important since it linked the others, it could save or ruin you. Often, my central card was Temperance illustrated by a man pouring water into wine, Temperance wasn’t very colourful, essentially it meant I was a self-effacing, nebulous, diluted person. According to my aunt, in my case the self-effacement was literal, it wasn’t a characteristic but a foundation, my true substance was effacement. She used to say that my skin was so white it was translucent, you could see me right through it. She said that Temperance explained quite a few things, nebulousness dominated my reading, it was my best weapon, it conquered everything, it encircled important events and softened their edges and shrouded them in fog. We built theories around Temperance, and attributed it to a mistake at birth.
During her pregnancy, my mother’s doctor predicted a boy for her, and even showed her a tiny cock on the ultrasound, the mirage of a cock further fed by my mother’s mature love, she saw in me a great man-to-be, for months she cradled me in her belly and sang my name: Sébastien. When I came into the world, my mother and the doctor looked at each other, they couldn’t believe their eyes, the doctor offered an abject apology. My mother didn’t want him as her doctor any more, he’d been criminally incompetent, because of him she’d had all sorts of tender thoughts that were now unrealizable, she’d spent a lot of money on blue paint and pyjamas, because of him she had no name to welcome me into the world on my first day. The large fibroma on my mother’s uterus should have killed me in the first months of pregnancy; my birth defied the laws of the human body, I was inexplicable. According to my aunt, neither my name nor my birth could be recorded in the great book of Destiny and it was likely that God wasn’t even aware of my existence. She believed this gave me freedom without limits since I would escape Judgement Day, among other things I would have the freedom to take people’s lives, I could become a hitman and never face justice. My soul would never see the gates of heaven nor the depths of hell, but would wander in limbo forever, I’d be as solitary as a piece of ice floating between two galaxies; my aunt wasn’t worried about my life but she was about my afterlife, where eternal desolation might await me. I wonder if she’ll continue consulting her cards after I’m dead, I wonder if the cosmic energy of her cards will awaken again.
The worst card was the Moon, it represents hidden dread and deep fears that take the form of a crab crouching under a bridge illuminated by the moon. For my aunt the worst thing in life was to be eaten away from the inside by a crab because it destroyed you secretly like cancer. Her daughter Linda turned schizophrenic at fifteen and my aunt had seen it in her cards in the guise of a crab, later my aunt decided she had transgressed a law by reading the future of her own daughter who not long after became completely insane; madness was both prediction and punishment.
Each card was crowned with a Roman numeral. It’s funny, even in the twenty-first century, knowledge of the future is still associated with the distant past. I wonder what modern tarot cards would look like, I wonder whether you’d see genes and microscopes, prescriptions for antibiotics and viruses, file names and email addresses, Nadine and Annie, cell phones and airplanes. Likely Death wouldn’t even be represented, or would appear in a positive form like resurrection through cloning or deep freeze, likely every card would have some good, a positive lesson to learn, a silver lining, they’d have a healthy attitude toward their trials and a smile pasted on their happy faces.
ONCE MY AUNT told me she secretly wished she’d lived in the Middle Ages, her gifts would have been sanctified forever if she’d been burned at the stake; for her, the grandeur of the punishment was in direct correlation with the power to be destroyed. She believed in witches and martyrs, which is why she loved me.
TO WRITE, EVERY DAY we’d go off to our favourite cafés, you’d go to the Plateau and I’d go to the Quartier Latin. You had the Eldorado, Café So and in the Mile End, Olympico; I had Les Gâteries, La Brûlerie, and Le Pèlerin.
At the beginning of our story we could hardly stand to be apart. We missed each other right away, even to work we needed each other’s supervision. At first we tried to work next to each other like lovers in the same café, but after a few weeks we agreed that to write efficiently, we needed to be alone in a crowd. We had to be able to think out loud without being heard by the one we loved, we had to put our heads in our hands and damn the words that refused to be captured and drum on the table with our fingertips without worrying about irritating the person across the way. Writing requires a letting go of the self unsuitable to love, when we write we have no dignity, we compromise ourselves if the other is around.
We never considered staying home to write since spending the entire day working, then the evening there too would have driven us crazy; the apartment wasn’t part of the outside world, quite the opposite, it was an envelope, a reflection of ourselves.
