*
‘Isn’t it
strange that in French, l’amour et la mort – love and death – are near
homonyms?’
‘And what do
you make of it?’
‘Think about
it: all the love metaphors in French, un
coup de foudre, la petite mort, etc.,
are death-related.’
‘In English
too. To fall for someone, is a bit like falling from grace.’
‘It must be
that love carries from within the seeds of its own destruction.’
‘You mean love
is an impossibility?’
‘In a way,
yes. One way or another, lovers always end up breaking up.’
‘And why is
that?’
‘Because love
is an illusion, which lasts as long as you want to believe in it.’
‘I am not much
of a believer in idols. But I believe in the disfigurement of death.’
‘You must have
had a lot of lovers, then.’
‘I did. And
killed every single one of them – not literally, no of course.’
‘I
understand.’
‘I bear the
trace of their absence on my skin, like so many scars, to remind myself that
life is transient, so that when my body decomposes, stitches will be the only
thing remaining as a proof of my past existence. So that a pattern may emerge
out of it all that finally makes sense to others.’
*
After they had
made love, he took a long, cooling shower, to wash away the pain he now felt.
They had just met, and it may be years till they met again. Tonight was to be
their last night. He would miss those interminable, absurd conversations of
theirs, but most of all he would miss her body. There was always a lack at the
core of his being that nothing would fill – not even the act of sex. He
crouched under the water jet, one arm against the wall to keep from sinking
further below, and cried silently. He had not thought separation would be that
hard.
Her face
caught his as he came out of the bathroom and stood by the doorframe, his wet
skin glowing with a strange intensity. She loved the tallness and slimness of
his limbs, as well as the curviness of his waist. There was something almost
feminine and fragile about him that had attracted her immediately. She could
see through the rough edges of his character and the solitude he seemed to
carry everywhere like a badge of pride. The face she now saw badly masked a
confusion of emotions with a false air of nonchalance. Even though she knew
next to nothing about him, and despite those many months of sporadic epistolary
exchange, and much more recently, feverish love-making, she could guess he was
a bad liar. Or perhaps it was the psychologist in her.
*
‘I will miss
you when you leave,’ she said flatly.
‘Like a leaf
falling from a tree.’ Hiding distress
with cheap poetry, she thought.
‘So we must
drink to your bright future, Doc!’ Hiding
sadness with forced joviality, he thought.
‘I will go
fetch that wine you love, O sweet-sour elixir of forbidden passions…what is it
called again? Cap Shiraz?’
‘You wouldn’t
forget!’
‘It doesn’t
matter – and then he added – his voice resonating from the kitchen with ominous
portent, yet in a such a way that pretended to be noncommittal. She heard the
unmistakable tone of alarm more clearly than if he had uttered those words in
front of her: ‘Nothing really matters,
unless you follow me to Paris, then you can have all the wines you’ve ever
dreamt of.’
When he
returned with the wine and two glasses, there was no trace of lightness on her
face anymore – this same lightness of being which made her leap instead of
walking, declaim instead of talking, somersault instead of mechanical fucking.
‘What can you possibly
mean? You have a “girlfriend”, remember?’ Those
damned suspension brackets of his, she thought as she mimicked brackets
with her forefingers, who is he trying to
fool? I am the bracket in his life, a supplement to validate his delusions of
grandeur. And I was mostly fine with it. So what now? Where is he getting at?
‘I’m sorry.
I’m not getting anywhere. I will not drag you into this’ – he made a vague
gesture with his hands – ‘nothingness.’ Typical
of males, to take with one hand what you give with the other, love reduced to
exchange value. Yet another case of
bad romance. She tried to refocus.
‘Don’t get all
sentimental on me. Tomorrow you’ll be gone. Let us at least try to enjoy those
last hours together.’
There was
something almost masculine about her demeanor, in the sultriness of her voice, the
affirmation of her tone, the detonating warmness of her laugh, like dynamite, the
strong features of her face, and her long, dark straight hair, which she had
once shaved, along with that leather jacket he remembered seeing her wear – not
to look the stereotypical Asian female part, perhaps? Yet he was able to see
through all of it, past the racial element, past the persona she must have
built with such minutia, and toward the marrow of her deeper self – what made
her unique and distinct from all the rest. Or perhaps it was the novelist in
him.
They sipped
their wine in silence. He lit a cigarette. She snuggled against him and he took
her in his arms. It must have been close to midnight. This was going to be a
long night.
