Not One Day

by Anne Garréta

  Green haven of friendly feminism and pragmatic methods: there you would dissect all the situations of aggression one might encounter, whether the target be your purse, your virtue, or your life. Analyze them, invent ways to block them. Simulate the confrontation if it was the only feasible strategy. In turns, each woman played the victim or the aggressor. The hand-to-hand was firm but thoughtful and careful. So much so that at the end of the semester, to have her class confront more muscular situations and less considerate adversaries, the sensei invited the university’s football team to come act as the aggressors.

  So that’s what you did three times per week. And after had blurted out the incredible story, you went to train with an added trepidation and a redoubled consciousness. Each woman who approached you (for partners were rotated to vary weights, tactics, and morphologies) to offer herself as a victim to your acts of violence or as a perpetrator, you saw as an adversary, a partner, but also as the possible unknown woman who perhaps would be betrayed by a gesture that was a bit too emphatic or a bit too soft. You gained a sharp, unprecedented consciousness of the weight of bodies, the proximity of faces, the pressure of hands, of limbs, of their abandon to your efforts, of their resistance.

  In your quest to discern, to guess which amongst these bodies was inhabited with desire for you, all their gestures, movements, contacts were eroticized. You assaulted these successive bodies with tenderness, you offered yourself to their endeavors with curiosity. You went to class as one goes on a date. A sensation of physical lightness, the prospect of vertigo. And yet, neither your suspicion nor your vague desire ever managed to fasten onto any one body. The unknown woman did not give herself away. Or else, if you thought you discerned a sign, just as soon you were seized with doubt: in the state of erotic exaltation you were thrown into, who could testify to the validity of your interpretations? If one woman, aiming to grab hold of your head and slam your face against the tatami, had incredibly gently suspended the gesture, holding your skull firmly and cautiously before dealing it the fatal thrust, didn’t another woman later on, while you tried your hardest to bear down on her with all your weight, didn’t she, before turning you over like a pancake and pummeling you with frightening strikes that stopped, suspended, precisely a centimeter above your sternum or your pubis, didn’t she dither and dally, prolonging your embrace?

  You never discovered who the unknown woman was. No declaration of her desire was ever addressed to you. No certain sign. You are grateful to her for that. The mystery of her identity, the search for signs, the hermeneutic passion it inspired in you, made that semester of self-defense the most arousing erotic experience of your life. An eroticism that was all the more strange since it never managed to fasten itself or settle on any one body, but instead was bound to all of them, and because it was fluid, vacillating, drove you to pay to each of them an intense and infinite attention. The exercise, a delicate and secret asceticism to guess the enigmatic desire of the other, utterly enchanted the body. Your own, all of yours.

  [Night 2]

  Y*

  Your first interview seemed different from all the others you had in the same circumstances, for the same purpose.

  You were young and still believed, on the verge of one of your careers, that you had ambition. You never set your heart on the pursuit of these careers. They proceed haphazardly. You certainly work—at university, at writing—but the necessary sociability with your peers, with the arbiters of your destinies—university types, literary types—bores you out of your mind, and you avoid it as best you can.

  Y, for her part, was on the road to becoming what she now is: revered, feared, and hated all at once, as a power in the field where those prized careers play out. All that, for her as for you, was still to come. Her passion was palpable in her words. She had traveled, lived elsewhere (which in your milieu was the exception rather than the rule).

  Your tastes seemed similar; your attitude with regard to your tastes even more so.

  You imagined that this first feeling of closeness, of complicity, could only deepen with time. Desire wasn’t far off. You got into the habit of thinking of her as a friend.

  Friendship seems to you today the most difficult thing in the world. You attempt it, and almost always doubt its reality. Thus the turn to desire, we resort to it, believing it will give form and flesh, the tangible weight of certainty, to phantoms and chimeras and through desire we dispel them, imperceptibly.

  You had always known her to fall for strange affairs that seemed to captivate her entirely, distant and absorbed at the same time.

