The summer after Katie shot herself, I tried a thousand different ways to pretend my life was normal anyway. Nothing about it was normal : I was living in France, sharing a twin-bed garret with one Nathalie and then another, squinting against sand the Mistral stung into windy submission once a week. I ran sometimes, down cobbled medieval streets and through the narrow passage cut in high ramparts to the river, where I crossed one bridge to see the broken one, and arced around a squat 14th-century tower and stopped in full view of swans, their tubed necks lifting and silent, rose-white in the southern light of hot dawn. The early morning was the only time to run ; after 7 it was already too hot, and the city shut down for 3 hours every afternoon, starting right when the morning's classes ended. So I went out in the fragile light of dawn, sometimes with a Nathalie, and ran to the river and back. And during the day I did not cry. I immersed myself in Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian novel cycle and studied Bakhtinian theory of games in the medieval epic. I practiced the complex diphthongs of French phonetics. I listened to tinny American music on a little radio, and bought my bread in French. I was engaged to be married in August, back in California, and I'd fallen ill with something bronchial during the first week abroad, in rainy London. Before taking an interminable bus southward across the water, I'd coughed through every cathedral narthex, and wept at night, and thought of Katie all the way from Edinburgh to Avignon ; and the words that kept haunting me, like a ghost of that wounded, gilded soprano, the words I couldn't escape no matter what configuration of tall buses, slow trains, heavy ferries and impossibly long afternoon walks I took, the words that came back over and over again were it should have been me.
Then in the spare classroom where I spent four hours every morning that summer, as wind took the city and shook memory from each solemn church bell, I read Jean Anouilh's Antigone. I knew the story : the warring brothers ; the long-suffering quiet queen ; the accidental, intractable king ; the rebel daughter acting to fulfill a destiny she didn't understand. The rotting corpse outside the city walls. A handful of earth to offer rest, dignity, peace.
It didn't work, of course : the guards will always catch Antigone in the act, defying her uncle's edict, clawing at the dirt with her bare hands to bury a brother who never knew or loved her ; they will always deliver her to the king her uncle, who will always offer clemency on two conditions - she must not speak of her defiance, and she must agree to leave her brother uninterred. Antigone will always refuse. Because that's how Greek tragedy works, the drama professor told us. We know the end before the play begins, the fatal destiny has already unfolded no matter what angle we approach it from, and these lines of dialogue just fill a necessary time-elapse to get from the beginning where we know what will happen, to the end when we will have seen it all ourselves. Over and over again.
One day I stood up in class and announced I thought the whole idea of heroism in this play was bogus : "ça ne tient pas la route," I said carefully, practicing a new idiom. It doesn't hold water. Even Antigone knows the body will always be uncovered, and no matter what Creon offers she will continue to defy him, all the way to the tomb where she'll lose courage in the face of stony darkness and hang herself with the belt of her own dress. And what kind of heroism is that? What is the point of her courage, her spunk and gamine spirit, if ultimately all she's going to do is cave (literally)? Stop fighting, stop protesting, stop trying to counter the force of blind, bland authority … abandon her voice, abandon hope, abandon her sense of purpose?
I stood in the sweltering classroom where bees, dazed and heavy in the still Provençal air, thrummed lazily in at one open window pane and back out at another, and I shook as I decried Antigone's false "bravery," this "independence" that ended up just as futile as Laïos's trying to avoid the destiny that overtook him on the road to Argos, this "resistance" that, in the play's finale, was nothing but another pretty word, its cadences merely decorative and insubstantial.
"What would you have her do?" the professor asked simply, after encouraging me to express this long (and unpopular) diatribe, holding up his tapered hands to shush the classmates who interrupted me with "Mais … mais …" every few sentences, and watching shrewdly as I tightened my jaw and blinked. In the buzzing bee-silence when my voice finally died, I'd have been glad of any distraction - a blinding sunbeam that forced me to sit down, a fire drill, a broken glass downstairs in the courtyard. Another voice. But there was just the hum in the air and my own heart like a hammer : I stayed standing.
