Christine Angot

INCEST

I shouldn’t dedicate this one to you

my beautiful Léonore, and so nice too,

as you asked me to add.

It’s winter’s return

Look, the sky’s overcast

And the snow is falling again

Sing Noël in my heart

Sing the Heav’nly Child

Christmas and happier days

Childhood, my long-ago childhood

CHARLES TRENET

Le Retour des saisons

No Man’s Land

I was homosexual for three months. More precisely, for three months I thought I was condemned to be homosexual. I really had caught it, I wasn’t imagining things. The test results were positive. I’d become attached. Not the first few times. It was the looks she gave. I started on a process, one of collapse. In which I couldn’t recognize myself. It wasn’t my story anymore. It wasn’t me. Still, as soon as I saw her, the test results were the same. I was homosexual the moment I saw her. Things turned back into me afterward. Whenever she was gone. Other times, even in her presence, I was myself again. I missed my daughter so much on trips, when I was away for longer stretches, three or four days. The feeling of betraying the only one I truly love. To whom I’d dedicated all my books. Writing is impossible. When you’re not yourself. My sexuality suffered. In the beginning I was dissatisfied. Then. I wasn’t anymore. I was less and less. Except for one thing (I’ll get to it later), that I never enjoyed doing. Something specific, that involves all the rest. Except for once, I remember. I never did it, so to speak. I had become one hundred percent homosexual apart from that. Apparently. The moment I saw her. But for this detail. Remaining fundamentally and profoundly heterosexual all the while. (But, without theory.) One detail that spared me. Otherwise I was completely homosexual. For a short time, but still, three months. There were no men at all in my fantasies, on the contrary, there were women rivals. I was on the sidelines, they were rivals with each other. I was fascinated by homosexuality. No one is fascinated by themselves, I wasn’t homosexual. And yet. I ended up feeling an enormous desire. As soon as I saw her arriving, I was caught. Even now, I still have to. Even at this very moment. Have to stop myself from calling her. Calling her at work, that’s my specialty. It amused her at first. All the “quick calls.” The secretary knew my voice. Of course. Right away. The secretaries recognize my voice. Right away, they know it’s Christine. I keep at it, I’m relentless. I make it clear, I’m not embarrassed. The weapon turns against me sooner or later. I use it. My former editor used to say “she’s a serial killer.” I want to call him too sometimes. My father has Alzheimer’s, typical, I call others. I telephone. Her, I can’t count the number of times. I call again. I hang up. I call back to say, “above all, don’t call me again.” “I don’t want to hear from you anymore.” I don’t get a call. I telephone again. I say “you could have called me back. So you weren’t going to call, hunh? You don’t have the guts! To do the opposite of what I tell you for once. When you know perfectly well… it’s not what I wanted. You know it’s not true, what I say. Not what I want. But the opposite. After three months, you still haven’t figured it out. You know that’s how it is. And if you don’t, well then…” Behaving like a baby. I’m perfectly aware. Not at first, though it was normal to call her at work ten times in an hour. She claims she loves me. For a blown light bulb, an empty ink cartridge, a fax that won’t go through, to read her what I’ve just written over the phone, for some anxiety attack coming on. Etc. Dinner, do you love me, and I forgot to tell you, I thought to myself, I’ll call her or I’ll have forgotten again by this evening. At first, it comes off well, she likes it, it’s spontaneous, it’s a change. Serial killer, it’s part of my charm. I tell her she’s a coward. She tells me I’m crazy. A lack of balance doesn’t scare me, there are others who can’t cope. Like her. People like her. Who have limits. I have none. Her, she has them. Me, I don’t. She can’t stand it. When things get so… neurotic. I get called insane. Several times. Don’t take it as an indictment, you’ve got reasons, it’s just an observation. Some people have limits, you have none. But still, I’m suffering. She can’t take it anymore. She has her limits. Who could? I hang up. I pass the mirror. Despite my face being all flushed, I think I look pretty good. I say to myself, “I’m worth more than this.” I don’t call her back. I say to myself “I’m not going to call her.” I say to myself “how dare she… ten years older than I am… and not all that attractive.” I lie down. Time to move on to something else. There are other things in life than calling Mademoiselle. I decide to read. I like reading. This doesn’t interest me. Coeur furieux, my heart is even more furious. I close the book and try to watch The Last Temptation of Christ. After five minutes I stretch out on the sofa and weep. I don’t just shed a few tears. Pretty soon it’s unbearable. I wonder who to call. Who to talk to about this. What number to dial to start sobbing right after “hello” and then “what’s the matter?” How many phone numbers before coming to my senses again? There are always offers. “If things aren’t going well, call me.” No, her. To see if she loves me to exhaustion, as she claims. If not, then really! “I’d do anything for you,” but not take two hundred phone calls. Right now, this minute! At her place, at work, at the hospital, with a patient in front of her. And then. I don’t call her again. I’m relieved, I’m finally free. Phew, I even say it out loud. I say phew. I pick up the phone and put it on my stomach. I tell myself that it doesn’t mean anything, there’s no reason I can’t have it on my stomach. The remote control is on the ground and still I’m not watching television. So there! Just because the telephone is on my stomach, doesn’t mean I’m going to call. It’s absurd! I’m so much better off without her. I’m not going to go and call her now, just when I’m starting to calm down. Besides, I have nothing to say. Not a thing. Phew. Really, phew. I didn’t want to. I was never homosexual. I was never interested in breasts. Mine included. We finally undressed one day. She said “touch me.” “Never.” I’ll never be able to. I told her, I remember, even though it was a long time ago, “your breasts bother me.” She said “well just your luck, they’re very small.” That’s just it! as long as I’m at it, I’d have preferred they were bigger. When she said “touch me,” that’s not what she was talking about. When someone says touch me… Fine, I put my finger in. You never get a chance to touch something like that otherwise. Léonore has a book about touching called Feely Bugs in the ‘Touch and Feel’ series. There’s nothing like this in it. Not the plush bug, the one with feathers, with lace, or, of course, the leather one, or the lamé one, or the very soft bug, the carpet bug, the sticky bug, the padded bug, the velvet bug or the bug with pleats, or the scratchy one, or the candy wrapper butterflies she collects. When I felt how slimy it was! I pulled back my hand. It’s peculiar. Too peculiar. It was the look she gave me. Even now, I have to keep from thinking of her eyes. I’m still vulnerable. Her look is terrible. For me. No one had told her that before. It seems. Sous-au-cun-pré-tex-te.Je-ne-veux. Devant-toi-surex. Poser-mes-yeux. (Under-no-circumstances. Do-I-want. To-over-expose. My-eyes-in-front-of-you.) She sings that sometimes. The phone is in the other room. I’m calm. Right here, right now. It’s more dangerous when it’s on my stomach. Within reach. I must have really bothered her at work, the number of times I called. Up to a hundred times in a day. I can’t count any more. Sobbing or cold as ice, “you’re hopeless, you poor thing, you poor, poor thing, but poor thing, your medical license should be revoked for failure to provide assistance to someone at risk. What a sham, not a shred of humanity. For someone who’s suffering”… “OK, you want to be friends, I’m calling as a friend, come over.” She didn’t come. “In any case, we can never be friends, we’re not going to see each other any more, it’s perfectly clear, besides sex, did anything ever work between us, more or less – and even then? Take care of yourself, sweetheart, keep an eye on your little savings. When you can’t, you can’t, isn’t that right? We can’t. Take care, take good care, get some rest, yes, you’re tired, my love, get some rest and keep watch over what little capital you have, so it stays untouched. For your legacy when you die. When you’re dead. For your family.” An allusion to the will she wrote when she was eight. Pitou to my godmother. My rabbits to Mama as long as they won’t be killed. My desk to Papa. My books to my cousins. My toys to poor children. My clothes to Françoise. I want to calm down. Take this damn phone off my stomach. I eject the tape of The Last Temptation of Christ and put in Deleuze’s ABC Primer, at least I won’t waste my time. Not my time, there’s that. Letter B, boisson, drink. I don’t call. Deleuze immediately raises the bar. Oh yes, I drank a lot. I stopped. Drinking is a question of quantity. You don’t drink just anything, everyone has their favorite drink, the quantity is set. Alcoholics and drug addicts are often ridiculed. Because ‘Oh, me, I can stop when I want.’ This is the last. The last phone call, the last, the very last. Before becoming completely disgusted with it. With calling. Given the answers. When I want to stop, I do. Next Saturday when I’m back in Paris, this afternoon, I already stopped a long time ago in my head. With her. The only woman I love is Léonore, not her. But I can’t dedicate this one to you, sweetheart. Sweetheart, I used to call you. Even if I’ve stopped now. Calling. I knew I could stop when I wanted to. I stopped a long time ago in my head. And Friday, too bad, I’ll go to Nîmes by myself. We were supposed to go together. I’ll take the train, I reserved a hotel room. I’ve stopped. Today, in a half hour, right away, already done, I’m done calling. If she called me, she’d regret it. She won’t do it, she wouldn’t dare. And if she does, she’ll regret it. I know how to destroy people. I’ll write her, it’s more certain. So that she won’t call me anymore. Finally. Phew. Besides, I’ll take her the letter myself, right now. In person and put it into her own hands. Unless I send a courier. To show her I didn’t come up with this pretext just to see her. Something that might seem like a pretext in her eyes, her beautiful eyes. I’m not going to shell out 200 francs for that girl. I’ll take it myself. The letter. Written on stationery from the Gramercy Park Hotel. Where we were so happy, barely three weeks ago. Happy, well, as for me, not always. I missed Léonore so much by the third day, I became myself again. I cried in secret. When she was in the shower I called Claude to get news. For two days I stopped being homosexual. I kicked her out of my bed. I never talked about it because I knew it was temporary. So now I take the stationery, the envelope and a page. I cross out the letterhead. And I sign it ironically “your little angel!” But she couldn’t care less that I’m upset. All she wanted: for me to calm down. I took the letter to her office. I ran. I left Léonore playing, watched by her friend’s mother. I’d taken her out of school, I was anxious, I left. I left her with one of her friends’ mothers, I don’t remember which. One of the ones always sitting on the benches. It was hot out, I arrived covered in sweat, I was dripping. For forty-eight hours, it was only by running that I could keep it more or less together. She laughed and said “see you Saturday,” to calm me down. I’d found her in the X-ray room, developing some images. At her practice. But in person. In the little darkroom. Yes, I know, I know I’m all sweaty. And I’d like, if possible, if it’s not asking too much, I know there are patients waiting in the next room, for her to read it in front of me. I don’t want to give it to the receptionist. I want to see her. Her. I want to be certain she receives it, in her own hands, right away. That she realize this time, it’s over, I’m done, finished. I ask her, in addition, to please not try to call me again, there’s no point. I don’t want her to. I left at a run, I arrived bathed in sweat, I ran everywhere for two days. The phone calls were rushed, the letters urgent. To get to the final letter, the final phone call, as quickly as possible. And to the last kiss, still, you can kiss me. As quickly as possible. The last water lily, the last look. I turn on the answering machine, I filter the calls, I won’t answer if it’s her, so there! People make fun of alcoholics because they don’t understand. They want to get to the last glass, to do whatever it takes, an alcoholic never stops stopping. Getting to the last glass. A little like Péguy’s phrase, which is so lovely. I’m giving a source because there should be only one author for each phrase. Péguy, Guibert, a woman. Even if I’m at my last glass, long since drunk. Even if I’m going to Nîmes alone on Friday. I reserved a room near the Jardins de la Fontaine, I’ll take the train back the next day. The little writer recounts his little life. Thibaudet. It’s true that her look is terrible. A little like Péguy’s phrase, which is so lovely. It’s not the last water lily that repeats the first, it’s the first that repeats all the rest and the last. The first glance, the first water lily, the first phone call, and the first glass, it’s the last one that counts. The alcoholic who gets up is intent on the last glass. The first eyes, the very last. The last one: he assesses. What he can hold without collapsing until the last one. Sweetheart, Three fifteen I’ve taken Pitou my heart for a walk honey I love you MCA. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll call her X, anonymous, MCA, or her full name. Sweetheart, three fifteen. Not the last glass, but the next to last, the penultimate one before starting again the next day, “alright, this one’s the last,” groups of alcoholics in cafés are amusing. The last water lily repeats the first, it never gets boring. You quit if it’s dangerous, if it becomes dangerous. But if it doesn’t keep you from working, if it’s a stimulant, then sacrificing your body is normal. For something that helps. Helps you bear something else. Something you couldn’t endure without alcohol. To touch, to stick your finger in, turn it, take it out again, put it in your mouth, make the vagina’s wetness go into the anus, what you can’t bear isn’t that, but what you saw one Sunday, in broad daylight, the light was streaming in through the wide-open bay window, I was looking at her sex, the day before I’d read excerpts from Desert Flower, by an infibulated African woman, you could cut it off, I said to myself, with a razor, with scissors, sew it back up, cut the threads, etc. Not randomly. You could remove the little nub of flesh, slick with a thick rain. What you saw of life in the middle of the afternoon one Sunday or in the desert, remove her flesh where it flows that MCA loves CA. I decided not to think about it anymore. Not to ask her “you know what I was just thinking?” But to calm the wound by licking it gently as long as there was still time. The open water lily also repeats itself on my daughter, I can’t calm anyone. Don’t think about it anymore. I said “loving someone is horrible.” She said “no, what’s horrible is when someone is torn away from you.” And I answered “exactly.” Your own self is torn away. I almost never did it. Covered with this greasy rain, I just felt too strange. I said to myself “if anyone saw me…” no one saw me. Drinking, to get control, I had to call her two hundred times in those anxious days. It’s normal. And at night. You stop, that’s it. It happened yesterday. I stopped it all. I don’t call anymore, I don’t love her anymore. If, at least, it had helped me work, even if there was a physical cost. But the last forty-eight hours, I spent them crying, telephoning, running around, delivering letters, running to get a taxi, the taxi wasn’t going fast enough. I stopped, but not on my own: she said stop. She couldn’t take it anymore either. I begged her for one last weekend. To do the thing I never do, to lick, I can say it, I hoped to be revolted by it for good. She didn’t want to make love at all. She’s here, she just got up. We’ll be friends. Friends. Platonic love. In the beginning I was the one who wanted this. You get caught up in contradictory things. In my own interest. I pretended. The first time I saw her, I thought she was ugly, a skinny little brunette.

————: A phrase I censored myself, which would have hurt her too deeply. Her hands ———— with knuckles a little too big for her thin fingers. Clean hands, the hands of a doctor, a woman, clean, graceful, soft, hands that can palpate an abdomen for half an hour. I felt good. In the beginning, in November, I didn’t confide in anyone, except to friends I could count on one hand, that I was condemned. I wouldn’t admit to anyone, except to these few friends, that I was going to leave her, that it was over. Still, for three months, the test results were all one hundred percent positive. If I get out, then it’s out of a fatal illness. I could have died with her. I wrote her such letters. “Do you love me? Do you love me completely?” The answer is no, I’ve got it now. Not completely. Not my telephonic raving. “I’m sure we love each other. Why is it we don’t know how to be together? Peacefully, happily.” We’ve been trying to leave each other since we met. Three months, one hundred and fifty times. Annie, on the phone, downplays it all, “there’s no difference, well, fine, a difference in morphology.” I gave life to my daughter, I could have died with her, this is where it has to stop. There are arguments. Diversity comes from one’s sex, it’s life, a geneticist friend would tell me. But I couldn’t stop. The test was positive. It’s life, but mine responded when she licked me. Positive. I didn’t think of my daughter at those times. After, when we cuddled, then often. Sometimes we dreamed. The apartment, the civil solidarity pact, I would inherit everything she owned. “I love seeing you, I love seeing you walk in the door. I love who you are. I love your hair, your eyes, your glasses, your clothes, your nose, your mouth, your waist. I dream: We have a house. We share it. We both love it. We choose things we love. Léonore is there. No one can find anything to criticize. You love what I write. You love it a lot. You come to Paris with me. We love each other. We feel strong together. With Léonore, too. Pitou my heart watches over her.” Pitou my heart was her dog’s nickname. She was very homosexual, she had everything, a female cat, a female dog. Homosexuality fascinated me. Léonore has a friend, Clara, who is authoritarian and always wants to be the mother. She’s always quick to say it, she says it fast. All that’s left for Léonore, she tells me between sobs, is to be the second mother. And she’s not allowed to have children, a little cat, or a little dog, that’s it. It made me sick. For three months I was truly beside myself. I thought I liked it. I wanted to keep on. A little bit longer. Leave her to me. I felt strong enough to drink the dregs. I could have licked her more often. I could do it again. Reluctantly, but what difference does that make? Everyone was worried, I’m saved, they will all be reassured. Except for my enemies, they liked it when I kept a low profile. It’s hard for me to believe now that it happened to me. I have the feeling I’m talking about someone else. That lifestyle didn’t suit me, the surroundings weren’t for me. There are some people it suits. With me, it’s like evidence of a virus. It gets my back up. On the day I start this book, in my apartment in Montpellier where I live alone with my daughter, I leave the answering machine on, filtering the calls. (I never do this, but I intend to. This time. She’ll get a recording.) I avoid all those who will find it reassuring, my health, my body, my stability, or those who, on the contrary, think it’s “fabulous.” I don’t know who to talk to anymore or about what. People were thinking, she’s working on her next book, that’s disgusting. Guibert, who intentionally infected his blood. I, myself, at fourteen. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted a powerful start, I seduced my father. Still, for me, at first, licking a woman was unknown territory. Stretched out on the ground, it’s suffocating. Straight women aren’t used to this. You can’t breathe in that forest. A healthy man’s T4 count ranges between 500 and 2,000, I was out of breath. Getting close to someone is always hard. But still, the last time, I loved her. Which helped me keep going for another, let’s say, thirty seconds. Usually I quit after three licks. Even then, I’d take a breath in between. Fortunately literature is a universal vocation. I’ll have myself cut, infibulated, maybe, bits of my flesh, of my sex will be put out to dry in the sun for my next book. I also might have a project on goldmines because of Léonore, or. Because of l’or, in Léonore.

The day the bay window was open, I made her come, though before I’d always quit after three licks. I suddenly felt my blood exposed, long before any tests. That’s it. My blood was stripped bare, exposed, it had always been clothed or covered until then without my being aware of it. It exposes your blood in three months. You’re undressed and then dressed again. Your blood has no more veins. The standard sexuality that was yours until then, you suddenly wonder how you manage. I had to live for three months with this blood stripped bare, exposed, in town, going shopping, I didn’t do my errands anymore the way “an unclothed body must make its way through a nightmare,” I had things delivered. My blood, unmasked, everywhere and all the time (in Europe, the United States, at the market or the seashore, in town, with friends), forever, except in the unlikely event of miraculous transfusions, an infatuation of two weeks, a miraculous disgust, a guy, I dreamed, my blood laid bare around the clock, on public transportation, the way I dressed to please him, when I’m walking in the street, always the target of an arrow constantly aimed at me. My shoes, I’d always chosen bulkier ones, and the jacket I wore everyday. Does it show in my eyes? That you can’t penetrate yourself. You find some expedient. There are always solutions. Living by your wits. You resort to alternatives. Yes. Wanting. For me, it was a question of expedients. And that has its appeal. Instead of wealth, longer lasting. Finding an alternative. I wanted to. Female homosexuality involves a lot of strains. I was lucky, she was a doctor, she prescribed me massages, respiratory rehabilitation, spinal physical therapy. My spine took a hit. During the forty-eight hours of anxiety (running around, telephone calls, letters, taxi) I skirted an asthma attack. Living on expedients is nice too, trying to catch your breath elsewhere, it’s over. I still could, that’s why I’m sad. “You’ve got to be two” – not her. There’s something about me she can’t stand, she says. “I want to live,” she finds me intolerable. People want to be tolerant. To be satisfied. One morning she tells me a dream she had, someone shot a little fallow deer in the ear. I was telling her: I want to write a book with you about all the different ways of dying. In her family they’re doctors from generation to generation. I need to write a book with you, please. “An aneurysm, it’s a kind of pocket, an abnormality, of course, on an artery wall, a cerebral artery, it’s a weak spot and it forms a kind of sack, weaker than the artery wall, that can rupture or tear at any moment. This anomaly occurs relatively frequently. The aneurysm can rupture. When this little sack tears or bursts. There’s a hemorrhage, in other words, the brain is flooded with blood because it’s an artery and the pressure is high, with each heartbeat, the blood floods in. The blood destroys the entire brain. When the rupture is complete, death is extremely sudden. People drop, just like that, right in front of you, boom, they’re dead. Sometimes it’s preceded by fierce headaches, that happens. Other times there are no indicators, it’s immediate. —And eczema, what’s eczema? —Eczema is a skin disease, caused by an allergy, often with bubble-like lesions covering different parts of the body that form crusts, which may start to ooze and are pruritic. —Are what? They itch.” But we never started, we were never able to do anything together, we never had time. We never seriously started. On one of the days we were breaking up, I told her, weeping, “I didn’t know how to enjoy you.” Even though she had offered herself. She gave me her father’s personal journal. I gave it back to her that weekend. Doctors from one generation to the next. All the ways of dying. I take praxinor. My blood pressure is so low, when I was getting on my bicycle yesterday, Léonore asked me, “Mama, are you going to die?” I could have dedicated this book to her, but I was afraid to. She uses her tongue like a cock. When she kissed me, I opened up. I wanted her. Living on expedients, that’s exciting. You lose half the world and there are lots of strains. But I still wanted her. Once she said to me: you’re a real little macho. I had trouble hiding my smile, of satisfaction. Like you see sometimes with actors who think they’re exceptionally good. What are you missing with me? Half the world, my dear, quite simply. With you I’m missing half the world, that’s all. I can’t get turned on by someone who hasn’t got anything. If there’s no dick, well, for me, it’s not enough. It was not important. And not true. You shouldn’t let yourself get worn down. By all the obstacles you meet. Stuck on the pubes, that works too. Without counting the satisfaction of solving the problem with only what you have at hand. When you think of all the ways there are of dying and you don’t die, it’s amazing. I was missing half the world, that was my big argument. A person is a whole world, that was hers. An entire world unto herself… incredible. Locked-in syndrome, what’s that? Literally ‘locked within.’ A rare form of brain damage. A drastic impairment of blood flow to one part of the brain because of a blocked artery that kills the nerve cells. Once or twice she called me a “little slut.” Homosexuality is when you can’t do otherwise, it’s that simple, Claude told me. No, the strains, the exhaustion, the disappointment. The exposed blood. But the freedom of not having to search anymore, I recognized that. That, yes. “I don’t care, I’m glad I’m done with her,” as we said when we were children. Good, good, good vibrations. Last night Claude dreamed good-bye, good vibrations, and he was crying. Good-bye, good vibrations, that got him sobbing. Everything gone, good-bye. Just as well. I met her on September 9th. I immediately fell in love with her mouth, her eyes, the way she walks. Her smell, her sex, the way she moves, her voice. More than anything, the way she looks at me. The way she walks. The way she runs after her dog, Baya. The way she throws a pebble into the sea for her dog when we’re on a walk. Her throat and the back of her neck. Her gold necklace, which she never takes off. Her slightly protruding shoulder blades. Her slightly hollow chest. I didn’t admit it for three months. I didn’t see anyone all winter long. Claude saw us through the window when he was watering the bonsais of neighbors across the street who had left for a weekend, friends of his. Valérie had her fit of jealousy. My mother said to me “love takes different forms.” Léonore told everyone at school “X and Mama are homosexuals.” Everyone understood. It was perfectly clear. I slunk along the walls in my jacket and my big shoes. Slunk along the walls, the barriers, like slicing them, with a razor, slicing veins and my luck. A razor in the rock wall, rock, pierre, my father’s name is Pierre, and on this rock I will build my church, that’s literature, I will carve it out, a wall of books, a wailing wall, incest, insanity, homosexuality, holocaust, start strong, my jacket, my big shoes, and my razor.

It wasn’t an illness, I’m simplifying. It was a state of weakness and abandonment that opened my cage, at least in the early days. The locked-in syndrome on the contrary, trapped inside. The afflicted person can’t move, or eat, or speak, only blink his eyelids, move his eyeballs vertically. He doesn’t feel physical pain. My ribcage is another matter. Strains, exhausting pressure. My back ached. She gave me orange oval-shaped pills, fenoprofen. I hardly have any more, just one left. I can call her right away, if it hurts, we’re going to remain friends, she’ll give me more. And prescriptions, physical therapy, with massages, for the lumbosacral region, and for my left leg because of lumbosciatica, an urgent case. To rise from the ranks of murderers, to write and heal, I tried to find. A state weakness and abandonment that opened my cage, it’s over. My blood was recovering. The pain is gone. Apropos Claude, thank you for the flowers. I got your flowers. Happy birthday, Christine, love of my life, Claude, Léonore, and three little hearts. He had called me, added “whatever you do, have a good day.” I was still with her. We had argued all week but that weekend we had dinner together at L’Escale.

