Not One Day

by Anne Garréta

  The landscape strikes you as eerie. Not that it’s exotic. Nothing really unknown. All of it seen and seen again, in CinemaScope, in real life. Except that it’s poles apart from the landscapes you grew up in. Except that it’s a landscape you don’t know how to photograph. The frame of your car’s windshield alone tames it enough for you to take it in. (And that’s how you take photos there: at arm’s length, in midair, through the lowered window of the right door, or else, surreptitiously, without taking your eyes off the road, straight ahead through the windshield… the camera sometimes aimed at the exterior rear-view mirror…) And just as you will always keep the trace of an accent that, in the depths of Virginia, of Michigan or elsewhere, will betray your foreignness, this landscape will always escape your capture: it exceeds the borders of your snapshot, it overflows them. That it’s been filmed to the point of blinding the entire world—the images of this landscape have dripped and bled (as we say of a badly fixed color that runs) over the entire planet to the point of inspiring parking lots, shopping centers, and suburban housing tracts all over—will not change anything here. Your gaze, like your tongue, like your culture, was formed in the towns of Europe, in its countrysides and mountainscapes.

  The New World is the only truly disorienting one, cutting across the Old World grain—a full world, of peasants relentlessly tending the land till it’s been exhaustively humanized. New World, unoccupied territory, where Chateaubriand thought he had seen shores empty of inhabitants looking at seas empty of ships, and whose hosts, to ward off the anxiety of these infinite spaces they are too few to populate, strive to cover up under sprawling suburbs, distraught metropolises, shopping malls rolled out over acres and acres, a blanket of concrete, parking lots, ramps, bypasses, asphalt. Lay the foundation to cement our disappearance, quickly, for its grip, imminent, threatens. The traces and imprints break down, fade, erased and phantomlike. For having failed to cultivate the landscape they are powerless to possess. America, or the middle of nowhere… This is perhaps the source of the elation that takes hold of you as soon as you set foot on the new continent: in the middle of nowhere, who are you? Here, you are you; there, another; nowhere, no one.

  What is so exhilarating about this vanishing of traces, about this ordinary nomad phantomization? And how is it related to the subject that’s supposed to be driving these stories?

  You were seated at your computer, you had launched the word processing program, plugged your headphones’ mini-jack into the back panel, next to the two USB ports, double-clicked on the music player. The clock in the menu bar at the top right of the screen indicated: Tue 3:07:01 AM. You didn’t know which woman to think about. You told yourself that you could engage any subject, whatever came to mind. What came to your mind was what flowed through the wire connecting you to the machine. Highway music. You embarked upon it. What ought to have been only a primer, a warm-up, became a digression, and the digression stretched for miles (for what path through these nights presents any evidence, any necessity? What path do we chart in the middle of nowhere, at no hour?), taking up the entirety of the ascribed duration.

  But how is it related to the subject that’s supposed to be driving these stories? And the figure of desire?

  The figure is the same and is another. A figure, precisely, and by definition…

  That of the Pontiac Grand Am, that grande dame or âme, American soul that you never stop desiring, object of your most constant desires, reigning over your nights, nights without nights, luminous nights and just as many days. Incomparable flight you never possess, no more than the world it allows you to brush up against, to cut across, so alien and so familiar.

  Could you have devised a more beautiful allegory, a more sublime figure of desire?

  [Night 11]

  K*

  You liked the name she called you: kiddo. She took a strange pleasure, perhaps it reassured her, in emphasizing the generational differences between you two, your wild and crazy youth and her maturity of a woman who has lived, who knows what is sensible and what is not—you, for example, and the desire she felt for you.

  You hadn’t perceived the shift occurring between you from an established friendship to attraction, that madness she fought against, before which she kept erecting obstacles, limits, safeguards.

  One autumn night she drove you home, and when it was time for you to get out, she lingered, leaning over her steering wheel, without speaking, without saying goodbye to you, and you waited, puzzled, for her to tell you her secret, a secret you had not imagined. She didn’t tell you, but prolonged your hug for an unusual amount of time. Then, after letting go, and before your silent interrogation, added only this: It’s ok kiddo.

  You got out of the car, confused by that sudden revolution of your shared feelings, asking yourself later, at home, stretched out on the parquet floor of the big empty room that served as your living room, hands crossed under the nape of your neck, if you hadn’t dreamt it, and how it was possible that six years of friendship could have, in the space of one night, been converted into a desire you hadn’t seen coming. The friendship had probably, from the start, been built on a basis of subtle desire, of a potential desire that good sense, affinity, tenderness had managed to tame, divert, shape into something else.

  This desire was worrying you. How would you respond to it? Were you responsible for it? Had you, by accident, without realizing it, activated or reactivated it? Didn’t it threaten your friendship?

  The order of what ensued is vague. There is no time in your memory, nothing but places and between them passages that open only to close again. And a meteorological memory, of the texture of the light. Light inseparable from the places and the movement of your body in space, of the vision of other bodies in that space and that light.