  She was then the lover of who, years later, would confide in you that her fears regarding her dominion over Y had revolved at the time around two rivals, you and another—who indeed became the chosen one, the happy recipient of Y’s affection and confidence.

  It was as if had lifted a veil before your eyes.

  You had never seen things from that angle, that of rivalry, of conquest, of dominion. You had even lacked the ability to imagine things from such a perspective. (Did you know that the society in which you were (sometimes) living was still a court society? And that the Ancien Régime had never ended? Multiplied, displaced and diffracted, it reigned more supremely than ever.) There would have had to have been someone to show you the way, the goal. There would have had to have been someone exerting enough power over your imagination to lead it onto the path. Curious aporia… You would have needed the spiritual direction of an Abbot Herrera to point out for you the steep road of worldly ambition and deception.

  And even then…

  Your reading of the human comedy is quite queer. Sensitive, certainly, to the pleasure of intrigues, to the fantasies of power, to the mechanics of rivalries and jockeying for the upper hand, you fail, nevertheless, to identify and project yourself: mimesis, even wishing and willing to succumb to its power, does not inspire in you the desires of a Rastignac. Looking at the spectacle of this world, you can’t help but recognize, here there and everywhere, swarming around, the puppets of Balzacian passions. Politics, literature, management overflow with them. There is no career in all of Paris that was not ghostwritten by the creatures of the Comedy. We have an abundance of young youngsters and old youngsters of both sexes, ambitious, as naïve as they are cunning, in thrall to their own little bildungsroman. Channeling (often without knowing or else knowing too well) Corteggiano, apocryphal instructions of a baroque cardinal of yore.

  What will then have prevented you from emulating the heroes of this society’s canonical plots? The text says splendors and miseries of courtesans, and lost illusions…

  It also says femme-écran…

  The funniest thing about it is that a lot of people around you have a clear-sighted view of the plot. If they did not outline it for you (or is it that you failed to recognize and decipher the hints they possibly dropped?), it’s clearly because they thought you were already aware of its necessity and its obviousness. Did they believe that you would naturally be inclined to pursue it, as they would have, had they been in your position, since such inclination is supposed to come naturally (thanks to a thorough inculcation in the great narrations of said society) to all ambitious subjects.

  These spectators probably still consider you an imbecile today, and certainly secretly despise you for having wasted the opportunity, and for having failed to jump into an affair so promising and so obvious. Had you discerned it, would you have been able to throw yourself into it? For want of cynicism, would you even have had enough bad faith to delude yourself that such a conquest could form the natural extension of a beautiful friendship and not of a vulgar affair?

  But aren’t you exaggerating your pessimism here? Was your affection for Y doomed to corruption? Couldn’t it have escaped the fate and faults of the milieu that had borne it? Wasn’t there a margin, an outside, a haven to shield it from the inquisitions, the constraints, the vanities?

  In that sphere of desire, can there ever be a love story without a plot? We cannot lead a worldly
life without getting caught in the web, trapped in the weave of its design. And when we think we have radically managed to escape it—in the frenzy of desire—it resurrects its laws, its comedy, its control. Our desires are overblown—theatrically and vulgarly: dictated and stolen.

  And so for a few years you have been suffering strangely upon recognizing the signs of the possession of the other.

  Would you have wanted to be for Y what the other was for her, whom she seems to desire? Will you ever know? For you do not know what he is to her. At best you might discern what she is to him. Power is without mystery. But in what then does Y indulge?

  You suffer perhaps because this specter of power has been emptied of its promise—the bond you imagined between you and Y—or perhaps all it has done is reveal its vanity. It feels as though you are entertaining a friendship with a ghost or a shadow of her. When you start doubting the reality of your feelings and fear having only dreamed or fantasized this ghost out of thin air, you reread a book that she wrote long ago, when you first met. And each time people mock in front of you this or that position that Y has taken or favored, which so obviously betrays the influence of the other, you can’t help but defend her even though this position turns you off.

