by Anne Garréta
What did you see in her that attracted you and stirred you so? The contrast of her body, so frail and thin, and a super acute mental intensity. Something limpid in her voice that sprung forth, clear and vivid, from her body. A sensual proclivity for analysis.
What did you have in mind? Pursuing the game you’d scarcely begun. Crossing back through the gardens, bottle of cognac in hand, climbing the staircase leading up to the vertigo-inducing wooden gangway that leads to rooms 16 through 24. Knocking on B’s door, identifying yourself, proffering the divine bottle and proposing a nightcap. Were you afraid she would refuse? It wasn’t a question of pride. Your hesitation stemmed from another concern. For if your offer was accepted, what then? How to proceed from there? You surmised the arrangement of the room’s furniture, you tried to deduce the gestures and signs through which B would invite you to stay or to leave, to ascend the staircase leading to the mezzanine. In your imagination, all such signs appear as achingly ambiguous, even though you know that, in reality, they seldom are, and that their intended meaning can strike like lightning. But if the temptation is not at all shared, then the threat of seeing the allure of this complicity dissolve, along with the harmonics of meaning that made you desire her in the first place… Was the attraction you had felt in her presence reciprocal? The allure probably had been. Did this precise allure have the same effect on her constitution as it did on yours? She was obviously a woman who liked to seduce, who had lovers. It was impossible to imagine her as prudish, or disapproving of desire in its wild variety. But would she have a taste for it? And if, out of habit or as a rare exception, she did indulge, what were you getting into? Wasn’t your life complicated enough already? Just how far did you want to push polygamy? Your lover in NY, a mistress in Paris, another in this palace. And their suspicions and jealousy were giving you headaches and weighing on your conscience… Did you really need a fourth? Pssh, this could remain just a delicious and perfectly brief adventure. One night, simple and uncomplicated. You kept coming back to it, sketching out this virtual night with B, and it seemed to you that her body would offer the same delight as her words, that the lovemaking would have the same sensual vigor, the same inventive vitality.
Vertigo seized you as you imagined it, time grew weary as you conjured this vertigo. Then it struck you that you were only imagining, were only letting yourself delve so deeply into your imagination, in order to defer for as long as possible the moment when that deferment would end up ceding the victory to your scruples or to your incertitude, without either a fight or an explicit surrender. Hoping to precipitate a decision, you got up from your armchair and walked back and forth, the bottle of cognac in your hand, from one wall to the other, from the horizon of books to the slant of the staircase. You were imagining too much. Soon, by dint of imagination and meditation, it would be too late to act, to try.
But did you want to try?
You went out into the garden, avoiding the main walk. You took the dirt paths, the least traveled paths, thick with shadow and silence. Strolling in the dark, one can sometimes sense an impalpable veil alight on the face: spider webs spun from hedge to hedge during the night and carried off in passing, webs that stick to the skin, so faint, so imperceptible they’re impossible to brush off. Invisible obstacles of devilish and audacious strength, of artfulness and perseverance, and yet so fragile against the tactlessness of a passing body, prey to desire, or a wandering body, prey to incertitude.
[Night 1]
C*
You’re in a faraway nightclub. People can barely hear each other. They have to shout in others’ ears. You weren’t shouting. You were quiet. Letting the others around the table scream their heads off, deafening each other. In the space of the hour you had already spent there, your distress had intensified. Your exasperation, perhaps. But can one tell distress from exasperation, from melancholy?
Seated next to C, you weren’t looking at her. You were simply feeling the presence of her body to your left. Sometimes her perfume, in waves.
You were attempting to measure, minute by minute, the tightening stranglehold of an exasperatedly physical desire, which you feel minute after minute becoming all the more unbearable, astonishing in its ability to grow, in its paradoxical ability to nail you there in a near-complete paralysis. You didn’t, and still don’t, remember having ever felt such a tyrannical desire. You were tracking its progress, its ascent. It had split your body in two: an abstract, imperceptible body, doubling another that was strained, steeled, exacerbated, a paradox of petrification and pulsation. You couldn’t steer your thoughts away from it, so much was this other body invading you. You witnessed, powerless, motionless, your own colonization by an inexplicable and obscene desire that your willpower was failing to keep in check, to contain, to purge.
