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Authors: Rachel Cusk
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BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
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Agamemnon hesitates before treading the tapestries underfoot and entering the palace, just as Adam hesitated before taking the red apple Eve held out to him. Woman, it seems, does not suffer these qualms. She is not afraid, or else she is in the grip of something stronger than fear, stronger than obedience. Clytemnestra persuades Agamemnon, as Eve persuaded Adam. She alludes to the splendour and beauty of the tapestries, their costliness, his might in walking over them; Agamemnon is torn, torn between obedience to the gods and the desire to submit to his wife. It is as though, for a man, a woman represents the possibility of doing without God. She is a force of pure mortality, in whom the darkest and richest possibilities
for living can be realised. Who are her gods? Whose authority, in the end, does she herself recognise?
for living can be realised. Who are her gods? Whose authority, in the end, does she herself recognise?
He walks in, walks over the tapestries. He treads their beauty underfoot and she kills him. What does it signify, her need to get him inside? In a marriage, inside is where intimacy happens, where couples fight or make love, where they’re honest, where they’re their ‘real’ selves. Most marriages have a public face, an aspect of performance, like the body has its skin. A couple arguing in public is like the body bleeding, but there are other forms of death that aren’t apparent on the outside. People are shocked by cancer, so noiseless and invisible, and by the break-up of couples whose hostility to one another never showed. They seemed so happy, people say, for the idea that death might give no sign of its coming leads us to suspect it is already here. You were the last people, a close friend said to me, the last people we expected this to happen to. And this friend, like some others, went away, just as people run away from plague victims in their agony, for fear that it might be catching. Sometimes the phone rings in my half-empty house and a woman’s voice says, we’re so sorry. We were so sorry to hear.
Clytemnestra, in her husband’s ten-year absence, has become intimate with Aegysthus. He is not, of course, the father of her children. He is not her husband, for her husband still lives. She is queen of Argos but Aegysthus cannot be king alongside her, for the king – her husband, Agamemnon – still lives. There is no space for Aegysthus, no throne, no room. If Agamemnon were dead a space would be created: the fatherless children, the husbandless wife, the country with no king, these would be vacuums that needed filling to keep the enterprise of life afloat. But as it stands, despite Clytemnestra’s will, nothing about Aegysthus meets with a fair wind.
His authority is rejected everywhere: the children resent him, the people refuse to recognise him, the country is viewed as being in a terrible plight. In marriage Clytemnestra found the force of life came up effortless and strong; children were born, power accrued, ambitions took root and flourished, but most of all there was belief, belief in the rightness and reality of it all. It is interesting what people will forgive, what they will tolerate, when they believe. When they doubt they will tolerate nothing, and Aegysthus is doubted by everyone except the woman Clytemnestra.
His authority is rejected everywhere: the children resent him, the people refuse to recognise him, the country is viewed as being in a terrible plight. In marriage Clytemnestra found the force of life came up effortless and strong; children were born, power accrued, ambitions took root and flourished, but most of all there was belief, belief in the rightness and reality of it all. It is interesting what people will forgive, what they will tolerate, when they believe. When they doubt they will tolerate nothing, and Aegysthus is doubted by everyone except the woman Clytemnestra.
In Agamemnon’s absence Clytemnestra has had to play his role: she has learned that she is capable of governing his palace, of ruling Argos, of commanding his underlings. So the mystery of his masculinity has been, to an extent, unveiled; the form of male and female has been tested and found to be limitation and lie. This new relationship with Aegysthus has been chosen by the new unisexual Clytemnestra. She is seeking a new form, a new configuration of female and male. She is seeking equality. Children will not be born from equality, nor will empires be built or frontiers expanded, for the pure peace of equality begets nothing. It is all aftermath, predicated on the death of what was before. To beget requires the domination of one thing by the other, the domination of female form by male content; then, in order to nurture what has been begotten, the reverse. Clytemnestra wants no more begetting. She wants the peace of equality but to get it she will have to use violence. To reach aftermath, first there has to be the event itself.
Why does she hate him so, this heroic husband of hers? Would she hate Aegysthus too if he were her bonded mate, father of her children, captain and gatekeeper of her life’s enterprise? Do all women have a special capacity to hate their husbands, all husbands
the capacity to hate their wives with a hatred that is somewhere fused with the very origins of life? The first time I saw my husband after our separation I realised, to my surprise, that he hated me. I had never seen him hate anyone: it was as though he was filled up with something that was not of himself, contaminated by it, like a coastline painted black by an oil spill. For months black poisonous hatred has flowed from the fatal wound to our marriage, flowed through every source and outlet, soaked into everything, coated the children like the downy heads of coastal birds are coated in tar. I remember how towards the end it felt like a dam giving way by degrees, the loss of courtesy and caution, the breakdown of civility and self-control: these defences seemed to define the formal core of marriage, of relationship, to articulate the separation of one person from another. Without them we would lose our form. Form is both safety and imprisonment, both protector and dissembler: form, in the end, conceals truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. Form is rigid, inviolable, devastatingly correct; that is its vulnerability. Form can be broken. It will tolerate variation but not transgression; it can be broken, but at what cost? If it is destroyed what can be put in its place? The only alternative to form is chaos.
