While honeymooning on Nantucket with my first husband, I spent a hot afternoon alone at its Quaker cemetery. Walking over its grass meant walking over thousands of dead in unmarked graves beneath. The grass unmarred, the dead anonymous—it was void upon void. Except for this solo stroll and its yellowing grass and August sun and the frighteningly absurd and empty feeling with which I returned to the hotel, I no longer have any concrete memories from that Honeymoon World.
That was neither the first nor last time I sought out the silence of a cemetery. I drafted nearly the entirety of my novel Little Neck in one. And so it was no wonder that, immediately upon reading a translation of the mysterious, void-ish, and only interview ever given by a French writer named Barbara Molinard (1921–1986), I became obsessed by the small cemetery vault in Paris that was Molinard’s obsession.
The interview appears at the end of her only book, called Viens in French and titled Panics by her English translator Emma Ramadan. But before I even knew the French title I felt compelled to obey its imperative: Come.
Panics almost did not exist. The writing almost died and was buried, unmarked. We have it only because Molinard handed over thirteen stories to her friend Marguerite Duras. And then there is a 14th text, “The Vault”: a beguiling, frustrating interview between Duras and Molinard that contains—including the questions—exactly 1,382 words. It is about a story Molinard did not write, but one which, if she had, would have been the only real-life event in the book.
How many times have I fallen in love with something or someone via English’s third conditional tense, and why did Molinard not write this story?
But she did write it, and then she tore it up.
EVERYTHING BARBARA MOLINARD HAS WRITTEN HAS BEEN TORN TO SHREDS. The previous sentence was written for the book’s preface by Duras in all caps, which was not her style. All caps is Molinard’s style. They were friends, and I like that in writing about her friend’s writing, Duras emulated her style.
When I talk about the interview and their friendship, I use their first names—Marguerite, Barbara. This interview, the whole book, is here only because of their intimacy. Barbara put the stories into Marguerite’s hands. We know nearly nothing of Molinard, nor the details of the friendship between these women, and so I often imagine a scenario: They are in Barbara’s house in the countryside and Marguerite follows her up a flight of stairs into a darkened bedroom where Barbara fishes four stories out of a wardrobe that smells of cedar and the powdery dregs of Arpege de Lanvin. Marguerite grabs them, and the butter from the artichokes they had at lunch transfers from her fingers to the paper, turning a few of the words translucent . . .
This is the story that Molinard did not write:
At some point in the 1960s, she is walking down a street in the 16th arrondissement and comes upon a cemetery. She enters and sees what she calls un temple de l’amour. Its plot is surrounded by a fence with a small gate. Barbara does not necessarily claim agency for opening it. No. She says, I push on it. It opens. Inside she sees a staircase: 20 steps leading underground. She goes down the steps. She goes down the steps. I am repeating that sentence because I am not sure what to say next. I am treading the silence of my story. Well it’s Barbara’s silence. And story. Though, again, she did not write it. There are 22 sentences in this part of the story that she dictates to Marguerite, two more than steps down into the vault, and here are the last ten:
On my way down, I feel a sense of calm. When I reach the bottom I’m struck by the silence. The room is a half circle. I see four tombs in the back. The silence that reigns there is unlike any other; it’s as though I’ve gone deaf. As I linger there, sitting on the stairs, an immense calm slowly invades me. Several times I think to myself that I should go back up. (My husband must be waiting for me.) But I stay there, tranquil and happy. ACCEPTED.
There has been a pause, my own, while I pick at the ends of my long hair and select a white strand from among the brown, pulling it out and flicking it on the bedroom floor—I think I pause here every time I am talking about this interview because it contains so much of my experience of being a writer, and I don’t know how to say that exactly. So I go back to Barbara, who elaborates on this sense of calm:
In the moment I wouldn’t have known how to describe it. Now I think it was because I was outside, outside of people, the street, everything. Which is a good place to be, really. There had always been a gap, an obstacle between them or the world and me. There, I was separated.
And then she leaves the vault, and joins her husband at a bistro. She goes back to The World. The Dessicated World. The Do-Your-Jobs-Like-A-Good-Girl World. (Can I call this living?—That is Anna Karenina and this too: It’s all just a deception, it’s just morphine under another name.) And a subset of The World is the Bistro World—of talking, laughing—and Barbara tries to be there: When I went back to the bistro, I saw them laughing, talking, drinking, as if nothing had happened. I fled.
She makes a plan to return to the vault and stay for three nights—weekday nights—to avoid the cemetery’s weekend crowds. Her packing list: candles, two or three bottles of Badoit, a bottle of red wine, warm clothes, salami, bread, and of course a sleeping bag. She can’t find a sleeping bag but will go anyway. She tells Marguerite: The next day was WEDNESDAY. I would enter the vault WEDNESDAY. I would return Saturday morning. But then, on the Tuesday night before she is to return to the vault, her husband nixes the plan. And here I interrupt the story of the interview to say something about Molinard’s husband and something about Duras.
The oeuvre of Patrice Molinard, a filmmaker and photographer, includes Fantasmagorie, a film version of Dracula, likely made before Barbara’s encounter with the vault, whose opening scenes include the image of a woman wandering a cemetery. And then a man and a woman—the same woman we have seen wandering the cemetery?—are together in bed. The woman is having a nightmare and as she tosses, the camera shows us a photograph of her—smiling, self-possessed—on the mantle. Then morning: the woman wakes and looks across the room. The photograph’s frame is still there, but the image of herself is gone, and in its place is a scrap of torn blank paper. We hear a narrator say, This young woman did not know that the strange lassitude, the feeling of emptiness that she was trying to chase away, would never leave her again . . . As the opening credits tell us, these lines are narrated by Barbara Molinard.