This wave of inhuman desire was mounting, against you, against your better judgment. A night with C was not at all your intention. Hadn’t she already once made a pass at you, which you had declined? For you simply did not find C appealing at all. You had even sometimes felt repulsion toward her body.
But desire, like repulsion, is without reason and defies explanation. Nor does repulsion cancel out desire.
How can you feel such a pressing, devastating desire for a woman you don’t even find attractive? A woman who does not fit any of your types… Hence your distress.
You were now intent on looking at her, scrutinizing her, identifying all of the reasons to lose your hard-on. You told yourself that her mouth was unappealing, that her features were too coarse for your taste, that her body, though supple, did not have the naïve delicateness or the energetic grace that usually excited you, that her manner, her gestures lacked the neatness, the discretion capable of seducing you.
You sought out the defects, inventoried the adjectives that might vanquish your desire. But this damned desire remained recalcitrant to all your curses and even to your denigrations.
Therein lies your melancholy: this desire is not yours. This desire cares nothing for you. Unrelenting, blind, deaf, brutal, offering no way out. A desire rising against your body’s will, and your body itself the traitor thwarting its own defense.
Then, maybe, could you divert it? You had started cultivating the hope that C was only the accidental object, not the source, of this desire. And even then, still interchangeable. You had looked around for other women. Asking yourself, of all of them, which would hold the greatest likelihood of being attractive to you. None. So pick at random, any one of them. Then you could begin to think of this other woman, to apply yourself to this task, to draw this unknown woman toward the center of gravity of the desire preoccupying you. So that her image would be caught in its magnetic field. But no, nothing. Not the least pull of attraction. The gaze and the flesh do not belong, it seems, to the same body: the image of the unknown woman and the pulsing of desire, each the center of different galaxies or parallel universes.
Dance? But dancing will only aggravate this part of you living a life of its own. All the heaviness and tension of desire is concentrated in a wave of mercury whose dull backlash keeps pummeling your solar plexus.
It seemed impossible that, so close to you, close enough to brush against you, C did not sense or recognize your body’s strange state.
How had this desire managed to creep up on you and catch you by surprise?
A long conversation the previous afternoon, seated on a quay, water beating against a pier. Something in her words that would have moved you, a bared vulnerability… A way to confide in you, breaking with her prior imperious and brusque sentimental demands… As if she was finally abandoning something to your mercy, to your discretion.
A night-time conversation, the day before: a glass of whiskey shared on a terrace overlooking the city; the calm of the night, the weightlessness of the air, the layers of light vacillating all around; the complicity brought on by long silences, solitude, altitude, the distant horizon?
A dance, the night before, in this same nightclub where, since you f
ound yourselves on enemy territory, you had to measure your steps, gestures, and be wary of any furtive contact, and yet, in the distance you both kept, a strange attraction was developing, as if invisible strings or forces linked your two bodies, and without even looking at each other, the movements of the other became perceptible, all the feints to throw her off thwarted, as if her body were prescient or forewarned of your body’s rhythm…
A reading you had done together and where it had seemed that she was venturing into you and that she was offering to let you get inside, too. In the sentences, in the breath that carries the phrases, in the voice that pronounces the words, what had she slipped, what charm?
A walk on an afternoon of ruthless sun in the streets of the old town? The cadence of your steps on the dusty ground? The wandering, the meandering, the voice?
After the nightclub, there will be, once again, the walk in the streets, the terrace, the final whiskey, perhaps. How will you resist? You who, in the past, have never even managed to resist far less intense impulses of your unruly senses? Sometimes even neglecting confirmation of said impulses in order to rush to the most discreet of invitations… How we love to exaggerate the power of desire. So resistible, so often. How many times have we truly, savagely, imperatively desired a body? Consider this question, reader, forget your heart’s outpourings, your head’s effervescence, your surges of vanity: how many times have you felt a desire that struck at your marrow?
