The Enchanted Clock Read online

  The

  ENCHANTED

  CLOCK

  The

  ENCHANTED

  CLOCK

  A Novel

  Julia Kristeva

  TRANSLATED BY

  Armine Kotin Mortimer

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS     NEW YORK

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund in the publication of this book.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York    Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2015 Librairie Arthème Fayard

  English translation copyright © 2017 Armine Kotin Mortimer

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54273-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kristeva, Julia, 1941– author. | Mortimer, Armine Kotin, 1943– translator.

  Title: The enchanted clock: a novel / Julia Kristeva; translated by Armine Kotin Mortimer.

  Other titles: Horloge enchantée. English

  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. | First published in French as L’horloge enchantée.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017031553 | ISBN 9780231180467 (cloth: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Passemant, Claude Siméon, 1702–1769—Fiction. | Astronomical clocks—France—Fiction. | Time—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ2671.R547 H6713 2017 | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031553

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Catherine Casalino

  Before and after are transitory conventions, but they can cause precious internal coups d’état.… As many thoughts as there are stars; the stars are there to remind us of it.… The word mystique should not be spoken here.

  —Philippe Sollers, The Intermediary, 1962

  CONTENTS

  I  Versailles

  1  When?

  2  “THEO.” What a Story!

  3  My Name is Claude-Siméon Passemant

  4  Nivi Can See Him as If She Were There …

  5  Even Though Time Disappears

  6  I Dream, Therefore I Am

  7  At the Collège Mazarin, During the Regency

  8  Now

  9  Where Are You, Astro of Mine?

  10  King, God, and Complex Time

  11  Louis the Beloved

  12  The Famous Clock

  13  Among the Convulsionaries

  14  Someone Has Whispered a Sentence in My Sleep

  15  “You Are My Depth”

  16  Mama, Are You French?

  II  Black Matter

  17  Inside–Outside

  18  What Is an Internal Coup d’État?

  19  I Have Again Dreamed of Your Ancestor

  20  Passemant with the Cassinis

  21  Here I Am at the Place de l’Étoile

  22  Happiness and Fire: With Émilie du Châtelet

  23  Do New Patients Exist?

  24  In Praise of Illusions

  25  Marianne’s Silhouette

  26  The Dream of the Primordial Universe

  III  Rebirth

  27  Death Is Not News

  28  Overdose

  29  Once Again I Have Broken with the Human Race

  30  A Ray of Icy Light

  31  Revolutions Start Like This

  32  Hyperconnectivity

  33  Common Intensities, Strange Intimacies

  34  Scenes from Life at Court

  35  Theo Has Just Landed

  36  Variations on Suicide

  IV  The Theft of the Clock

  37  9999 Has Been Stolen

  38  Beauty Spots

  39  Superluminal Speed

  40  Inestimable Trophy

  41  Signed, Passemant

  42  The King Is Naked; or, The Beginning of an End

  43  What If He’s the One!

  44  Aubane Would Have Preferred to Evaporate

  45  Jealousy? What Jealousy?

  46  Conspiracy for a Cause

  47  Together Again: The King and His Clockmaker

  48  Beehive

  49  Where Were You?

  50  What the Press Wasn’t Saying

  51  Paradise Is at the Lux

  52  Silence and Poem

  53  Rose Laurels

  I

  VERSAILLES

  1

  WHEN?

  Time stopped. When? I’m not familiar with this tight, round word. The day passes, the hour strikes … Time that flows for you is crushed for me, in an accumulation of presents. Vertical duration. I stand erect. Suspended, untouchable. Stylite in this overpopulated desert, in the midst of a cumbersome-encumbered throng: products, computers, e-mails, iPhones, trains, planes, videos, markets, supermarkets, hypermarkets, connections, depressions, corruptions, few conversations, miniscreens, giant screens, a few books, fast food, and more or less organic bars. Stingy nouveaux riches, insolvent-insoluble nouveaux poor. No men, but a mass of chargés d’affaires, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, employees, artisans, artists, traders, bankers, philosophers, politicians, computer scientists, ecologists, extremists, wheeler-dealers, minimum-wage earners, temp workers in limbo, salaried show workers, monks (bearded or not), unemployed, homeless, and even poets. Women, a few—more and more—who hold, carry, and transmit. Words, silences, dreams, delirium. Everything. Nothing.

  Petrified or enraptured, what’s the difference. Taking refuge in the immaculate substance of time, I am outside time and outside the game in the great game. Play of skins, perfumes, syllables, accents, touches, breaths, waves, melodies, sparks, bursts of words, nausea, stench, suffering, migraine, palpitation, aggression, brutality, penetration, defecation, smothering, vomiting, bloodletting. Nothing.

  In this everything, and next to it, I take a stand. I take a multitude of actions that explode time, pulverizing its flight. I swim in a whirlpool of endless challenges, failures, new starts, and new unfoldings. Indestructible founder, builder of what is required and urgent. I chase after the indispensable, the imperative, the vital, the whatever. I create, I believe in it, it exists, it has to exist, intoxication becomes reason, intoxication is reason, intoxication-reason: that’s me.

