by
Annie Ernaux
View all notes
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.
With Guillaume life carried on as usual. Only one thing had changed: she felt less desire for him. In every other respect, she loved him and was very happy with him, while Thomas was confined to what she thought of as daydreams. Deep down, however, she was certain she would run into Thomas again the following summer in Sorge, since he came there every year, and that certainty was a foundation. Guillaume suggested going away together the following August. Anna was okay with any other month of the year, but not August. “Well, that’s new,” he said, “you always used to say you liked getting away from Sorge in the summer.” “I did?” she said. “People change.” And she pretended to attach no importance to it all. She was busy with her articles, exhibitions she had to see. Whenever she went to Lille, Lyon, Geneva, Marseilles, she would regret it wasn’t Bordeaux. But even in Marseilles or Lausanne she hoped to run into Thomas in the street. After all, she thought, he can travel about, too. From this point on, then, the world was filled with his presence, since anywhere, at any moment, he might appear on a street (it was always a street) and walk toward her.
But this time something had changed. On the two previous occasions when she had conceived a burning passion for someone, she’d never been quite sure the other party would respond; she’d probably even known from the outset he wouldn’t. In Thomas she had glimpsed the possibility, not only of a response, but of a fire identical to her own. How had she seen this? Who knows . . . ? Each morning (or every other morning sometimes, for they needed to catch their breath and rest a bit, no doubt), they would run into each other in Sorge, and sometimes in another part of town, for there was no need any longer to focus on the precise spot where they’d first met. Fate, having slipped into gear, was easing up. Anna would go out, pick up a couple of items of shopping and then stroll about, going as far as the café terrace facing the countryside or the town hall opposite. Thomas, meanwhile, would have gone to see a mechanic on the outskirts of town or to visit a friend, but it was most unusual if, some time around eleven, he didn’t pop up all of a sudden, even in some obscure side street, walking toward her. Without remarking on their chance encounter, they would have a coffee somewhere and talk about the town, their activities, what they were reading, but never of personal matters, and never face to face, seated together, side by side, at the small round bistro table.
[...] You can pretend to disclose them to your hairdresser or your gynecologist, to certain friends, but in reality you disclose nothing, you just appear to be talking about a love affair, an awkward choice to be made between two men, and by transforming your story into that of millions of men and women since the world began — falling in love with someone when you’re perfectly happy with someone else — laying bare a very ancient conflict to which no one has ever found a solution. “You have to choose,” said some, “you have to decide one way or the other.” “You should conduct the affair in secret but stay with Guillaume,” said others. “You have to let it go,” urged some. “But you must know which one you truly love,” declared still others. But how can you choose in life without cutting your own self in two? For it’s not about, on the one hand, a man, and on the other, another. It’s about a life — beating, quivering like an organ laid bare — to which both men belong; and if you break with one of them, whichever one it might be, you might not survive.
At more settled moments in her life, Anna, each time some powerful emotion or torment came crashing down, would compare her situation, which was essentially very happy, to that of people who had had to endure some terrible misfortune foisted on them from without. And she would feel ashamed for being so extravagantly affected by little setbacks and misunderstandings, fallings-out. At moments like these she would have been capable of remarking that women given to falling passionately in love are often idle, with nothing much to do with their time and seldom any care for the morrow. Could anyone imagine Phèdre with a job? It’s a spiritual luxury, being in a position to enjoy these overwhelming emotions, which can certainly kill you or drive you insane, but at the same time are the mark of some deep-seated transformation. And yet it’s so wonderful to have the leisure to be transformed, to give yourself up to this perilous play, when so many people are compelled to think, first and foremost, of simply hanging on.
In the afternoon, they walk together along a path bordered with yellow reeds where, from time to time, herons drift softly by. It pains her, it pains her greatly, to be walking there with him, and not with Guillaume; and that pain will be inscribed in her for months to come. Nearly every time she’s with him, albeit of her own free will, of her own desire, it will pain her, pain her continually, to see him standing in Guillaume’s shoes, to herself be putting him in those shoes: in her brain it’s a sort of nightmare every time. And yet she has to go through with it, she knows she has to pass through that dark night. It’s dangerous, though, far more dangerous for her than for these two men, who will also suffer, of course, but she — she is risking death, or something worse than death.
She said nothing, not so much because she was fearful, but because she didn’t have the words to describe what had been taking place inside her for months now. Had she known what was taking place inside her, she would have told him, no doubt; and, understanding Anna, he would have understood. But it was the first time he had seen her without words to define something, and for that reason, being wholly bound up in his emotions, instead of telling himself that she was momentarily at a loss for words no doubt, as he would have done had he been feeling less anxious, he thought she was deliberately avoiding the issue. For the first time, he thought like an ordinary man and ascribed ordinary behavior to her — he, who had always known exactly what it was she was and wasn’t saying, and was wedded to her the way a vase is wedded to the water it encloses. They wound their way laboriously through the wood, they were no longer holding hands, and when he paused for a moment to gaze up at the top of a tree and she came over to give him a little kiss on the cheek, he turned away and resembled an eagle all of a sudden. Never before had this happened, not once in twenty years had he turned away when she had come up to him. Their clothes, the damp tree trunks, and the stones were black; the rest of the landscape was a dazzling white. When they pulled out onto the road, which they both knew like the back of their hand, he went the wrong way and they drove for miles in the wrong direction without either of them noticing. [...]