A Girl's Story

I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.

How are we present in the existences of others, their memories, their ways of being, even their acts? There is a staggering imbalance between the influence those two nights with that man have had upon my life, and the nothingness of my presence in his. I do not envy him: I’m the one who is writing.

The girl in the picture is not me, but neither is she a fictional creation. There is no one else in the world I know in such vast and inexhaustible detail,

She has no defined self, but “selves” who pass from one book to another.

There will inevitably be a last book, as there is always a last lover, a last spring, but no sign by which to know them.

The girl in the picture is a stranger who imparted her memory to me.

One cannot see the future of something learned.

Each one of my desires has enriched me more than the always-deceitful possession of the object of my desire.

But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things, or even just one thing that cannot be reduced to any kind of psychological or sociological explanation and is not the result of a preconceived idea or demonstration but a narrative: something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded, and can help us understand—endure—events that occur and the things that we do?

The thought of “just enjoying life” is unbearable. Every moment lived without a writing project resembles the last.

There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so.

Déjà le souvenir de ce que j'ai écrit s'efface. Je ne sais pas ce qu'est ce texte. Même ce que je poursuivais en écrivant le livre s'est dissous. J'ai retrouvé dans mes papiers une sorte de note d'intention : Explorer le gouffre entre l'effarante réalité de ce qui arrive, au moment où ça arrive et l'étrange irréalité que revêt, des années après, ce qui est arrivé.

What others believe about us is nothing compared to that which they do not know,

I am endowed by shame’s vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.

The only thing that matters to me is to seize life and time, understand, and take pleasure.

(Here, I note the first manifestation of a desire for inaccessibility, which, throughout my love life, has always arrived too late.)

People in this world, she imagines, talk endlessly about poetry and literature, the meaning of life and freedom, as in The Age of Reason, Sartre’s novel that she inhabited for all of July, transformed into the character of Ivich. She has no defined self, but “selves” who pass from one book to another.

I know it sounds absurd Please tell me who I am. —Supertramp “One thing more,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so.” It was not true. The shame of her surrender, her letter, her unrequited love would go on gnawing, burning, till the end of her life. [. . .] After all, it did not seem to hurt much: certainly not more than could be borne in secret, without a sign. It had all been experience, and that was a salutary thing. You might write a book now, and make him one of the characters; or take up music seriously; or kill yourself. —Rosamond Lehmann, from Dusty Answer

At this very moment, out in the streets, the open spaces, on the metro, in lecture halls, and inside millions of heads, millions of novels are being written chapter by chapter, erased and revised, and all of them die and a result of becoming, or not becoming reality.

The most intense part of her life is the time she spends immersed in the books she has insatiably consumed ever since she learned to read.

Pero para qué escribir si no es para desenterrar cosas, hasta una sola, irreductible a explicaciones de toda suerte, psicológicas, sociológicas, algo que no sea el resultado de una idea preconcebida ni de una demostración, sino del relato, algo que salga de los repliegues escalonados del relato y que pueda ayudar a entender —a soportar— lo que sucede y lo que se hace.

Qué hacer de esta verdad: que soy nula, que no doy la talla en la vía en la que me he iniciado

Ni soumission ni consentement, seulement l'effarement du reel qui fait tout juste se dire "qu'est-ce qui m'arrive" ou "c'est a moi que ça arrive" sauf qu'il ny'a plus de moi en cette circonstance, ou ce n'est plus le meme deja.

Yo miraba sus hombros desnudos, su cuerpo que por primera vez veía abandonado en el dolor. Me parecía estar delante de la mujer joven que me trajo al mundo difícilmente una noche de guerra. Pensaba, con estupor, que mi madre podía morir.