The Stalinist's Wife Read online

  France Théoret

  The Stalinist's Wife

  Essential Translations Series 4

  Translated by Luise von Flotow

  GUERNICA

  TORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY • LANCASTER (U.K.) 2013

  Letter to Mathieu Lord

  August 1991

  MY VOICE IS NOT STABLE. This is most inconvenient. The idea of writing you a letter came to me after I read about Hitler’s extermination camps and the Soviet gulag. Each piece I read inhabits me. I am endlessly grateful to the authors who wrote them. These readings changed me. I left you, and it was because of your Stalinism.

  I made a mistake that women don’t usually make. They keep the house and ask their partner to leave. I was afraid of your doctrinaire ideas, of what you are. At the time, I’d assumed a kind of contempt for psychology, very much like yours, that verged on disgust. I no longer disdain psychological analysis. I resort to it. The visceral fear I felt when I left is understandable. It can be explained. Your decision to join the ranks of the Stalinists was unilateral. I was not consulted. You informed me of it once you were admitted to the party. You behaved the way men used to behave, in the authoritarian generations. I am faced with the fact that I have a husband who is indoctrinated. I am not contesting your resolve. I feel terribly guilty at the thought of distracting you from your commitment. Not a day goes by without my feeling inferior in the face of the decision you made. You acquired a strong idea by yourself. You became a member of an elite. You deploy rough language and utter categorical expressions that confirm the claims you make.

  Remember, I haven’t questioned or confronted you. My hostility toward your ideological commitment has been total. I’ve found no way to display this. I’ve worn myself out, my internal unease apparent in sleepless nights disrupted by nightmares and disasters. I’ve not often talked to you about myself.

  You put on airs of intellectual superiority, and more recently, political superiority. Your organization is one of the most severely orthodox. Your ideological positions are beyond discussion. Faced with your certainties I lose my faculties. For years you have been calling yourself an artist and you never complete any work of art. You no longer sketch. You do not paint. The way you describe your grand plans for exhibitions to our friends makes me furious. Not once have I contradicted you. I leave you to your fabrications. I have been your accomplice, considerate and deferent. How many times have your fantasies about being an artist cast doubt on my own perceptions? You have spoken about your art in front of me, the silent one, about your non-existent productions, about your almost-finished canvases, your short and long-term projects, your contracts with prestigious art galleries. Pure mystification. For a long time I thought you were telling the truth. My life at your side has been a shared fiction. I have been the privileged witness of how other people see you. Our friends – but also your colleagues – treat you with such admiration that my judgment is clouded by their enchantment. They see you as an artist, though you haven’t yet completed a single work of art.

  At this time of writing I am no closer to being powerful, or just careerist. Something abnormal happened between the two of us, and this has destroyed what remained of our accord.

  My face resembles my mother’s. My figure hardly resembles hers. My mother is a hesitant person, undecided, someone who has difficulty making choices. She reacts by swearing and yelling, and she’s always whining about her life. She is a woman who does not inspire me. Her face is marked by peevish anger and grimaces, and her body contracts in quick, unexpected jerks, sudden reactions. She is the image of unhappiness. A horde of unresolved resentments fills her eyes, and her voice asks me where they come from. Where does all this come from? She is twofaced: there is an everyday face she wears for us, and there is the face she shows to society, with carefully studied manners, exaggerated politeness, a look that mimics high society. My mother does not know who she is. She is full of prejudice, and displays no personal will or logic in her thinking. She is the exact opposite of an inspiration or a model. But for all that she is not a mean or cruel woman, although the constant back and forth could drive anyone in that direction. She pretends to be awed. She puts others down the moment we are behind closed doors. I am not unaware of what my mother thinks of you. In her eyes, you are an insignificant, unaccomplished man. I am deeply attached to the woman who gave me life and I feel sincere affection for her. But for a long time now I have not believed what she says. I am torn between my affection and the impossibility of paying any real attention to her words because she is so irrational. What she says about you is not insulting to me because I don’t accord her any credibility. You pay her a lot of attention and are absurdly circumspect.

  You render yourself blind and childish. I observe her harshness, she is imperturbably indifferent to you.

  My parents are unable to say anything loving. They refuse. You don’t notice that they are too self-satisfied to give free rein to affection. They are on guard in case someone should try to extract money from them. They have established distrust as a system. For them, intellectuals are the butt of ongoing labelling and derision. They see you as an innocent, which you are not. I am alone with my fear and my anxiety.

  You resemble neither your mother nor your father. If there weren’t some slight similarity between your facial characteristics and those of your mother, I would have my doubts about your origins. Your people have so little influence over you I wonder which parent you are closer to. Which one are you like in your mannerisms, your gestures, your personality? You have never talked to me about affinities, complicities, or confrontations with either one. Your behaviour does not seem to have bothered anyone; there has been no conflict. Your father and mother accepted you the way you are. What I am writing is close to being a perfect fable, an idyllic image taken out of religious books. I know nothing about disagreements you may have had. You speak to them in soft murmurs; you treat them as inferiors, as people who can’t understand. They supported you, paid for everything you wanted. I cannot know whether your relations have always been so simple and clear. Your conversations are rudimentary, calqued on a religious version of each one’s role. You seem to have come from nowhere, have no attachments, and no feelings for your parents. I insist on noting your lack of feeling. I discovered what it is that torments your mother. You display a disconcerting coldness for her personal unhappiness.

