Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

would have liked to keep that mess the way it was—a mess in which every object evoked a caress or a particular moment, forming a still-life whose intensity and pain could never, for me, be captured by any painting in a museum.

I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.

Those eight days on my own, without speaking, except to waiters in restaurants, haunted by the image of A—I was astonished to be accosted by men, could they not see him silhouetted inside my own body?—were seen by me as an ordeal for the betterment of love. A sort of further investment, this time in imagination and craving through absence.

One night the thought of getting myself screened for AIDS occurred to me: “At least he would have left me that.”

I would look at the blouses and the pairs of shoes I had bought to please a man, now meaningless clothes, existing solely for the sake of fashion. Was it possible to long for these things, or for anything else, other than in connection with a man, other than to serve the cause of love? I had to buy a shawl because of the bitter cold: “He will never see it.”

Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to f ind 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.)

Here we can only wait for disasters which have been forecast but do not in fact happen: a land offensive led by the “Allies,” a chemical warfare attack by Saddam Hussein, a bomb outrage perhaps at the Galeries Lafayette department store. I experience the same feeling of anxiety, the same frustrated desire to know the truth as I did when I was living out my passion. The resemblance ends there. For in this case there is no room for fantasy or imagination.

The man who returned that evening wasn’t the man I was carrying inside me throughout the year when he was here, and when I was writing about him. I shall never see that man again. Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.

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.

He had said, “You won’t write a book about me.” But I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words—words he will probably never read; they are not intended for him—the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.

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.