The Enchanted Clock

by Julia Kristeva

  Me and my neurons. Fourteen billion. And their thousand billion nerve connections. Thousands of billions of cells of two hundred different types, 10 percent immortal, the others constantly renewed. We observe ourselves. We test ourselves. Who knows whom? The molecules have the first word; should they let go of me, the trip is over. But it suffices for my hormones to hold on and for me to take my beehive off its hinges. They are not annoyed with me: they demand tact, I try, I search, I recompose, and they come along in my wake, mine, ours. My pleasure is good for them. Sleeping neurons, hormones, cells, and particles awaken, reproduce, are vitalized, I get away from them; they let me get away again. Another race, a new life. Till breath ends, no more ILY.

  52

  SILENCE AND POEM

  No word from Astro. I’ve lost the sense of time, as we know, but this time the break is too brutal and the absence too long. Although my paradise counts vast firmaments of winter, this is not normal. Usually he calls me morning, noon, and night, except when he is exploring a superluminal neutrino or conspiring in the Passemant archives. I generally answer within seconds, me too. But the unpredictable can happen. And it does.

  I am in my Atlantic refuge. The storm has blown all the barrels of salt from the salt marshes against the windows of my veranda. Leibniz terrified and swept away, electricity and networks off, Nivi alone against the flood, darkness, cold. I was away from my smartphone for a long time and didn’t get Theo’s barrage of texts until much later, too late. A dozen “Are you there?” “Are you there?” “Are you there?” cut off by a furious “Ciao!”

  Men are cruel babies—you don’t have to be a shrink to know that. All men, but not Theo? But he is! It’s enough to make you laugh and cry. Surely he heard the news about the storm: it was reported around the world; he must have understood that I was overwhelmed, and surely he must have worried, not being able to reach me. He could have tried to call Stan or Marianne or the city hall or the police station or the fire station or whatever … But no, I had to be there, I had to reply “present,” always present for him, reassure him—otherwise, panic … Poor paralyzed darling! Oh, not that at all, much worse: a predator … Except that there is no prey, there never was … A sort of love, this too: an unbearable state of abandon, the trap of having been mistaken: she doesn’t love me, women are all alike, never again … I can picture the scene he might have imagined for himself high under the heavens, at the Gran Sasso for example.

  Since then, radio silence, neither telephone nor e-mail—unreachable. No matter that I call, try to explain, elaborate, make myself understood—nothing. Disappearance of Theo. He sulks and drops me. He plays dead … I take back my calls, my messages; I’m angry. I could have been gravely disaster-stricken, or drowned, you don’t want to know how I am, what happened, not important. “It’s nothing, a woman who’s drowning …” It’s cruel to keep quiet like that, it’s killing me! Are you okay? What’s going on? A disaster, something serious at the lab or in the cosmic background radiation? No answer.

  After all, billions of men and women on earth are separating at this very moment; the storm is nothing like an event. On the other hand, echoing the Portuguese nun who finds that she loves the love she still has more than the lieutenant who has abandoned her, I realize that Theo’s absence causes me less anguish than his mute pain. Compacted into a smashing silence, his pain smashes me in turn. I hurt from not hearing him say that he hurts without me.

  Nothing … Still nothing … This silence from Theo … It’s not normal, even according to his own logic, his time that doesn’t exist and his intermittent appearances. No, it’s not normal at all!

  “Normal? Am I dreaming? If Astro were normal, he wouldn’t love you, and you wouldn’t love him either.” Stan makes fun of me, with the same words I repeat to myself silently—but pathetically.

  “Instead of worrying yourself sick, you should call one of those acronyms your lover hides under: ANGST, AIM, LUTH, and all the rest!” Marianne wants to calm me down by making me face the absurd; I confess I find this sort of tenderness exasperating at times. “Look, if there had been anything serious, his colleagues would have alerted you. Nothing fatal, so let it go, I’m telling you! From working day and night, or rather at night, with the stars, that man doesn’t just forget you. He forgets himself. Maybe he finds that amusing, after all …”

  Obviously they understand nothing about our affair.

