“Don’t worry, I’m fine.”
“I’m not the kind who says, ‘it’s nothing, just a woman drowning.’”
She doesn’t miss a trick, that one. When Dr. Baruch wants to please me, she fires off one of those Exocets I myself taught her to use, in this case a line from La Fontaine. We are supposed to chortle together. Not me so much, because I don’t agree with her in the slightest. For the moment Teresa is my entertainment, she’s a great deal more engaging than anything else, including thalassotherapy, and since my one vice is curiosity I’m currently devouring all I can get hold of that has to do with my saint in particular and mystics in general. I feel well within my rights to fire back: “I’m not drowning, darling, I’m allowing myself to be seduced!”
But I’ve underestimated her again.
“Not Bruno, is it?” she says, with a censorious sniff.
Well I never! Has she overheard a phone call, or gone into my e-mails? Unlikely, it’s not her style. Did she spot that old exhibition catalog of works by the Beguines, which Zonabend found in an antique bookshop and gave to me the other day?1 “For company on your journey toward Teresa. Love, Bruno.” That surplus word “love” did not escape my notice. But Marianne can’t have seen the catalog or its inscription; I keep it at home, where I consult it religiously.
Got it: Bruno had Freud’s complete works delivered to me at the MPH address. The standard edition in English, twenty-four volumes accompanied by an “affectionate” note. A generous if somewhat ostentatious gift, and a peculiar one, because not only do I read English poorly, the MPH is also growing increasingly cognitivist, in line with the rest of our globalized planet, and disdainful of psychoanalysis. Zonabend decided to defy the international trend, he claimed, simply to “please me.”
Point noted. I got the message, and couldn’t help feeling a consequent twinge. My colleagues rapidly forgot about the anachronistic offering, except, as I now realize, for Dr. Baruch. In love and therefore jealous, my friend saw the whole thing in a flash, well before I woke up to the pickle I was in with my funny old publisher. Who has, sure enough, become rather more than that in recent days.
“Oh, stop fantasizing!” I stand up, to cut the conversation short. “Happy Christmas, happy hydrotherapy, happy New Year! Send me a card I might get before Easter!” I give her a warm, close hug, but I can sense that she’s not fooled.
Did I really seduce Bruno with my talk of saints? Or does mystical seduction itself make straight for its human target, publishers included, without need of assistance from me? Having lost, as the reader will recall, my faith in human relationships, I am inclined to favor the second hypothesis. Be that as it may, Bruno is a changed man since I mentioned Teresa to him. The Beguines catalog, the complete Freud; my middle-aged publisher is getting adventurous.
For he did not stop at “love” and efforts “to please me” with gifts of books. We were at the dinner-date stage. I accepted the invitation, just to see what he was after. Never in our long and intermittent history had I thought of him in any but a professional capacity, but pieces of his story started coming back to me as I sat opposite him, nursing my drink, in the Café Marly overlooking the sculpture courtyard at the Louvre. The erstwhile handsome rogue and shameless philanderer had been kicked out by his wife — what, five years ago? — because she couldn’t stand any more of his Monster Baby scenes. To the surprise of tout-Paris, that microcosm of media-savvy glitterati, his wife went and married a great but obscure biologist at the INSERM medical research institute, without either celebrity status or private income — not much of a playboy either, at best a boat in the marina of La Rochelle, thanks to which I numbered him among my summer acquaintances. As expected, the diffident scientist had found safe haven in the arms of Stéphanie formerly Zonabend, henceforth Coblence. He has found happiness, actually, if the beaming face of their little girl, nearly three, is anything to go by. She skips along the strand at the Île de Ré under the frankly spiteful glances of the readers — mostly women — who feign an interest in the output of Zone Books.
So Bruno found himself alone, not really noticing, rapidly swamped by feminine attentions as calculating as they were tiresome. At length, having escaped this enterprising harem “for the sake of liberty and the Enlightenment,” as he put it, he settled into a comfortable, carefree celibacy. His only ambition now, his great priority, was to consolidate his position as a tough businessman. “The only publisher who doesn’t lose money by reading books”: quite a feat, I must say, in our times of runaway illiteracy. It won him respect across the board in the trade. Meanwhile he kept a proud eye from afar on the education of his twin sons, students at a prestigious business school across the Atlantic.
I thought he seemed shy, for once. His soulful eyes, like those of a romantic youth, slid surreptitiously from my lips to my cleavage and back, but sought more often to plumb my own gaze in search of goodness knows what depths. He had not, however, shed his old go-getting energy, his knack for knowing when to push. On this occasion he made bold to tell me about his boys, signaling intimacy. They had jointly won the sought-after Humboldt Prize, involving a training course in India related to the famous microcredits system that had earned its deviser a Nobel Prize. At the same time (“and this, Sylvia, is what matters!”) the experience had led the pair to discover Buddhism.
“You see, Thomas and Michaël are staunch rationalists, like their father, whose agnosticism you can rely on.” He took a long sip of Château-Lagune, closing his eyes beatifically. “But then they get to visit all kinds of holy places, temples, and monasteries. They talk to gurus, how about that? They even met up with one of their Israeli cousins, the son of my aunt in Haifa. The guy’s living in an ashram in Pondicherry, for goodness sakes! Mind you, what with those violent God-squad crazies in the Middle East not to mention our precious ally Bush and his neocons, I don’t blame the Israelis for getting hung up on Eastern spirituality, do you? First India, then Japan, it’ll be China next…Not your field, you say? Sure, it’s not mine either, but I’ve started learning Sanskrit, did I tell you? Absolutely, been doing it for a while now. No, I didn’t rediscover my faith, the future belongs to ecumenism, it’s just a matter of intellectual curiosity. At the same time I’m keeping up my Hebrew, in order to follow the teaching of a spiritual master who looks at the great currents within Judaism and knows how to put them across to people like me…So when I hear you talk about mysticism…Do you know that book by Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism?2 Absolutely essential, my dear…Of course you have, but allow me to suggest you read it again, you know how these things mature with every reading, however many, in my experience…How about his Zohar? No? But that’s the very pinnacle, the ne plus ultra, you absolutely must, it’s all in there…Excuse me? I’m being ridiculous? But I thought you were letting me know that…well, that all that was important to you, and so I thought to myself I wasn’t so alone after all.” It was my turn to drain another glass of wine. Bruno wasn’t alluding merely to an exchange of spiritual intimations. “Of course, I mean, you approach the issue from a Christian perspective, and that interests me too…You must agree that Agamben’s book on Saint Paul is his best by far? I should have published that, don’t you think?…Oh, I can’t tell you anything, you’re so much more knowledgeable than I am, with your training and your female sensibility, goes without saying. And yet, how can I put this, a complicity between you and me is worth saying…I think so. A new alliance, if you like, in Hebrew they call it akeda, sacrificial alliance, or berit, over circumcision…Now you mustn’t feel that I’m trying to influence you, far from it, you write it your way, like you always have. For me it’s the diversity of approaches that counts, you know me, Mister Multi-pronged Attack…”