Consumed

9

THE TRIGGER WAS THE RELIGION of the breast, of the fluid of the flesh which is there to nourish, to create more flesh. And then there was an actual breast, Célestine’s wonderful left breast, which was full, not of milk and milk glands, but a buzzing, bristling hodgepodge of insects of every shape and configuration. Yes. “My left breast is a bag full of insects. I don’t know why it’s attached to me, and I would like very much to… disconnect it. You can have it afterwards, if you like. I know you’re fond of it.”

We were on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, the only two members who were not moviemaking professionals. The year before, it had been an American opera singer and a computer-game designer. Sequestered in a deluxe villa in the hills overlooking Cannes, we were to discuss in the most leisurely and free-form manner all questions of cinema and society with our nine jury colleagues—including our president, the Serbian actor Dragan Štimac—while eating the most exquisite meals and wandering the most Arcadian gardens. Eventually, we would sit around the grand table in the impressive ballroom and vote for the various awards. There were twenty-two films in the competition for the Palme d’Or and several other intensely anticipated and analyzed prizes.

The villa was said to belong to a ninety-three-year-old Russian countess, a former beauty who was actually lurking somewhere on the premises, hidden from view, not wanting to be seen but thrilling to the excitement of judgment on art that thronged her halls. It was in the grotesquely Russianate pool anteroom, in a changing room tiled like the Hermitage, that Célestine pulled my face to her naked left breast and said, in a voice shivering with horror, “Listen!”

I listened. I heard her heart, trip-hammering. “Your tachycardia,” I said. “Can you control it? Do you need your pills?” Her face was disfigured by fear; it was, I confess, a face I despised, a rare face. She squeezed her breast, jounced it like a bag of cherries. “Entomology,” she said. “Bag of bugs. Listen to them in there. They would like to come out. Especially the Hymenoptera. They tend to be claustrophobic. Which is strange, of course, because my breast is very much like a wasp nest, and you’d think they’d be comfortable in there.” She was really crushing and kneading her breast in her hands, and I gently pulled them away and held her wrists down on her thighs. She sighed, her face relaxed, and she laughed a small laugh.

I had never heard anything like this from her before. It shocked me and terrified me. It was as though she had had a stroke of some bizarre kind, and the strangeness of her face supported that thought. The pressure was also bizarre, because soon we would have to gather around that table with the jury and the chief of the festival and have solemn discussions and arguments and rancorous voting. I tried to turn it into a joke, a spontaneous piece of performance art. “This is your response to the North Korean film, isn’t it? The North Korean film has burrowed into your breast, your left-wing breast, your Red breast.” I knew the movie had affected her profoundly, and had already disturbed many sleeping Marxist dogs which never leave their French intellectual kennels. But she screamed at me, and moaned, and I was terrified that the jury would become a criminal jury and they would convict us and we would never be allowed to leave the czarist villa. No one came to monitor us, though. We had heard many shrieks and shouts and arguments and morbid moanings throughout the course of the evening before, then the night, then this Sunday morning, the Sunday of the palmarès. A passionate and creative group of cineastes.

And so the essay. It was really a letter to me, a confession she could make in no other way, published in the Paris magazine Sartre, though I had begged her not to. It was too intimate, I said. But she said, “Philosophy is intimate, the most intimate act of thinking.” And so: “The Judicious Destruction of the Insect Religion,” an essay by Célestine Arosteguy. Of course, those of us on the jury of that year would hear the resonance. The North Korean film was called The Judicious Use of Insects, and in her essay Célestine confesses that the movie triggered the “stroke”—of luck?—but reveals that the breast disconnect, the insect connection, had been building for years and so terrified her that she couldn’t speak of it to anyone, not me, not her beloved physician. She describes the scene of the ultimate vote for the Palm. The president had asked the jury for the titles of all their proposed candidates for the Palm to be handwritten on a piece of festival paper—complete with golden embossed palm symbol—and passed to him. When he came across her paper, upon which she had written the title of the North Korean film, he took his cigar lighter out of his pocket and set fire to it, tossing it into the ashtray which he himself had brought every day to our meeting room in the Palais des Festivals and now brought to the villa in defiance of the non-smoking regulations. “I was not allowed to bring my nine-millimeter pistol,” he said, with his characteristic sarcasm-dripping smile, “so this will have to do.” The festival’s artistic delegate, who was there to certify the legitimacy of the voting procedure, was horrified at this barbarity and gently admonished the jury president. But he would not be cowed. “If this thing wins the vote for the Palm, or in fact for anything at all, I shall resign as president and I’ll let everyone know why.” And his look to Célestine was hideous, mocking, malicious, and misogynistic. I was there too, of course. I did not intend to vote for the North Korean film, but I had not yet revealed my own choice.

