Lily Hoang: Invisible Women

Freud asked, or imaged himself asking, “In all your travels and experiences, did you ever happen to see another woman resembling this one?” Freud, while asking this, imagined the girl and her pristine smile, the clarity in her speech, and how quickly this transformed on the introduction of a plant. Before giving her to Lou, he had attempted to trick her with a recreation of a flower, made of silk and the finest scents, and she played with the false flower as though it were a doll.

“No,” Lou answered, “I should never have imagined a woman like this could exist.”

The doctor tried to peer into her eyes. The Russian lowered her gaze, or imagined herself lowering her gaze. Freud remained silent for the whole day.

After sunset, on the terraces of his home, Lou Andreas-Salome expounded to the doctor the results of her missions. As a rule, the Great Freud concluded his day savoring these tales with half-closed eyes until his first yawn indicated his necessity for rest. As quickly as his first yawn appeared, the old man would retreat to his bed. But this time Freud seemed unwilling to give in to weariness. “Tell me of another woman,” he insisted.

“There is a woman down the hall who has skin that flutters like loose rags,” Lou begins saying, enumerating her names and customs and wares. Her repository could be called inexhaustible, but now she was the one who had to give in. Dawn had broken when she said: “Doctor, now I have told you about all the women I know.”

“There is still one of which you never speak.”

Lou Andreas bowed her head.

“Yourself,” Freud said.

Lou smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”

The doctor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”

And Andreas said: “Every time I describe a woman I am saying something about myself.”

“When I ask you about other women, I want to hear about them. And about you when I ask you about yourself.”

“To distinguish the other women’s qualities, I must speak of a first woman that remains implicit. For me, it is myself.”

“You should then begin each tale of your women from the departure of self, describing yourself as you are, all of you, not omitting any truth as you acknowledge it.”

Outside, the morning sun was brutal. Even though they both wanted some relief, there was little hope from the early light.

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Andreas said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing myself all at once, if I speak of myself. Or perhaps, speaking of other women, I have already lost myself, little by little.”

“It seems as though you’ve been speaking of nothing but memory.”

“It always seemed to me: since our body must play for us a double role, since it is just as much ‘we ourselves’ as also at the same time the immediate piece of external reality, to which we are in the most various ways forced to adjust ourselves in exactly the same fashion as to all the rest of the external world — for this reason it can only accompany us a little way along the road of our narcissistic behavior.”

When Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas first began corresponding, he asked her for an image of her likeness in the form of a photograph. The Great Freud asked in the meekest manner, but Lou Andreas could hardly decline his offer. When she did provide him with her photograph, she prefaced it with the acknowledgement that although the picture captured her image, there was no connection between the still figure encased in sepia and herself. In that way, there would always remain permutations of self, never the same woman, the perpetual shape-shifter.

There is always mucous dripping from the eyes of the woman down the hall. It grosses us out. We wish she would go to the doctor and get it fixed. We tell her, “Woman, go to the doctor! Let him fix your eyes!”

She says, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”

The woman down the hall is not old. In fact, she’s a good looking woman, nice body, strong features, except for that yellowish mucous that will not dry from her face. We have seen it travel down her face, past the soft curves of her breasts, and all the way to the cup of her knees. It’s disgusting. It’s repulsive.

We tell her, “Woman, you are not such an ugly woman. There is no reason for you to be so alone, so hideous with your lonely eyes.”

She says, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”

The woman down the hall often tells us stories about where her eyes have been, how if only we had lived the life these poor, old eyes had lived, we would understand. She tells us elaborate stories about how she came to own these eyes, how they did not always belong to her, that she can remember a time when she was not so blessed and afflicted. She says that they were a gift, but we can’t imagine such a thing being a present. We can’t think of how one would wrap something so moist and spherical.

So we tell her this. We call bullshit on her story and the woman down the hall, she uses her fingers to scoop an eye out from her socket and there, right there underneath that mucous eye, there’s another eye! Under one set of her eyes, she has another. And somehow, we’re surprised when she tells us again, for the five thousandth time, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”

The woman down the hall dreams of Dora. Every night, when she closes her eyes, she becomes a frightened girl, lying on that infamous couch, which is actually just an old leather thing like you’d find in any old house. The woman down the hall dreams Dora’s dreams. They’re not especially spectacular. In fact, she does not even know they are Dora’s dreams. She thinks they are her own, only in the dreamscape, her name becomes Dora. Sometimes, on accident, she calls herself Dora, because it is easy to become confused. Because even when banal, Dora has a vastly more exciting consciousness than reality.

“I find it pleasurable,” the woman down the hall tells us, and our intestines roll abrupt somersaults and backflips. We’re sure we’re going to either throw up or drool. Somehow, all at once, we’re disgusted and turned on. It shouldn’t be this way. It’s not right, but there is something truly compelling about her and all her perky smiles filled with sunrays and butterflies and that cold metal room with those old cold cocks and that she finds pleasure in it, well, that’s not our fault at all.

The day that man appropriated the woman down the hall as his object, the sky dropped tornadoes onto our heads to tell us to help her, but we did not understand the message. Then, the oceans filled our lungs with salty water until we could not breath, but even then, we could not get it. Finally, the earth shook the word HELP in big, bold letters, and we ran. We ran with legs we did not have, legs of clean muscle, and we arrived to her screams. Then, we punched with arms we did not have, arms of passion, and we threw that man away from her body, our friend, our woman who lives right down the hall from us. She laid there, legs apart, and a cyclone funneled him away forever. We didn’t care to turn and watch him fly out.