From the beginning of my relationship with Claude I began the process of interleaving different layers of my life. I applied to my active adult life the same method I had used during the long wait of childhood, a method which had never failed me, a habit of interspersing my days with constant daydreams of the most elaborate kind. These have become so essential to my equilibrium that I am sure that, for example, my inability to learn to drive is linked to an instinctive desire to make fullest use of those perfect opportunities provided by travel on public transport. Passive, captive, the body is set aside, just as it is during sleep, while we reserve, for the ever-changing representation of ourselves which we put in its place, a position which is often better, more controlled than in our nocturnal dreams. Who, moreover, on waking from a bad dream, has never tried to correct the unpleasant impression it leaves by allowing the unconscious or semi-conscious mind to supply its own happy ending? Anyone who, like me, has been so inclined, will know how much can be made of an open window on the overground train, offering a bold, fleeting glimpse of intimacy, or of those paradoxically secretive fa?ades that slip by as the train passes through a provincial town, of those conversations between strangers on a train, upon which one intrudes while pretending to sleep. However brief the vision, however fragmentary the perception of our fellow travellers, a minute shred of ourselves becomes caught on it, and, just like those indiscreet television cameras which we pretend to believe are operated by an invisible hand, continues to force its way into the interior of a Parisian apartment, a provincial home, the domestic complications under discussion on the opposite seat. The dreamer refracts his own life. The world lays so many alluring or dangerously intriguing images before him, he wishes he could reflect each one of them, enrich it, fill it out, and thereby set it in perspective. The brief exposure, like the glimpse of a stage set, of the apartment or the provincial home, allows him to inhabit each for a few seconds, even if his own taste is utterly different; 'I am sharing the life of that family', he likes to imagine, with a slight shudder, if the discussion they are having reveals values he himself has always reviled. To some degree, the parents of a dreamy child are right to worry that the child will lack character later on, in the generally understood sense of 'rounded character', since the dreamer prefers to be several people, live several lives, many of which have no more substance than a speck of dust blown into the doorway of a house by a breath of wind. On the other hand, it is wrong to think of the dreamer as someone who turns away from the world, for very often his various lives actually give him a greater degree of empathy with it.
Certain daydreams, self-evidently, are erotic, and I was deep into this territory long before I became familiar with any actual sex acts, loosely associating them still with mouth-to-mouth kissing and hands on breasts. It is likely, too, that my natural disposition to daydream went hand in hand with a taste for masturbation. Ever since I was very young I have tended to fantasize elaborately and at length while masturbating. My fantasies are repetitive and become increasingly complex and labyrinthine with time, sometimes over a period of years, like those soap operas which run and run, with the writers making the plot up as they go along. I couldn't bring myself to orgasm without them. Having said that, not all my erotic daydreams are accompanied by an act of masturbation. The protagonists of the pornographic films in my head have features, physical and moral, which are both stereotypical and composite, and are drawn from a fairly broad range. Within certain categories–the owner of a bar or sex club, the businessman in a hurry, the group of idle young people, the foreigner who utters profanities in a language I do not understand, etc–I will cast from all ages and from a wide variety of physical types. Only very rarely are they manifestations of real men, people I know or happen to have met, or even film stars I swooned over as a teenager. Although there may be similarities between circumstances and activities I have known and those concocted by my imagination–and on some occasions the latter will strangely foreshadow the former, on others be inspired by them–neither my real-life partners nor my friends nor even simple acquaintances ever make their way into my daydreams. One of my masturbatory fantasies is incestuous. In this case, understandably, I think, the taboo is sufficiently strong for me to have substituted for the memory of my father's features, a body which is quite unlike his, and which is different each time. But broadly speaking, the taboo extends to forbidding me to summon up a stranger I might have noticed in the street. Obviously my characters must be composed of features belonging to real people, gleaned here and there, but such references are negligible or unconscious. Identification with one particular person is never possible. Even when I have happened to feel, and admit to myself, a strong desire for a man which has turned out to be impractical, or indeed impossible, to satisfy, I have never assuaged my frustration by recourse to fantasy. It is a curious fact: the realm of my daydreams is so tightly sealed, so radically out of bounds to any person whose identity is in any sense real to me, that even though I might gladly admit such a person into the intimate sphere of my real sexual activity, they would continue to be excluded from my erotic daydreams. I might invent a story in which I socialize with a man; I have a rendezvous with him, I imagine our conversation, but there my fabulation stops, before I get as far as suggestive words or gestures. I am incapable of using this means of removing the obstacle or taboo presented by real life, of deriving pleasure from this kind of mental transgression. If they are to develop freely, my sexual musings must have cast completely adrift, and I expect that the dreadful captain to whom, at that moment, I hand over the helm, would not welcome the sight of one among the crew whose face, summoned by a minute twitch of conscience, recalled the laws of terra firma.
