Кристин Анго: Incest

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.

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.