There was on our jury an aged, angry, exiled North Korean director, Bak Myun Mok, who was obviously an enemy of the director of the North Korean film in competition. He was prepared to do anything to prevent his entrenched countryman from winning a prize, and so he was campaigning—none too subtly—against him. He turned specifically to me and spread his hands in helpless despair. His translator, Yolanda, was a shy young Spanish woman with short, straight black hair that suggested she was trying to look Korean. Even the way she held her mouth was somehow Korean. Yolanda was not comfortable with what he was saying. “You are a philosopher,” she said to me, beginning her translation, but then paused and looked at him apprehensively, almost begging him to say something other than what he was actually saying. In response to this insolence, the director picked up a pencil—we had all been provided with pencils and pads of paper, so charmingly retro—and prodded her viciously, twice, in her delicate, exposed clavicle. Though there was an eraser in the end of the pencil, it left an angry red mark almost immediately.

The translator turned back to me with wide apologetic eyes and continued. “You are a philosopher,” she said, “and that meat dog of a wife of yours is also a philosopher. Both of you professional philosophers, whatever that means. Can you not explain to the bitch that the movie, even the title, The Judicious Use of Insects, is not philosophy, and not art, but politics of the worst, most repressive kind. And to give this wretched, sinister movie any prize would be to shackle the art of cinema to the wall of political expediency.”

“‘Meat dog of a wife’?” I said to Yolanda. “He really said that? And ‘the bitch’?”

“Under his breath, yes, he said those things.” Yolanda’s voice shook with distress, and her eyes became shiny with tears. “I made sure that I did not misunderstand him. I asked him to reconsider what he was saying. And he said those words again, no longer under his breath.” Then, as a tremulous pedagogical afterthought—Yolanda was trying to acquire a French teaching certificate—she added, “In Korea, meat dogs are called nureongi or hwangu, meaning ‘yellow dog.’ You don’t let them into your house. ‘Bitch’ is girl dog.”

He was not small, Bak Myun Mok, but he was arrogant and therefore slow and unprepared for my attack. Because we were not allowed to bring cameras and cell phones to our retreat, there are no photographs or videos of the expression of my rage, though the aftermath—Bak’s broken cheekbone, his black eyes, his shredded lower lip—was duly recorded by the police photographer summoned to the villa. Through all of this, Célestine was profoundly absent and vacant-eyed, increasingly anesthetized by her own spiraling reactions to The Judicious Use of Insects. I won’t go into the overall delicious scandal, which is well documented on the internet. Suffice it to say that the voting procedure was quite irregular, the palmarès was a satisfactory pandemonium, and the North Korean film won a Special Jury Prize—for “artistic subversion and visual elegance”—in consolation. Dragan, the president, voted against this, though he had clapped his hands in delight as Bak and I rolled around on the floor, exclaiming in several languages that this was real cinema and unsuccessfully encouraging the rest of the jury to join in. Bak also voted against the prize, his vote conveyed from a dentist’s office in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he was having emergency treatment on an upper-left bicuspid which I had loosened when I smashed his face into the replica Winter Palace Dutch tiles of the ballroom floor. When I grabbed his hair and dragged his head towards the solid ebony voting-table leg, the action had produced a satisfying smear of saliva, blood, and mucus on the tiles, mostly from that rocking tooth splitting the gum it was embedded in.

Bak later swore that he had been mistranslated and that he had a deep respect for all women, particularly intellectual women like Célestine, and was incapable of even thinking of words like that in relation to her. Yolanda later came to us in Paris, technically as a witness in the assault investigation proceeding against me, but emotionally to sob and whine about the loss of her festival job and the general degrading of her standing in the community of translators. She did ultimately end up in bed with me and Célestine, and was very sweetly needy and desperate sexually, which of course was a delight to me, and would normally have been to Célestine, but she was still benumbed. It was only when I forced Yolanda to describe our sex play in real time in the most obscene way in both Spanish and Korean that Célestine was somehow resuscitated.