Many of my amorous or sexual encounters follow a similar pattern to this one of flicking back and forth between real life and dreams. Perhaps it is precisely because seams of dream life are embedded between the layers of real life, pressing down upon them, but never merging, that life itself ends up being constructed like lamellar tissue. I was fortunate in that right from the start my life was held in place by a solid axis, supplied on the one hand by my work, principally the work for Art Press, the aims of which always remained clear to me, and reinforced, on the other, by my relationship with Claude, which, because we had in some sense embarked together on a social adventure, and also because it did not restrict our sexual freedom, had never been called into question. So, for some years, in parallel with this axis, I had pursued segments of various other lives, some of which had developed into long and deep relationships. I have written 'lives' and not 'affairs', because each of these relationships had a particular characteristic rhythm, set of rules and specific rituals. Each one allowed me to transport myself onto a different stage, to exploit different registers, like an actress: I might be bohemian, tart or bour-geoise, depending on the social position of the man I was seeing, and the social position he assigned to me, the friends he introduced me to, the restaurants he took me to, the activities or work we met to pursue. Free from many of life's contingencies–as are most affairs to which the partners commit only a portion of their time, and as are adulterers, provided they are casual–these parallel lives held, for me, a charm similar to that of my daydreams; they were hybrid in nature; they gave substance to my mental images, but had none of the harshness of actual everyday life. In this way I visited countries, frequented milieus, met personalities, not to say slept in houses, wore dresses, enjoyed perks which I might have vaguely glimpsed during the course of my daydreams, and I little cared that none of these privileges were actually features of a permanent way of life or lifestyle. In any case, I have always been fairly indifferent to status symbols, and the fact that I had tasted the vegetables at the Moulin de Mougins did not stop me tucking into a couscous in the bistro on the corner; similarly, though I had joined in orgies in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, I could still feel at home at a wedding reception in a small village hidden away in Umbria. The dreamer only hoards immaterial possessions, and attaches only limited importance to the fact that the object of his dreaming may by chance actually materialize, only to return once more to its immaterial state, in the form of a memory. In any case, he remains confident that the process can be reversed. I became very closely involved with Jacques during a period of over six years, while I was actually living with Claude, then I left Claude to live, initially, with a female friend who took me in, then alone for about three years, and then at last with Jacques, with whom I still live today. And it was not until the recurrent arguments between myself and Claude touched on the subject of the direction Art Press should take that I decided, one day, to remove my clothes from the large closet in our bedroom for good. When we decide, all of a sudden, to strike out on an unknown path, our determination is sustained, I suspect, by a kind of anaesthesia, since although I can see my clothes spread out across the bed, as though I were preparing to set out on a journey, I cannot recall what I felt at that moment. Perhaps it was my precociously early acquaintance with the great novels of the nineteenth century, a timely corrective both to the books which lull little girls into the expectation of a prince charming, and to the serialized love stories in the magazines my mother bought, novels which transported me into a society which in actual fact made no more connection between love and marriage than did certain ancient societies or certain long-ago peoples described by ethnologists, which we falsely pretend to be shocked by, as though their values were quite unlike our own. Or perhaps it is my nature, which is simple, one might say, primitive. At any rate, the fact remains that these basic requirements of mankind–the need to avoid solitude, to enjoy carnal pleasures, free of guilt or blame, but equally, to go beyond one's own pleasure into the realm of love for another person did not seem to me to be automatically or necessarily connected. I did not expect to satisfy them all with a single partner, I did not attempt to, or even imagine I might. Since, in that libertarian era, there were no secrets, it would sometimes happen–though rarely, it must be said–that people close to me would question my arrangements, or rather would express surprise that all my partners accepted them, in particular Claude, with whom I was living, and Jacques, who was himself single. I did not know how to answer them, since it was not a question I would ever have asked myself. However, although my secondary lives were not secret, they were, to some extent, separate. I would pass through virtual partitions, which I myself had set up, like Fantomas passing through the walls of people's houses, or a science fiction hero passing through the walls of time: and although I might take with me certain elements from one world, and tell tales of them in another, the people I dealt with were not supposed to have any personal acquaintance with the other worlds I came from and still less were they expected to remind me of them if I did not wish it. It was inconceivable to me. The truth, of course, is that it was I who deliberately, naively, turned a blind eye. Which is why these secondary lives were in one sense also dream lives.
