Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

It occurred to me that writing should also aim for that—the impression conveyed by sexual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.

For instance, reading in Vassili Grossman’s Life and Fate that “people in love kiss with their eyes closed” led me to believe that A loved me since that was the way he kissed me. After that passage, the rest of the book returned to being what everything else had been to me for a whole year—a means of filling in time between two meetings.

It would only last for a few hours. I never wore my watch, removing it just before he arrived. He would keep his on and I dreaded the moment when he would glance at it discreetly. When I went into the kitchen to get some ice, I would look up at the clock hanging above the door: “only two more hours,” “only one more hour,” or “in one hour I’ll be here and he’ll be gone.” Astonished, I asked myself: “Where is the present?”

We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.

Also, parents and children are the last people able to accept freely the sexuality of those who are closest to them and so remain forever inaccessible.

Children will always refuse to see the truth reflected in their mother’s absent stare and silent behavior: at times they mean nothing to her, in the same way that grown-up kittens can mean nothing to a mother cat longing to go on the prowl.

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.

I often wondered what these afternoons of lovemaking meant to him. Probably nothing more than just that, making love. There was no point looking for other reasons. I would only ever be certain of one thing: his desire or lack of desire. The only undeniable truth could be glimpsed by looking at his penis.

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.

This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love without contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences.

(It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about his own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show himself and to be seen at the same time.)

It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

(A similar belief, equally deep-rooted, leads me to believe that knowing where my sons are—at a party or on holiday—is enough to save them from an accident, drugs, or drowning.)

I was unable to tear myself away from Michelangelo’s David, filled with wonder that a man, and not a woman, had portrayed the beauty of a male body so sublimely. Even if this could be explained by the oppressed condition of women, it seemed to me that something had been irretrievably lost.5

When I was feeling really bad, I had a strong urge to consult a fortune-teller; it seemed the only decisive thing I could do.

I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.

One day, lying on my stomach, I gave myself an orgasm; somehow I felt that it was his orgasm.

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 felt like rereading one or the other of the books I had skimmed through when A was there. I felt that the waiting and the dreams of that period had crystallized within the pages and that I would rediscover my passion, intact.

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.

(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.)

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.

Everything about him was precious to me—his eyes, his mouth, his penis, his childhood memories, his voice, and the decisive way he took hold of things.

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.

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.