“I wanted to write you, to send you a note to let you know I’m thinking of you – and love you. I read Calamity Jane in the plane, it was very beautiful and poignant. ‘Oh, how I wish I could live my life again.’ I hope you’re well, that your writing is going well. See you soon, Claude.” My phone was busy all evening yesterday, she was crying. I was listening to her. We now communicate only with our voices, she refuses to see me. She was crying, I had prepared some lines to read to her: Everything in this world is suffering, only love is a reason to live, Racine tells us it’s forbidden. And to explain my recent behavior, Dario Fo: the love of paradox, as is well known, often leads to inconsistency. I myself am a victim of it, it happens to me one day, then the next as well. I sat there with my books open on my lap. That morning she was at home, working quietly. Baya arrived with Yassou, the little cat, who looked strange. She seemed to be trying to show X something. She doesn’t want me to call her X. Neither her real name, nor her initials. The little cat’s paws were wobbling. She had been bitten on her soft underbelly, probably by a dog from the neighborhood. Yassou is not afraid of dogs, she’s used to Baya and Djinn who are “nice to her.” It’s the first time anything has happened to her, there was never anything wrong with this cat. X is fed up with pet issues. She was exhausted, but she still had to take the cat to the vet, you could see her insides. They had to give the cat anesthesia to sew her up. X went to work, suffering people all day long. Neither X, nor MCA, nor Marie-Christine Adrey, nor Aime CA, or Love CA. My love? My dear? My dear little sweetheart, my little darling, my dear, sweetheart, my love, beloved. Beloved, beloved. (In Savannah Bay, when she puts the necklaces on the older woman.) These patients could live for years in this state. They die of complications. Secondary pulmonary infections, sepsis, bedsores… Eczema, aneurysm, I’d have liked to do it all. We didn’t have time. To start something together, not even a photo album. She’s fed up with pet problems, Baya, who almost got run over. Then had to be spayed. And now Yassou, attacked by a dog. She left the answering machine on, didn’t pick up, she was putting on a new bandage. Yassou is in a terrible state… I didn’t tell Léonore, I’m worried about traumatizing her with suffering animals. Neighborhood dogs that bite… She’s preparing a course about stinging insect allergy, it’s tedious. Then the conversation deteriorated. She doesn’t want to make love anymore. She doesn’t want to love. There’s no point. No point, no point, no point, as I always put it so well. She’s not rejecting me personally. All women, no women, not one more woman. I asked a question I thought was innocent. A man? She swore at me and started crying. “I don’t give a shit about guys.” I let her talk. I sensed she wasn’t doing well, not at all. “You, you’ve got your life ahead of you, you’re straight, you, you don’t give a shit. But me, now I understand. Having sex with a woman, you’re right, it’s incest.” So then, I did it, I’d convinced her, I was right, I was alone. In three months. She started crying, nothing could stop her, no matter how many times I told her I loved her. I was torn between satisfaction that she finally understood and sadness at seeing it was over, that’s certain. Just when I was about to accept it, fully aware of its wounding aspect, oh well, too bad, it’s not serious. Once you’ve understood. Come on. Let’s dream. I’m dreaming. We have a house. We share it. We love it, both of us. We choose things we love. We love each other. Léonore is there. In our love. (Léonore in our love!!!…) I’m delirious. I’m dreaming. No one can find anything to criticize(!). You order a sofa from Domus in Nîmes, she knew I like to read lying down. You told me on the phone “you’re the first and only one.” You like what I write. You like it a lot. You often go to Paris with me. You brought your mother’s diamonds in a waist pack to sell so we could buy a big house together. We love each other. We feel strong together. And with Léonore. Pitou my heart watches over her. But her, it’s over. One day, I remember, we were at my place. I picture myself explaining the hierarchy. A man is better than a woman. (As a lover.) A doctor is better than a blue-collar worker, a White man is better than a Black man. She was outraged. Even though I specified “in the eyes of society.” Lots of things, little by little, and another mistake on my part: I shouldn’t have had her read my drafts. I wrote about her pussy, about her hair that would turn salt-and-pepper, about the beginning when I found her ugly. My disgust, and that’s all she saw. Not the positive things. I would tell her, “I’m heterosexual,” she would answer, “I’m not going to get operated on.” I’m leaving for Paris in twenty minutes. Claude and Léonore will take me to the airport. I called the hospital, I want her to call me back before I leave. This morning, the anxiety came back. Me, I don’t care. Goodbye calf, cow, pig, men, women. “We love each other. I’m sure we love each other. Why is it we don’t know how to be together? The two of us? Peacefully, happily. What I’m certain of: I love you. I love seeing you. I love seeing you walk in the door. I love your hair, your eyes, your clothes, your nose, your mouth, your waist.” My blood continued to deteriorate, putting me on a par with those who live in ghettos. I’m not wanted anymore in any case it’s too late. They defend themselves. Last night she didn’t want to talk to me on the phone. “I don’t have time, I don’t have time to call, I’m the one who saw all the patients today, I can’t go out, kisses.” It’s over. What’s impossible fascinated me. “I miss you.” In The Mother and the Whore, she says to him: You can’t even put up with drunkenness in people you love. My poor, poor, poor shitty Alexander. I said to her.

I was at her place yesterday. In the morning. While I was in Paris, she felt free, to do her usual things. One of the patients, a woman, said to her secretary “what beautiful eyes the doctor has,” in front of her. On Avenue Saint-Lazare last week, Sylvie was attracted by an androgynous young woman; she realized it was me when she saw my profile. At the hotel, I needed a taxi, I was asked “are you ready, sir… oh, I beg your pardon, miss?” My face and allure are ambiguous, always have been. The mark has only deepened given the test results. Even if it’s over. I call two hundred times, but after two days of emptiness, I don’t call on the third, and I don’t call anymore. I never call again. And I don’t care. Me, I wouldn’t have called her again. She called me and said “it would have taken locking me up to keep me from coming to pick you up.” Since you’re at the airport… And yet, I’d already taken out money for the cab fare. At night, I mentally filmed the weekend. I was going home. There was no one at the airport, I’d hoped. Phew. I was calm. I would need some time, some peace and quiet, and then… I’ll meet a guy. Unless I stop everything. We’ll see. For now, I take a cab, I head home. I don’t like taking taxis, they bore me. She had called me in Paris, I was at Frédéric’s, I told him, “tell her I’m gone.” He handed me the phone anyway. “I’ll come pick you up as we agreed? —No, not necessarily.” I’d filmed my arrival. It was fine. I took a taxi. I checked if she was there, she wasn’t. It didn’t make me angry, on the contrary, phew. Finally. Three months. Phew. Next week, I’ll call Mathilde, she’s getting back on Thursday, and we’ll go to a nightclub. I take a cab. It drops me off. I go in. Maybe there’s some mail for me. I look. I unpack. Calm. It’s nice to be home. After four days. I dream. I unpack, I separate out the dirty clothes. That was my movie, it’s not the way things happened. In my movie, I took my trousers to the dry cleaners. I washed a few things by hand. My sweaters smelled of sweat. You can’t even put up with drunkenness in people you love, I thought of that line again. Your little calculations. Your little savings. Your legacy. Your family. Your cousin. NC, Nadine Casta, haine c’est, hate is, this drama, this movie, this money. Since we’d separated, she had made all her little plans, filled all her little weekends in May. And me, naïvely, because she had come to pick me up: For the Ascension Day holiday, I’d like to go to Paris with you, we could stay at Frédéric’s, he’ll be in Italy. We’ll go to the theater, and especially we’ll go see The Mother and the Whore together. And all the other Eustache films. She had planned her weekends in conjunction with her sole heirs, we are separated. For the Ascension Day holiday, Île de Ré with NC.

(I don’t have the right to use real names, the lawyer has forbidden it, not even real initials. “This manuscript repeatedly presents problems with regard to violating the privacy of individuals close to the author, notably her daughter Léonore, a minor, her former partner, Claude, her father [who was engaged in an incestuous relationship with her – see the extended description at the end of this work]. Other individuals also see intimate details of their private lives broadly exposed, notably Marie-Christine Adrey, the author’s lover and the ‘protagonist’ of this work, the actress Nadine Casta, etc. Beyond this general problem, which runs through the entire manuscript, the following passages, which contain particularly imprudent statements, must be removed. She doesn’t want me to call her X. Neither her real name, nor her initials. […] Neither X, nor MCA, nor Marie-Christine Adrey, nor Aime CA. This invasion of privacy is all the more intolerable as Marie-Christine Adrey’s refusal to be identified is emphasized by the author herself and because the revelation of her identity allows her to be connected to the work as a whole. Your cousin. NC, Nadine Casta, haine c’est, hate is, this drama, this movie, this money […] For the Ascension Day holiday, Île de Ré with NC. Invasion of privacy in addition to defamation. Then page 23, Eustache, I’m sorry, but it’s better than Nadine Casta, a defamation, which may not seem objectionable per se, but becomes so through repetition throughout the work of similar phrases that reveal a profound animosity, page 30, Your cousin. NC, Nadine Casta, haine c’est…, calumny, page 61, defamation, page 61, invasion of privacy, page 67, invasion of privacy and defamation, page 74, invasion of privacy and defamation, page 84, invasion of privacy and defamation, page 87, new defamation, page 106, invasion of privacy and defamation, page 110, invasion of privacy, page 111, libel with regard to an obvious attack on the reputation of Doctor Jean-Claude Brot, page 119 to page 123, serious invasion of the privacy of the author’s father, as she recounts their incestuous relations in precise detail. In conclusion: these passages are listed as examples, however the entire manuscript presents a comprehensive problematic of the invasion of privacy of persons mentioned, described, etc., whether they are explicitly identified, as is often the case, or identifiable. The risk of legal action is all the more evident given the pointedness and relentlessness of the attacks and the fact that they constitute attacks on the private lives of private individuals. The damages resulting from judicial action would be significant as no precautions were taken. The lack of moderation or compromise in the author’s statements is a determining element of the work to the extent that it allows the reader access – in so far as is possible – to the author’s passionate insanity.” Well, there you have it.)

X had magical moments. On the phone, comments I would have liked to transcribe. I love you. It’s good when we’re together. It’s good when we… and she was off, Nîmes, Domus, a sofa, we’ll go for a walk, I’ll call you… she laid out our daily life. She would have kept going but vampirism, feeding on, sucking me dry, taking everything, keeping me from living, from breathing, I’m sick of always being reproached for the same thing when the opposite is true. I made an appointment with a children’s shrink. Léonore needs help too. Locked-in syndrome, ways of dying. I pressed my palm against the back of her neck, gently, so she would keep the same rhythm. Bill told me about the disease. Equilibrium will return. No, everything was fine. I dreamed, I thought things over. One half of my life, men, the second, women. PS to Claude: I’ll be thirty-nine on Saturday, that’s probably why this week is so difficult. You’ve probably thought up an entire plan for my birthday, me, I don’t know what I’m going to do. A kiss. “Locked-in syndrome” is a rare form of brain injury. The test results were positive. Always. “Do you want to relax at your place? Do you want me to drop you off, so you can go through your mail in peace?” Yes. She drops me off, a quick kiss, I get out of the car. Ok, everything’s fine. It’s all going the way I filmed it. For my arrival in Montpellier. My departure and my arrival up to then. It’s fine. She came to get me but, apart from the drive, in her car, the Saab, nothing is different. From what I imagined in Paris last night before leaving, at Frédéric’s. The mail, the phone, the dirty laundry, the dry cleaning, the cinema listings, some reading, some rest, and tomorrow, writing. Phew. Three months. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t work. At that point it was getting dangerous. I open the front door. She leaves. I hear the Saab’s motor. The Saab, Île de Ré, NC, they’re supposed to be part of the charm. Yesterday, I said to X, Eustache, I’m sorry, but it’s better than Nadine Casta. She, that it was different, I answered “yes, like homosexuality, always the same argument.” And she, you really just say anything at all. But I insisted: Modiano is better than Rouaud, Eustache better than Nadine Casta, heterosexuality better than homosexuality, doctors better than blue-collar workers. She uses her tongue like a cock. The test results were positive, I loved her tongue. Like no other. My father spoke twenty-five tongues. The doctor and the writer rise from the ranks of murderers, that’s something we had in common. How’s Léonore? She sees Doctor Dhersigny on Thursday the 14th. She was fine when you got back on Saturday? I’m going to have my blood pressure checked this afternoon. If some dramatic event occurred, everything would be more bearable. In Beethoven, the concertos where the orchestra abandons its role of accompanist and comes into direct conflict with the soloist. With X, the change of scenery, transgress, transcribe, transfer, alas, this won’t last. I slept at her place after the airport. I cried. I was so moved. Calf, cow, pig, before falling asleep, I called her “my little girl.” I didn’t know what I was saying, I was falling asleep, I had come. Otherwise, too bad, I’d opened the gate. Carrying my bag, I was halfway upstairs. I dropped my bag. Flew down the stairs four at a time. I opened the door, the street, the car was blocked on the street, she hadn’t taken off yet. I got there. In front of her. I told her “you go and park.” And she “come here.” I let her kiss me in the middle of the street, I don’t give a shit now. Calf, cow. eczema, scaly hands, calf, cow. Her black hair and eyes like the last water lily. Genetically identical animals are rare. Among cows, several dozen for fundamental research. Why MCA? Léonore said to me “you’re crazy about babies,” we were watching television, and then “you’re a mad cow.” I wasn’t able to work before I quit. I did a little on Sunday, Sunday night phew again it’s over. Next to last. Water lily. Before starting again the next day and quitting. I quit, finally. I developed some ideas, scenarios, faxed them to Jean-Marc, they all fell down laughing. I was inspired by Tahar Ben Jelloun, explaining racism to his daughter, to do the same with homosexuality. Calf, cow, pig. What do you think? My sweet little five-and-a-half-year old. You are my love. I know you know this, that you’re my love. My great love. The greatest love of my life. You know it. You know that X slept at our house. You asked me last night, you said “where’s she sleeping?” She slept at our house. It’s quarter to ten, she’s still asleep. She’s tired. I was just making love to her, there it is, that’s what I wanted to explain to you. My love. You know, sweetheart? When she comes back up towards my face, the name on my lips is yours, my beauty. Lé-o-nore. You know what she said this morning when I woke her around six? I woke her up because I was writing down ideas. In my little notebook, you know, on the mantel? I turned on the light, I couldn’t see what I was writing. She said to me, “you’re a little devil with the face of an angel, and I love you.” A little devil because I’d woken her up. The face of an angel because she thinks I have an angelic face. And I love you, because she’s in love with me. You think that’s funny, hunh? A girl who’s in love with another girl. Well, yes, that’s the way it is. She’s homosexual. Frédéric is too, you see. He’s in love with a boy at the moment. They write each other letters but never see each other. That makes Frédéric sad. Some are happy, others are unhappy. I know a writer – unhappy – who masturbates dogs. You don’t know what that means, I’m sure. I’m heterosexual. My sweet. Of course. Straight. Or else how could I have had such a pretty little girl? Never, you understand, not once have I ever felt desire for a woman. A man’s sex penetrates radically. I like what’s radical. Other kinds of penetration are possible, borders, journeys. Crossing borders, go get your globe, I’ll explain. The idea didn’t work, I kept going, I could have stopped. There was an interview with a singer right after the babies. “What effect did learning your father was homosexual have on you? —None, well yes, actually, laughter.” Léonore said “she shouldn’t laugh, it means that he doesn’t love her mama anymore.”

I talked to her about her eyes. Her answer was “my eyes are captivating and yours piercing.” My cousin Marie-Hélène always wanted to have red eyes. Genetically similar rabbits are a good tool for understanding… I was sinking. Into things that… I faxed Jean-Marc more than one hundred pages once. I was following threads without end. It was bad. I wept. I was falling apart, I waited. It was becoming dangerous, I couldn’t work anymore. The last water lily was rotting. I started again. I feel sick to my stomach, like in a car on hairpin turns, and I get dizzy spells. In front of a mirror, facing the audience, Bulle Ogier drapes necklaces around Madeleine Renaud’s neck, they lose themselves in a chant, the girl, the mother, the one, the other, my little sweetheart, little, little love, my little sweetheart, my love, etc. Marguerite Duras always addresses homosexuality and incest through the lens of the past and death, always aslant, which is hard to understand. I told her “you go and park.” I unpacked my things, it didn’t take long. I heard the bell. I had time to read the mail. She came upstairs. Marie-Hélène wanted red eyes. She got them. She was always asked “like rabbits?” It was her favorite color. Diversity, red eyes, that’s life, we had them more than once, Claude and I. I helped Marie hold Yassou still for the shot yesterday. The little creature’s fur has been shaved. The mark of the dog’s canine teeth still visible. The little creature was afraid. Her stomach was completely shredded, her insides exposed. It was a black dog, I saw it. Who did it. For the first night in a year, since Claude left, yesterday, last night, Léonore slept in her room, I slept in mine, you know what I did? For the first time? In a year? Since I’ve been living alone? I left the shutters open. I wasn’t afraid.

Marie and I were arguing, I shoved her dog, on purpose, she hugged it tight. I screamed “no, no, no, no, not that.” I don’t like that dog, Cartier jewelry is always numbered, the trinity ring she gave me was engraved 666, the number of the beast. She has very little direct contact with Léonore, we reject each other through Léonore and Baya, born the same day, July 9, not the same year. I was already infected when I was pregnant with Léonore, the incubation period was several years. I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced such joy, delivering a girl, it’s obvious, already incubating. I was already surrounded by clusters of homosexuals, I cried in her arms on Saturday. And Sunday, the scenario I’d filmed the previous day, during the night at Frédéric’s, I finally produced it. A day late. On Sunday night, the bag, but the blue one, I go up and this time I don’t stop in the middle of the staircase, I go up, and I get Léonore, at Claude’s. I think of Yassou, her stomach pierced by canines. “In a certain way, it works out well for me,” she claimed, “I’m always worried others won’t like my smell” when I didn’t want to lick her. For every impulse, there was repulsion. Repulsion also means disgust. Disgust means ghetto. Ghetto, prison. This group of female homosexuals, this “milieu,” which Claude, with reason, thinks doesn’t suit me. What use are animal clones? Exactly. Finally. Phew. Fortunately it’s over. I went home yesterday with my blue bag. I dreamed of a perfume called Hogana, which made me think of dogana, of a customhouse. She likes me in pants. If necessary, in a dress, not in a skirt. On the contrary, Mayen, last year. Wearing pants, a sweater, T-shirt, no bra. Loved me. I became sober once again, feminine, myself. I have an appointment on Thursday the 14th with a children’s shrink for my daughter. AIDS isn’t really an illness, it’s a state of weakness and surrender, my dear, that uncages the beast we had within. I give it free rein to devour me, I let it inflict on my life what it would have done to my corpse after. Claude: You let her give you a ring, after all. And this ring, after all, is a kind of engagement. And I know how you are, you, with symbols… A ring, on top of it all, is an engagement. I’m sorry, but the triple Cartier ring, it’s an engagement. I hesitated. I didn’t know if I should accept. (I didn’t hesitate at all, that’s not true, I was happy.) The next ring I wanted to give you. We talked about it just this summer. I’d put money aside. It’s crazy how you can be in someone’s life and it all evaporates. Sunday night it was over. Léonore was asleep. But I still called, no one home, left a message, not at all upset. It’s Christine. She called me back. She cried. When she sees the bed… I was calm, I calmed her down. “Yassou is doing better.” In her gay ghetto, conversations about animals. Baya, Yassou, Minou, Djinn, Misty, Victoire, Muzil. Last night on the phone it didn’t go well. Because of one detail that derailed everything. The first meeting at the Esplanade, it was no, homosexuals, heterosexuals, there are two camps. ‘Camps’ is not appropriate: gloves. To turn inside out like a glove, it’s sticky, you need gloves. And you see, I just made love with her, sweetheart. I was going crazy, you know. All autumn long. October, November, December, January. I wanted to hide it. I couldn’t bear the thought that anyone in our neighborhood might imagine me with a woman. That my little girl was the daughter of a woman who lets herself be licked by a lesbian. Your papa, I called him my love and my pet. Yassou is doing better. The civil solidarity pact set off a debate about all possible misuses. How are children made? The man puts his sex into the lady’s sex. Léonore sings with Clara “doing the thing with your lover is dis-gust-ing,” she laughs and starts again. The idea that Marie and I… doesn’t register. Her breasts, her feminine eyes, with make up, getting wet. On my thigh, who got wet on my thigh, how could it register, sweetheart? She left a letter lying around from Annie who was traveling in Africa, “I don’t give a shit about giraffes, with their big eyes, when there are children dying of starvation right next to them.” It might as well be Greece for me, I went back to my native land. She doesn’t want a graft, we’re not going to get a godemiche. I talked to Léonore about the Holocaust, the Jews, homosexuals, communists. Dr. Mazollier said to Léonore “your mom likes words.” Dr. Galy told me “a little early.” Dr. Zériahen said “no one can judge.” Dr. Dhersigny told me I was irresponsible. As a child Marie often had dizzy spells, without doing anything physical. In her head there was a kind of sound, she floated, completely. Claude: you’ll always be the only one, because you’re the first, because you’re the last one I loved, to whom I wanted to make love, to have a child, to go on vacation, to go to a restaurant, to discover the world with and see people live, the one with whom I’d have fought, against her and against myself, to live alone and together. You were my future. You will be my past. My only past. As for the rest, what good is it. In four days, you’ll be thirty-nine. I met you when you were barely sixteen. I want you to be happy. Claude. Thank you for the flowers. Yassou is doing better. Baya got hit by a car. The veterinarian treated her. Misty, Victoire, Muzil. She has a profession, as a doctor, in which you can’t make too many mistakes. I, of course, can afford to leave myself open all the time, to listen only to myself, it’s my stock in trade.

I call her Marie, her name is Marie-Christine. Yesterday, my psychoanalyst: Who chose your name? In Christine there’s an allusion to Christ. I talked about my mission, my drive to save others, to puncture their usual life preservers so that they’ll save themselves with me or on their own. Who chose your name, “my God!” I said. I’d just understood. Your father or your mother? My God. My mother wanted to call me Marie-Christine. My father said: No Marie. I got married and then separated. A husband, a mari, calf, cow, pig, or a Marie. No husband, no father, no man, no life preserver, the whole kit and caboodle, cousin Nadine, NC, haine c’est, hate is, the girlfriend, all that’s dragging behind her. I went to see her yesterday and called her “my treasure.” When she was little, the safe was kept in her room. Her mother’s diamonds, their cash. In a little waist pack to buy an apartment. A diamond merchant in Paris, make an appointment, appraise the rocks. A large house for the two of us thanks to them. “You should sell them,” NC would tell her. Her cousin had met a diamond merchant. She gave me her father’s notebooks again. I was supposed to be named Marie-Christine too, in one of those families that throws money out the windows for the maid to pick up at the foot of the grapevine. The fruits of labor. Paintings on the walls. Léonore, my love, my gold. I’m in her room today, seated at the green table, a card table, where I’m writing. Through the window I see the garden, the oleander, the palm trees, the magnolia. At the back of the garden, my father watches the road to Clermont that borders my garden. Mon trésor, mon amour, mon or, Léonore. My treasure, my love, my gold, Léonore. My Léonore, my treasure. My treasure, my gold. No Marie, no marriage, no gold. The safe was in her room. Doctors were paid in cash at the time. Her father gave her mother money, which she put in the safe with the jewelry and other valuables every night. This house is crushing me, it was built by my grandfather, a doctor in Canet, himself a doctor’s son, who was also a doctor’s son, and so on for generations. Books and medical courses piled up, going back centuries. I had a fit of rage in Miaurey (Niger). We had gone to see the last herd of giraffes. Children came running from all directions. Since the first day at the Esplanade, I had told her it was all Greek to me. Knowing just one word – “gift” – and repeating it constantly, with their skinniness and swollen bellies. Maybe she’ll give me a bike so I can be more independent. She was born in Oran, the fellaghas, the bombs, an Arab killed right on her doorstep, and the beach house, hours with her mother, walking at least two hours on the beach every day. We’ll need a big house, a very big one, at least two hundred and fifty square meters. To shelter my tongue when it’s licking, I like the taste of blood, I even use it as an unguent at the same time. Everything gets turned inside out like a glove. Why is the devil’s tongue pictured as a flame that splits like two fused metal fingers that are separating? I hold on to the banister to climb the stairs to the lawyer’s office (my blood pressure is 80, 90 at the most), so that he can effectively complete the separation of bodies between Claude and me. The gold is separating. I feel nauseous. I’m dizzy. A herd of humans looking at giraffes. Suddenly I asked myself what the hell I was doing there. She gave me all that, the letter from Africa, her father’s notebooks, to help me get over my writer’s block, because I couldn’t work. I gave them back to her, it’s over. I was going crazy: the gap between outside and my room. And yet, I could have drunk the dregs. Even if, when you’re not fully developed it’s hard to get excited about something wet. Like a glove, it’s true, it can always be reversed. It’s true. That’s good. The term gloves fits better than camps. I see the stitches. I turn it inside out. I move the cock, I see the spot. I penetrate. My fingers become a cock. Cock, coda, tip, tail, that’s how you tell a dog’s breed. There’s no breed, just an odor. The mucous membranes, the caress, I’m not the one caressing, it’s the liquid moving under my fingers. Misty, Muzil. There it is, sadness, but also laughter. Ultimately, I don’t give a shit about the giraffes, their big eyes. I end up feeling like an unwanted spectator, feeling rejected, superfluous, Bénédicte writes me, I feel I’m in the way, I’m not a part of it, I’m there almost against my will and against yours, I resented you for the discomfort I felt. You build a wall, a wall of glass, transparent but impassable, exposing yourself the entire time. You put yourself callously on display, you don’t invite others to look, you don’t make the slightest gesture of welcome. The circle of solitude closes. We’re frozen, we can neither escape nor come into contact with you. Reading you, my stomach began to hurt, my limbs, my whole body and I asked myself “is this really living? So much darkness, no way out, so little light? It seems to me that you forget the light.” And my treasure, my love, my gold?

