The French Supervisor by Aristi Trendel
for CL
A most dear friend called him Zarathustra. She had a knack in nicknames. She meant to put in it all the derision and disdain she felt for men but I put in it all the affection and admiration that belatedly grew up in me. There had been others before it: his Highness, the French Emperor, the Sun King. She asked for news every time I had an appointment. And how’s his Excellency doing? His Excellency was not always doing fine. He went through a period of depression once and shut himself off for several months. He told me about it when he was on the mend again. I listened carefully with compassionate attention. Human, all too human, after all. Besides, I knew what he was talking about. He was a democratic emperor, I must admit. An aristocrat, a republican, both facets of him were familiar to me. « Double-faced, dangerous men of power » my most dear friend apophthegmatically warned. But Zarathustra was harmless even when he showed his toughest, his most implacable face to me. I was pretty sure I’d never fall in love with him.
My most dear friend called it transference, as if the mystery of love could be resolved by that word. I had known Zarathustra for more than six supervising years but it was only on the seventh that he became dear to me. Naturally the why and how and when of such a development intrigued me. When I went about my daily activities, the matter seemed irrelevant to me but in the pre-dawn light of watchful consciousness, it became of utmost importance. I have a strict schedule which I follow with a disciplinarian’s faith, but my order-enforcing fervour miraculously fades away in the dead of the night. Then I enter the maze of desire whose existence I had forgotten for some time. I have always pictured the Minotaur as a silver-haired man, hefty and lusty and fire-breathing. Only elderly men take my fancy. Educated of course and of the intellectual type. Some artistic sensibility is an asset. Zarathustra proudly bears this profile. His hair shines with a metallic purity and he is of the most intellectual type. And if he had the choice, he’d rather be a writer than an academic. « I can’t write. I’ve tried » he told me twice. Twice my heart flew out to him but did not alight on such confidences. Something was lacking. That was usually the case. He often stirred some feeling in me but never my blood or imagination.
Another supervisor had done so before him but he wasn’t mine. He stirred everything in me. A real upheaval. Sturm und Drang. He was the specialist of the movement I aspired to study. Thus it never occurred to me that Zarathustra would ever enter my life, although I had known him for a little while. He was famous for his seminars I didn’t miss and infamous for his sharp tongue I didn’t care about. But as my ideal supervisor would not have me, Zarathustra stepped in or rather trod heavily in his elephant’s gait. « I’m not sensitive to the way people perceive me, » he told me, « just like an elephant. » A white elephant, I thought afterwards, when he became dear to me, like the white whale and such symbolic stuff I studied under his supervision. Since Zarathustra became dear to me, my imagination has been following a positive trend. I have a fertile imagination. I have sown in it the most mysterious, the most tenacious, the most voracious elective affinities. And I have reaped the most bitter fruit. « What a German swine! » my most dear friend burst out when I told her the tearful story of my heart-break and she bridled, « casting pearls before man. » She was strong on word-play. Yet no feminist wrath could shake a man off his pedestal (in any case, not a supervisor). Men have this enchanting thing that can defy the law of gravity. When my divine supervisor turned me down and I experienced my own death, Zarathustra had the opportunity to pick up the body. It was no surprise that he did not resurrect it. He was a mere man after all, albeit a superior one.
I accepted his offer. What could I do with a dead body, anyway? The idea of studying something, provided that it had nothing to do with Sturm and Drang, did not abandon me. Studying remained the only way out of the despair I perpetually found myself in. Some join communes, others climb up the mountains or set sail for the open sea, the brave or the cowardly kill themselves. I had decided to take up a doctoral dissertation, so I’d stick to it by hook or by crook. But it was to no avail. My heart was not in it. I read a lot and thought even more. But nothing flowed from it, not a single spark to brighten up the gloom of the task. I considered giving it up. But there was no commune to go to, the mountains gave me the creeps, the sea made me sick, as for suicide, in spite of Lucretius’ illustrious example, it seemed of poor taste to me. So, I slaved away under my master’s stern eye, no labour’s lost after all.
I am used to working hard. It’s the most important ingredient in my old maid’s health-minded recipe: yoghurt, yoga, swimming, chastity and hard work. Zarathustra has never seen me as an old maid. On the contrary, he takes me for a youngster. He noticed the hard work. I became sensitive to what he noticed after he became dear to me. But might not this endearing process have started before, when I was still enthralled by Sturm und Drang and later on when I was down in the dumps and could not look up but only plumb the depths of loss? Faces are overarching moons. They hover over us even if we don’t look up. Sometimes they even come down on us. Paul Klee with his animals and moons gave me the clue. I remember Zarathustra with his arrogant demeanour and his walk-on part in the delight and the dread of my life. A total stranger to me, without any genuine interest in it. Supervising my work didn’t alter this state of things.
