Invisible Women

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The Great Freud’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised women visited in thought but not yet discovered or found.

Sigmund asks Lou: “You, who go about exploring and seeing things, can you tell me toward which of these futures — these women — the favoring winds are driving us?”

“For these women I could not draw a route on a map or set a date for the arrival. At times all I need is a brief glimpse of possibility, an opening in the midst of an incongruous word, a glimmer of light in a pupil, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect woman, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of strengths unavailable to men and weaknesses that are more subtle reasons to improve than flaws. If I tell you that the woman toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for her can stop. Perhaps while we speak, she is rising, brushing her hair and donning a loose summer dress, within the confines of your empire, you can hunt for her, but she will never appear as you imagine her to be.”

Already the Great Freud was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the women who menace in nightmares and maledictions.

He said: “It is all useless, if the last woman can only be in the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Andreas said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Freud replied: “The woman that exists in this inferno can hardly be expected to see through it; and men are too caught to even look up.”

And Andreas said, calmly: “And that is why we look, door to door, searching for the woman to help guide us through this inferno toward freedom. She is one person, but she is also every woman in your atlas. Every woman.”

The End