Paris Was Ours (6 page)

After just nine of its fourteen prescribed days, however, Operation Lacan came to an abrupt and painful end. Although I had tried to take solace in one of the master’s many enigmatic axioms — “one’s unsuccessful acts are the most successful, and one’s failure fulfills one’s most secret wish” — the combination of his impenetrable prose, my own unwashed turtleneck, and my waiter’s pointed stares was wearing me down. Finally, it was the waiter himself who pushed me over the edge: the edge being a humiliating breakdown that caused me to flee the café in tears and to avoid the place for the remainder of my Paris sojourn. This happened one afternoon when, looking pointedly at my furrowed brow, he leaned over my book and broke
his silence to exclaim: “Ah, the ‘mirror stage’ essay? But that is his easiest one, mademoiselle!”

Maybe you agree with the waiter. But in my own defense, I humbly submit the following sentence, where Lacan describes the moment when an infant sees himself in a mirror for the first time and thus becomes aware of himself as an
I
:

It is this moment that decisively causes human knowledge in its entirety to be mediated through the desire of the other; constitutes the human subject’s love-objects in abstract equivalences through the other’s cooperation; and transforms the ‘I’ into a sort of armature that is threatened by every ‘blow’ from an instinct, even though [such encounters between the ‘I’ and the instincts] should amount to a natural maturation—the very normalization of this maturation henceforth depending, in the human subject, on a process of cultural mediation that (in the case of the love-object) the Oedipus complex best exemplifies.

Um,
comment
?

Now I don’t know how you—or my waiter at the Flore, for that matter—would have chosen to explain this line to a flustered twenty-one-year-old hopped up on
chocolat chaud
. Lacking any such guidance, I had had to content myself with underlining “the desire of the other” repeatedly in bright green ink and musing aloud that here, surely, Lacan was evoking Sartre’s celebrated maxim, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” (Proud to be engaged in Deep Thought at Sartre’s own favorite café, I tried to talk about existentialism there as often as possible; for lack of other company, though, I had to aim most of my
remarks at the waiter, who of course refused to dignify them with a response.) This only partly accurate assumption, unchallenged by any further study of the
Écrits
, led me in turn to the (also only partly accurate) conclusion that for Lacan, a person’s identity—her
I
—depends on her ability to elicit desire from someone else.

Perhaps, I mused, this was an
enfer
for some; but for me, whom an American expat friend had laughingly dubbed “the Left Bank kissing bandit,” it sounded like great news. Cut loose though I was from all the moorings—linguistic, cultural, social—that had secured my identity at home, and nervous though I was to brave the daunting terrain of adult love affairs, I had found, in this faux-Lacanian insight, a source of reassurance. As long as I could elicit and maintain the
désir de l’autre
—the Parisian male still being, in my eyes, the ultimate
autre
—I would know who I was. Following Lacan’s stated project of reworking, and revolutionizing, René Descartes, I coined the following motto: “I am loved, therefore I am.”

With this in mind, I transformed myself into what another friend liked to call “a one-woman band of seduction,” rapidly changing instruments and varying my performances depending on what my audience, at any given moment, seemed to most want to hear. To impress Pierre-Yves, a professor of international relations, I read five newspapers a day, keeping careful notes on all the obscure geopolitical conflicts that as an undergraduate I had—wholly absorbed in my thesis on French surrealist fiction—blithely ignored. With Étienne, who had poured his inherited wealth into a vanity publishing house for sleek, glossy philosophy tomes, I struck a more intellectual note. Perched on an uncomfortable minimalist sofa in
his sprawling Marais apartment, I would “casually” interrogate him on subjects that I had determined in advance would get the conversational juices flowing. A sample question: “Do you think that radical evil, in Laclos’
Liaisons dangereuses
or in the novels of the Marquis de Sade, serves as a deliberate subversion of the Kantian categorical imperative?” Imagine my (artfully feigned) surprise when he answered with a broad grin that he had written an essay on
this very topic
and would be delighted to tell me
all about it
!

In my dealings with François, a haughty young count who saw ill breeding as the greatest sin, more superficial things became paramount. After a traumatic first visit to his mother’s imposing
hôtel particulier
—“Ah bon,” she said in mock innocence after scrutinizing me from head to toe, “Americans don’t believe in having their clothes pressed?” — I worked assiduously to resemble a chic young woman of the
grand genre
. Naturally, my dry-cleaning expenses skyrocketed; so, too, did my expenditures at the secondhand designer-clothing shops of the eighth and the sixteenth, where the city’s grandest dames would deposit the Chanel suits, Hermès scarves, and Lacroix party dresses they had abandoned after a season. This shopping strategy was not without its risks: I lived in fear that at one of the
fêtes mondaines
I attended on François’s arm, a glamorous female guest would recognize my ensemble and cry: “
Mais tenez
! That looks
exactly
like the dress I just gave the maid to sell at Réciproque! In fact, I think it
is
the dress!” But luckily, this never came to pass, and François himself never seemed to wonder how my label of choice had come to change, almost overnight, from J. Crew to Chanel.

In retrospect, though, I’m reasonably sure that François
never even noticed; for as long as I was projecting back to him the image he expected to see, he didn’t look too closely at me at all. Only when I deviated from the codes that, through him, I had learned to try to follow did he appear to recall that I was not what I was trying to be. In these moments, François did not treat me with kindness: he would viciously attack my “vulgarity,” for instance, when I used such colloquialisms as “appart,” “par contre,” “mince alors!” and “bisous.” (The first, in case you’re wondering, should be replaced with the unabbreviated “appartement”; the second, with “en revanche”; and the third, a mild swear word, with “flûte alors!” The fourth, a common sign-off in both speech and writing, should never be used at all.)

