This week’s Translation Tuesday follows a woman who—in pursuit of materials to build the protagonist of her novel, Madame X—visits, amongst others: a psychoanalyst, an actress, and a Pierre Huyghe exhibit. This extract from Romanian-born and Paris-based Sinziana Ravini’s debut novel La diagonale du désir, is the Swedish writer’s metafictional romp through a world of artistic and literary references in order to ask the question: how much of our own desires are constituted by our fictional encounters? Conversely, how much of fiction’s desires can be found in the actions of the world? With her translation, Kaylen Baker shows us a voice which, with characteristic humor and intelligence, uncovers the role that art and aesthetics play in forming the ground on which the mystery of our own desire is made visible.
The Pact
The building presides over the street like an impenetrable stone palace but, here and there, kissing cherubs cling to the molding façade, as if to draw out a repressed sensuality from such sobriety. Several floors up, I’m standing in the middle of a room full of books, and paintings of divinities, opposite a man who’s always filled me with dread.
“And what might I do for you, mademoiselle?”
“I came to see you because I’m writing a novel.”
“You must’ve mistaken me for someone else. I’m a psychoanalyst, not a publisher.”
“I know . . . I called on you because I want to take my main character to a shrink.”
The man begins to finger a cigar. “Imagine if every writer brought in their creative work for analysis. I’d never see the last of them! Who is this character?”
“Her name is Madame X. That’s all I can tell you for now.”
He cuts the cigar, lights it and inhales. “And what do you hope to explore through this novel?”
“I want to create a character who sets out to discover her real desire. Since I don’t have a lot of courage or imagination, I decided to ask a few women I admire to pick the plot themselves, by giving me missions, which Madame X will carry out.”
“And why not solicit any men, mademoiselle? Or do you have something against them?”
“On the contrary, but it’s the female unconscious I’d like to explore. Imagine finally being able to respond to Freud: What does a woman want?”
“Won’t she be . . . somewhat divided, this woman?”
“I see her rather as a subject in perpetual transformation.”
“So why have you come to see me—me, and not a woman?”
“Exactly because you are a man.”
“Hm. I see.”
Silence settles around us. What am I doing here? When Faust signed the pact with Mephisto, did he find his soul, or lose it?
“I think we’ll stop here.”
“So, you’ll accept to become my fictional analyst?”
“Fictional? I’m quite real myself.”
“I’d rather conceal what’s real. Didn’t Oscar Wilde say that masks make us tell the truth?”
“Yes, well, the truth, you know . . . it’s debatable. I’m not sure I’m ready to play your game.”
“And psychoanalysis, that’s not a game?”
“Indeed, but a serious one! The game you’re about to create is quite dangerous. I’m under the impression you don’t really respect psychoanalysis as it is.”
“Then treat my lack of respect like a symptom.”
“Humph.”
Taking my purse, I make as if to leave.
“Let’s say your project intrigues me. When can you come back?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Very well, mademoiselle . . . ?”
“Madame X!”
“Very well, Madame X. Does Thursday afternoon work, 4 p.m.?”
“Works perfectly.”
I get up, taking my things again and we agree on a rate. On the stairs, I’m seized by sudden vertigo. Reaching the street, I throw myself into the first taxi speeding past.
The Door
Where is he? Every time I come home I need to find him. I walk through a series of apartment rooms as if through an endless labyrinth. And voilà—in the salon, bathed in the plum light of late afternoon, watching a movie on the sofa, our cat extends his legs, looking like a reclining statue. I have the urge to lie down next to him, but I know how much he detests displays of affection, and the pointless proximity of other bodies. I resign myself to caressing the silky fur of my little animal, stretched like a yawn.
“Can’t you see you’re disturbing us?” says Vincent, frozen in front of the screen.
“Oh—sorry.”
I head towards my office and settle in on the divan that I recently bought from a young hypnotist. Since then, the divan has become my only ally, the only place where I’m able to roam around my own brain. I’ve covered it with a Persian carpet, the kind that people in Anatolia unfurled in their tents, to transport their turf across the turf they wander over. Each time I fall asleep here, I dream of returning to a world where the difference between what’s real and what’s imaginary no longer exists, a world where I might finally grasp the flame of writing, the flame that warms and devours, rouses and kills. Yet I’m left out in the cold. I erase. I write, I erase.
It’s often said that women who write live dangerously. But the women who attempt to write who don’t succeed, aren’t they risking more?
*
Today, it’s different. I’ve finally found the door to open my novel. I press the button to turn on my computer. Nothing. I unplug and replug it. Still nothing. An hour later, after several frantic attempts at resuscitation, I decide the device has relinquished its soul.
“Well that’s fine. It’ll help you return to reality,” says Vincent, when he sits down to dinner. It’s true that, of late, I’ve begun to meld a bit with my computer. The only place I don’t take it is to bed, because Vincent can’t stand hearing me write. Which doesn’t prevent him from barricading himself in his office in the evenings, before departing on numerous trips to the four corners of the globe. Tomorrow he leaves for Bangkok, to speak about the astrophysics research center he recently began directing. He has several important emails to send. I clear the table, hoping he won’t take too long. But he takes a while, as usual, and I fall asleep dreaming of his falcon eyes, his sharp, conqueror’s nose and his unruly hair, reminiscent of Chateaubriand.