I had entered Yolanda from the rear—not anally, you understand; she resisted that—and Célestine had her back up against mine. As she heard the breathy, ragged, dirty phrases coming from deep within Yolanda and mounting in intensity, she turned until her belly was against my back, reached across my head, and grabbed Yolanda by the chin and the hair. She rotated Yolanda’s head until the shocked translator had to twist towards me to avoid having her neck snapped, and then, face to face now, Célestine said, “And the meaning of the title, then? You can explain it to us and reveal the sinister malignancy it encodes according to Bak Myun Mok? I saw you talking to him in the halls of the Festival Palace. You were flirting with him. He must have confided in you.” At first Yolanda was understandably confused, firstly because Célestine spoke to her in her very imperfect Spanish, and then not least because she had seemed to be on the verge of a monumental orgasm, one which had a Moorish flavor somehow, or perhaps that was just my delusion, and now had twisted me out of her, leaving her to pump frantically against my right knee, which had been aching in its chronically unpredictable way, so that I had to shift her pudendum to my left knee.

Most of this melodrama is, as I have said, embodied in the famous essay, famous for the personal events that it revealed as much as for its radical, some say unhinged, approach to consumerist philosophy. What Yolanda said in our bed about the North Korean film did not satisfy Célestine. Bak Myun Mok’s interpretation fell along traditional political lines: staggering under the burden of a crushing drought, the poor villagers in the film—who lived in a hermetically sealed fantasy of a timeless proto-Korean village—were forced by their rulers to supplement their protein-poor diets with insects, which were viewed as noxious and disgusting by the filmmakers, although of course considered legitimate delicacies elsewhere in the world. (Even in modern South Korea, beondegi, steamed or boiled silkworm pupae, looking unashamedly segmented and insect-like, are a popular street snack food.) The title word judicious was used with irony, in the sense of “desperate,” “last-gasp.” But in the stunning and brilliant new world of North Korean Juche Idea, or neo-Stalinist self-reliance, one would not have to resort to insects to feed one’s children, and this was exemplified in the most didactic, programmatic way by the revolt of the peasants against their village elders, who were all members of a violent, repressive, shamanistic caste that promoted insect-eating as a religious imperative. Did not Célestine see the crude propaganda involved? Was she seduced so totally by the retro visual style of the movie, so strangely in color and camera movement like a lush Douglas Sirk Hollywood melodrama of the 1950s?

What Célestine did see was a work created expressly for her by, unaccountably, a North Korean movie director whom she had never heard of and who probably, given the geo-fencing of the country, had never heard of her. How was this possible? Of course, she recognized the inevitable theory that this was a solipsist reverie, but in the spirit of inner drama it didn’t matter if it was: it had meaning for her, and gave her a philosophical project. Korean cinema, particularly North Korean, became an obsession for Célestine, but of course, given its unorthodox trajectory, it did not require study of Korean history or even the actual watching of Korean films. No. It required research of the subversive, subterranean kind, and so I came home one evening, for example, to find our apartment full of acolytes of Simon Sheen, also known as Shin Sang-ok. Shin was most famous for having been kidnapped in Hong Kong, along with his actress ex-wife, Choi Eun-hee, by the future dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il. Kim was a movie fanatic who understood the propaganda value of film, and also knew movie charisma when he saw it. And he didn’t see it in North Korea, so he kidnapped it. (The evening proved to be dismal and awkward, with no narrative to speak of, though Célestine was enraptured by the Sheenians’ somewhat confused presence.)

Célestine convinced herself that the director of Judicious was not Korean at all, but was in fact a kidnapped French director who knew her very well and was signaling her through his film. Bak had claimed that Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un himself was the movie’s producer, following the principles set out in his father’s book On the Art of Cinema, and so, given that the passion for movies still flourished in Pyongyang in tandem with neo-Stalinist ruthlessness under the guise of the Juche Idea, why would they not kidnap the best appropriate director? Why would they not kidnap Romme Vertegaal?

