Julia Kristeva - Teresa, My Love - An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

For he did not stop at “love” and efforts “to please me” with gifts of books. We were at the dinner-date stage. I accepted the invitation, just to see what he was after. Never in our long and intermittent history had I thought of him in any but a professional capacity, but pieces of his story started coming back to me as I sat opposite him, nursing my drink, in the Café Marly overlooking the sculpture courtyard at the Louvre. The erstwhile handsome rogue and shameless philanderer had been kicked out by his wife — what, five years ago? — because she couldn’t stand any more of his Monster Baby scenes. To the surprise of tout-Paris, that microcosm of media-savvy glitterati, his wife went and married a great but obscure biologist at the INSERM medical research institute, without either celebrity status or private income — not much of a playboy either, at best a boat in the marina of La Rochelle, thanks to which I numbered him among my summer acquaintances. As expected, the diffident scientist had found safe haven in the arms of Stéphanie formerly Zonabend, henceforth Coblence. He has found happiness, actually, if the beaming face of their little girl, nearly three, is anything to go by. She skips along the strand at the Île de Ré under the frankly spiteful glances of the readers — mostly women — who feign an interest in the output of Zone Books.

So Bruno found himself alone, not really noticing, rapidly swamped by feminine attentions as calculating as they were tiresome. At length, having escaped this enterprising harem “for the sake of liberty and the Enlightenment,” as he put it, he settled into a comfortable, carefree celibacy. His only ambition now, his great priority, was to consolidate his position as a tough businessman. “The only publisher who doesn’t lose money by reading books”: quite a feat, I must say, in our times of runaway illiteracy. It won him respect across the board in the trade. Meanwhile he kept a proud eye from afar on the education of his twin sons, students at a prestigious business school across the Atlantic.

I thought he seemed shy, for once. His soulful eyes, like those of a romantic youth, slid surreptitiously from my lips to my cleavage and back, but sought more often to plumb my own gaze in search of goodness knows what depths. He had not, however, shed his old go-getting energy, his knack for knowing when to push. On this occasion he made bold to tell me about his boys, signaling intimacy. They had jointly won the sought-after Humboldt Prize, involving a training course in India related to the famous microcredits system that had earned its deviser a Nobel Prize. At the same time (“and this, Sylvia, is what matters!”) the experience had led the pair to discover Buddhism.

“You see, Thomas and Michaël are staunch rationalists, like their father, whose agnosticism you can rely on.” He took a long sip of Château-Lagune, closing his eyes beatifically. “But then they get to visit all kinds of holy places, temples, and monasteries. They talk to gurus, how about that? They even met up with one of their Israeli cousins, the son of my aunt in Haifa. The guy’s living in an ashram in Pondicherry, for goodness sakes! Mind you, what with those violent God-squad crazies in the Middle East not to mention our precious ally Bush and his neocons, I don’t blame the Israelis for getting hung up on Eastern spirituality, do you? First India, then Japan, it’ll be China next…Not your field, you say? Sure, it’s not mine either, but I’ve started learning Sanskrit, did I tell you? Absolutely, been doing it for a while now. No, I didn’t rediscover my faith, the future belongs to ecumenism, it’s just a matter of intellectual curiosity. At the same time I’m keeping up my Hebrew, in order to follow the teaching of a spiritual master who looks at the great currents within Judaism and knows how to put them across to people like me…So when I hear you talk about mysticism…Do you know that book by Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism ? 2Absolutely essential, my dear…Of course you have, but allow me to suggest you read it again, you know how these things mature with every reading, however many, in my experience…How about his Zohar ? No? But that’s the very pinnacle, the ne plus ultra , you absolutely must, it’s all in there…Excuse me? I’m being ridiculous? But I thought you were letting me know that…well, that all that was important to you, and so I thought to myself I wasn’t so alone after all.” It was my turn to drain another glass of wine. Bruno wasn’t alluding merely to an exchange of spiritual intimations. “Of course, I mean, you approach the issue from a Christian perspective, and that interests me too…You must agree that Agamben’s book on Saint Paul is his best by far? I should have published that, don’t you think?…Oh, I can’t tell you anything, you’re so much more knowledgeable than I am, with your training and your female sensibility, goes without saying. And yet, how can I put this, a complicity between you and me is worth saying…I think so. A new alliance, if you like, in Hebrew they call it akeda , sacrificial alliance, or berit , over circumcision…Now you mustn’t feel that I’m trying to influence you, far from it, you write it your way, like you always have. For me it’s the diversity of approaches that counts, you know me, Mister Multi-pronged Attack…”

He floundered and flailed, absurdly and endearingly, and I felt he was being genuine. Was this really the same Bruno I had known ever since my Duras book? The cynical big shot with his marketing jargon, the wizard of publishing scoops with an air of the soixante-huitard recycled into a credible CEO? He wanted to talk and talk, certainly not to listen to me; his outpourings were rambling rather than erudite. I liked him better that way; I let him ramble on. When finally he got around to his Charolais steak I managed to slip in edgewise some details of Teresa’s life. Her Marrano grandfather, the court case over her father and uncles’ right to call themselves hidalgos, her ambiguous friendship with John of the Cross, her dalliance with Fr. Gratian. I’d unplugged my “Sigmund” antenna, it seemed more appropriate to bolster his male yearning for complicity.

“Absolutely, absolutely,” he nodded absently, as if in a dream, “that’s it, our subject. You don’t mind me calling it ours ? But look here: what exactly did ‘love’ mean, to these people? We don’t know anymore, do we? And that’s the problem. The ‘Hiroshima of love,’ you said the other day, if I remember rightly? There you are: we don’t know the first thing about it, we’ve lost the taste for it…I hope you’re enjoying your fish?”

We had gone out into the Tuileries court. A biting wind drove snow against the steep glass of Pei’s Pyramid , blew white flakes into my hair, my shoes, in a giddy vortex of lights. Bruno drew me close to shield me from the blizzard breaking over Paris. Then he slowly turned my face toward his, found my lips, and I lost consciousness of all but the taste of his mouth. Fragrance of blond tobacco, enveloping saliva that dilates me. A burning sap creeps through my chest, flows into my belly, floods my sex, my thighs. My legs have gone. I want to gulp down everything, this man, the wind, the wine, the museum and its auspicious scars, I am pleasure open wide. Bruno feels it, feels me, comes closer still, his face vanishes, now the whirlwind of memory that raked it vaporizes it into a mist of sleet. His tongue is still inhabiting me, I am fluid, I will not cry out, I will not fall, I strain, I melt, he licks the roof of my mouth, my cheeks, he holds me back, we start again. Not me, not him, it isn’t us, this kiss belongs to nobody; someone or something beyond ourselves courses through it. Who is kissing whom? The Louvre itself participates in this exorbitant desire, and Notre Dame as well perhaps, and the Bernini sculpture of Louis XIV on horseback nearby, and the Pyramid , and definitely the Carrousel mall, and why not the Great Architect while we’re about it; and then there’s the Ganges, and my readings of La Madre, and the complete Freud, and Gershom Scholem, and Agamben, and the installations crafted by the Beguines — everything and nothing, in this snowstorm that’s painting the city white.