I also chose not to look over the garden wall to where my friend–lovers were busy in other compartments of their love lives. I have already described how jealousy would suddenly flare up between myself and Claude. But nowhere else. I knew quite well that my male friends saw other women, had other relationships, and in some cases, wives. I knew some of these women as friends, or I might equally, while swinging, have come into contact with them sexually. I never had a particular emotional attachment to any of them. Of all the relationships I have had during the course of my life, they are the only ones from which emotions have been entirely absent, recalling rather that sense of moral well-being I have on occasions when I find myself having a conversation on a subject to which I am indifferent. I suppose I had neutralized their existence in advance. Not that they had no identity, but for me the mention of them evoked only bit players who did no more than cross the back of the stage and exit. For I set the limits of the stage and placed the actors in their positions, entirely according to my own convenience, and it little mattered if I knew my friend was married or was closely involved with another mistress, I was able, by a trick of distortion, to place my own mental image of my relationship with him at centre stage. Since for me none of these relationships was all-important, and I certainly never felt as though my entire life depended on any of them, none of my partners' affairs, either, could be considered a major obstacle, sending me back to my place in the wings. If I had had to explain myself at that time, I might well have happily claimed that the privileged position I routinely assumed to be my own derived in some sense from my ubiquity. I would have argued that I actually received more attention because people knew I might well soon drift off somewhere else, or perhaps, in my head, had already done so. I have learned since then that there is a form of egocentricity which paradoxically seeks not to focus on and strengthen the ego, but rather to scatter it and break it down.
The men I was involved with were no more secretive than I was, really, when it came to sex. Jacques was the one exception to this. His allusions to other women were rare and discreet and it was understood that I was not interested in asking questions. I was provoked to a variety of different reactions by the contrast between this mysterious part of my life and my own entourage, where the tendency was towards openness, a contrast which was the more noticeable because of the unique character of what I had begun to feel for Jacques. In the early days of our relationship there had been three or four occasions on which I had displayed jealousy. It was not at all the same kind of jealousy as that which had fuelled my crises with Claude. Although it is all a long time ago now, and memory has done a remarkable job of sifting and sorting, I am quite sure that until then I had never worried about a rival who might be more beautiful, or better in bed, than myself. The presence of an intruder shocked me: if the fact of her existence had emerged gradually in the course of conversation, or if I had just happened to run into her one evening, I would have had no difficulty reducing her to a generalized outline, but I felt crowded by her abrupt arrival on the scene. It felt like that absurd situation, only a thousand times more so, when you respond to a smile or a kiss from a friend some distance away, only to realize that the gesture was intended for the person behind you. Thus you discover simultaneously that you are not the only one who has a special friendship with them, and that sometimes they may simply not see you and you have to stand aside.
