By Hélène Cixous and Sophie Lewis.
The following is an extract from from Angst by Hélène Cixous (Silver Press, 2026), trans. Sophie Lewis
As soon as the telephone thrummed, I knew. I was in the back bedroom. It was the last room in the world. At that time, the stories that came were telling me what they wanted. I could believe anything, for I’d stopped believing myself. Lying there, defenceless, without papers. Without remedy strong enough to keep me alive. Without being dead. But prey to the ache of hope. All the languages were spoken in the world except mine. All the books were writing to me, except the one I’d have liked to read. No one ever wrote that. All my thoughts were for the Being, all my life spent in the need to perceive not this wall but the smile that would acknowledge me. The face for which my face would have ceased to fade. In bed, unarmed, unlettered, unpenned. The moment juste: when a single word would restore you to life. Not even a word, a sound; a hint of a name; even if not said for you; even written in a book finished long ago. The day you leafed through all the books without finding more than the promise of that hint, and still it could be you who forced their text to concede the space of a possibility; in which the lives you followed in your delusion, because you thought in their calls one tone of the beloved name resonated, all sent you back to the same bed; that day if, instead of ringing repeatedly, the phone jingled just once and then nothing, you could hold this last moment still, one more life, the doubt would feed you, this unique ringing perhaps introduce a new sign.
The telephone was ringing again. It was over. The best weapon from now on was not having one. When one has a gun, one thinks one is defended. It just makes it easier to knock us off. Unarmed, one can’t help wanting to get away; not to live; but the body’s afraid of feeling itself dying. Condemned? What joy! This was the last chance. At last the acid test. The conviction released me. When you reach full term you can let yourself do everything you wouldn’t do earlier, for fear of hastening things towards the end. Doing things you resisted to avoid attracting death’s attention. You’d think this was a birth! You’re lying on the bed, absorbed in the labour that’s going on as if you were the universe. It’s nature at the controls and you are nature. Nothing can stop a round head from emerging between your thighs, the joy! Truth comes out your guts, no one can gainsay it. Nothing stops you writing letters you had to put off when you weren’t full term. For fear they’d be ill-received. In case they’d have gone too far. Letters better left unsent, for fear they’d arrive, cause hurt, trigger events leading to the truth; when you thought you might have something to protect, a body to injure, to spare, a hope; not to stress-test. A doubt not to indulge. You were playing the dead woman. For fear the man with the smile would answer with silence. But at the very last hour, out comes the head, out pops the letter, its little body, a real one, and you don’t grab onto it, wholeheartedly, there between your legs, at just the moment when she’ll flap her wings and go. You can cut the cord yourself, there’s no blame. The letter is sent. If it’s a complaint, it’s nothing to do with you.
A conviction delivers: all the books promised that. Despairing is a crime no more. You’re allowed to send your latest objections to the one you’re missing: ‘A word from you would have brought me back to life. I wouldn’t care about dying if I’d only known what stopped you from speaking that word.’ Your first letters of rebellion. There’s a weight on my heart that I can shift now.
They don’t want me to live! And I wasn’t meant to believe! They want me lost. No regrets. And just one heartbreak, the last.
Right away, telegraph him: ‘Mon amour. It’s over. My one wish would have been to see you watch me die with my own eyes.’
Luckily he isn’t there. Who knows who would have watched you?
I had dropped the book before the last chapter. Pointless to read the rest, it was over. There is error. Because of the separations. It was a case of trompe-l’oeil. Having made it through the solitudes, the overcrowded lycées, the tunnels and series of deserts, without being watched, we end up at the foot of the last mountain, with our soul’s very last resources we kill ourselves scaling it. It was written in the books that in the end once up there we’d be able to see, but for dubious reasons all that these eyes find at the end of the world is a wall. And no one to look at me. All these separations agglomerated in order to build the wall which makes you want to go back to bed. Alone.
