Incest

The object is not essential, what counts is the demand for love. I was asking her to spend Christmas with me. For a while, I thought I could master it. I said to myself “she’ll come back to Montpellier on the 25th, we’ll celebrate Christmas on the 25th.” I don’t like to celebrate Christmas on the 25th, I don’t like eating a big lunch. I can’t do celebrations at noon. A poor man’s Christmas, playing catch-up, the real celebration having been on Christmas Eve, I couldn’t, the foie gras from the evening before would still be weighing on her stomach, and the champagne, a magnum of Ruinart, in Paris, the real feast with twenty friends, and the godchildren, the godchildren, the godchildren, especially the godchildren, “me, I don’t have any children, of course, I was touched when Nadine asked me two times to be godmother to her children,” the children she feels closest to, whereas Léonore… if writing were visual I’d make the gesture of a finger tapping on a cheek swollen with air, which means ‘that’s rich,’ but she doesn’t give a shit. Léonore isn’t a part of her family and never will be, she doesn’t give a shit. Léonore’s just a little girl who is nothing to her, as they say. She gets a day-after Christmas, after the most urgent needs have been satisfied, the cousin, honor where honor is due, and the godchildren, the crown princes who will inherit her legacy as first cousins, closest kin, whereas Léonore is nothing to her and never will be anything to her. Never. Less even than her dog. The cleaning woman, the cook, the little poor child. She has never taken Léonore for a walk alone, even though she takes her dog out everyday. Alone with Léonore, she doesn’t want any part of it, not to the movies, not for a walk when I’m not there, not even going to pick her up from school, not once. For Christmas, it’s a Barbie doll put under the tree “from Marie-Christine” who’s celebrating in Paris after having trawled through the boutiques on the Boulevard Saint-Germain with her cousin who gets a forty percent discount at Prada and Jil Sander, while Dominique Quentin has to pay full price, as do I. It’s disgusting, clothing designers don’t care, just like everybody else.

Afterward I said to myself “no, I could never go meet her, getting out of the plane, exhausted from Christmas Eve, from the celebration, the real Christmas celebration, the night before. I get seconds.” We were meant to leave for Rome on December 28th. I’d reserved a hotel near the Piazza del Populo, the same week she’d promised to do everything she could to stay in Montpellier, and with Léonore and me. She hadn’t really wanted to, that’s what she says now, I’d pressured her, she had kept warning me, she wouldn’t do it if it would cause a scene. Scenes, conflicts. I tell her, Rome, I don’t want to go to anymore. It’s December 4th, our tickets are canceled. The hotel was called Hotel Quantin. We’re breaking up because she loves Nadine Casta and I love Dominique Quentin. It’s a real philosophical system, with a proper foundation, what causes me distress is the famous “insidious development” and the subjection to internal causes and that continual progression that doesn’t stop once the trigger sets it in motion, the engine starts, and it cannot be stopped. It’s in motion. Not a single phone call from Marie-Christine, it has now been more than ten days since the delusions set in, not a single phone call, not one visit, was able to stop me. The system is delirious, enduring, and impervious. I’m not the one who invented it. I won’t go to Rome because it will persist until the end of the year. The demand for love is made at the cost of a fight to the death. Last night Claude came by to see me, he said, “Oh Christine, your face is in tatters.”

Nazism, I persecute Marie-Christine for being homosexual even though it’s just a variation provoked by an arrested sexual development. Several highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals. But I have a sadomasochistic structure, which no one can deny, and, by the way, no one does. I am not the first, or the last, to persecute homosexuals, even if it’s cruel, I freely admit it. Why? Because my father was homosexual. He wasn’t, I’m raving, I’m exaggerating, I’m spouting nonsense, but the sodomy he practiced on me and on a certain Marianne, as he told me, brings him close to them. Bisexuality is human. It exists in a latent state in all heterosexuals, Freud said this as early as 1920. It’s one aspect. Not to mention his limp wrists, which he was always twisting and turning. Everything can always be twisted around.

Yesterday she said to me on the phone, “you destroy others because you yourself were destroyed,” that’s always nice to hear. Soon she’ll tell me she pities me. Paranoids can’t stand that, it’s intolerable, intolerable. In-tol-e-ra-ble.

I wept. She talked to me then:

—This may be our very last phone call. Do you have anything to add?

—Merry Christmas.

—I doubt it will be particularly merry.