What would I have her do? I thought. Fight. Fight to the death - and keep fighting. Not contradict her own early words of rebellion. Once you've gone against the king, you might as well keep screaming from inside the black stones of your tomb, you might as well use the voice that troubled his resolve and refuse to let him tune you out, refuse to go quietly into the grave. Or … learn your sister's language, honey-throated docility promising to live on its own terms even though she says otherwise. You have to say otherwise, to the king - kings are fragile things, really, they need constant reassurance, like small boys, like sopranos. Else those colloratura passageways from this world to the divine ineffable ether of the next one quake and shiver and risk collapse.
"Vivre," I said, my whole soul aching. "Live. I would have her live."
"Even with compromise?"
"Oui." Compromise, oh don't you see it, Monsieur le professeur, compromise is necessary, sometimes you have to say yes, it doesn't mean you mean yes, you can still mean no, but you can't work to achieve your no if you're dead. Alive you can work from the inside. And yes, I get it, Anouilh's 1944 Antigone reads allegorically, the haggardly determined, damned princess is not just resistant but Résistante, just as Creon's kingdom "is" Occupied France, and the guards are collaborators, and it seems so horrifying to go along with this horror, so necessary and Romantic to speak out against it even running the innumerable risks of standing alone against the official decrees. What if more people had said "no"? What if Creon hadn't felt he had to make a point? What if the population had been less beaten down by war and loss and terror, still reeling from the attacks on Thebes, had had more energy to combat a tyrant and its own weakness and temptation - the draw to small comforts that is, if not irresistible, at least a torment to resist, in a time of rationed chocolate? What if? But none of that was true, and so you have to choose. Complicity or rebellion. And in the black-and-white world of Greek drama, of l'Occupation, of earnest adolescence, compromise seems the worst sort of duplicity, and the blurred zones where duplicity might bring about redemption seem the worst sorts of compromise. But oh, Monsieur le professeur, I would have her live. Vivre malgré tout, malgré elle-même, vivre en dépit, mais vivre. In spite of everything. In spite of herself. In spite, but live.
My classmates shifted uncomfortably in the warmth of the room, in their wood-and-vinyl chairs. I sat down.
*
I haven't read Antigone since then, haven't thought much of the youthful rebel with her impossible destiny and improbable determination. I've thought a lot about Katie, though. And I have made compromises. I've had to, in order to survive. I've been a good student, a thorough scholar, a respectful daughter, a faithful lover, and most of the time a careful friend. I've leapt through hoops as they raised their looped heads before me. I got good grades because I had to, to get into a good college, to score well on grad school admissions tests, to get into a good grad school, to get a scholarship, to get a Ph.D., a job, a grant, an article published. When in France, I fill out my papers in triplicate, in neatly aligned penmanship. My research is meticulous and minutely detailed. I may work slowly, but I do what is required. I'm not admirable, I'm diligent.
In short, I have, in the years since Katie pressed a gun to her palate, released the safety and fired - with such impeccable aim the bullet shattered a perfectly symmetrical plate off the back of her skull and didn't even mess up her hair in the front - moved on. In fact, it never occurred to me until this very minute, typing in my 4th-storey office and looking out at a lowering Louisiana sky (spring here hanging like wet cotton ropes in a hammam), that of all the violent things Katie did, taking her life, perhaps the most violent of all was choosing where to shoot. [K] is a palatal consonant : she removed the elemental possibility of her own name, the oddly distinguishing letter she bore with self-mocking, nerdy pride, like a child's pendant worn a whole life long. All that remained was the dental plosive [T], the other half of her, unpronounceable without its first phoneme. She erased herself, ripped her own name in half and was gone, before I could even think the word goodbye, much less I love you or please, don't go.