Early one morning I am alone in Jacques' studio after he has gone to work. Sitting at his table, in the bright light of the bay window, which illuminates the table and utterly exposes me, I write him a letter in a state of erotic fury. I have quite forgotten, now, how I have just come to realise that Jacques receives frequent visits from another woman in this studio. But I still remember the image I employed to re-appropriate the space and set my own imperious stamp upon it. Some time before this, Jacques had burned his hands in an accident, and for several weeks his movements had been impeded by two stumps of bandage. So we had developed a habit of having sex with him on his back and me sitting on top of him. I liked this position, particularly when I could feel the slightly rough texture of the bandages resting on my hips. In the letter, in which I compared myself to the Eiffel Tower, straddling his body, I asserted my exclusive right to this position. One's self-awareness may so deceive one that, while being fully aware of certain character traits or ways of behaving which we know we tend to overplay, we fail to acknowledge the feelings they are intended to repress. I am fairly sure that from very early on I was sufficiently clear-sighted to know that the reason why I placed sexual accomplishment at such a premium was because I used it in the same way as someone who becomes hooked on painkillers, not just to mask pain, but to get high. Despite this, I could not have said exactly where the pain lay. It is the automatic reaction of the seasoned drama queen, this highly polished dividing of the self: I work myself up into a fever with my copulatory locutions, while simultaneously watching myself play out the role of icon of sexual liberation. I even philosophise; in the almost non-stop dialogue I conduct with the phantom tribunal which is constantly summoning me before it, I explain that other values in life are insignificant, as long as in this area one is prepared to pursue one's fantasies to the limit. Having a self-image necessarily implies a certain distance. Now, at this moment, that distance was not the distance of a critical self-consciousness which, stepping backwards for a moment, addresses an aspect of itself, either judging it or, at least, subjecting it to irony; it was, on the contrary, a projective awareness, separating off from itself a sort of mannequin of its own making. I wonder if you will understand what I mean when I say that although I was present at the making of this mannequin (which is the opposite of its being un-made, even if it also demonstrates its artificial nature) this artifact was never-theless something to which I was inescapably drawn. The visible part of my consciousness needed to identify with a conquering figure, a Joan of Arc marching towards the spire of Reims, or rising up, why not, like the Eiffel Tower, because the other part, the part which I was precisely incapable of looking at, and for which, a fiortiori, it would take me a long time to find words (because the inner eye, like the organic eye, actually sees long before it can describe what it sees) kept bumping into the furniture of the minuscule apartment where this letter was being written, and from where this entire mental construct was being raised. Suddenly I had to make room for three in it, and actually for more: I had to let in the unknown face of the man who until then had seemed like the sincerest of all men, Jacques. In replying to my letter, he did not resort to metaphor. He asked me if I had ever wondered how he had managed the thousands of little tasks and movements of daily life all this time, without the use of his hands, given that I never spent longer than a few hours with him.
In the weeks after my break-up with Claude, when I was lodging with my female friend, in a cosy apartment under the eaves which would have made a good setting for two emancipated Truffaut heroines, I received messages of a rather more pressing nature from Jacques. They arrived at a rate of one or two a day, either by post or delivered by hand into my letter box. I always open my post, even today when, for professional reasons, there is an awful lot of it, in the same spirit of naked anticipation as that in which I receive surprise presents, even of the most modest kind, because, in a rather facile way, I invest the object of communication with the possibility of being such a huge number of different things that this potentiality wipes out any guess I might make based on what I might expect, or want. Alas, whereas a present retains its magic potential, providing I don't immediately dismiss the idea of using the useless gadget, or the hope that I might respond to the invitation even though I know my diary is already full, so that both present and invitation may act as potential interruptions in the organisation of my life, on reading Jacques' letters, which were at one and the same time urgent and–since written–delayed responses to a telephone call or to our conversation over dinner the night before, my mind immediately misted over.
I read them straight through, without stopping. I did not reread them, or scarcely. Having said that, I have kept them all. I read them in a state of panic. My eyes zigzagged down the page, I thrashed around among words which seemed to have become opaque. I might have reacted the same way if I had been attacked in the dark, flailing about, trying to seize hold of a hand, a sleeve, a flap of clothing, but failing, in the end, to catch hold of anything. During this period it was my firm belief that I would from now on be able to enjoy an even greater degree of flexibility in the exercising of my sexual nomadism, and I was quite sure that this also meant I would have more time to spend with Jacques. To him it looked as though I was turning into a kind of air traffic controller preparing to set up a vast network and he made it clear he was not interested in being connected. One thing which annoyed him, for example, was an idea I had for sharing a large loft space with one of my boyfriends: this man was an artist, and he could have had his studio in one part, and Jacques and I would have lived in the other. Jacques called it perversion: the na?ve speculations of a woman who until now had thankfully managed to keep real life and fantasy separate.
