by Anne Garréta
This second memory-image is bathed in an extraordinarily bright light. It comes from the right, entering through what must be the large bay windows of a hotel dining room, intensified still more by the stretch of white tablecloths covering all the tables, perceptible although blurry in the image. Bright light, but you see your body before your eyes like a dark patch (you must have been dressed in black, and the other point of view, that which doubles the place of your gaze set apart from your body, lets you discern, hung on the back of your chair, a leather jacket). The little girl approached silently while you were chatting and stood behind your chair. When the conversation had ebbed back toward the other end of the table, feeling her presence, you turned around to face her. The back of your chair separates you from her. Her face is level with yours.
She has placed her forearm or her hand on your shoulder, as if to dance. The memory is of silence and stillness, of the weight of this child’s arm on your left shoulder, of her sad eyes fixed on yours, of an infinite duration. But you also know that she spoke to you. You also know that behind your head, where the table is, where the light is coming from, also comes an ugly wave of whisperings and looks that you can’t see but that tug at your gaze, which you strive not to turn away from the child who is speaking to you, so seriously, with a determination interspersed with silences, without seeming to pay attention to that which you do not see, behind your head, but that she can’t avoid encompassing in her field of vision.
The child asks you timidly if she will see you again, if when you come to Paris she will see you, if you come there often, if New York is far. A cloud of wickedness envelops you both, saturating your perception. You strain not to turn your face away from the child and confront the gaze that you feel on your back, make it stop by dissolving that strange colloquium with the child. To not turn around. To listen to her, respond to her, pay her the necessary attention, possess her calm and patience.
When the child with the sad eyes will have let her arm slip from your shoulder after having gravely said goodbye to you and will have gone off as silently as she came, you will face the table once again. , with a little smile, a bittersweet voice, then offered out loud her interpretation of the scene. She had apparently not missed a word and meant to expose its meaning. Obviously, she said, you represented for the child, because of the ambiguity of your appearance, the figure of prince charming promised to little girls by fairy tales and whom at this age, unconsciously, etc. The girl awaited prince charming and had mistaken you—grotesque error—for him. had therefore seen very precisely, under the pretext of Perrault and Freud—or rather of Walt Disney and Bettelheim, those two counterfeiters—what she had wanted to see. And you had seen her see it; you had felt her drooling gaze on your back.
You shrugged your shoulders, refraining from making any comment. If, by some fluke, the story was indeed a fairy tale (for might have been mistaken about the genre of the story itself, rather than the child about your gender), in ’s version, the stepmother, i.e. the witch, an obscene narcissist, a jealous caster of spells, transforming everyone she kisses into toads, had absconded. With her apple poisoned by the tree of tactless, lawless, and falsified knowledge.
[Night 5]
N*
That year, three factions made up the preparatory classes at the Lycée Henri IV: the studious commoners, a priesthood of political fanatics, and a decadent and libertine minority.
It was ten years before the revolution of ‘89.
The studious commoners would sit on the left side of the classroom, closest to the windows, just beneath the professorial gaze; the libertines on the right side; the militant clergy, for their part, strategically wedged between these two wings.
You were not of a fanatical disposition, nor of a laborious one. For the first time in your life, you could finally do what you wanted. Done with the ten hours of math and the nine hours of physics that had been inflicted on you weekly for years on end by the wisdom of your parents and their legitimate ambition for you. You would never attend X nor Centrale nor any other school of the kind. You certainly wouldn’t have gotten in: the entrance exam requires a masochistic diligence whose secret you do not possess, or a passion that the academic machine is rarely capable of arousing.
Since you had early on started indulging the vice of solitary reading, you had eyes only for what one no longer dares to call the humanities. (And it’s a shame, you think sometimes these days, that in your assignments you didn’t encounter books that would have been able to inspire in you an analogous passion for the sciences. When you glimpsed, a few years ago, at your junior and senior year math books before putting them away on the highest shelf of your newly built library, you were seized with anger for the pedants who had had the nerve to inflict such abominable puke on generations of unfortunate students. You had forgotten that the point of this instruction was never to instill an affinity for the subject but to make it into a pure instrument of selection. It would be pointless, thenceforth, to call on native intelligence or curiosity to offer the least adventure, the tiniest escapade. We could—and what a scandal it would be—discover a passion for mathematics; who knows where that could really lead us, and society swept along too. You had to reach thirty and read English fluently in order to delve into an honest history of mathematics and finally learn something of it. Literature, though minutely minced and grotesquely drowned in the aseptic brew of Lagarde and Michard, was still surfacing in scraps.
Culture on that side, although crumbling, boiled down, was not yet fully attenuated and neutralized. The vaccine wasn’t perfect. A paragraph of Montesquieu, of Stendhal, or of Flaubert, a verse of Baudelaire, of Aubigné, or of Racine, even amputated, disfigured, coated in bland commentary, could still prove virulent on a susceptible constitution. You fear that the latest pedagogical improvements have eliminated the last remaining chances of accidental inoculation.)