  You present yourself as the eternally youthful son – to your parents and to mine – polite and accommodating. You cultivate juvenile relations with our families. They have no inkling of your ideas or your thoughts, your high level of competence. You have not announced your membership in the Stalinist party. This is your intention. You talk to members of the older generation like a child looking for protection. For every member of our families, you are a man incapable of doing the slightest evil. My anxiety is growing.

  I married a man to whom, for the most part, I am of no interest. You established rituals that govern the way we live. You made important decisions: the hours that you spend at your writing desk form the central part of our shared lives. You want me to take care of the shopping, the meals, the laundry, and the housekeeping because I know about these things and am used to doing them. I lived alone for a long time before we were married. Since the first day we started cohabiting I have done all these chores. Not for a moment did I think I was responsible for you. You moved from your parents’ house where your mother was at your service to our apartment where I am. I have been acting out of love, not anticipating the dreadful consequences of our habits. When you arrived at my side you filled such an immense and tangible emptiness. I close my eyes and relive the feeling of well-being of those first years we spent together.

  You accept
me if I prepare an elaborate, timeconsuming meal, beef bourguignon or chicken with mushrooms, when I have cleaned the apartment, changed the bedclothes, ironed your shirts. I have your approval when I sit down at my desk after tidying everything up. You want to know what I am reading. You warn me, with your legendary severity, against reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. Your words stay with me, take me hostage as I read. You, too, think I am weak and easily influenced. Your drawings call up the world of larvae, viscosities, and shapelessness. A man who is impassioned by larva-like creatures and caught up in viscous matter has set himself up as my instructor, is warning me of the dangers of reading. Your influence encircles me. You dictate what I should and should not do; you lay out the requirements and the restrictions.

  You have noticed that I make a difference between paid work and unpaid work. I earn as much as you do. My professional life is demanding, my hours much longer than yours. I am young, I take it all on. There is free time. An obscure, implacable struggle starts up between us. I want to go to the cinema, the theatre, art galleries. You refuse to accompany me; you claim there is little worth going out for, and you criticize my taste. You prefer the work of the avant-garde. I spend too much time justifying where I go. You decide for me what is worth seeing. Some winter evenings when it is too cold or the rain is too heavy I can’t go out. I shut myself off; I hang about my writing desk.

  I dawdle in front of my notebooks; I don’t open them. Finally I sit down, jot a few lines on a sheet of paper. Dizzying questions assail me. What I have learnt turns into a pile of falsehoods. I discover a gaping hole that matches my inability to endorse my knowledge. What I know is viscous and ineffectual. My language is terribly trivial, confused, clouded by the effects of religion, by clichés about family, by grandiose epics. A beer, a mass, Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, our home and native land. This country, I discover that I am a stranger here, that I cannot find a way in, that my condition of internal emigration has existed for a long time, and that just one page is sufficient to describe this state of affairs. Writing reveals the lack of knowledge, of another way of thinking, if such a thing even exists. I live here; I am not from here. It is impossible to be elsewhere.

  I have no wish to hand you the page I’ve written that puts our certainties into question. You don’t have the time; you are engaged with your formless, deformed figures, underwater amoeba, decomposing bodies. My calligraphic expression on paper does not compare with cooking or housekeeping, which is what you want from me.

  You have boundless confidence in your own opinions. The avant-gardes are no secret for you. You have studied them. When you say that a certain film merits or does not merit the label of avant-garde, not one of our friends contradicts you. I am moved by the attention that your judgments garner. I notice when you adopt one of my expressions, when you copy an idea of mine that you criticized earlier, when this idea, which I defended, finds favour with the others. I exist through you. I do not demand credit for that idea. I have read often enough about prestigious authors borrowing from their wives.

  Your negative judgments weigh heavy on me. I don’t forget a single one. They accumulate, and end up pushing aside what I am able to say. You do not base these judgments on shared knowledge. It has taken me some thought to realize that you transform a subjective assessment into an objective idea, that you behave like a tyrant. You do not have a high opinion of me since you contradict me and dictate your point of view. You do not want to influence me; that would not be enough. You have begun to remake me, ordering me to sit down at my desk after I have carried out my duties. The way we live, which is so arbitrary and so little defined by me, is weighing me down. We could change our ways, our habits. We are free within our own home. You have too much to lose if something should change because I am the one who gives and you are the one who receives. It’s a wellknown story: the dominant person wants to maintain the status quo. I make the following decision: our house will become a throughway, a pied-à-terre, disorganized but clean enough, where I prepare fast food, of poor quality. There is no decor; the furniture is threadbare. This is of no consequence.