  Isn’t it only natural that our acquaintances, in cafés, in town, in bed, end up influencing our views, our opinions? Judgments are not at all reflections, but made to accommodate those of the circle of our acquaitances. Our habits prompt our judgments more than our tastes do. Can one shed them without tearing apart the circle of friendship? And how can we tell a taste from a habit, an inclination from a subjection?

  At the same time, you feel a sort of sadness, for the imposture is obscene and cruel, and disfigures Y, whom you love and didn’t know how to protect (or perhaps conquer…).

  You are resigned, however, and are sometimes mad at yourself for the idiotic sentimentality of your attitude. It is, after all, completely ridiculous to still feel the force of a bond that is always refuted and thwarted by the rarity and superficiality of your exchanges… But that is further complicated, for, beyond and beneath the frivolity and the professional chitchat you exchange, she sometimes happens to tell you things that are curiously intimate. And you don’t know how to interpret these moments or these confidences. You feel (or do you imagine?) something else, perhaps something real (what an absurd hypothesis…). Are these the moments when her guard is down, the moments when the former persona of Y surges from under the hard armor of frivolities, strategies, and courtship rituals? Or else are they also inauthentic, another ruse or habit, a ritual behavior, a tactic of these milieus: the affectation of profundity, the exhibition of a sincerity destined to reassure us, all of us, that we are still very human and not the grotesque automata of a stock plot? Is it simply that the private, the intimate, the things felt are only extra ammunition for a war game of frivolity? And how should you respond, to what should you address yourself: to the ostensible appearance, or to the furtively discovered depth? Must you show that you glimpse something that troubles you, show that you recognize something perceptible, that you’re ready to understand it and protect it like a secret? Or must you, just like her, repudiate it, enjoy it, not insist, and remain in the realm of social levity? Is it out of prudishness that she acts thus? For to insist would perhaps reveal or expose some vulnerability…

  But we have learned that this world is traitorous and that the surest way to preserve what we cherish is to devalue it overtly so that no one would think to take it, to flaunt it so that no one can expose it for what it is or steal it.

  Defiling what is sacred to us so as not to be taken hostage…

  Or else indecency stretches so far into the intimate because everything is profane, because there is no secret, no interiority, because everything can be put to use for schemes, control, subjection…?

  Thus we have that paradoxical and concomitant overestimation and depreciation of desire, intimated in the language we use to speak of our erotic lives… In terms manifesting its vulgarization, and in the tone and accent we use to pronounce them, pretending we will not be imposed upon by the power of the thing. Hygienic, necessary, metronomic: the driving score, with no syncopation or breath, of a municipal fanfare or a spin dryer. That banality blown out of proportion; that showcased insignificance… You suspect that the sort of lexical volunteerism used by your interlocutors is the fruit of an effort, of a concerted resistance to an intimate sentiment that it would be too ridiculous or childish to expose. And it seems to you that, through an additional act of ruse or resistance, the shameless assertion which would seem to be merely paradoxical prudishness—or better, just as much prudishness as shamelessness—is beyond our control and runs without stopping, the prudishness dictating the shamelessness that unveils the prudishness, the one signifying the other and canceling it out in the same utterance; familiar strangeness, through which the shameless assertion preserves or calls to renounce the possibility of its double, of its other—defends itself from rendering its secret to Eros, its inestimable poverty offered as a sacrifice to the ostentatious abundance of our consumer mores.