As Claude would say with contempt “I suppose her friends…” A poor woman with no cock. Yet she cried all night that November day. Telling me “there’s no such thing as love.” I answered “of course there is.” She said “sure, for others, maybe, that could be, but not for me. I wanted to believe in it. I believed in it with you. I was wrong. Wrong again. There’s such a thing for others, not for me. You, you’ve felt it, maybe, with Claude.” Return, I went back. When I’m in Italy, I miss France. When I’m in France, it’s Italy I miss. The face of a woman you’re trying to force to leave you is beautiful. Her mouth all small, her eyes that won’t let go of yours, her arms open wide. I might never have known this. If I’d held on to my disgust for other women. There was a couple, two men, on the café terrace in January. It was one of the rare days when Marie and I were getting along well. She had just said to me “I know him, I see him on Avenue Saint-Lazare, he looks sad.” I said “well, sure, he’s homosexual,” but as a joke, of course! She didn’t like it. After that it was my rants on the telephone. Which she didn’t like. Claude arrived at the same café with Léonore and a girl, about twenty, who seemed to be his mistress. The brunette from Rue Saint-Guilhem, she’d seen her one day and then told me “she’s not worth your little finger.” One night I had a dream. A record of Mireille Darc was playing. She was singing the Francis Lemarque song, À Paris, in her insufferable voice. Marie wasn’t paying attention. Even though this song, this song… I woke up and she called me “sweetheart.” I wrote down the dream in a little notebook, on the mantelpiece. “Did you sleep well, my love?” Yes, my love. “What time is it?” Seven thirty. “Do you like waking up next to me?” Yes, my love. “I’m going to buy you a miner’s hat with a little light on the front so you can write things down at night.” I had gotten up and opened the shutters, I wanted to see her face. One day, just like that, I was ready to buy a house with her. With a large terrace and a garden would be ideal. To go out, to come and go, inside and outside. I’d do this, I’d do that. I didn’t want to stop. The test was responding! I love seeing you, I love seeing you walk in the door. I love who you are. I love your hair, your eyes, your sunglasses, your clothes, your nose, your mouth, your waist. I dream: We have a house. We share it. We both love it. We choose things we love. Léonore is there. No one can find anything to criticize. You love what I write. You love it a lot. You go to Paris with me. We love each other. We feel strong together. With Léonore, too. Pitou my heart watches over her. Pitou my heart was her dog’s nickname. She would laugh, she’d laugh briefly, “in eight days, you might say the opposite.” I believed everything I said. I would have been ready to move into a house with her on a day like the one with the miner’s hat. With the little light, to write things down at night, ideas and dreams I had. A two-story house, her with a garden below. Me with Léonore above. There was also: “You just left, it’s nine twenty. It’s ridiculous to love your eyes the way I love them, to love your hands, your palms and the backs of your hands, your body, its softness, its slenderness, your hair and your neck with your golden necklace. You have to burn this letter. It’s silly. I love you. Christine.” In the beginning, there was the thrill, but it was always followed by disgust, we got dressed again. Then one night she said to me, “this is the first time I’m not afraid of being deceived.” And Claude, the next day, “it’s crazy how you can be so completely in someone else’s life and then it all disappears.” I couldn’t work. I called Marie to say, I called her again to say “give me an idea…” There were patients in the waiting room, she was in a hurry. “Give me an idea, I’m not going to hang up until you give me one. Give me one, please, I’m blocked. —Talk about the fact that I have no cock, which drives me to despair everyday. —Everyday? —Everyday a bit more.” Thank you for the flowers, they wilted, I threw them away. Irises don’t last long. I called Marie to say “do you remember that in November I was a hair’s breadth away from buying a two-story house with you?” It was late, I had to hang up. Before, when I called her, she would say before going to sleep, “I kiss you very very very,” “I kiss you very very very and all over.” Muzil coughed like crazy. In the beginning I’d say to myself “the incisions for cloning will be unpleasant.” Muzil, Misty, Yassou, she has turtles as well, and fish, but Baya eats their food, Pitou, my heart. She’s such a glutton. “I love women,” how many times did we hear that? Saying “I love women” when you’re a man is easy. “I love animals” is easy for a human. Muzil told me how completely the body, once it’s delivered into the web of medical treatment, loses all identity, is bled dry of all history and dignity. Bénédicte writes me “maybe you don’t show the reader the door, maybe you don’t leave him on the doorstep, and maybe I simply haven’t known how to recognize the light in your books.” I liked the position with me lying on top of her. It worked well, it was like with a man. We both liked it. I remember once, I’d barely recovered, barely caught my breath, hadn’t had a chance to rest, she wanted to make me come again. My body was drained. It needed time to recharge, like a hand-held phone. It has to sit in the base for a while without being removed. Drained, no feeling in my breasts. She was licking me, even though that position… She was rushing, I’d barely rested, barely caught my breath, I ran through a few possible fantasies, none of them worked, like the faxes to Jean-Marc, I burned through them. One after the other. Exhausted. Not a single one worked. None fit. Not one, there are days when. I finally said “stop.” For the first time, we were confronted with failure. I couldn’t go to sleep on that note. I placed her fingers on me. “You don’t like settling for failure, do you?” I looked at the curtain covering the window. Claude and I chose the fabric together. We chose everything together, we were “the lovebirds.”

Her father’s notebook: My balls: My parts. Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, America: the five parts of the world. 1937, my youth. I was born December 18, 1906 in Carcassonne. That’s where I spent the first six years of my life. I only have a few memories of that time. Léonore will remember everything. Her dog, Baya. Yassou, the turtles, the fish in the aquarium after school. Clara. Doing the thing with your lover. Mama and Marie. Maybe the house on Île de Ré. When we walked along the beach, we had a dog with us, like many homosexuals, our child had become a monster due to degenerate unions. Fortunately Léonore was with us, throwing pebbles into the sea. Her small presence alone cutting it short. I licked her, this mother, whose child is a dog. I’m crazy, really, I’m crazy. I’ll only reach a small readership of lunatics like myself if I keep this up. As Janine predicted. I stopped, I’m getting to work, my little audience of lunatics is my life preserver. When I stand up from my chair and start to stagger. Overcome with nausea again. Walking down the Rue de la Loge, supporting myself on the walls, climbing the stairs to the lawyer’s office, leaning on the banister. At first, I hugged the walls, now I lean against them. “I love women,” “I love animals.” I’m still in shock. I didn’t have any intention of calling last night, none at all. I was exhausted, I wanted to go to bed early. Very early. I had a good day. I’d spent hours with Claude. Léonore came home in a good mood. She had spent the day with Clara at her grandmother’s. I had plans for May 8th with Claude. Things were going well, everything was more relaxed. I called. But I had muscle spasms from the bottom of my abdomen to just below my chest, it hurt a lot. I pick up the phone. I ask if I’m interrupting. She says “I’ll call you back in five minutes.” Fine. Are you OK? My stomach hurts, I’ve got muscle spasms. I’m so tired. Then all happy she says “I went to the opening of the Arpac show, I decided to host an evening on the 16th with Agnès and Annie.” It went downhill from there. I was invited, I could bring anyone I wanted. Whom should I bring? She thought it would make me happy. Well, you’re wrong. We’re not seeing each other anymore, not at all, not even as friends. Always, always, always, trying to break up, to break it off, to stop. I believe, right now I’m describing without thinking. Repack my things, my bag, adios, I’m sorry we ever met. I regret going to that dinner on September 9th. Where I met you. Always, always. I saw Alain, I’m going to work with him. That’s good. You must be happy? Stop pretending you care. I’m going to bed. I’m exhausted. Yes, that’s better, you’re right, go to bed. Get some rest. Kisses. Yes, that’s it. Goodbye. See you one of these days. But still we keep going. We talk. But it’s not working. And there are problems with the connection. She says “I’ll call you back.” I call Frédéric so the line will be busy. I stay on for a good half hour. Then I call her back. I say “sorry, Frédéric called me, you must have gotten a busy signal.” The project with Alain sounds good. Stop it, please. Little by little, it becomes unbearable. I hang up, I say I’m sick of it. I call back, I say I’m sick of it. We have to stop completely and not see each other anymore at all. I can’t stand it any longer. I go to bed, I brushed my teeth and am ready to go to sleep. I even unplugged the phone. I go to bed, but I call her again, I plug the telephone back in and call again. To tell her: I’m fed up, fed up, fed up. We spend hours like this every night. She says to me that we could spend the time reading instead, or watching movies, or with friends, or resting, instead of this, hours wasted, for nothing. Unplugging the telephone, then calling back. I go to bed, I call her again. I went to bed, telling myself, now it’s finally over. I couldn’t take it anymore. The only good thing about it is that tomorrow I can write this scene down. Rita told Claude “in Les Autres, Christine went too far,” and then, “is she still together with that woman?” And Herman “we’ll find out everything in her next book.” I wasn’t seeing my father anymore, I’d met Claude, I’d married him. I decided to see my father again. With him, I’d only had inconclusive sexual relations. Like an ephebe, as if by chance… I needed a complete overview, for my writing to strike hard. Yes, strike hard. Like blows and blood. Anal penetration wasn’t so bad at the start, but after. I’d read in the media “press coverage has to be earned.” Shaming the journalists, little jabs, the way you shoot small arrows at the carnival, it’s ethical and it’s relaxing. Using the muscles of the sphincter and perineum to write certain pages. Marie. What are you doing right now, Marie? Are you seeing patients? You’re at the hospital this morning. This afternoon, you’ll play tennis. Tomorrow is your day off. You won’t do anything, you don’t want to do anything. Saturday you’re driving Léonore and me to the theater. You don’t give us much choice as to dates. But it’s nice of you. Over the phone I read her the passage “this mother, whose child is a dog.” She didn’t react, it didn’t get her worked up, their dogs are children, often Labradors, everyone must know.

The good thing is she’s a doctor. She prescribed respiratory rehabilitation and spinal physical therapy. After three months of homosexual torsion, it was necessary. (I’m not kidding.) The physiotherapist asked me what kind of work I did to put my back in such bad shape. Writer. He didn’t ask any more questions. He understood. Breasts, I didn’t dare touch them. The clitoris, I had no idea where it was. I didn’t like going out with her and having people think I was trying to get my bearings. She came to make up Léonore’s eyes to look Japanese for the carnival. My little daughter, Midi Libre wrote about her. Slanted eyes fill with tears when they burn, Mister Carnival. For the little Japanese girl, the parade took a different turn. The school children didn’t stop singing or doing their folk dance. Except for the little Japanese girl, whose kohl was running. Giraffes when I’ve got starving children right next to me. A lesbian, when I’ve got my daughter crying next to me, burns Mister Carnival. But, Mister Carnival, forty years ago it could have been her in a camp of deported homosexuals. I dream! I dream: I loved seeing her, seeing her walk in the door. And with Léonore. Pitou my heart watched over her. That was her dog Baya’s nickname. She was very homosexual, she had everything, a female cat, a female dog. I was fascinated. Clara always wanted to be the mother. She’s always quick to say it, she says it fast. All that’s left for her, Léonore tells me between sobs, is to be the second mother. But she’s not allowed to have children, a little cat, or a little dog, that’s it. It has made me sick. I’d caught it. For three months I was truly beside myself. I wanted to keep on. I felt strong enough. But that’s it, I drank the dregs. Léonore cares less and less for playing the boy in their games, since Clara absolutely insists on being the girl. With a wave of his hand he cut short any discussion: How much time? Muzil told me “the doctor doesn’t give the truth straight out, but gives the patient the means to figure it for himself, by talking in a roundabout way.” The lack of a cock, I was conscious of it and regretted it. A game of mirrors, I fell victim to it and regretted it. After a certain time I had no pretensions to perfection. I tried. I rebelled now and again. I wore skirts. The head doctor prescribed Muzil massive doses of antibiotics. I love women, I love animals, I love men, I love Italy, I love the color red, I love Léonore, I love life, and dogs too.

Her first letter: It’s from René Char. It’s for you: Push your luck, seize your happiness, and take risks. After seeing you, they will get used to you. The second: The air I always feel almost lacking in most human beings, if it blows through you, has a profusion and a sparkling ease. I live marvelously with you. That is our extraordinary luck. Twenty after twelve. I have before me the letter from Africa, Guibert’s book, the magazine Eurêka, Libération on Viagra, her father’s notebooks, the animal clones, the telephone. She didn’t call me this morning. I’m exhausted. I was asleep. Léonore woke me. At the door, knock knock. No Marie. I’m alone. A photographer just called me, he wants me to write something, to accompany photographs of goals in football matches. And also: Of course I’m moved when I think of you when I see you, of course the idea of not seeing you not holding you in my arms not making love with you anymore is unbearable. Your absence, this solitude in which you’re with me despite it all is a strange kind of test I’d like so much to be able just to be near you to have you in my life For the first time I truly feel the absence Suffering is hard it’s necessary Maybe I’ll lose everything I’ll lose you I don’t know I think about you way too much I think about you almost all the time Kisses. I don’t want to call her. That feeling has evaporated. Yesterday, before he left, Claude said, it’s only with you that I feel energized like this. What do you mean? I can’t explain, energized. I want to do things with you, feel these surges with you. Not just to pass the time, energized, exhilarated, I really want to. I didn’t feel energized at all. I didn’t feel like going to the cinema, to a restaurant, on a trip, or on vacation. No particular desire to do anything together, no particular exhilaration with her. And yet the test results were positive. Her breasts were small, but still they were hers. It fascinated me. I pictured her with other women. I wasn’t jealous, women touching each other fascinated me. She was standing in a field that was mown very short. She’d had the dream in New York. Her father was with her. The field was very flat, the grass cut very short. Maximum visibility. And yet, you could hear hunters, shots. Unbelievable, that hunters would dare shoot in a space that was so open, with such visibility, leaving the animal no chance. Yes, they would. A little deer arrives. Its eyes are both calm and terrified. She sees it, she says to her father: It’s not possible. The hunters won’t shoot. But they do, not only that, but they shoot it in the ear, such a fragile spot. The little deer, calm and terrified. I was the calm and terrified little deer, of course, or else she was. Writing that, I recapture our love. I love her. I’m going to call her. I dream. A house, the two of us. Two storeys. Léonore is there. It’s all fine. I write. She leaves for work. She comes home, I’m there. I go to pick Léonore up from school. Except for Thursdays, Thursdays she goes, she takes her to shore with Baya. The two of them throw pebbles into the sea. Baya looks for them in the water. Oh! no, she’s not cold. Look at all her fur. I’m not homosexual. I was for three months. I thought I was condemned to be homosexual. I really was caught. But I refused to sleep at her place. In that house full of animals. With a pool. When you think of all the ways to live, it’s also amazing you don’t die. Swimming in the pool. Taking a bath. Nine o’clock, taking a shower. Deciding on May 8th “I’m not going to wash today.” Or telephoning, crying, waiting, making the restaurant reservation for tonight, feeling a bit bored, waiting for friends to go on a picnic (not me), it’s a gray day, it will clear. Feeling energized, listening to music. Coughing, feeling low. Doing errands in the morning, all the stores will be closed in the afternoon. Getting a hard-on, making love. Masturbating, pissing, feeling deflated, thinking about something, crying, returning from Africa. Reading. Not loving. Feeling bored. Seeing your daughter again. Waiting for me. Waiting for my call. Not calling. Knowing I’ll end up doing it. Maybe not. This time. Maybe not right away. Letting me take my time. Turning me over. Maybe I’m writing. Maybe I’m with someone. Seeing us from the window across the street while watering the bonsai plants. Leaving for London, asking a friend, Claude, for example, to water the bonsais while I live across the street. Unlocking the house. Yelling in the street. Like last night. Someone did, for at least two hours. Saying to yourself, it’s noon, she said we’d eat together. Waiting for me to call. Knowing I will. She’ll call. I called. There were women in the camps for deported homosexuals. Classical music was playing over the speakers. The SS stripped Jo. They shove a pail onto her head. Brunette, breasts bared, her slender hips, her torso, her neck with her thin gold necklace. The cosmetics of her gaze. The kohl is running. A tinplate bucket. They sic the guard dogs on her. She thinks of Baya, the dog she adored. Pitou my heart. The dogs barking around her. My darling What I’d like most is to be able to live close to you With you, you for me and me for you, with other close friends, intimate friends sometimes, to live and create a space for us. I dream. We choose things we love. Pitou my heart watches over her. More and more often, I find myself saying us for you and me, thinking of you when I picture the time to come, life, the future I love you you know don’t forget it Let’s be together. I just called her. It was busy, there was the click of call waiting. She didn’t take the call. I called back. She still didn’t answer. I called again, it rang, then the answering machine. I left the following message: What’s going on? I call you, it’s busy, you don’t take call waiting. I call back, I get the answering machine. What are you doing? Maybe she took Baya out for a walk right after hanging up. I doubt it, I called back right away. Maybe she decided she didn’t ever want to hear my voice again after such a night. Last night on the phone “I’m suffering” and “I’m so unhappy, leave me alone.” Then I reversed, we ended the call saying we’d see each other tomorrow, in other words, today. Maybe she changed her mind again over night. Yesterday I’d decided to break up, definitively this time. No, I wasn’t sure I really wanted her to go to Avignon with me. Much less to Paris next month. In fact, we may never see each other again. Ever. I sensed sobs in her voice and backtracked. When she said “you had me convinced of things, I believed in…” I was touched, “in love…,” “a few days ago you told me you would always love me and that you’d never forget how I am with you, all I do for you, but no, you have to take off.” We’d already broken up in February. I told her “I need to be alone.” She replied “me too.” At night, Léonore was in bed. I called her, I shouldn’t have. The conversation derailed, things went south again. Then I watched Muriel, the two girls drive off in a taxi at the end of the movie. I called her, spontaneously, she was happy, she said I wrote you, I went for a walk, I thought about you all day. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Tell me. No, I’ll tell you tomorrow. I don’t know if we’ll see each other tomorrow. We agreed we’d take Léonore to the theater. After that we’ll split up. We’ll see. Well, we’ll see. Tell me what you were thinking. I was thinking that I loved you and of all the things about you that I can’t stand. Well, we aren’t seeing each other. I can easily go to the theater with Alexandra, don’t put yourself out. I spent an excellent day without you. She slammed down the receiver. Five minutes later, it rang. I said some things again. Again she slammed the phone down. I went to brush my teeth and take my medicine. I called her back, she had unplugged her phone. I called her again four times. She didn’t answer, she had unplugged her phone and fallen asleep. Later, she admitted to me that she’d heard the first ring. She didn’t want to answer, hearing the ring was enough for her. And the others, the other rings? She’d put in earplugs. I know when I’m a pain in the ass too. I won’t admit it, the day I admit it will be a masterpiece, no one wants to say it. No one can say it. When they’re a pain in the ass. No one. I live by making do, I won’t say more. I have a hard time putting up with being nailed, for much too long now, I won’t say more. Three months. Not all the time. Men who don’t nail you or women who would be inclined to but only with fingers. Marie told me “you know there are women who take Viagra to improve their performance.” Claude, “you know that in the United States, they wanted to make the goals larger? So there’d be more of them. To make it more appealing to the spectators.” On Saturday morning, after the telephone train wreck, I called her yet again. To ask her, OK, then, so what do we do? I’ll spare you the details, but there was a lot of yelling. She finally came over around two. As soon as I see her it heats up. Then cools down, she can feel it, there’s a little nib, a little nub, a little old stub that’s missing. I made her read what I wrote about football and while she did I read her letter. With her doctor’s handwriting, very large. A day like all the others without you. A colorless day, bland. (She doesn’t use punctuation.) A day like all the others without you A colorless day bland A sharp feeling of missing you and yet I don’t move I don’t take a single step towards you (There’s no punctuation at all. No limits, the metals are mixed, fusion, mixture, no commas, no periods.) A day like all the others without you A colorless day bland A sharp feeling of missing you and yet I don’t move I don’t take a single step towards you I listen and know that you are in me I can feel you move in my stomach It’s my stomach that speaks to me most clearly about you I let myself be carried away I want the risk of loving of this particular love with you so unique and sometimes so intimate along with the terrible lucidity that comes with it I am proud of you proud of myself with you, of the love you bring me but is it meant for me this love The words your words are they meant for me If just once I felt I was born of real love This absence of love turns all my own attempts barren Aborted love aborted fate maybe that’s what it is and maybe that’s my true fate Maybe I’ll never get beyond it Maybe I’ll go from one pair of arms to the next in search of a gesture a face that really speaks to me of love that would address something truly unique to me Single destination of a word that was lost of a love not built of a life that is self-destructing yes I want to belong and I want to love to love you to be loved by you But I’m left with nothing I think of love and I feel invaded I’m afraid of never being able to and if I’m never able to Then what’s the point of continuing Yes I’m afraid and the more I’m afraid the more I keep at a distance from you the more I flee from your face your arms You understand but you can’t stand it and I can’t either I love you. I call Léonore Marie-Christine and I call Marie-Christine Léonore I didn’t know when they put her on my chest that that’s what having a little girl was like the Holy Virgin separated from the Child I was crying don’t laugh at Marie my husband watched over us, Joseph, I was the mother of Christ and the Christ, Marie-Christine’s fingers were six years younger, I was giving birth to Léonore Marie-Christine Marie-Christine Léonore Léonore Marie-Christine Marie-Christine Léonore Léonore Léonore Léonore Marie-Christine Léonore Léonore Léonore. Léonore Marie-Christine Marie-Christine Léonore. Léonore Marie-Christine. Marie-Christine Léonore. My little love my little sweetheart my gold my treasure my love my little love Marie-Christine Léonore Léonore Marie-Christine Marie-Christine Léonore Giving birth I became homosexual giving birth to Léonore Marie-Christine Léonore Léonore Léonore Léonore-Christine we should go to that restaurant In Copenhagen The Léonore-Christine Léonore Marie-Christine Léonore Léonore My treasure Okay the goal the goal in the football match. Léonore knows it’s the World Cup. They hear enough about it at school. I called Pierre Blanc, the photographer, he was pleased I’d started. Very pleased, they will pay me what I asked. He seemed happy, very happy. On Saturday night, at her place, I put on Alain Chamfort. L’éternité c’est quand je prends ta bouche Pas le nombre d’années que purgent les condamnés. I find eternity on your lips not in the number of years prisoners spend behind bars. She talked to me about Yassou, the scars from the black dog’s teeth are still visible. I talked to her about Léonore right after that. What made you think of Léonore all of a sudden? Yassou, the little cat. I put on the last Alain Chamfort recording Saturday night, she was in the other room putting a new bandage on the cat. I saw her cross the entire length of the large room. When she approaches from a distance. When I see her entire body coming towards me. Especially if she’s smiling. And especially if her eyes are shining. Or if she’s speaking with other people. I see her through the window. Like yesterday. Or three little knocks on the wall. From the other room. They’re far away, beautiful, they’re going to sleep. Sleep, yes, I’ll knock on the wall. Of course. And also, when I’m going to bed, kisses and a caress, yes, of course. We went on a bike ride yesterday. I lost my science magazine. What are animal clones good for? All the questions the French are asking. What is locked-in syndrome? You’re not addressing another cause of dysfunction: aging. And yet we know that vaginal dryness and discomfort during intercourse exist. Marie is allergic to cypress, of course, the tree of cemeteries, but of Italy as well. A sting, as if by chance, a sting from its stinger gave her a headache for twenty-four hours. My love It’s Saturday you just left and I feel so deeply that I’m with you I have your strength and your desire in me and my desire and all this makes me want to live to move forward to wait for you to follow you sometimes to show you the way or to take your path it’s often one that’s difficult even for mules we don’t have hoofs only our hearts our hands our mouths Our words and they’re so often full of doubt But also filled with a certainty of evidence of a Love we share for a long time I hope maybe forever. She rarely talks about it but now and again she tells me it hurts her feelings that I don’t ever lick her. I lick her arms, her stomach, her chest, often. Lower, I can’t stand it, it’s what I didn’t like. She doesn’t care for the term to lick. (Didn’t care for it.) For her, it’s licking the plate clean. A greasy plate. She says fingers of course, but what you touch with your mouth… I’m the first woman who won’t do it to her, four or five times maybe, or six, not at all after that. It gave her the feeling there was a part of her body I didn’t like. I let a little time pass, I knew I would go downstairs. I didn’t want to go home right away. She was in a hurry to accompany me home, she started work at the hospital very early the next morning. I felt so good in her arms, I wanted to stay there for a while. And I knew that if I licked her, she’d be in less of a hurry. She was no longer in a hurry. I cried, tears on my cheeks with the vaginal secretions of Marie-Christine Léonore-Christine, at that restaurant, we let the champagne flow. Léonore. Léonore. Marie. Marie. Christine. I was crying, it was fusion, I was her, in complete homosexual delirium. Totally delirious. I dove back in. The last glass, once you’ve drunk it, you’re usually not supposed to drink even another drop of alcohol. Licking, crying, she was covered with vernix, she was all black and purple when she was just born, when they laid her on my chest. I would have licked her like mother cats, mother dogs do, if the doctors hadn’t been there watching. Yesterday she was crying. The last water lily. I am raw from missing you But it feels necessary the whole trip back the temptation to get near you was so strong But impossible to move towards you to bring on and suffer the violence of impossibility. Léonore was in La Grande-Motte at my mother’s. Marie told me about the cat, Yassou, I started crying Léonore my own little kitten. She offered to go, to go on a bike ride with her, to take her to lunch, to go for a walk because she was sad. Afterward, in any case, she went to the beach with her grandmother, we’d go back. Tomorrow Sunday with you a Sunday for the two of us a life for us a book for us I love you. I called, she was so happy. We went for a walk. Marie rode André’s bike, I rode my mother’s, Léonore rode her little pink bike, we went for a walk along the lakeshore. It was hot, we went into the pine forest. It was hard to ride, the sand, the pine needles. We decided to leave the bikes. To walk along the golf course with Baya. Baya, of course. The three of us and Pitou my heart. A man in a Jaguar explained the possible paths. Léonore objected, she knows them, she could have told us. We’re allowed to walk there, there are cars, but only once in a while. We felt good together. I carried Léonore on my shoulders for a while, she’s big, too heavy now. We went into the forest a ways. We stretched out on the ground. It was nice. We got up. We started for home. Léonore asked me if we could go to Île de Ré this summer with Baya to celebrate both birthdays because Baya was born, like her, on July 9th. Then she whispered in my ear “Marie-Christine is homosexual, isn’t she.” It was my mistake, I said some things that were not appropriate for her age, from one generation to the next, words are less serious, I told myself, perversity shifts. We went to a restaurant. Then we had to part. She was staying with my mother, I was going back with Marie-Christine and Baya in the Saab. She cried, it took us an hour to leave, we parted, we went back, we reasoned with each other, we went back until my mother came and got her. She cried the entire afternoon apparently. Marie-Christine said: I’m exhausted, I’d like to sleep, for me this is not an ideal Sunday. For me, it is, with my little girl in a pine forest it was an ideal Sunday. We argued. For me it’s an ideal Sunday. Well not for me. Well it is for me. I was homosexual for three months, I’ve recovered somewhat. I’m going to stop, it’s a matter of weeks, of months, not years. Baya, Yassou, Muzil, I can’t go on. I was in a good mood. I went to the watchdog committee against Front National, it got me out for once after three months. I went to pick up Léonore from school. We ate. I put her to bed. Things were fine. One o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t sleep. I took some pills. I fell asleep. She had an earache, she woke me up, I yelled at her. My psychoanalyst told me it wasn’t serious if I took myself for Christ. My readers are my saviors. Readers, choosers, the chosen one. Gold, l’or, Léonore, Marie. There it is, it’s simple. Let go of everything, no man’s land, not even a scrap of heaven, Don’t keep even the slightest thing that might distract you, let go of every obstacle. Tear up all the little notes. Quarter past three Sweetheart I love you. I would have liked to be near her always. Léonore cried when I left her at school. Marie and I argued on the phone yesterday. She said “calm down, I’ll call you back,” I hung up. I went to bed, Léonore was having nightmares, she whimpered in her sleep. I got up several times to caress her. Her whimpering didn’t stop, it started again, I had to get up several times. And finally miraculously I murmured softly into her ear “mama loves you, mama’s here,” the nightmares stopped. Before our argument, Marie-Christine said she was aware of the no man’s land. It went downhill after that. Authorities in Bavaria were recommending that a sign be tattooed in blue ink on the buttocks of those infected. I’d always taken precautions with the poet, even when he begged me to treat him like a bitch and I used him like a dildo for Jules. I’d smelled a very strange sweat emanating from our three bodies. I kept myself from coming in the poet’s mouth because cocksucking was what most excited this little hetero who whined that girls wouldn’t blow him, and as substitution or some reverse projection he wanted to be taken like a whore. He finally wrote me, as if with regret “According to the blood tests, I don’t have AIDS.” All this young man thought about was suicide or glory. My love I don’t want to let you read this letter written in a moment of sadness of complete loss of self-confidence. Don’t ever look at me again. That’s how the letter began. We talked some more about homosexuality, things went downhill. Bringing friends to the evening she’s hosting on Saturday is out of the question. She swore she would kiss me on the mouth in front of everyone. Telling me the whole time that we had no future, dragging me into the dirt even though I’m untouchable, relegating me to a caste. I was and I would have liked to remain that way, I think. I would be so again. One day, in an interview, “are you an untouchable?” I answered yes right away. In India they have no rights, no possessions, no one can mix with them. I just telephoned her. Last night I unplugged the phone, this morning I wasn’t home. I unplug it more and more often, I leave the answering machine on, I’m not there when she calls, I’m outside, I’m with other people. I listen to the messages. She’s destroyed, I think. Still, I called her back at the hospital. She wants to buy me a bicycle, she wants us to go get it this afternoon. To all her suggestions, no. You don’t have to. Yes, since I suggested it. It wouldn’t be the first time you reneged. I’ll pick you up at three. You don’t have to. I’ll call, you can leave the answering machine on. You don’t want the bike. Saturday, I’m having a gathering for you, you’re telling me you might not come. I told her I was falling apart, my feelings weren’t the same, “you know, I don’t love you as much as before.” We agree to meet at three. For two hours. Is it true that you don’t love me as much as you used to? I say that because I love you more than before. Oh! of course, it’s the Angot logic, oh! yes, you’re right.

