This was such a devastating book. It might be due to my sentimental mood, for even the quotes out of context made me tear up.
It follows the quite stereotypical encounters of gay men, struck by sexual desire first and then by “love”. However, there is a tenderness which is so quintessentially queer. Daring to express your love, dealing with shame, being vulnerable to the other and to yourself first for loving and admitting who you are, challenging masculinity roles.
The translation is beautiful with sentences that pour into one another. Other times the final sentence just shatters the previous ones: “The only thing that Lucas finds reassuring is that the embalmers have done a remarkable job. You can’t even see the trace of rope around his neck.”
Philippe, the narrator, is a character whom I can relate to in some ways - the shy, fragile boy, who does well at school, who is stubborn to his core, yet naive. I even ascribe to his notion of jealousy.
I could sense what was about to happen during some parts and yet it hit me so hard…
Quotes
You didn’t have to attract desire… . Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing.
I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don’t listen. Their words roll over me but don’t stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck’s back. I’m an idiot. An easygoing idiot.
Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.
If I shut up, it’s just to avoid being confronted by violence. Is it cowardice? Perhaps. I prefer to see it as a kind of necessary self-protection. But I will never change. I will never think: It’s bad, or It would be better to be like everyone else, or I will lie to them so that they’ll accept me. Never. I stick to who I am. In silence, of course, but it’s a proud, stubborn silence.
I like to repeat his name to myself in secret. I like to write it on scraps of paper. I am stupidly sentimental: that hasn’t changed much.
This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.
I think I love him for this loneliness, that it’s what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.
the perfect little crack in an extraordinarily brief window of opportunity. If I had not been abandoned by my friends, if he had failed to convince his to leave him behind, this moment would not have taken place. It could have almost never happened. I try to figure out the part that chance played, to assess the nature of the risk that led to the encounter, but I don’t succeed. We are in the land of the unthinkable.
In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life. It starts there, in the winter of my seventeenth year.
As I approach, I see his nervousness, see that it’s actually just shyness. I wonder if he feels shame. I want to believe that it’s only embarrassment, a question of modesty. I remember, also, that he’s reserved in a way that sets him apart. I could be put off, but instead it moves me. Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.
He hints at all the questions, all the hesitations, denials, and objections he had to overcome, but adds that he had to do it, that he didn’t have a choice. It had become a necessity. The smoke gets in his eyes. He says that he doesn’t know how to deal with it, but there it is. It’s given to me as a child would throw a toy at the feet of his parents. He says that he can no longer be alone with this feeling. That it hurts him too much.
Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it.
It’s the violence that the words carry within them, their admission of inferiority and, at the same time, of love.
Love, it’s taking each other in the mouth, maintaining a certain comportment despite the frenzy. It’s exercising restraint not to come, the excitement is so powerful. It’s abandonment, that crazy trust in the other.
I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. I wonder sometimes if I have ever written of anything else. It’s as if I never recovered from it: the inaccessible other, occupying all my thoughts.
I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, unidentifiable sound can make you jump. In order not to sink completely, I hang on to the memory of his body: his white veiny penis, his moles. This vivid memory saves me from ruin.
It’s also the first time I’ve smiled at him. He smiles back at me. It seems as intimate to me, as magnetic, as skin against skin.
he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.
it’s the likelihood that actually matters more than the truth, that the feeling counts more than accuracy, and above all that a place is not a question of topography but rather the way that we describe it—not a photograph but an impression.
And the feeling of never quite belonging, of being a person uprooted, as if, maybe, who knows, a sense of not belonging is something one inherits.
I wonder if it’s cold fathers who make the sensitive sons.
I’m no longer a neurotic, frightened, easily insulted boy, but rather a boy who’s thinking, who’s been awakened. It’s something that comes from using the body. From stirring up desire, sharing oneself with another, finding victory over a kind of solitude. Of course I can’t say anything on the outside, it’s part of the contract, but I believe that the change in me is visible, that if one looks closely, one can see a difference.
but the only thing that matters is that I’m holding on to him, that I’m holding on to him outside.
The trace of his scent, an intimate mixture of cigarettes and sweat, is the only thing that saves me.
Everything reeked of savings—not poverty so much as mediocrity, which struck me as less forgivable.
There is the insanity of not being able to be seen together. An insanity that is aggravated in this case by the unprecedented situation of finding ourselves in the middle of a crowd and having to act like strangers. It seems crazy not to be able to show our happiness. Such an impoverished word. Others have this right, and they exercise it freely. Sharing their happiness makes them even more happy, makes them expand with joy. But we’re left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves. This passion that can’t be talked about, that has to be concealed, gives way to the terrible question: if it isn’t talked about, how can one know that it really exists? One day, when it’s over, when it finally comes to an end, no one will be able to attest to what took place.
Jealousy, though not an entirely unknown feeling, is nevertheless somewhat foreign to me. I’m not possessive, figuring no one should have exclusive rights to someone else, as if a lover were a piece of property. I respect everyone’s freedom too much (probably because I can’t bear to have mine undermined). It seems to me that I am capable of good judgment, even detachment. These are qualities that have been attributed to me, even at that age. […] Except all my beautiful principles crumble in a second, the second this young woman throws herself at Thomas.
(And when you’ve been hurt once, you’re afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.)
affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don’t have the choice.
I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It’s a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations. I could have contented myself with saying that I was smitten (and it is true that Thomas knew how to make me weaken), or infatuated (he could conquer, flatter, even bewitch like no one else), or obsessed (he often provoked a mixture of bewilderment and excitement, turning everything upside down), or seduced (once he caught me in his net, there was no escaping), or taken with (I was stupidly joyful, I could heat up over nothing), or even blinded (anything that embarrassed me, I pushed to the side, minimizing his defects, putting his good qualities on a pedestal), or disturbed (no longer was I ever quite myself), which would have had less positive connotations. I could have explained it away as mere affection, having a “crush,” an explanation vague enough to mean anything. But those would just have been words. The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word.
I burst out laughing; I don’t know that it’s my last laugh with him.
I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.
Everything is in its place, everything reassures me. Except that I miss Thomas. I miss him terribly. And that changes everything. Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?
In spite of the great departure, the ambitious effort to forge a new existence, he fell back into all the same traps: shame, the impossibility of sharing a love that endures.
I say “courage,” but it may be something else. Those who have not taken this step, who have not come to terms with themselves, are not necessarily frightened, they are perhaps helpless, disoriented, lost as one is in the middle of a forest that’s too dark or dense or vast.
In the end, I tell myself that you understood. It was love, of course. And tomorrow, there will be a great emptiness. But we could not continue - you have your life waiting for you, and I will never change. I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again.