I’m twenty-eight years old, no one in the village knows he has a child, in addition to the other two, an additional child, an older girl, that it’s me, and that I ended up going by Angot like him. With regard to acknowledgment, there’s something I wanted to say:
Tough luck
Yesterday, in a conversation with my mother, I’m talking about what happened. She asks her question, “would it have been better…?” Because of something his sister said on the phone that shocked her “one more headache, as if there haven’t been enough headaches already, now he’s going to have another child.” My mother thinks of the poor baby about to be born, none of this is the baby’s fault. My aunt had to put up with a lot, she repeats, I tell my mother that it’s classic, just like my father who must have had to put up with some difficulty or other, to get the upper hand and, in the end, to lose his mind. My mother goes: well, I’ll tell you something: tough luck. No, not tough luck. I explain. I feel neither hatred nor love. She thinks she understands and says “yes, that’s it (her implication ‘like me’) indifference.” No, not hatred, not love, not indifference, it’s my father, not forgiveness, not indifference, nor love of course: acknowledgment. There, that’s it, acknowledgment. He didn’t acknowledge me, but me, I acknowledge him. He’s my father, I acknowledge him. I acknowledge him as my father. He is my incestuous father, I acknowledge that. I am his incestuous daughter, he is my incestuous father, I acknowledge him, he would not acknowledge me, but I acknowledge him. Léonore is his granddaughter, she could have been his daughter, that’s enough.
Digression, I recount a dream
Léonore is his granddaughter, she could have been his daughter, that’s enough. Phew. That’s what I just wrote. And this is the dream I had last week. A quick look backward. Claude and Judith, the daughter of my psychoanalyst in Reims, Jean-Claude Brot, from a long time ago, more than fifteen years, Claude and Judith, she’s blond, about twenty-five years old, they’re attracted to each other, they’ve talked about it, it’s a matter of time. I was sure as soon as I heard that she was going to medical school in Montpellier, she wants to be a psychoanalyst like daddy, she met Claude, she reads my books, she knows who I am, I shaped her father as an analyst, I was his most important patient. Things are taking shape. It’s New Year’s Eve, they’re attracted to each other, apparently she told him some “powerful things.” But when she feels a strong emotion, she represses it. That’s one of her problems. But it’s on my back that they profit. They get a frisson of incest over my body. I shudder. I shiver. It’s a mise en abyme like the vache-qui-rit label that sends you running to the toilet with the urge to vomit. A few days ago I dreamed that Claude and Judith had a child, the child of incest will soon exist in a debased form. Yes, yes, comparisons are always tough. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes…Not tough luck. No, not tough luck. It’s not enough for me to describe rejecting the monster, I live it. I live it, and often at night. I spent an awful day. I take advantage of this to tell Jean-Claude Brot, if he reads this book, that he shouldn’t have talked about me to his children, that was a huge mistake. Even if he said “the young woman,” they were able to recognize me, the proof. He should have talked about me only in work groups, he should have been able to manage. He should refund the cost of my analysis because he ruined everything, blabbermouth. I’m not a topic of discussion. Or for a thrill. I thought about telephoning you, Mr. Brot, but honestly, do I want to spend my life calling out everyone who pulls some shit or other? I’d end up in an ocean of slime. I’ll write and that’s it. My ambition: the extent to which I’m limited, merely to write about that. I can hear you: as for that, Christine Angot, no one is making you say this. Exactly.