Everyday for two weeks I said “we’re through,” she always found a way to disarm me, I started crying again and we didn’t break up. One night, I started in again over the phone, but then “fine, I think you’re right, we’ll never make this work.” And she wouldn’t change her mind this time. I didn’t know what to do with my days, much less with my life. I didn’t know where to take Léonore on walks. I wrote: We didn’t dare, we weren’t able to strip bare one before the other. There. That’s what I believe. We were in a hurry to get dressed again. Now that’s that. We’re happy. I’m afraid you won’t like the reason I love you. I love you because you’re gentle, gentle, gentle. Because you throw pebbles for your dog on the beach. I never loved having anyone take care of me the way I loved having you take care of me. I love you in a way that no one has ever loved you. That’s right, no one. I’m sorry, I don’t have the right to say this. It’s probably not true. But I admit that I often think things like this. You’re going to tell me you know all this. Well then, fine, you at your place, me at mine. Each in her own home and the hell with it. I wasn’t worthy of you or you of me. We didn’t give each other the means, we keep them for others or for ourselves. Sweetheart, help me allow myself to get near you. Guide me, take my hand. Let’s stop. Tell me you love me, catch me. I should never have let you walk on the beach alone. That’s all. You’re aware, my love, that it’s difficult to be with you. You take back everything you give. Oh my goodness, what babbling. And all of it for a story that’s coming to an end. Don’t you think we should have managed better than others? What an admission of weakness and how I blame myself. And how I blame you, too. I love you. Everything I could never say to you, and still can’t, it’s all lost. Maybe I’ll be able to tell you them some day, a long time from now. That evening, I read the letter to her over the phone. She told me she’d think about it. She came to get me at the train station, we went off, it was wonderful. The letter upset her. She just called me back, everything is going well, she loves me, she’s glad she’ll see me this afternoon, no, no, I was wrong to worry, there’s nothing wrong, the line was busy, the call waiting signal sounded, it must have been someone leaving a message on the machine, she was playing tennis, she’d just walked in, no, no, there’s no problem, she’s looking forward to seeing me, she’s in a hurry, she’s got to meet someone, she’ll come right after. Aside from a few minor worries from time to time, it all went like that, she would look at the real estate ads and call me. We even went to look at a house. We took the freeway to get there. I saw a dead dog on the shoulder. I couldn’t get rid of the image. I tried to block it out, I didn’t dare mention it. After the house tour, we had a dinner invitation, I had to talk about it, I was forced to say “there’s an image I can’t get out of my head. —What is it? What, what, what? —There was a dead dog on the side of the road when we arrived. —The freeways, especially that one.” We changed topics. She said to me “the day you don’t love me anymore, tell me, it’s not worth it.” But she still went off to Île de Ré alone, without me, to see her cousin. When she called I heard her cousin’s voice “Marie-Christine,” in the tone you use when calling from the next room for something that belongs to you and that you need. Jean, with whom I had dinner yesterday, said to me “it’s crazy how pretty the name Christine is and how ugly Marie-Christine is.” She left, she wanted to be far away from me, to get some distance, she needed some rest, far away from me. I wrote her. “Marie-Christine, let’s be clear. You said you’d write, well, here’s my answer. I’m bored with you, it’s no fun, I never laugh, but worst of all, we don’t share. The conversations we have don’t interest me. When you came back from tennis the other day (your tournament), your skin was ———— and ————. And yet, I let myself be seduced by you, you weren’t like that, you’re never vivacious for long, you need easy targets to shine.” And me with my dreams. We’d have a house. We’d share it. Léonore would have been with us. Pitou my heart would have watched over her. “Most of all, there’s a cruelty in you. You fan suffering when you see it, you’re incapable of real friendship, of real consolation, in short, of real love. I know now, after this letter, that you won’t call me again. I’ll be rid of your lack of love.” At the same time, I took notes, for myself, in my notebook: She is: not attractive, ————, ————, hollow chested, I don’t like talking to her, her friends, etc., the animals, she’s her cousin’s lap-dog, etc., when you forbid human cloning, you’re obliged to reproduce, which is good. The telephone rang. I didn’t pick up. The answering machine turned on. It was her, calling from Île de Ré. I wanted to talk to you, to chat with you on the phone, before you leave for Turin. Well, fine. Okay, listen… I don’t even know what time you’re leaving. If you get my message, try to call. If not, I’ll call you Sunday night when you’re back. I wanted to tell you that I hope everything goes well in Turin and to send you a big kiss. “These last two weeks, to tell you the whole truth, even sex with you seemed dull. Desire responding only out of habit.” She even said so herself “last week-end you seemed on auto-pilot.” I dialed her number in Île de Ré. I let it ring three times and hung up. The phone rang immediately after. It was her, “you got my message? —Yes, I just walked in this second. I called you back, but when I heard the end of your message, that because there are men in the house, ‘the two of us are out,’ you and Nadine as a couple, I hung up, and besides if all you have to say to me is ‘I hope everything goes well in Turin,’ then I’m not interested in talking to you. —I wanted to tell you I was thinking of you, that I keep seeing things here that remind me of you. —And what are you thinking about me? —I want to let some time pass, I don’t want to answer right now, I’ll tell you when I’m back.” Just then, I hear her cousin Nadine, the actress, with her voice that carries, calling from the kitchen “Marie-Christine…” Having a lesbian in the family is very practical. Handy, available, clever, not prissy. “Someone’s calling you, go ahead.” If there were five of me, I could make even more, says a woman from Austin, Texas, when asked about cloning. All these remarks annoyed her when she read the manuscript. It’s too easy, I know. Always leaning on tangential things, drawing connections, since I began writing there have always been other voices, other texts, other things, another angle from which I try to show myself. Me and something else, always. Now I have to rely on myself, what is closest, most real, nothing much, what with the incest I can’t manage to feel like I’m anything much, my body, my life, the place I live, the scene I’m acting in for myself, with my anxieties, my crying fits, my telephone calls, my intelligence, etc., all my limits, to be at the very edge of my limits, to lean on it the way I lean on the banister of the stairs to the lawyer’s office. Let everyone see my insignificance, my nothingness, me as a minimal human being, the tiny little writer that I am. Trying, with shrewd remarks, like the one about cloning, to seem a tiny bit more clever than she is. Me: “I didn’t care for you at the party at your place. I didn’t like dancing with you as much as I used to. This all developed over the past few weeks. Before my desire was sincere, urgent, directed at you. My love too. I discovered beauty in you and then it became hidden, around the end of February, and didn’t resurface. In the United States we felt pleasure and had some good moments but no happiness. There should be some happiness after a few months. For a while I truly hoped to live with you, it’s not possible with you. There really is too little love. There’s too little of everything.” Yesterday I asked her “would you rather you’d never met me?” – she said that it depended. Would it be better for a child to be born cloned or not be born at all, soon there won’t be this kind of thing at all in my books. I hope. No letters either, I hope. Just my inanity, nothing else. It’s a little utopian. “It was no passion, it wasn’t love, it was an encounter and we used up all its charm. A little passion, a little love, a little encounter, a need to seduce, you did it, it’s over. I no longer exist for you. We dreamed, you talked about the civil solidarity pact, you remember, you’d say ‘you’ll inherit everything I have, my aunt will say “you’re disinheriting your godchildren.” ’ I met someone in Turin. I made love to him. I don’t think we’ll see each other again but it got me away from you. Phew!” When I was writing the letter, I hadn’t yet gone to Turin, I was leaving the next day. After writing it, I wrote in my notebook: Not a word. Don’t write her a word. Don’t call her. Don’t leave a message. Hold firm. Early on she sent me two quotes from Char. The first: The air I always feel almost lacking in most human beings (she was a pulmonologist), if it blows through you, has a profusion and a sparkling ease. I live marvelously with you. That is our extraordinary luck. The second: Push your luck, seize your happiness, and take risks. After seeing you, they will get used to you. That was a long time ago. L’Escale was a long time ago. New York was a long time ago. It was a long time ago that we used to get up at night to dance together. Not a word. Don’t write her a word. Don’t call her. Don’t leave a message. Hold firm. The moments of happiness with her are moments of unhappiness. She said to me “the day you don’t love me anymore, tell me, it’s not worth it.” I promised I’d tell her, implying that it wouldn’t be long. I was that fed up. “Dinner is ready,” her mother would say, “hang on, I’m coming, I’m getting ready,” her diabetic father would answer, giving himself an injection. “Your father, your mother, your cousin, none of it’s interesting, my poor dear.” With Claude, the moments of unhappiness were moments of happiness. The last time at her place. I was thinking of Léonore. I couldn’t separate, I had promised Léonore I’d take her to see Zorro, Marie-Christine wanted to see it too. Marie-Christine Léonore Marie-Christine Léonore Marie-Christine Léonore. And I can’t get loose. Even though the goal of life is simple. I met Claude at a demonstration one day. He lived in Reims, so did I, we knew each other already, through our parents who worked together. I grabbed his shoulder, I told him it was me. He turned around, we fell in love. Love. Yesterday I was telling someone “I’m not in love with her anymore.” We agreed to meet at the movies. He got there late because of work. I was saving two seats, I made a sign when I heard noise in the dark. Afterward we went to eat crêpes in a café, everything else was closed. He wore a blue anorak. He took me home. Sometimes he came upstairs. He didn’t know what to do. One day when he was about to leave, he came up to me and said “I love you.” I told him “you shouldn’t say that.” He stayed. He slept over, he couldn’t get a hard-on, then the opposite. And then he didn’t leave. Little by little he brought all his things. A year later we moved into a bigger apartment together. Which belonged to his parents, first mistake. Maybe not the first. His mother would see me when I opened the shutters. It was the same co-op, they lived across the way. The argument began (the argument with them). I started my psychoanalysis, I started to write, we got married. My mother would cook us dinner to cheer us up. We were young, about twenty-five. I finished my psychoanalysis, I left to study for a year in Bruges, we were separated. We were planning on getting a divorce. A shame. I left Bruges, I was writing, I wanted to move to Nice. We would be separated, but I wanted to be nearby. We would be separated, but I loved him. There was the thing with my father. That was sorted out, we began to be happy. To be really happy. Everyone called us the lovebirds. He would ask me “how much longer do you think they’ll call us the lovebirds?” Until what age? Rue Bosio, Rue Blacas, the lovebirds. No longer in Montpellier. I don’t remember when they called us the lovebirds. We moved to Montpellier. First we got a place in the Citadines, then we found a permanent apartment. Where I am now. We spent six months in Italy, paradise, utterly Edenic. Léonore from one year to eighteen months. We came back early January’94. Something was no longer working, I didn’t realize it. Time passed. Léonore got bigger. Day care, nursery school, kindergarten. She’s starting elementary school next year with her parents separated. Claude left a year ago. In April. I met Marie-Christine in September. Léonore Marie-Christine Marie-Christine Léonore. I’m trying to get Léonore some help, I saw a psychologist yesterday. Who treated me like I’d been beating her for a year, I’d only just noticed the bruises, it had to stop. “She’s your daughter, she loves you”… implying “no matter what you do. Say.” Those of us who have endured incest, AIDS, etc., that’s how we’re treated, like hardship cases! Or we’re given support, that’s how they treat us. I called Marie-Christine to come and see me. She didn’t want to get her car out again this late. I called Claude who came to sleep here, I took a lot of pills, I’m groggy. I asked Claude what he thought of the title No Man’s Land. In his opinion, it’s a title for English professors. That afternoon a friend says about Marie-Christine, “she seems a bit gloomy. —No, on the contrary, she’s very cheerful, very amusing, very funny.” I was homosexual for three months and change, fifteen days, we had gotten together again more or less. But I’ll stop there. I’m going to retire. One day I’ll be a grandmother, it will be wonderful.

Marie-Christine won’t read this book, like Claude, she doesn’t want to. “It kills things,” apparently. Claude didn’t read Sujet Angot either. No one around me reads anymore. In fact, I’m Indian, one of the untouchables. I touch garbage and normally the dead. In India, the untouchables touch the dead. I only touch garbage. No one wants to touch it with me. My manuscript, I’m alone with it for months, months and months and months. Even after it’s published, people who care for me don’t want to read it, “it kills things,” apparently. After the article “Christine Angot Tells it Straight” appeared in Le Monde, 9/24/98), the Minister of Culture proposed me for the Order of Arts and Letters, the medal. Arts and letters, the letters are splitting, I tried to keep the letters straight, and I felt dizzy all day when I was writing this No Man’s Land. Well yes, of course, I know what you’re thinking: you say to write is to touch garbage, that you’re an untouchable, an Indian, but still, it has something sensational about it, but still, it’s finery. Being a writer is a kind of regalia. When I was little, I would wrap my arms around my mother’s neck and she would say “my most beautiful necklace.” Yeah, sure, a necklace of garbage. There was a game when I was little, when you had a golden bracelet “c’est de l’or?” – is it gold? If it was gold-plate, you said “non, c’est de l’ordure,” no, it’s shit, I don’t know if you know it. Which goes to show you what my father made of me and my mother, of our relationship, which was beautiful before we knew each other. Not dross at all, on the contrary. When Léonore was born, I had a premonition of all this. That two women were garbage showing itself. That’s why I called her Léonore, to be sure. Mon or, mon amour, mon or. My gold, my love, my gold. Lé-o-nore. Nonor, my golden love. To be sure. To be sure; sure, sure, sure. So that it would be a gold-plated bracelet and all you’d have to do is scratch it a little, with your fingernail, and it would give like butter when you stick your finger in it, it wouldn’t be gold at all. you’d have to answer “no, it’s garbage.” Stick your fingers in as if it were a lump of butter. “Penetrate the piano like a lump of butter,” Duchâble’s piano teacher used to say to him. In his adolescence, he found the image revolting. Léonore and I would be pure gold. I’d take her on walks in her stroller to the Peyrou park in Montpellier. Madame Gasiglia, the pediatrician asked, with an e or without the e. What do you think? With an e, because it’s a girl. For Christmas this year, Marie-Christine is going to Peru, to visit friends who have a mine, but copper. Last Christmas she bought me the Cartier trinity ring. One day, during an argument, I threw it on the ground and almost threw it in the Lez, a river. I still don’t know what I’m going to do for Christmas. Her, she’s going to Lima, then to the Andes with 4X4s and horses and chauffeurs and friends. She’ll cross the copper mines and mountain passes at five thousand meters. There will be endless hairpin turns. Among her friends will be Nadine Casta, NC, or Gisela Orjeda, GO, like I wanted to be instead of having to retire too young. But I’ll be a grandmother one day and it will be wonderful. And my granddaughter, if it’s a girl, Léonore can name her whatever she’d like, everything she touches is gold. By then maybe I’ll be a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Christmas

After homosexuality, it was insanity. It was Christmas that made me go crazy. We were back together again. Her trip to Peru had been canceled. We were supposed to go to Rome. She would spend a family Christmas with her cousin as always. We were going to leave after. I can’t say: I was insane for three months. For three months, I thought I was condemned to be insane. It’s been much longer than that. Or else it’s the others who are insane. And that’s a crazy thing to say. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’ll just tell this anecdote, I’m not Nietzsche, I’m not Nijinsky, I’m not Artaud, I’m not Genet, I’m Christine Angot, I have the means that I have and I make do with them. There will be an anecdote, too bad, an account of a trigger, it will be Christmas time, it will be descriptive. I’ll describe my insanity through a sudden insight. I was barely conscious of it until the previous page. It was worse.

First, the signs, the symptoms. The alienation that comes over you, it’s no longer me. The causes, which are blinding, immediately discernable. It’s November 28, 1998. I can’t mix things up this time. The kind of connections I’ve drawn until now between everything, everything and anything, I want to stop making them. Cloning, Viagra, Baya, Yassou, Muzil, poor dead Guibert, I’m going to let it all drop. I’ll make do with my own little things, my stuff, Christmas, Nadine Casta, Marie-Christine Adrey. Without bringing in anything larger or universal. Time to calm down, to try to be what I am, that is to say, not much. Putting all this more or less in order would already be something, not bad. Everything will be in the proper order from here and maybe even make me happy some day. And I’m going to try to be polite.

Precise, logical, and clear for once. Maybe things will go better afterward. I’m suffering from paranoia, I think, delusions too, I think. I ordered some books for the definitions and borrowed others. I’m not going insane, I already am insane, I definitely am insane.

Signs, symptoms, immediately discernable causes, trigger, deep causes, concrete manifestations, and word games, folle, a crazy woman but also a gay man, a folle with a limp wrist, (mine are often limp, too, I’ll get back to that). I’d like some classification, maybe even footnotes at the bottom of the page, a critical apparatus including all the books I already have at my disposal.

There are testimonies, many people have told me, it’s not just something I’m inventing. There are witnesses, people who saw me. Waking up this morning, I myself was a witness, it’s Saturday, tomorrow’s Sunday, the day after is Monday. I ask Moufid Zériahen, doctor, psychoanalyst, if he could find a place for me in his clinic for a while. I woke up this morning (very early, in any case I’d barely slept, one of the signs is insomnia of course), I said this to myself very clearly. I don’t know for how long, I know it’s necessary. My reactions are off. The clinic is called L’Alironde, it’s bit outside of Montpellier. (A friend’s son is there, manic-depressive. He just applied for disability assistance, you certainly can’t work with that condition.) You can have yourself committed, Walser did, as a matter of fact. That’s not why I want to do it, but because I have the feeling that I can’t take it anymore. I’m at my limit, what with my mental structure, incestuous, I mix everything up, it has advantages, connections others don’t make, but too much is too much as they say, it’s the limit. I mix everything up, I go too far, I wreck everything. I called Claude this morning to tell him I wanted to spend some time in a clinic and why, he said to me “the good thing is you’re lucid.” Yes, I’m lucid, yes, I’m going to explain everything to you, everything, everything, everything.

Claude said something else when I telephoned again later to read him these two pages: “what’s more it’s mischievous and impertinent.” No, not at all. It’s not at all mischievous and impertinent. It’s not at all a game. I’m not mocking you. I really did wake up this morning thinking of L’Alironde, I’m paranoid and delusional. I’m at risk. It’s not mischievous and impertinent. I can be serious. I can explain. I can try, I don’t know if I’ll be able to, it’s complicated, especially for me, because I’m insane, it will be difficult. I have a tendency to mix things up, you saw it in the first section. No order at all, everything’s mixed together, my mental structure is incestuous, OK, I’m at my limit, I’m not joking, I can feel it. Screaming into the telephone at two in the morning, insulting someone you don’t know, or barely know, who didn’t do anything to you, nothing special but who talks like others did a long time ago, I dragged her through the mud, I said it was worse than a pile of shit even though I didn’t even know her and I don’t care. I’m putting on an act. Stop. Until then I let my insanity show, I exposed my defective mental world. Laclave said it three years ago “her mental world is one of morbid imprisonment.” Since Wednesday, it culminated last night, I’ve been at my limit. It has been nothing but a permanent howl since, I slapped my face, I beat my own body, I was red, I was home alone, if Marie-Christine had been here I might have killed her, if it were Nadine Casta, I would have. I lay on the ground all night. The series of telephone calls described in the first section started up again and I didn’t even realize at the time that it was the work of a deranged mind. Oh, I know perfectly well why.

I associate things others don’t associate, I bring together things that don’t fit together. Dog-child, incest-homosexuality or AIDS, cousin-couple, blonde-bitch, money-hate, movie star-bitch, Léonore-gold, mass grave-gold mine, Holocaust-ghetto, worker-black, etc., etc., and what’s more, I highlight opposites, all the time, for example: Eustache is better than Nadine Casta, Dominique Quentin is also better than NC, I bring things into focus. Frédéric is right, she’s Nadine’s cousin, she could have been a cousin of Le Pen. He’s right but it blocks me. I have to get rid of the block, unblock it all.

I am used to rather particular punctuation. I punctuate my sentences in an unusual way, I’m going to try to stop. I will use punctuation only for clarity, so that readers can find their way. The clarity of my statements. So that my statements are clear, are understood. A bit fastidious, maybe, but this time properly. I won’t write anymore, for example, “I licked her, this woman, whose child is a dog,” I won’t write that anymore, what’s the point? Other than ending up alone. We’re now separated for good, for good this time. I will no longer write, Nadine Casta, NC, haine c’est, hate is, it’s hatred. Not that either.

How I went insane because of a simple trigger, Christmas. A three-day momentary fit of insanity. Before I would have written: momentary fit of insanity, three days. My system of punctuation, I need to get rid of it, to find one that’s more common, more natural, so that people won’t have to make as much of an effort, it’s ridiculous, it was ridiculous. Especially since virgule, comma, etymologically means verge, little penis. I just learned this, I had lunch with Laurent Goumarre and two of his friends, psychoanalysts. I’m losing the thread, I was talking about the trigger. About the three-day momentary fit of insanity. Of breakdown. Which does not mean that I didn’t become profoundly and completely, totally insane, no, I really am insane. The trigger. What the trigger is that occurred, let’s be precise, on Wednesday, at noon on Wednesday, that led me this morning, after a night of trembling, trembling really trembling, my entire body, even though I took my dose of pills, to decide to ask Moufid Zériahen to accept me into L’Alironde for a time.

The trigger

November 25th, a month to the day before Christmas. For years Marie-Christine has spent Christmas in Paris with Nadine Casta, her actress cousin. Surrounded by family. It’s a “ritual” from “time immemorial,” it’s “family” and besides, it’s “one day of the year.”

Rewind: November 15th, we’re at Frédéric’s. We’re happy to see each other, it’s obvious. A pleasant evening aside from two false notes, nothing serious, life is full of them. The conversation turned to Nadine Casta’s Chambord with Decourt, Dupont, Durand. Doesn’t matter. I’m not obligated to like her cousin’s films. Like Frédéric says, she could have been a cousin of Le Pen. At least Le Pen is not an artist. I rant, I take it back, I let it go so everyone knows where I stand. Second false note, during dinner, someone trots out Christmas. Second slap in the face. It was still a very nice evening, our need to be alone together was urgent. We call a taxi, in the taxi, we’ve barely sat down, we start in. We get to the hotel, far from making love, we hate each other, we go to bed, I cry. I cry, I cry, I can’t breathe and am in a very very bad way, my anxiety level is rising. It’s horrible. It’s because of Christmas. I put on an act, OK, maybe, no doubt. I ask her to go back to her cousin’s to sleep, it was a mistake to get together again, we were better apart. It’s too late, but she’s going to get another room, she calls reception, I stop her at the last minute, she lets me. She goes back to bed. My anxiety level is still rising. I get out of bed, fall to my knees, I try to breathe, it’s blocked, I pant (putting on an act doesn’t mean you aren’t suffering), I insult her, with her cousin, like all good homosexuals, she’s the family lackey, always available to serve the real woman. She has paid no attention to me at all for Christmas, and yet she still claims she loves me. In response, I get to hear it all, in short: poor thing, you’re not making any sense, you’re mixing everything up. The ‘poor thing’ is the insult-trigger: I screamed, I think the entire hotel heard me. I hit her hard, on the head, and for a long time. She hit me on the side of the head, my temple, her fingernail on my eyelid, another fingernail on my ear. I had a hematoma, I still have it, a scar on my eye.

Back in Montpellier, I telephone her, my anxiety builds, several calls and hang-ups later, I tell her it would have been really nice if we had prepared, the two of us, a beautiful Christmas for Léonore, her mother, mine, André, and Frédéric, of course. On the 24th, Claude would have taken Léonore on the 25th, we would have gone on peacefully, we would have spent a quiet day, we would have gone to the movies or taken a nap. Impossible, concepts like family, godchildren, obligations to people who have always been there, it’s not like things are going to change all of a sudden, just because I’m there, like they’ll change at all. It’s all normal, it’s all considered completely normal. I’m the one who’s raving. All I need to do is look around me. She was talking to me about the civil solidarity pact just a few weeks earlier, I remind her. You have to keep this shift in mind. I cry, I go to bed, I don’t want to see her anymore, I tell myself I don’t want to see her anymore, I unplug the telephone. The next day, there’s a message, “answer me, please pick up” in a nice voice, “it’s twenty past eleven, pick up the phone.” She calls again, she really wants to spend Christmas with me, she’ll do whatever she can to make it happen. She hopes it won’t cause any scenes, if there are any conflicts, she’ll go to Paris after all. That’s what she tells me. I’m happy, I buy a copy of Marie-Claire, the special New Year’s issue. I tell my mother, I tell Frédéric, I don’t tell Léonore yet, though, “you never know, let’s be cautious.” But I believe Marie-Christine, she’s happy, our first Christmas together. It’s very important. She telephones her aunt, “I can’t bring Mother to Paris.” Her aunt understands. Marie-Christine, delighted, was very wily. She said to her aunt, “Godmother, I’d like to ask you for some advice,” not a bad opening, it worked, Marie-Christine felt very clever. The big nut, Nadine, was still in Acapulco. She telephoned Marie-Christine on Wednesday, the call went badly, Nadine cried, there will be about twenty-five people, but she needs Marie-Christine to bring some lightness to the holiday. Everyone needs her, it’s not possible, she has to come. Twenty-five people and she must be one of them. It’s not possible, you have to come. She cries. She flips the person I was ready to take as my love like a crêpe. The person who calls me, tells me the news on Wednesday around noon. It takes my breath away, I tell her I’m done with her, I can’t, it’s too much, too much is too much. She could at least have waited until after my reading at the CRL. How am I going to manage?