SO. “WE MUST DESTROY the insect religion,” she said.

“Tina, are you really awake? Are you dreaming? Do you know what you’re saying?”

[“Tina?” said Naomi.]

[“From Célestine. And we both loved Tina Turner, the American singer.”]

[“Okay. So, Tina.”]

“He would be forty-two now,” she said.

“Who would?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“Romme,” she said. “He was almost exactly twenty years younger than me.”

You need to know that while there was always Aristide, there were also what we called lacunae, intervals when we needed to be apart. And inevitably filling those lacunae for Célestine was Romme, a brilliant young and radical filmmaker who left his Sciences Po studies to communicate his politics through the art of cinema. Strange politics, and strange cinema: an obsession with Ike Eisenhower, China, the 1950s in America, and the films of Douglas Sirk. Romme Vertegaal was a student of Célestine’s, and of course her lacunate lover as well. He was Dutch born and ridiculously tall, and he stressed to Célestine right from the very beginning that, perhaps in keeping with his extreme height, his eye was always on oblivion. “Blessed, blessed oblivion,” the original Beats would have tattooed on their shoulders, and Romme had those words tattooed on his heart. It was clear that he intended to disappear, to “obliviate,” and eventually he did, leaving Célestine quite devastated. We had just reconnected, filling our latest lacuna with ourselves, and the substance of our rekindled talks was this newly lost love of hers, and the unexpected pain it caused her hurt me too, because I thought she would never recover from it, and therefore any love between us would be experienced in the shadow of this holy, much greater, lost love. Romme was a spectacular young man even beyond his absurd, almost surreal height. Perhaps you have encountered some of his works on YouTube. They are stunning.

His friends were certain that he committed suicide in some fiendishly clever way that involved the absolute dissolution, possibly by automotive chemicals, of his body, and that was also the tentative official police version of his disappearance. Célestine, however, was sure he went to China and disappeared into the vastness of that country, despite his height. And then came Judicious, and Célestine knew that he had ended up in North Korea, making propaganda films for Kim Jong Il, and then real movies for his possibly more volatile successor, the boy-king Kim Jong Un, movies which had certain messages directed at her, Célestine, Romme’s eternal and transnational love.

And so, that night when Célestine shook me awake to tell me that we must destroy the insect religion, I knew we were in trouble. I just didn’t know what shape that trouble would take. Perhaps in the cards was an approach to whatever clandestine North Korean representatives in Paris we could find with the suggestion of a special visit to their homeland from two famous French philosophers, with an emphasis on the philosophy of cinema. Once there, Célestine would try to contact Romme Vertegaal, who worked under the pseudonym Jo Woon Gyu (the listed director of Judicious), and would elope with him, or rather would marry him under the auspices of Supreme Leader Kim, auspiciously replicating the forced marriage of Simon Sheen to his actress ex-wife after they were both kidnapped, and symbolizing the divine fusion of political philosophy and cinema in the Workers’ Paradise of the North. Could Célestine really think in these terms? Profound emotion lay beneath all her thinking, but it never stopped her from being crystalline in her logic, rigorous in her doctrine. Everything connected with Romme, on the other hand, was soaked through with girlish lunacy, and was very disturbing and destabilizing to me and to us.

But even given all the time I spent living in her head and in her body, I never could have anticipated Célestine’s actual Korean strategy.

WE DRIVE AN ELECTRIC Smart Fortwo in Paris. I took Célestine to a North Korean restaurant where she was to meet some mysterious collaborators on her Romme Vertegaal project; it was famous for its startling military-theme design featuring the graphics and colors of totalitarian kitsch. She asked me to leave her there; she would call me when she was finished. I became worried that she was getting into a potentially dangerous situation. I fantasized that she herself would be kidnapped and spirited off to Pyongyang. That she didn’t want me involved troubled me even more: it meant she was communing with Romme, almost the only time that she could not also commune with me, and of course that was distressing. I confess that I parked our car some streets over and lingered across the street from the restaurant.