I made no connection between love and sexual pleasure; nor, in my view, was pleasure single and indivisible. As I had always had several relationships on the go at once, I had never been concerned to measure the intensity of pleasure I derived from the sexual act with each one of my lovers, and if a practice I was fond of did not appeal to one of them, I would never have dreamed of insisting he go along with it. I knew quite well that a particular form of pleasure encountered with one man was not necessarily available with the next, but that the latter might, on the other hand, introduce me to a different pleasure again. Now, there is no doubt that what appears at first glimpse to offer a wider and richer range of experiences, in fact served to hold back the development of my libidinal personality. From this point of view, I was relatively slow in coming to know myself. What I have called the interleaving of the layers of my life entailed, as its corollary, the faceting of my libido. For a long time, through niceness, desire to please, curiosity, and various other reasons which were not solely connected to the pursuit of pleasure, I focused a lot on responding to the desires of my partners, while rather haphazardly satisfying my own. Passing from one body to the next, from one erotic world to another, my sexual persona adapted in a variety of ways, and I carefully managed my reactions. If I found myself able to respond to my partner's taste for a specific position, practice or role-play I would focus on working up that response, but I might equally well forget about it with someone else. I think this must be a faculty I share with many women who compensate for their traditional absence of initiative with a considerable, almost experimental degree of physical availability. The difference between myself and others is that I have changed partners more often. And while being very steady within my relationships, my friendships, my work, my intellectual pursuits, I was, unlike certain erotomaniacs whose rituals for achieving pleasure leave as little room for improvisation as the rules of monastic life, sexually versatile.
I could not put an exact date on the moment when, to put it concisely, my body separated out from my being. It became most clear that this was what had happened with the writing and publication of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. The success of the book accentuated the phenomenon still further. All writing entails a process of objectification, and in this case the aim had been to detail the maximum possible number of erotic situations and sensations experienced by my body. The book provoked countless reactions. Through this process of description and interpretation, the body of Catherine M. definitely ceased to belong specifically to me. But before even starting on the book, in order even to conceive of such a project, and before that, to commit to memory the scenes I recount in it, my inner gaze needed to be able to function in some sense as an outer gaze. In general, this so-called outer gaze is mediated; it passes through the gaze of another, who may or may not be present. The psychological circuit is extremely short, generally unconscious, but if I am in the process of 'looking at' myself, there, lying naked in this room, am I not imagining what someone looking at me sees, or would see if he were lying next to me? In this case, are not the mental images I have of my body and the position it is in, which I am perhaps trying to make conform to that mental image, already, to a large extent, reflections of the imaginative faculty of someone else? When we criticize someone for being narcissistic, we are usually ridiculing them for thinking they are blessed from the outset with such a beautiful body that their sole duty is to maintain it as it is, or at least to show it off well. This is a crude idea. The solitary narcissist who only has his own 'gaze' upon himself, and plunges into his own reflection exists only in the legend. The more common form of narcissism, to which, I think, my own belongs, is more modest and is quite prepared to submit to the principle of reality…I know, as do most of my brothers in egotism, that my attractions are unreliable, and that an appreciation of my appearance depends largely on the point of view from which you look at it. Now, points of view are provided by other people.
The fact that I consider my physical person as a sort of compromise between the ideal I inevitably forged during childhood and particularly during adolescence, the far vaguer puppet which succeeded it in my adult fantasies, and the patchwork made up of reflections in mirrors, other people's eyes and in photographic prints, has probably made me extremely flexible in my sexual relationships, while this same flexibility tended to accentuate the unevenness of my image. The conviction, which was never stated, but was nevertheless quite clear, that I possessed a floating body, distinct from my real self, the self we believe–probably in error, but we need to cling to the belief–represents our true being, and the versatility I showed during the early decades of my sex life, were mutually reinforcing. I shall try to be more precise by saying that I feel as though I have two bodies. One is the body I inhabit, or rather carry around, like a snail with its shell, without ever having really understood its relationship to the outer world (I don't drive, I can't swim; I am frightened of going downstairs in the dark, and I am forever twisting my ankle), whose needs and desires I must do my best to satisfy, whose aches and pains must be relived. Before going to sleep, I bury my head in my arm and am surprised by the smell, and when I touch certain parts of my body other than those involved in habitual gestures, such as the inner thighs, or the crease below the buttocks, they feel as though they belong to someone else. This body is a rather burdensome mass, which I can only really take the measure of once it has withdrawn: the impression left in a crumpled sheet, the empty place I leave behind and to which, on some pretext or other–reluctance to leave, fear I may have forgotten something–I return. I wonder, in fact, whether the moment when we recover awareness and the accompanying feeling of plenitude after the brief absence from oneself which is orgasm might not also belong to the same register. As for the ultimate withdrawal, the one which I will not be able to witness, I sometimes catch a glimpse of it, when, for instance, I happen to revisit a place where I lived for a long time, to which I have not returned for even longer. The immediacy with which the memory of my absent body imposes itself upon the space wipes out any other feeling, as though I had vanished into the ether and could at long last get a sense of my body in its entirety, from a point of view somewhere outside it. I am the involuntary, but accountable trustee of this cellular body.
