Adèle

by Leïla Slimani

Wanting to is the same as giving in. The dam has been breached. What good would it do to hold back now? Life wouldn’t be any better. She’s thinking like a drug addict, like a gambler. She’s been so pleased with herself for not yielding to temptation for a few days that she has forgotten about the danger.

Adèle doesn’t like her job. She hates the idea that she must work to make a living. The only ambition she ever had was to be looked at.

She would have loved being married to a rich, absent husband. To the outrage of all those proud working women who surround her, Adèle wishes she could spend her days lazing around a large house with no objective other than to look beautiful when her husband returns. How wonderful it would be to get paid for her talent of giving men pleasure.

She finds her life small, shabby, lacking in grandeur. Their money smells of work, of sweat and long nights spent at the hospital. It has an aftertaste of reproachful looks and bad moods. It is not a passport to idleness or decadence.

“It’s on me!” Adèle announces, despite the fact that her bank account is overdrawn and these colleagues have never once bought her a drink. But so what? She’s taking charge now, she’s treating them, and after a glass of Saint-Estèphe, in the woodsmoke-scented air, she has the feeling that they love her and are forever in her debt.

She finished her articles well before deadline, suggested stories from all over the world, always arrived in his office with solutions and never problems, all of this with the sole intention of making him like her. What was the point of working now that she’d had him?

Did he even notice that she had her eyes closed? She shut them in a rage, as if seeing him disgusted her, as if she was already thinking about the next men, the real men, the good ones, somewhere else, the ones who would finally know how to control her body.

They saw her and they don’t judge her for it, but somehow that makes it worse. Now they’re going to think that she’s available, that it’s okay to be familiar with her. They’re going to want to have a laugh with her. The men are going to think that she’s up for it, easy, a slut. The women will treat her as a predator; the kinder ones might say that she’s emotionally fragile. They will all be wrong.

Adèle had a child for the same reason that she got married: to belong to the world and to protect herself from other people. As a wife and mother, she is haloed with a respectability that no one can take away from her.

She had always thought that a child would cure her. She had convinced herself that motherhood was the only way out of her malaise, the sole solution that could end this perpetual flight from herself.

She loved him with an intense, physical love, but still it wasn’t enough. Those days at home seemed endless.

They walk quickly along the street, side by side. They don’t touch. They rarely kiss. Their bodies have nothing to say to each other.

He hasn’t closed the shutters, and when she gets into bed Adèle can see the peaceful expression on her husband’s face. He trusts her. It’s as simple and as brutal as that.

Adèle hates him for his naïveté, which persecutes her, which deepens her sin and makes her even more despicable. She wants to scratch that smooth, tender face of his, rip apart this reassuring bed.

Full of gratitude for being loved and paralyzed by the idea of losing everything.

Adèle is ready but she wants him to wait for her. She spreads a towel on the bathroom floor and lies down. She closes her eyes and hums a melody.

Anyway, she’s not listening anymore. She is bitter and irritable. Tonight she seems unable to exist. No one sees her, no one hears her. She doesn’t even try to suppress the images that flash through her mind, that burn behind her eyelids. Her leg shakes beneath the table. She wants to be naked, she wants someone to touch her breasts. She wants to taste another mouth on hers, to feel a silent, animal presence. Her only ambition is to be wanted.

And seriously, I don’t know why you feel the need to behave like that. To get drunk. To talk down to people as though you alone understand the mysteries of the world and we are just a bunch of moronic sheep. You know, you’re just as ordinary as we are, Adèle. The day you finally accept that, you’ll be a lot happier.”

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.

Then she decides that it’s not worth living while fighting against such a desperate desire, such an absolute need.

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.

Maybe if she cries out, if she starts moaning, she’ll find it easier to feel the spasm coming, the liberation, the pain, the anger. She whispers little ahs. But a moan shouldn’t come from your mouth, it should come from deep in your belly.

This is her favorite moment. The moment before the first kiss, nudity, intimate caresses. That moment of anticipation when everything is still possible and when she is the mistress of the magic.

She tenses her vagina and a shiver runs through her whole body, as if the pleasure is not yet totally consumed, as if her body still harbors memories so vivid that she could, at any moment, summon them and make herself come.

These waiting rooms where people wait for the words that will change their lives.

It wasn’t for the flesh she yearned, but for the situation.

She has no clear memories of them, and yet these men are the sole landmarks of her existence. Each season, each birthday, each event in her life corresponds to a lover with a blurred face.

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.

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.

“I don’t know if you can understand, if you can believe me. But it’s nothing against you, Richard. It never was, I promise. I just can’t help myself. It’s beyond my control.”

What he fears the most is that they will force him into a decision, telling him confidently: “In these circumstances, Richard, you have no choice: you must leave her.” Talking makes things irreversible.

But there’s something terrible about being cured too. It means losing something. You understand?”

“The night he found out the truth, I slept very well. A deep, soothing sleep. When I woke, even though the house was a wreck, even though Richard hated me, I felt a strange kind of joy, even a sort of excitement.”

He felt incapable of playing the role of a passionate lover, and—stupidly—he had thought that Adèle would be relieved by the feebleness of his desire. Like any intelligent, sophisticated woman would be. He thought that, compared to all he had to offer her, sex was negligible.

Simone swallows a mouthful of gin and clicks her tongue against her incisor. “People who are never satisfied destroy everything around them.”

But you don’t fool me. Richard, poor bastard, he doesn’t see a thing. He’s like your father, blind and naive. Men don’t know who we are. They don’t want to know. But I’m your mother, I remember everything. The way you wiggled your hips . . . You weren’t even eight. You scared men.

She was a burden to her mother when she was a child. Now she has become an adversary, without ever having the time for tenderness, for gentleness, for explanations.

She imagines the men taking turns, shoving their dicks inside her, flipping her over and fucking her again until they have driven out the sorrow, until they have silenced the fear that lurks deep inside her.