Pastis Love

My hacking cough is back. April in Tbilisi is very wet. I’ve been losing my temper often. Devoted readers of this blog might remember a passage I translated from my grandfather’s novel, L’Abolition. You can find it here. My granddad was Russian, but he moved to Paris when he was four, and spoke 8+ languages. L’Abolition he wrote in French. He worked as an interpreter for the UN, but he was also a writer. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer, he burnt everything he’d written in a bin in his garden - he was a perfectionist, my grandma says. L’Abolition survives him because it was published by Gallimard in 1978.

This passage comes much later in the novel, when Alcandre, the hero, has already long been separated from his earthy girlfriend Aubépine (he catches her having sex doggy-style with a Nazi soldier in the woods). He’s now living in Paris, and reunites unexpectedly with Aubépine at a train station. They begin living together. Alcandre’s mother dies, and they have the house to themselves.

These passages produce in me equal quantities of horror and amusement. They concern the domestic life of this couple: Alcandre, who is apt to engage with things purely through symbol, to idealise, manages at first to adjust to the facts of living with a woman. I had a conversation with a man recently about heterosexual domestic life. His conclusion was that familiarity breeds contempt, that mystery must be preserved at all costs. It would be unwise for the father to remain in the delivery room, etc.

I’m convinced that these chapters are satirical. I never met my grandfather, so who can say, but I am alive now to the kind of dry irony that runs through the book. Alcandre begins to worship his connection to ‘the cycles of the cosmos’ through the menstrual cycle of his young wife; he accepts and comes to love her physicality. He also praises marriage as the last remaining relic of slavery… comparing Aubépine to the little flute-playing slave-girl, carved of stone at the foot of Aphrodite on the Ludovisi Throne. Then suddenly his rapture dries up, and Aubépine becomes intolerably mundane. He’s repulsed. It’s like, every woman’s worst nightmare. I can’t bear that kind of intellectual misogyny, I’d rather be dunked in the river as a witch… I wonder if you’ll agree it’s taking the piss out of this kind of man. It’s just like, too much otherwise. P.S. Note the particularly beautiful pastis metaphor at the end…

He began to love precisely that which had formerly been so hard for him to tolerate: the indisputable presence of Aubépine’s body, its existence delineated and asserted by a convergence of sensory impressions; in short, he tasted the pleasures of finitude. Holding her at a distance so as to have the whole of her before him, he followed the incline of her shoulders with his gaze, followed the elegant hollowed convexity, when she’d doze off on her side, between the line of her ribs and the ridge of her hip, he’d climb back up along the curve of her thigh, foreshortened, to her folded knees, to the bloom of her breasts, resting now, to the oval of her chin, the childish nose adorned with freckles, and her ringlets, less dense than before; the palm of his hand in turn tracing this circular route along her skin, returning like Magellan’s ship at the end of its undulating glide to the point of departure. [the way this sentence travels in fits and starts across the page in imitation of his hand, come on!! he was a brilliant writer]

Little by little a cautious tenderness connected him with the young woman in the intimacy of communal life, and not symbolically, but materially, as if her body had become a part of his own, an organ, invisible and forgotten in the daytime but born anew each night, with every sunset recreating the space required for its existence. And so he came to live with her, from within, to live with her urges, her obscure pains, the subtle variations in her mood and her temperature, to the point of discerning as she did the fragile communications offered by her sense of smell and touch; and, assimilating himself to the pulse of life in this little rediscovered part of himself, more sensitive than his own body, he attuned to the rhythm of his lunar clock, and through the mediation of Aubépine’s body, participated in the perpetual alternations of the cosmic cycle.

For these lowly domestic facts, the bad moods, the blood-stained serviettes, were now teaching him, in tandem with the inadequacies of his virile nature, stretched as it was on a linear course towards nothingness, about the placid wisdom of eternal renewal, its tireless orbit, and the certitude of the infinite in the finite.

Lying in Aubépine’s arms, so close did he feel to his reabsorption into cyclical eternity, that a nervous caution prevented him from abandoning himself to it. A sudden dart of heart-rending anguish shook him at the threshold of that blind paradise, as sometimes happens when one notices its shortcomings. The nights were brief. The acid of self-awareness began to corrode the substance of his happiness.

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As he stood up to open the shutters onto La Plaine, as he lit his cigarette, looking at Aubépine curled up under the crumpled duvet, Alcandre was cast back into finality. The tiles of the pavilions and the leaves of the fruit trees glistened under a light rain. Smoke from the factories mounted in twisted columns to bear the weight of a low-hanging sky. What an effort it would take him to shatter the apparent coherence of this morose landscape […] How could he recognise the little flute-player in this messy-haired woman, pulling the covers over her head? Alien Aubépine, distant Aubépine, aloof as she sheltered in the ruins of her sleep, (<3) beginning now to live her own life, to think her little unknown thoughts. The treasures of the night were being snatched, roughly, from Alcandre’s grasp.

And so began the unhappiness with Aubépine, the separation, the equality, the conflict. The little slave, the nighttime flute-player had transformed, at first light, into a stubborn housewife. “I have my little ideas,” Aubépine would say, and, easy as they might be to satisfy, Alcandre would stiffen with impatience, like a monarch, benefactor of his people, when faced with a petition hindering his plans. Aubépine’s little ideas, which she defended with a sly and tireless sweetness, this evidence of her alterity, of an existence independent and mutinous of the willowy laws that dictated their nights, began to live inside of Alcandre like a physical pain, a little tumour that one tries to ignore but which reappears and establishes itself, insistent, ominous, to disturb any moments of happiness.

It began the very morning of their marriage. They left the town hall and Alcandre led her to a cafe and ordered two pastis.

“I don’t like pastis,” said Aubépine, sweetly.

It had never occurred to Alcandre that this tender little body, this cloud borne of his own thought, could be the repository of tastes and habits unknown to him, the subject of autonomous desires. “I don’t like pastis,” this sentence, which resembled exactly the poison it evoked, clouded and diluted the transparency of Alcandre’s happiness.