But you digress. Yes, you could have developed a passion for mathematics but you only had eyes for the disciplines of meaning and interpretation. You had reached, at last, their blessed land. Glorious emancipation. Literary libertinism was no longer a hidden vice cultivated in secret.
You could indulge your other inclination too in such a liberal place. Quite a year you had there, happily filled with all kinds of darings and temptations, of free pursuits and affairs.
You will tell the story of one among many. Why this one rather than another? So be it.
You will tell a few others, too, another day, soon. They have the charm of coming-of-age novels. Does it not seem to you, twenty years later, that everything then, even your passions, your feelings, had an energy, an optimism that has since been lost? Delightful illusion conjured up by the retrospective narration of youth: wasn’t the world newer then, and your sensitivity, too?
Charming topos. Young imbecile that you were, trusting in her own strengths, filled with wonder at the thought of trying her young powers in intellectual disputes, in exhilarating projects of seduction. You were finally, you thought, in your element. To prevail in rhetorical exercises, to overcome all rivals at intoxicating speed. To learn, know, and conquer everything through the free play of the mind.
One, then. Why her? Because, young imbecile, your adventure with her had the same effect on you as your scholarly trophies. A triumph of will, a price for excellence snatched in a fierce struggle in the ferocious competition of libertinism.
N was by all possible accounts a very beautiful woman. Everyone, even the austere priesthood, longed for her. A knockout. You’ve since been told that she made the cover of a magazine dedicated to the exhibition of female nudity.
You feel a pang of regret. You knew so little of her in the end. The only portrait you would be capable of giving today is all exterior. A portrait on glazed paper offering only an icon for fantasies. And on the verso, the features of a beautiful intelligence… And yet—but how can you express this, how can you capture this in the fragments of memories still accessible to you, she was something other than
that… Confusingly, you feel it, you know it, even though her figure lacks density, as if ghostly…
You don’t even know anymore how it all began, through what maneuver you had convinced her to go on a date with you. Through what little note borne from seatmate to seatmate up to her desk. For a real polyphonic epistolary novel was being composed during class in the rows of the right side. A concentrate of Liaisons Dangereuses, bastardized with German metaphysics.
Writing this title, the memory of the circumstances, uncannily, comes back to you. There I go. You were lavishing your epistolary attentions on , who, still hesitating to give in to your entreaties and, perhaps to buy herself some time, or to complicate the affair, suggested, or enjoined (you no longer remember), that you pursue the conquest of N. Was that the condition of her consent to your wishes? (Perhaps, for not longer after, she did in fact yield to your desires.) She even offered to intercede between you and N. N had made it known to her that she was curious about you, perhaps that she was interested in you, and maybe more. It’s possible that even though in your young vanity you believed you had won over N, it was she who had subtly brought you to precisely the position she had calculated. (You believed you were laying systematic siege to a fortress, maundering about the battlefield…)
You no longer know what wrote to her (perhaps you never knew), nor what you conveyed to N.
In any event, it was a Friday, the day before some vacation (Easter, you think). After lunch you strolled with N through the streets of the Latin Quarter. You still remember the men doing a double take as the two of you walked by, those who whistled and your stupefaction at such a spectacle. Your indignation. If you were her (but obviously, you are not her), you wouldn’t have put up with such a barrage of scurrility, you wouldn’t stop yourself from slapping their moronic mugs once and for all. Obviously, you are not accustomed to causing riots in the streets. You still aren’t accustomed, either, to being thrown out of a café by a waiter, more jealous than scandalized by your alleged indecent behavior, which happens nearly right away when you have spent a few moments kissing on the bench of the dark back room of a bar near Odéon. Precise memory, here, magnificently precise, of the obstacle of N’s barely-ajar teeth pressed playfully against your tongue.
It was out of the question to go cause a riot in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Cafés were not a good idea. This exclusion was also new for N. Normally, she tells you, she has no problem. You bring to her attention the small difference between this and the norm. (Specify, for the intelligibility of the story, that at the time your hair had been quite long.) Finally she proposed that you go to her place, close to Saint-Sulpice, provided you let her check first that there’s no one home.
You remember waiting for her at the foot of the building, deciphering the titles of old books on the stand of a second-hand bookseller, in a state of mortal terror mixed with excitement, for you had never imagined that the adventure would go so far so fast. You had anticipated some flirting, but now the possibility of a room, a bed, was looming. And how would you act? A Stendhalian panic was flowing through your limbs. Not a single book title made sense, and N still hadn’t come back. Perhaps she was retreating too, maybe the building had another exit and she had slipped away while you were consulting abstruse volumes of yesteryear to kill time, to kill the wait. The suspicion, crossing your mind, pricked your vanity and your pride at once. Mortified impatience, excited panic… Wayward head and heart.
But she came back.
In the kitchen, on a table, near a bird cage sitting on newsprint, there was a chessboard, a game already started.
In the bedroom, a piano.
And then what? It didn’t help quash your panic to tell yourself that the entire world would certainly have liked to be in your place. It also didn’t help vanquish your paralysis to whip up your pride and envision the exercise as a test on a competitive exam where the point was not only to do well but to excel, to prevail over the entire world. And what was the difference between that and a challenging essay question?
