Simone de Beauvoir Is Living on Mars by Mary Grimm
1. In the future, of course.
2. She teaches French and creative writing to the children of colonists/explorers/military people who are there to defend this territory for EARTH.
3. EARTH is always spelled with capital letters on Mars.
4. She is known for her sarcasm, her command of languages (English, French, Russian, a bit of Chinese, and Martian), and for wearing a turban. The turban gives her an old-fashioned and exotic air.
5. Martian is not the language of the native inhabitants of Mars, of which there are none, but a sort of patois drawing words from the several languages of occupying EARTH countries.
6. It was thought that she died back in the 20th century, but she was discovered to be alive some years later. She is 162 years old.
7. She has a number of amusing stories about Jean-Paul Sartre, but no one remembers who he was. The story about the lobster is popular, though.
8. Simone has her particular friends.
9. Simone gives lectures on feminism in the canteen at lunchtime. Because of her particular friendship with the Director of Security, diners are required to at least pretend to listen attentively, which they do but not without comments sous le souffle.**
10. Some do not bother to be sous le souffle. “Some” here refers of course to her great rival, Ms. Bredon, the English teacher. In the early days after Simone’s arrival, they fought bitterly for the devotion and tuition credits of the students.
11. Simone doesn’t permit exosuits or any of their accoutrements to be worn in her classroom, even though it’s majorly inconvenient to divest oneself of these for an hour-long class.
12. Simone’s favorite foods are pommes frites and macarons, often accompanied by a glass of sweet wine. The Director of Nutrition is of the opinion that it is not a healthy diet, but Simone has survived on it for 162 years, so what is there to say.
13. There is some curiosity about her “missing years.” The on-dit** is that she was debriefed upon her re-discovery by a committee of eminent scientists, bureaucrats, and science fiction writers, but the records are sealed.
14. Her creative writing classes are the most popular. She encourages flights of fancy, especially if they are critical of the patriarchy or of governmental authority in general. Her critics remark that it’s a wonder that she got this job, with her attitude.
15. No one knows how she got this job.
16. On Thursdays at 4, she hosts un petit salon** with sweet wine, faux French bread spread with faux pate, for her intimates and those she would like to intimidate. On Sundays, she has an at-home (a la maison**) for anyone who drops in, with so-called American cheese and crackers. Sundays are byorborw (bring your own refillable bottle of recycled water).
17. She entertains her particular friends often but without regularity, receiving them in a pre-war negligee.
18. The war that the negligees predates is World War II.**
19. Simone doesn’t like anyone to refer to her great age, and remarks that she looks younger than 162 are particularly unwelcome because she deems them insincere. Which they are.
20. She is known to be in a fierce rivalry with the next oldest person on Mars, who is only 85, and who likes to refer to himself as the oldest human on Mars, in effect, Simone points out, erasing herself, who is both the oldest woman and the oldest person.
The oldest person in the solar system, for that matter, she has been known to say when she is furieuse.**
22. People do make fun of her, if you were wondering, but never where she can hear. Or where her particular friends can hear. Or near any of the vidcams of the security system. Usually only in the privacy of their room or privately-atmosphered porta-cabin. When they are by themselves.
23. Simone is reputed to be writing a book about her experiences, actually writing it with a ballpoint pen on sheets of paper. The pen and paper are pre-war.
24. Since she wrote four autobiographical volumes covering her life until 1972, and since everyone knows what she’s been doing on Mars, one assumes that the new book will be about les annees perdues.**
25. Before Simone arrived, French was taught by an ex-nun, niece of a prominent politician on EARTH, formerly Sister Anne-Cecile, now known as Annette Ryan. She claims she feels no resentment, and in fact has volunteered to do the research for Simone’s book.
26. It’s said that Simone already has been paid a nine-figure advance by a publisher on EARTH.
27. It is also said that she’s writing a holoseries that is a mashup of the 20th-century TV show Three’s Company and She Came to Stay (her autobiographical novel about her and Sartre’s menage a trois with an acolyte of existentialism).**
28. If you are invited to Simone’s room, you will notice that she has a replica of her childhood doll, Blondine, in a prominent place. Blondine is wearing a pink dress which once had a matching bonnet. Her eyes open and close and she has a head of real human hair.
29. Simone likes to think that she looks no older than 58, the year that she wrote Les Belles Image, a novel about fashionable doubt and despair, and advertising.
30. As recounted in one of her autobiographies, she had raging tantrums as a child. She maintains that they were an early revolt against the tyranny of the patriarchal bourgeoisie. They stopped when she came into her own as a revered writer and philosopher.
31. Some remark that they have not in fact stopped.
32. Her favorite student is the daughter of the Director of Wellness and Natural Healing, who she has declared to be a future genius 64 of philosophy. No one is foolish enough to say that philosophy has no place in a planetary colony, or at least not until after latestage capitalism has taken hold, which is certainly more than a few decades in the future.
33. Simone writes a column for the colony newsletter called “Squeezings from the Grapevine.” Each week there are several paragraphs on issues of import, such as the recent “Criteria for Ethical Actions.” She fills in the space remaining with newsy anecdotes, under the pseudonym of La Femme Qui Sait.** She particularly takes note of who is rumored to be sleeping with whom, reported in Gossip Girl** style: identifiers but no names, XOXO.
