Annie Ernaux

A woman plots the emotional and physical course of an all-consuming affair with a married man, during which she loses herself in her passion before the relationship comes to an end. By the author of A Woman's Story. Reprint.

Simple Passion

Sarah Christine Gill

In the course of conversation, the only subjects that escaped my indifference were those related to this man, his work, the country he came from, and the places he'd been to. The person speaking to me had no idea that my sudden interest in their conversation had nothing to do with their description or even the subject itself, but with the fact that one day, ten years before I met him, A. had been sent to Havana on an assignment and may have set foot in that very night club, the Fiorendito, which they were describing in minute detail, encouraged by my attentive listening. In the same way, when I was reading, the sentences that gave me pause were those concerning a relationship between a man and a woman. They seemed to teach me something about A. and lent credibility to the things I wished to believe. For instance, reading in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate that 'people in love kiss with their eyes closed' led me to believe that A. loved me since that was the way he kissed me. After that passage, the rest of the book returned to being what everything else had been to me for a whole year - a means of filling in time between two meetings.

I would drink in the sentences that I thought betrayed his jealousy, the only proof of his love in my eyes. After a while I realized that 'are you going away for Christmas?' was no more than a simple, practical question, to decide whether or not to fix a meeting, and certainly not a roundabout way offinding out if l was going skiing with someone else (maybe he even wanted me to leave so that he could see another woman). I often wondered what these afternoons of lovemaking meant to him. Probably nothing more than just that, making love. There was no point looking for other reasons. I would only ever be certain of one thing: his desire or lack of desire. 

Sometimes I told myself that he might spend a whole day day without even thinking about me. I imagined him getting up, drinking his coffee, talking, and laughing, as if I didn't exist. Compared to my own obsession, such indifference stupefied me. How could this be? Even he would have been astonished to find out that I never stopped thinking about him from morning to night. There was nothing to suggest that my attitude was more justifiable than his. In a way, I was luckier than him.

I felt like rereading one or the other of the books I had skimmed through when A. was around. The feeling that the waiting and the dreams of that period had crystallized within the pages and that I would rediscover my passion, intact. Yet I was reluctant to do so, postponing the moment when I would open the first page, almost out of superstition, as if Anna Karenina were some esoteric work in which it would be forbidden to turn a particular page on pain of ill fortune.

He had said, You won't write a book about me.' But I haven't written a book about him, neither have I writ- ten a book about myself. AIII have done is translate into words words he will probably never read, which are not intended for him - the way in which his existence has af- fected my life. An offering ofa sort, bequeathed to others.

Helen 

We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time. 

not even the sound of his voice could make me happy. It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were togeth- er making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

I measured time differently, with all my body. 

I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myselfturned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.

When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life ofan intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.

soochie

“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written—when only I can see them—from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love without contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences.

(It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about his own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show himself and to be seen at the same time.)”

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