Meanwhile, Zone switched niches. Seeing as everybody else was writing and publishing fiction, Zonabend slashed the literary list to the bone and went into contemporary nonfiction. “Essays are such a catch-all, ever since Montaigne and Rousseau, you know, essays have been great sellers.” But without spurning his old flames.
“The time has come for you to take up your pen once more, my dear! I need you, yes I do, I’m serious, surely you realize you’re cutting-edge? Come now, I’ve always known you had flair. Value crisis! Apocalypse now! The new sicknesses of the soul! How to become a suicide bomber so as not to go crazy when you’re crazy already! You are at the total front line of all that, my dear Sylvia, and plus you’ve got the inside story, with those fruitcakes of yours! You hold the key to the enigma, on the deep-down intimate level, I mean.”
Bruno is trying to flatter me: he dreams of a White Apocalypse Mark 2. I’m thrown, I’m not on the same wavelength as when he published me.
“Do you hear what I’m saying? Today’s Anne-Marie Stretters, Lol V. Steins, what are they doing? In France they’re singing on shows like Star Academy, or making a fortune as high-end escorts, like the one who tripped up Daniel Stern, what was her name? Anyway. So, think about it: suppose those same rather sordid heroines are Muslims, what choices do they have, between the Pill and the chador? Suicide bombers in the making. I’m rushing the transitions, ok, but here’s your theme: apocalypse, feminine case. What say you?”
“You mean the Hiroshima of love would only get more devastating?” I’m alluding to the subtitle of my book, which Zonabend has evidently forgotten. “And I’m supposed to be the expert in the field?” I say, feigning jokiness.
“The Hiroshima of love, excellent!” Bruno can already see me on TV, guesting on the Guillaume Durand show, or, why think small, on prime time with Patrick Poivre d’Arvor.
“I don’t know, but I do think there can be religious women in love. I happen to be reading one now who talks about nothing else.” Teresa, by default, again.
“Really? Well, why not…Let’s see. Not Diderot’s nun, she’s been done. A fundamentalist? A mystic?”
“A writer.”
“Not another writer! Ok, do me a synopsis.” My publisher goes quiet all of a sudden. He doesn’t seem very excited about my saint. “Religion is always a mystery for you psychologists as well, isn’t it? So that’s it…I’ll trust you. I want it. I’ll send the contract. And get your skates on.”
Bruno’s such a bore. I don’t feel like ticking boxes. I am steeped in Teresa, her faith and madness speak to me, and the faith I never had may not be so far distant. As for madness, well…A bonfire under my white apocalypse?
Hail Teresa, borderless woman, physical hysterical erotic epileptic, made word, made flesh, who unravels inside and outside herself, tides of images without pictures, tumults of words, cascades of florescence, a thousand tongues listening out for whom for what, listening to time etched in stone, eardrum larynx cry out write out, night and brightness, too much body yet disembodied, beyond matter, empty gaping matrix throbbing for the Beloved ever-present and yet never there, but there’s presence and presence, His in her, hers in Him, sensed felt buried, sensation without perception, dart or glass, pierced or transparent, that is the question, transverberated instead, and again inundated, La Madre being the most virile of monks,33 most canny of the herders of souls, a veritable twin of Christ, she is He, He is she, the Truth is me, or Him in the deepest part of me, me Teresa, a successful paranoiac, God is myself and what of it, what’s the matter? A free-for-all, who can beat that? Certainly not Schreber, not even Freud, awfully serious chap from Vienna, gloomy rather, a woman finds it easier to talk about these things, what things, well, her of course, her beside herself, obviously, in the throes of dread and delight, little butterfly expiring with indelible joy because Jesus has become it or rather her, butterfly-Jesus, woman-Jesus, I know someone who though she’s not a poet composes poems without trying, novels that are poems with an extra something, extra movements, I wonder whether it is really I, Teresa, speaking, the path that is pain, the Nothingness of everything, that everything which is nothing, do what is in you to do, but gaily, be cheerful, my daughters, for twenty years I vomited every morning, now it’s in the evenings and it’s harder to bring up, I have to provoke it with a feather or some such thing, like a baby a baby girl if you prefer latched on to the Other’s teat, mystic or is it spiritual marriage, young John of the Cross34 says there’s a difference, I don’t really see it, more like two sides of a coin, or like the Song of Songs, as always as ever she sings off-key but she writes true and carries on founding her convents, her girls, her Church, her own gestation, her game, a game of chess, games are allowed, oh yes, even in a cloister, especially in a cloister, God loves us to be playful, believe me, girls, Jesus loved women, what are the Doctors so scared of in us, yes, checkmate to God too, oh yes, Teresa or Molly Bloom, I am numb at last, I flow into the water of the garden, flow on by, all we do is feel pleasure, souls that love can see all the way into atoms, that’s right, for yes is all there is to souls like mine, mine sees as far as the infinite atoms that are atoms of love, the philosophers don’t have a clue, they become scholars, they recoil from your sensations, the best of them are mathematicians, tamers of infinity, and yet it’s as simple as that, oh yes, metaphors mutating into metamorphoses, or possibly the other way around, oh yes, Teresa, my sister, invisible, ecstatic, eccentric, beside yourself in you, beside myself in me, yes, Teresa, my love, yes.
Chapter 2. MYSTICAL SEDUCTION
Besides obeying it is my intention to attract souls [entice souls: engolosinar las almas] to so high a blessing.
Transforming the beloved in her Lover.
It’s Christmas. People are buying trees, foie gras, oysters, gifts. Some will go to midnight Mass, millions are already clogging the freeways, apparently London is paralyzed by the weather (shame that the one destination that could tempt me is off limits due to global warming); there’s been a deadly pile-up in Gironde, three young people carjacked by a drunk in the 13th arrondissement, two dead, one critically injured. I’m staying put. The MPH ladies are of one mind for the vacation: they are trooping off for some thalassotherapy in Ouarzazate. For some unfathomable reason Morocco at Xmas is a magnet for the political class (“Of a right-wing bent,” my friend Dr. Marianne Baruch points out) and for women of a certain age.
Marianne is going as well, not looking forward to it much — but the alternative is “Not been there, not done that,” already the favorite expression of this Prozac-popping chronic depressive and proud of it. Ouarzazate wins: “Cheaper than Biarritz or Quiberon, and sure to be sunny, you know?” I do.
“So I guess Mme Leclercq will be staying put, as is her wont?” Our psychiatrist’s intent sympathy is trained on me. I must be looking even more oblivious than is my wont; Marianne is fishing for a smile.