Sphinx (16 page)

I push back my chair, close the typewriter, and place it on the ground. Opposite me is a stack of pages, sitting atop the table that has served as my desk in this hotel room where I allocated my wandering. I crack the joints in my fingers one after another. I lean back and the chair cracks, too, under the pressure of my reclining. I stare at this miserable heap that has turned me into a recluse for the time it took to construct this narrative. I am powerless to free my gaze. What do I do now with this pile of paper, impossible to neatly classify as an essay, novel, or allegorical memoir?

At last, I wrest myself from this position. This hour is the last that I will have spent at the table that I forbade myself to leave before the thread of this ultimate unwinding of memory had been exhausted. And now I am, I think, free; I can rise and cross the threshold of the bedroom where I wove and imprisoned the vision transfixing me.

I can cast off my anchor and walk through the city streets, my mind delivered from the funereal brooding that kept leading me to the same abyss.

And so I rise, pushing the pile of pages to the upper left corner of the table. I unhook the jacket that upon my arrival I had relegated to
the wardrobe, stinking of naphthalene. I stumble over the dinner tray I ordered earlier tonight (and every night for the past two weeks), turn the key, open the door and cross the threshold. The staircase is dark; it's eleven o'clock and tonight winter is spreading over the canals, turning them to ice. I walk aimlessly through streets, along quays, over bridges. I recognize a cabaret. Farther down, I pass a row of windows behind which women are exhibiting and offering themselves, to be consumed behind drawn curtains.

I plunge into the heart of this district given over to venality and artifice. The nearby port bordering the area sweeps the streets with a wind that brings odors of oil or sometimes of sewers. Brushed by this wind, skin takes on the taste of salt. I lean forward to escape from the onslaught of icy gusts that petrify the immobile bystander. The humidity permeates clothing and condenses above the canals in thick slabs of mist.

I lose myself in the silent and deserted areas, in the tranquil streets bordered by houses with darkened windows. Unintentionally, I deviate from my path and before me reappears the animation and furious illumination of this ghetto where people come to sell hell and flesh. A wide canal wraps around the cobblestone street where I push through a clotted mass of people. I cross over the canal, splashed with light, to its most distant border where the eddies slow; here it divides into three branches, forming a grid of diverging alleys. Conversations, which I had been catching in snippets as I walked by, stop resounding in my ears. On the other side of the canal, where I have just come from, I had swerved to avoid a screaming junkie who was rolling and contorting on the ground in the grips of withdrawal. From here, I see he is now being shooed away by two police officers attempting to grab hold of him.

The brisk wind strikes and assaults me with its breath as I step onto the path that runs the length of the canal. The farther I plunge, the more the
alley darkens and narrows between the smooth black walls of successive warehouse facades and the abrupt edge of the quay where the tide breaks.

Two dark-skinned figures walk toward me, speaking loudly in a dialect that sounds like pidgin English. I hear the two men before being able to distinguish their features, and I keep walking without making eye contact. When I overtake them, they stop and approach me. They surround me in the cone of light diffused by a lone lamppost. The first lines of a poem I have been trying to recall for a few minutes reconstruct themselves in my mind. In a hollow of smashed pavement at my feet is a puddle of stagnant water frozen on the surface; it looks like a pane of ancient glass studded with detritus and trapped air bubbles.

The two men close in on me and speak to me brusquely; I see their eyes, bloodshot, fixed on me. I don't understand what they want from me. I tell them I have somewhere to be. I see the smaller, more nervous one pull a knife from his pocket and flit the blade, long, thin, sharp, before my eyes. My back to the canal, it's strange, I feel nothing…But I am haunted by these lines swirling through my head: “The virgin, lasting and lovely today/Will it crack for us with a drunken flap of the wing…” What were the next two lines, the crucial complement?

The deeper voice of the other man cuts through this dancing in my head. He is speaking rapidly; in his bursts of broken delivery I hear the word
money,
which is repeated by the little one in a voice rendered shrill with fear, haste, or excitement as he says, continually tearing at the air with his knife: “Giv'you'money!” I never have any cash on me; I am incapable of giving them what they want. But how can I prove it to them? I remain mute and immobile with the incompleteness of those lines continuing to plague me. It feels as if I have been standing, motionless, in this frozen décor for a very long time; I detach and distance myself from my body, now petrified. I gaze at it, upright at the edge of the
canal, mirrored in the ice: the simulacrum and its reflection. My mind wanders, carried far away at the whim of those two lines in search of that symmetrical fragment which has disappeared into oblivion, the whole thus robbed of its meaning and harmony.

Suddenly, wrenching myself from my reverie, I shake my head and try to free myself, try to force a passage, to break the encirclement pushing me toward the edge of the canal. The man who had been standing unarmed at my left blocks me. I feel a blow to my back, an icy shard pierces my heart. Gripped with this frost, my chest contracts, all my attention rushing and contorting there. A vast silence; time's passage frozen, fixed, crystallized.