Face to face in cafés back when we were never apart, we’d glance at each other over our screens as we awaited inspiration, we suspected the other of plagiarism, we reflected in an atmosphere of confrontation. Things between us began to sour when you asked me to read parts of what you were writing in the middle of a sweltering sunny day outside at the Café Les Folies; you wrote like a client. Women moved through your story like on an assembly line and most of them were dark-haired. You told the story of your fixation for women wearing boots, you said you had boots in your blood the way blacks have rhythm in theirs, it was no one’s fault, especially not the women who were not wearing boots for you, it’s just that boots gave you an erection no matter what. To make you happy, I bought tall black leather boots but you never asked me to wear them; after all, I was your girlfriend.
Hearing you clatter away on your keyboard when you were writing, I felt you were touching the women you were writing about, you flirted with them with your smooth talk, as a client you had the advantage of writing frivolously, in your hands women became anecdotes. Fro
m the start, the difference between our sexes hurt me because mine wasn’t up to yours, mine looked downward, mine was solemn.
We agreed that the feeling of uselessness that comes from writing urged us into simple pleasures, and we absolutely had to hold back from the pleasure of the refrigerator, sunning on the balcony, strolling in the shade of the maples in La Fontaine Park, afternoons in the sidewalk cafés on Saint-Denis Street, pornography for you and, for me, with my fondness for alcohol, pitchers of sangria. We wrote in cafés because we liked being seen in the midst of artistic fervour, we wanted to launch an artistic movement with a manifesto, we wanted to originate a new school of thought. We needed the people in cafés to surround our aspirations with humanity; in our narcissism, there was always room for a human backdrop.
I TRIED TO keep writing during our story, but I wrote nothing and had to lie to you about how I spent my days the way I had to lie to the men who passed through my life when I was a whore. Love made me feckless, in this new joy that filled my life, I had nothing to say. Meanwhile, you wrote articles and your novel, and I wrote nothing or any old thing, garbage, dreadful stories, a master’s thesis based on Lacan’s theories that demonstrated that those same theories were always right though they bored people to death. Could it be that I was waiting for you to leave me so I could spew everything back onto you? In the past, I’d done the same thing with my clients.
WE EACH HAD ideas about writing. For you, it meant surprising everyone with new ideas about taboo subjects and for me, it meant taking enough time so no one would be waiting for me. The other side of the coin of my first book was its enormous weight that would crush the second. Often I told you that the problem with the first book was that everyone had liked it but no one read it to the end, all those readers who had given up on Whore might keep me from finishing my second novel. My readers and I were accomplices, I taught them that vomiting could be a way of writing and they made me see that talent could make a person sick.
With me writing meant opening the wound, it meant betraying, it meant writing what was missing, the story of scars, the fate of the world when the world has been destroyed. Writing meant showing the other side of people’s projections and it meant being a sadist, to make it work I had to carefully choose who I surrounded myself with and love them with incredible passion, I had to push them to reveal the worst in themselves and try to remind them who they are. You wrote differently, you had charm. You were on the side of superheroes, the good guys, Casanovas and girls wet between the thighs, writing meant writing toward the light. Unlike mine, your writing was meant to dissipate any uneasiness the reader might feel, he was supposed to feel at home with the Casanovas and the hot girls, writing meant compensating, raging against your own mediocrity, and making up for it with heroism.
Your writing didn’t interest me, but it did interest you. Your beauty justified everything you wrote and outside of the passages I couldn’t read because I was too jealous, when I read you I pictured you writing in cafés, and I felt your promiscuity. Reading you, I saw you in your beauty that took up all the space and had nothing to do with me, I understood you existed well before I began existing for you, your past mocked me, it harried me out of your life. Everything you did sprung from your beauty, you were like DJ Maus, in your virility was the appeal of feminine forms.
At first I tried to write at Le Pèlerin, I wondered about all kinds of things that had to do with you, what the customers at Café So saw when they looked at you. Especially the women who must have swooned just watching your physique bent over the screen, observing your eyes as dark as your eyebrows, as imposing as your jaw line, contemplating your giant mouth that I kissed standing on my tiptoes and the way you covered your face with your hand and looked between your fingers, your sheer size that was impressive even when you were sitting down, your size that, or so they must have thought, gave weight to the words you were writing. In their minds you were writing love songs and in their fantasies your words knew exactly what they wanted. At any time, the women who watched you could stand up and ask for a light, get fascinated by your screen and lean over to look, displaying their cleavage, come back the next day and start building a bridge that would lead to a fling, who knows.