It’s an enchantment, a bewitchment. Or rather, in all likelihood you will have overestimated the strength of your reason and your will. You believe you are the master of your desires; you think you are free to succumb to them or not; even free to deliberate them. We screw up, and end up screwing.
To this day, you do not know how, by what means—surreptitious and yet certainly obvious—C succeeded in imparting to you this brutal and sad desire which, after flooring you unexpectedly, still appears to you a pure enigma, a singular monstrosity never felt again. You can still see her, voice, face, steps, scent, wandering, a body on which to extinguish this unbearable desire, in which to purge oneself of it, the only way out of vertigo.
C possessed the art of the seductress: a nearly infallible intuition of the fault lines through which desire insinuates itself in the other. What had she captured, grasped about you, that gave her such power over your senses for a night? What fracture had her desire diabolically discerned in the architecture of your drives to so subtly pour the potion that dissolves distance, repulsion, defiance, irony, self-possession?
How do these women know?
What kind of Tristan, melancholy and bewitched, do you become, drifting on these waves of Chypre perfume that reach your nostrils, your lips, prevailing over the thick and heavy haze of cigarette smoke you were both drowning in?
Her victory must be acknowledged. You lean over, and in the swaying of bass, the slamming of percussion, the swells of electronic reverb, you whisper your defeat in her ear. Why bother shouting it when she already knows—and probably has for a long time?
[Night 10]
D*
And now for an adventure that, for the longest time, you’ve wanted to be able to forget, to make it so that it never happened. Every time this story comes back to mind, you wish you had had the intelligence—or the humility—to spare yourself the affair.
There is a chance that tonight’s examination of the memories D left you and the retrospective glimpse of your own idiocy will irritate you intensely enough to make you give up your project altogether.
Then why choose to give in to it? You certainly have enough stories that are more pleasant, or more interesting, to consider. You’re not lacking in material. You have to stick to a contract of thirty nights and not one thousand and one or mil e tre (Scheherazade or Leporello? Who can tell the difference?), which would force you to go dig up the most minuscule, the most distant, the most insignificant, the most ephemeral stirrings.
Pluck up a bit of courage, you enjoin yourself, forcing your fingers to transcribe what now appears on the screen. A bit of courage, it’s only five awful hours to endure. Perhaps you’ll feel better at the end of the operation. If, at least, you could help yourself to a little local anesthesia. But it’s not pain that you fear, it’s disgust at the bile and the humors that have corrupted these things of the flesh. What do you need? A glass of cognac? Granted.
You write. You pour.
Now, let’s calmly consider the question.
It had all begun quite simply, during one of your trips into town when you were living abroad. Trips busy with society life here and there, with visits to a few places where you acted out, without much conviction, your various “careers.” Semblances of careers, more or less successful imitations of careers. During each of your brief visits you touched base with the various circles of your life, a life admittedly quite scattered. And one that you do not yield to except in fits and starts, when you wake up (or when you are awoken, often brutally) from your absorption in the other side—obscure, meditative—of life (the one that has your criminal predilection). You have a tendency to fade out of the world, the real world, the world in which we supposedly live. Your ambulatory mania, the bane of travel, your departures, your trips elsewhere, your estrangements are only a paradoxical translation of it. Not that you like to travel.
You don’t really have a taste for trips; you curse all that forces you to leave home. And yet, it seems you have spent the past fifteen years of your life in airports, in train stations, on the road. When you sum it all up each year to fill out your various tax forms…
(For one of the results of your dispersal in space, of your transhumance, is to have multiplied the complications of your material life, all its pains in the neck: tax forms, bank accounts, residences, deductions for retirement plans, permits, licenses, subscriptions, identity cards of every kind… It’s a monstrous and contradictory avalanche of paper, of traces, of forms, of assignments and liabilities that follow you and inflate each year without you being able to halt their expansion. And you tell yourself again and again with each new piece of mail, each new pile of daily business to take care of that you leave, perilously, outstanding—for you throw up your hands in despair, you defer paying bills, cashing checks, responding to invitations, summons, proposals, injunctions, obligations, until the day after tomorrow… you Oblomov to death—you tell yourself that you need to simplify your existence, that you can’t stand it anymore. You dream of a Spartan life, shrunk drastically, mercilessly, to the strict social, legal, and material minimum: you push it until almost nothing remains. One room, no matter where.
