Incest

I call her Marie, her name is Marie-Christine. Yesterday, my psychoanalyst: Who chose your name? In Christine there’s an allusion to Christ. I talked about my mission, my drive to save others, to puncture their usual life preservers so that they’ll save themselves with me or on their own. Who chose your name, “my God!” I said. I’d just understood. Your father or your mother? My God. My mother wanted to call me Marie-Christine. My father said: No Marie. I got married and then separated. A husband, a mari, calf, cow, pig, or a Marie. No husband, no father, no man, no life preserver, the whole kit and caboodle, cousin Nadine, NC, haine c’est, hate is, the girlfriend, all that’s dragging behind her. I went to see her yesterday and called her “my treasure.” When she was little, the safe was kept in her room. Her mother’s diamonds, their cash. In a little waist pack to buy an apartment. A diamond merchant in Paris, make an appointment, appraise the rocks. A large house for the two of us thanks to them. “You should sell them,” NC would tell her. Her cousin had met a diamond merchant. She gave me her father’s notebooks again. I was supposed to be named Marie-Christine too, in one of those families that throws money out the windows for the maid to pick up at the foot of the grapevine. The fruits of labor. Paintings on the walls. Léonore, my love, my gold. I’m in her room today, seated at the green table, a card table, where I’m writing. Through the window I see the garden, the oleander, the palm trees, the magnolia. At the back of the garden, my father watches the road to Clermont that borders my garden. Mon trésor, mon amour, mon or, Léonore. My treasure, my love, my gold, Léonore. My Léonore, my treasure. My treasure, my gold. No Marie, no marriage, no gold. The safe was in her room. Doctors were paid in cash at the time. Her father gave her mother money, which she put in the safe with the jewelry and other valuables every night. This house is crushing me, it was built by my grandfather, a doctor in Canet, himself a doctor’s son, who was also a doctor’s son, and so on for generations. Books and medical courses piled up, going back centuries. I had a fit of rage in Miaurey (Niger). We had gone to see the last herd of giraffes. Children came running from all directions. Since the first day at the Esplanade, I had told her it was all Greek to me. Knowing just one word – “gift” – and repeating it constantly, with their skinniness and swollen bellies. Maybe she’ll give me a bike so I can be more independent. She was born in Oran, the fellaghas, the bombs, an Arab killed right on her doorstep, and the beach house, hours with her mother, walking at least two hours on the beach every day. We’ll need a big house, a very big one, at least two hundred and fifty square meters. To shelter my tongue when it’s licking, I like the taste of blood, I even use it as an unguent at the same time. Everything gets turned inside out like a glove. Why is the devil’s tongue pictured as a flame that splits like two fused metal fingers that are separating? I hold on to the banister to climb the stairs to the lawyer’s office (my blood pressure is 80, 90 at the most), so that he can effectively complete the separation of bodies between Claude and me. The gold is separating. I feel nauseous. I’m dizzy. A herd of humans looking at giraffes. Suddenly I asked myself what the hell I was doing there. She gave me all that, the letter from Africa, her father’s notebooks, to help me get over my writer’s block, because I couldn’t work. I gave them back to her, it’s over. I was going crazy: the gap between outside and my room. And yet, I could have drunk the dregs. Even if, when you’re not fully developed it’s hard to get excited about something wet. Like a glove, it’s true, it can always be reversed. It’s true. That’s good. The term gloves fits better than camps. I see the stitches. I turn it inside out. I move the cock, I see the spot. I penetrate. My fingers become a cock. Cock, coda, tip, tail, that’s how you tell a dog’s breed. There’s no breed, just an odor. The mucous membranes, the caress, I’m not the one caressing, it’s the liquid moving under my fingers. Misty, Muzil. There it is, sadness, but also laughter. Ultimately, I don’t give a shit about the giraffes, their big eyes. I end up feeling like an unwanted spectator, feeling rejected, superfluous, Bénédicte writes me, I feel I’m in the way, I’m not a part of it, I’m there almost against my will and against yours, I resented you for the discomfort I felt. You build a wall, a wall of glass, transparent but impassable, exposing yourself the entire time. You put yourself callously on display, you don’t invite others to look, you don’t make the slightest gesture of welcome. The circle of solitude closes. We’re frozen, we can neither escape nor come into contact with you. Reading you, my stomach began to hurt, my limbs, my whole body and I asked myself “is this really living? So much darkness, no way out, so little light? It seems to me that you forget the light.” And my treasure, my love, my gold?