the capacity to hate their wives with a hatred that is somewhere fused with the very origins of life? The first time I saw my husband after our separation I realised, to my surprise, that he hated me. I had never seen him hate anyone: it was as though he was filled up with something that was not of himself, contaminated by it, like a coastline painted black by an oil spill. For months black poisonous hatred has flowed from the fatal wound to our marriage, flowed through every source and outlet, soaked into everything, coated the children like the downy heads of coastal birds are coated in tar. I remember how towards the end it felt like a dam giving way by degrees, the loss of courtesy and caution, the breakdown of civility and self-control: these defences seemed to define the formal core of marriage, of relationship, to articulate the separation of one person from another. Without them we would lose our form. Form is both safety and imprisonment, both protector and dissembler: form, in the end, conceals truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. Form is rigid, inviolable, devastatingly correct; that is its vulnerability. Form can be broken. It will tolerate variation but not transgression; it can be broken, but at what cost? If it is destroyed what can be put in its place? The only alternative to form is chaos.
An outcast from marriage, I look at other marriages with a different eye. Silently I congratulate the couples I pass in the street, while at the same time wondering why they are together and I am alone. I know that they have succeeded where I have failed, yet I can’t seem to remember why this is so. Later in the
Oresteia
, when Clytemnestra has herself been murdered, the Furies tasked with representing her female outrage and keeping her righteous anger alive in the world keep falling asleep. They become drowsy, lazy,
forgetful: they fail to remember and articulate the injustice she has suffered in her attempt to be free, to pursue the murderer and be his conscience, to keep cleaning the black tar of hate from her image. And I, too, cannot remember what drove me to destroy the life I had. All I know is that it is lost, gone. The blackness of hate flows and flows over me, unimpeded. I let it come. I cannot remember.
Oresteia
, when Clytemnestra has herself been murdered, the Furies tasked with representing her female outrage and keeping her righteous anger alive in the world keep falling asleep. They become drowsy, lazy,
forgetful: they fail to remember and articulate the injustice she has suffered in her attempt to be free, to pursue the murderer and be his conscience, to keep cleaning the black tar of hate from her image. And I, too, cannot remember what drove me to destroy the life I had. All I know is that it is lost, gone. The blackness of hate flows and flows over me, unimpeded. I let it come. I cannot remember.
But Agamemnon killed Clytemnestra’s daughter, her first child. Men are said to resent the child that first takes the woman’s love and attention away. And it is true that a woman can find relief in loving something that is not her opposite. Her baby doesn’t judge her, doesn’t desire her: for a while it seems to reconnect her with her own childlikeness, her girlishness, her innocence, but in reality her links to that state have been irrevocably severed by motherhood. The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy. He is free, for in the baby the romance of man and woman has been concluded: each can now do without the other. Out of their love they created an object, the baby, and in doing so they defined it, defined their love and its limitations.
Their romance has been concluded and now, perhaps, they are murderously angry with one another. Perhaps she thought the baby would make him love her more, but in fact she seems to have lost him: he has used it, the baby, to make his escape from her. She doesn’t want a doll after all – she wants a man, a man to love her and desire her. Iphegenia, led out in her saffron-coloured wedding dress, is perhaps the sacrifice that lies at the heart of all marriages, the death on which the whole enterprise is built.
Everywhere I see couples, but when I get close enough to hear them the impression changes. Image becomes reality: I am briefly entangled in the net of marital conversation as it passes, am momentarily webbed in its tensions and politics, its million-threaded illusion of harmony. When couples talk, everything they say means something else. Their talk is referential, but the reality it refers to is hidden from view. You see the shadow, but not the object that casts it.
Most evenings now Rupert and I meet in the kitchen. He is always in: I go downstairs and there he is. It is the opposite of marriage, this endlessly recurring randomness through which we find ourselves thrown together. While his supper revolves we talk. He asks me about my situation. He’s interested in the house and in the nature of its energy supply. One evening he opens a bottle of wine and offers me a glass. He offers me a share of his meal, pasta with a red sauce that comes from a Heinz jar. He says he thinks he can arrange a cheaper deal for me, if I give him all the paperwork. He loosens his tie. Outside the kitchen windows is a dry, violet-coloured darkness, and from the neighbouring gardens comes the sound of people talking and laughing in the warm evening. In my garden cats prowl through the overgrown grass and recently I saw a huge fox, mangy and ruddy, standing on the back wall on its four cankered legs in the dusk. Upstairs the children lie asleep in their beds: I imagine them there, like people sleeping in the cabin of a ship that has sailed off its course, unconscious of the danger they’re in. We have lost our bearings, lost our history, and I am the ship’s captain, standing full of dread at the helm. Rupert sloshes more wine into our glasses. He tells me I’m doing a great job. He tells me
he thinks I’m a very nice person. He tells me we’re in the same boat, in a way. After a while I say goodnight, and go and shut myself in my room.
he thinks I’m a very nice person. He tells me we’re in the same boat, in a way. After a while I say goodnight, and go and shut myself in my room.