As I stood there smoking, sheltering in the entrance to a carpet shop, I mused, oddly enough, on the fact that even in his youth, Romme had worn hearing aids—originally Phonaks, but when last seen, Siemens—as a result of a childhood disease. When I finally accepted that I needed them myself, I thought of Romme’s claim that they were tuned to the music of the spheres, and then, more seriously and mundanely, to certain satellite frequencies. He was never ashamed of or reticent about his hearing disability; he was more likely to be boastful and aggressive about it—he politicized it, like everything else—and so it became a cause. After he had worked you over in a café, you felt as though you ought to at least pierce your eardrums with a fork tine in solidarity with him, and also to experience firsthand the divine creation of Swiss and German audio technology. In a kind of audio-homage to him, I went to his own audiologist when it came my time to be fitted. By then, digital technology had enhanced the sophistication of these devices beyond science fiction to the point that they could be linked to cell phones, satellite GPS, and many other communications devices. It was commonplace to call them hearing instruments, an appellation with empowering artistic overtones, as opposed to hearing aids, a term unfailingly evocative of aging and infirmity. My own Siemens instruments featured Bluetooth, six separate programs tailored for different hearing environments, rocker switches for program shifting and volume control, and a wireless controller that looked like a garage door opener. Mme Jungebluth cryptically assured me that she numbered several international intelligence agents among her clientele, none of whom was hearing impaired.

I was certain that any of those agents would have been listening to Célestine’s dinner conversation if he stood where I did on that corner, and recording it and transmitting it to some distant Siberian outpost, but I was left, pathetically, only to imagine it. And then I saw Célestine emerge from the ornately carved doorway of the restaurant in the company of two Korean men in dark suits and ties, one middle-aged, one quite young. She turned to face them, paused, and hugged them, one after the other, with great, joyous warmth. The young one handed her a padded manila mailing envelope which he took out of his inside jacket pocket, and as she stuffed the envelope into the pocket of her coat, he put his hands together, bowed, and turned away. His companion did the same. As the two men walked off down the street, Célestine took out her old Nokia clamshell and called me. I quickly muted my own phone’s ringer and turned my back towards the restaurant.

“Yes?”

“I’m on the street outside the Eternal President. Will you pick me up?”

“Of course. Give me ten minutes.” But I stood there for at least five, watching her like a spy, like a curious stranger, like a talent scout for an Albanian sex-slave trader, analyzing her body language as she paced and smoked, rhythmically patting and squeezing her coat pocket to make sure that the envelope was still there, seeming to take pleasure and security from whatever was in it.

Back in the car, Célestine was distracted and joyful, a very disturbing combination. “How was it?” I said. “The Eternal President. I’ve never been in there. I assume the name refers to Kim Il Sung. The walls must be covered with glorious images of him in that Stalinesque North Korean style.”

It took Célestine too many seconds to reply to what I said, almost as if she had to decide to absorb it first and then decide to respond. “Not just the walls, but the plates too. Kim Il Sung as the Sun King, laughing, happy, emanating yellow rays of light, encircled in red, adored by soldiers and workers of all ages. And the floor show: beautiful young girls in strictly cut, short-skirted military dress and cake-shaped peakless caps, but executed in cartoonish colors and fabrics, pastel chartreuse and fuchsia, performing perfectly synchronized choreography that seemed to mock military exercises while somehow glorifying them at the same time. And singing songs that did the same thing, pop versions of army songs, soldier songs, aggressive and cheerful and threatening. It was exhilarating in its alienness.”

“And the food? You ate?”

“Oh, yes, we ate. Fish and soup—I think it was dog, honestly—fried dumplings, fritters, and kimchi, and a lot of things I couldn’t identify. The music seemed somehow to mix in with the food. It made it humorous to eat, even ironic. My friends assured me that it was authentically North Korean, not South, but that only the elite there would experience the high quality we were presented with.”

“Your friends were Korean?”

It was here that Célestine looked at me for the first time since she got in the car, almost surprised to discover that she’d been talking to another person and not to herself. “Oh, yes. They were Korean. South Korean, but very helpful.”

“But very helpful? You mean you would have preferred North Koreans?”

“For my research, yes. That would have been better. More direct. But these were two lovely, helpful men.” Célestine patted my thigh in an attempt to be comforting, but it only irritated me and made me more suspicious.

“They’re film people?”