  I fabulate. I think of you as detached from materiality. If you receive lower-quality service you will get used to it, you will not make a fuss. I begin to lose interest in material things. I will read more. I set up a dichotomy between real life and the lives lived in books. All the clichés come back, the separation of body and soul, of material life and abstraction, boundless concepts. I plan to make regular and patient use of the bookshelves and my writing desk. You have no respect for my very real efforts, the hours I spend over my books. You nag, you criticize. You say I lack perseverance, that no one can achieve meaningful results without regular and assiduous activity. Whenever you obsess over your own opinions, I have to reject the idea of a paternal figure, resist the image that comes up in me. My father is possessed by a visceral rage against intellectuals. His violent diatribes are continuous. I sought out a companion who loves books. I did not make a mistake. The authority you assume and the blame you ascribe to me are taking on a paternal tinge. You, too, view me from above, inflicting your discontent and disapproval upon me.

  It’s the pattern. This is the expectation for girls of my generation: a man who doesn’t drink, doesn’t run after other women, and doesn’t swear. I look for a desirable young man who loves and enjoys books. A man who is the enemy of books is a potential enemy of mine. What do you want from a woman? I have no doubt about your desire. Your libido is activated without words. I have to make do without words of love.

  Your father and mother decide to take us to New Brunswick via the Cacouna area where they were born and where we will meet relatives you don’t know. They are happy about our marriage, and about us as a new couple. We drive through quite deserted countryside, along sparsely inhabited concessions, down dusty gravel roads. The steep inclines make me think of winters of never-ending solitude. It is a clear, dry, sunny day. The people, poor but welcoming, show us their possessions. Their root cellar is tidy. They don’t have a refrigerator or a freezer. Your father is enthusiastic; it reminds him of his childhood.

  We have the guestroom on the ground floor next to the kitchen. Golden sunlight penetrates the blind and the curtain. We get up, get dressed. The farmer’s wife, your aunt, says: how lovely she is, Mathieu’s wife. Your mother’s tone is peremptory: be quiet, they’ll hear you. Everyone in the kitchen falls silent.

  You don’t tell me I’m lovely, or even pretty. Your prick replaces your non-existent words. You are fiercely interested in my organs, in the most conventional and repetitive way imaginable.

  I’m the one who gets creative. I teach you my anatomy in order to lead you to the button of my pleasure. You refuse, you mutter, you protest. You say I’m dishonest. You deploy your dick, your prick, your rod, words that used to make such an impression on me when my mother used them. Sex is a reality that is a taboo. We do it, we do not talk about it. I have a silent lover.

  You whine, you complain. You say your physical condition is deteriorating. I hear from a couple of your colleagues that you keep talking about your visits to the doctor. You say you are a diabetic though the doctor has only identified symptoms that may lead to the first stage of the disease. People are talking about the disease as being confirmed. They ask if you are getting enough rest. They talk about a young man who is already burnt out from too much work. Genius comes at the price of precarious, uncertain health. It is a well-known fact that young men with superior intellectual faculties are more likely to suffer from a delicate constitution. The people who have talked to me sympathize with you.

  You suffer from new and uncertain pains. Your heart condition causes you anxiety. Diabetes due to genetic heredity is your greatest worry. You compare my health to yours. My condition is no cause for worry while your fragility requires constant attention, rest, and hours of peace and quiet.

  I sometimes feel that you are the woman in this couple. It is my duty to protect you. Your weak constitution p
rovides you with a further way to exercise your power. I am obliged to recognize how much university teaching demands of you, and that I can expect nothing more.

  I cannot get used to your continuous complaints. I can’t tell the difference between what is serious and what isn’t. A short while ago you told a friend that you need a sabbatical year as soon as possible. Your condition is deteriorating. You have to get better. A normal sick leave is not enough. You laughed: leaving your job and not working at all anymore, that would be the best solution.

  You suggest a crazy idea that seems worth considering. Your work weighs on you. You’re afraid of not being able to find another job that is as prestigious. The life of an artist is precarious. You study the art market. The situation in Montreal is impoverished and miserable when compared to Paris or New York. You assert that in Quebec we are the fourth world of art. You have to ponder your options – the irritating life of university teaching versus the risky adventure of being an artist. You don’t want my advice. Your genius is a sure thing. You declare that your health is poor. You tell our friends that you are obliged to work, but are really an artist.

  You keep putting the life you are living into question. From this I deduce that a man who is brilliant and exceptional should not work and should be supported. You see your work as a professor as an injustice. You make impossible demands.

  I can no longer think or speak in your presence. Your university position is enviable and envied. There are competitors just waiting for you to defect, or simply quit. I have gotten used to you, your nocturnal habits, your silences, your refusal to answer the telephone, the true and false messages I have to give out. You accept your mother when we visit your parents but you grumble about her frequent unwanted phone calls. I let her talk on and on, and don’t interrupt because I know how much this helps her fill her loneliness. You do not adapt to me. I make few demands. You pout, you scold, you argue, you fly into a rage when we have to travel for Christmas or for family parties. You say that if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t go. Our families expect us to participate. It is just as impossible to stay away as it is to imagine an imminent break-up. We belong to them. It is my task to remind you that we are not alone.