I book our summer holiday, the same holiday we always take, to a much-loved familiar place. I tell my husband that we can split the holiday in half, changing over like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of the children. He refuses. He says he will never go to that place again. He wants only what is unknown to him, what is unfamiliar. He thinks there is something ruthless and strange in my intention to revisit a place where once we were together, and the truth is I don’t yet realise the pain this intention will cost me, the discipline I will have to inculcate to endure it. Great if it doesn’t bother you, he says. I say, you want to deny our shared history. You want to pretend our family never happened. That’s about right, he says. I say, I don’t see why the children should lose everything that made them happy. Great, he says. Good for you.
Rupert is gone in the mornings by the time I get the children up for school, and in the evenings I avoid him. I stay in my room, fencing with the long nights. I can no longer sleep: I’m too frightened of dreaming, and of waking from the dreams. I’m frightened of my house. I’m frightened of my own bed. I feel as though I have walked out into a world that looked through the windows to be balmy and warm, only to discover that the sun was the frozen sun of winter, the dazzling light that of polar regions and glaciers. It is colder out here than I could ever have imagined.
One night I hear the front door violently slam: Rupert has gone out. He does not return until the next morning. He does not go to work. All day I am aware of him in his room. At nightfall he emerges in his white robe, ill-looking and sheepish. He says he
called in sick; he overdid it a bit last night, at the pubs and clubs in the town centre. Did he go out with friends? Well, no, not exactly, though he seems to remember meeting a few people in the course of things. But no, he went out drinking alone. He came back at about three and slept the rest of the night in his car. He’s been sleeping most of the day, but he’s a bit the worse for wear. He looks at me dartingly, his eyes yellow with drink.
called in sick; he overdid it a bit last night, at the pubs and clubs in the town centre. Did he go out with friends? Well, no, not exactly, though he seems to remember meeting a few people in the course of things. But no, he went out drinking alone. He came back at about three and slept the rest of the night in his car. He’s been sleeping most of the day, but he’s a bit the worse for wear. He looks at me dartingly, his eyes yellow with drink.
I go away for a few days with the children and when I return my neighbour calls round. There’s been a disturbance, she says. She hates to have to tell me. Your lodger, she says. She says she’s written to him threatening the police if it goes on. She hopes I don’t mind her doing that, but she was really at her wits’ end. He was out there, she says, pointing. Out there in the garden. It was gone midnight and she had gone to bed, when she heard the most excruciating, demoniacal noise. She got up; other people began to open their windows and call down, and eventually she opened her window too. There he was on the lawn in the darkness, wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. She said to him, people are trying to sleep and you’re making the most dreadful noise. You’re creating a disturbance. But he didn’t seem to hear; he didn’t really seem to know she was there. The next day she came and rang on the bell. She said she hoped there would be no more nonsense, and he agreed that there wouldn’t. But then there he was again, the next night. He started at about one and it went on until five or six in the morning, out in the garden with not a stitch on. But it was the noise, this simply awful noise he made, on and on and on until she thought she’d go mad.
What sort of noise? I said. What was he doing?
Well it’s funny, she said, but I think he was trying to sing.
In the biblical story, Abraham also binds his child to an altar and raises a knife over his head. At least Isaac remains ignorant as he’s led up the mountainside of what his fate is to be. Abraham, like a good father, tells him a half lie: he makes out that they are going up there to sacrifice a lamb. Is it because there’s nothing in this for him that Abraham is capable of that small act of mercy? His sacrifice won’t oil the wheels of civilisation; he isn’t doing it to make the wind blow, to turn things his way. His God has merely required it of him, with the cruelty that can only be born of intimacy, for God knows that Abraham cherishes Isaac more than anything else. Recently Abraham criticised God for his plan to lay waste the iniquitous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, killing the righteous side by side with the sinners, for there is always good to be found even where evil has the upper hand, and why, Abraham wanted to know, should people who had struggled to resist evil receive the same punishment as those who had succumbed to it? In reply God merely thundered at him for having the temerity to hold an opinion, like a parent thundering at an inquisitive child. Now God retaliates by directing Abraham to destroy what he loves the most. He is teaching him a lesson, for isn’t that precisely how God feels about the prospect of destroying those righteous residents of irredeemable Sodom? It’s hard to be God, hard to be responsible, to be in charge: that’s the lesson here, that responsibility means putting moral duty above personal feeling. If Agamemnon’s was a lesson in the harsh politics of self-interest, in the suppression of feeling as a winning move in the pursuit of success and the human power play with the gods, then Abraham’s is precisely the reverse. It’s a lesson
in the discipline of objectivity, a discipline that is nowhere more exacting than in its governing of the moral core of love.
in the discipline of objectivity, a discipline that is nowhere more exacting than in its governing of the moral core of love.
BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
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