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I couldn’t imagine sex ever being related to anything else.
So it would appear my life is confined to the period separating the Ogino method from the age of cheap condom dispensers. It’s one way of measuring it, possibly the most reliable one of all.
As I watched the frail figure of the boy in his cheap raincoat, the humiliations he suffered during his pathetic existence, somehow I knew the bleeding would not come back.
In my diary I wrote: “Fantastic. If only I didn’t have this REALITY inside me.”
I returned to my accommodation on foot. In my diary I wrote: “I am pregnant. It’s a nightmare.”
When I made love and climaxed, I felt that my body was basically no different from that of a man.
One week later Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. By then I had lost interest in that sort of thing.
Through this story, time has been jerked into action and it is dragging me along with it. Now I know that I am determined to go through with this, whatever the cost, in the same way I was determined to go through with my abortion after tearing up the pregnancy certificate, aged 23.
I want to become immersed in that part of my life once again and learn what can be found there.
My ass had caught up with me, and the thing growing inside me I saw as the stigma of social failure.
I too was prepared to cling to the washbowl. Little did I know it could cost me my life.
What gave me the courage to go on living that afternoon was the voice of a woman who was to hit rock bottom and die.
Girls like me were a waste of time for doctors. With no money and no connections—otherwise we wouldn’t accidentally end up on their doorstep—we were a constant reminder of the law that could send them to jail and close down their practice for good.
As was often the case, you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law.
Later on, I learned that the drug prescribed by the doctor on the Boulevard de l’Yser was used to prevent women from miscarrying.
(My diary read: “I can’t write. I can’t work. Is there any way out of this mess?”) I had stopped being “an intellectual.” I don’t know whether this feeling is widespread. It causes indescribable pain.
Neither of us had mentioned the word abortion, not even once. This thing had no place in language.
But you don’t need to picture reality to feel it around you, and knowing that life went on for most people made me wonder, “what on earth am I doing here?”
Girls who abort and unwed mothers from working-class Rouen were handed the same treatment. In fact, they probably despised her even more.
The only reason why he was ashamed—I found out that night—was that he had treated a college student like an ordinary salesgirl or a factory worker because he knew nothing about me.
On another afternoon I entered Saint Patrice’s Church just off the Boulevard de la Marne to tell a priest that I’d had an abortion. I immediately realized this was a mistake. I felt bathed in a halo of light and for him I was a criminal. Leaving the church, I realized that I was through with religion.
For many years I celebrated the night of January 20-21 as an anniversary.
Now I know that this ordeal and this sacrifice were necessary for me to want to have children. To accept the turmoil of reproduction inside my body and, in turn, to let the coming generations pass through me.
Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
Standing on the platform at Malesherbes Métro station, I realized that I had gone back to the Passage Cardinet in the hope that something might happen to me.