34. When she first came to the colony, the editor of the colony newsletter interviewed her. The resulting article dwelt on her aristocratic nose, her ever-present turban, and her ability to whip up a decent omelet with faux eggs, but buried in it was her answer to the question the editor asked about les annees perdues. “Where were you? What were you doing?” Simone answered that she had left her body for a time, that she had taken up a semi-religious practice that involved a kind of spiritual martial arts, and that she had learned the secrets of the future.
35. Questioned about this later, Simone had laughed and said that she was probably void drunk** at the time, and that she hadn’t meant that at all. Or possibly hadn’t said it. That possibly she was talking about something that Jean-Paul had said that she imperfectly remembered.
36. The editor of the newsletter was sent back to EARTH not long after and all copies of the newsletter (hard copy and virtual) disappeared.
37. The Vice Commissar of Conspiracy, another of Simone’s particular friends, has let it be known that Simone has a fear of the effects of low gravity. She wears ankle weights at all times, concealed under the vintage bellbottom trousers she is fond of, so that her bones won’t, as she says, “crumble and melt.”
38. When Simone is feeling sentimental and has drunk enough sweet wine, she may tell the story of her amour for Nelson Algren, commenting favorably on his writing, his love of low company, and his physical accoutrements. His zizi merveilleux.**
39. When Simone dreams, she dreams of the future. She has the past trapped in her books, where it has been made her servant. Nelson, for instance, is imprisoned in the pages of Les Mandarins.**
40. Simone has her detractors, of course, although they are careful to voice their criticisms in a jocular manner, as at the foibles of a be- 65 loved elder relative who may be going senile but has the power to strike them from her will.
41. When murmurs of revolution are heard in the colony, one’s thoughts naturally turn to Simone. Even as a child, she flouted authority. One is amazed that she stayed so contentedly in Sartre’s train, although one would never say so. One is also perplexed that she left Algren for Sartre and their sexless (in its later years) relationship, if his zizi was so merveilleux.
42. Simone professes a love for the landscape of Mars, its dry, tortured rocks, its waterless rivers. She maintains that EARTH is vulgarly lush with foliage except in its desert regions. The sound of the wind on Mars, she says, is better than any symphony written by a bourgeois composer.
43. Some try to interrogate the former Sister Anne-Cecile about the contents of Simone’s book, but she claims that she has not been made privy to the text itself. She has revealed only that there will be various appendices, including one on footwear in the late 20th century and another on the pros and cons of violent resistance to government excess and restrictions.
44. In the lost time, les annees perdues, empires rose and fell, politics made of the EARTH a maelstrom of despair and terror, viruses rampaged unchecked, and social media spread like the tentacles of a sentient and mordantly humored octopus. There is a minor element (led by Ms. Bredon) that claims some or all of this was Simone’s fault, although they will not explain how.
45. Some question whether Simone is the real Simone, blasphemously suggesting that she is an impostor: someone who has studied up on the original Simone and schemed to take her name and prestige.** 46. Simone finds these rumors amusing. Or says that she does.
47. She likes to lecture her favorite student on the knowledge vouchsafed her during les annees perdues although the student is more interested in hearing about Algren’s charms.
48. Simone floated without thought for those many years without the need to verbalize. She tells her student that she inhabited the universe as a mouse lives in a great castle, stealing crumbs of thought and emotion.
49. Simone has taught herself to play the violin since she has settled on Mars, although not very well. Her favorite song is “J’ai Deux Amours” (originally sung by Josephine Baker). Second favorite is “La Marseillaise,” which she plays standing on her bunk, dressed in her prewar negligee while Blondine looks on.
50. In these disappointing times, Mars, with its desiccation, its howling wilderness, the lightness of its gravity, is the best place to practice philosophy, according to Simone. “La philosophie est de la merde,”** she says, “but what else is there.”
Notes of Interest
**sous le souffle – under the breath.
**on-dit – the rumor.
**un petit salon – an intimate and exclusive gathering.
**a la maison – an “at home” party, for the masses.
**World War II – a 20th-century conflict of some duration.
**furieuse – pissed off.
**les annees perdues – the missing years, of which there are approximately 80.
**Link to article on casting for this as yet unnamed venture, with a profile of Lex Decker, who will play the Sartre/Jack Tripper character. He intends his portrayal to be an homage to John Ritter.
**La Femme Que Sait – The Woman Who Knows.
**Gossip Girl – An American teen drama series based on the novel series by Cecily von Ziegesar, a member of a German noble family.
**void drunk – A condition of intoxication resulting in dizziness, hysteria, and attacks of loquaciousness; often suffered by first-time space travelers.
**zizi merveilleux – definition redacted.
**Les Mandarins – a roman-a-clef about a group of disgruntled intellectuals in post-war France.
**A common trope in nineteenth-century novels which has fallen out of favor.
**La philosophie est de la merde – Philosophy is shit.
Mary Grimm is the author of the novel Left to Themselves (1993) and the story collection Stealing Time (1994), both from Random House. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, Mississippi Review, and Bellingham Review.