  But what affair? Does it make any sense?

  It’s not because he fished me out with his boat that I take Astro for the Savior. And while his ancestor Passemant projects himself to the year 9999, I only count the internal coups d’état up to 9,999 (and more, with affinities) by sounding my survivals with Stan and my A. We are islanded, Theo and I, the way others are landed, in the insane disunite of skin-to-skin, wounded blood and hearts, I breathed in by him, he by me. Each excluded from the other yet joined, reciprocal, thoughts facing thoughts that sometimes screech or scream, and cheer. Solitary beginnings that meet, unmask, dismember one another. And try to remain luminous, musical, swarmed, austere, outside the earth.

  Could this be the first time in the world? Could we be a species of strange humanoids convinced there is no solution? Because the expansion of the world-happiness, of the world-unhappiness, is, was, and will be infinite? A way, perhaps the only way, of consuming death. Not the death that strikes once and for all, that science promises at age 150: future seniors equipped with hearts and other computerized organs, vigilant so that artificial uteruses and clever cloning programs do not overpopulate a planet already overloaded with the aged. No, I’m talking about the death that sizzles every nanosecond in Émilie’s fire, the death permanently at work in life.

  Astro’s ellipses instill emptiness in my paradise and remind me that death, my own death, is a decisive part of the experience. Since those same suspensions teach me not to count on anything or anyone, not even Theo (“Are you there? Ciao!”), but to transmute the emptiness into rebounds, I no longer live as if we were born to die. Given we’re born, let’s innovate. Each in our own way, unpredictable and unique, ephemeral but sharable. Neither hope nor responsibility, it’s only a game. A sort of paradise, all the same.

  Whereupon here’s Astro appearing on my screens again. After this long abyss of how much time? Two years, six months, three weeks, two days, six hours? I don’t know, I don’t want to know. He’s in China. How could he escape?

  The Chinese send taikonauts to the Moon, soon a busload of Sichuanese following in the footsteps of Apollo and Neil Armstrong! After Bordeaux wines, Ile de Ré salt, Airbus, African minerals, luxury industries, digitization, cinema, and other details, the Middle Kingdom wants to compete on the international market for space technology. About time. Too weak to worry the powers already in place, China launches scientific and educational partnerships with the European Space Agency, after the American contracts, which are imperative, and above all the old friends in Russia. Thus, from Beijing or Shanghai (it makes no difference to me: I delete the Latitude app), Astro lands by e-mail in my Lux paradise. But like a poet, for a change: “Our China: close/distant, small/immense, fragile/indestructible link. And breath fills the void.”

  That’s all. I was no longer expecting it. Exactly what I needed. For the moment, Astro spares me the hypertechnical exploits of his sophisticated mission; I ask for nothing more. Not the shadow of an excuse—let it go. The ellipses confirm the pure Theo style: the spontaneous concision and gift with which he associates me: “Our China.” Right away I approve the first-person plural.

  Then I reread and decide that this prose poem is much more than a Taoist painting on silk launched as a tweet by my specialist in chaotic inflation, a yin/yang connoisseur of binary thought and a practitioner of the transcendental respiration of yoga. These ciphered flashes describe Theo and Nivi. Together? “Our China”: necessarily, that is us, fragile/indestructible. I receive, let’s say, a declaration of love; it matters little if that was the revenant’s intention or not. What�
�s written is written; each word overflows with a meaning that expands me, and I find I was unjust, earlier, in going over the behavior of its author with a fine-toothed comb.

  Whether he eclipses or not, plays dead, capricious, predatory, or independent, basically I have never doubted that Theo exists and will exist for me in him, for him in me. The unknown space is he, the solid point around which my burning moments regroup, my transfigured hells and purgatories. A stranger among strangers, confirming my own strangeness, placing it in play like the others. So let him remain unusual! A chance, in fact, a harbor of grace for our solitary departures, these new lives for Nivi, transports and transfers, leaden echoes and golden echoes. He, the chosen silence, our disunite.