Tough luck
Kréma candy, public garden, chocolate cookies with hazelnuts, whole ones, Rue Grande, my childhood friend Jean-Pierre, Chantal Ligot, my wheelbarrow, our store, which we made in the cellar, not the cellar, some abandoned house next door, with broken windows, the turret, the big wooden door we didn’t open. But something else too. Later. From the time I took the name Angot. Do you think it would have been better in the end if you’d never taken the name Angot. Philippe Sollers: Angot, in the eighteenth century, a woman who was prepared to do anything to succeed was called an Angot. The Codec is done. I’m going to get to Le Touquet, I don’t enjoy it. Or sodomization either. I don’t enjoy any of it. The car, giving him blow jobs in the car, eating clementines off his cock, stiff, the pharaohs of Egypt, the day we didn’t go to Carcassonne. Nancy. I’ve already said a lot about it. What else is there? I’m thinking. There’s the adret and the ubac. With Mozart playing in the car, in Isère, where we’d rented a house in a small village for a week or two. He showed me the adret and the ubac on either side of the road, with a cassette tape of Mozart, or Albinoni. It was hell. The clementines, that was there. To hear him push, that was in London in a hotel, around Easter, near Marble Arch. The restaurants, too many restaurants. Too many restaurants and hotels, an enormous number of churches visited, points of interest, including physical, geological, geographical, precisely in Isère a resurgence. Do you know what a resurgence is? And we went to see the resurgence. The guide to Isère is something his father concocted when he worked for Michelin. Not hatred, nor love, nor indifference, acknowledgment. It’s not in my shitty Châteauroux that I ever would have seen a resurgence, not in my mother’s milieu, at least the milieu into which my mother was born. I wouldn’t have learned to speak German sitting at a café table there or gotten 19 out of 20 in Latin on my bac after studying in depth the first two sentences of variant translations.
Le Touquet
Easter vacation. Often at Easter. It was in Le Touquet that he ventured to my genitals. Until then we were restricted to mouths, arms, thighs no doubt, I imagine, to kisses, lots of kisses. Caresses in the largest sense. In Le Touquet he has severe migraines. We’re staying in a hotel in the center of the village, which he had no doubt found in the Guide Rouge. Which I still use myself, by the way, it’s great. Acknowledgment. I don’t know what’s up with him but he insists we go see My Name is Nobody. With that blue-eyed actor, whose name escapes me, Terence Hill? Terence Hill. Of course he was always the one who chose the movies. That’s how I ended up seeing Aguirre, the Wrath of God even though it wasn’t at all appropriate for my age. Or a film with Alain Delon and Senta Berger, she was shown naked, you could always see her breasts, I remember how awkward it was for me. And that he found her pretty. And I was jealous, I was a real idiot. I deserved what happened, I was an idiot. An idiot, a fuckwit, from the cunt, all to explain that I shouldn’t use those words, out of respect for women, that it’s necessary to be polite. Aguirre, the Wrath of God, I can’t think of Klaus Kinski without thinking of my father, I can’t. We go for walks, we go out to dinner, out to lunch, one Sunday midday he points out some homosexuals and explains how they do it, anal sex. I was learning all this at once. I didn’t like My Name is Nobody, I didn’t understand why he had taken me to see it. He read the news. Every day we had to find Le Monde. Every day. He read it every day. He counseled me to do the same. Sometimes he read it in restaurants sitting across from me. He’d offer me a page. Surely I wasn’t always as interesting. He had seen me up close an hour before that was enough, and he would see me again. When I wasn’t bored, it was exhausting. The interesting conversations were exhausting. At home, it was a completely different world, in Reims, Champagne. In Le Touquet he had a lot of headaches. He’d wanted to go back to the hotel so he could rest, in the dark. (When Marie-Christine told me that she wanted to go home after the movie on Sunday, it must have been that, I had another breakdown. Because she was tired and wanted to go home and I would rather have gone for a walk. She cannot understand and today, Tuesday the 22nd, she’s leaving for Paris to stay with Nadine, we separated last night on the phone, it wasn’t definitive, the definitive break happened a little later.) He asked me to come with him, told me it would be nice of me. I wanted desperately to be nice, I really wanted to please him, I wanted him to approve of me.