That’s why Alan’s muffled jealousy became quite perplexing to me. Alan didn’t know him. He only took me to him and waited for me driving around the residential streets in Zarathustra’s suburb. I was worried a bit, because he had no driving license, I was training him. Alan’s a business student and an aspiring writer. He’s my student and would be my lover too, if I let him. But I can’t let a twenty-two year old boy be an old maid’s lover. I haven’t figured out how I could take him out of harm’s way. He smokes, he drinks, he sniffs; he knows what sodomy is and feels guilty about it. I don’t even know whether he did it for kick or out of a deeper need. He’s a lost kid, a fallen cherub. What has he found in me? It’s hard to be a mother to him. I feed him with yoghurt but he puts so much sugar in it. I take him to the pool but he doesn’t swim. I bring my yoga instructor to him but he finds her ugly and says to me that breath control would be too dangerous for him, he would just stop breathing for good. But he works harder than before and can concentrate next to me. Along with his marketing books there’s poetry and Proust and a blue note-book. « Inspiration » he says « that’s what I find in you ». I can’t help thinking about Zarathustra and sensing this shadow upon me he steals what he calls a pal’s kiss. It has a disconcerting heat. He says he’ll wait until he graduates and then he’ll propose to me. It’s hard to reason with him. His new character is called Oed and he’s a wide-eyed visionary and he’s bold and knows how to get what he wants. He says he’s impatient but he’s working on it. I’m sorry I have to be cruel. I’m not even attracted to him. That’s more than a technical hitch. But he thinks I will as soon as he writes what he has in mind. By that time, I’ll be in an old people’s home, I maliciously think. But I know that would be too early for me, I’d just be ageing, a decaying old maid. Nevertheless, he may become a writer one day and then things will get easier for him.
Alan has written the most poetic declaration of love anyone has ever made to me, in the most romantic circumstances a woman and a man could find themselves in. He’s a kid but he writes like a man. He writes sentences like this: « When I died, not even the rain let its silver tears fall upon my grave. » That was quite unexpected in my old maid’s days. The youth and the old maiden. Classroom favours such quaint things. I’m not very fond of acrostics but when my name sprang from the love poem he wrote to fulfil his declaration of love writing requirement, my heart leapt for joy. For the potential of romance in it. I could only take it for what it was: courtship. Yet how could I forget? He writes like a man but he’s a kid. I praised the verses but ignored the secret in them. He didn’t put it in bold after all. He didn’t expect me to respond. I was too old for him but apparently he was blind to it. The poem was only warming up. At the end of the second term he came up to me and declared that he was now free to ask me for a drink. He assumed I knew. His poem was between us, a flimsy veil to be lowered or raised. I’m sensitive to uncanny forms of love but I was embarrassed too, found it heartless to refuse yet I did and disliked my ways, dull, polite, tutor-like. But Alan is persistent and carried his point or rather his texts did it for him. So here we are, pals or perhaps something deeper than that. I had to drive off the sex thing and Alan temporarily settled for what was offered to him.
He came to my writing course because he heard there was passion in it. « Passion? » I echoed in disbelief. When Alan enunciated the word, I felt ill at ease -not that I believe that I’ve got nothing to teach- and then somewhat sick. « Passion? » I snorted out in mirth and said nothing more because Alan was not the right recipient for it. How could there be any passion left in that stump of a heart, in that dried-up hag? Self-contempt’s a terrible thing and I’m sometimes prone to it. Apart from that and some sporadic fits of distress, I fare quite well. « I wasn’t aware of it » I mumbled at last. But my amazement and dismay did not escape him, he saw the turmoil in me. I don’t know what he surmised from it but if he’s to become a writer, he should know how vulnerable and pitiable humans are, teachers and tutors, too.