  53

  ROSE LAURELS

  Quite young, I liked to hide in the garden among the rose laurels (oleanders) bordering the roses and peonies. A flowerbed of blooming forest decorated the wall of the property; I would hide in its vegetal light. The dew moistened my hair, the dirt crunched under my sandals, I would rub my cheeks against the polished leaves, the minute petals, silken drops of blood more welcoming than the royal flesh of the barbed rose bushes, less odorous than the toxic peonies. I felt time live. Was I three, four? The garden brought itself to me; I ran to it. It yellowed in autumn, was covered in snow in the winter. I awaited spring and until the end of summer perfused myself in the green stems and the chocolate branches. A little rounded button, swollen with wind and water, I grew rosier from day to day in the warmth of the rains. I absorbed the rhythm of the laurels; I was one of them. A brown then wine-red bud, I became raspberry and opened into bundles of scarlet stars saluting the sun. I disappeared for good.

  “Where has Nivi gone? Has anyone seen Nivi?”

  Grandmother pretended not to know where I was, and the adults played along: no one would find my hiding place. Only Mama understood: “Leave her, she’s taking her time.”

  The butterflies, confusing me with this peaceful blossoming, would land on my open arms, stop palpitating, and I would count the instants of their sleep according to the beating of my little girl’s heart. I was butterfly, bee, pearl of dew, pollen, petal, twig. So that’s what time is: rhythmic metamorphoses, luminous, volatile enclosure.

  The magic ended one day during school holidays. I had already grown when I discovered that the red bundles had disappeared from the fresh bearer of my secrets. A huge burst of laughter shook my stupor. My cousin and her friends were filling the basin of the little fountain with the cut heads of my rose laurels. They were preparing a gigantic floral installation.

  “That’s so stupid!” Mama declared, sickened by this modern art that arrived at our house in the form of a cemetery of faded petals.

  Grandmother asked that the massacre of the laurels be severely punished and the guilty girls denied the beach.

  I didn’t say anything. At the time the idea did not occur to me that this devastation could be part of a war long smoldering and declared by cowards against my secretive person.

  “They’ll grow back next year, don’t worry!” snickered the little pests.

  I didn’t believe them. I no longer went to flower with the rose laurels. Only the golden memory of the words inhabits me now: rose laurels. The foliage unrolls only in my throat; their waves of sound often bathe my nights. They amplify the slightest noise in Stan’s bedroom and abruptly wake me, butterfly held in the hollow of a vermillion calyx in a forest of dreams.

  “Everything’s okay, Mama, I’m cured now,” murmurs Stan, curled under his comforter.

  It’s no use: I have trouble flowing into the sap of my laurels, where I sense time trembles. Sometimes it stops; sometimes it runs at top speed.

  But the garden still brings itself to me, and I still bring myself to it. Is it the garden’s time I am seeking in the stars with Astro? In this nature said to be still that ILY revives?

  Today, nothing calms me better than to take care of the garden. Then the floral rhythm from when I was three returns, and I water the citronella geraniums with fresh water, in the rockery at the edge of the ocean, in front of the Ars steeple.

  Theo is in a state of grace such as I have never known for him. He returns from Antarctica, where his Harvard colleagues’ telescope, BICEP2, has just captured primordial gravitational waves, the oldest traces of our world. These extremely tenuous representations of the background vibration of the universe are said to offer irrefutable proof of cosmic inflation.

  “I never would have believed I would live this moment! The world inflated like a balloon at a prodigious speed! In a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, all the points of the universe located at millions of light years apart from one another! Can you imagine? The confirmation we were lacking of the scenario called ‘eternal inflation,’ you know … Which postulates the permanent creation of the universe … Which reduces the Big Bang to a simple stage in the multiplicity of infinite new developments—some giving birth to all sorts of possible universes … some already known, others in the process of being born … With this, cosmology is moving farther away from metaphysics!” He couldn’t be happier. “We proceed by demonstrations, you understand … Demonstrations! Fascinatingly varied multiverses are more than possible: they are … they are taking shape … Isn’t it wonderful?”