The other body is the social body, the one which brings me into varying degrees of contact with others, and which promotes an image of me with which, in the end, each person is free to do what he will. The social body lightens the load of the cellular body. Whereas the latter carries weight and may create obligations for me, I am quite happy to delegate to others the job of shaping my social body, since it does not matter much to me whether I can recognize 'my self' in it or not. In front of the photographer's lens, I am an accommodating model, as docile as I was in the days when my mother subjected my recaltricant head to painful sessions at the hairdressers, or made me wear dresses she had thrown together on her sewing machine. Being of average height, average weight, with a changeable face, I have come across a diverse range of opinions as to my appearance, some flattering, others disparaging: too pointy for some, too chubby for others, while my face has been variously deemed affable, pert, or sullen. I can attest to a real pleasure in this kind of virtual mauling. Each time someone tears off a little shred, I am relieved of a fraction of responsibility for myself, for which I am thankful, since I am quite weighed down enough by the superego in the moral and social domains. Truth to tell, two pleasures combine here: I am fully aware that through the process of appropriation by others I am able to transcend my physical boundaries, and at the same time I can see that they are actually busying themselves with only the hide of me, while leaving me otherwise in peace, to pursue my inner dramas undisturbed. Mere tenant of the cellular body, liberal dispenser of the social body, I actually identify with neither one of them. This explains why I never felt that the coupling of this body with another body was equivalent to a commitment of myself. Whether the contact was a one-time thing, or regular, it was so easy to have at my disposal this fleshly emissary, whose function was to represent me in the world, and being confident that it was cool and detached, as indeed a good diplomat should be, I failed to see how any dire consequences could ensue. For this reason I was unable to understand Jacques' solemn arguments. He apologized for the inevitable use of the word 'passion' which, he said, should be understood in its 'quasi evangelical' sense, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the 'Feydeauesque' arrangements into which he accused me of trying to drag him. In an attempt to make sense of my comings and goings on the sexual circuit, and of my way of asserting my mastery in this field, his missives compared me to those ladies of the Middle Ages who made knights do battle in tournaments. He brought in psychoanalysis and in the end the words 'refusal of castration', 'hysteria', 'perversion' and long quotations from Lacan left me prostrate. On the one hand, I was prepared to believe Jacques knew more about these things than I did, on the other, these interpretations seemed disproportionate to what I had hitherto considered the simplest thing in the world–all the rest was so very complicated! I felt like an actress who has been asked to give up her career because she is suspected of having committed the crimes of Medea or Lucretia Borgia. Did I ever imagine that Jacques might stop seeing me? Did I fear that in order to keep him I would have to change my way of life? To be honest, I think I was incapable even of pursuing the argument that far, and that under the circumstances my divided nature did an amazing job.
I had always adapted readily to all sorts of sexual practices, and respected the personal moral code which each person, even the most inveterate libertine, follows in this department, without, of course, adopting it myself. With Jacques I accepted the rule whereby our relationship was exempt from the general system of sexual exchange–an exchange which was, perhaps, not so much physical as verbal, consisting in the na?ve, not to say kinky, retelling of one's sexual adventures–within which I had operated until then, and in which, at the beginning of our acquaintance, at least, he had also participated. Once we had decided to live together, this acceptance necessarily had its impact on my way of life. I do not recall having taken any definite decision about it. But certain parts of me quite simply declared themselves free and independent of the part that was making this commitment to Jacques, and neither part ever felt the need to justify itself to the other. The need never arose. Jacques himself never asked any questions, and I no longer spontaneously told him all about my affairs.