The day of my reading at the CRL

November 26th, the reading has been announced and it has to be good. The 27th will be just as dark, the night of the 27th to the 28th will be terrible.

But the 26th: at 6:30 p.m., I have a reading, it has to be good. It’s a day full of symptoms.

Breathing: Ragged. I can’t get my breath back. Noisy. Desperate panting. Enormous anxiety. It comes from a very deep source, you can feel it.

Insomnia: I take sleeping medication, I can’t sleep. Even when it’s warm, I’m cold under the duvet, I’m shivering, my fingers are blue, my knees are knocking. My lips are dry, purple.

My face: Drawn with fatigue because of the insomnia, vacuous, eyes blank, someone in a forest who can’t see her feet under autumn’s dead leaves. Eyes blank and terrified, what is there to hold onto?

My whole body hurts, my joints, my back, my lips and my temples. But worst of all, I have the feeling that the next five minutes will be terrible.

I don’t know what it is. A neurosis, a psychosis, I’ve got the definitions, I will look them up. I have to go to L’Alironde, maybe not for long. I can’t take it anymore. Besides, I keep repeating the same thing. I say “I can’t take it anymore” or “I can’t stand it any longer.” Even if I’m alone, I tell myself that I can’t take it anymore.

I slap my face. On the 26th I slapped my face in front of the mirror. Not just once, several times. If someone were here, I’d kill him. Nadine. It could have been anyone. Who represents hate. It’s hatred, I call people, I make a lot of telephone calls, I beg (these calls are like gulps of strong liquor to give me a last, I don’t know), I search, I don’t find. There’s no one. Apparently, I’m overdoing it, my reaction is out of proportion. Me, I don’t think so. People find everything normal. When it’s all insane except me. What’s it called when you have that feeling? For the series of telephone calls, here’s a list of the most symptomatic:

I search through boxes for the telephone number of my father, Pierre, in Strasbourg along with the number of my half-sister, who’s married to a dentist, and of my half-brother, married to a Marie-Christine. I don’t find anything, not one number. I don’t have the strength to check the Minitel or to call information. That would require consistency, a clear desire to reach a particular person, which I don’t have. I would have dialed a number if I’d happened on the piece of paper it was written on. I hadn’t wanted to put them into my address book, to do them the honor, which may well, on its own, be a sign of instability. I had put them in a box. Just in case. This is the case. (And if I did call them, really called them, if I decided to call them now and suggest we spend Christmas together. After all, why not? Is it that bad of an idea?)

Around one p.m. I call Nadine Casta at home, in Paris. In a fit of insanity. I hesitate. I open my address book, I close it again, I hesitate. Finally, I open it. Then there’s another sign:

I entered the number in my book wrong. I put the Cs under A. Chatelain, Constant, Casta. AFAA, Attoun, Art-Press, then all of a sudden Chatelain, Constant, Casta, it ends with an A, Angot begins with an A. I put them on the same page, but Angot wasn’t there. That itself was a sign. The melting of my personality, associating, mixing up, that’s my mental structure, between Élisabeth Angot, EA, and Nadine Casta, NC. EA, an abandoned child, not her but me, NC, it’s hate, not her but me, I already explained it. There you have it, now if that’s not a symptom! Like Emmanuel Adely, there are a ton of EAs among writers.

I put down the telephone, I take a small piece of paper, I write down what I intend to say so I’ll remember, me with my stammering and her, an actress who has mastered language. I’m in tears, my cheeks flushed, eyes blank, hair a mess, I’m sweating and shivering at the same time, I remember. My back is stiff, so stiff it aches, it’s my vertebrae, my back, always my back that’s trembling it seems to me. My lower back. I write it down on a little piece of graph paper: Marie-Christine and I wanted to spend Christmas together in Montpellier. In a new relationship, in love, the two of us wanted to build something together, around us, without any other ties, not even very old ones. Things are complicated, I’m suffering. Her decision to go to Paris has been making me suffer since Wednesday, after your phone call, you insisted she come. We’re going to break up because I can’t tolerate it anymore. You need to know this and the pain that it will cause.

I’m rewriting it from memory, I threw the paper away. I called her, with the paper in front of my vacant eyes, so that Nadine would understand. I got the housekeeper (not two hours a week, all day every day, she takes care of everything, the cleaning, the laundry, the errands, food, at night when she comes home, NC can stretch her feet out under the table, the maid is there, and for everything else, there’s a secretary, professional papers, train tickets, plane tickets, for vacations, Nadine’s or the children’s, or hotel reservations at La Mamounia in Marrakesh, at La Gazelle d’or in Taroundant, she wanted to have a party there when she turned fifty, or in New York, in the Pierre, everyone would have been invited). Close paren, I don’t want to leave the reader stranded like before. Polite, proper, and comprehensible. Frédéric told me the first section was hard to read because things were jumbled. The birthday party ended up being held on Île de Ré. The point of bringing up this anecdote is to underline the modest end, going round the world and ending up in the house on Île de Ré, two storeys, fifteen rooms. In the village of Ars, with the same old people, the Casadesus, the Wiazemskys, Chouraqui, Chesnais, Baye, a little farther away, in the village of Loix, more secret, more secluded, more simple, at least in appearance, it’s much more expensive. “It’s crazy how high real estate prices are now on Île de Ré,” say Marie-Christine and Nadine sitting in the garden of the large house they bought together. I telephone. Chatelain, Constant, Casta, on the A page as if by chance, the little piece of graph paper, the housekeeper answers, “who may I say is calling?” A horrible question. It’s Christine.

—Hello Nadine. It’s Christine. I’d like to talk.

—So would I. But I’m on my way out, I have a lunch date and the taxi is waiting downstairs. When can I call you back?

It was before my reading, afterward I wouldn’t give a shit. Too bad. Go ahead, go to lunch.

—Late afternoon? You’ll be around?

—No, I won’t be around.

—And in the evening?

—No, I won’t be around.

—Tomorrow afternoon?

—Tomorrow afternoon, yes.

—OK, I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.

—Yes, because there are some things that are complicated.

—Complicated? How?

—We’ll talk.

I regretted calling, she was going to call me back, I didn’t want her to. It was done. The damage was done. As they say. On the 26th, in tears before the reading, I might have moved her.

Then, a call to Moufid Zériahen. I’ve been trying to reach him since ten in the morning. I had thought of calling him the day before, on Wednesday, but I held back.

Another process was underway, also by phone, with Marie-Christine. Plans to break up, screams, I made her listen to my ragged breathing, gasps, my hoarse cries, almost groans on some phrases, interspersed with yelling. After certain words, family, obligation, duty, godchildren, cousin, since forever. Another fit was setting in. It was being sparked again. The receiver was slammed down several times, after “it’s over,” “goodbye,” “well, see you some day.” You know. I threw in dry comments, alternating with death rattles, I made her listen to my constricted throat. Not from exhibitionism, not to draw her attention to it, but simply because I was suffering. She said some words, followed her logic, spouted some things that made me puke with horror, or at least scream. Just the thought of it, just picturing it. Imagining certain scenes, to see what it was related to, all the things it brought up. She was poking around in my childhood, stirring it up, not even realizing it. She was the last, absolutely the very last person on earth I could get along with. We had nothing to say to each other, we were complete strangers. She was in one camp, I was in the other. Eight days earlier she was talking about a civil solidarity pact. A dream. I was getting nowhere, it was exhausting. I take the blame for everything. I was trying to destroy her and her cousin, it was that or me, I preferred me, you think that’s not normal?

The morning of the 26th, of Thursday the 26th, I worked. Alain Françon is staging Les Autres, Sujet Angot, and No Man’s Land as one play, I’d suggested combining the three, to make them all one language, my usual stew, my classic incestuous mix, which I wasn’t repressing up to that point. ‘Everything can always be mashed together’ could have been my motto.

Late that morning, I don’t know which of us called the other. She did, I think. She’s free after two thirty, to get together before the reading if I want or to go for a walk. After the blow with the Christmas… I ask if she’s joking. If it helps for her not to come, she agrees not to. Implacable reasoning, repetition of the reasons for Christmas, Nadine needs support, you don’t suddenly let drop people who have helped you at some point, she has a family, turn of the century morality, nineteenth century, I spew at her. Intolerable notions of loyalty and fairness. So ancient and arbitrary, to be honest. So vile.

When I recount my day on the 27th, Friday the 27th, you’ll be treated to Nadine’s phone call, you’ll see, it’s something else.

To summarize. A few dozen phone calls, at half past noon she asks me – I was in tears – if I want her to come over at two thirty. I tell her it will be too late, that I’ll be dead by then. We hang up and I go lie down.

At two o’clock Denis rings, we had a rendez-vous, I was in no condition to speak. Marie-Christine telephoned, hung up, called back. Two good hours have passed before she hangs up, saying “I’ll be right there,” without giving me time to say “no,” I could feel her exasperation. It was about four o’clock, about two hours before the reading. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t prepared, I hadn’t showered, I didn’t have the strength to get to 20 Rue de la République, to say hello to Anne and Gil who had invited me to the CRL. I knew if I did, at what cost?

I called Moufid Zériahen. He was in.

—It’s Christine Angot. I have a reading at six o’clock, I’m not in any shape to do it, I’ve been having an anxiety attack since yesterday noon.

—Come right away.

—I can’t, I don’t have time. (Marie-Christine was going to come over. Unless I were to stand her up. After all!… Like Christmas.)

Despite all that she inflicts on me, I haven’t stopped loving her yet, what masochism. Paranoid, that’s certain, delusional, too, masochist, I’d have to check. The doorbell. It’s her. Moufid must have heard the bell. I tell him:

—I’d like you to say something that will calm me down.

I weep.

I go into another room with the hand-held phone.

—A few words.

—In that case, I need you to tell me a bit more.

—It’s about Christmas and Nadine, Do you remember?

—Yes, I do.

—Do you remember Marie-Christine told me she’d try?

—Yes, I do.

—She called Nadine yesterday, who told her it was impossible. And so she’s going. She’s going to Paris.

—And you’re surprised?

—Yes.

—Those are archaic relationships, you know, what would you have done if your father or your sister called, wouldn’t you have answered?

He’s feeling around, that’s not the issue, no, that’s not it. It’s difficult over the phone.

—No, I would have been ‘out.’ She called me yesterday, and I’ve been in this state since then, I have to do this reading. I’m very, very anxious, I scream and slap myself. I can’t stand it.

—What time does your reading end?

—Around eight thirty.

—Come see me after.

—But after it will be over.

—It may help you during the reading to know that you’ll be coming here when it’s done.

—Or I could come now.

—You just told me you couldn’t.

—I’ll see.

Marie-Christine arrived, exasperated. She saw I was on the phone, she kept making signs of impatience. Of anger, “I can’t believe it,” “No this isn’t possible, I must be dreaming,” “I came I’m here and you’re on the phone. I’m here, I’m paying a price to be here, and you’re on the phone, you’re unbearable and on top of that, when I’m here, when I come over despite everything, despite all the horrible phone calls this afternoon, despite the fact that your personality is impossible, delusional, paranoid, perverse, masochistic and sadistic, you are on the phone.” Completely exasperated.

I hang up, I say to Marie-Christine:

—Don’t get upset, I was talking to Moufid, he recommends I go see him.

—That would be a good thing.

She offers to take me in her car, we’d come back after, we’d drive straight to the reading if time is too tight. I call Moufid back, I tell him I’m on my way.

He fit me in for ten minutes between two patients and I went to do my reading. Things were a bit better. And it went well.

Night

She tells me she’s going to go to bed, that she’s going back to her place. I can’t possibly be alone that night, not at night. After all the effort. She’s dumping me, Christmas, and now at night. Again. When I’m in my worst state. Her reasoning: 1. She doesn’t have her things, 2. If she leaves her car parked where it is, she’ll get a ticket like the last time.

—OK, then I’ll go sleep at Claude’s, I can’t stay alone.

—If you go sleep at Claude’s then we’re done, do you hear me? Done. Come sleep at my place.

—I can’t, not after everything I’ve gone through since Wednesday, I don’t have enough faith in you to fall asleep at your place. Don’t you understand?

I started shivering again. Always the same spot, my lower back, around my kidneys. Gil and Anne had barely turned the corner. I collapsed onto my bed, on my back, my head hanging backwards, my eyes blank again, my fingers blue, it had started again. And Nadine getting ready for Christmas with twenty-five people. Her cousin is coming, that’s great, as always, it’s a ritual, an ancient ritual, it will happen again, once more, in a few weeks, since forever.

It must have been one in the morning, I couldn’t take it any more, I had to go to her place, make one more effort, go to the enemy’s, or else she’d leave me on my own. If I went to Claude’s, she’d leave me. She finally grabbed my bag, threw two or three things in it, took my hand, quick and easy. I put on my coat, I was like a huge bear that couldn’t walk anymore, nose dripping, crying, face contorted, a huge bear at the end of its tether. She goes downstairs, I stop on the landing, I can’t move.

—I’m downstairs and you’re staying upstairs, is that it?

Shouted up at me at half past midnight.

She climbs the stairs again, without any trace of tenderness, exasperated. She pulls me along to the street where her car is parked. I don’t cross the street, I’m petrified. I want to scream. I head back towards my place. She drives up, opens the door, she says “hurry up.” I get in the car. I say “take me back to my place.” An ancient ritual practiced since forever with people who have helped her and whom she can’t abandon. Out of loyalty, yes, out of duty, yes. Yes. It’s her family, she has a family, yes. Nadine is essential, Nadine is a fundamental part of me. If you can’t stand her, then you can’t stand me either. A cousin, godchildren, yes. I sleep very little. I wake up very early, the morning of the 27th, I call Claude. I say to him “please, I can’t take this any more, introduce me to some new people.” That very evening, there will be Nicolas and Judith, the daughter of my first psychoanalyst in Reims, she was at the reading yesterday, she liked it a lot. She’d heard about me all through her childhood, I shaped her father as an analyst, “the young woman” in exceptional terms. I’m too tired.

The day of the 27th

I clean the house. In the evening I may see Marie-Christine, we still haven’t decided. I’m also invited to Claude’s with Judith. I have a five o’clock appointment with Toro, my chiropractor, he’s Colombian. He helps me. Finally relaxed, I get home at six thirty. I’m doing well. Maybe I’ll even draw myself a bath. I call Marie-Christine in this tranquil state. I don’t want to see her, I’d rather rest, eat a few raviolis, watch the movie about Thomas Bernhard I’d recorded, and go to bed early without discussing everything again. We talk calmly, a call comes in, it’s Nadine.

I summarize what’s on my little piece of graph paper, which I’d kept. Her answer:

—We’re a family. It’s a family of octogenarians, of ghosts, of this family, of ghosts, of shades, you see, Marie-Christine and I are the only ones that have a bit of life left in them.

—…

—They’re like ghosts. When you have kids, you want Christmas to be joyful, Marie-Christine is the only one who brings the slightest bit of joy to this holiday. If I didn’t have children, I wouldn’t care at all about Christmas, and I wouldn’t do anything, I’d go to the movies, I’d do whatever. (So the movies are whatever…)

—I have a child and I’ll be alone with her.

—Like everything that reminds you of childhood, Christmas is important for everyone, obviously. (In that brisk tone that made her famous, the slightly haughty woman who is suffering.)

Ancient, a ritual, ghosts, a family of octogenarians, and that I was perverse to express my suffering the way I did, that she understood very well, very well indeed, perfectly, everything I was saying about legitimacy and illegitimacy, but it’s not her responsibility. Besides, it’s a very male thing to do, to meet someone and say “everything you’ve done before me, everything that existed before I came on the scene doesn’t exist anymore, men do that.” But she’ll telephone Marie-Christine and will give her clearance. Because, anyway, she has lost interest. She doesn’t want to be responsible for our break-up. It’s really not worth it. She had put pressure on Marie-Christine over the phone the other day, she’ll give her clearance.

I didn’t say: I know you broke out in tears.

—Give her clearance? But you don’t have to give her clearance.

—Yes, I do, I’ll give her clearance. I don’t like it when people do things out of obligation, on the phone I put pressure on her. I want to take that pressure off her and for her to spend Christmas with you. Because, in any case, under these circumstances, I don’t like it.

Another phone call to Marie-Christine, this time I got told off. Later she told me she had bought and chilled a bottle of champagne, she also bought filets of fish because I love them. She should have told me instead of insulting me and hanging up on me. I tell her “I’m leaving,” I’d decided to go to Claude’s.

—Right, you do that, go see Claude and your old analyst’s daughter. Go have a nice time with others who are more interesting than I am. You’re exhausted, but go ahead, go out. This time you’ll be with people who suit you.

—You’re right, I’m going to have dinner with my husband and my old analyst’s daughter.

We hang up on each other. At Claude’s, Léonore is asleep, I stroke her hair. Judith and Nicolas are seated with a bowl of salted things between them. We go to the table. What Claude has cooked is not good, the store-bought gnocchi are hard, fortunately there’s a salad and bread, the ham isn’t good either. I don’t at all like the way he talks about the sauce he made. The conversation, anecdotes and more anecdotes, that’s it. I leave early. A little bit of cheese, I don’t wait for the ice cream. To be polite, I tell them about my insomnia, the reason I have to leave, ten hours over three nights. Two messages from Marie-Christine are waiting for me “you are a real shit, a real shit. You left, I can’t believe it, you are a real shit, a real shit.” The line is busy, then it rings. She was on with Nadine. What is it some women have against their relationship, why do they find it objectionable? It got poisonous. I was still screaming at two in the morning. Even though I was calm before, I’m now in my bed, deformed and disfigured with pain. She’ll end up unplugging her phone. After a particular thing I said.

She hangs up. It’s Friday night. I call her back a good dozen times, I leave pleading messages. “Please pick up, I’m begging you, please,” I’m garbage, I’m a masochist, I have no dignity, I treat myself like shit, I plead with her. She picks up, she tells me again that this is her last sentence, that there’s no point calling back, because Nadine is objectionable, that I’m not the first to say, it’s part of her, it is her.

—You wouldn’t defend me the way you defend her.

And so on until the end, I don’t know any more. I must have fallen asleep. I woke up around six o’clock Saturday morning, the 28th, on Monday I was to see Moufid Zériahen, I was going to ask if I could be admitted to L’Alironde for a while. I wrote, things got a bit better. There are rooms for writing in the hospitals and psychiatric clinics, but things shouldn’t be mixed up.

There would be other signs, other symptoms and other physical manifestations, I only mentioned the most recent, the ones right after the trigger. If I went back in time, I could write pages and pages. A sense of suffocation, vomiting, nausea, bouts of colitis, insomnia, breakdowns, suicidal urges, spectacular ones, I picture myself again one evening in Spain, in Rosas, lying on the sidewalk, I was eighteen years old, I was on vacation with Pierre, a summer evening, I was stretched out on the sidewalk because my stomach hurt so much, people passed by, it was vacation time. Vertigo, fits of hysteria, I remember a Place d’Erlon in Reims, on the corner of Rue Burette, near the Espace store, I’d thrown my eyeglasses on the ground, I’d broken them (like I did when Chirac was elected), Place d’Erlon, I remember the reason: I didn’t know what to buy for dinner, slapping my own face, in public but mostly alone, and my speech, a way of talking that constantly associated disparate things. François told me “you should put yourself to the side a bit.” A way of unintentionally attacking with language, obstructed breathing, in the end you’re alone. You feel contempt for people who help you, you feel contempt for people who don’t. When I got married, I had insomnia for eight whole days and lots and lots and lots of violence, perverse language, this chapter could have been long and detailed, I’ve forgotten some, and I have to be precise, clear, accurate, and orderly. I don’t want to end up with something more or less impressionistic, what they call: artistically vague.

Definitions

These are taken from Elisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon’s Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, published by Fayard. We’re now on Wednesday, December 2nd. I’ll get back to Sunday the 29th, Monday the 30th, and Tuesday the 1st. I was affected by certain definitions. I made an initial diagnosis, empirically, I’m not a doctor. I took some words, I understood what kind of insanity I have, what form. I figure it out, and it’s not pretty: it’s terrible. As they say: the rules of the game. The rules of the game as they say, I’m somewhat mad as they say, I’ve got my feet on the ground as they say. It’s a kind of excuse, this “as they say,” a kind of regret, and of innocence. I’ve underlined certain words to make reading easier. At the same time, it’s for emphasis. And finally, it builds something. Earlier my motto could have been ‘Everything can always be mashed together.’ I couldn’t take it anymore, as they say: enough was enough.

Incest

We call incest a sexual relation without force or constraint between blood relatives to a degree prohibited by the laws of each society. In almost all known societies, except for a few cases including Egyptian pharaohs or the ancient nobility of Hawaii, incest has always been severely chastised then prohibited. That is why it is so often kept secret and experienced as a tragedy by those who engage in it. Prohibition is the negative side of a positive regulation: the obligation of exogamy. The act is disapproved of by social opinion and always experienced as a tragedy caused by irrationality or leading to madness or suicide.

Mental illness

Whether called fury, mania, delusion, rage, frenzy, or alienation, madness has always been considered reason’s ‘other.’ Extravagance, senselessness, confused thinking, mood swings, excessive emotion: these are the manifestations of this affliction that human beings have suffered since the beginning of time.

Paranoia

This type of mental illness – which Freud compared to a philosophical system due to its logical mode of expression and an internal consistency that is close to “normal” reasoning – could be defined as the insidious development, determined by internal causes and following an extended evolution of a delusional, lasting, and impervious system that preserves from its inception complete clarity and order of thought, will, and action. Paranoia consists of two basic mechanisms: delusions of reference and illusions of memory, both of which produce different delusional beliefs of persecution, jealousy, and grandeur. The paranoid individual suffers from a chronic illness, believing himself a prophet, an emperor, a great person, an inventor. It is a pathological defense mechanism, people develop paranoia because they cannot tolerate certain things, provided, naturally, that their psyches are predisposed to it. Paranoid individuals love their delusion as they love themselves, this is their secret. Paranoia is defined as a defense against homosexuality.

Narcissism

Françoise Dolto locates the roots of narcissism in the privileged experience of words spoken by the mother directed more at the satisfaction of desires than in response to needs.

(Like when your mother tells you that you’re the one she loves most in all the world, that you’re the most beautiful thing she has done in her life, that her life was worth living if only for this, to have you, to have had you, that of course giving birth is not exactly a pleasure cruise but there’s nothing more beautiful in life, nothing, that she thinks you’re so very intelligent, that she wishes she had talent like yours, that naturally she avoids saying it too often, but of course you’re the prettiest of all the little girls she knows, that just because she tries not to say it too often, doesn’t mean she’s not thinking it, that she will love you forever, that that will never end. Never, never, never, you understand?)

Homosexuality

Freud was not interested in valorizing, degrading, or passing judgment on homosexuality, but first and foremost in understanding its causes, origin, and structure from the perspective of his new theory of the unconscious. Hence his interest in latent homosexuality in neurosis and even more in paranoia. Freud used the term perversion to designate sexual behaviors deviating from a structural (and not social) norm, and he classified homosexuality as such. He did not assign it any pejorative, differential, depreciating, or on the contrary, valorizing character. In a word, he brought homosexuality into the whole of human sexuality and humanized it by conceiving of it as an unconscious psychological choice.

In 1920 he formulated a canonical definition: homosexuality is the result of human bisexuality and exists in a latent state in all heterosexuals. When it becomes an exclusive object choice, its origin in girls is an infantile fixation on the mother and disappointment with respect to the father. And he stated “…to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than to do the reverse…” In a letter dated April 9, 1935, to an American woman worried that her son was homosexual, Freud wrote: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime – and a cruelty, too.”

The Kleinian view, although liberal, considers the female version of homosexuality to be an identification with a sadistic penis.

A lover of literature, Freud often stressed that the great creators of art were homosexuals.

Subject

A common term in psychology, philosophy, and logic. It is used to designate an individual who both observes others and is observed by others.

Suicide

Suicide is the act of killing oneself so as not to kill another. It is not the result of neurosis or psychosis, but of depression or a serious narcissistic disturbance.

Perversion

A term derived from the Latin pervertere (inversion) used in psychiatry and by the founders of sexology both pejoratively and positively to designate sexual practices considered to deviate from a social and sexual norm. From the middle of the 19th century, psychiatry categorizes as perversions sexual practices as diverse as incest, homosexuality, zoophilia, pedophilia, pederasty, fetishism, sadomasochism, transvestism, narcissism, autoeroticism, coprophilia, necrophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sexual mutilation.

Sadomasochism

A sexual perversion founded on a mode of gratification from the infliction of pain on another and from pain suffered by a humiliated subject, as well as on the reciprocity between pain passively suffered and pain actively inflicted.

Two processes: the reversal of aggression against the subject him- or herself and the inversion of an active function into a passive one. This process can be accomplished only by means of an identification with the other in the order of fantasy. In sadism, one inflicts pain on another and feels pleasure in a masochistic way by identifying with the suffering object.

Moral masochism is performed through language, based on a sense of guilt, it is the most significant and most destructive. It is characterized by its apparent remove from sexuality and a loosening of ties with the loved object, attention being focused on the intensity of the pain, whatever its source. It is a matter of being able to sustain a certain level of suffering. Psychoanalysis has progressively shifted sadomasochism to the core of ‘normal’ individuals.

Nazism

From the moment he rose to power, Adolf Hitler implemented the National Socialist doctrine, of which one of the principal objectives was the extermination of all Jews in Europe as an ‘inferior race.’ Similarly, it was seen as necessary to remove all those considered ‘defective’ or bothersome to the social body. Thus Nazism treated homosexuality and mental illness as equivalents of Jewishness according to their theory of hereditary degeneration.

Hysteria

This condition’s distinctiveness lies in the fact that unconscious psychological conflicts are expressed in a theatrical manner and in symbolic form, through paroxysmal physical symptoms. (I mentioned them, screaming, ragged breathing, blocked diaphragm, the need to lie down on one’s back, the tendency to drop to one’s knees, the cries, indifference to being watched by others or even experiencing pleasure in it, slapping one’s own face being the epitome, an actor rehearsing in front of a mirror, crying jags, nervous breakdowns, lying on the ground, messages left on the answering machine saying “I’m begging you, please” and ending in a sort of groan, audible even on the machine.)