If I must begin with a muse, why not a woman who’s already embodied many women? My friend Mademoiselle K, a chameleon of an actress, is able to play the part of little lost girls as well as the femme fatale. I meet her for lunch at Chez Paul. The waitress, a small, compact, curvy redhead endowed with an authoritative eroticism worthy of a Red Army commander, brings us two nicely crisped duck thighs. Today, Mademoiselle K resembles no one but herself, with her long, gleaming black hair and melancholy eyes. I describe the Madame X project and ask if she wants to be my first muse.
“Certainly, darling.”
“Alright then, what is your deepest desire?”
“I don’t think we really recognize our desires . . . at least not the deepest one.”
“Then go as deep as you can.”
“In that case, I would say, filling the void of others . . . Madame X needs to meet a man who can fill her void.”
Mademoiselle K tells me about Catherine Deneuve in Alain Resnais’s film La Chamade, the double life of a woman who lives in a gilded cage, and about Jeanne Moreau, the tumultuous lover who abandoned her lovers on the side of the road, and about Marguerite Duras, her alcoholism, the death of her lover in the arms of another. I ask her to give me a task, to get the action of my novel going. She wants to think it over for a few days. “Such an important assignment shouldn’t be rushed.” And she’s right. But I don’t want to wait any longer. I feel as though my life has been nothing but one gigantic waiting room.
The Blue Dress
In the garden of the Grand Palais, awash in soft afternoon light, I find my friend Eugene, the feared art critique—feared especially by these café servers—sitting in the shadow of a Japanese banana tree in his usual posture, belly up like a weary dandy, his blond hair all fanned out. He’s just ordered two whiskeys on the rocks.
“It’s hardly 3 p.m.!”
“And?” he says, a malicious glint in his eye.
“Listen, Eugene, I need you.”
“And I need you.”
“That’s not what I meant. Vincent’s institute is organizing a gala in several days to finance their next research project. The women all have to wear creations from the same fashion house. Like in communist countries, except here it’s capitalism making us all uniform. I have to go to the showroom to look for a dress. I really don’t feel like it, I hate this sort of soirée. I already borrowed a blue dress from another house that I like better . . . would you want to accompany me?”
“With pleasure. But first let’s see Le feu sous la glace.”
“Fire under ice?”
“The exhibit on the painter Félix Vallotton, at the Grand Palais. That’s what it’s called.”
“Oh! Sure . . .”
Offering me his arm, we sink into the gloomy museum corridors.
“Look at this,” he says, facing a woman painted from behind, in the middle of a long hallway. It’s impossible to know if she’s the mistress of the place or a simple maid.
“What’s she looking for? I feel like she’s looking for something,” I say.
“She’s looking for nothing.”
“How’s that, nothing?”
“She’s not looking for anything because she doesn’t need anything . . . looks like you.”
My glance falls on a sleeping woman. Her book has slipped from her hand.
“When are you going to yield to me? You know, it’s not because you’re married that you’re not a free woman.”
“We’re not living in the nineteenth century, Eugene. You don’t need to make a pass at me to seal our friendship.”
“It’s you who’s living in the nineteenth century, not me!”
I admire women who are able to bring men to their feet. Who never say yes. Never say no. Who convey them, over time, to the dulcet, gentle lands of friendship.
*
After the showroom, Eugene wants to see me in the notorious blue dress.
It hangs helplessly in the bathroom. Stroking the velvet fabric, I think back to the other day, the only time I wore it, at the wedding of a businessman. What happened that night? At the hotel, I’d dressed myself in the royal blue, letting it envelop me like the night sky. Around my neck I’d wrapped a scarab beetle necklace. Confronting my reflection in the mirror, I’d felt, I think for the first time, intoxicated by my metamorphosis. But Vincent hardly glanced at me. Once we arrived at the party, he disappeared into the crowd. I found him much later, deep in discussion with several sponsors. I stood at his side like a shadow.
When we got home, he fell asleep immediately. The next day, before our alarm, I left our charming hotel, an old bucolic farm, and headed to a little stream at the edge of the valley, where autumn leaves glistened like jewels in the rays of the rising sun. Lying in the grass in the half-light, on the bank of the little river, amid violets and poppies, still wearing the blue dress I hadn’t taken off, I let my tears wash over me. Then I fell into an obscure, Sibylline trance, carried along the currents of the stream like a pre-Raphaelite nymph. As a child, I’d been struck by the image of Millais’s Ophelia. I didn’t understand why she bathed in the river dressed in her gown, why she floated like a water lily, her thin arms open to the sky. One day, I finally understood. I only desired one thing, to dive into the painting and save her. Suddenly, I saw Vincent rushing towards me. He walked at a fast pace, as if he’d finally discovered something important, and was going to lay down beside me and whisper it tenderly, but he stopped several feet away and said indignantly, “What are you doing there? The taxi’s here!”