I feel my head hit a pane of glass, and yet—I didn't know I was falling. Sharp slivers jut out before my eyes, surrounding my skull with painful edges. The brush of a flap of a wing across my face, the caress of the feathers in the fan you were waving…Eden, Eden…

My body is wrested from the ground. My skull smashes through the pane of ice, which breaks into blades that slash my forehead and cheek, though I am unaware of it; a red veil hurtles down before my eyes, heat spreads through my skin. My body is no longer touching the ground; I feel it take flight, trying to balance, shunted about at the whim of the waves. A sudden muffled scalding at the bottom of my chest, the pain of a sundering wrests me from the mute dream that had been suspending the reality of the world around me. Suddenly I feel the inflicted pain; the suffering that I finally experience forces me to realize what is happening in this moment. The two men drag me to the edge of the quay and throw me into the void of a part of the canal that has not yet frozen over. In my death throes, as the waves of blood stream and escape from my back, I feel myself take flight. Then the split-second bedazzlement of a descending darkness into which I sink and lose myself.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

In Anne Garréta's original French text, the narrator of
Sphinx
walks, overtakes, passes, is dragged along, is led places, follows, hurries, rushes, reaches, reaches on foot, sets foot, wanders, descends, ascends, climbs, strolls, promenades, returns, roams, roves, visits, meets people, joins people, travels, traverses, crosses, takes paths, gets lost, gets diverted, trundles along, flies away, and eventually sinks. Never does the narrator ever simply
go
anywhere. When I read the book for the first time, this never crossed my mind. It wasn't until I was translating the book that I asked myself why. The answer is, on the surface, relatively simple: to say “I went to the Apocryphe,” the narrator would have to use the
passé composé
(the most common French tense used to describe actions already completed) and would have to say either
“je suis allé”
or
“je suis allée.”
In other words, for the narrator to say that they simply
went
anywhere would require revealing his or her gender.

Sphinx
is powerful because it refuses to do just that. At no point do we find out the gender of either the narrator or his or her love interest, and at no point does it matter to the story. Although written fourteen years before Garréta was asked in 2000 to join the experimental France-based literary group Oulipo (a portmanteau of
Ouvroir de littérature potentielle,
the Workshop for Potential Literature),
Sphinx
certainly follows in the footsteps of its members. Authors such as Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, and Michelle Gringaud used linguistic constraint as a source of inspiration for their writing, for example in Perec's
La Disparition,
a lipogrammatic novel written entirely without the letter ‘e.' Why did Garréta decide to write a genderless love story? Why this constraint? By omitting the supposedly ever-present phenomenon of gender, Garréta both reveals and undermines sex-based oppression, demonstrating that gender difference is not an important or necessary determinant of our amorous relationships or our identities but is rather something constructed purely in the realm of the social.

Taking inspiration from other authors working to overthrow the destructive construction of gender in Western society, such as Monique Wittig and Roland Barthes, Garréta set about subverting the way gender works in the French language in order to combat its sexist nature. French contains grammatical gender, meaning nouns are assigned either masculine or feminine gender, and pronouns and adjectives then take on agreement. On the other hand, English has semantic gender, meaning that inanimate objects are not assigned a gender, but people and living creatures are (with exceptions) referred to either as masculine or feminine. In French, the subject's gender can be identified as soon as there is agreement with a verb in the past tense or with an adjective, whereas in English the subject's gender can only be identified through personal pronouns and possessive adjectives.

Garréta believed that equality could not exist within a language that puts the two genders in opposition to each other, and so created a language and a world in which amorous relationships are not determined by a binary of distinction. This diffraction of constructed identities is an important aspect of queer theory, which Garréta defined at a talk in 2013 at Sciences Po in Paris as “an enterprise of deconstruction of categories that comprise a particular ontology of sexes and of sexualities.” To read
Sphinx
is to engage in this deconstruction.

Translating
Sphinx
into English, I never had to deal with any of the
verb tense agreement problems that Garréta was constantly confronted with. It would be impossible for a first-person narrator speaking in English to reveal his or her gender without speaking about it explicitly. And so the constraint of this Oulipian text at first seemed only to crop up in the sections in which the narrator speaks about A***, when I was faced with possessive adjectives at every turn. Garréta took advantage of the fact that, in French, gender agrees with the object, meaning that in the phrase
son bras, son
is in the masculine because
bras
is a masculine noun, not because the person the arm belongs to is a man, while in English this phrase would normally be translated as his or her arm. This rule of French grammar makes it difficult for those learning French to remember to refer to a thigh as “she” and a neck as “he,” but provides a way for Garréta to avoid revealing the gender of her characters.

Where Garréta enlisted possessive adjectives to avoid gendered language, I alternated between four different strategies in English: using a demonstrative, dropping the article altogether, pluralizing, or repeating A***'s name. In other places, I rewrote certain passages to avoid personal pronouns, or applied adjectives directly to the subject rather than to something possessed by the subject. I broke Garréta's code by creating a new one. Because writing with a constraint does not add up to being constrained by your writing. Rather, it means bending your text to accommodate your ideas, interrogating the words of your language and finding out how they can be used to feed your whims.

But it would be missing the point to list the places where Garréta's text was one thing and mine became another. The constraint is in every sentence, every verb, every adjective of the French text. The entire narrative, almost every detail of the story and the style used to tell it, was shaped by the fact that there are no gender markers for the narrator or his or her lover, A***. The words wrap around their own limits, but without conforming
to them; rather, the constraint and the writing become one and the same.

Focusing on the verbs in particular, the enormous difficulty of Garréta's enterprise becomes obvious, as does the masterful way Garréta made the text breathe within the framework she designed. In order to avoid gender agreement with certain verbs in the past tense, Garréta often uses the
imparfait
instead of the
passé composé,
but the imperfect tense implies an action that was repeated many times in the past or done regularly. And so the narrator,
je,
is always taking up habits: the habit of wandering, of skipping classes and studying for exams at home, of going to nightclubs with a priest, of playing the same songs while DJing, of visiting A*** before reporting for DJ duty, of sitting at a certain table at Café de Flore, of contemplating bodies, specifically A***'s body, of calling A*** on the phone every morning, of going into all kinds of bars and clubs and talking to mobsters and socialites alike, of staying up all night and sleeping during the day. Repetition can be boring, and the narrator knows it, constantly lamenting his or her state of ennui, his or her lack of a vocation and thus the endless aimless wandering, the mechanic repetition of mixing the turntables and talking to the same detestable people in the Apocryphe, the torturous cycles of fighting and making up with A***.