  Ultimately, you act as if the thing were real and felt, and as if you were still speaking with the woman you believed you knew. You realize, after the fact, the absurdity of your conduct and sometimes fear that she will interpret your response as a sort of affected sentimentality, the marks of affection as weakness or calculation. And at the end of it all, you are still surprised by the distant marks of her benevolence toward you, and ask yourself if it’s the ancient bond that perhaps never was, or was only fleetingly, that faithfully dictates them, or else something else (but what? You are tired of rereading Balzac, Gracian, Acceto, La Rochefoucauld…). And still, you ask yourself now and then why you see her so seldomly. Is it because she finds you so remote, your interests perhaps too distant from the world that haunts her, this world that absorbs her, it seems, entirely (this world where she absorbs herself entirely? to flee? to surrender herself? or else because there is no other…), or if it’s because she feels as awkward with you as you have felt for a long time with her, uncertain as you both are of the plane on which you might meet, the virtual or the artificial, and afraid to choose one or the other. And above all, does this all take place only in your head, where not even the phantom limbs of a brief dead past reside, only the pure hallucinations of meaning, the psychological moiré effect without a shred of substance, the shadows without bodies to carry them, nothing but you and you playing against yourself—are you not your best adversary?—at the ancient and unreasonable game of analysis.

  And all that, all your interminable dissection of shadows, is still too psychological and naïve.

  A little cynical and banal splinter pricks you during your mental odysseys, instilling in the Jansenist and contemplative animal the suspicion that the world is nothing but a battlefield splayed with interests, fights, and strategic ruses of ambition and power, inauthentic through and through, authenticity being nothing but the ultimate fiction deployed by the inauthentic to better help you delude yourself, and what you believe to be moral delicacy or an inner and sovereign leaning is only the function (or screen) of your powerlessness to pursue the only truly real things that exist, here and now, that you don’t have the virtue to desire without scruple, for you lack the courage to recognize that there is nothing in this life (the only one we will ever be given) beyond influence, vanity, women, fortune… But is it your fault if you lack faith? If you don’t manage to believe in these objects, if none enchants you? All that you have experienced of them, when you still believed you desired them, never gave you any pleasure. The whole religion of subjectivity (the idolatry of desires, the logic of diversion, the theosophy of rivalries, the art of subjection) seems to you grotesque. All that appears to others solid and pleasurable turns to smoke before your eyes. If it had sufficed to get down on our knees to believe… Ironic aporia of sovereignty: Mustn’t we get down on our knees to ascend to the throne?

  Sometimes
you miss Y.

  One morning, in a taxi that was taking you toward an airport, a train station, a lecture hall, the radio tuned in to some cultural program brought you her voice, the naked, enchanting voice of Y that it seemed you had never heard before in its nudity, in its harmonics, in its inflections, her specter, the erotic fulguration of a desire without history and without hope.

  You think of how simple it would be to call her, meeting her in some discreet garden, a dark café. Perhaps the figure of what you desired would appear: to ravish her in her milieu, as if it were possible to strip her of these traits that she was probably driven to adopt in order to adapt to this world and the sort of Darwinian competition it compels. Irony: this heroic desire of stripping exceeds control itself, absolutizes it. More irony: in terms of milieu, you don’t have one, you’ve developed no specific adaptation to any and that’s what makes it so that you are thoroughly not at home anywhere and that these phrases are the only milieu that the two of you will ever share.

  How to unknot the thread of desire. Dream up nights. Wander again among the shadows.

  [Night 9]

  Z*

  She had accompanied you to the airport. Your memory is saturated with airports, with goodbyes in terminals. You had had a last coffee together before separating, seated face to face, on either side of a table studded with circular stains left by the bottoms of glasses of previous travelers and, bringing your two coffees, the waiter wipes it down with his damp and dirty rag. She says to you that it had been spotted this morning while she was getting out of the shower, on her left shoulder blade, a strange and dark scar she had not managed to glimpse with her own eyes, no matter the effort she made to grasp at an image through a game of surreptitious reflections—even skewed—of her back in the mirrors decorating the bathroom. She says she remained silent and settled for wrapping herself up in her towel. She also says that she had wanted to ask you what this scar looked like, the one that escaped her gaze, her ruses, but she is afraid the scar will cause confusion, that she will be asked where it came from.