At the time, I tried to excuse his behavior by comparing myself to the American newcomer to French high society whom Proust introduces in
Le temps retrouvé
: “Dinner parties and
fêtes mondaines
were, for the American girl, a sort of Berlitz language school. She heard [words] and repeated them without always knowing their value, their exact significance.” But the comfort I found here was cold at best. Having embarked upon a mission to be loved, I realized from François’s unalloyed disgust that whomever he had loved all along had not, in fact, been me.

As it turned out, the same held true for my other French boyfriends. Pierre-Yves never got over the fact that I hadn’t, as I felt compelled to admit some months into our relationship, demonstrated against Operation Desert Storm back in the States. Étienne was shocked that
I
was shocked to learn—again, some months into our relationship—that he had a wife who lived in Brittany but visited him every other weekend in
the Marais. Looking back at my calendar, I saw that those visits corresponded with Étienne’s and my Saturday afternoon assignations in the Hôtel de Crillon: rendezvous that I had taken to be wildly sexy deviations from our usual stay-at-home routine, but that my lover had arranged for much tawdrier reasons. (Predictably enough, Étienne countered my chagrin with a philosophical argument: “But why does this bother you,
mon coeur
? Does Sade not remind us that Nature, which alone issues the laws that men are compelled to follow, abhors marriage and indeed all monogamy for the limits they place on Her transcendental
will to pleasure
?”) Still another boyfriend, Charles, too often referred to me as an impersonal
quelqu’un
, as in, “It’s nice to hold somebody in my arms like this,” or in a raunchier vein, “I like it when somebody gives me a blow job.” In both cases, it was clear that my place in his life was purely structural and could be filled by any old
quelqu’un
who came along.

When I was honest with myself, these incidents were more than demoralizing: they were devastating and left a permanent knot in the pit of my stomach. As a result, I more or less stopped eating, a development that all my lovers welcomed because it gave me the wiry, emaciated look of the archetypal
parisienne
. But of course, I wasn’t a
parisienne
, archetypal or otherwise. Yet I had sought to win and retain my lovers’ desire on that entirely fictitious basis: I had molded myself, time and again, into the woman I thought they wanted, and then was shocked to discover they had no interest in the woman I was. In that respect, the problem lay not with my boyfriends’ Frenchness, but with my misguided “Lacanian” belief that
le désir de l’autre
would give shape, substance, and value to my still-unformed self.

Looking back, I see clearly how all the insecurity and self-doubt of the recent college grad were exacerbated, in my case, by immersion in a culture where my inexperience was thrown daily into fierce relief. However much I may have believed it—in my sad, masochistic heart of hearts—at the time, my paramours were not the villains in my ongoing Parisian soap opera. They were merely complicit in a game that I myself had recruited them to play: a mad chase through a fun-house hall of mirrors where, in all the refracted distortions, the pursuers never reach their target, because she is always already lost.

Translation from Jacques Lacan’s
Écrits
by Caroline Weber

Keep Your Distance

K
EEP YOUR DISTANCE
from Arabs if you want to be successful in this city.” I had heard this friendly advice from several Arab intellectuals I met when I first arrived in Paris; even the famous Arab poet Adonis told me when I met him for the first time: “You will get nothing from Arabs, only a headache, keep away from them—as much as you can.” I remember Mustapha himself told me the same thing when he bade me farewell in Tunis: “I know Paris. I’ve been there several times and I’ve had difficult experiences with Arabs, believe me!”

But Mustapha contradicted himself, as did most Arab intellectuals in Paris. They give this “friendly advice,” but you see them always together, everywhere together. Mustapha, for instance, whose knowledge of Paris and its streets and cafés is unmatched, gave me an appointment at Café de Cluny, although he knew very well that Café de Cluny was like a headquarters for Arab writers and journalists. Until then I had been there just three or four times and yet in those few times I had become acquainted with several Arab journalists, poets, artists—like Shamil, Abdelwahab, Nabil and Riadh, and Salem and others. But I agreed with Riadh that Café de Cluny was one of the
best cafés in Paris. It was a large building situated at the point where the two great boulevards of Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel meet.

Once I went up to the first floor, and that day I had just bought my Erika typewriter from the Duriez shop nearby. I saw Riadh in the café working on a translation of poems by Saint-John Perse. He glanced up and said: “Look at that man!” I turned round to the man sitting at the window overlooking boulevard Saint-Germain. “Oh! It’s Samuel Beckett,” I exclaimed.

“Yes, and he always sits in the same place,” said Riadh, adding, “You see, the customers on the second floor are better than those downstairs.” It was clear that Riadh was alluding to the Arab journalists who usually gathered on the ground floor.

The moment Mustapha saw me, he laughed and shouted: “Come here, you Assyrian-escaped-from-the-museums!” And he hugged me.

“What are you doing in Paris?” I asked him quite spontaneously.

Mustapha looked at me for a moment and said with a smile: “This is an insult, not a question!”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because an Iraqi is not allowed to ask a Tunisian what he’s doing in Paris. The right question is ‘What is an Iraqi doing in Paris?’ So, never ask a North African intellectual what he’s doing in Paris!”

I answered him, joking: “Well, get me a visa to America and I will leave Paris to you, my friend.”

Mustapha started scrutinizing me all over: “Look at you! In just a short time you’ve become healthy and handsome. When you were in Tunis you looked like someone with bilharzia.”

“Did you summon me to Paris to mock me, Mustapha?”

“Not at all. I came from Tunis to arrange your life here.”

“You came to arrange my life, Mustapha, or to destroy it?”

“I want to save you from your life of monotony and turn you into a legend!”