Roots of Change
Cheryl Caesar lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University. She publishes poems in America, Europe and Africa. Her book Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era, is available from Amazon.
By Cheryl L. Caesar, Ph.D.
I’m sitting on the edge of my chair, scrolling through the news. It’s one week to the inauguration of Joe Biden as President. I’m angry every day, frustrated, disgusted – and hopeful and excited. I’m thinking of a time thirty years ago…
I’m sitting on the edge of the rust-colored corduroy Clic-Clac. It’s a French sofa-bed that folds sideways; if you put too much weight at the edges, it can flip over. I haven’t had to worry about this lately, because my husband hasn’t been there. Retired, he likes to travel between Paris and Tuscany every six months or so. Now he’s sitting in the leather easy chair in a dark suit and tie, smoking Gauloises and drinking whiskey. That’s what he does every day, wherever he’s living. I used to find the suit impressive – what American man would put it on every day to sit at home? Now I wonder what the point is.
“You might as well let me go.”
I had chosen my words with care. “You have to” is out of the question. In the past, Leo had launched forty-minute rants after I asked, “Would it maybe be better to…?” Screaming, “You have the NERVE – the CHEEK – the GALL – to say what would MAYBE BE BETTER?” until my head pounds and I run to throw up.
“I am miserable every day. I am sick constantly. If I stay with you I will die, and you won’t have me anyway. So why not let me go now?”
I don’t remember his reply. He might have called me “Madame Mimosa,” an epithet he and his friend Anita had invented to mock my “over-sensitivity.” Probably not: even that sobriquet had kept some traces of affection, and there was none left. He probably shouted my name at me as though it were a curse, or something shameful. I know he said, “Don’t expect me to pay for a divorce.”
Of course, I didn’t expect it. I had been living on my own for the past six months, supporting myself with under-the-table English lessons. I had no working papers. Leo had promised that they would be easy to get if I came to live with him in Europe, but promises made, promises broken.
What I did want was the little three-room house in Montrouge, a suburb south of Paris. I had bought it with the inheritance from my father. Leo had insisted that I withdraw the money in cash to put in our joint bank account, before paying for it. Just as he’d insisted that we marry under “common property” statutes. That’s what a “good woman” did. His own three-story 16th-century villas in the mountain village of Monteggiori were not affected by this, as he’d bought them before the marriage. But he planned to give me one. He promised.
And now I was rebelling, refusing to be his “good woman,” his “Eternal Feminine.” I remember in The Anatomy of Revolution, Crane Brinton said that people don’t revolt when they are the most downtrodden. They haven’t the necessary hope for it then. They rebel when they have won some improvement to their condition, and then it is taken away. That’s what happened with me. I had just known six months of freedom, and I wasn’t going to give it up again. “La liberté n’as pas de prix,” said my friends, knowingly. Freedom is priceless.
I remembered the months before those. Monteggiori was a village of seventy people, where I spent my days cooking, cleaning, descaling the stone walls of the lower floors that Leo wanted to rent out. Sitting for hours while he ate, drank and smoked with his Serbian relatives, speaking a language of which I understood every tenth word, about people and places of which I knew nothing. I was not permitted to leave the table – that would be rude. By the time they had emptied the bottles and wandered off to their naps, I had just time enough to scrub the dishes and start the next meal. No reading, no writing, no studying. Just the fiaschi of red wine from the trattoria next door. I could always help myself to those.
There was no email in the 1980s, no computer in the house. If I tried to write a letter to friends or family, Leo would sneer, “You don’t have any friends. You think friendship is writing a letter” – ignoring the fact that it was he who’d taken me away from them. Both my parents had died the year I was 25. On the day I learned that my mother’s cancer had metastasized, he refused me a postage stamp to write to her.
After months of this life, I became like the prisoners that Bruno Bettelheim recalled from the Nazi camps – zombie-like creatures whose egos had collapsed. I let myself be cored out, and offered Leo just the reflective surface of the “good woman.” He had often modeled the behavior for me: “This is how you should ask for something!” Eyes cast down, hands clasped behind the back, digging a toe in the ground, stammering. Now I did whatever he demanded. I was a shiny, hollow gourd, reflecting his image. And yet there must have been a shred of self left somewhere, underground maybe, that drew back and observed.
Gradually, I came to see Leo’s cruelty. I couldn’t perceive it when he did it to me. It was all too mixed up with my own childhood abuse, my drive to redeem myself by winning and keeping the love of this man 35 years older than me. But I saw it when he abused anyone who seemed to appreciate me. Or even animals. When he ranted at me – “You’re a BUM, Cheryl Caesar! You’re a LAZY SHIT!” – I picked up the stray kitten in my lap, and put her outside. I didn’t want her to have to hear it.
