There was Catherine, Alain, the streets, the boy who kissed me at a party and whom I didn’t want to see again. There was rain, the Sorbonne and cafés. There were maps of America. How I hated America! There was boredom. Would all this never end?

I was only interested in myself in relation to Luc.

He asked me what I was doing with myself. I replied that I was working, I was reading. In fact, whenever I read or went to the cinema, it was only with the thought that I would be able to talk to him about the particular book, or about the film whose director he had told me he knew. I was desperately seeking for bonds between us, bonds other than

The basis of everything is my fatigue and boredom.

And yet it’s probably this moment that I will have loved the most, the one when I accepted the fact that life is just as it appears to me now, quietly heart-breaking.’

tête-à-tête

‘You always put on the same tune,’ he complained. ‘Mind you, it’s not that I don’t like it.’ He had adopted a neutral tone for those last few words and I recalled that we had been together when we had first heard that record. I was always finding that he had little surges of sentimentality for things that had been markers in our relationship but

Only, when I am in bed, at dawn, when all that can be heard in Paris is the sound of cars, my memory sometimes betrays me: summer, with everything I remember of it, comes flooding back. Anne, Anne! I repeat that name very softly to myself, over and over in the dark. Then something stirs within me that, with eyes closed, I greet by its name,

On the way back in the car my father took my hand and held it tight in his. I thought: ‘I am all that you have left and you are all that I have left, we are alone in our unhappiness,’ and for the first time I wept.