  He doesn’t wait for my opinion; I don’t have one. “Permanent creation” is good for me: start out differently, be differently, not once and for all, evolve with time while adapting to circumstances … What could be better?

  Astro marvels: that’s enough for us; they’ll have to confirm in the lab, but a new era has begun for sure.

  Whereupon Stan bursts in: “Hi Theo, you landing? Things are moving like mad in the sky, it’s a scoop!”

  “You said it, mousquetaire! And you? Better and better, I see. One for all, all for one!”

  The two men have created a code, like for a partly secret “brotherhood,” to show Nivi she isn’t everything. And also to impress her. With three principles. Primo: As abstentionists and strikers, indebted and indignant, humans are unraveling. Never mind, France is resistant, take heart, you d’Artagnans! Secundo: Men have always been fragile, but from now on it is admissible to say so, and we, Stan and Theo, recognize it. Women are equally fragile, except that they prefer not to think about it. Like Nivi, who is courageous but still has her 9,999 internal coups d’état. She lacks the Gascony wit, alas, and she doesn’t know swordplay. Tertio: As fragile men, they are also full of cleverness. They cut seconds into sixtieths of seconds like Claude-Siméon, or even into a thousand billionths of billionths of nanoseconds, like Astro. They do really exist, but they don’t let themselves get easily trapped, or even seen—not much, not often … Like God … And like Theo. They are in love with women—certain women—while still being happy bachelors … Their first names rotate between Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnan. Faithful to Louis XIII (for a change from Louis XV and his 9999), engaging in heavy combat with the cardinal’s guards, they recuperate the queen’s necklace while also unmasking milady, join the siege of La Rochelle (right near Ré again!), and end up reconciling with Richelieu before each returns to whatever life he likes … And the duo starts up: We are the captains of Gascony, to make Nivi laugh and pester her a bit.

  “This time you swallowed the Big Bang, obstinate Athos! Long live eternal expansion!”

  “You’ve about got it, d’Artagnan. New worlds are being born, and it’s not over!”

  “So there are no ‘zero moments’ left? Only sequences of beginnings? We relinquish The Origin of the World to Courbet, intrepid Aramis!”

  “And one learns to tolerate contingencies! In the process, Porthos, we distance ourselves even more from theology. Because the laws of physics reside at the heart of the universe, not before, not afterward, we discover them as we go along, and we obtain their proof. That’s all, that’s huge.”

  “A little humility, d’Artagnan! There are still a lot of crazy dreamers in the cosmology tribe. You fabul
ate hypotheses; you take your math calculations for realities.”

  “Not untrue, captain, but this time your timing is bad, the very day when BICEP2 provides proofs, and what proofs!”

  “We’ll see, wait for the next scenario … Pardon me, the next ‘scientific discovery,’ with your permission … Not everybody can be a captain of Gascony … Shameless liars and fighters!”

  And they start up again:

  We are the Captains of Gascony,

  Fighters and liars without shame,

  From Carbon and from Castel-Jaloux,

  We are the ones!

  They’ve rehearsed their number; they like to play it for me from time to time; I pretend to disapprove, but I’m actually proud. Jealous, in fact! One jealous of the other, normal, and of Nivi, to be expected, Stan and Theo run their duel in the French manner, at a gallop, like a carnival, like a historical memory. It’s their music.

  She feels the happiness of being with them and also of not being, if it’s only by intermittence. Nivi leans out the open window. A smile hovers over the park, but the houses around it stand as opaque, as stiff, almost as threatening as before. The light shimmers in the chestnut trees; the Lux looks like the décor for a solemn fairy theater. An airy radiance welcomes her; she seems to understand that a shadow has melted inside her, disappeared for good. The smile reigns upon the world, it is the world, and the Lux is its vivacious and colorful proof.

  Nivi’s sadness, always fleeting, lost, on the lookout, has molted into something luminous, unheard of, and fabulous. Not really a destiny but a unique reality, almost exalting, somewhat like morning, for which a single word comes to her lips: serenity.