Adèle

by Leïla Slimani

The love is there somewhere, she has no doubt about that. A rough, misshapen love, dented and bruised by everyday life. A love that has no time for itself.

You know, you’re just as ordinary as we are, Adèle. The day you finally accept that, you’ll be a lot happier.”

Never since that evening—not in the arms of men, nor during the walks she took years later on the same boulevard—has she ever rediscovered that magical feeling of actually touching the vile and the obscene, the heart of bourgeois perversion and human wretchedness.

This endless routine amuses and irritates Adèle in equal measure. She does not understand this polite hedonism, this obsession everyone seems to have with “eating well” and “drinking well.” She always liked being hungry. Feeling herself bend but not break, hearing her stomach groan emptily and then conquering her need, proving herself above all that. Thinness has become a way of life.

This is a house to grow old in, thinks Adèle. A house for tender hearts. It’s made for memories, for friends who drop by and others who drift away. It’s an ark, a clinic, a refuge, a tomb. A godsend for ghosts. A theater set. Are they really that old? Can their dreams truly end here? Is it already time to die?

Adèle is afraid of dying. Her fear is intense: it grips her by the throat and stops all thought. So she starts palpating her belly, her breasts, the back of her neck, finding swellings that are, she feels sure, the signs of a fast-moving and horribly painful cancer. She vows to stop smoking. This resolution lasts an hour, an afternoon, a day. She throws away all her cigarettes, buys packets of chewing gum. She runs for hours around the rotunda in the Parc Monceau. Then she decides that it’s not worth living while fighting against such a desperate desire, such an absolute need. That she would have to be insane or utterly stupid to inflict this deprivation on herself, to watch herself suffering and hope that it lasts as long as possible.

Her obsessions devour her. She is helpless to stop them. Because her life requires so many lies, it has to be carefully organized—an exhausting activity that occupies her entire brain, that gnaws at her. Arranging a fake trip, inventing a pretext, renting a hotel room. Finding the right hotel. Calling the concierge ten times to check that the room has a bathtub, that it’s not too noisy. Lying without trying too hard to justify herself. Justifications give rise to suspicions. Choosing an outfit for a rendezvous, thinking about it constantly. Opening a cupboard in the middle of a meal and replying to Richard, when he asks her what she’s up to: “Oh, sorry, I’m looking for a dress. I can’t think where I’ve put it.” Checking her bank accounts, over and over. Withdrawing cash, and leaving no trace of it. Going into the red to buy lingerie, to pay for taxi trips and overpriced cocktails in hotel bars. Being beautiful, being ready. Getting her priorities mixed up, inevitably.

She keeps no souvenirs, no receipts, no proof. She is wary of married men, sentimental men, hysterical men, old bachelors, young romantics, online lovers, friends of friends.

Very quickly, she understood that desire was unimportant. She didn’t want men she would have to approach. It wasn’t for the flesh she yearned, but for the situation. Being taken. Observing the look on a man’s face when he came. Filling herself up. Tasting another’s saliva. Miming epileptic orgasms, lascivious pleasure, animal satisfaction. Watching a man leave, traces of blood and semen under her fingernails.

In the depths of her amnesia there exists the reassuring sensation of having existed a thousand times through the desires of others.

And when, years later, she happens to bump into a man who tells her in a deep and slightly shaky voice: “It took me quite a while to get over you,” she draws an immense satisfaction from this. As if all of it has not been in vain. As if, in spite of her best intentions, some sort of meaning is somehow mixed up in this eternal repetition.

She wanted them to burn for her, wanted them to love her to the point of losing everything, even though she has never lost anything.

Far from Paris, in that small provincial house, she would give up the very thing that she thinks defines her, her true self. The very thing that, since no one else knows about it, represents her greatest act of defiance. If she abandoned that part of herself, she would become merely what everyone else sees. A surface without depth, without a flipside. A body without shadow. She would no longer be able to tell herself: “Let them think whatever they want. They’ll never know the truth.”

Men rescued her from her childhood. They dragged her from the mud of adolescence and she traded childish passivity for the lasciviousness of a geisha.