I had rescued a grey parrot, Alice. She gave me something to get up for in the morning. In Paris one day, I saw that she was cowering down as Leo made striking motions at her. He accused her of not acting “friendly.” That day I took her on the métro with me to all my lessons, afraid to leave her alone with him.
And I came to see the fundamental illogic of this man, my former professor, who insisted he knew better than I about everything, even the inside of my own mind. I noticed how on one day he would intone that my mother had “damaged” me so that no one else would want me. The next day, he’d proclaim that her beatings hadn’t been abuse at all – that I’d deserved them. And still another day, he’d declare that I was a liar, that none of it had happened. Finally it occurred to me: there was no way that he could believe everything he said. In fact, he wasn’t interested in truth at all, only in power. And he got that from hurting me. As Winston answers O’Brien in 1984, the only way to be sure that you have power over another is to make him suffer.
He had so much power already. He’d persuaded me to leave my graduate studies, my grants and assistantships, my professors who supported and respected me. My friends, my family, my country. But he still needed daily proofs.
These realizations nourished the root of self. It must have been as tough as Virginia creeper. It dug in, and then leafed out during the next six-month stay in Paris. I gained the courage to plot an escape. In May, I packed the bags and accompanied him to the Gare de Lyon. I boarded the train with him, and then jumped off at the last moment. He went on to Tuscany, and for the next six months I heard nothing from him – never a question about how I was surviving.
But by then I’d realized that I could survive. And be happy, alone. That gave me the strength to declare my independence.
It would be a long battle over the next two years. Supporting myself on those English lessons. Paying for lawyers. The first took my five thousand francs and told me to give up my house and “go home.” Wherever that was. The second heard my story in ten minutes and declared, “Vous avec épousé un vieux porc, mon petit, vous n’en sortirez pas sans laisser quelques plumes.” (“You married an old pig, kid, you won’t get out without losing a few feathers.”) Then she helped me.
Leo would falsify documents. Hide two-thirds of his income: his second pension and his Monteggiori rents. He would get a valuation for the house across the courtyard, which shared the same street number with but was 30% bigger, and pretend it was ours. He would invite his second lawyer to stay in Monteggiori, and then tell her that the vacation was in lieu of her fees. He went through three lawyers in a year.
Surely, I thought, the judge would get fed up with being lied to, and impose some kind of penalty. It never happened. Apparently, this was what they expected, that litigants would cheat all they could. It was a part of the French divorce culture, along with the dictum that a second (or, like me, a third) wife with no children was entitled to take only her “jewels” from the marriage. I had a good laugh about that one.
Because by then I was laughing at him, rather than crying and vomiting. What a relief.
I began to do things for myself. I enrolled in the doctoral program in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. (The tuition in French public universities is free; there were only a few hundred francs a year in fees.) With a student visa, I could legally work 20 hours a week, official teaching jobs for language schools, ministries and civic associations.
I bought a second-hand briefcase to replace the plastic shopping bag I’d been using. Doesn’t seem like much, does it? But it was an epiphany for me, that I actually deserved such a purchase. I bought a pocket calendar for my appointments, rather than scribbling them on pieces of paper folded in eighths.
The healing took time. Twenty years to purge the alcoholism. A new self-abuse rushes in to fill the gap left by the old. But the worst years of my life were over. I would never be so miserable again.
I’ve thought of this story constantly since 2016. I can’t help it. Donald Trump is the only other person who can make me vomit just by the sound of his tirades. Whose sneering face makes my head twinge and pound. I have seen his narcissistic abuse of the country, the world, the planet, every day. His lies that he doesn’t even bother keeping track of. Lies that the press, like those French judges, passes over as normal. His cruelty to others. The kids still in cages. The hundreds of thousands of Americans dead of COVID-19 because Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, told him that more Democrats would die than Republicans. And finally, last week, his incitement of a violent mob to break into the Capitol and trash it, smear feces on the walls, kill a police officer.
Now I’m sitting on the edge of the Clic-Clac. With millions of others, I’m saying softly, “I’m leaving. You might as well let me go.” I could never have foreseen the lies and crimes that Leo would perpetrate during our divorce. Every time I thought he couldn’t go lower, he proved me wrong. Trump has done the same, and I could never have guessed the outrages he would commit after losing the election They were worse than any of us could imagine. And we still have seven days to get through.
But I know we can survive. We have felt the stirring deep in our roots. They will keep growing. We will get free. And then we will begin to heal.