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.

The young guard wasn’t a child when he arrived, he was tall, with thick hair, and there were no lines on his face. When he showed the first signs of withering, then I would feel my own skin to see whether I was getting older. He too would be a clock, we would grow old at the same speed. I could watch him and judge how much time I had left from the springiness of his step.

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.

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.

I received that caress several times – the only one I was able to tolerate – the silent gratitude of a woman receiving death at my hands.

‘You are kind,’ she said. That touched me. I smiled at her and she was smiling as the knife went in.

If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come – I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.