by
Annie Ernaux
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In the morning, I don’t want to get up. I remain in bed, curled in a ball, unmoving. Stomach pains. Dismaying perceptions—all the memories that make me think that S was a Don Juan. Those are not the worst. Others: his wish not to leave any trace of himself behind when he left, neither photos nor objects; the fear of people finding out about our affair.
A sense of my own mediocrity, a general lack of courage, particularly when it comes to writing.
Last night, images of the Russian–German war in the documentary From Nuremberg to Nuremberg. Leningrad, 1941: the heart-stopping courage of the Soviets, their almost mystical resistance. “My father was decorated by Stalin.” The pain I feel at having known and lost an entire world, at having glimpsed something I could never have imagined before, because it had never been embodied, in a face, words, a pair of hands: the communist ideal which rallied men and women in Leningrad, in Stalingrad, and was passed on to that blond green-eyed boy, who had no sense of betraying anything or anyone when he yearned for Guy Laroche ties and suits by Saint Laurent.
lol
On the train back from Marseille I read a passage from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the passage about the “Japanese book on a carpet of leaves,” etc., and all at once I’m filled with burning desire, an incredible longing to make love, though since S left, I’ve been all but frozen. I could weep from the memories, the lack, all the vanished sweetness. To lose a man is to age several years in one fell swoop, grow older by all the time that did not pass when he was there, and the imagined years to come. This desire also means I might be ready to fall back into the same kind of favola with someone else.
aww
I’m no longer sure that freedom exists in writing. I even wonder if writing isn’t the domain of greatest alienation, in which the past and the horror of lived experience return. But on the other hand, the result, a book, can function as a means of freedom for others.
Evening. The terrible thing is that in the past I looked for a man to “stabilize me,” to have a kind of brotherly love. Now all I want from a man is love, that is, the thing which most resembles writing—the loss of self, the experience of emptiness being filled.
Quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book: the same determination to get every single scene right, the same minute attention to detail. I could even accept the thought of dying providing I had lived this passion through to the very end—without actually def ining “to the very end”—in the same way I could die in a few months’ time after finishing this book.
IN FRONT OF people I knew, I tried not to betray my obsession by words, although to exercise such self-control continually is extremely taxing. At the hairdresser’s one day I saw a talkative woman to whom everyone had been speaking perfectly normally until she announced, her head tilted back over the basin: “I’m being treated for my nerves.” Immediately, the staff stiffened and addressed her with distant reserve, as if this irrepressible confession were proof of her insanity. I feared I would also be considered abnormal if I had said: “I’m having a passionate love affair.” Yet when I was among other women, at the supermarket checkout or at the bank, I wondered whether they too were wrapped up in a man. If they weren’t, how could they go on living this way—that is to say, judging by my previous standards, with nothing else to wait for but the weekend, a meal out, the gym class, or the children’s school results: things for which I now felt aversion or indifference.
(Am I the only woman to return to the scene of an abortion? Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.)
Now it’s April. Sometimes I wake up in the morning without immediately thinking of A. The prospect of rediscovering “life’s little pleasures”—meeting friends, going to the cinema, enjoying a good meal—has become less horrific. I am still in the age of passion (one day I will no longer be aware that I wasn’t thinking of A when I woke up) but it has changed, it has ceased to be continuous.6
Whether or not he was “worth it” is of no consequence. And the fact that all this is gradually slipping away from me, as if it concerned another woman, does not change this one truth: thanks to him, I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it.
I measured time differently, with all my body.
I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.
When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.