Chloe Aridjis: Asunder

I closed the book and went to take a shower, making the water hotter and hotter until I could bear it no longer. Yet right after drying off I went straight back to the book, desirous to continue. New faces rose to meet me, together with some I’d glimpsed earlier, and I began to feel similar to that restless matter, whatever it was, somehow trapped in the wrong casing. Several of the women looked into the camera seductively but others seemed to push away an invisible aggressor; I couldn’t understand why they’d allowed themselves to be photographed.

The rest of the afternoon, squandered. I couldn’t pull myself away. Over and over I thought of leaving the flat but would then pour myself another glass of water, make myself a sandwich, a cup of tea, then another, then another sandwich, more water. Every so often I returned to the living room and circled Daniel’s desk, or rather, the book, half expecting something to drift up from its pages and free me. Finally, at a quarter to five, I forced myself to go for a walk but by then the sun had withdrawn so I stuck to familiar streets in the neighbourhood.

That evening Daniel decided to try out a recipe he recalled from his married years; dinner was pushed back an hour. While he rushed around the kitchen banging, clanging and dropping things, Pierre and I sat in front of the small black and white television whose surface was coated in a sticky layer of dust. Every now and then I got up to change the channel but found nothing I could understand, and Pierre didn’t really seem to be watching. I considered turning up the volume all the way to startle him into action but just as I was leaning forwards to move the dial Daniel announced the food was ready.

Towards the end of our meal, wholewheat pasta in a peculiar mushroom, sesame and avocado sauce, Daniel asked me about my afternoon. I shrugged and said I’d taken a nap and then gone for a walk, to which Daniel replied I must be getting to know the area well. Pierre shook two tablets out of his medicine bottle and knocked them down with wine, his way, I couldn’t help thinking somewhat enviously, of flushing out the day.

Once Pierre had merged with the sofa and our dishes were stacked in the sink, the person to wash them still undecided, I felt I’d waited long enough. Just as Daniel was about to get up from the table and head to his desk for a late-night session, I asked about the book.

‘Which book?’

‘The one with the women,’ I said.

‘Which?’

‘Photographs… Of women.’

‘Oh, the hysterics.’

‘What do you mean?’

Daniel didn’t answer.

‘Were they agitators?’

‘No… ’

Daniel reached for the dented silver case Pierre had left on the table, extracted a cigarette and lit it, though he rarely smoked.

‘Victorian porn?’ I thought of Lucian’s abundant collection.

He laughed.

‘Then what do you mean?’

‘No, as I said, they were hysterics.’

‘Why do you call them that?’

‘I don’t. Their doctor did.’

‘They all had the same doctor?’

‘Yes, they formed part of his collection.’

I couldn’t tell whether he was having a laugh.

‘Daniel, what are you talking about?’

Lowering his voice a little though Pierre was way past hearing, he began to tell me about a doctor who at the end of the nineteenth century ran the largest neurological clinic in Europe at a hospital in Paris, a former gunpowder factory that was now starting to produce, one could say, a new kind of explosive, and how this doctor called the place his living museum of pathology, with a constantly updated collection.

‘And this is the catalogue?’

‘I guess you could say that… he manipulated his patients to pose in different ways to illustrate states of hysteria. And then took pictures.’

His cigarette was more than half ash without him having drawn on it more than twice. He put it out and pushed the saucer to the other side of the table, as if disgusted by it.

‘Why do you have this book?’

‘Research.’

‘They turn you on, don’t they?’

‘What?’

‘You find them attractive.’

I was about to mention the wayward eye at the Drunken Duck when he leaned forwards and asked darkly, ‘Marie, what were you doing at my desk?’

‘You were out.’

‘So?’

‘You’re always out.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘And when you’re home you’re with Pierre.’

‘He’s our guest.’

‘No one invited him.’

He threw a glance in Pierre’s direction.

‘You’re welcome to come with us on our walks.’

‘I don’t want to.’

He shrugged and rose from the table.

‘I’m tired, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

I said goodnight and remained seated, watching him limp off down the corridor and into his room.

Once in bed and fuelled by darkness, my thoughts ran wild as I imagined women pinned down while men gathered round to capture signals and frame their unrest. I thought about this doctor’s gaze and how he’d reduced his patients to wraiths, the headboards of their beds like tombstones and the inscriptions on their pillows rewritten. Of female lives condensed into a series of dramatic gestures. The male gaze, nothing seemed free of it. It plundered the living and the dead, manipulating bodies cold and stiff or warm and supple; in either case, depriving them of tranquillity.

I pulled the duvet up around me, half willing Daniel to reappear at the door though I knew that that night he wouldn’t, and tried to beckon sleep as I lay with the ghosts of the former couple and the ghosts of the hysterics and the image of our guest stretched out on the sofa, the flat becoming more populated with every passing hour.

Given the fog in which he moved, I was surprised when Pierre announced that his last day in Paris was some kind of Journée du patrimoine , similar to our National Heritage Day, and suggested we go and see something old and stately. To this day I don’t know how he came to choose Challement, a hamlet in Burgundy with a little-known chateau, whether he’d been given a pamphlet or was told by a friend.

We set out at ten and bought three tickets to Clamecy, the station nearest the chateau. Daniel surprised me by coming to sit by my side while Pierre took the seat opposite us. He pulled out a newspaper in German, opened it to the middle and frowned as he began reading something in the upper right-hand corner. Once the train left Paris we rushed through the suburbs and before long were hurtling past wall after wall, or rather one continuous wall, of pine trees, thousands of green needles made one by velocity as they filled our windows. Daniel nodded off, his head resting on a shoulder, but I was eager to stay awake to the scenery. Every now and then Pierre would reach into his jacket pocket and extract a liquorice coin and slip it into his mouth, making loud smacking noises from behind his newspaper.

After a while the trees fell away, revealing a second landscape hanging parallel to the first: that of the granite sky, which seemed suspended by a few rusted threads that could at any moment snap, leaving this heavy lid to collapse on to the fields and vineyards blanched by winter.

Daniel had arranged for a guide. At Clamecy station a man was waiting for us, a tall figure in jeans and a parka slouched against his Renault. He was fluent in English and as he drove us down the country road, rolling up his window as the sky fought for expression, he explained he’d worked in Dover for two years.

Off the main road we turned into a smaller one, then past a copse of trees, up a tiny hill, and towards a large piece of land enclosed by a low crumbling wall. The car came to a halt. We got out, Pierre last, and were led through a gate hanging off its hinges and into a thickly overgrown garden. Its paths were no longer distinct, the original layout blurred by a profusion of dandelions, thistles, nettles and other weeds. There was a brackish pond hemmed in by reeds and flagstone. Grass half a metre high. Overturned bottles and black rubbish bags with dirty rainwater in their dents. The open jaws of a pair of corroded garden scissors. A few metres in the distance, an old car with missing tyres.