And I am a grown-up now (as Katie never will be), and have chosen to teach Antigone to undergrads this semester, in my survey course on 19th- and 20th-century French literature. As I sit here choosing dialogues for analysis and preparing scenes for in-class role-play and themes for discussion, I am staring at the pregnant grey sky of southern Louisiana but seeing the cerulean expanse over Avignon, where rain is scarce and strange but the Mistral rushes like a mob through the streets and rattles shutters, rifles papers, strangles small birds. And though I am thirteen years beyond that summer, and though all that remains of Katie now is a shoebox full of ashes I have never seen, held together with a purple rubber band from a bunch of broccoli we bought at Star Market the last time she came to my house for dinner and which I wore as a bracelet until I couldn't bear to feel it on my skin, suddenly it seems I can smell coconut, a faint tinge in the air like the sunscreen Nathalie wore. That tiny, fiercely-craved breeze at the back of my neck, that only teases but doesn't really lift my hair for cool release, carries the salt-promise of the Rhône, not the canned sterility of office air-conditioning. The garret the Nathalies and I shared had a window that opened upward, onto the roof of 5 bis, rue Saint-Christophe. We got in trouble every time we opened it, and earned sunburns for our trouble that make me cringe now, and once my foot sent an errant shingle, disturbed by the latest wind-storm, down into the street below. But we would open it anyway, and climb out, and sit silent on the clay-paneled roof and watch the city's afternoon dissolve into the burnt blue-orange of evening. Now I have all the sky I want, but I can't open this window : the university wishes to ensure my safety. I am four storeys up, after all, and the university does not want to know about the times I walked barefoot on a high slant without a railing.
I find myself tempted to tell my students the story (a story, stories) of Katie. I want to rail them with the futility of a sacrifice that costs more than it can ever gain, and impress upon them the necessity of patience in times of oppression. After all, what if every single Résistant had chosen suicide instead of secret networks, code-poems and dye-jobs and uniformed disguises, what if nobody had thought to imbue an aria with hidden meaning, and Offenbach played blithely in the camps as millions of prisoners shrugged and looped their scarves and belts around their necks? I want to say : Antigone is wrong, she gives up too easily, she is too young to think things through, her mission becomes meaningless. Live, I want to tell them. A tout prix.
But I will go into the classroom today and present them with an arbitrary interdiction. Let nobody pronounce the word "pamplemousse" ! Grapefruit is hereby verboten. And I will provoke them with questions. What does this forbidding represent? What does it mean to go against it? Why would a person shout "pamplemousse" and insist on shouting it, over and over again, blind with the fury of syllables resonating against the wall of their own refusal? Pamplemousse, pamplemousse, pamplemousse ! Shout it, and shout it again, even when someone tells you to stop. The sister, the caretaker, the nurse, the campus cops, the king. Yes, even your professor. Why would you?
And deep in my heart I know what I want to hear in response. Does this make me a closed-minded thinker, an inflexible interpreter of the theatrical work? Soit. Let it make me what it makes me, but let them answer : because resistance is right, when the rules or rulers are absurd. And because these syllables, ridiculous though they look all clumped together on the page, these are our voice. And we will use it, on the principle of the thing. Our name is "pamplemousse," and we speak it with pride, and the more you tell us not to, the prouder we are.
I want them to believe what I have lost. I want them to fly in the face of my weariness and jadedness with youth, and passion, idealism and doggedness about getting their way. As I stand before them bereft and broken-hearted, confronting the endless litany of my failings and my wounded memory, I want them to believe in something, in this era when even war gets a commercial, strongly enough to defend it at all costs, especially when the cost is too high. Come to class and stand before me saying "grapefruit." Repeat it until the southern sky goes clear again, the sunbeam comes blinding through the window, the bees perk up and zoom toward the remaining azaleas, the fire drill shrills, a glass breaks against the pavement in the quad courtyard below.
Prove me wrong. At any price.
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