Desire

It is connected to mnemic traces, to memories, it is realized through the unconscious and hallucinatory reproduction of perceptions that have become ‘signs’ of satisfaction. The demand is addressed to another, it is apparently directed at an object, this object is not essential because the demand is a demand for love. Desire is directed toward a fantasy, towards an imagined other, it is the desire to be the object of another’s desire and desire for absolute recognition by another at the cost of a fight to the death, which Lacan identifies with the dialectic of the master and the slave.

Schizophrenia

A type of mental illness with symptoms that include incoherence of thought, emotion, and action thinking, withdrawal and delirious activity. A pure state of insanity characterized by the subject’s internal entrenchment. The patient, male or female, falls into such a state of delirium that he or she seems to lose his sense of reality.

Night and day, eyes staring, eyelids never raised or lowered. Attempts are made to speak with the afflicted, he or she does not hear. A shard torn from the tomb, a kind of victory of life over death or death over life. But abruptly able to stop trembling and slowly say “the angels are all white.” (According to the clinical case of Louis Lambert.)

Loss of vital contact with reality and intent on not being himself.

There is “schizophrenic art,” wild, like art made by children and primitive peoples.

Foucault refuses to make any diagnosis but finds in the madness of Artaud, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Hölderlin the final instance of the work of art: “Where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates its time of truth.”

Applications

I see myself primarily in the two statements: Paranoid individuals love their delusion as they love themselves. And: It is a matter of being able to sustain a certain level of suffering. And in others on contempt and delusions of persecution that lead to destruction.

I recall having said, in reference to Seen from Above, that rape was good, “of course rape is good, otherwise we couldn’t bear it.” There was no doubt in my mind, at the time it seemed to me to be inarguable. I was quite simply: paranoid.

Nadine is intolerable and I’m not the only one to say so. “It’s a pathological defense mechanism, people become paranoid because they cannot bear certain things.” When we’re at table and she goes on and on about her problems with film shoots, Catherine Decourt here, Dupont there, Durand, Emmanuelle Vigner, who gave her an insanely expensive watch for Christmas last year. She was in the film, Mari et Femme, with André Dujardin, which I went to see in Sète and she’s presiding over the dinner after the screening, Marie-Christine sitting next to her, the crown princess, they burst into laughter at each other’s refined jokes. The entire table follows suit. Like the king, when the king laughs, the entire court joins in. When the jester makes the king laugh, the entire court doubles over. Marie-Christine, I’m neither sitting next to her nor across from her, but catty-corner along the table. Other friends are there. From Montpellier, doctors, professors, whom Nadine knows, lay it on as soon as she’s near, they ask Marie-Christine, “How’s Nadine? Is her film going well? And Decourt? How are things with Decourt? Of course we’d like to have dinner with Nadine.” Or, “I love Dupont.” And, “Nadine is a very warm person, and very generous.” They ask questions about Decourt, offer their opinions, list the films of hers they liked, inquire if, in fact, there is a ‘Decourt effect.’ Nadine calls her “Catou” to tease her gently. She recounts impossible moments on the set. Delays of unbelievable rudeness (but all in lavish juicy detail), and what she did to show Decourt, to teach her some respect, which they owe the technicians and the production team, NC. To embarrass her, to make it clear to her that everyone was waiting. I’m remembering Dominique Quentin in Edward II, her scream in the middle of the movie, I’m on another planet, this scream exists, no one is thinking about it. The conversations are all about plays that will be opening, about restaurants they’ve tried or want to try, about the third Michelin star given to the So-and-so brothers, the Pourcels and their Jardins des Sens, and about film ticket sales.

Paranoia is based on delusions of reference, Quentin or Eustache, I alternate. Persecution, jealousy, grandeur, of course. People become paranoid because they cannot bear certain things. That’s the way it is. Marie-Christine tells me, “I saw Nathalie Bayard, I had dinner with Nathalie Bayard, we went with Nadine to the beach where Nathalie Bayard always goes, if you saw how Nathalie Bayard is with her dog, everything revolves around the dog, she chooses the beach for him, she loves him.” This because she knows I don’t like the way she is with Baya, her dog, but if I saw how Nathalie Bayard is, I wouldn’t make any more comments. I saw Chambord, I’m not just speaking nonsense. Besides, Freud compared paranoia to a philosophical system because it’s so rigorous, because its expression is so logical, and because thought, intention, and action are so clear and ordered. Obviously “people become paranoid because they cannot bear certain things,” that is my case. Except for one scene, the film is so academic, it pretends to be sensitive. And even a little revolutionary, for example with the way it goes after the image of the star. “Look, I’m filming Decourt’s thighs, I’m bold enough to do it, she’s sixty years old and I dare film her thighs.” There was a scene in which Decourt was panic-stricken, I don’t remember what was happening to her (because on top of it all the screenplay is completely muddled), Decourt was supposed to get up and leave right away. But you know what she did right at that moment? Nadine was telling us (this wasn’t the first time I’d heard this anecdote), she said, Catou said, “and my bag?” Can you imagine, Nadine goes on, the bourgeois reflex that is deeply grounded, very deeply grounded inside her, she’s thinking about her bag. So I told her, “but Catherine, you don’t care about your bag at the moment, you really couldn’t care less, Catherine, you leave your bag, naturally, you don’t even think of it.” And everyone at the table agrees. Naturally, she doesn’t care about her bag at the moment. They all agree. Maybe there’s a picture of her son or godson in it, what do they know, all of them?

(I’m annoyed that I changed the names. It makes the book less good. But better that than paying damages.)

The object is not essential, what counts is the demand for love. I was asking her to spend Christmas with me. For a while, I thought I could master it. I said to myself “she’ll come back to Montpellier on the 25th, we’ll celebrate Christmas on the 25th.” I don’t like to celebrate Christmas on the 25th, I don’t like eating a big lunch. I can’t do celebrations at noon. A poor man’s Christmas, playing catch-up, the real celebration having been on Christmas Eve, I couldn’t, the foie gras from the evening before would still be weighing on her stomach, and the champagne, a magnum of Ruinart, in Paris, the real feast with twenty friends, and the godchildren, the godchildren, the godchildren, especially the godchildren, “me, I don’t have any children, of course, I was touched when Nadine asked me two times to be godmother to her children,” the children she feels closest to, whereas Léonore… if writing were visual I’d make the gesture of a finger tapping on a cheek swollen with air, which means ‘that’s rich,’ but she doesn’t give a shit. Léonore isn’t a part of her family and never will be, she doesn’t give a shit. Léonore’s just a little girl who is nothing to her, as they say. She gets a day-after Christmas, after the most urgent needs have been satisfied, the cousin, honor where honor is due, and the godchildren, the crown princes who will inherit her legacy as first cousins, closest kin, whereas Léonore is nothing to her and never will be anything to her. Never. Less even than her dog. The cleaning woman, the cook, the little poor child. She has never taken Léonore for a walk alone, even though she takes her dog out everyday. Alone with Léonore, she doesn’t want any part of it, not to the movies, not for a walk when I’m not there, not even going to pick her up from school, not once. For Christmas, it’s a Barbie doll put under the tree “from Marie-Christine” who’s celebrating in Paris after having trawled through the boutiques on the Boulevard Saint-Germain with her cousin who gets a forty percent discount at Prada and Jil Sander, while Dominique Quentin has to pay full price, as do I. It’s disgusting, clothing designers don’t care, just like everybody else.

Afterward I said to myself “no, I could never go meet her, getting out of the plane, exhausted from Christmas Eve, from the celebration, the real Christmas celebration, the night before. I get seconds.” We were meant to leave for Rome on December 28th. I’d reserved a hotel near the Piazza del Populo, the same week she’d promised to do everything she could to stay in Montpellier, and with Léonore and me. She hadn’t really wanted to, that’s what she says now, I’d pressured her, she had kept warning me, she wouldn’t do it if it would cause a scene. Scenes, conflicts. I tell her, Rome, I don’t want to go to anymore. It’s December 4th, our tickets are canceled. The hotel was called Hotel Quantin. We’re breaking up because she loves Nadine Casta and I love Dominique Quentin. It’s a real philosophical system, with a proper foundation, what causes me distress is the famous “insidious development” and the subjection to internal causes and that continual progression that doesn’t stop once the trigger sets it in motion, the engine starts, and it cannot be stopped. It’s in motion. Not a single phone call from Marie-Christine, it has now been more than ten days since the delusions set in, not a single phone call, not one visit, was able to stop me. The system is delirious, enduring, and impervious. I’m not the one who invented it. I won’t go to Rome because it will persist until the end of the year. The demand for love is made at the cost of a fight to the death. Last night Claude came by to see me, he said, “Oh Christine, your face is in tatters.”

Nazism, I persecute Marie-Christine for being homosexual even though it’s just a variation provoked by an arrested sexual development. Several highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals. But I have a sadomasochistic structure, which no one can deny, and, by the way, no one does. I am not the first, or the last, to persecute homosexuals, even if it’s cruel, I freely admit it. Why? Because my father was homosexual. He wasn’t, I’m raving, I’m exaggerating, I’m spouting nonsense, but the sodomy he practiced on me and on a certain Marianne, as he told me, brings him close to them. Bisexuality is human. It exists in a latent state in all heterosexuals, Freud said this as early as 1920. It’s one aspect. Not to mention his limp wrists, which he was always twisting and turning. Everything can always be twisted around.

Yesterday she said to me on the phone, “you destroy others because you yourself were destroyed,” that’s always nice to hear. Soon she’ll tell me she pities me. Paranoids can’t stand that, it’s intolerable, intolerable. In-tol-e-ra-ble.

I wept. She talked to me then:

—This may be our very last phone call. Do you have anything to add?

—Merry Christmas.

—I doubt it will be particularly merry.

—And Happy New Year.

Moral masochism. It the most destructive, for me it’s essentially expressed through language. I won’t go into the details. I’m a sadomasochist, that’s hard enough. I have conversations in my head, a lot, in that spirit of torturing, with Claude, Marie-Christine, my mother, and others. With others, there’s no harm, it’s not serious, the pleasure of sticking someone’s nose in his own shit, and the situation is not reversed. You’re a sadist, the other person, surprise, thinks they’re in the wrong (and they really are in the wrong), they argue, instead of – there’s only one thing to do, only one, it doesn’t occur to them – putting themselves in the role of victim, it has to be surreptitious, for me (me or another sadist) to switch, immediately, to apologizing, to reverse the process, to feeling pleasure in the pain in turn, to become at once the victim, which I am in my fantasy, right then, the moment I apologize and now, in turn, to feel pleasure in pain I’ve inflicted and in pain I receive. It’s not very original but that’s what I’m living and I don’t enjoy saying it. Taking pleasure in the pain you cause and the pain you’re given. ‘Everything can always be twisted around’ could have been my motto. I’m looking for a new one. People who know me, answer, suffer, or say, as Claude did yesterday “I don’t hold it against you, I know.” Suffering from what is said to me, and at the same time taking pleasure in what I say to others, I just can’t do it anymore. I’d like it to stop.

The other day

I stop by her practice. Her secretary, whose name is Nadine (Nadine Martin), doesn’t tell her right away that I’ve arrived. She finishes her mail, her phone call, typing on the computer, whatever. Then she picks up the phone and tells her “Christine is here,” she says to me “she’s examining someone’s breathing.” I wait a moment, several minutes. Then I leave, I don’t wait. This secretary whose name is Nadine and who is creating a barrier, after what’s happened, I won’t put up with her. Marie-Christine had told me “when I was interviewing her, she told me her first name, I said ‘that’s good.’” Finally a Nadine she can order around. I really am spouting nonsense. I said this secretary’s name several times, and I left:

—Nadine, will you tell her I couldn’t wait, that I was in a hurry, OK, Nadine?

—Certainly. In any case, I’ll tell her you stopped by.

—Thank you, Nadine, thank you. Good-bye Nadine.

Familiar hallucinatory process, one Nadine replaces another. One head of black hair replaces another, especially if it falls softly on the nape of the neck.

Yesterday, Thursday, December 3rd, I called the hospital in the morning:

—I wanted to let you know that Saturday I’m going Christmas shopping with Claude. He wants to give me my present, we’ll go to Avignon for the day…

—To Avignon?

—You know there’s nothing in Montpellier.

Then, I call her back five minutes later.

—I wanted to tell you something else, but it will hurt your feelings.

—Go ahead.

—I don’t want you to give me any Christmas presents, I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to tell you early enough, it’s December 3rd, it’s about the time when people start looking for presents. And that’s just it, I couldn’t stand it if you gave me a present. You can understand that. After everything that’s happened, I think.

—Anyway, we had said we’d exchange presents in Rome.

—You know perfectly well I don’t want to go anymore.

—We hadn’t really decided yet.

—Well, me, I’ve decided. I don’t want to go anymore. I’ve known since noon on Wednesday (November 25th) when you didn’t call. You know that. And since then I haven’t changed my mind (impervious).

Ten minutes ago, I called her at her practice, the tickets to Rome have been canceled at my request. I asked her never to call me again. Ten minutes ago, I called her:

—Maybe it was a mistake to cancel the tickets.

—You want to go?

—No. I told you I wouldn’t change my mind. I don’t want to go. But we could have waited a bit longer just in case.

—I could call them back if you want.

—But I don’t want to go to Rome, not at all. Rome is finished. After all that’s happened. The only place that would be possible for me now is Seville.

—I could call if you want.

—But I didn’t say I wanted to go. I can’t at the moment. You know very well I’m blocked, and that I haven’t wavered, not for one second, since Wednesday noon.

At the cost of a fight to the death, which Lacan identifies with the dialectic of master and slave. I can’t take it any more, I can’t go on, I want someone to help me. Writing made me feel better, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, but since the definitions, it’s over. The relief ended with the first difficulty I ran into.

A while ago I was thinking of another example of sadomasochistic inversion: Sujet Angot, the structure.

Other points of view

Gisela: Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little bit.

Marie-Christine: You’re making me crazy. You’re pushing me to the limit.

Nadine: It’s extremely perverse, the way you present your suffering to others, telling them afterward that, in any case, there’s nothing they can do. Whether you like it or not, I’m going to call Marie-Christine tonight and give her clearance. Under these circumstances, I’m no longer interested. You can’t say what you’ve just said and then play innocent, as if you hadn’t said anything, telling me it was just so I would know how you’re suffering.

Yvon Kermann: You have a sado-masochistic relationship with the public.

But most of all, during the night from the 1st to the 2nd, Marie-Christine had wept in my arms, telling me: I love only you, I’ve never loved any one but you, you’re the first and only one, but you don’t want me so I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to disappear, you won’t hear of me ever again, not ever. You can’t stop me, because I’ll do it when you’re not here.

The last few days (flashback)

Saturday, November 28th, in the evening, there’s a party at Nathalie’s, in the end I accept the invitation. I don’t watch Marie-Christine dance, I don’t dance, I pout, I tell everyone that I’m tired, exhausted, I’m told “not me, I spent the whole day kayaking and I’m not tired…” Or “drink a little whisky, it will wake you up.” Red wine makes you sleepy, and whisky wakes you up. Or “I’m sorry I told you the other day that you were overreacting. —Well, it’s your point of view. —No, I shouldn’t have said it. —It doesn’t matter.”

It was horrible.

The key moments:

We make love. My fantasies are often of humiliation. Marie-Christine humiliating a girl, who is such an idiot, she doesn’t notice that I’m there, I know what Marie-Christine is thinking, I get off on this. Marie-Christine doesn’t give a shit, while the other one would lay siege to her house for eight days just for a chance to sniff her. Marie-Christine will take advantage, will tell her “since you’re here, go ahead, lick me, you won’t have come here for nothing.”

Another element, a Freudian slip while writing yesterday, that encapsulates my sadistic and sadomasochistic disorders, instead of ‘vaginal penetration’ I wrote ‘vaginal, sodomization.’ And you see, the comma comes in, the virgule, the little verge, little penis, it’s starting all over again. As if my head, mounted on a pivot, had two faces always present, I connect, I associate, everything relates, that’s what I call my incestuous mental structure. Which I’m trying to lessen a bit, like a fracture and a facture. A digression on fracture-facture, on puns:

Puns, jokes

On multiple occasions, Freud used Witz as much to make fun of himself as to show those around him that he could laugh about the most dire realities. A joke is an expression of the unconscious. Like human sexuality, it has infantile and polymorphous aspects. Freud studied joke-techniques and the mechanisms of pleasure they generate. There are inoffensive Witze and those that are tendentious, motivated by aggression, obscenity or cynicism. When they hit the mark, jokes, which require at least three people, the author, the recipient and the spectator, render suppressed desires more bearable by giving them a socially acceptable mode of expression. According to Freud there is a fourth motivation, one more terrible than the other three: skepticism. Jokes in this register bring absurdity into play and instead of targeting a person or an institution, they attack the certainty of our common sense. They lie when they tell the truth and tell the truth with a lie. Jokes produce pleasure. If they rely on condensation and displacement, they are characterized primarily by the playfulness of language. Humor, the comic, and jokes, all three bring us back to an infantile state, because “the euphoria we try to reach along these routes is nothing other than the temper of our childhood, a time when we were ignorant of the comic, incapable of making a joke and had no need of humor to feel happy in life.” Freud did not consider his book on jokes to be very important, he viewed it as a psychoanalytical essay applied to literary creativity. The book was not received with much enthusiasm, the first edition of a thousand copies took seven years to sell out. Jacques Lacan was the first, in 1958, to raise Witz to the level of a concept.

A few examples: Crêpe: Flip like a crêpe. Marie-Christine wanted to spend Christmas with me, Nadine calls her, sheds three tears over the phone, she lets herself be flipped like a crêpe with a little butter. Butter, Vaseline, tears. Sodomy, the body is flipped. Practical, you end up with a body that has no vagina and no breasts, at an age when we were ignorant of the comic, incapable of making jokes, and had no need of humor to feel happy in life. Still, jokes about Toto, lemons, carrots. There, no lemon, no vagina, a carrot.

Other examples: Folle: A gay man with a limp wrist. I often let my wrist go slack, my father used to. Elisabeth (my father’s wife’s name): bête, animal. The reason why I don’t like animals, not even the poor Baya, Marie-Christine’s dog. Another example: The mark: I am marked, the mark, and also the D-mark, to the point, my father’s wife was German, he deeply admired Germany and its culture. I’m trying to keep things more or less in order, not too cluttered. I reached a point of no return, the word associations were threatening, incestuous ideas were filling my head: always experienced as a tragedy by those who engage in it. There is no partition, everything touches, nothing is untouchable. It’s disapproved of by social opinion and always experienced as a tragedy caused by irrationality or leading to madness or suicide. I’m not making this up. The brain cannot be divided into separate parts. It’s not that I’m missing something upstairs, as the saying goes, it’s a house without walls, like those lofts that are very fashionable these days, I had some press in September, you hear all the noises, from the kitchen and the bedroom, and the radio, and the TV, and the telephone, the fridge kicking in, the doorbell ringing yesterday, one o’clock in the morning, Marie-Christine wanting to tell me she loves me, and the bathroom, you’re never alone.

Lacan turned the joke into a signifier, that is a sign through which a trace of truth emerges. Like Freud, he had a biting sense of humor. He often used the technique of figuration through the opposite as evident in “love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” As to vaginal sodomization, I agree completely with Melanie Klein’s theses in which she considers female homosexuality as the use of a sadistic penis. In my case it’s undeniable. I don’t have a dick, but I still sodomize you, not in the ass, but I sodomize you anyway. We have nothing, we have nothing for ourselves, and our head is fucked. Fucked, pulled out, of the cunt, that is, unblocked. Our head is fucked, you understand, it’s pulled out of the cunt, our head is, but where should it go? Rome? You want it to go to Rome? We canceled the tickets, there’s no more flight, no more hotel. Seville? It’s two weeks before Christmas, you know we won’t find any rooms at this date. In Egypt, the pharaohs of Egypt and the mummies, there are no rooms at this date.

(My old reflexes set in again on this page, I’m not working well, in fact, I don’t feel well, as I’m writing I want to cry and that’s not normal. I’d promised Léonore we’d go see Kirikou and the Sorceress today, Sunday, at eleven. Marie-Christine came and rang the doorbell in the night, I’d just fallen asleep, to tell me she wanted to stay together. I said no. Maybe I’ll add the intermediate phases later. After Kirikou. I told her no. I repeated it. She asked her question again several times. I said “you woke me up” in any case the answer is no. It’s not a question of whether I want to or not, it’s that I don’t want to. She left at a run, she ran away, her dog running behind her, not even on a leash. She’d tried to choke me before. She got down on all fours above me, I was lying down, I was in bed in my nightshirt. She was fully dressed, in the outfit she wore to that dinner and her leather jacket. She straddled me, she took my throat, my neck, in her hands and pushed with all the strength in her arms. I grabbed her wrists to make her stop, she could have killed me. She sat on the ground next to the bed and started squeezing my arm very tight and shaking it. I let my arm go limp, completely, I let it go. I was exhausted. Of course I still am. She slammed the door and stumbled down the stairs, running down the street to disappear from my sight as quickly as possible, I was at the window, I was calling to her, I think I’d have liked her to come back, complete nonsense, ridiculous, overdone, disproportionate, again I took the usual dose before going to bed. This morning my tongue is swollen, doughy, I’m thirsty, nothing matters anymore.)

The cinema with Léonore, Sunday morning, 6 December

We’re on time, but the line extends to the wall across the way, people are wondering if they’ll get a seat, there are children, adults. Everyone is standing on line. I go to the end of the line with Léonore, it’s not a straight line, it’s hard to tell who’s in front and who’s behind, it’s not obvious. Unless you’d gotten there first and watched the order in which everyone arrived. I take my place in line and move forward as the line advances. Some guy, thirty, tall, brown-haired, with a mixed-race wife and a young child, says to me, very confidently, “so you want to cut in front of me, is that it? You know perfectly well I’m ahead of you.” No, I’m moving forward, that’s all, I’m not trying to take his place, not at all. I’ve got other things on my mind. The line moves forward again, again he gives me a sidelong glance, bending down because he’s very tall, and a lot heftier than I am, “you’re in a hurry, what’s your problem?” I’m already upset enough by the night I just spent, but I finally say to him “if you don’t like the way I walk, that’s too bad, I’m sorry.” Again he accuses me of trying to cut in front of him, he was first. At that point, I grab him. The whole street can hear, I yell, I grab his arm by the sleeve of his anorak. I push him in front of me, shoving him so he’s well in front, completely and fully in front. “You’re ridiculous,” he tells me. The crowd is silent, people look away when I meet their eyes, their mouths are busy with other things, their eyes too. I tell Léonore that the guy was bugging me, I hope it didn’t bother her. She said no.

(The film was good.)

When I got home, there was a long message.

“I don’t know if you’re there or if you’re screening your calls. I’d like to see you today, so we can give each other something before we break off completely or get back together. I don’t want us to forget, but to forgive. What we had together was beautiful.” She wasn’t home, I called her cell phone, she was on the tennis court. She was happy when she heard it ring.

That’s fine, but everything that happened before this is not going to just disappear. The trigger on November 25th can’t be overcome. I was talking about causes, profound causes. To go into that, stir it all up? What good would that do? Will it make the book more interesting? No. It won’t make the book more interesting. And most of all, it’s not very polite. It’s not essential, essential, I’m perverse, just consider the way I engage in mental torture. To the point where some people, made crazy by things I’d said to them, these people around me, close to me, were driven to beat me, to insult me, sometimes very harshly (bitch, disgusting, perverse, whore, that all happened), to strangle me (two times, once in Bordeaux, and once right here in Montpellier), to shake me, to beat me, insult me. But always, pushed to the limit, I trust them when they say, at their limit, that they know me, they know me well, they’ve seen me, they’ve heard me, pushed to their limit by a mechanism inside me, a verbal mechanism, extremely effective, extremely destructive, extremely sly, above all extremely sadistic, at all times evoking elements from reality, fitting, wounding, in a kind of ferocious machinery that no one can stop, certainly not me. Except death one day. Or another trigger, in the other direction. But it would all come down to the same thing. My motto could have been ‘everything can always be twisted around’ and ‘everything can always be mashed together’ so it’s logical. I went to see my homeopathic doctor yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d last seen her, she gave me mercurius, mercury, quicksilver, quoting the corresponding phrase: “wanting to break social conventions or to see them only as the instrument of human relations, he ended up breaking human bonds themselves,” it’s logical. I need logic. I’m getting there, others understand that I say what I think. In Sujet Angot, there’s a passage in which Claude says as a compliment: “your writing is so unbelievable, intelligent, muddled, but always luminous, accessible, direct, physical. Your readers don’t understand a thing and they understand everything. It’s intimate, personal, shameless, autobiographical, and universal. You are touching without using gimmicks, without being emotional, you make people think with bits and bobs, a miracle of logical disorganization. Freedom without chaos, openness without drift.” That’s very kind, but he doesn’t get it. It wasn’t freedom without chaos anymore, but the opposite, nor was it openness without drift, but the opposite. I couldn’t take it anymore. With my muddled bits and bobs. I have a critical apparatus, there, a rather solid one. Roudinesco’s Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, I’m happy with it. At my level. As they say, by the way, people who say “at my level” put themselves down, I don’t claim to be a specialist either, I’ve got my limitations, I’m a failure, I try to be logical, simple, and to make myself understood by most people. If everyone did the same, we wouldn’t have all this shit. A lot of writers think they’re hot shit, that’s not very polite.

Valda candy

What is a substratum? It comes from substernere, underlay. That which serves as a foundation for another existence, without which a reality (conceived of as accidental) could not subsist. Without which the trigger would not have had all these consequences. It’s the substance, the essence, the base. On which an action is carried out. Queneau, “a solid substratum for the development of the actions which he might conceive,” Renan, “the earth provides the substratum, the field of battle and of work, but man provides the soul.” The earth, that element upon which lies a geological layer. Linguistically, the Gallic substratum in France. The substratum. What are the zones? What is the terrain? Upon what does it grow?

