He floundered and flailed, absurdly and endearingly, and I felt he was being genuine. Was this really the same Bruno I had known ever since my Duras book? The cynical big shot with his marketing jargon, the wizard of publishing scoops with an air of the soixante-huitard recycled into a credible CEO? He wanted to talk and talk, certainly not to listen to me; his outpourings were rambling rather than erudite. I liked him better that way; I let him ramble on. When finally he got around to his Charolais steak I managed to slip in edgewise some details of Teresa’s life. Her Marrano grandfather, the court case over her father and uncles’ right to call themselves hidalgos, her ambiguous friendship with John of the Cross, her dalliance with Fr. Gratian. I’d unplugged my “Sigmund” antenna, it seemed more appropriate to bolster his male yearning for complicity.
“Absolutely, absolutely,” he nodded absently, as if in a dream, “that’s it, our subject. You don’t mind me calling it ours? But look here: what exactly did ‘love’ mean, to these people? We don’t know anymore, do we? And that’s the problem. The ‘Hiroshima of love,’ you said the other day, if I remember rightly? There you are: we don’t know the first thing about it, we’ve lost the taste for it…I hope you’re enjoying your fish?”
We had gone out into the Tuileries court. A biting wind drove snow against the steep glass of Pei’s Pyramid, blew white flakes into my hair, my shoes, in a giddy vortex of lights. Bruno drew me close to shield me from the blizzard breaking over Paris. Then he slowly turned my face toward his, found my lips, and I lost consciousness of all but the taste of his mouth. Fragrance of blond tobacco, enveloping saliva that dilates me. A burning sap creeps through my chest, flows into my belly, floods my sex, my thighs. My legs have gone. I want to gulp down everything, this man, the wind, the wine, the museum and its auspicious scars, I am pleasure open wide. Bruno feels it, feels me, comes closer still, his face vanishes, now the whirlwind of memory that raked it vaporizes it into a mist of sleet. His tongue is still inhabiting me, I am fluid, I will not cry out, I will not fall, I strain, I melt, he licks the roof of my mouth, my cheeks, he holds me back, we start again. Not me, not him, it isn’t us, this kiss belongs to nobody; someone or something beyond ourselves courses through it. Who is kissing whom? The Louvre itself participates in this exorbitant desire, and Notre Dame as well perhaps, and the Bernini sculpture of Louis XIV on horseback nearby, and the Pyramid, and definitely the Carrousel mall, and why not the Great Architect while we’re about it; and then there’s the Ganges, and my readings of La Madre, and the complete Freud, and Gershom Scholem, and Agamben, and the installations crafted by the Beguines — everything and nothing, in this snowstorm that’s painting the city white.
Unplanned and futureless, that strange, long embrace, outside of time, outside of place, had the tang of impossibility, and we both knew it. All the more reason not to let go, to cling on, with bodies on fire and bellies throbbing, in a weightless suspense that was neither erotic nor antierotic: more than perfect, pluperfect. As the pluperfect tense indicates an action completed before another action in the past, so must our ancient histories, Bruno’s and mine, have crossed in the far distant past, around follies and temerities that had been lived and left behind by others long before us. For a quick moment this past made as if to snatch us out of our skins before bringing us back, inevitably but undramatically, for once, to those pleasures we still call physical — according to Mother, Colette, or Sagan, I’m not sure which. All of a sudden our bodies felt pneumatic, impalpably light, drained of passion. Just a smile and a swarm of symbols and memories, a trail of exploding grenades.
Silence, taxi, “Take care of yourself,” “Work well,” “I’ll call you,” “I’m going away tomorrow.” Serenity.
He’s going away, I don’t know where or with whom, and I don’t care. Attempting to decipher Teresa’s experiences is pride and exhilaration enough. Now Bruno’s effervescent kiss makes me think that the headiness of it might be shared, like lonelinesses are shared that do not communicate but walk side by side into infinity. And it reminds me, if need be, that the most ideal quests keep me enthralled only insofar as they are wedded to the body. Alright, it’s my job to know that, I knew that. The extraordinary thing is that it took that silly, infuriating Bruno to remind me of it!
Build up a little database gleaned from the history of mysticism — now there’s an idea. After the Café Marly kiss plus the sensual details provided by my Teresa and avidly drunk in by me, I’ve lost my ability to classify, systemize, and synthesize. The useful oddments I come across in the works of theologians and other religious historians keep breaking up and scattering, before adhering like magnets to one another at the whim of my moods and fancies. I rearrange, I draw my Carte de Tendre,* my topography of feeling, in Teresa country. [*La Carte de Tendre: map of the emotions engraved in Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie, 1655–1661.—Trans.] Did I say country? “Continent” is a better word for that mystical universe that Teresa may not necessarily have understood or truly explored, but which precedes her, surrounds her, and nourishes her unawares. Yesterday it made her more intelligible to me; today, however, I feel it muddying her singular, boundless, scandalous trail.
Whereas in canonical faith all souls are divine and by the same token immortal, I use the word “mystical” to denote a psychosomatic experience that reveals the erotic secrets of that faith in a parlance that it either constructs or silently refuses. In the mystical experience an extraordinary union comes about — while the speaker is in life — between the soul and his or her God, the finite cleaving to the infinite in order to consummate its true eternity, “alone with God” in the most immediate, intimate sense of a successful incarnation and indwelling. The body wounded by desire experiences and signifies its unspeakable union with the “fundamental principle of being” (Lalande),3 with the Other (Lacan),4 with “Christ’s humanity” (Saint Teresa of Avila). The figures of this hierogamy, this sexual and sublimated osmosis with the absent Beloved may vary, but each inscribes a fracture in the sacral community to which they pertain, and by derivation often touch upon the social and political pact itself. Maximal singularity, rupture of links, recasting of the religious, or of the a-theological quest: mysticism is regarded by “ordinary people” as a form of inner, albeit extravagant, wisdom at odds with the official knowledge, whether ecclesiastic or secular, that so readily reveres it when unable to recuperate it retrospectively.
The impossible desire for a lacking love object is exaltation and pain that are hidden, reticent, at once thrilling and morbid. Excess or emptiness? Or both? The word mystery, from the Greek μυω, “to conceal,” to be closed up (like lips or eyes or sores) goes back to the Sanskrit mukham, “face,” “mouth,” “entrance.” But the mystics, nurturers of this most inner of interiorities inhabited by the All-Other (le Tout Autre), transmute it to the outside — and hiddenness becomes a path. Life bursts into fullness, absence into genuine presence, suffering into bliss, mortification into delight, Nothingness into ecstasy, and vice versa. Religious space is thus transformed into a stage for love, while the search for truth becomes a matter of body-to-body, spirit-to-spirit, body-to-spirit encounters. Mysticism, without distinction of “categories,” embarks on a genuine recasting of metaphysics.