They’re all bright kids. They write sentences like this: « It’s the dead of the night. I know this paper must not remain white. » That comes from Aline, the African queen, but there’s also Annabelle, the bluest eye, who wrote a letter to herself entitled « Narcissus in the Dock » and Jean-Sebastian, the sharpest mind, the most cultured of all. I’m glad they don’t dislike me. I thought I was more attentive to them than they were to me till Alan stepped in. He stayed both terms and kept a low profile in class but he was noticeable for his good looks, his air of Rupert Brooke. Then he handed in work. There was wit in it and a sort of despair, playful, deterred. « A beautiful loser » I thought in a literary mood. He didn’t always respect the assignments but I never reproved him for that. He handed extra work, too, texts he wanted me to read but refused to discuss in class. We discussed them in private in fact, in classroom tête-à-têtes. I edited them all and was curious to see what was coming next. I enjoy reading the students’ work: secret hopes and desires leaping out in disguise. They’re all honest kids. They strive for something still shapeless and undefined. I don’t know if they’ve experienced the strife I went through in their age. Alan has. Something consumes him day and night, never lets him rest. In the first page of his autobiography he wrote: « I’ve got a laptop but paper and pen are my best friends. » There’s another best friend too, Eve, alias Lady Bunny or junkie queen, the young man he slept with, slippery and serpent-like. He may go back to this text one day and then he’ll surely put in it that it got started as an assignment during a creative writing course in a French frontier city where his studies took him. He’ll relate then his infatuation with a woman past her prime, past desire. Writers don’t forget. That’s why they become writers. What happens to those, then, who can’t forget but can’t become writers either, who can’t even fall back on criticism as Zarathustra did? Alan wants to be a writer now. That’s not all he wants to be. He’ll go into advertising but he won’t sell his soul to it. He claims these are his new aims. Why not? A writer businessman. I told him James Fenimore Cooper was one. But James Fenimore Cooper bores him. He reads William Burroughs and Jean Genet at the pool in a scanty bathing suit. Men and women steal glances at him, some attempt to chat him up, but he holds his blue note-book fast and waves at me to show there’s somebody out there watching over him. He often looks up and gazes at me but I know it’s rather at the inner space in him, I can see he’s chasing a thought that keeps fleeing him, that he’s peering into an image still foggy in him.
He wants to know nothing about the writer I’ve spent my nights with, although he is the greatest stylist of the second half of the twentieth century. « This stammerer, this leper, the lewd, this ludicrous Narcissus, » he says scornfully and I can see that he has read more than he wants to admit. « He’s got a lot to teach, Alan » I insist, « he’s a Daedalus. Don’t take his wings, just look how he flies over the sea, just look at the splendour of these wings. » I’m thrilled to bits when I speak about him, his images tumble down on me. I’ve learnt how to fall asleep at will but I’ve stayed awake for his sake. He writes sentences like this:
« And, though there was much in the aftermath to regret, and a harm that would never cease, Betty remembered these days - the open fields, the dripping eaves, the paintings, the law books - as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not scattered as is a constellation but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn. »
Writers have this magic thing, a flying carpet they provide you with. Zarathustra knows a lot about him. He recommended him to me at a time when I only knew a single story written by him. But it would have been enough to set me on the track. He says he admires him but doesn’t love him. Admiration without love seems quite lifeless to me. I don’t care who the man is, I love and admire the writer I’ve spent my nights with. But I respect Zarathustra’s views. We have the same tastes, anyway. We’ve only disagreed once, on Jung. Zarathustra says he’s a crook, but I’ve spent many a night with him, too. What to do? Zarathustra’s a fastidious thinker and an even more fastidious critic. He writes sentences like this:
« Joyce has been admired as the most prodigious artificer, Mann as the most thoughtful ironist, Proust as the most shrewdest analyst. For the graceful arabesques of lyrical prose and delicate glimpses into the dark, we have Virginia Woolf; for tense metaphysical speculation and flights into utopia, myth and mysticism, we can turn to Musil and Broch, to Gadda for the convoluted splendors of the baroque, to Nabokov for the dizzying heaven of « aesthetic bliss, » to Céline for the deafening nightmares of history; and for those who expect literature to take them to the threshold of silence, the supreme guide is still Beckett. »
Concise and precise, terse and tense, my supervisor’s prose puts literature in a nutshell. This luring list is from his magnum opus, his work on the European novel. He’ll never finish it. He’s got no more resources for it. He put it aside when he got depressed and never went back to it. Zarathustra will never climb up the mountain top although he has taught the Ubermensch. Zarathustra fears illness, death. They are no longer an abstraction to him. Zarathustra didn’t know there was a bound Prometheus in store for him. Zarathustra is plagued by Pandora’s gifts, hope too. He is learned but not wise. When he told me that he was sick, I was quite shaken but I refused to think about it. He chose to forget and so did I. Zarathustra is possessed. His sweet obsession with words drives me up the wall. He’s working on a woman now. He always works on something, of course. It’s an intensive, a hectic work. He’s thinking about her day and night, but at the end he’ll rest for the while. Yet there’ll always be illness, death. Zarathustra cannot rest. Only his superiority keeps him afloat. I don’t know if this is accurate enough. Surely women too. Words and women. Unlike his namesake, he’s not squeamish about female flesh. He won’t retreat before it. But I’ve got no great insight into him. Before, before he became dear to me, I used to think there was nothing to see. Now I think back and forth. I think about the day he gave a sign of lust, albeit an involuntary one.