Heredity

A grandmother who committed suicide, my father’s mother. She threw herself out the window at the moment her husband and his son, my father’s brother, were entering the courtyard on their way to take a walk. My father suffers from Alzheimer’s, as did his father before him. I suffer from the opposite disease, for almost fifteen days now, fifteen days on Wednesday, I can’t get Christmas out of my mind, I have cried every day because of Christmas. I can’t forget Christmas. I cry, I can’t forget, I want to, but I can’t. I cried, I broke up with her, I got myself strangled, I even slapped myself. Christmas Christmas Christmas. Memory loss is not what I suffer from. I don’t have amnesia, rather I suffer from hypermnesia, too strong a memory, if there is such a thing. Christmas Christmas Christmas. I have a six-and-a-half year old daughter, “you always have to bring in Léonore.” Nadine is just an intermediary, Christmas a trigger. I don’t want the legitimate family to take precedence over the unstable one. Paranoids cannot tolerate certain things, I can’t tolerate Marie-Christine not loving me enough to want my child to have a nice Christmas with her and going to celebrate Christmas with her godchildren. My child in other words my flesh in other words my body, what I am, my life, what I’ve lived through that makes Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas.

Now: to organize the mistakes I’ve made not by how I’ve made them but by why, things I’ll never recover from, “move on to other things” I’ll never move on to other things, the causes, suffering at its most ineradicable, I will be polite, because in the end it makes you very, very polite. It takes away all your aggression, all true hatred, the hatred we show, sometimes, it’s fake, it’s not real, it’s false hatred. It’s a pretense. I’ll try to talk to you. Just as I’m now trying to talk to Marie-Christine, to see if it can be any use. I’ll try to talk to you, here we go, there won’t be any plays on words, there won’t be any hatred, there won’t be anything, there won’t be any literary formulations, maybe this won’t be literature, there will be nothing; nothing, nothing, nothing, there will be nothing. There will be nothing but memories, each memory will be a wrenching that must be written down. Memory, a book of memories. I remember. I remember Ricola, Kréma candies, but something else too. I remember Vittel Délice soda, but something else too. A swing set, stitches in my head, near my eyebrow, my mother in a state, but something else too. I remember Marie-Hélène, the soft sand, my pleated tweed skirt with leather piping, the Nuts and Mars candy bars and Americanos when we got out of the swimming pool in Reims, but something else too. I remember my green skirt with suspenders, my wheelbarrow, my little friend Jean-Pierre, my neighbor Chantal, my grandmother, the rabbits and chicks at the Ligot’s house, Kréma candies, raspberry first, strawberry second, lemon third and orange to finish. I remember cookies with hazelnuts and all sorts of delicious things, I remember two-person swings, etc., etc., but something else too.

What?

Go on, spit it out, your Valda candy.

I was so happy to know him. Meeting him the first time was so much more than I’d hoped. And then, eight days later, not more than that, I swear, not more, I was so disillusioned, I couldn’t have imagined. Way beyond my expectations and eight days later, a disappointment I could never have dreamed of, never. I met him in Strasbourg with my mother at the Buffet de la Gare, he seemed so extraordinary to me. I, who had never had a father to introduce to my friends, all of a sudden I’d be able to tell them how extraordinary he was. I was charmed. I felt no desire for him, it wasn’t that at all. Charmed. Like you can be by someone you love. I found him intelligent, interesting, so much more cultured than your average person, so exceptional. My friends’ fathers could pack it in (this isn’t a quip, it’s not mischievous and impertinent, as I’ve said). Him, he spoke thirty languages, he was elegant. I don’t want to go into details, in short, he exceeded my expectations. By far. I told my mother, who was happy, she said to me “you see, I didn’t choose just anyone to be your father.” I agreed and then some, I said “no, you didn’t, you certainly didn’t.” And then eight days later, my mother and I were spending eight days at Gérardmer in a hotel, he came to see us. Dinner, a walk around the lake, bedtime. He came to say goodnight in my room, and there, he kissed me on the mouth. Already just the discovery of a kiss on the mouth, and that he kissed me like that. I didn’t understand, I understood very well, I didn’t believe it. I really did ask myself. He loved me, he said he loved me. I’m very sorry to tell you about this, I’d so much rather be able to talk about something else. But how I became insane, that’s it. I’m sure of it, it’s because of this that I became insane. This was the cause. In eight days I went from the ideal father, even more than ideal, unhoped for, a father I could never have imagined possible, and he was my father, and he loved me, and we looked like each other, and he was happy, and he found me extraordinary, me too, he was dazzled. There were so many promises. No, I repeat, I never felt any desire for him, no, I say it again. Never. I do know what desire is, after all. Pleasure, there may have been some, I don’t deny it. But never desire. I wanted to please him, of course. I am very sorry this has to be discussed. Very sorry. Why am I talking about it? Well, because I talked about it with Marie-Christine and she thinks it’s a good idea. I hope it’s not because it excites her, she says it doesn’t, that instead it makes her feel bad. It tears me up to talk about it. When I talk to her about it, it tears me up, fortunately I’m in her arms, otherwise I probably couldn’t. I shouldn’t write this. And I shouldn’t talk to her about it. What it will evoke, in her, and in you, will be the same thing, pity, you won’t be able to love me anymore, neither she nor you. She won’t love me anymore. We will no longer be able to make love. You won’t want to read me anymore. I think, well too bad, it’s a risk I have to take. We don’t like people who have suffered, we feel sorry for them, we don’t like the insane, we feel sorry for them. No one wants to live next door to an insane asylum. It’s normal, I understand. I’m the same. I’m a poor girl, no one falls in love with a poor girl. No one wants to make love to a poor girl, unless you’re a pervert. What else?

I didn’t talk about it to anyone. Not anyone. No one knew. Do you understand? From fourteen to sixteen. I talked about my father at school. All the things about him I could be proud about, the intellectual things, his knowledge, his culture, I was appropriating it, sometimes I shared it with others. I mostly talked about it to my friend Véronique. I would tell her what I’d learned over the weekend. She was interested, fascinated. All the things about him I was proud of. All the more since I hadn’t talked about my father at all for fourteen years, not to anyone. There were things I hid, things I was ashamed of, but there was plenty I could talk about.

And now, I tell myself the same thing, keep silent. If I talk it will be worse than before: it helps to talk, they’ll tell me. I hate having to write this. I hate you. I despise you. I don’t want to know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re thinking. Always the same thing and you’re all the same. Calf, cow, pig and I hate you. It’s that or the clinic. I have to. It’s the clinic or talking to you. To you. Writing is a kind of rampart against insanity, I’m already very lucky that I’m a writer, that at least I have this possibility. That’s already something. This book will be seen as a shit piece of testimony. What else could I do? What else? Orange Kréma candy, but also:

The Codec grocery store, Le Touquet, being sodomized, the car, giving him blow jobs in the car, eating clementines off his dick, stiff, seeing him on the toilet, hearing him groan, the pharaohs of Egypt, Champollion, the day we didn’t go to Carcassonne. I’ll give it a try in this order. Nancy.

The Codec

There was nothing left. I met him at fourteen, from fourteen to sixteen, it happened. Even though I asked him to stop, every time. On the phone, before we met, every time. Each time he told me yes. Each time it wasn’t possible. Like Marie-Christine, each time I break up over the phone, when I see her, it’s not possible. But, as she told me, between the two of us, nothing’s forbidden. Luckily. It was Thursday night (December 10th) I replied “luckily, luckily.” It stopped when I was sixteen, I told Marc, who told my mother. It could finally stop. From sixteen to eighteen we wrote each other. In his letters, he reproached me for stabbing him in the back. When I turned eighteen, he stopped writing and sending money to my mother because he could no longer be forced to pay support if my mother decided to take legal action. In any case, she wouldn’t have done it. Then there was Pierre, then Claude, then analysis, then I wrote. I wanted to see him again. To finally start to have a normal father-daughter relationship. I met him in Nancy. He had promised, he had absolutely guaranteed that nothing would happen. I remember his look in the café, he had just met me at the station, later that weekend we went to see Jacques Doillon’s Family Life, which I’d already seen, which I’d adored, I wanted to see it again with him, I thought he would like it as much as I did. But no, he didn’t understand what I meant. In any case, I picture the café again, there were a few steps leading down into the room, I see myself sitting at the table, facing him. Especially, at a certain moment, I see his look again. Which was a look of desire and I said to myself “it’s starting again.” “He’s not going to keep his promise,” or else I knew it would be hell, that he would show me his desire, that he kept hold of this desire to please me. The hotel, two rooms, time to say goodnight, and there it was. It started again. That’s the moment I decided to turn over, to turn my body over, to turn myself over. Why? To finally be considered a woman, not a piece of ass, an asshole, butter on the flipped crêpe, Vaseline, I wasn’t just a piece of ass, I started to take control from that moment. Control of this story and now I have it (let’s say). At first he had the upper hand, I was under his thumb. Suggesting, flipping myself over onto the good side, I wrote already, I had started. Taking control, having the upper hand. And now, I have it. He’s lost his mind, Alzheimer’s. Me, I’ve got an edge over the incest. The power, the sadistic penis, that’s it, thanks to the pen in my hand, confidently, fundamentally. The weaker hand, the upper hand, very well. Now I talk to Marie-Christine, I write and I’ll talk to Moufid Zériahen too. I don’t write the way I used to. I’m not out to attack, not anyone. If I say “the hell with those who’ll read it” it’s because I’d rather have had something else to write about. That’s all. Writing is not choosing your narrative. But taking it, into your arms, and putting it calmly down on the page, as calmly as possible, as accurately as possible. So that he will turn over in his grave yet again, if my body is his grave. If he turns over again, it’s because I’m not dead. I’m insane, but not dead. I’m not completely insane either. To take it in my arms as it is, I’d rather have taken another subject in my arms, no one asked me. It can take an entire lifetime for a writer to take in his arms something that doesn’t concern anyone. Hence this admonition not to be resentful, a regret, a last one, not to have been able to write other books than those, knowing how you’d react and that your reaction would hurt me. I’m getting sidetracked, I had left the Codec, to explain that there was “nothing left” at the Codec moment, I had to back up a bit. It wasn’t a lapse in logic, on the contrary. I’ll get there. You’ll see, I’m very, very polite, I don’t have a choice, I no longer have any choice, none at all. I said that I’d write certain things, and I’ll do it. You’ll see, I’ll go to the very end. How I went insane, you will understand, I hope. And if it’s not enough I’ll write more books. A lot more. And in the end, all the readers will have understood. Maybe it will take until I die, but in the end you will all have understood how I became crazy. All. I promise, it’s a promise. It will be kept. This is not a digression I’ve been on since the beginning of the Codec chapter. Otherwise I’d have put it in parentheses. It’s not a digression, I’m getting there. So. Nancy. I’ll get back to it, perhaps. It’s not pleasant to talk about, me, for whom speaking has been such a pleasure. Such a profound joy. I can hear it already, I can already read it: Christine Angot, the pain, the pain of writing, not the pleasure. That’s why: the hell with them. So, Nancy, it starts up again for a time, a short time. Luckily. Grand finale, swansong, the energy of despair, the drop that made the bucket overflow. As they say. One or two visits to Nice and it stops. I’ll explain how. I’ll explain it all in any case. All. How I went crazy after NC, a trigger, I hope no one else will tell me about it being out of proportion, exaggerated, ridiculous, the final drop that made the bucket overflow a long time ago, the whole bucket. The smallest extra drop, that falls, overflows with those that have already fallen from the bucket, forming a puddle at the base, there really is no room left, no room left at all, to understand that “no, Christmas, I’m going to spend it with my godchildren, my family, it’s normal, everyone understands that, everyone understands me, it’s not that all of a sudden anything will change just because you’re here now, just because you’re here I’m supposed to drop everyone?” No, don’t drop anyone. Go spend Christmas with your Nadine, and your Nadine, go ahead and fuck her. I said I was going to be polite. I will be. Thinking about it again does that to me. I’m going to calm down. Crazy people can calm down. They get worked up, there are crises, critical moments, and then things calm down again. It starts up again regularly, and then things calm back down. There are crises. It’s not serious. But when the bucket can’t even overflow. It’s not full to the brim, it’s already swamped, the bucket itself. The bucket itself is already swamped. It itself is already drowned, the bucket. If you add a ladle-full of Christmas, of grandchildren, of time immemorial, of family and ghosts, of Chambord, of slut cinema, OK, I take that back, whatever is done or not done in those cases, Catou and of that’s the way it’s always been, and of it’s a ritual, and of it’s not that anything will change just because you’re here now, that makes a crisis inevitable. I’m going to calm down. Give me a few seconds, I’m going to calm down. You can trust me, I know, all it takes is a little patience. I’m going to calm down. I am a polite person. Like my mother was telling me yesterday “at fourteen you were very nice,” “trusting,” “you were vulnerable,” “you were trusting because you’d never been hurt,” “and so it was easy to hurt you.” I was a nice person thanks to her, who had never hurt me, her, obviously. I don’t like it when anyone tells me that. What does it mean? That afterward I wasn’t nice anymore? That I’d become a sadistic penis, is that it? Is that what’s implied? Is that it? Or is it something else? Hunh? Kréma candy? Kréma candy and something else. Something else, but what? Yesterday she said to me “do you think it would have been better if you’d never met him?” Do I have time to answer questions like that? Do I have the time? And on top of that I’d have to pacify her, to reassure her. We’d have to talk about whether or not she did the right thing to introduce me to him. That question doesn’t interest me. The hell with those who’ll read the answer. Why not ask me straight out: Do think it would have been better not to be the person you’ve become? Why not? Why don’t you flat out ask me that question? Do you, Christine Angot, think that it would have been better not to be who you are? And another thing. Do you, Christine Angot, think it would have been better for you (and for us, too, is the implication, of course) if you could write other books, perhaps less negative? Perhaps with a bit more light? Do you think it would have been better for you if you were a piece of Kréma candy? With strawberry, raspberry, lemon, orange or clementine flavors? Because in general you always, you the public, you the critics, can never keep yourselves from describing the world as plus-minus, positive-negative, good-evil, candy-bile, intelligent-moron, man-woman, white-black. To which I answer, I’ll tell you to your face, I will give you an answer: Be polite. Fine, I’ll start again. It stopped in Nice, after one or two visits, I was an adult, I was twenty-six years old. It stopped for good, I don’t have time to talk about the circumstances right now. But I will. The Codec came after it stopped. It was about establishing a normal relationship. My half-brother and half-sister had finally learned about my existence, they’d gotten their diplomas, that is, their education was no longer at risk, so they could be told of my existence. I was twenty-eight years old. Claude and I had decided to go to Strasbourg for a few days. Elisabeth was there in the beginning, after which there was only my father and my half-brother Philippe. My half-sister, who had visited me in Nice two weeks earlier was on holiday in Tunisia visiting a friend. Visiting the daughter of a friend of her mother, Elisabeth. Claude’s and I slept in her room. I’ll spare you the tour of the apartment. The welcome. I’ll spare you the quiche too. Elisabeth also leaves on holiday somewhere. No more quiche, nothing left. The refrigerator is empty. Claude and I offer to do some errands. My father tells us he has an account at the Codec. He gives us the information, explains which Codec, tells us how to get there, where it is. (He knows Claude knows, not that Claude knows where the Codec is, but that he knows, I should have said it earlier, it would have been more logical.) He says put it on the Angot account. I double-check how to do it. So all we need to do when we get to the register is to tell them to put it on the Angot account? Yes, that’s it. That’s all we need to do. (My name is Angot, has been since I was fourteen, when he acknowledged me under the 1972 law of filiation, before that my name was Christine Schwartz, but you know that already, I’ve written about it in almost all my books; or you haven’t been paying attention.) So, we’re getting the groceries, I can picture us again, Claude and me, in that Codec. Mouchi had told me in July that when she was little she dreamed of being a grocery bagger at Codec, she loved bagging groceries. Humor, kids are so cute. So very cute, given her social class, really too cute. Are there Codecs in Tunisia where she spends her vacations? Joking aside, as they say. I can see the two of us getting the groceries, filling a cart, coming up to the register. We put our things on the conveyor belt, and I say “put it on the Angot account please.” At that moment, some kind of neighbor, some lady behind us, a friend of Elisabeth’s, bourgeois just like her, a tennis player, surely, just like her, a woman in one of the liberal or intellectual professions working in an international organization, like her, intrudes (like her), and says (like her): “but you’re not part of the family, who are you?” Like the idiot I still was at the time, I answer “I’m his daughter.” She replies that she knows Elisabeth very well and the children very well too, that she’s very sorry, but I’m not Philippe or Mouchi, she knows them, it turns out she knows them, it turns out that I’m out of luck that she’s in line behind me, and that I’m not going to be able to take the Angots for a ride like that, me and my little boyfriend. It turns out she’s there. So no. I won’t be able to. While we bag up the things. Very quickly, we put everything in bags very quickly. I can’t stand listening to that lady. The godchildren, she knows them, the godchildren, and has for a long time, Léonore, no one’s seen her face, or maybe it was not quite a year ago, what’s that, a year, it was exactly a year. We run to the car with our bags, I don’t want to cry in front of them, the people in the store. So we run to the car, yes, like thieves. We run just like thieves. We close the doors and I cry. But the owner, who had been informed, came out of the store and ran after us to the car, and he knocks on the window, on Claude’s side. I tell him: quick, take off. He takes off very, very fast. Fortunately. We arrive at my father’s house, he’s on the phone with the owner. He defuses the situation. He says he knows that woman, but that she doesn’t know the entire family, no, everything’s fine, he reassures the owner. He tells me it’s not serious, that everything’s fine.

I’m twenty-eight years old, no one in the village knows he has a child, in addition to the other two, an additional child, an older girl, that it’s me, and that I ended up going by Angot like him. With regard to acknowledgment, there’s something I wanted to say:

Tough luck

Yesterday, in a conversation with my mother, I’m talking about what happened. She asks her question, “would it have been better…?” Because of something his sister said on the phone that shocked her “one more headache, as if there haven’t been enough headaches already, now he’s going to have another child.” My mother thinks of the poor baby about to be born, none of this is the baby’s fault. My aunt had to put up with a lot, she repeats, I tell my mother that it’s classic, just like my father who must have had to put up with some difficulty or other, to get the upper hand and, in the end, to lose his mind. My mother goes: well, I’ll tell you something: tough luck. No, not tough luck. I explain. I feel neither hatred nor love. She thinks she understands and says “yes, that’s it (her implication ‘like me’) indifference.” No, not hatred, not love, not indifference, it’s my father, not forgiveness, not indifference, nor love of course: acknowledgment. There, that’s it, acknowledgment. He didn’t acknowledge me, but me, I acknowledge him. He’s my father, I acknowledge him. I acknowledge him as my father. He is my incestuous father, I acknowledge that. I am his incestuous daughter, he is my incestuous father, I acknowledge him, he would not acknowledge me, but I acknowledge him. Léonore is his granddaughter, she could have been his daughter, that’s enough.

Digression, I recount a dream

Léonore is his granddaughter, she could have been his daughter, that’s enough. Phew. That’s what I just wrote. And this is the dream I had last week. A quick look backward. Claude and Judith, the daughter of my psychoanalyst in Reims, Jean-Claude Brot, from a long time ago, more than fifteen years, Claude and Judith, she’s blond, about twenty-five years old, they’re attracted to each other, they’ve talked about it, it’s a matter of time. I was sure as soon as I heard that she was going to medical school in Montpellier, she wants to be a psychoanalyst like daddy, she met Claude, she reads my books, she knows who I am, I shaped her father as an analyst, I was his most important patient. Things are taking shape. It’s New Year’s Eve, they’re attracted to each other, apparently she told him some “powerful things.” But when she feels a strong emotion, she represses it. That’s one of her problems. But it’s on my back that they profit. They get a frisson of incest over my body. I shudder. I shiver. It’s a mise en abyme like the vache-qui-rit label that sends you running to the toilet with the urge to vomit. A few days ago I dreamed that Claude and Judith had a child, the child of incest will soon exist in a debased form. Yes, yes, comparisons are always tough. Yes, yes. Yes. Yes… Not tough luck. No, not tough luck. It’s not enough for me to describe rejecting the monster, I live it. I live it, and often at night. I spent an awful day. I take advantage of this to tell Jean-Claude Brot, if he reads this book, that he shouldn’t have talked about me to his children, that was a huge mistake. Even if he said “the young woman,” they were able to recognize me, the proof. He should have talked about me only in work groups, he should have been able to manage. He should refund the cost of my analysis because he ruined everything, blabbermouth. I’m not a topic of discussion. Or for a thrill. I thought about telephoning you, Mr. Brot, but honestly, do I want to spend my life calling out everyone who pulls some shit or other? I’d end up in an ocean of slime. I’ll write and that’s it. My ambition: the extent to which I’m limited, merely to write about that. I can hear you: as for that, Christine Angot, no one is making you say this. Exactly.

Tough luck

Kréma candy, public garden, chocolate cookies with hazelnuts, whole ones, Rue Grande, my childhood friend Jean-Pierre, Chantal Ligot, my wheelbarrow, our store, which we made in the cellar, not the cellar, some abandoned house next door, with broken windows, the turret, the big wooden door we didn’t open. But something else too. Later. From the time I took the name Angot. Do you think it would have been better in the end if you’d never taken the name Angot. Philippe Sollers: Angot, in the eighteenth century, a woman who was prepared to do anything to succeed was called an Angot. The Codec is done. I’m going to get to Le Touquet, I don’t enjoy it. Or sodomization either. I don’t enjoy any of it. The car, giving him blow jobs in the car, eating clementines off his cock, stiff, the pharaohs of Egypt, the day we didn’t go to Carcassonne. Nancy. I’ve already said a lot about it. What else is there? I’m thinking. There’s the adret and the ubac. With Mozart playing in the car, in Isère, where we’d rented a house in a small village for a week or two. He showed me the adret and the ubac on either side of the road, with a cassette tape of Mozart, or Albinoni. It was hell. The clementines, that was there. To hear him push, that was in London in a hotel, around Easter, near Marble Arch. The restaurants, too many restaurants. Too many restaurants and hotels, an enormous number of churches visited, points of interest, including physical, geological, geographical, precisely in Isère a resurgence. Do you know what a resurgence is? And we went to see the resurgence. The guide to Isère is something his father concocted when he worked for Michelin. Not hatred, nor love, nor indifference, acknowledgment. It’s not in my shitty Châteauroux that I ever would have seen a resurgence, not in my mother’s milieu, at least the milieu into which my mother was born. I wouldn’t have learned to speak German sitting at a café table there or gotten 19 out of 20 in Latin on my bac after studying in depth the first two sentences of variant translations.

Le Touquet

Easter vacation. Often at Easter. It was in Le Touquet that he ventured to my genitals. Until then we were restricted to mouths, arms, thighs no doubt, I imagine, to kisses, lots of kisses. Caresses in the largest sense. In Le Touquet he has severe migraines. We’re staying in a hotel in the center of the village, which he had no doubt found in the Guide Rouge. Which I still use myself, by the way, it’s great. Acknowledgment. I don’t know what’s up with him but he insists we go see My Name is Nobody. With that blue-eyed actor, whose name escapes me, Terence Hill? Terence Hill. Of course he was always the one who chose the movies. That’s how I ended up seeing Aguirre, the Wrath of God even though it wasn’t at all appropriate for my age. Or a film with Alain Delon and Senta Berger, she was shown naked, you could always see her breasts, I remember how awkward it was for me. And that he found her pretty. And I was jealous, I was a real idiot. I deserved what happened, I was an idiot. An idiot, a fuckwit, from the cunt, all to explain that I shouldn’t use those words, out of respect for women, that it’s necessary to be polite. Aguirre, the Wrath of God, I can’t think of Klaus Kinski without thinking of my father, I can’t. We go for walks, we go out to dinner, out to lunch, one Sunday midday he points out some homosexuals and explains how they do it, anal sex. I was learning all this at once. I didn’t like My Name is Nobody, I didn’t understand why he had taken me to see it. He read the news. Every day we had to find Le Monde. Every day. He read it every day. He counseled me to do the same. Sometimes he read it in restaurants sitting across from me. He’d offer me a page. Surely I wasn’t always as interesting. He had seen me up close an hour before that was enough, and he would see me again. When I wasn’t bored, it was exhausting. The interesting conversations were exhausting. At home, it was a completely different world, in Reims, Champagne. In Le Touquet he had a lot of headaches. He’d wanted to go back to the hotel so he could rest, in the dark. (When Marie-Christine told me that she wanted to go home after the movie on Sunday, it must have been that, I had another breakdown. Because she was tired and wanted to go home and I would rather have gone for a walk. She cannot understand and today, Tuesday the 22nd, she’s leaving for Paris to stay with Nadine, we separated last night on the phone, it wasn’t definitive, the definitive break happened a little later.) He asked me to come with him, told me it would be nice of me. I wanted desperately to be nice, I really wanted to please him, I wanted him to approve of me. He didn’t protect me at all, I can’t remember him being gentle, not once, for example. For example, if I hurt myself somewhere, would he take my arm and kiss the spot? No. Or would he pull the covers up over me so I wouldn’t be cold? Never. My mother was the exact opposite. She never told me I was extraordinary, I never was extraordinary (Sujet Angot, the narcissism I’ve been accused of, it’s not my fault), but she did pull the covers up over my shoulders, yes. Often. She took wonderful care of me, as a mother. He had headaches, and he wanted to rest in the dark, in his room, shutters closed, as little light as possible, and if possible my hands, my hand on his forehead. I was very, very nice. I was really very nice. He appreciated it very much, it did him so much good, I had no idea how much good it did him. I did him an enormous amount of good. Thank you. Thank you. It did him so much good, so much good, how nice it was of me. There was nothing unusual, nothing complicated, I was lying next to him on the bed, the shutters were closed, I didn’t like it. It was nice outside, I thought it was awful to stay shut up indoors on Easter vacation with my father. And then, I guess, I had to get under the sheets, at some point he must have suggested it. Things went further, he touched my sex at Le Touquet. He said: you know why it’s wet? Because you love. I regret having discovered wetness in circumstances like those.

We went on a walk. We’d arrived by airplane. We didn’t have a car there. He had just gotten his pilot’s license. He had rented a plane and we flew there from Reims, he from Strasbourg. I was going to be able to tell Véronique at school. He asked me what Véronique’s family name was, how it was spelled, and explained the etymology, where she lived, her father’s profession, viticulturist, Foureur champagne. We’re taking a walk in the forest surrounding Le Touquet, the pine forest, the area is filled with beautiful houses. He writes articles in his field, linguistics, he has a book in progress. He’s an admirer of Champollion, he’s very interested in the Iberian language, it will be his major work. He wrote an article on the pronunciation of w in French. People think it’s v, because of they way wagon is said with a v sound, but it’s oueu according to French rules of pronunciation. Wagon is an exception, from German, Wagen, der Wagen. We pass the houses, each more beautiful than the last, he makes jokes, he’s in a joking mood: that one is fifty thousand copies. That one there, oh, that one, it’s at least one hundred thousand. I’d have to write a detective novel to get that one, he jokes. I, who have never seen anything, I laugh, fascinated. My book might not sell many copies, it’s a difficult subject, linguistics, which doesn’t reflect on its quality. That one, oh two hundred thousand. A million. One and a half million. That one, fifty thousand. One million. Two million. One hundred and fifty thousand. We laugh. We had just been to see the airplanes.