I rather think Catherine M. must have been born around this time. I mean by this that the person I was with Jacques began to observe–with some distance, but close attention–the person, or persons I became when I was on a sexual spree, with the result that after a number of years of note-taking it began to add up to the material for a book. When I try to express the frame of mind I was in then, the nearest comparison I can think of is with the kind of vivid but unreal perception we have when, as the phrase goes, we recover our senses after having been unconscious. At that moment, objects at eye level appear enlarged and bizarrely close, and the voice of the person speaking right next to us echoes strangely loud in our head, and it is by reference to these amplified signs that we manage to situate our own body: on the ground where we have fallen, or to wherever we have been carried. Until then I had always enjoyed my sexual freedom as though it had been an innate faculty, but now I began to register images of myself via situations and encounters which, for the first time, appeared to me with the otherness of the picturesque.
Thus our lives take shape, not according to the convention which pictures a narrow ribbon of a road, leading to an invisible horizon, but as a series of layers, as densely packed as the earth's crust, and, likewise, permeable. Although I did restrain my impulses somewhat, I continued to maintain certain relationships, some of which led me into the kind of chance encounter which had long been a feature of my sexual practice. But as I did not share these practices with Jacques (whereas I had with Claude), they began to seem to belong to a sedimentary layer which was so remote from my daily life, so completely sealed off from it, that I began to feel like a speliologist. This is typical of the kind of paradox our conscience will accept, to enable us to live with our own contradictions: whereas certain dreams so thoroughly invade our sense of reality that they become as firmly rooted as proven facts, our minds, conversely, make us experience certain moments of the immediate present as though they were so far removed from our daily life that we would be quite prepared to believe we had dreamed them, or that they already belonged to the past, which justifies our treating them with as little importance as if they really had been chimera or distant memories.
There was a period during which the course of my life became so enmeshed with so many segments of other lives lived through as though in a dream, and so many daydreams, that the result was rather like a fabric where the pattern has been pulled out of shape; the fictional landscape aroused as much emotion as the real facts. These were the years after the death of my father and, a few months later, of my mother, the latter having been particularly dramatic, as it was self-inflicted, and violent. For no reason I could identify, I noticed shortly after these painful events–the second more so than the first–and for some time thereafter, that I tended to drift into erotic reveries of a kind to which I was unaccustomed. Until that time, I had used my fantasies as an aid to masturbation, and I had only ever evoked imaginary partners. Now I began to daydream in snatches, constantly re-running the same short, fairly anodyne scenes, usually dialogues or seductive glances, flirtatious exchanges, signs which in real life, though small and apparently insignificant, occasionally gave me such acute momentary pleasure as to provoke an actual spasm, but which would not have been sufficient to support an act of onanism. Was it because I was now selecting the model for my fantasy partners from among people who really existed, whether they were part of my social circle or I had simply come across them at some point, that I began to show such unaccustomed reserve?
Nor did I feel the need to convert these daydreams into reality. I have never been a flirt. And because I had always led my sex life without restraint, I had become a fatalist; if a relationship was meant to happen, the opportunity would arise without my feeling I needed to influence things, and if not, the current of desire would flow away somewhere else, wrapping itself around a different branch. In this way, for a number of years, four or five real people had doubles, in my fantasy life; as it turned out, only one of them came finally to play a role in real life, but such was the nature of this relationship that, for as long as it lasted, it continued to feature more prominently in my imagination than in my active life. He was a moody man, who, as a lover, maintained a fine balance between delicacy and brusqueness, and then, for no apparent reason, would cease all contact, closing the door, never calling me on the phone. Perhaps this mysterious capriciousness led me for the first time to try tricks for snaring him which were thought out well in advance. I would find it difficult, now, to say how much time I spent filling up these intervals with fantasies, but I think I would be alarmed by the tally of hours spent working on strategies to break down his resistance or going meticulously back over our meetings.