He didn’t protect me at all, I can’t remember him being gentle, not once, for example. For example, if I hurt myself somewhere, would he take my arm and kiss the spot? No. Or would he pull the covers up over me so I wouldn’t be cold? Never. My mother was the exact opposite. She never told me I was extraordinary, I never was extraordinary (Sujet Angot, the narcissism I’ve been accused of, it’s not my fault), but she did pull the covers up over my shoulders, yes. Often. She took wonderful care of me, as a mother. He had headaches, and he wanted to rest in the dark, in his room, shutters closed, as little light as possible, and if possible my hands, my hand on his forehead. I was very, very nice. I was really very nice. He appreciated it very much, it did him so much good, I had no idea how much good it did him. I did him an enormous amount of good. Thank you. Thank you. It did him so much good, so much good, how nice it was of me. There was nothing unusual, nothing complicated, I was lying next to him on the bed, the shutters were closed, I didn’t like it. It was nice outside, I thought it was awful to stay shut up indoors on Easter vacation with my father. And then, I guess, I had to get under the sheets, at some point he must have suggested it. Things went further, he touched my sex at Le Touquet. He said: you know why it’s wet? Because you love. I regret having discovered wetness in circumstances like those.
We went on a walk. We’d arrived by airplane. We didn’t have a car there. He had just gotten his pilot’s license. He had rented a plane and we flew there from Reims, he from Strasbourg. I was going to be able to tell Véronique at school. He asked me what Véronique’s family name was, how it was spelled, and explained the etymology, where she lived, her father’s profession, viticulturist, Foureur champagne. We’re taking a walk in the forest surrounding Le Touquet, the pine forest, the area is filled with beautiful houses. He writes articles in his field, linguistics, he has a book in progress. He’s an admirer of Champollion, he’s very interested in the Iberian language, it will be his major work. He wrote an article on the pronunciation of w in French. People think it’s v, because of they way wagon is said with a v sound, but it’s oueu according to French rules of pronunciation. Wagon is an exception, from German, Wagen, der Wagen. We pass the houses, each more beautiful than the last, he makes jokes, he’s in a joking mood: that one is fifty thousand copies. That one there, oh, that one, it’s at least one hundred thousand. I’d have to write a detective novel to get that one, he jokes. I, who have never seen anything, I laugh, fascinated. My book might not sell many copies, it’s a difficult subject, linguistics, which doesn’t reflect on its quality. That one, oh two hundred thousand. A million. One and a half million. That one, fifty thousand. One million. Two million. One hundred and fifty thousand. We laugh. We had just been to see the airplanes.
The lock
Easter holidays one year later. In Strasbourg, in the family apartment. They’re all away on vacation. My vacation is their empty apartment. I sleep in the parents’ bedroom with my father, in the marriage bed. I see the children’s room, their little universe. They’re much younger than I am, eight and ten years difference or six and nine. They don’t know me, they don’t even know I exist. Yes, I know, I’ve already said it, let me repeat myself if I want. I’m there for a week. It’s a long week. We’re used to weekends, sometimes long ones. He works. I don’t know how to take care of a house. I don’t know how it’s done. I know how to do two or three things, I have two or three routines, I see what my mother does, but I don’t have the reflexes. He works. I’m on vacation, not him, he comes home for lunch and in the evening. I’m bored, I look at the house, the décor, Elisabeth’s taste, in all it’s cute. When I get home my mother will say “I don’t like cute things.” In the bathroom there’s a rather large glass jar filled with costume jewelry and another filled with cotton balls. There are printers type set drawers with tiny trinkets. It’s not the apartment I’d visit later with Claude (at the time of the Codec when there was nothing left), a large duplex, very large, with terraces, just a few steps from the Orangerie, the public garden he adores, which he tells me about. He explicates everything. Iberian, Latin, the Orangerie, etymology, German, the pronunciation of w in French, politics, racism, animals, plant names, everything, the Egyptian pharaohs, the origin of languages, language families, Noah, Shem and company, Indo-European, Hindi. It’s all clear. In the morning, we eat breakfast in the kitchen. At noon he comes home. He sees the milk left out, the bottle of milk, I’d forgotten to put it away, don’t I know that milk spoils? That it’s undrinkable if it’s not kept cold? He throws a tantrum. His arguments are endless. And above all the lock:
We go out, it’s lunchtime. The door closes behind us, we’re on the landing, the keys were left inside. I get yelled at. I’m not in charge of the keys, am I? That’s not the question. Why should it be me, just me, who’s responsible? I’m not the one in particular who was supposed to lock up. I can’t take it anymore. What is going on? Why am I being yelled at? I don’t get it. That’s not the point. Of course it’s you who are responsible. Don’t you know that when you are at someone’s house, when you’re not at home, you always enter second, after the owner, who opens the door and at the same time offers entry to the visitor who only enters then. Always. It’s a basic rule of politeness. I’m surprised you don’t know it. And conversely, when you leave the house, you go out first so the owner can bring up the rear and lock up his house behind everyone. The laws of hospitality, he’s an expert. He’s an expert on customs, how to open, how to close? How to pass in front of an older person? The owner is the first to have contact with door when you enter, and the last to have contact with the door when you go out. Now we need to find a locksmith. You think I’m enjoying this. It will cost a fortune. I won’t be able to find one before two o’clock. There’s only one thing to do, go out, go for a walk, we’re forced to, the keys inside, money, wallet, everything. Me: But why did you go out if you still needed to get things? I thought you were done. I thought I could leave because you were outside? Even if I didn’t know that rule of politeness, that basic, fundamental rule. Now the locksmith, the lock, it will cost a fortune. (He would never have said a shitload.) A fortune. He is very very very very very very very very very very very very, very angry. I’d like to run away. I wish I could escape. I want to see my mother. When I got home I almost told her. I can see myself again at the station. I told her “it was horrible.” What, how? His character. His character was my answer. She told me she understood, that she knew him, that she wasn’t at all surprised. That a whole week was surely too long. It’s the first time I let my disappointment show but not about the real keyhole, let’s say. Wandering around the streets with him for two hours, it was horrible, waiting until we could call a locksmith, in neighborhoods where everything was closed for the lunch hour, in residential neighborhoods, where there’s nothing anyway, he didn’t have his car keys, nothing, we couldn’t even go to another part of town, he had to go back to work, he would be late, that wasn’t the worst, but being locked out because of your stupid mistake, and having all these worries that I could do without, and the fortune it’s going to cost to get the locksmith to come.
Gare de l’Est
I give this example, but the same thing happened in other places. I can picture it very clearly. I was intolerable because of X, my character was bad, I irritated him, because of X I was intolerable, I exaggerated, I said something unpleasant, I don’t know, I don’t remember, he had enough reasons. He’d been counting on spending a few days with me, well, no. Enough. We were supposed to be together until Sunday, well, no, enough is enough. Maybe I think that he’ll enjoy driving all the way to Strasbourg, so then, I shouldn’t complain. No point insisting, now he can’t stay. He is in such a state, that it’s enough. That’s it. I’m fourteen or fifteen years old. I’m young, I’m still little even. To wait for the next train to Reims in some station and it’s cold. To return to my mother, hoping she hasn’t made other plans. It was my father, my father who wanted to see me, but he’s tired of me, he wants to go home, he’
s going home, he got his car, he left, he didn’t look at the train schedule, he left me at the Gare de l’Est, with my bag, he gave me money to buy a ticket. He didn’t offer to wait with me, the two hours or three hours or four hours before the next train, it’s cold in the station, there are plastic seats on the left side where people are sitting, no one waits as long as I do. He couldn’t wait with me, he had to get back, right away, Strasbourg isn’t next door. Stuck there, alone because of my bad character or having said the wrong thing. Anxiety, tears, I hide, I have my bag. Luckily I have my bag. My bag is the only friendly thing in this enormous station.
Incest Page 11
