This summer, I watched a porn movie on Canal+ for the first time. My TV doesn’t have a decoder, the images on the screen were blurry, the words were replaced by a strange sound overlay, whistles, murmurs, another kind of language, loose and repetitive. You could make out the figure of a woman in a corset, stockings with garters, and a man. The story was incomprehensible and it was impossible to predict any of their actions or movements. The man approached the woman. A close-up, the woman’s genitals appeared, clearly visible in the flickering screen, then the man’s genitals, erect, penetrating the woman’s vagina. For some slow minutes, the back-and-forth of the two sexual organs was shown from different angles. The penis reappeared, in the man’s hand, the semen spreading on the woman’s belly. I thought that writing should do exactly that too, reproduce the feeling caused by the scene of sexual intercourse, the feeling of anxiety and astonishment, a suspension of moral judgment.

Since last September, I have done nothing else but wait for a man: to call me and come to my house. I went to the supermarket, to the cinema, picked up clothes from the dry cleaner, read, graded writings, behaved exactly as before, but if I hadn’t long been familiar with these actions, it would have been impossible for me to do them without the price of a terrible effort. And especially when I spoke, I had the impression that I acted instinctively. Words, phrases, even my laughter, formed on my lips without my thought or will really participating. Besides, I have only a vague memory of the things I did, the movies I saw, the people I met. All my behavior was artificial.