  Me? Nivi. “My language” in Hebrew. Spitting image of my grandmother Niva, only slimmer. Jeans and striking T-shirt, black skirt when needed, dark eyes, Chinese cheekbones, cherry lips, and well-rounded bosom. Not in the least androgynous. Ageless because time has stopped for me.

  Have you ever observed the Luxembourg Gardens from the height of a bird? An intelligent foliage plants luxury in the heart of Paris. Florentine walls of linden trees, red beeches, chestnut trees, and skillfully pruned plane trees. Fir trees, fruit trees, Ginkgo biloba, and even a Philodendron selloum line rigorous lawns or are scattered across them. Flowerbeds in a moiré of iris, rose bushes, and tenderly disciplined pansies. Mirrors of water sleeping in patches, bursting in fountains. White sinuous or rectilinear paths, framing the first steps of babies and the rough-and-tumble of schoolboys. They offer chairs to expansive lovers and irreducible readers. This kingdom is because it thinks. A nacreous light bathes its logic, raises it from the ground. Bees, children, refugee and migrant fowl of all sorts. Marie de’ Medici’s pure caprice, the Carthusian nursery, the Haussmannian s
cissor-cut sacrificing the Philosophers’ Valley and the Alley of Sighs. Tastes and actions follow one another and compose anew. The Luxembourg Gardens today are a sublime smile in the history of France, its imperturbable, serene resistance. When a bird soars and observes, it floats in the sky like the smile of the Cheshire cat: without a cat, without support, eternity goes with the sun and the mist.

  I was that bird. It was by chance that I landed here upon my arrival in Paris, in a mansard room let for a song by a family related to mine. They lived comfortably above that time regained.

  That was the age of the Sputnik. I dreamed of conquering the cosmos, astronomy, and nuclear physics, of joining the secret labs in Siberia. “It’s out of the question, young lady, your parents aren’t even members of the Party.” The Red hierarchy had quickly put me in my place. In the East, I took refuge in the microcosm: language. French, English, Indo-European languages, and—why not—Chinese … Go with French! So much for interstellar spaces! I invent for myself an infatuation for France. It’s still with me.

  More in love with France than the French themselves? Possibly. Stan certainly has something to do with it. Infinite time will always have the form of the Luxembourg Gardens for me—the way migrating birds fly over it and such as I first saw it from the sixth floor of the home of my approximate cousins, the Vogels.

  I frequently go by their building. I look at the lighted windows. Who could be living there now? Who sees what I used to see? I don’t know. But I would be ready to kill the imprudent owners or renters of those premises so as to inhabit, if only for one moment more, the only place in the world where I could live with a smile until I die.

  When the Six-Day War broke out, the Vogels left Paris for Jerusalem, and their apartment was bought by promoters who apparently ruled over the neighborhood. Luckily, the new owners, extremely rich, had underestimated—maybe even forgotten—my mansard studio, and for a long time I was able to enjoy it for a modest rent. Years of study, reading, music, mostly happy love with Ugo, until Stan was born. Then the departure of Ugo Delisle, who, having discovered that he was not made for fatherhood, went off to return to his native Italy, the country of his mother, the Red Brigades, and free love. I too left that bird’s life at the Lux to devote myself to little Stan, who had decided not to grow up the way everyone else does. He sang better than he spoke and had only “orphan” diseases, which is to say, unidentifiable ones. Enough, though, to produce tons of worries and so-called atypical schooling. In short, life without respite.

  My son X-rays me, entrails and bones. He knows what pain constricts my throat if someone happens to raise their voice. He holds my sweaty hands when words fail me. He perceives the tears in my dry eyes when I am struggling to remain standing. Stan is the only one who realizes you exist.

  You are neither a passage nor a door. I have no need for light, no more than for night, oxygen, orgasm, even death. I have had it all; I still have it. With my ex-husband Ugo Delisle and with others. Times were like that, times are like that—that’s life. Now you give me what was missing: the fullness of solitude, a solitude full of you.

  Obviously I have always been alone, externally as well as on the inside. But that was an absent solitude lacking existence and flavor. Alone with myself. That solitude is not filled in by you now. You make it present, and I don’t suffer from it. I’ve come to like it. Thanks to you. You alone with me, me alone with you—because you are almost never here—the two of us alone. Nothing obligates us. No need to speak to each other. No. You make me break with the untruths of solitude. You make it vibrant; I embody it. I don’t think I’m trying to reassure myself by imagining that your solitude is an echo of mine—mute coincidence, silent fulfillment. Certainly not. In a more delicate way, your solitude diffracts mine. When you are here, we listen to each other, holding hands, but this handprint endures, and we also hear each other think, whether our bodies embrace or we remain far, far apart. I like this understanding, this taste for integrated absence, this pleasure in each other—“the pleasure in God,” you’ll say with your distant, almost funny seriousness.

  Because you are alone, though less than I am, I don’t come to you to rejoin you, the better to grasp my solitude and simply to feel myself truly alone. Not to expect anything from you. Other than that you exist and that you agree to think about me, with me. Two solitudes that are annulled only at infinity. You smile. “In Eternity.” I don’t know what that is. You say: “A world where time does not exist.” A time-out-of-time, perhaps. “We have to forget time.”