Our meetings always took place in his living-room but once. His wife had visitors or something like that. I followed up the stairs a man who in a burst of youthful energy, of unreasonable speed started to run. I had to hurry to keep up. Zarathustra looked young. I was never aware of his age before that race, of his grey-tinged hair, the deepening silver shade. It was to be foreseen when Zarathustra announced his emeritus status to me but I didn’t think about it. Incurious, remote I found myself in the heart of his intimacy, his reading den. Zarathustra’s study is a classic-looking one, just like the man, sober but not square. After a guided visit to his library I missed the magazines, they’re in the attic I’ve never seen he made me sit on his reader’s sofa; he devours books lying on it, such a polymath ogre he is. The window was left open to dispel the cigarette smell. He’s an inveterate smoker, he won’t relent. I’m oversensitive to cold, especially the January one, and I thought I’d start shivering on the spot, but not at all. Zarathustra was smiling broadly. « Let us see, where is it? » Zarathustra’s tidy, but absent-minded too. He retrieved my cardboard folder from the upper drawer of his professor’s desk. « ‘Mother Tongue and the Prodigal Son’ That’s it. » It was the first part, the first crop of his supervisor’s work. His humorous tone could not be missed. Gently he sat next to me. His reader’s sofa was now accommodating another person on it. Gently, he looked at me. Zarathustra wears no glasses but I don’t know what colour his eyes are. They must be dark. He didn’t like the work, it wasn’t a failure crop but it wasn’t exactly what he expected from me. He couldn’t say what was wrong, but I knew. There was no heart in it to keep step with. « ‘Nutrition?’ How could you write such an ugly word? » he asked but he was in no polemical mood. He had left the supervisor’s armour on his professor’s desk and I wore no chastity belt. It was the first time, me, him and the books, steeped in those vibes, so very different in this room. Indeed, he had never given any signs of seduction before, unconscious or not. Playful, paternal, he commented the work, a plethora of remarks, side and central ones. It seemed such a delightful task. It seemed we embarked on a pleasure-craft. I felt at ease, such a smooth crossing of the sea with a library on board and a cosy sofa on top. I was warming to him. Even his pedantry was no longer disagreeable to me. He disliked the way the greatest stylist of the second half of the twentieth century spoke of sex. « The French writers » he said « are good at it, take Stendhal, Flaubert, so very refined, such a subtle mastery of it. » « But they’re dead, » I parried, « he’s alive, a man of our time » and I was tempted to quote a sentence of his that had got into me, « He woke up with an erection of metallic adamancy » but abstained from it. I didn’t dare bring this Esperanto of desire between a foreign student and her French supervisor. It might have seemed mischievous to him, although it sounded spry to me. So we remained with his French writers’ ways. My American writer’s narrative mores were too sharp, too unsettling perhaps. Yet while I think about my supervisor’s mountainous body, as he stirs from sleep, I do wish I had cited that sentence to him.
I left his study and forgot all about him. But why did I? How could I? He was my supervisor, after all. The other one was gone. He left me in the lurch. He dropped me like a ball that bounced up. Zarathustra was generous to me. He corrected the articles I wrote for magazines. He edited the texts I didn’t write for him. Zarathustra would do anything for the right word, the one that can kill and resurrect at once. He was devoted to it like a priest. I had no more gods or that’s what I wanted to believe. It took more than a year and a half to write the second part. It was such a perfunctory task although I became more involved in my American writer’s world. I kept thinking of turning into a farmer or something of the sort, I even took a course on the rudiments of organic farming and did some voluntary work. Alan was not around yet to mother and dote on. We became close to each other in the middle of Zarathustra’s fifth supervising year, but it was not too late to convince me that teaching was the right track, that I had to follow it up.
My most dear friend would call him Tadzio, if she saw him, but unfortunately she’s away. I told her about him, even about the literary nickname she would give him. That’s the main difference between us, she fancies the young and I fall for the old. Not that she doesn’t find Zarathustra handsome enough to attract a woman younger than him. But she hasn’t seen the vulnerability in him, the soft spots underneath the elephant’s skin. She only saw him ranting and raving and she would not put up with it. In her bestiary there are only swines and wolves, but Zarathustra belongs to another species of man. And he’s got presence and makes it felt he’s got charm. The day he walked into the debate room in a burgundy jacket, I also felt that although I was impervious to him. The colour suited him. It set off a greyish lock that kept falling on his forehead while he performed. Always at home in fighting talk, oral or written defiant discourse. He had his field-day and was acclaimed. A spellbinder in a burgundy jacket, an enviable man, a master of his superior man’s fate. He felt on top of the world when he juggled with words. He told me that, « I had an easy life, I was a happy man, » before the disease and the looming loss and all that stuff that prods man into sense.
