Marie Cardinal: La Clé sur la porte | The Key of the Door (1972)

Like Marie Cardinal's more famous Les Mots pour le dire | The Words to Say It (1975), La Clé sur la porte (trans. as The Key of the Door) is autobiographical. In this earlier novel, a woman in her early forties – married to a man called Jean-Pierre who works in Montreal – lives in France with two daughters and a son, although the names of the children are changed here: Grégoire (18), Charlotte (16), and Dorothée (14). Like Marie Cardinal (whose name isn't mentioned in the book), the narrator has suffered a terrible childhood as a pied-noir with an abusive, egotistical, hypocritical Catholic mother who told her daughter at a young age that she had made a number of attempts to abort her. The narrator seeks to ensure that her children don't have the same miserable childhood as her.

And both the children and the mother undergo a deep learning curve in the process. Her children are adolescents during the hippie period, a time of experiments with drugs, casual sex, rock music, free-thinking, and a general attitude that is far more relaxed than the narrator's contemporaries experienced in France during her youth.

I'd have translated the title as 'The key in the door', but there we have it. Because that is exactly what the book is about: the mother leaving the key in the door at all times, including when she goes out to work, meaning that not only are the teenage children allowed to come and go as they please, but so are their schoolfriends. In fact, the flat is open house, meaning that it is full of the sound of teenagers, the sound of youth, and Youth is now a highly exploited commodity, biscuit city for the capitalistic economy which is so hated by both the mother and her children.

But then there are contradictions, as all will learn: the teenagers and their friends believe that they are escaping from bourgeois society, when they are merely escaping into another kind of bourgeois trap, another set of conventions: they (or at least many of their friends), are just as débiles as the people they criticise.

In a word, of course, the utopia becomes dystopian: the mother, and indeed her children, are wide open to abuse, particularly when the aimless, parasitic young Amerloques (Yanks) descend on them, and even more so when other 'friends' steal highly valuable items from the narrator. A very interesting read.

My Marie Cardinal posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marie Cardinal: La Clé sur la porte | The Key of the Door
Marie Cardinal: Les Mots pour le dire | The Words to Say It

Marie Cardinal: Les Mots pour le dire | The Words to Say It (1975)

Les Mots pour le dire (The Words to Say It) is quite a staggering autobiography, the account of a woman on the verge of madness and her journey not back, but into a new life, an authentic existence.

This is a long journey, very harrowing in the first part which begins with the thirty-year-old narrator's frequent pyschosomatic vaginal bleeding, her extreme panic attacks, her refusal to take medication and her flight from a psychiatric hospital to expensive three-times-a-week sessions with the psychoanalyst who will cure her, but only after seven years.

This is the story of a pied noir, an Algerian descended from comfortable European parents, but divorced before she was born. Now a non-believer, she was largely brought up by a pious Catholic mother of overwhelming hypocrisy, who never educated her in sexual matters and still mourns the earlier death of her infant daughter. The book steadily reveals, as if from the psychiatric couch, the reasons behind her mental illness and takes us through the childhood and adolescent traumas and the almost unbelievable callousness of the mother.

The book is dedicated to 'Le docteur qui m'a aidée à naître' ('The doctor who helped me to be born'), and he is very much a listener as opposed to a talker, only speaking when it's really necessary, not taking notes but taking everything in. For instance, he coaxes from his patient the meanings of 'tuyau' ('tube'), which caused her shame as a young child when urged to piss down the tube of the train toilet by her mother and grandmother, or the makeshift one she (ignorantly) later uses to masturbate with, causing more shame.

But the key to a vital source of the victim's pain is her mother taking her, as an adolescent, into a crowded street and telling her that she did everything she could to induce a miscarriage to prevent her giving birth to her: this is a mother whose Catholic convictions mean that she sees it as a sin to have an abortion, but sees nothing wrong in attempting to perform her own abortion, nor in describing to her daughter how she wanted her not to be born.

The telling of this sickening act frees the patient from her loss of blood, and even the madness in her (which she calls 'la chose' ('the thing')) subsides to a large extent. But now she is really born she must learn to be a person in her own right, which is what the second and final part of this book is about, and which ends when she settles her final account with her psychoanalyst, just after being freed at last by the effective suicide of her mother drinking a bottle and a half of rum.

Unforgettable.

My Marie Cardinal posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marie Cardinal: La Clé sur la porte | The Key of the Door
Marie Cardinal: Les Mots pour le dire | The Words to Say It