  If you were religious or simply a believer, “eternity” would mean “the hereafter.” But you live in the stars, “in perspective,” Stan says. I think we’re dreaming. I call this dream a fiction, a secret transport under the open sky. But you? I like to think that you carry me within you precisely when, to scrutinize the stars, you abandon us. For interminable days and nights. I persuade myself that I am the invisible depth of your giant telescopes, the very ones that confer visible surfaces upon celestial bodies. And that during your starry time, you think, you see, you live in a cosmic solitude. I am persuaded then that you are the most alone of us all. Or the exact opposite: at the limits of the All? My sole. What to call you?

  Solus? The word seems too solar, exclusive and peremptory. It would be more correct to just call you You, without a name, a conjugate secret, me in you, you in me, my Asteroid, my Alone other, my A. I have no need to emphasize anxiety to discover that I’m missing you. I constantly tremble because of it; only at intervals do I lay myself open. For what purpose? For nothing. I have chosen gratuity; now I enjoy it a bit more. The furrow of your gaze in mine, osmosis of our hands that do not let go in the face of this film that the world has become, that we watch without seeing. Your breath, your odor, your voice from which I take food and drink outside time: when you are with me, while listening to your messages, when reading your texts and your e-mails. Dreaming about you, recalling you, reinventing you. Creating you.

  “I am 300 million years after the Big Bang. With you and the red stars, those galaxies that I see now as they were 13.82 billion years ago. Because it takes time for light to reach us. These are very young galaxies, no comparison to the older spirals like the Milky Way or Andromeda. Witnessing this fascinating spectacle, I see time swallowed up. ILY.”

  You are convinced I understand what is happening out there, in the constellation Fornax, which you have just captured on your screen. Thanks to the Hubble space telescope, which was aimed at the desired target for at least 270 hours, you managed to obtain the most detailed image of the distant universe, an “ultra deep field” that puts you in contact with what took place 13.82 billion light years before.

  “ILY” is our signature, as secret as Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, three compacted letters, to be written but not to be spoken:

  “I Love You.”

  Magnetic field. Disk of accretion. Our star-baby. The first Earth-like extrasolar planet, habitable. Incredible but true: ILY.

  More than 13 billion light years separate us, too. I, Nivi, am swept into the abysses of my patients, listening to their spiraling labyrinths. He, my Astro, not content to try out everything his state-of-the-art telescopes can offer, the most high-performing ones on earth—from Grenoble to New Mexico, from Toulouse to Seattle—persists in camping out day and night at some hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, a mere trifle compared to the origin of the universe. Obviously two realities that do not facilitate our nevertheless permanent meetings.

  Since the day we met in the waters of the Atlantic off the coast of the Phare des Baleines, time has opened up, sweeping away limits and obstacles.1 Whatever happens, whatever the weather report, genetics, or the Internet may say, ILY is felt and thought, ILY is translated into words, acts, patients, stars, lives, and deaths. ILY in everything, in nothing.

  It was a violet morning, the garnet disk of the sun barely pierced the mist, the warm sand no longer caressed my feet, nothing at all kept me on the shore. Runn
ing toward the rolling surf of the rising tide. Embracing the nervous wave. It catches me, loaded with algae and iodine. I let it massage my face, my skull, the back of my neck, my back. Force my arms, my thighs, my calves. Iridescent, warmed skin. I hear my heartbeat. I breathe in air between two waves. To be reborn has never been beyond my power. Why not? I burst out laughing, ô violet rays, I can no longer see the shore. Nothing but that circumflexed ô, no horizon. I go under, I am no longer cold, I am the iceberg that melts, the polar bear that drowns, I sink, I don’t cry, ever, I will laugh to the end. What is there at the end of time? Lights still, sparks in my eyes, salt filling my throat. And my hand in his hand.

  “Certain galaxies stopped making stars millions of years ago. Practically asleep. Drowned, if you prefer.”

  What is it? I hear an adolescent voice, its trumpeting, then velvety, timbre. I cling to the fear that’s slipping away under this arrant audacity. I squeeze a hand, and always this voice; I don’t give a damn what it’s saying; it’s as if it’s trying to reach me, to grab me like a hand that does not want to let go of mine. A lifebuoy, sailor’s hitch, caress.

  “I think you’re fine for the party … Oh yes. You know, there’s always a handful of unrepentant revelers huddled together in the interior regions of the galaxy, celebrating new beginnings. They fuel the revelry while the galaxy takes a well-deserved rest. A new burst of stars is confirmed at 5,000 light years, and the celebration continues around the hub. Not in its core but at the margin. When the center collapses, the process begins again at the borders. Such is the life of stars. Ours too, perhaps.”

  The sun finishes drying my cheeks; it’s burning my eyelids now, my lips. I open my eyes.

  “Theo. Theo Passemant. You are on board my boat …”

  “Passemant … I’ve heard that name before …”

  “I fished you out near here. Very far from shore … You had to have guts. Or be unconscious … Do you remember?”