  There is the halogen light that floods the surface of your desk at the university, the all-nighters you pull working in your office; the light of the computer screen, distinct, surging out of the shadows. The email window turns it to black night streaked with bright green letters. K will find these late night messages on her screen in the morning, a few doors farther down the hallway. Emails in which you tell her about your pinball machine feats, your video game triumphs (you spend way too much time in the student game room three floors below), the little hermeneutic discoveries you chance upon in your readings, and then all that one never talks about, for there are things—self, light, meaning—devoid of substance, but whose spectral presence we may try to grasp, to capture obliquely, in fragments, incidental or reflected.

  There is the murky, garish light of the video game Mortal K. One night she came to watch you play, struggling against her horror of violence, even virtual violence, which you delighted in, decapitating, blowing up, carbonizing adversary after adversary in an interminable quest for virtual immortality.

  There is the incredible light of a late afternoon after a storm that has rinsed the air and rendered a hallucinatory purity to the facades, the trees, all the objects it bathed, leaving behind a pale, bloodless sky, violently intensifying colors, expressing an unbearable darkness from the trunks of trees. You walk through the campus gates, K still hesitant, delaying the moment of her response to your plea—let’s take a walk?—the coded phrase whereby you had, early on, started signaling the resolution to give yourselves over to pleasure, after a walk that leads you, along the shopping streets, by the old cemetery, through the ghetto, to your house.

  You, too, had started calling her kiddo.

  It’s two in the morning, and you remark that this project you have undertaken, to make an inventory of these moments of your life according to the pure order of desire, is a project that is either insane, vile, or idiotic.

  The narration washes up there where you unravel. The autobiographical account is an imposture (as if you didn’t know that already): you are unable to unwind the nonexistent spool of a film that was never shot. Fragments of moments superimpose each other, cancel each other out. There are only erasures. In your memory, everything ha
s decomposed and dispersed under the spectrum of what K became for you. Could you even render a cubist portrait of her, an allusive portrait, a portrait in fragments? No, not even. Indecipherable. What machine, what fiction must you invent or construct to manage to capture what would only be an abstract figure of K, a figure pierced with ellipses, and the enigma that you become in the space and light of her memory?

  Worse: the desire you both gave into destroyed the friendship—and today, you miss K. All that she feared from you, from desire and its danger, came to pass. She could not keep herself from feeling it, from yielding to it to the point of inspiring it in you and, having inspired it in you, didn’t have the heart to protect herself from it, nor the force not to succumb to it, nor the freedom to abandon herself to it entirely without reservations. You’ve both left the place where you met. It’s been five years since you last saw her. You are dead to each other, and you must resuscitate who you were at her side, and who she was at yours.

  You struggle with this impossible memory. You cannot recount K. Tenderness devastates you. And here is the core of your powerlessness: you had more than desire for her. And when it comes to that, there is no way you can resort to the half-ironic, half-moral perspective that allows for narration. This aloof point of view that outlines and pins down, that immobilizes the memory under the lamp or under the tongue, and, methodically, like a scalpel, observes and describes it. Autopsy. A cold narration, consistent with the coldness of desire.

  You cannot recount K, and the reason is visible in the traces that remain, in that partially electronic correspondence that you keep on a shelf of your library, those gray ashes of phosphorescent signals consumed on the screen of former nights, that you reread a few months ago as one rifles through dust, in search of clues as to the genesis, forgotten like all the rest, of a novel that you conceived of at that time.

  In this panic of sudden comprehension, you’ve just typed a load of nonsense. K still remains within all that you are today. There is no one to resuscitate, and it’s because the memory is still alive that it resists autopsy and decimation over the course of a story.

  You didn’t know it then, holding yourself to the comfortable concept of a friendship that had digressed into desire, you still didn’t know it at the moment you began writing tonight, but you loved K, and I suddenly feel with a five-year delay the devastation of having lost a woman that I loved (that you loved?) without ever having known it. And who probably put down all her defenses to love you.

  You should have suspected it at the first word written tonight. You should have, in rereading that correspondence a few months ago, understood it all. The dialect in which you wrote to each other is the dialect of all your loves: a chimera of French and English, strewn with bilingual wordplay, vertigos of language, trepidation over meaning. K is also, she was already then—that was legible, but how long does it take to understand what one has written without having premeditated it?—the shadow or the double of another woman you loved, who did not look like her, and whom you were still mourning when you loved K, without knowing it and perhaps without wanting to know it.

  Your blindness, so convenient and so well maintained, has just exploded in your face. It’s ok kiddo, you would say.

  Or is it?

  [Night 4]

  L*

  A gaggle of writers hurtling down the sloping streets of a town foreign to most of them, on the way to a restaurant where they will be fed between two feasts of discourse.

  Lost in this cortege, busy chatting boutique et politique, was a little girl dragged along, from colloquia to readings to signings, by her stepmother, who was doing a worldwide promotional tour. Putting on a show of her affection.