No telephone, no electricity, no computer. A futon, a plank on two blocks, a pen, a notebook, a library nearby. You’ll eat bread, fruit, raw vegetables, raw meat if necessary (will you go so far as to give up your coffee maker? And the hot plate that necessarily accompanies it?). But here’s the paradox: it’s in fleeing before the invasion of material life, multiplying the exiles, the trips when you rejoiced at the thought of casting everything off, that you find yourself once more multiplying the constraints. You buy—for you wouldn’t be able to resist the desire of a volume that promises flights of fancy or thought—books you can never resolve to leave behind (why must you keep the trace of your transports? To be able to reiterate them?), they weigh you down, and the desire to be transported ends in the accursed possession and accumulation of signs, objects. You have carried thousands of volumes both ways across the Atlantic; you have the backaches and sore arms to prove it. You scatter money that you forget to spend in multiple accounts, for you have desire only for books, for the escape an airplane ticket can buy you. And you leave, packing two t-shirts, two tops, two pairs of pants, two pairs of underwear, sometimes nothing at all, just your satchel. And six months later, because doing the laundry is a drudgery to which you won’t resign yourself except in desperate cases, you return weighed down with a complete wardrobe that is uniform (for you don’t have luxurious or fashionable taste) and heavy-duty (for you only c
are for what is solid, good quality, what will resist the harsh regime of your habits… all that is light and ephemeral is an immoral squandering in your eyes… if you can’t count on these shoes and this leather jacket lasting for ages, what’s the point?) and which fills your drawers, stuffs your buffet and hutch, makes your clothing rack buckle, litters your parquet floor, devours your space, and throws a hurdle at each step. And it’s a miracle if your mother, visiting you in your exile (for she loves to travel, and is greatly concerned with domestic comfort), has not bought you, out of love, the indispensable cookware and that strict minimum in terms of dish towels, plates, glasses, and silverware without which one lives, according to her, like an animal. Even if it means loading you up like a donkey at moving time… (For how can you throw out a present from your mother? It would be a crime of ingratitude and indifference… No more than the books that you buy, you cannot bring yourself to throw out anything from your mother. Fatal loyalty.) Very fortunate also, if she has not, taking advantage of your absence, surreptitiously left in your kitchen cabinets a preciously preserved part of the inheritance intended for you and which she loads and lavishes upon you by anticipation: a bundle of tea spoons which she carefully explains come directly from some great grandmother (and Lord knows those poor people suffered and toiled to accrue such bequests—the mere thought of it makes you ache all over…), a fragment of your father’s trousseau, towels and napkins embroidered with his initials by the nuns of the convent of the old cross-border town, for which he has no use (you didn’t know men were given trousseaus; there’s a mystery there in need of elucidation; you run to the nearest bookstore, combing through shelves of anthropology, history, and sociology; you discover an extraordinary field of research, questions, speculations; you gather material, you are captivated, you spend a week in your bed between sheets embroidered with the initials of some ancestor—if they don’t last for a century, what good are they?—reading volumes; your bed overflows with them… you move to the living room couch…), and then, oh surprise, the first piece of a porcelain set intended as a birthday present (for you have enough books, she thinks…) or even a dozen crystal cognac glasses in case you should have guests over… Guests? Such misery! In what state of enthusiastic delirium were you when you sent out that invitation? You must immediately organize this shambolic mess in which you lie in a state of chronic procrastination… You spend a night sketching bookshelves to house the excess, you regret the absence of a workshop where you could execute this simple woodworking project (you did bring back from the countryside a part of your collection of jointer planes, rabbets, wood chisels, saws, framing squares, and marking gauges, and flew in a crate of English hand planes—all of which now sits enthroned on the mantelpiece, having driven out a few stacks of books—but you didn’t have the time to build the workbench of your dreams in your kitchen: your mother and your lover threaten disowning and divorce if you actually undertake the project…).