I would plan out my days in such a way as to clear periods of time in which to daydream, during a journey, or a long wait I knew I would have at a medical appointment or treatment, exactly as I might have arranged a real meeting. For years I must have devoted my first and last thoughts of the day to laying my plans, and pleasurably anticipating their results, for I would later realize that I had managed to furnish weeks, even months of physical absence of the subject himself with virtual incident. Now, so great is the power of desire, and the resources of the imagination which support it, that four or five months of waiting, fuelled in this manner, were as rich and emotionally varied as if the man in my thoughts had actually shared my life during this period. This explains why he whose wait is long does not grow weary. Unless he is mad, and mixes up dreams and reality, his obsession will lend substance to his dreams, so they become solid walkways between actual events, while, quite often, real events, which may be too brief, or the source of disappointment, can come to seem more like dreams. What place do two hours of furtive caresses take in our affections compared to the length of days spent imagining the pleasure to come? Is it not in fact precisely the dearth of real facts which makes it necessary, by way of compensation, to bolster up our dreams? In these circumstances, the passage of time, that is to say, the succession of events which constitutes real life, does not make us weary of waiting, burying the products of our imagination beneath its own sediment, no, it favours their proliferation, so that the waking dreamer is as unaware of the passage of time as the sleeper, shut away in his nocturnal dreams. And when, one day, he does wake from the dream, it is not because he suddenly becomes aware once more of time. Nor do events shake him awake. Like the little cat who has come to cling onto our lap, pawing us for minutes at a time, concentrated and insistent on his pleasure, then suddenly, though no movement or sound has disturbed him, sits up, stretches, and disappears in response to a call which we cannot hear, so our own desire abandons its object. There has been no sign to warn us of our approaching detachment. I noticed one day that I had not seen the man in question for quite a while, nor had he featured in my daydreams. Only then did the notion of time return. I said to myself, more or less: 'Six months without thinking of him! I would never have thought it possible!'
Imaginative people pass through many an ordeal in their fragile little bark before capsizing in a real storm. While others come up against obstacles, or work out the route which will get them safely past, they find, without making a detour, a passage through which they can slip into a dream, and by the time the dream is over the obstacle will probably be safely behind them. Spared the struggle, they cling to these dreams, refuse to relinquish their desires, and maintain a child's blind faith in their visions. From the moment I found myself in a couple with Jacques, I adopted a general way of behaving which was much calmer than the one I had had with Claude. My temperament was better matched to his, and it suited me better to share the way of life and interests of a writer than those of an art dealer. There was also the fact that sexual permissiveness had tacitly become a taboo subject between us; that way we avoided the risk of jealous outbursts of the kind I had periodically experienced with Claude. Other people noticed that I seemed to have settled down to a gentle cruising speed. It was mentioned, for example, on a walk I took with Claude–with whom relations had calmed–and a mutual female friend. We had reached the age at which life seems to have crystallised, which does not mean that it is less full of events and emotions, but, because we are eager to put to use the experience of our youth, we tend to trap them in reflection and analysis. We were in Cassel for the Documenta, and were going to visit the Gem?ldegalerie, which was in the castle overlooking the town. We had decided to walk through the terraced gardens and were making our way up through them slowly, partly because of the heat and partly because we were talking. I think the reason why I have not forgotten this moment, which was pleasant but, after all, insignificant, since I have quite forgotten what profound subject we were discussing, may be because the female friend expressed her admiration for what she called my wisdom. It is possible that in the presence of Claude, and the absence of Jacques, who had not come on the trip, I was making an effort to appear serene. Nevertheless, perhaps what I needed, in this situation as in others, was for someone to offer me an image of myself with which I could identify. I was undoubtedly happier with Jacques than I had ever been before, but I needed a personal viewing point from which to contemplate my happiness. One has to be able to take a step back in order to achieve a vision of oneself, arrived at by oneself, which, dialectically, because one tries to pin it down and in certain cases to improve upon it, ends up becoming the model to which one conforms. I was unable to step back from myself.
After all, I lived my life in all sorts of contexts, with all sorts of people, and this, because it meant seeing things from a different angle, should have altered my understanding. Added to which, as I have tried to say, the fact that I did not share all aspects of my sex life with Jacques had made me a more acute observer in this field. Nevertheless, each of my ongoing sexual friendships generated its own hermetic world, and it would have felt incongruous to me to use one as a pretext for asking myself questions about another, particularly about my life with Jacques. I may have made up a few more stories than other people, but each time I was so well and truly caught in the trap that I never stopped to wonder what I was up to, or indeed what anyone else around me might be up to. Equally, it never occurred to me that other people might also be pursuing their own storylines elsewhere.
