Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

One day, as I was going naked to the refrigerator to get some beer, I remembered the women, single or married, mothers with children, living in my old neighborhood, who secretly received a man in the afternoon. (Rumor was rife: it was impossible to say whether people reproached them for their improper conduct or for the fact that they devoted the daylight hours to lovemaking instead of cleaning the windows.) I thought of these women with acute satisfaction.

although he spoke fairly good French, I could not express myself in his language. Later I realized that this situation spared me the illusion that we shared a perfect relationship, or even formed a whole. Because his French strayed slightly from standard use and because I occasionally had doubts about the meaning he gave to words, I was able to appreciate the approximate quality of our conversations. From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.

in the Metro, in waiting rooms, places where you are allowed to do nothing at all, as soon as I sat down, I would start daydreaming about A. A shudder of happiness would course through me the very second I entered that state. I felt I was giving in to physical pleasure, as if the brain, exposed to a repeated flow of the same images and memories, could achieve an orgasm, becoming a sexual organ like the others.

(Even now, rereading those first pages has the same distressing nature as seeing and touching the toweling bathrobe he used to slip on at my place, and take off just before he got dressed to leave. There is one difference, though: these pages will always mean something to me, to others too maybe, whereas the bathrobe—which matters only to me—will lose all significance one day and will be added to a bundle of rags. By writing this, I may also be wanting to save the bathrobe from oblivion.)

(Am I the only woman to return to the scene of an abortion? 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.)

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.