*
There’s so much unmet sorrow and desire in the folds of this blue velvet dress, that I decide to desanctify it by letting it cover me one last time. But when I see myself in the mirror, it looks like I’m wearing a shroud. The royal blue has torn out my heart. Eugene’s compliments, and his hand on my knee, which I push away delicately, leaves me icy.
The House of Cards
I really need to get going on Madame X. The next day, I invite my friend Aimée to see the Pierre Huyghe exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, with the hopes that she’ll also accept being one of my marionettes. Aimée is a young artist and a doting, alluring mother, always on the lookout for points of eruption, things like explosions, summer showers, and emotions.
I find her dressed in a white outfit and a pair of black riding boots, in the middle of a mass of monoliths arranged like a house of cards. We begin strolling around the rooms. A white dog with a pink paw appears, followed by several individuals sporting bird-head masks, who begin pacing around a black skating rink and a sculpture of a woman, lying like a queen, her head covered by a beehive. I talk to Aimée about my wish to delve deeper into female desire. She explains that the hunt for desire is nothing but an illusory quest. “Desire blocks the view, like the hive on this woman’s head. We run after things that don’t exist.”
*
Once seated in the café next door, I rehash the idea of my novel. I tell her that she could see Madame X as an empty canvas. It’d be up to her to choose the first dab of color. As for the assignment, I don’t want to rush her, but she responds immediately: “Madame X could begin her story by masturbating!”
“Isn’t that a bit too . . .”
“It’s like any other beginning. Like writing on a blank page, that moment when everything gets constructed and deconstructed at the same time. The moment when everything’s still possible.”
“Thanks to an orgasm?”
“Why not? Orgasms transform us. At least for several seconds! It’s a good way to set the stage before getting on with your story.”
When Aimée leaves, I remain puzzled in the café, dreaming up all the twists and turns that await me. Have any women pioneered a picaresque tale? A female version of Don Quixote, King Arthur, Candide, or Gulliver? I begin walking from street to street, stopping in front of every shop window, every recess, like a dog who’s lost his master, looking for a sign—but a sign of what? When we don’t know what we’re looking for, why do we follow one street rather than another? I want to walk down all the streets at the same time. Voilà, that’s my problem. I desire everything, and thus, nothing. I decide to return to the Pierre Huyghe exhibit. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find a source of inspiration for the adventures that await me.
Back in the museum, I lie down on the cushions, facing a film showing a man asleep on a red sofa. He’s surrounded by several people dressed as judges, adorned with glowing masks shaped like books. A witch leaves a pumpkin beside a mini locomotive. A white rabbit runs around the furniture, pursued by a skeleton man. Farther off, a redheaded woman in a white lab coat pulls the strings of a small marionette which resembles herself.
I feel like I’ve descended into the catacombs of the unconscious. In one scene, a nude woman with black hair and glacial beauty dons a cape and enters an auditorium, where the masked men from before circle around, murmuring some occult melody. The same scene repeats itself, this time in a cave, with the redhead. One of the men approaches her and removes her lab coat. Between her spread legs, drawn on the ground in chalk, I glimpse the key to the human psyche—Lacan’s Borromean knot. Shortly after, a man and woman make love in a red room, to the languorous music from Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. They seem to love each other. To truly love each other. I think of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, of Morel’s love for Faustine which he transforms into a work of art on a strange island where movie projectors play their love story on repeat . . . One day, a new man arrives on the island and falls for Faustine. He discovers later that he’s actually fallen in love with a work of art. She doesn’t exist. She’s been dead for a long time, like Morel, and the only thing left is her hologram.
I’ve always dreamed of finding myself in front of a piece of art in the form of a dream. Here it is, finally, but my knowledge that it will remain a work of art, so remote from my life, plunges me back into melancholy.
*
Once home, in solitude, I fall asleep thinking of those satanic rituals, of those uninhibited bodies. Will I transform my life into a work of art one day? After a restless night, I get up, thinking of the task of my dear friend Aimée. But how can I set the stage for a void? I’d imagined a more heroic mission. Aimée has always been a sort of Joan of Arc for me, a warrior. Could masturbation be seen as a war against reality?
I place my hand on my stomach. It’s all warm. I slip it between my legs. It travels across my body, my pubic bone, my clitoris, my lips, my orifices. It’s all there, right where I left it the last time. I begin to walk my fingers from one territory to another, then all over, gently, very gently, though after a few minutes that feel like an eternity, I’ll admit, the only thing I feel is an arid, abandoned terrain. My vulva is like the entrance to the Pierre Huyghe exhibit: an imploded house of cards.
Translated from the French by Kaylen Baker
Romanian-born Sinziana Ravini is a Swedish writer, art critic, and editor of the art magazine Paletten. She has curated numerous exhibitions, from the “United States of Europe” (2011–2013)—a nomadic exhibition that deals with European identities and travels between Lodz and Paris—to “The Black Moon” at the Palais de Tokyo (2013). She currently teaches at the Sorbonne. La diagonale du désir (Stock, 2018) is her first novel.
Kaylen Baker is a writer and translator in Paris, originally from Hawaii. She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, and an MA in translation at the Université de Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. She has previously published in The Adirondack Review, Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, and was the 2019 winner of the Broadsided Press Switcheroo contest.
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