I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.

I never thought about the past. I lived in a perpetual present and I was gradually forgetting my story.

perhaps that made us equal and they were trying to console themselves by depriving me of the only thing they could.

They had seized some imaginary power, a power over nothing, a tacit agreement that created a meaningless hierarchy, because there were no privileges that they could grant or refuse.

‘You have so little idea what it meant to have a destiny that you can’t understand what it means to be deprived as we are.

I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’

If you do something that isn’t forbidden, and they intervene, then it’s not the activity that’s attracting attention, it’s you yourself.’

I’d been their clock: watching me, the women watched their own time tick

We had our own time, which had nothing in common with that of those who kept us locked up; we’d rediscovered the quality of being human.

Inevitably, with memory comes pain.

Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose.

they wouldn’t allow themselves to be overtaken by events like terrified creatures who could be led to the slaughterhouse, because they could not conceive of the slaughterhouse.

But then another anxiety assailed me, the sense of an infinite void, vertigo, and the fear of falling in this strange darkness, spinning endlessly in nothingness.

am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.

my companions’ nostalgia was allayed as they experienced the vast silence of the plain, the continual rustle of the grass.

We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death.

It was only at the moment of death that they admitted their despair and rushed headlong towards the great, dark doors that I opened for them, leaving the sterile plain where their lives had gone awry without a backward glance, eager to embrace another world which perhaps didn’t exist, but they preferred nothingness to the futile succession of empty days.

I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious.

what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others,

time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being,