*
‘You did not
really mean what you said earlier, did you – about Paris?’
‘There is le dire and le vouloir dire, in-between which lies the irreducible slippage of
the non-dit.’
‘There is more
to it than the treachery of language. The heart itself pulsates with half-lies
and half-truths, in that fraction of time between one beat and another, when
life itself is on hold, suspended belief, foolish expectations, a kiss that
takes the lover’s breath away, for ever or so it seems…’
‘…and in the
act of dying-and-being-reborn, each time made anew, the moment I saw you,
scrapping off my old skin…’
‘You only saw
what you wanted to see.’
‘And what is
it that I saw?’
‘You saw an
exotic woman, easy-early bird of prey, to satisfy your lust of the Orient.
Nothing but a number – one of the many students you fucked, Prof. Yet you saw
more, I will not deny it.’
‘What else did
I see?’
‘You saw a supplément d’âme, not a soul mate; in
that way only could you possibly have loved me – that night when we first had
sex and you dared whisper the three-word phrase right to my ear.’
‘What else?’
‘You saw
someone you could escape with, from the impossibility of true love, Love with a
capital L, which keeps eluding you, I, all of us.’
‘You saw
chronic dissatisfaction at your doorstep, you saw me in your dream while you
were fucking your femme, enchained by
displacement.’
‘You saw those
phantom limbs of the past returning to haunt you, when you had thought, albeit with
bracketed irony, that finally, you may have ‘settled’ with someone, only to
find that that someone is – me.’
‘Is that all?’
‘You also saw
I wanted you, and you could not resist the call. Now look at you, pondering on
whether or not to leave your ‘girlfriend’ (mind the brackets) – for me (mind
the dash) as if weighing sundry fruits on a balance at the cashier.’
*
He met his ‘girlfriend’,
which he had always been careful to call a friend – hence the brackets – almost
a year ago, and thought himself ‘freed’ from the web-like contingency of
relationships. Until he answered the other’s call. Until quite quickly, what he
had feared and desired at the same time occurred: the supplement had mutated
into something of an altogether different nature, and he could not distinguish
centre from periphery anymore. Until finally, a new center risked displacing
the old one.
She remembered
the first time he entered the classroom, and declared he was their French
teacher. She always had something of a fantasy – no more than a whim – for
teachers, especially French! Imagine! And when he asked her for coffee, she
wore a yellow skirt and black boots to impress him. He, being unable to avert
his eyes from the folds of her neck – and those ear piercings of hers! She,
wishing the moment would never end, yet all the while reassuring herself that
this was all a bit of fun. Yet here they were now, searching for each other’s
eyes, debating on the meaning of love. Lying on that bed of his, which in so
brief a time, they had learned to make theirs.
‘What did I see?’ she asked, and turned her face
upwards, toward the ceiling, away from his arresting gaze. But there was no
escape, for the masquerade was long overdue, the act of reckoning before them
both. For they must kill that gnawing ‘thing’ standing between them once and for
all – call it love if you like – or somehow resurrect it, to then propel it
onto a whole new plane before it left them with nothing but an empty shell. For
while both knew love was a fraud, there was the hope that in the process of
this act of perjury, something more would be revealed, something worth
pursuing, although they would have denied such a thing existed.
‘You saw an
exotic young man whose distance, whose very foreignness, made you feel at home
– yet another act of displacement.’
‘You saw my
vacillations as a reflection of your own uncertainties, just as you saw in my
‘freedom’ of choice a confirmation of your own ‘enslavement’ into the role of
supplement.
‘What else did
I see?’
‘You saw
French romance when this is Australia, you saw a successful academic when
success in itself is vain, you saw an accomplished man in place of a frightened
child, yet you saw more and I thank you for that.’
‘I saw in the
novels we shared a pathway to those fictive selves we had imagined for
ourselves, and which now reside in me, in you, and to a great extent define who
we really are.’
*
‘Come,’ she
took him by the hand and drew the blanket over. ‘We must bury the dead: Is it not
what love-making stands for in the face of the severed birthstrings of affect?
Do you feel how cold I am?’
‘Like fucking
a corpse, yes.’
‘All the pores
of my flappy scaly skin oozing with the rotten smell of your departure.’
‘We will
remain – remains.’
‘Keep lying,
with me, to me, or else my blood will freeze.’
‘Take me.’
‘With you,
from you – fort da.’
‘Between désire d’amour and désire de mort.’
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