I found a letter from P in a file of invoices from the eighties. A large white sheet of paper folded in four. Semen stains had made the paper yellow and stiff and had given it a transparent and grainy texture. All he had written, in the top right corner, was ‘Paris, 11 May, 1984, 23.20, Friday’. It is all I have left of this man.
I met P, a publicist, a few weeks after my mother was admitted to hospital in a severely disturbed state. Her condition deteriorated with each passing day and she had suddenly become an old woman. I wondered how I was going to endure it. I would leave the hospital in a kind of stupor, putting on music, a tape or the radio with the volume turned all the way up, it was the time of Scorpions and ‘Still Loving You’.
P called me for I no-longer-remember-what project. His voice on the phone unsettled me, and I felt a desire to see him. But when I caught sight of him, already seated at the table in the restaurant on rue de Rome where we had agreed to meet, he appeared tired and quite ordinary, probably close to fifty. I felt it had been a mistake to accept the lunch date. I would never sleep with him, no matter how much I longed for a man, as I did then. Even though his voice and conversation, at once brilliant and aggressive, appealed to me, I made up my mind never to see him again when we parted. But later that night I was astonished by the violent urge to give myself an orgasm while thinking of him.
So when he rang a few days later to invite me to the Roberto Matta exhibition at Beaubourg I did not turn him down. With P, as often happens when I begin to desire a man, I wanted to make love as soon as possible to end the wait that keeps one from thinking of anything else and recovering a sense of calm.
When the day came, we had lunch at the restaurant on the rue de Rome and visited the Matta exhibition – nothing more. All we did was kiss in the taxi on the way back to the Gare Saint-Lazare. On the commuter train, angry and discouraged, I thought of how I would have to wait some more, see my sick mother a few times more, before getting laid (to use the expression I use only with myself ).
Over the following week, P contrived to make my desire unbearable with repeated phone calls in which he talked about his own desire. I received his proposal to meet for an hour at noon to make love in a hotel in the Opéra district – a time and place convenient to his work and which did not conflict with his obligations as a married man – as a deliverance.
After a silent, almost tense lunch, we took a cab which halted on a small and busy street between rue de la Paix and avenue de l’Opéra. The hotel we entered had a no vacancy sign hanging in the foyer. A man appeared and P had a quiet word with him while I stood aside. The man motioned for us to go upstairs. On the first floor, a middle-aged woman appeared in the dark hallway, and I saw that P was giving her money. She opened the door of a room and discreetly withdrew. It was windowless and gave onto a little sitting room which overlooked the street. The bed was covered in fake fur and surrounded by mirrors. I remember that we found ourselves naked in less than a minute and that he made me come with a gentleness and skill which for me have not been equalled since on any first time with a lover. The woman with shining eyes I saw in the mirror, just as I was leaving, did not seem to be myself. I touched my hair. A strand was damp with semen. We had been in that room for barely an hour.
Afterwards, all I wanted was to get home quickly. On the suburban train, I felt the strand of hair – dry now, matted and stiff – brush against my cheek. I wanted to forget that afternoon and the man who had taken me to a hotel that obviously rented rooms for paid sex or, at any rate, for clandestine affairs. In my state of fatigue and satiation, I was certain I would never want to sleep with him again. But by evening, I no longer saw any reason for leaving him: my sole desire was to sleep with him again.
Over the spring of that year, as my mother’s condition inexorably deteriorated, I made love like a madwoman with P at the hotel where we had gone that first time, the Hôtel Casanova. It was a hushed place where, despite all the comings and goings (the faint noise of doors could be heard), you never met anyone. All the rooms were dark, and all had mirrors, sometimes a two-way mirror hidden by a curtain at the head of the bed. The fact that we could only stay for an hour – the time P paid for – made our touching and embraces greedy. The place itself, where every detail signalled transient sex, whether or not it was for money, was an incitement to excess and the most obscene language imaginable, which, at that time, would come back to me in flashes, a simulacrum of prostitution.
In these rooms, I sometimes thought of my mother. It seems to me that I needed to feel pleasure in order to endure the image of her shrunken body, her soiled underwear; that I needed to go as far as possible in the exhaustion of pleasure, to a state of dereliction through sweat and semen, in order to erase – or perhaps attain – her own dereliction. Obscurely, Casanova’s rooms merged with my mother’s room at the hospital.
‘Fucking as if to die from it’, the phrase had never rung so true for me as it did that spring. And that it was possible for me to do so seemed to me great luck, almost a kind of grace.
If I arrived early for our meeting, I would stroll through one of the department stores on Boulevard Haussmann, Printemps or Galeries Lafayette. Here, at all hours of the day, there are women who burn under their skirts and who shop as though nothing was going on: I was one of them.
After the hour at the hotel, we would walk to Gare Saint-Lazare. Spring was early and hot. I lived in a sweet state of torpor devoid of any thought of past or future, apart from the need to take the commuter train to return home. If P had a little more time, we might go to an art gallery or a museum. In the deserted rooms we caressed each other recklessly. In the late afternoon, P would call me from his office, reminding me of what we had done earlier and proposing a scenario for the next time we went to ‘salute Casanova’, as he said. He possessed an extraordinarily refined imagination, which X-rated films and Penthouse so desperately lack.
I never asked myself if I loved P. But nothing could have kept me from going to make love with him at the Hôtel Casanova. He had no illusions, saying, ‘You just like my cock, nothing else.’ But isn’t it already a lot to desire a man’s sex, his alone?
I had stopped rebelling against my mother’s condition. When I went to see her at the hospital, I stroked her hair, her hands. I no longer felt revulsion towards her body.
One afternoon in mid-June, just as we were entering the hotel, the man who was usually on duty rushed towards us with great gestures of denial, exclaiming that the hotel was full. Perhaps a police raid was in progress or had just ended. We took a taxi to the Père Lachaise cemetery, with its shady paths. But in this open setting, with trees and birdsong, we were at a loss. All we did was caress each other furtively. In the heat, P’s face was red. As the first time I saw him, I found that he looked tired, older than his age.
Another attempt to go to the Casanova, a few days later, met with the same result. P did not look for another hotel, nor did I want him to. It was at the Hôtel Casanova, during that hot spring and the beginning of my mother’s illness that our story developed and took shape, from one orgasm to the next.
After that, we met every now and then at my home in the suburbs, when he had a few free hours in which to take the train. He visited reluctantly, left quickly, seemed uncomfortable in my apartment. I waited for him without desire and without imagination. Things had turned sober and normal. One time I asked myself, ‘What is he doing here?’ I no longer remember when we stopped seeing each other for good.
I have never gone back to the street the hotel is on, even though it is located in the heart of the Opéra district, albeit devoid of shops. Perhaps he was right to say that I only cared about his cock, for it’s all I remember of the hours we spent together at the Hôtel Casanova. Yet I know that because of this man (whom I saw from a distance one day on the platform of the Opéra metro station – his hair was white), I felt the infinite and mysterious aspect of physical love, its dimension of compassion. And every gesture, every embrace afterwards, contained something of him and the Hôtel Casanova, like an invisible substance uniting men and women who will never meet again.
Photograph © Laurent Chéhère, The Golden Lion Hotel, from the Flying Houses series, 2012
This is an extract from Hôtel Casanova et autres textes brefs by Annie Ernaux used by permission of Editions Gallimard © Editions Gallimard 2011, 2020