Then what? Here’s when the indefinite that eludes your memory comes back to haunt you. Then, there was N, who probably, unlike the young imbecile that you were, had more sensuality and tenderness than vanity, and probably, in not taking you for the entire world, saved you despite yourself from your infernal pride and wretched libertinage.
You decipher retrospectively, outlined in negative space, all that you are unable to say or describe of N. Something of her subtlety, her quality. Which today you can neither say nor describe for, young imbecile that you were, you did not perceive it, even if it fortunately affected you as N, in her great gentleness (for that afternoon spent in her bed, everything was gentle and subtle), bestowed its grace on you.
You’re reminded of that comic scene of the Confessions when, in the arms of the superb Venetian courtesan whose name, you believe, begins with a Z (like the name, you suddenly think, of the obscure object of desire of a Balzacian novella), Jean-Jacques, in the throes of a delirious panic, suddenly loses his composure. And Z, saddened and hurt, pronounces a sentence which N mercifully spared you: Giacomo, lascia le donne, e studia la matematica.
[Night 8]
X
She had an incredible story to tell you. All her stories are incredible. has a passion for hyperbole, and her hyperboles always delight you. They let you play the part of sensible moderation. You act the angel.
The story was, truly, like something out of a novel. Back on campus (she was living in NY at the time, close by) to visit some friends in the graduating class just after hers (why hadn’t she also visited you on that occasion? You must have been elsewhere, on a jaunt who knows where…), had found herself one night in a car with a half dozen students. And one among them had recounted that in a class at her gym, among the fifteen students, there was—a rare thing—a professor, and she was incredibly cool, exciting, and French. And who could it be among the faculty?… For she was enrolled in the same self-defense class as you, and thought you were really just the coolest, but just so cool and French and such a professor that you were totally out of her league. Exoticism incarnate… Wasn’t it wild?
You poked fun at this declaration that had reached you by ricochet and by surprise. You asked the name of your admirer. didn’t know, it was a chance meeting, a friend of a friend. It was all very remote. A description perhaps? But it was night and the car was dark and everyone had piled in after an outing. The incredible story was that a stranger was pining after you, probably ever since she had had the occasion to throw you on the tatami during your lessons, or even to fight back your fraternal attempts to strangle her.
So, what are you gonna do? offered to round up her friends from the fateful convoy and inquire, dig up a name for you. But to what end? Such affairs go against the professorial honor. objected that the student wasn’t taking your courses, it just so happened that you were in the same self-defense class. In which case, no one would be able to accuse you of harassment or even of seduction. Weren’t you the object of desire? Casuistry, my friend, casuistry. She’s not one of your students but who says she won’t become one? And anyway, it’s not reasonable, really, in good conscience, to give in to a fleeting and mindless crush, a pure effect of the imaginary transgression of an institutional boundary. You were flattered, terribly, that a student found you so cool that she was falling for you, but as it stood, what would you gratify? Your vanity?
thought you were being rather severe. This unknown woman was silently burning up with passion! It’s certainly cruel, but that never lasts… And then, what impression would it give? Right in the middle of an assault, possibly the pedagogical simulation of a rape attempt, whispering in her ear: “So you think I’m cool? Shall we do it for real?”
Ridiculous.
You were actually laughing quite a bit, seated on the parquet floor in the middle of your perfectly empty and zen living room where every day you practiced your katas and did some stretches, some push-ups. The telephone conversation shifted to
other incredible stories and ended on your profession of disbelief.
You were, however, curious. That night in bed, before going to sleep, you mentally reviewed the participants in your Self-Defense for Women class. You tried to remember events that could have retrospectively betrayed the feeling that had led to a confession so hyperbolic (but perhaps the hyperbole should be attributed to the narrator and not to the character of that incredible story) and so public, in a car full of strangers. It was comical: you were the last person to know, and by accident, about the desire you had sparked.
You didn’t think about it again until the moment, two or three days later, when you were getting dressed to go to the gym. You always put on your gi in your office, thus shielding your modesty from the lack of privacy in the dressing rooms. You also liked to walk like that, in your uniform, under the trees of the campus. It allowed you to inhabit the place in a certain manner, rather than simply crossing it like one is condemned to pass through French universities, for example. You understood that night, stripping off your clothing and putting on your uniform, that this ritual also served the purpose of giving you the time for your metamorphosis from a professor who solemnly receives students during office hours into a student ready to indulge in hand-to-hand sparring. Knotting your belt, you thought again of the unknown woman who, despite your metamorphosis, always perceived the professor and the frog under the uniform of the student. And, walking under the trees, you promised yourself that you would pay strict attention tonight to all of your gestures and try, without betraying anything on your part, to detect the desire beneath the unknown woman’s uniform.
This self-defense class was very interesting indeed. Students fought under the direction of a remarkable sensei: a short, not skinny, black woman born and raised in the Bronx, living in the Bronx, black belt in jiu-jitsu, and marvelously capable of inspiring combativeness and courage in the most timid of the young, well brought-up girls who made up a good part of the class.
