I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

It suggests that people were not avid to learn, and that you had to apologise for wanting to convey your knowledge.

And now, racked with sobs, 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.

Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering?

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

It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human.

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.

She raised the arm she was still able to move and stroked my cheek while I placed on her skin the point of the knife that I had spent ages sharpening. I was swift and accurate, her arm fell back and her heart was beating no more.

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.

Now, I had nobody left to love.

The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women?

So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to—really had a very vivid imagination.

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