But what is sense? Zarathustra in a short-sleeved jacket and beige Bermuda-shorts shook hands with me in the English bookshop. He was the last person I expected to see although he must have been going there as often as I did. It was a sultry July in the French Eastern city, one of those summers you can hardly breathe. It was courageous of him to leave the shade of his study in an afternoon of violent heat. I had seen him in slippers but his vacationer’s attire was new to me. He had recovered his taste for words, his old self and to tell the truth I preferred this man to the listless, the inert one I had glimpsed once. I had sent him my second part and he was reading it. « I’m here for you » he said and I smiled at these fateful words. He was looking for one of my American writer’s books to check a story up. He didn’t mention exactly what, but it was something I wrote which seemed dubious to him, not serious enough. « I can lend it to you » I said, but he declined the offer and looked reproachfully at me. I saw the mistrust. It was all cast around him. You are what you write, he seemed to say, although he remained silent and then took a book off a shelf and asked, « Are you familiar with him? » he meant J.M.Coetzee. I’ve only read In the Heart of the Country and found it wanting, I said, a fake foray into a woman’s heart, he doesn’t know it well enough. Zarathustra hadn’t seen anything wrong, but did he know much more than Coetzee about it? He told me, then, in a sardonic smile, I should give this marvellous writer a second chance and I took his word for it.
In mid-autumn I called. He sounded forbidding, my second part was no better than the first one. I wondered whether he was more irritated than disappointed. There was a touchy edge in his remarks. I could see his face, a rancorous mask. I didn’t know if my offence was as severe as that. Should I plead guilty and retract? Admittedly there was no heart in what he read but still there was some reason in it. I went back to his living-room to stand by it. His surly air, his glassy stare did not put me off. I listened to his stern rebuke without batting an eyelid. There was a bunch of flowers in a blue vase next to my visitor’s armchair. They looked incongruous in the frosty atmosphere. But blue was always appeasing to me. It was picked up by the painting opposite me, an open sea, behind him. It had often been a pleasure to rest my eyes on it, the rolling wave, the inscrutable offing. « You should not defend. It’s a corrida, you see, » Zarathustra was, now, saying to me. « I just can’t let you go to it. » I smiled at the image that sprang before me. How could I help seeing a sacrificial Athenian virgin marching up to a blood-thirsty bull? Zarathustra got up and rushed to the window, « What time are you coming back? » he called out to his wife who was starting up the car. « That’s marriage, too » he commented to me to link his act to my second part, although my « Connubial Confession » was far from being inspiring to him. « You seem to ignore one important term, desire, » he said, and his face was transformed by the power of the word, « the beautiful word of desire. » Zarathustra has two faces when he strikes a blow for literature, a sour and a sweet one. It was the latter that suddenly bloomed before us. When Zarathustra spoke thus, he struck a cord with me. He touched me to the quick. I still feel the prick. I still wince at the memory of it. My composure was gone. I wanted to flee. There was only one place offered to me, the hollow of the wave he displayed. « Have you started the third part? » Zarathustra spoke mildly. Why this volte-face?
« I’m almost through » I said.
« Then we’ll see each other soon. »
I was in no hurry, indeed. I left his living-room in a Sturm und Drang mood. His remark, a casual one, unleashed a torrent of misery in me. I thought it was just my regular allotment of grief but this time it seemed to be without stint. I shoved away the annotated second part, I shunned the third one. I thought that was the end of it. There was something in me I failed to grasp. I went to an analyst and told him why I started this dissertation, how I sought to dam despair up. I thought that was the crux or at least a loose thread to pick up. I found myself voluble, gleeful in speech but my verbose reprieve lasted only a couple of months. I was feeling better, but my finance was cracking up. I suspended the relief. The uneventfulness of days was weighing upon me. And the decision I was taking seemed unfortunate, of ill-will. But deus ex machina appeared to me. I ran into Zarathustra one afternoon in a down-town telephone booth. His size in that cramped space fell on me first, then his silver shine. The grey-haired man in a grey raincoat stood and spoke. He got sight of me and nodded through the glass. The ghost of desire was now between us. He had conjured it up. Our silent exchange reminded me that I should write and apologise for abandoning the work but kept putting it off. I wrote dozens of rough drafts. I could not find the decorous words, the right way to have a clear break. He was my last bond to it and I was unable to sever it. Zarathustra was involved in an enterprise that go going to the dogs, had unfortunately for me invested on it. It was impossible to write this brief note of release. I toiled on and completed the third part. I knew I wouldn’t have his blessings with it but I sent it to him and braced for the third round of rebuke. It was the best I could do. My task was done. I hadn’t given up.