“No. They’re insect people. I mean, they’re from the Entomological Society of Korea. I was curious about the accuracy of that film, the Judicious film, its approach to insect life in Korea. I want to write a piece on it for Sartre magazine. Jean-Louis Korinth there is extravagantly enthusiastic. Of course he always is, and then he kills it when he actually sees it. He has an idea in his head immediately, and then what you write never matches what he has in his head…”

She was rambling now, wandering off into the deep woods of the Korean Peninsula, her head turned away from me, not seeing the streets slip by. I wondered if she had drunk too much. Alcohol had really been deranging her brain these days, her short-term memory, her emotional responses. I tried to bring her back.

“And so they were able to illuminate some things for you? Insect life in North Korea as portrayed in the Judicious film?”

She turned back to me, and her face opened and blossomed and became joyous once again, this time without distraction. “Oh, they did more than that,” she said, and she dug around in her coat pocket and brought out the manila envelope, which I had not dared to mention. “They gave me the movie. They gave me a DVD of The Judicious Use of Insects.”

WE SAT WATCHING THE DVD as soon as we got home. Dinner for me was coffee and cigarettes, something that Tina would normally never allow, but I and my ragged metabolism did not at the moment exist for her. She stopped and started the movie as she made notes on her spiral-bound bloc de journaliste, her focus intense, her gaze transcendent. Our copy of Judicious had French and English subtitles and had obviously come from the Cannes Film Festival, where it had probably been used as a screener for potential distributors. Célestine had found, above a Korean travel agency on the Rue de Rivoli, the minuscule Paris office of the Entomological Society of Korea—an outpost of shadowy purpose, one might imagine, for how useful could it really be?

But apparently the fraternity of entomologists and insect enthusiasts of all stripes was well established and seemed to be somewhat free of the usual politics. As I mentioned, she had gone there to verify the facts of village life as they pertained to the insect-eating depicted in Judicious. She had assumed that she would have to educate her new entomologist friends about the very existence of the movie, but to her surprise they had copies of the film and were very proud of their connection to it: the society had gotten a consulting credit which was very prominent in the end-credits roll. The two men she had met in the office offered to take her to the Eternal President for dinner after pointing out that credit to her, promising to discuss their involvement with the movie in detail, and then surprised her with the supreme gift of the rare movie itself. They also promised to send her a copy of the newly revised edition of Korea Insect Names when it became available, as well as enrolling her as a subscriber to their journal Entomological Research, which she said she preferred to see in Korean rather than in English, and assured them that she was already beginning her Korean language studies. They assured her in turn that to have the searchlight of the mind of a genuine philosopher illuminating the subject of Korean insect life was an excitement beyond imagining for them, and would surely be for their colleagues as well. They would eagerly await her Sartre piece on Judicious and would definitely consider it for publication in their official journal, as destabilizing as such a piece would be, nestled between “Evaluation of Larvicidal Potential of Certain Insect Pathogenic Fungi Extracts Against Anopheles stephensi and Culex quinquefasciatus” and “Electroantennogram and Flight Orientation Response of Cotesia plutellae to Hexane Extract of Cruciferous Host Plants and Larvae of Plutella xylostella.”

Célestine believed they were just being fastidiously polite, but she would submit it eventually nonetheless. Her ineluctable attraction to hard science was not uncommon among professional philosophers, who often found themselves adrift in abstraction and politics and longed for what seemed at a distance to be gloriously earthbound and thus substantial and undebatable. It seemed to me now that she was playing entomologist in front of our sad, outdated, cathode-ray-tube Loewe TV (at one time the crème de la crème), whose blurry image frustrated her constantly, so that she sometimes fell forward on her knees to squint up at the screen, hunting for details, studying the world of the movie as though it were a tropical rain forest in Papua New Guinea and she were living inside it. I anticipated an eight-hundred-page monograph called The Judicious Consumption of Korean Insects, perhaps in the Korean language, perhaps in fifteen years. She had that look as she worked, that look into the far distance, the future, a ferocious look that always terrified and thrilled me.