A husband whose legacy in IMDB is one film about vampires and one about Orpheus does not accept his wife also temporarily descending into darkness? Duras doesn’t explore this in the interview. Perhaps we have been there before. There being marriage. Or perhaps Marguerite does not explore Barbara acquiescing to her husband’s wishes because for Duras, acquiescing to another is sanity, and sanity is neither freedom nor oblivion, the two places from which literature and art are made. Madness exerts a seduction on me—that is what Duras says in an interview in 1967 with the French critic Jacqueline Piatier—and she continues—It is, at present, the only true expansion of the person . . . Or, Marguerite might not have questioned Barbara’s acquiescence because of what critic Toril Moi calls Duras’s obsession with wordless psychic pain. If Marguerite had probed Barbara for her emotions around canceling her vault stay, this interview would have veered away from that obsession, where instead, it EMBODIES it. Something happens to Barbara when she is deprived of the vault:
The physical pains begin that night. I had horrifying muscle aches. It took me an incredible amount of time just to turn over in my bed. From that night on, every night, the pains are different. I have pains in my neck, my back, my limbs. Then, cold sweats. And then, shortness of breath. I couldn’t breathe anymore.
. . .
At a certain point the pains are so intense that I agree to see a doctor. I tell him everything. I tell him about the vault and the terrible suffering I’m experiencing. He tells me, “I’m not worried about your suffering. These pains are a blessing. You should expect more, and for them to become even more violent. This suffering HEALS you. You are very lucky.”
I marvel that, despite the doctor’s condescension, Barbara is able to hold on to a different reality: The pains were an extreme version of the pains I would have felt had I slept on the ground, directly on the stone floor.
Is Barbara mad? I suspect that Marguerite believes, happily, that she is. When Barbara’s husband says that her stay in the vault would be bad for him and for the kids, she does not go. Is the madness in this situation the narrowness in which many women feel they are allowed to act? But perhaps labeling something the patriarchy is like naming a single strand of grass in a vast pesticided lawn. Important to, I guess, but not at the risk of overshadowing the other societal madnesses.
I feel that I understand, innately, her desire to spend time in the vault. The silence that reigns there is unlike any other. It’s an extreme version of a cloister. An extreme room of one’s own. And writing happens at—and inside—the extremes. I never feel more calm and accepted, to use Barbara’s words, than when I am separate from The World, writing.
And then there is the supposed madness of tearing up of the work, as Duras describes it in the preface:
Barbara tears to shreds just as carefully as she writes, according to a method. Each page is ripped into four pieces. Those pieces piled up form a whole. That whole, those piles—intermediaries—between the ashes and the page, remain on her table, before her eyes, for a certain amount of time.
But laying waste is its own kind of production. (Dante Rossetti burying his writing in his wife’s casket is the poem of his grief!) Barbara tearing up the stories into nothing—or, not nothing, exactly—does her tearing up need to be negative?—is also a kind of fertility, a freedom. If I feel that my writing is an extension or expression of some ineluctable self, then destroying that writing is my means of escape. And I don’t mean escaping my unhappiness, which I want to protect as much as my happinesses. I mean the crap of The World, the mediocrity of my Self—to write these and then destroy them, so that I can keep living. Sometimes publishing is just the pushpin that renders the butterfly a (mere) specimen. It’s only the act of writing that can be a way of living, a way to stay alive. Marguerite says of Barbara’s writing, Without it, the constant suffering would not have been bearable. Of that I am sure. (I am not sure that Barbara is not a specimen collected by Marguerite.)
Towards the end of the interview, Marguerite asks Barbara, What is the void? Marguerite seems to expect—I did—Barbara equating the void with the vault. But she says that the void is what we live. It’s bullshit. It’s in everything, the cities, the people. The human race should be better. We are very mediocre. Ramadan chooses to translate le néant as the void—where a closer translation to le néant might be the nothingness—a choice that indicates Ramadan, who has translated two books by Duras, sees, or sees Duras seeing, the void as an actual space. Ramadan steers us away from le néant as a malaise and more towards a space. In the documentary The Places of Marguerite Duras, Marguerite sits in her dark home, with its walls of stone—you have to think vault!—and the interviewer says, A lot of your films take place in a house, cut off from the outside world—and Marguerite says yes. And then a few moments later she says, It’s only women who inhabit places, not men—
It’s only women who inhabit places, not men—that Molinard was a woman is important to my understanding of her vault story. While I have not inhabited her words (The silence that reigns there is unlike any other), I have let them live inside of me. I am trying to obey her six-decades-old command—Viens—Come. I am coming to her silence. In a literal fashion as well: last year I drafted a grant application to go find the vault and sleep inside of it for three days.
Sometimes I tell people the story of the vault, and it takes forever, much more than the interview’s 1382 words, more than this writing of nearly 2400 words.
Once, around midnight at a scraggly park in uptown, I told Sasha about the vault. As I talked, the raccoons came out to look for melted ice cream cones, and we could hear rats behind us in the ground ivy. But I told the story of the vault for so long that night that the park became silent. It couldn’t have been silent, it was New York City. But the vault had infected the air. What do you think the vault means, Sasha asked. All the sounds came back. I started out not knowing, and I finish not knowing. I have, I hope, only added one more corridor to the mystery.
*