I don’t easily give up. Zarathustra says I’m stubborn and he’s not wrong. He first made this remark when he knew little of me and I was surprised because I considered him blind to everything but texts. I can’t give people up. I’ve never thought of giving Zarathustra up, although he meant nothing to me, but he has. I didn’t really mind then, but that was before, before he became dear to me. Between me and him there’s a dead dissertation to bury or to relive. I can’t relate to people through hate so it has to be through love. I don’t like sweeping statements but any kind of love is the right one. That’s why I let Alan into my life though I’m still worried a bit. He’s a Round Table knight whose grail is set in a woman’s heart. He wrote this sentence in his paper at the end of the second term exam. Their adult understanding of their favourite childhood tale they were asked. It was Galahad’s legend his chosen one. Correcting was anonymous, but I instantly recognised his handwriting, his style, his turn of mind. It was a beautiful text. I kept it in my mind like the rest. How eagerly he opened up to me and complained about my unwillingness to do the same towards him. How tough to look for a grail in a dead heart. That’s why I’m on my guards. Alan has entered my cloister-like flat, sprawled on my bed, wrote at my desk, but knows nothing about my tight rope walking and the gap underneath my feet. « I’ve got no access to your body, but I often feel that your mind is also a virgin forest to me » he repeats. « Let’s call it our Hyde-and-seek. » That’s his brand of wit. Its flossy felicity delights me. I feel grateful to him. He has relieved the maiming monotony of the chain-like days and weeks. I walk along the river banks at dusk when he invades me leaving my flat to him. I trust him more than before. He no longer tells me, « if I wasn’t afraid of needles, I’d shoot. » He’s making plans. He wants to leave the city and wants me to follow him. I wasn’t born here, but here I’ll die. So will Zarathustra, indeed, it occurs to me. He was born here, has been walking along the same banks much longer than I have. His city strolling habits appeal to me. The countryside bores him. Now I’m surprised that such details beset my mind. Before, before he became dear to me, I thought I knew nothing about him. I was just sleepwalking in and out of his living-room looking at his paintings on the wall, blind to him opposite me.
Zarathustra’s living-room feels familiar. There’s his favourite edition, the whole Pléiade in it. I know where to stand and sit, when I should listen to him or start to speak. I didn’t fear the visit to discuss the third part, although I knew it was going to be tough. I felt aloof, detached. He was visibly annoyed, had the sulks. He took up the corrida leitmotiv, but there was a new element in it. « It’s a massacre, you see, and my name would be involved in it. » I really did not want my dissertation of discontent to disgrace his honourable name, but I clearly saw he was being unfair to me. « Another supervisor will be glad to go ahead » he said and I must admit I was quite taken aback by it, I must admit I found something craven in it. How unfortunate for him to get mired with me, but I’d just wash my hands off. « It’s up to you » I said and waited for his response. He didn’t pursue the issue further but leafed through the manuscript and started to comment on it. There was something I wanted to know, though, and I was sure he would not beat around the bush, he would tell me what to do. There was only one thing I could not do, put my heart in it, it had been sucked out of me. « Is it bad? » I asked, « Should I throw it in the dustbin? » I’d have been glad to get rid of it. Despair was still there but I was learning to live with it. It was his turn to be taken aback. The question even elicited a smile from him. He knew I was cruelly direct, he had told me that when we spoke about his disease. « No, » he said « you should not. Intellectual work should never go into a dustbin. » All was said and done for me. It was easier said than done for him. The verbal tussle that followed up was hard for both of us. « You’re fighting like a lioness » he said, « you’re fighting with claws and beak. » I had often admired Zarathustra’s imagery but I could hardly picture myself as a carnivorous animal or a bird of prey. I’m a vegetarian, anyway. « You’re dishonest » he said when he came across a quotation that sounded ambiguous although prestigious. But dishonest was not the right word. He doubted about my intellectual integrity, I doubted about his understanding of me. Twice he got up to bring evidence from his study to what we discussed. He was right the first time but the second he found out he was wrong. « Nobody’s infallible, not even the Pope » I said, although I didn’t know whether he was a Catholic or not. « Score one to one » he said but there was still an introduction and a conclusion for me to write and him to read.
« You must finish by all means, » Alan said to me, « get your mind off it, be free. I want you to have a deep feeling for me, the deepest one you can have for a man. » I couldn’t see the connection very well but Alan didn’t know how much I meant to invest on it and how little I finally did. I am sorry again I cannot not offer what he’s asked because he’s a kid and the deepest feeling I can have only goes to grey-haired men. He looks unhappier than before now that he no longer turns to drinks and drugs. I read with him Les Paradis Artificiels again but I refrained from making any comments on it. He’s more nervous too. He may resent having given up the only comfort within his reach. There’s a growing dislike in him for the man he has never seen, as if he’s sensed the spell Zarathustra has started to throw on me. I’ve got no boy-friend, yoga seems better than sex, still Alan’s jealous attention and affection are flattering me, human all too human after all, and on top his irrational attitude exasperates me. Then I see how my supervisor was exasperated by me although my middle-aged silliness was different from my spoiled kid’s. Why wasn’t Zarathustra more detached ? Why did he remind me of that terrible word I had cursed and damned? Why did he claim my heart?
