Invisible Women

4

Sigmund Freud had noticed that Lou Andreas’s women resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each woman Lou described to him, the Great Freud’s mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the woman piece by piece, he reconstructed her in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.

Lou, meanwhile, continued reporting on these women who live down the hall, but the doctor was no longer listening.

Freud interrupted her: “From now on, I shall describe women and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a woman with perpetual hair, often exposed to painful sunlight, in a city without war. Now I shall list some of her wonders: glassine eyes with pupils as deep as cathedrals so people can imagine their lives through death in those vast dark spaces and return just as quickly as they became entrenched; fingers long as palm trees that can play the harp with their fronds in the wind; skin as taut as a marble tablecloth, set with foods and beverages also composed of marble.”

“Your mind, doctor, has been wandering,” Lou responds, or he imagines her responding. “This is precisely the woman I was telling you about before you interrupted me.”

“You know her? Who is she? What is her name?”

“She has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing her to you: from the number of imaginable women we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With women, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Women, like dreams, are made of desires, and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

“I have neither desires nor fears,” Freud declared, or imagined declaring, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.”

“Women also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a woman’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer she gives to a question of yours.”

“Or the question she asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”