The Stalinist's Wife

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.