After reading my introduction he looked more relaxed. The severity of his mien eased, the saturnine frown was gone. He seemed committed to end my ordeal. I never found him humane enough, I wondered whether he was moody, I considered how hopeless I’d be at humouring him. But Zarathustra spoke thus: « It’s your persistence, you see, there’s something convincing in it. » I was disappointed to see that Zarathutra didn’t know my American writer as intimately as I did. He became chatty, he pounced on Djuna Barnes. He was reading a doctoral dissertation on her. The dissertation was bad but Djuna was good. « I don’t think you know her » he said. « Of course I do » I protested but didn’t tell him about my hot nights with her. At least I was glad he liked her. « An out-of-bounds fornicator » he said. How prude my supervisor was turning out to be; but no, « incest » he confided to me. I couldn’t help thinking about Alan and his desperate drive to lay with a woman so much older than him. I looked keenly at Zarathustra. We were deep in sex. He was taking up the Esperanto of desire I had avoided once. And I who had thought he was not fluent enough. He wanted to comment on oral sex. My American writer brought it right before us. How gleefully, how glossily outspoken he had been about it. « Well, he’s a man » Zarathustra said. But I wasn’t thinking of the man. He was the man. With flesh and some blood. He looked handsome, at great ease. His voice steady and scholarly, his speech crisp. No warmth about him but the frost was gone. In the wake of his beauty I felt bemused. It was the first time he offered a lotus fruit. I gathered my befuddled wits, picked up the annotated folder Zarathustra handed to me. « He’s playing God with his students » my most dear friend had said. Certainly a Greek one, flawed and fragile, even frivolous perhaps. Zarathustra was just acting like a man. « I still don’t understand why your work was not as good as I thought it’d be. » Zarathustra looked perplexed. « Perhaps you’ve overestimated me » I offered. The smile that appeared on his face did not persist. A thoughtful gaze took over, stayed fixed. While he was weighing the evidence, I clearly saw he found hard to admit that he had been mistaken about me.
I pored over his annotations. They called fourth a single observation. Zarathustra no longer wanted to mortify me. There was only his turn of phrase in them. The improved version of my text bore his mark. The daze of desire was now upon me. I evaded it. With a mind full of misgiving I went to him. « I’ve got some changes to propose » he announced to me. His turn of phrase had been revisited, reviewed. The introduction had been corrected again. How very odd to see that Zarathustra was putting his heart in it. He gave me some instructions for the conclusion, too. I listened to him reverentially, I took notes diligently. I left with an important piece of information. Zao Wou-Ki was the painter of the open-sea opposite me, the painter who comforted me. It was bought before the artist became famous, at the early years of Zarathustra’s marriage. I had not asked for the name, it was spontaneously given to me after being tested on my knowledge of him. I failed the test, it was the only picture of his I had ever seen.
Zarathustra was gaining ground in my mind. He was now scudding across it. His wart-flecked face started pursuing me. I knew why. It was the shaft of aquamarine light. I’m no synaesthete but aquamarine is the colour of desire. The conclusion was not difficult to write. My absorption in it made me neglect Alan a bit. His latest texts were left unread. He sulked for days on end and I was in no mood to humour him. I was paying tribute to my American writer, it was a taxing job. Alan would have to wait, do his job. But kids are impatient, have no self-control. After he got his driving-licence he started wearing a black cap and called himself the lady’s chauffeur. He drove me to Zarathustra, when the conclusion was read, and was supposed to pick me up in a hour and a half. But Zarathustra was in a chatty mood and Flaubert and Stendhal came up and some others, too, I hardly knew - Céline apart - and would have to discover if I wished to catch up. And somewhere between Flaubert and Stendhal, Zarathustra told me again about his fear of death. But the immortal beam of aquamarine was now upon him. Then Zarathustra came to my « Conclusion ». « It was a surprise » he said as he leafed through the text « it was good, I really liked it. » I lost three battles but I won the war although I’d never be absolved of my past sins. There was truce between us now that we would be walking into separate ways. I could still cross his path along the river banks, but the city was big and God knew when I’d see him again once this Franco-American chapter in my life was sealed for good. I really didn’t care that the rest of the work was not good enough but that was before, before he became dear to me. Zarathustra finally came alive in my mind and that would review the whole past. I left with a wisp of regret, a wish to undo what had been done.
