by
Annie Ernaux
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S . . . the beauty of it all: the very same desires, the same actions as at other times in the past, in ’58 and ’63, and with P. The same drowsiness, even torpor. Three scenes stand out. That evening (Sunday) in his room, as we sat close to each other, touching, saying nothing, willing and eager for what would follow, which still depended on me. His hand passed close to my legs, stretched out in front of me, and brushed them each time he put his cigarette ash in the container on the floor. In front of everyone. We talked as if nothing were going on. Then the others leave (Marie R, Irène, RVP) but F hangs back, waiting to leave with me. I know that if I leave S’s room now, I won’t have the strength to return. Then everything’s a blur. F is outside the room, or almost, the door is open, and it seems to me that S and I throw ourselves at each other. Then the door is closed (by whom?) and we are just inside, in the entry hall. My back, pressed against the wall, switches the light off and on. I have to move aside. I drop my raincoat, handbag, suit jacket. S turns off the light. The night begins, which I experience with absolute intensity (along with the desire never to see him again, as with other men in the past).
It’s been over a week since S has come around. Too long. I review my life since then, and am amazed by how many stupid, unpleasant events there have been: the meal with H, the young people’s book award in Montreuil, the last of my courses on Robbe-Grillet, and the lunch today. That life consists of this accumulation of endeavors, bland and burdensome actions, punctuated only occasionally by moments of intensity, outside of time, is horrifying. Love and writing are the only two things in the world that I can bear, the rest is darkness. Tonight I have neither.
Last night he called but I can’t have him over, Éric and David are here. Tonight was the film screening. His wife not there—“she’s a little under the weather,” his usual phrase, which doesn’t mean anything. Unless she’s pregnant . . . Watched the Russian film, sitting next to him. I only caressed his fingers. I drive home very quickly, playing cassettes with the volume turned up all the way, the song “Éthiopie,” and I understand, I remember my “lust for life” at eighteen, the despair that lay beneath, the same as that which I feel tonight, at forty-eight. All because of a man. And when I see him there, in the hall of the embassy, he seems forgettable—a pretty boy, nothing more. I’m rereading Anna Karenina.
lmao
Saw Too Beautiful for You. Nothing about it resembles my story and everything does. As I leave the cinema, I know it’s about me, and ordinary life and the contradictory relations between men and women. And I’d have liked not to have to leave the cinema and for this story not to end. Art as a shortcut. Phrases from the film that I could have said myself: “It’s nice to wait for a man,” and about noontime meetings in motels, “There are people who don’t need to eat lunch.” And then, “I am a woman who lives. I am a woman who keeps on living”[Josiane Balasko, weeping].
Dreamt I was trying to board a train with a suitcase. This takes place in the USA. The gap between the platform and step is too wide. I manage to get on the next train, with extra effort and attention, and keep hold of the suitcase. Can I keep the suitcase—S—and write?
For five years, I’ve ceased to experience with shame what can be experienced with pleasure and triumph (sexuality, jealousy, class differences). Shame spreads over everything, prevents any further progress.
I also thought that writing acted as a kind of morality for me. That is why I didn’t want to have affairs before, so I wouldn’t lose the obsession with writing. For a long time, a life of pleasure seemed impossible to me (it even does now) because I write. I forgave my husband’s pleasure seeking because he didn’t write. What else is there to do when you don’t write? Eat, drink, and make love.
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.