What would dying matter if I could have told him just once: ‘Dear friend, I cannot die unless you too will die.’ I see my death before me, and I know you will be buried in the same coffin as I. More than three days looking inward, stirring these sorry thoughts, while the telephone’s ringing off the hook. Mon amour, what solitude, god wants me to die a mother. And while the torment lasts, the pleasures are keeping pace with the threat; the lightning and its thunder, the raging telephone, and the ceiling so black you’d think you were at sea. And the threat is aggressive, as much as the calm to follow.
Alas, my tomb will be the mother. More than anything I’d have liked to die inside you. No one to tell you, but there will be a letter to let you know: ‘Nun hat die arme Seele Ruhe.’ Solace.
I was in the mourning bed, full of sorrow, wasted by waiting, I had exhausted all my body’s strength desiring without attaining, I was at the head of the bed, lying against the wall, the black sheet over my head, memory tacking upstream, downstream, before, behind, but the bed made no progress, what’s the point skipping the past, the telephone was tolling, I’d already have answered if only I could have spoken just once to the smiling man: ‘Dear friend, it’s all over. Come quickly with your brief farewell’; I’d perhaps have stayed in bed; perhaps he would have come; no matter; at least I’d have left him this sign of suffering; but no messenger, the line was busy, no way of reaching him. Or of landing one last blow. Love only surrenders to death after dictating its last unkindnesses.
Life wanted me to hide. I couldn’t stay in bed until the last page. Dear friend, I waited for you until the penultimate chapter. The space is narrow, the house without means. No hole, no cubby. Everything leaves you open to the first comer. I’d have liked to hide under the bed, close by, but I didn’t want to gratify death. Then what if Tantris appeared, the unhoped-for well-beloved, with his dancer’s body and his fine expression of severity, the very minute you went out? Joy! Embrace him, cling to him. Misery! Death is on the stairs. The cost of this consolation. He could not defend you. Without arms. You were expecting this somewhat. Not wholly. He should have come armed. Something worrying would have stopped him. Things would unfold as if one of us had warned death. But he didn’t appear. ‘Goodbye my love, my distant one.’ No one on the stairs. ‘You won’t have seen me die.’ The stairs were never-ending.
As long as the descent goes on, stir up hideous ideas. More than three days of torment, rain, tears, shame, remorse and soul raging to excess. In the end my cries dropped away.
Now to go outside, taking care not to look round.
Death must have gone in. I guessed from the silence.
Outside? After such wildness, one is so tense, a hint of iron remains in the soul, and in the mouth a taste of blood that won’t wash out. You can never again forget why you are mortal.
Further, and further.
Outside, but in darkness. That night nothing could stop you, not the memories nor the anxiety, nor the police. Nor the biblical gales fit to fend off the dead, nor the rain steelsheeting. My stubbornness paid off. A taxi stopped. Life itself had ordered it. I sank into it. If this wasn’t life, who cared, being stronger than death that day gave all my movements irresistible confidence. I was sitting in the back, no idea where I was going, through which town, towards what trial of isolation, it was the night of the first mourning. I didn’t know who would be buried, which blood would pay the way. Soon I would have to know. Never again not know which body I was coming to.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hélène Cixous was born in 1937 in Oran, Algeria. She is emeritus professor of literature at the Université Paris VIII, where she founded the Centre d’Études Féminines et de Genre. She is the author of more than seventy works of fiction, plays and essay collections; recent titles in English translation include So Close, Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett, Hemlock and Philippines. In her 1975 essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, she created the term écriture féminine to describe a uniquely female style of writing.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Sophie Lewis translates from French and Portuguese. She has translated works by Stendhal, Violette Leduc, Noémi Lefebvre, Leïla Slimani, Françoise Sagan, Sheyla Smanioto and Micheliny Verunschk. Lewis’s translations have been listed for the Scott Moncrieff, Republic of Consciousness and International Booker prizes. Her translation of Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild won the 2022 French-American Foundation prize.