My car was nowhere to be seen. It had vanished with its driver in it. I walked home fast. Not that I was in a hurry to return but I knew that a quick gait could chase unwanted thoughts away. My car was pulled up in front of my block-of-flats. « I’m sorry, » I said « I was late, it’s good you didn’t wait. » Alan stayed still looking straight at the steering-wheel. « This silly old man’s a chatterbox, that’s all he is » he said in disdain. That was it. My heart flew out to him, the old man and the words. It alighted on his elephant’s skin and the soft spots hidden beneath. But of what use could it be? It could never sooth the soreness in them, it could never ease the fear of death. A useless heart is no better than a dead one.
The epiphany of Zarathustra’s body came to me a couple of months later. He wanted to see the whole work before binding and we fixed a loose date. I was supposed to phone before calling by him but there was no answer the whole afternoon. The wisest thing to do was to put the errand off. There was no real urgency but in my mind. Yet no yoga exercise could keep me from seeing Zarathustra that very day. Late in the evening, safely past dinner time, I called. I knew he would not mind, he would not be surprised. I said I was close to his house, I could be there in a couple of minutes. I always found the gate locked and rang the bell and after a considerable number of seconds Zarathustra would appear at the porch and would wait for me to cross the yard and walk up the ten steps to him, but tonight the gate had already been unlocked and Zarathustra was waiting for me at the porch. It was a darkling November and there was fog but his fleshy silhouette in a light grey sweater and dark grey trousers stood out sharply against the door, from the dark, in the faint light of the street lamps. He shook hands with me as he always did and for once I thought I could reach up to his cheek, just a daughterly kiss, brushing his skin like a leaf. That would be all. A chaste, good evening kiss, so natural in France. But that could not be all. The vibes were back, released like winds running amok, dancing crazily in November fog. So, I did not reach up to his cheek did not brush his skin like a leaf, and naturally did not grab his hand fast, did not melt into his arms. Zarathustra pushed the door open, stepped back, let me into the hall. The vibes followed of course. « You’re bringing me your child » he said as the metaphor goes. « It’s not my child, it’s my stillborn » I wanted to correct but checked this impulse too. « That’s not exactly how I see it » I qualified his remark but he persisted and unfolded his metaphor. And for once I did not answer back, I did not defend my view. « You were right about Coeztee » I said instead « I finally appreciated him. » But Zarathustra no longer remembered this exchange. I was acutely conscious of each minute we disposed of, ticking away. His failing memory, his failing health fell upon me. Zarathustra was now dear to me and the aquamarine was flooding into him. In the seasons of life it was winter for him, autumn for me, but our bodies were immersed in summer heat. And if I were a writer and wanted to expand on this furtive meeting of us, I’d put nothing in it of the crude sensuality my American writer sometimes favours for his illicit romances. I’d turn to my supervisor’s French masters instead, to learn how implicit one can be with the explosion of desire in one’s mind.
We’re all tentative writers. Our stories overlap, then break apart. I’ve adopted Alan. He needs a confidante and a reader too. I’m not a perfect mother but I’m a good listener and an ideal reader. Zarathustra’s entered the pantheon of the nearest, one more figure of endearment. We don’t choose our parents, sometimes our supervisors either. The aquamarine light is on in my mind. Softening, shimmering. How very odd, Zarathustra clad in grey, erect at his porch, in November fog, Zarathustra in July Bermuda-shorts buying the latest Coetzee in the English bookshop, Zarathustra in burgundy jacket that highlights the silver hue of a rebellious lock, chiding and indicting, then igniting the most serious talk, Zarathustra in formal dress, the cheered Diva at the Sorbonne, Zarathustra stark naked in my fantasies surrendering to a plea of reckless caresses, Zarathustra swathed in the afterglow of love, silent and serene cradled in my arms. I keep thinking, what was it? His age, his disease, his relish for the intellect, his craze for words, his literary thirst that nothing could quench, his vain discourse, his pride in scholarship? I keep thinking, when was it? The early afternoon I got a glimpse of his profile in the telephone-booth, he seemed even bigger to me, somewhat clumsy and bear-like about it, or the mid afternoon he sat next to me on the sofa in a promising proximity and he was paternal, pleasant and playful, or just the dark autumn evening, all erect waiting for me, clad in grey in November mist? It was inevitable, predictable, but I took no notice of it. Too salient to be seen, too hastily dismissed.
I’m glad I have this fondness in me, even if there’s the old pain in it and the phantom one, the one that is still to materialise in me, that is lurking in the dark, that I’ve been carrying along without being aware of it. I’m glad something finally came out of it, out of my sterile research and my futile supervisor. My main regret is that he knows nothing about it. I’ve never made a declaration of love to him, never uttered one of desire. It’d have been simple, really. No need for acrostics, really. In our leather armchairs, formal and frosty warming up to words, amidst his fervent discourse on Voltaire and Marquez - not a word on Sturm und Drang although his German culture is solid enough - and the French novel and the American short story, an irreverent, mid-phrase interruption, Je vous désire.
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