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In a way, too, I didn’t want my mind to concentrate on anything else but the wait itself, in order not to spoil it.
I experienced pleasure like a future pain.
On the train, on the way back, I felt that I had literally written out my passion in Florence by walking through the streets, visiting the museums, obsessed by A, sharing everything with him, eating and sleeping with him in that noisy hotel on the banks of the River Arno. I need only go back to read this story of a woman in love with a man, which was my story. 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
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HE LEFT FRANCE and went back to his own country six months ago. I shall probably never see him again. At first, when I woke up at two o’clock in the morning, I didn’t care whether I lived or died. My whole body ached. I would have liked to tear out the pain but it was everywhere.
During the day I tried desperately to find things to do, so as not to remain idle, otherwise I felt I would be lost (the meaning of the word was vague: to have a nervous breakdown, to start drinking, and so on).
I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.
I didn’t want to get up. I would see the day stretch ahead of me, with no plans. I felt that time was no longer taking me anywhere, it only made me grow old.
I replied to words he had never spoken, sentences he would never write.
When I went to bed around midnight, thoroughly demoralized, I realized that I had really believed in that phone call all day.
Throughout this period, all my thoughts and all my actions involved the repetition of history. I wanted to turn the present back into the past, opening on to happiness.
I thought: “I was here one day.” I wondered what the difference was between this past reality and literature, perhaps just a feeling of disbelief that I had actually been there one day, something I wouldn’t have felt in the case of a fictional character.
Of the living text, this book is only the remainder, a minortrace. One day it will mean nothing to me, just like its living counterpart.
In the tunnel at La Défense, on my way back, I thought, “Where is my story?” Then, “Now I can hope for nothing more.”
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.
Whether or not he was “worth it” is of no consequence.
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.