  How old was she? Ten or eleven perhaps. The age of lanky limbs, of a growing body’s prolonged clumsiness. The awkward age. Awkwardly dressed by this stepmother. Shoes that did not make it easy for her to negotiate the slopes of the hill our little Parnassus was hurtling down, heedlessly, so much were they absorbed by their boutique et politique, paying no attention to the child. She had been celebrated enthusiastically at her arrival, her prettiness and kindness had been praised. The ladies had passed her from arm to arm to kiss her, then came the outpouring of customary compliments to the stepmother.

  You went down the street without talking, looking at the river below, straight ahead. And the bank beyond, distant, and the horizon behind, proffered. You see that in your memory: the opening of the space from the point of view of your body pinned to the hillside, gaze delighted by the stretch of world revealing itself far away. You suspect, however, that another perspective has superimposed itself on that image of memory, the perspective you would have perceived on another day, but in an identical light, from the terrace of the hotel where you were staying. Still, the sensation of the air lingers with you, the feeling of an open space, like a kingdom by the sea. You hang over it. You feel as though you could soar over it if you so desired.

  The child was close to you, probably because you were the only silent ones. You noticed she was struggling to go down the hill, that the soles of her little girl shoes were sliding on the cobblestone. That, desperately holding back, she was becoming paralyzed. She nearly slipped backwards. You kept her from falling. From that moment on, she didn’t let go of your hand.

  Sensing that she was still scared, you set about explaining to her how to adjust the balance of her step to the slope, how to relax, to resist, without rushing, the force of gravity that carried her body forward, to identify the vertical and hold herself without fear, using her arms to balance against the momentum of the slope, to set her eyes before her and embrace the landscape to steady her body in space. And to further reassure her, you told her that going back up would be less perilous than going down. That the descent, on mountains, in life, in cities, was always more dangerous than the climb, and that if ever she were to find herself one day on the top of a steep mountain confronting vertigo, all she would have to do is turn her back to the void and go down how she would have climbed, but reversing her steps, facing the slope. Or else, from the side, slanting, in such a manner as to resist the pull of the void and the fall.

  This little girl didn’t make a lot of noise at the lunches and dinners. She must have been even more insufferably bored than you were. They sent her to bed early, too, as one does. You believe you remember that one evening, as you showed up late for dinner, her stepmother, , told you that she had been asking about you, had been looking for you, that she had recounted how you had explained to her the art of descending slopes and that she now no longer had any fear because she knew. complimented you on your pedagogical talents. You didn’t discern any irony in this compliment.

  The symposium wrapped up with a brunch where everyone showed up weighed down with their luggage. People moved between tables, swapping seats. You found yourself, not long before the hour of your departure, seated at the same table as . You chatted boutique, politique. You had resigned yourself to it, in order not to appear unsocial.

  What you find in your memory when you probe it: there are memory-images that are like paintings defying the articulation of a single perspective. Their focal point is divided between your body as it fits into the remembered space, and the point of view of no one, as if your gaze had become detached from your body. The image of the memory that makes up the painting is thus paradoxically anchored and drifting. These memory-images are rare. You would have needed some sensation to strike your body in order for the memory to fasten itself there: a light, a worry, a numbness, an alarm…

  And then, for the rest, for all that did not coalesce into a picture, there is a sort of stenographic scribbling of the past, eliding the repetitions, a sort of partial code, a compressed file, a hasty script, to be completed with all that we know too well, or believe we know too well, the blur of days, of things, of people, of words, of events, of landscapes. And which automatically, or nearly so, comes to supplement the traces, the outlines, following patterns where you suspect our forms, our comm
on habits of narration and description, of playing a part. These are prescribed, taught, indoctrinated by the vulgar and prevailing uses of representation that novels, serials, films, and conversations have forever ingrained in us.

  Between the first memory-image that, at the beginning of that night, you considered and attempted to fix on the page… (A sketch, like a study that a painter would have gone to execute in a museum of an inaccessible painting that she can’t otherwise obtain, a painting by another painter, that in seeking to copy she can’t help but dissect, and onto which she inevitably imposes her own manner… If you can’t understand this, go see the copies, the sketches, and the studies that were done over the centuries by all the painters, of paintings of their significant predecessors. In the order of personal memory, too, we succeed each other, aesthetic generation after aesthetic generation. And perhaps the cunning of memory, of fiction, and of life only ever amounts to this: to step into that spectral gallery of pictures we do not remember having painted, but that our senses and time have composed and conserved for us, that another painted for us, and to forever redo our apprenticeship by turning ourselves into copyists—critics, confectioners, kitschifiers, curators, disciples, dissectors, engravers, iconoclasts, restorers, counterfeiters, high priests, translators…) Between the first memory-image and that which at present you will try to summarize, all your narration will have amounted to little beyond the stenographic buzzing laboriously deciphered, decompressed, and transcribed in the common language.