The lock

Easter holidays one year later. In Strasbourg, in the family apartment. They’re all away on vacation. My vacation is their empty apartment. I sleep in the parents’ bedroom with my father, in the marriage bed. I see the children’s room, their little universe. They’re much younger than I am, eight and ten years difference or six and nine. They don’t know me, they don’t even know I exist. Yes, I know, I’ve already said it, let me repeat myself if I want. I’m there for a week. It’s a long week. We’re used to weekends, sometimes long ones. He works. I don’t know how to take care of a house. I don’t know how it’s done. I know how to do two or three things, I have two or three routines, I see what my mother does, but I don’t have the reflexes. He works. I’m on vacation, not him, he comes home for lunch and in the evening. I’m bored, I look at the house, the décor, Elisabeth’s taste, in all it’s cute. When I get home my mother will say “I don’t like cute things.” In the bathroom there’s a rather large glass jar filled with costume jewelry and another filled with cotton balls. There are printers type set drawers with tiny trinkets. It’s not the apartment I’d visit later with Claude (at the time of the Codec when there was nothing left), a large duplex, very large, with terraces, just a few steps from the Orangerie, the public garden he adores, which he tells me about. He explicates everything. Iberian, Latin, the Orangerie, etymology, German, the pronunciation of w in French, politics, racism, animals, plant names, everything, the Egyptian pharaohs, the origin of languages, language families, Noah, Shem and company, Indo-European, Hindi. It’s all clear. In the morning, we eat breakfast in the kitchen. At noon he comes home. He sees the milk left out, the bottle of milk, I’d forgotten to put it away, don’t I know that milk spoils? That it’s undrinkable if it’s not kept cold? He throws a tantrum. His arguments are endless. And above all the lock:

We go out, it’s lunchtime. The door closes behind us, we’re on the landing, the keys were left inside. I get yelled at. I’m not in charge of the keys, am I? That’s not the question. Why should it be me, just me, who’s responsible? I’m not the one in particular who was supposed to lock up. I can’t take it anymore. What is going on? Why am I being yelled at? I don’t get it. That’s not the point. Of course it’s you who are responsible. Don’t you know that when you are at someone’s house, when you’re not at home, you always enter second, after the owner, who opens the door and at the same time offers entry to the visitor who only enters then. Always. It’s a basic rule of politeness. I’m surprised you don’t know it. And conversely, when you leave the house, you go out first so the owner can bring up the rear and lock up his house behind everyone. The laws of hospitality, he’s an expert. He’s an expert on customs, how to open, how to close? How to pass in front of an older person? The owner is the first to have contact with door when you enter, and the last to have contact with the door when you go out. Now we need to find a locksmith. You think I’m enjoying this. It will cost a fortune. I won’t be able to find one before two o’clock. There’s only one thing to do, go out, go for a walk, we’re forced to, the keys inside, money, wallet, everything. Me: But why did you go out if you still needed to get things? I thought you were done. I thought I could leave because you were outside? Even if I didn’t know that rule of politeness, that basic, fundamental rule. Now the locksmith, the lock, it will cost a fortune. (He would never have said a shitload.) A fortune. He is very very very very very very very very very very very very, very angry. I’d like to run away. I wish I could escape. I want to see my mother. When I got home I almost told her. I can see myself again at the station. I told her “it was horrible.” What, how? His character. His character was my answer. She told me she understood, that she knew him, that she wasn’t at all surprised. That a whole week was surely too long. It’s the first time I let my disappointment show but not about the real keyhole, let’s say. Wandering around the streets with him for two hours, it was horrible, waiting until we could call a locksmith, in neighborhoods where everything was closed for the lunch hour, in residential neighborhoods, where there’s nothing anyway, he didn’t have his car keys, nothing, we couldn’t even go to another part of town, he had to go back to work, he would be late, that wasn’t the worst, but being locked out because of your stupid mistake, and having all these worries that I could do without, and the fortune it’s going to cost to get the locksmith to come.

Gare de l’Est

I give this example, but the same thing happened in other places. I can picture it very clearly. I was intolerable because of X, my character was bad, I irritated him, because of X I was intolerable, I exaggerated, I said something unpleasant, I don’t know, I don’t remember, he had enough reasons. He’d been counting on spending a few days with me, well, no. Enough. We were supposed to be together until Sunday, well, no, enough is enough. Maybe I think that he’ll enjoy driving all the way to Strasbourg, so then, I shouldn’t complain. No point insisting, now he can’t stay. He is in such a state, that it’s enough. That’s it. I’m fourteen or fifteen years old. I’m young, I’m still little even. To wait for the next train to Reims in some station and it’s cold. To return to my mother, hoping she hasn’t made other plans. It was my father, my father who wanted to see me, but he’s tired of me, he wants to go home, he’s going home, he got his car, he left, he didn’t look at the train schedule, he left me at the Gare de l’Est, with my bag, he gave me money to buy a ticket. He didn’t offer to wait with me, the two hours or three hours or four hours before the next train, it’s cold in the station, there are plastic seats on the left side where people are sitting, no one waits as long as I do. He couldn’t wait with me, he had to get back, right away, Strasbourg isn’t next door. Stuck there, alone because of my bad character or having said the wrong thing. Anxiety, tears, I hide, I have my bag. Luckily I have my bag. My bag is the only friendly thing in this enormous station.

There was also the trip to Carcassonne where we didn’t end up going, there were a lot of promises not kept. The trip to Rome is kind of the same thing. Ruining it, sabotaging it. Sabotaging life, messing it up. “That screws up a woman’s life,” like that person said in Interview, yes. You win, good answer, good conclusion, good look, good allusion, good hook. Yes, that’s it. Yes, it’s true. Yes, it screws up a woman’s life. It screws up a woman, even, we could take it that far. It’s an act of sabotage. Yes, we could put it like that. This book will be seen as testimony about the sabotage of women’s lives. The groups that are fighting incest will be all over it. Even my books are sabotaged. To take this book as a shit piece of testimony will be an act of sabotage, but you’ll do it. It screws up a woman’s life, it screws up a writer’s life, but, as they say, it doesn’t matter.

Rome

Contrary to what you’ll read in the end, we did go there. I mention it now because of the sabotage, it’s more logical. I open the parentheses to insert what happened after the end of the book. I didn’t know we would go to Rome when I wrote the last page. I came back and I ended it. As agreed, Marie-Christine left for Paris on December 22nd. That provoked very serious anxiety attacks again. I was once again in an unbearable state. I don’t want to revisit it. We broke up right before she left on the 22nd, this break seemed credible, there was still some hope, but very faint. I expected Frédéric the morning of the 24th. Marie-Christine was meant to return on the 25th on the twelve-thirty flight. She was hoping we would celebrate Christmas together that day, with Frédéric, my parents and Léonore of course. Even if we were separated, even if the break was confirmed, it didn’t matter, we could still celebrate Christmas together. I was impossible, I overdid it, again, I read the last two pages I’d just finished writing the morning of the 22nd to her over the phone. She got an ear infection, in Paris, and was not allowed to fly, if her fever went down, she might possibly take the train. I went to pick her up at the station with Léonore on the 25th, she had her presents from the day before, a pair of Jil Sander slacks in a bag, there was also a duvet cover, CDs, gifts from twenty-five people. She was deaf in one ear. She wanted me to be gentle and nice to her, I wasn’t, quite the opposite. In the end, Christmas went well. But things started up again the next day. We didn’t want to go to Rome. When she wanted to go, I no longer did. When I wanted to go, she no longer did. The delirium continued, the violence even intensified. We didn’t leave on Sunday as we were meant to, we were still billed for the night in the hotel. In the end, we did leave, but later, on Tuesday. In the airport we had six hundred francs stolen, it was all a waste. I was a fountain during the whole six days in Rome. I cried in the street, at the restaurants, everywhere, on a bicycle we’d rented. Again, she came close to hitting me, I said “no, I’m begging you.” She didn’t do it. It was still horrible. We really did separate on our return. It’s over. And this time, it’s permanent. It was sabotage up and down the line. We were lucky to be in Rome and we looked like we were at a funeral. One day she says to me “come, I’m going to get you a present, I’m going to buy you a Venini vase,” I lost her on the way to the shop on purpose. As soon as I lost her, I ran through the streets in a panic. I couldn’t find her. The streets were filled with people. I went to the shop where we’d seen the vases, I went to Prada, I went back to the hotel I went to another possible boutique, she was nowhere, the streets were packed, I thought she had gone for a bike ride to get rid of me. It was our last day in Rome, and our last day period. I went back the hotel yet again, she still wasn’t there. I left her a message: I’m looking for you, I went here, here, and here, I’m going out again, but I’ll be back. I went to a restaurant we liked, she wasn’t there, the weather was magnificent, we weren’t taking advantage of it, we weren’t taking advantage of anything. Our trip to Rome was screwed up just like my life. The Venini, which I wanted so much, also screwed up. It was supposed to be my Christmas present. The restaurant together, sabotaged. Claude, Judith, and their child were spoiling the landscape for me, I was having nightmares, I ate breakfast feeling nauseous. I returned to the hotel, she still wasn’t there. I lay down on my bed. The sobs came. We had two beds. She came back around three thirty. I was so happy I couldn’t believe it. But it all started up again. Before the Venini, we were supposed to go to Prada, just to see, we spent the last two hours we had left, it was full of people, foreigners, Japanese people, someone addressed me in English, I did my Pierre Angot impression “I’m not English nor American,” I was an idiot, a bitch, a cunt, a beast, Elisabeth, sassy, impertinent, stupid. At the moment I insult myself all the time, ultimately my narcissism took a real hit in this whole incest story. Marie-Christine was sitting on the ground, she’d had enough. I finally bought some shoes that hurt my feet, I’ll never be able to wear them. When what I really wanted was a beautiful Venini vase, a reflection of my life if she had kept her promises from the start. So we’re not together anymore. I’m not with anyone. I don’t think it’s worth it anymore.

She doesn’t want to see me again, she told me she came close to killing herself several times. She told me she now thinks of herself first, that she has to save herself. That there were very serious consequences. It all weighs on my shoulders. At the beginning, after we broke up, I was calm and then on Saturday I had a very bad anxiety attack. With phone calls, slapping myself and screaming, countless calls to Marie-Christine. And finally calling yesterday, after all, you’d have to be completely drunk to call yesterday. I called Philippe yesterday, my half-brother. His tone was impassive, he didn’t know whom to believe, his father had spoken to him about it, he had said I was making things up. OK, fine, doesn’t matter. I’m fed up with talking about it. I’m happy the book is finished, happy. I’ve already got the opening sentence of my next book. It will be: “I’m not going to spend my time calling Philippe Angot, director of a company for spare antique auto parts.” It will be the first sentence of a very long response to an imaginary interview about art. Writing, art, what I was saying about limits, all that. Incest is the book in which I present myself as a real shit, all writers should do it at least once, after that, we’ll see. Or maybe they should do it several times, or maybe do nothing but that. Writing may only be doing that, showing one’s inner shit. Of course it isn’t. You’re ready to believe anything. Writing is not just one thing. Writing is everything. Within limits. Always. Of life, of one’s self, of the pen, of height and of weight.

Since we broke up, I’ve received two letters from Marie-Christine. It’s hard not seeing her anymore. Yesterday I had just a glimpse, she just drove me to my psychoanalyst at nine at night, for the second time that day, it was nighttime, it was cold out, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind accompanying me. I was expecting her to refuse, to save herself, she really doesn’t want to see me again at all. She agreed, came to pick me up at nine and at ten she drove me home. I’d have liked to spend a bit more time with her, but she doesn’t want to anymore, she says I put her too much at risk. I don’t know if that’s true. Everything is always my fault. You’ve got to give and take. Since the break up she wrote me two letters:

January 6, 1999 Christine One day after another; of course I’m sad alone without you it’s very hard loving someone with whom love is impossible I’m worried that this state of misery will last. I think of you so often. Everything brings me back to you to us and I can’t say us anymore MCA

January 7, 1999 Christine One day follows another, hour after hour, not thinking farther ahead than that concentrating on the moment not thinking that your body is far from mine that tonight you won’t be in my arms that I won’t go out to dinner with you, to the movies with you, on vacation with you that I won’t make love to you that I won’t see your neck your eyes I have your eyes in mine Sunday night your sad frightened eyes No idea what to do too much hope too much despair I don’t know what to do to stop thinking of you all the time Still I know that I’m supposed to go on day after day trying to start living again to start hoping again but hoping for what going where I think too much about you MCA

When I got into her car last night at nine, it was nice, there was music, it was Aznavour’s La Bohème la bohème. I was in a cozy little cockpit, but only for the duration of the drive. It was really, really, truly over.

I’m not going to feel sorry for myself. I’m not going to spend my time calling Philippe Angot, director of a company for spare antique auto parts. But I’m not going to wallow in sweetness either. So:

With Marc

I’m sixteen. Marc is thirty. He’s a friend of my mother’s, he becomes my first lover, he’s from India, a chemical engineer with Henkel. He goes to see my father, he tells him he has to stop, the sodomy, he tells me it could be dangerous for me too. He talks to my father about it. The three of us go to the movies one day, I’m staying at the hotel with Marc and my father, but not with him. But in the cinema, a science fiction movie with Charlton Heston, Soylent Green. Soylent Green. I jerk them both off at the same time because I’m sitting between them. It’s my worst memory of all. I do it so as to not reject my father, he already feels so rejected because I’m with Marc and on top of that I told the secret. He hates talking about it. I won’t be able to tell Marie-Christine, it’s too dirty. Not even in her arms. Not even if she tells me she won’t be disgusted. I made a big slip more than once. I was quoting from Les Autres. The phrase the Arab girls say “because people who write disgust almost all of them,” I write instead: because almost all people who are disgusting write.

Sodomy

It was a village in Isère. It must have happened there. He looked for a pharmacy far out of the way to get Vaseline. He found some. He didn’t look before trying, but after. I was complaining. He told me to appreciate my luck, very few men did this, it might be a rare or maybe even the only chance in my life to experience it, this sensation that certain women, that many women adore and they complain that their husbands don’t do it, nor, most of the time, do their lovers.

Stop

I asked him to stop. I told him I didn’t see any advantage and I was scared of becoming disturbed, very scared, he saw the advantages: on the contrary, this way you know it’s a man who loves you. In Isère I wore a Shetland wool turtleneck sweater I liked a lot, red and tan. He loved it too, why? Because it flattered my breasts. This sweater I loved disgusted me, I’d have preferred he just like the sweater. He took pictures.

The watch

Grenoble isn’t far away. My birthday isn’t far off either. My birthday is not a date that matters to him but we’re so close, he’s going to give me a present, we shop for it together, it’s a silver watch, with a rigid wristband also made of silver.

The clementines

He has gotten some groceries. He’s naked. We almost never leave this house in Isère. But we go on walks, he loves nature, he loves the calm, he likes to hike in the mountain and along trails. Whenever he meets anyone, he says hello clearly. It’s polite. That’s what one does. He does. I have to, too. I have to be polite. He puts clementines on his penis for me to eat. It’s disgusting, disgusting disgusting disgusting.

Food

I met him in the Strasbourg train station buffet. He had ordered choucroute. Choucroute for lunch. It’s the specialty, the station buffet’s choucroute was meant to be good. He ate a lot at lunch. People who eat a lot at lunch disgust me. They often smell after. I hate the smell of food on someone’s breath. The smell of medicine or fatigue on someone’s breath, fine, but from something they’ve eaten, revolting. The worst being: garlic, raw onion, shallots, sauces, béarnaise, chives, even meat, especially at noon. I discovered restaurants with him, good restaurants, pleasant restaurants, with stars, I know what the symbols in the Michelin guide mean, stars, forks and spoons. Red, black. I often ordered smoked salmon. I discovered frogs’ legs, with toast, grilled, hot, warm. Sometimes though the conversation dragged. And the prospect of a nap weighed on me. When I was born, he was thin, there was a period when he was fat, at the time, he was average. He looked like Jean-Louis Trintignant, a less handsome version, he had the same smile, the same teeth, not the same voice, the same mouth, the same lips, the same type. He wore same kind of sportswear.

I’m not looking to accuse him. Monsters only exist in fairy tales. I’m not looking to accuse or excuse him. Only one thing counts, the mark. He left a mark on me.

Phrases that accompanied the gestures

The week in Strasbourg when the others were away on vacation. I spend my vacation in their home, it goes badly, everyday I get yelled at. For the milk, for the keys, I remember one phrase. We’re in the marital room, “the marital bedroom,” I had suggested sleeping in Mouchi’s room, “no, the marital bedroom” said with a certain irony, a quip, a game, everything is funny. He is stretched out and I’m seated on the edge of the bed. He looks at me, I’m above him, he says “you are beautiful, very beautiful, you will be able to get yourself very handsome men.” Such a gift, such an opportunity, to have very handsome men, I’d never imagined, I’d never have dared, to go after such very handsome men. This is good news, unexpected news to me, but “you could have gone after” would be more fitting now. Because I realize that even if I could have, it’s finished now. He announces this piece of news, he’s the one who announces it, no one before him had announced it, his news is rotten. The fruit comes from dirt, it would have been a beautiful piece of fruit.

“You have very soft skin, like your mother.”

He compared the size of our breasts, me, my mother, Elisabeth, and Marianne, his mistress at the time. I was jealous of Marianne. She was a student, she was doing political science, she was young, she was free, he was in love with her, he hadn’t seen her for a while. She was an important part of his life, a student, young, free, making love to quite a few guys, including a Black man he saw her with once. Sometimes she just did it if she thought she’d “get pleasure” out of it. She could have been his daughter, I was jealous of her but not of Elisabeth, Elisabeth’s crotch smelled of “rotten fish,” he never licked her. That was something he didn’t like in general, he would tell her, he couldn’t tell her the real reason. But he told me. Another thing, the grimace she made when she came, he didn’t like seeing her face at those times. He had told her, but she started doing it again, maybe she didn’t realize what she was doing with her face, otherwise she would have paid attention. A German, a certain Brigitte, my mother remembered, me, I don’t recall her name. This German woman’s breasts, grapefruit, me, oranges, my mother, lemons, Elisabeth, oranges and not a bad figure besides, a lovely waist. And nice, above all very nice, very attentive. Stupid, but nice. Two problems, her face and her vagina. Marianne, lemons, “that can be touching, too, small breasts or no breasts at all.” I’ve had enough. One morning, with Marie-Christine, I started telling her about it all again. I told her about the clementines, the milk, the lock, she knew about it, the politeness, the complete lack of grammatical mistakes, perfect accent when speaking other languages. The rotten fish, Marianne, of whom I was jealous. The picture I had of Philippe and Mouchi, he gave it to me when I met him at fourteen. I wanted to have at least one photograph of them. Mouchi had a little tweed coat, she was smiling, one day my uncle said that Philippe looked like me. It was a big event. My mother didn’t comment on these resemblances, or didn’t notice them. I also told Marie about “you have very soft skin, like your mother,” I told her about it stroking her back gently. She left to take her dog Baya for a walk after, along the edge of the Lez, she left me alone to write before doing one or two Christmas shopping errands. We were planning on spending the 25th together. She was landing at the airport at twelve thirty. We had all of Christmas day together, Frédéric, who is coming down from Paris by train early in the morning of the 24th, will be there, my mother and André, and of course Léonore. Who, like me, has my father’s hands and feet.

I could listen to anything, with me anything was possible, the clementines and above all talking. Marie-Christine was telling me this morning “there is a kind of naïveté, anything is possible, he can do anything, he is above everything.” Perversion, Marie-Christine was saying, Lacan called it père-version, the version of the father. As soon as I met him, there was only his version, the one reference, the only right one, above the others, above all others. And the Latin, German, English, Spanish, Iberian, Czech versions, not counting slang or dialects, the Angot version. Even religion was nonsense. Phrases:

I had soft skin.

I could get myself very handsome men.

I was beautiful.

I was free.

You could talk about anything with me, it’s very rare to meet someone like me (as open).

I was intelligent.

Do you like being a woman? I didn’t care for that question. When I saw it coming, I always felt uncomfortable. Without really understanding why. The question seemed to imply “because I wouldn’t,” but maybe that wasn’t it. In any case, I gave an answer I liked even less than the question. An answer I will be ashamed of all my life. I would answer “at the moment, yes.” Next to Soylent Green it’s my worst memory.

I’ve got a hard-on, I can’t help it.

When I saw you and you were just a little baby in your crib, I wasn’t interested. You didn’t interest me. (It was hard to get his interest. Mine too.)

We looked alike. We recognized each other as in a mirror reflected from a distance. Unbelievable.

I had breasts the size of oranges.

A tight vagina, very tight, and fresh. Marianne too, hers was fresh, but maybe not as tight. She slept with a lot of men. He hoped I’d enjoy the same sexual liberty later.

The idea of a cool fountain. In the morning, at night.

Another phrase from much later:

I’m eighteen, I’m with Pierre, he’s very handsome but we haven’t been making love often for some time. I see my father one day, nothing happens, it’s tense, he interrogates me about my life, I show him a picture of Pierre, in black and white taken in a plane, he’s suntanned. I tell my father that I’m not very sensual. He doesn’t agree: that’s wrong, it’s the man’s fault, or else “one is less sensual at 18 than at 15.”

German

Learning a language was easy. In Reims I went to a school that required German as your first foreign language, I had studied English. The other students had had three years of German, me, none. It was easy. For him, Spanish, etc., grammar, good grammar, vocabulary. But there was a lesson plan, classes. No, if I learned German, if I spoke German, they couldn’t fail me on the exam for the national diploma.

He had an answer for everything. I was scared of becoming disturbed, even if the pharaohs in Egypt… but no, this way you know it’s a man who loves you.

Manners

You should have let that woman go ahead of you.

The correct expression is not par contre but en revanche.

Do not drop the negating particle.

In the country, you say hello to people you encounter.

He was an expert on manners, on grammar, on all languages, on pronunciation, on idiom. He knew a great deal. You had the impression that he knew absolutely everything in certain fields. The adret, the ubac, when to climb to the top of a mountain, when you pass someone you don’t know you greet them.

Nice

He came in through the French doors. He’s going to spend a few days and take me to Carcassonne. Going there has been one of my dreams, he was born in the area, so I have some ancestry there. I have Catalonian ancestry through his mother, a woman (who committed suicide) whom I resemble. I’ve seen her face and her profile when she was seventy, I know what I’ll look like at seventy. I will be like her. He sleeps in my bed. He penetrates me. Claude is sleeping downstairs, we have separated. One morning on awakening, I have a vision of him as a monster. I tell him, he gets angry and decides to go to Carcassonne by himself, and earlier than planned. I cry, I go to see Claude downstairs, I’m twenty-six years old. I prepare to tell him that since Nancy, it had started again. He knows, he heard during the night, the mattress made noise. Claude becomes my master. It’s finished, I won’t touch my father again, and he won’t touch me again.

I was a dog, I was looking for a master. And I’m still a dog and I’m still looking for a master. When he barks in my face, like Marie-Christine did on the phone yesterday. It’s normal, I did everything for it. I’m crazy, they’re not going to lock me up because I write and because it’s got a hold on me. Maybe I’ll try to be a monster, just like him, I’m insane, just like him, I speak my language perfectly, just like him, I’m unbearable, just like him I’m charming, maybe, just like him, I’m a brunette, just like him, I have small hands, just like him. I’m a dog, I’m looking for a master, no one wants to be my master anymore. And he, would he be willing to be my master again? Would I still know how to obey him? Would I know how to suck his old cock again right now, maybe his memory would come back. Would I still know how to give him a blow job in a confessional like I did in that church in Savoie, in the village where the houses were all roofed with flagstone? On Sunday, I was visiting some people with Marie-Christine, Patrick was joking about the prior evening when he said, quoting the movie Pédale douce, “It’s not his brains you suck.” It wasn’t his brains I was sucking. That’s how I became crazy. It’s not a very polite way of talking. I’ll finish this book the way I started it, that is in the middle of a complete breakdown, there was a calm phase in the middle, a very short one. It wasn’t his brains I was sucking. Marie-Christine, do you hear me? She doesn’t want to see me anymore, we had started to talk, she doesn’t even want to see me. We’d agreed that the solution might be for me to tell her. To tell her what I’ve suffered. But tonight, Marie-Christine, you’re leaving to spend Christmas in Paris with Nadine, you’re going to celebrate Christmas Eve, there will be twenty-five people there, me, I’ll be alone, Frédéric will come down, so I won’t be alone. We had agreed we’d celebrate on Christmas day but we broke up before that. We won’t go to Rome. We won’t spend the 25th together. You know why? Because in Savoie there was a church in the village where all the houses had flagstone roofs, in this church the Stations of the Cross were particularly beautiful and the confessional witnessed my open mouth on my father’s penis, I had to finish him off in the car, he didn’t want to ejaculate in the confessional after all. It wasn’t his brains I was sucking, do you realize, I could have had very handsome men, I could have loved Nadine’s movies, I could have spent Christmas Eve with you. Either had very handsome men or been with you. But no, you see, Marie-Christine. You’re leaving tonight, we canceled the tickets to Rome. You’re going to be with your family, I’m weeping like the dog I am, you don’t celebrate Christmas with your dog. Dogs are stupid, you can get them to suck on a plastic bone, and they’re stupid, dogs believe you. They don’t even notice what they’re sucking on. It’s horrible being a dog.

Copyright

Copyright © Christine Angot, 1999

English translation copyright © Tess Lewis, 2017

First Archipelago Books Edition, 2017

L’Inceste was originally published by Éditions Stock (France), 1999.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress information is available upon request.

Archipelago Books

232 3rd Street #A111

Brooklyn, NY 11215

www.archipelagobooks.org

Distributed by Penguin Random House

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

Cover art: Louise Bourgeois

Cover and text design: Tetragon, London

Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien du Ministère des Affaires étrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France aux Etats-Unis.

This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.

This publication was made possible by the generous support of the Lannan Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

ISBN 9780914671879

Ebook ISBN 9780914671886

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Content

Christine Angot
INCEST

No Man’s Land

Christmas

Valda candy

Copyright