Watching the movie with Célestine controlling it, rolling it backward and forward, freezing frames of obscure interest and providing a rambling, improvised narration, was to witness the creation of a new movie related only vaguely to the one the Cannes jury had judged some weeks ago. In the new movie, the one co-directed by Célestine in our humid, cramped living room, the enlightened elders of the fictional North Korean village of Chosun (an ironic reference to the ancient Hermit Kingdom of that name, immediately positioning the village as primitive and isolationist and floating in time) have decreed that insects of all kinds shall be bred and harvested as the main source of nutrition, and that the traditional crops of rice, maize, and cabbage shall be used only to feed those insects. In this version there was some bizarrely deformed—not to mention anachronistic—Atkins nutritional dogma about vital insect protein replacing woefully deficient and health-destroying grain carbohydrates which fostered dependency on the West and its stooges.

Babies are, of course, exempted from the new insect diet, and so there were seen in profusion the peasant breasts of the village women, always presented in connection with the breastfeeding of infants and never sex, or at least overt sex (some of us on the jury found the breastfeeding sequences extremely erotic; others did not). Though we of the jury had been assured that the version we saw was the official one approved by the Workers’ Party of Korea, and that this version would be shown everywhere in the country with no excisions, there was great skepticism among us as we were wary about this possibly being a ringer tailored specifically for our decadent Western tastes. Would there really be bare breasts and engorged nipples on screens in puritanical Pyongyang, never mind Kaesong or Chongjin? Undoubtedly, these questions hurt the film during our voting, but of course they were irrelevant to Célestine, for whom Judicious was a love letter from Romme Vertegaal.

And the occult (in the medical sense) key to the message from the kidnapped film director seemed to be the sequences in which the now happy, radiant, nutritionally enhanced village is raided by a fierce mountain tribe of warrior priests who violently subdue the men and rip innocent babies away from their blissfully nursing mothers, not incidentally exposing those aforementioned engorged nipples. The warrior priests worship insects as sacred beings, and believe that the ingestion of insects ennobles man and keeps him from descending into bestiality; thus even infants are not to eat anything but the sinister black insect mush which forms the priests’ diet. After the initial conquest of Chosun, there are occasional winklings-out of brave, clandestinely nursing mothers who have fled to the mountain forests, followed by their execution by strangulation.

Célestine was horrified and transfixed by these scenes, even as she was, in a sense, creating them; she clutched her left breast as she watched them (her larger breast, and my favorite, even though it was less perfectly shaped than her right; it was not just the size, it was the nipple, the areola, the elastic softness, the birthmark like the one on Elizabeth Taylor’s cheek). For her, the message from Romme, the love letter’s message, was: Cut off your left breast, that rustling bag of insects, because if you don’t, those insects will spread their insect religion to your entire body, including, and especially, your brain. And then you will be done as a philosopher, and you will be of no use to Romme Vertegaal.

I soon saw this as Célestine’s version of what we called apo, for apotemnophilia, though I was aware that it seemed not really to conform to the template of the syndrome. That template involved the desire for an amputation of one or more limbs as a correction to a body whose structure was not yet correct. My right leg does not belong to me, it is an extraneous appendage. I need it to be gone; I cannot be whole, I cannot realize myself, until it is gone. At my insistence, Célestine and I studied apo assiduously, because I could not accept her certainty that she had received a diagnosis from an old lover through the medium of a movie which mysteriously conveyed both a prognosis and a drastic course of treatment, all of which seemed accurate and acceptable to her.

Célestine indulged me in my desire to convince her that she was suffering from apotemnophilia, which, though exotic enough, was at least an acknowledged psychic construct supported by a body of technical medical literature and many websites of the afflicted. Research was ongoing. Discoveries involving skin conductance response experiments followed up by magnetoencephalography seemed to confirm the neurological basis of the syndrome; it could be argued that it was not in her neurotic imagining but was corporeal, a brain problem, and therefore “real.” But the Célestine version of apo was perhaps too exotic even for this structure. She gently pointed out to me, as in a casual, sweet discussion (the devastating technique she used with her students which made them love her), that she had had no breasts in childhood and therefore had not as a child wanted them amputated; that a desire for breast reduction or even mastectomy was not a recognized part of the apo syndrome, but related more to gender change/confusion and other psychic states, and that it was not so much that her left breast felt as though it were not part of her body as that it was full of insects that were a danger to her, like ductal carcinoma in situ or full-blown breast cancer, and therefore the removal of that breast was calmly, rationally indicated.

