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.

My memory begins with my anger.

and how can you feel privileged not to have something that everyone else has?

It hurt, men didn’t care about women, they got them pregnant and then walked out, saying, ‘How do I know it’s mine?’

There was a time, before I’d found the inner world where I entertained myself, when I was still inquisitive and docile, when I’d have been intimidated. I’d have wondered what I’d done wrong to deserve this scrutiny, and I’d have feared the punishment.

‘Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’

Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness.

It’s true I know nothing of all that and have no memories of my own childhood. Perhaps that’s why I’m so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human.

Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.

it is I who am dying, who was already dying in the bunker – and I tell myself that I am alone in this land that no longer has any jailers, or prisoners, unaware of what I came here to do, the mistress of silence, owner of bunkers and corpses.

Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they’d known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and 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,

It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men.