WHEN YOU WRITE you learn that writing has its moods that need to be expressed in a familiar environment, writing doesn’t require open spaces to take flight, any old street corner will do just fine. You understand that writing often comes from the boredom of sitting down every day at the same table with the forgetful air of the waitress, it comes from the void left by long sunny afternoons, it appears when you stop paying attention to what’s happening outside. In a train bound for Prague, I didn’t know what to write because I was seeing too many new things, and so I wrote about Le Pèlerin; on the other side of the world I turned to my oft-beaten paths, I carefully described the mirror that faced the table where I usually sat, in the train taking me to Prague I gave it an oval shape. When I returned and discovered it was square I was surprised, though the shape of things isn’t important when you’re looking inward. After years of writing in cafés I can attest that you’ve finally found your spot when you can cry, keeping an eye on your face in the mirror, without anyone seeing you.
BECOMING A WRITER was an old dream of yours while for me it was the logical conclusion of my anti-social nature. By writing in cafés, you wanted to maintain the image of the writer seen in the midst of creation, in thought you wanted to write the book whose process we could follow, including the tormented air of the author racked by doubt, hunched over his keyboard, features exhausted by the effort of speaking, his blank-page look awaiting the great work to be done. One day you told me that in the promotional pictures for your future novel you’d be smoking a cigarette, you thought that through their image, writers should oppose all forms of propaganda, especially the kind that came from West Coast baby boomers.
For the longest time, the fact that you wrote kept me from writing. If you had loved me forever, I would have given it up. When you came into my life, I gave you all the space though you didn’t ask for that much, everyone knows that giving too much is a form of deviance, a lack of coordination, by giving too much you give things that no one wants, like cable-knit sweaters and baby pictures. Often we’re generous to other people to remind them how heartless they are. My grandfather was like that, a benefactor to people who didn’t want anything from him. For him generosity was like dropping his offspring and collapsing onto someone else, he always gave with a sense of urgency for fear of not having time to eliminate the material of his life that might incriminate him the day God came to judge him. In his misery, he must have wanted his soul to be naked and without ties, he wanted God to take the measure of his Word and be ashamed; today, I have many of his things, his cottage, the boat that he used to fish for rainbow trout and his prayer books from the thirties entitled The Lord’s Day. On the first page of the books, space was set aside to write your name and address, ever since I noticed that there were property rights over prayer, it hasn’t been the same, the need for an address meant that the message might get lost en route, I stopped praying for fear of reaching the wrong ears.
I DIDN’T LIKE you being a journalist. A lot of journalists want to write a novel that pays tribute to human suffering. To justify your goal you talked about the lack of column inches and journalistic neutrality that kept you from exhibiting the best of yourself and expressing the true nature of your opinions. I didn’t know what to say, I thought your dream of writing sprung from a misunderstanding, which is that autonomy and free speech were the clarion calls of truth; in my mind, writing didn’t free anyone from anything, it alienated us, we slipped that rope around our necks.
At Nova you told me you were a freelancer, you had heard of me on the radio and in the papers, you had seen me but hadn’t read me. You seemed so untouched that I was touched for you, I turned red and hid my idiotic smile with my hand as if hiding my years of prostitution. I made you promise never to read my book and you t
hought I was joking, you hadn’t found out that I never joke. Your lack of emotion that night might have been the effect of coke, but that wasn’t it, when you were young you’d been taught to be French and for your family being French meant keeping your distance in all circumstances, especially when congratulating someone, being French meant acting like a parent watching his child take his first steps, it meant encouraging from on high.
Your father educated you from afar, to speak to you he’d go through your mother, he reprimanded you in the third person. Normally he was impassive; he became emotional only behind his telescope, especially when he was waiting for the passage of a comet since it represented an expected but uncertain appointment, the way the betrothed feels about her soldier gone off to war. He liked to say that a comet might not pass at its appointed time, it might be carried off by currents moving through the bottomless chaos of space. Your father was afraid that the order of the universe might suddenly be reversed and that’s why he observed the heavens. The cosmos held his cherished novas and supernovas born of what he called the “Iron Catastrophe,” the moment when the atomic cohesion of stars was undone. His greatest hope was not to observe exploded stars but to see stars explode, he wanted to see their gases projected into space, where perhaps the soul resided. He wanted to witness the failure of the laws of nature that dictate that the atoms composing the stars must hold together, as if that would prove the failure of the divine. As far as your father was concerned, Earth could stop turning from one day to the next and cast France into eternal night; your father was like my grandfather.