And the element of religion was also far from a classic apo concern. Célestine’s book The Nipple and the Mouth, about the universal religion of the nourishing breast, was of course the critical text here. It delineated how a pure, rigorous atheism required the rejection of some religions that were not recognized as religions but functioned as religions and thus needed to be exposed and dismantled—like the insect religion of Judicious as communicated to Célestine by her former Dutch-born French lover, Romme, now transmuted by the alchemy of kidnapping into a North Korean movie director. You see, then, what I was faced with on that waking from a dream, the dream that had been our life together up until that moment in the early morning in that villa high above Cannes. And so my unspoken struggle with Célestine was to be conducted on two fronts: her desire to amputate her left breast, and her desire to reconnect with the phantasm of Romme Vertegaal, aka Jo Woon Gyu.

Had she actually had a stroke, a cerebrovascular accident, while we watched Judicious in the jury box in Cannes? Had the stroke clouded her brain with cosmic portent while the images of peasants, warrior priests, and insect harvests flowed over us? (I thought of Philip K. Dick’s post-stroke religious novel The Divine Invasion.) By the time we had got back to Paris, she was joking about our experience during the festival and suggesting that her little “philosospasm” had been caused by the overheated and overly critical public atmosphere of the festival itself. And did she have another stroke during the night which reanimated the power of the movie over her after it had lain dormant for several months? Could a stroke regenerate the effects of a prior stroke, effects which had flared and then shriveled away to nothing? I urged her to book a CT scan. I scanned her face myself, looking for telltale weakness, a slumping mouth, a drooping eye. I found nothing, and she felt nothing, and refused to see a doctor of any kind. It was a simple series of epiphanies, she said, the kind we often suffered together—suffered because they struck us as revelations that demanded action, that upset comfort, turned it over and dumped it on the polished hardwood floor. She was talking about philosophical and social awarenesses, breakthroughs of cognition which were inextricably mixed with potent emotional mandates. We would often force these moments into being while traveling when exhausted, or when writing while under extreme political duress. I could not deny the reality of these intangible and cryptogenic events; we had shared so many. Intellectually, for a nanosecond, it all seemed reasonable, and then it all seemed patently foolish and insane: amputate a perfectly healthy breast because, against all plausibility, its owner disowned it and feared its contents?

I insisted that Célestine let me study the results of her last mammogram. She did not resist. Its affirmed normality (with the usual technicians’ disclaimers regarding the unusual density of her fibroglandular tissue seen bilaterally, which decreased the sensitivity of the mammography and thus possibly compromised an accurate assessment) did not faze Célestine. It was three years old, and so it contained the seeds of its own inadequacy; it represented a flawed and circumspect medical worldview which could not and did not address the plane of existence upon which human life is conducted. There had been ultrasounds, pictures of the inside of her breasts. We strolled through them as though they were old family photos. There were no insects in evidence. Of course not, she said. The onset of the insects is abrupt, barbaric, and absolute. It is a colonization, as per the village in Judicious, a first staging, to be followed by a total metastasis and subsequent subjugation. How did they get in there, into that beautifully sealed liquid dome? “They can burrow. They can tunnel. They can inject eggs. I’ll be meeting with my entomologist Korean friends about it,” she said. “We’ve already made a date to discuss global insect strategies.”

“I’d like to be at that meeting. I’d like to document this… adventure.”

“You can, of course you can. And you can do more than that. You can meet with your audiologist and see if she’ll tell you where Romme is living right now. She will have been in contact with him, I’m sure. They had a special relationship, very complex and subtle, and his hearing—and so also his career as a filmmaker—in some ways depended on her. He won’t have abandoned her, even at the distance between Pyongyang and Paris. I think now they can even reprogram your hearing aids for you over the internet. After all, they’re just tiny Bluetooth-and-Wi-Fi-enabled little computers. I think you’ve even done it yourself, haven’t you?”

I hadn’t, but I had no doubt that it was possible. And I had no doubt that if anyone was programming the Dear Respected Leader’s favorite movie director’s hearing aids over the internet from an office in Paris, it would be Elke Jungebluth.