A bright light was floating above the sea. Looking out towards it my vision got blurry. I felt awful. I felt a strong desire to be debased.
I was in El Pelícano, like every night. Nestled up close to the hotel, it was the restaurant we went to for every meal while here in the Dominican Republic. It was moored on the seafront and a small platform extended a short way over the calm water. Music – merengue, bachata – was always playing a fraction too loud over the speakers and Salvador, the restaurant’s manager, had his hair very short the way I like it and big, strong hands that I’d already shaken, twice.
On a normal night, I went down from our room in the hotel and had a beer and read my book until my mother arrived from the seminar she was teaching at the university in Santo Domingo. Tonight, she was having dinner with her students, and I was going to be alone.
An initial scan of the space had revealed no one with his short hair or broad shoulders. There was no use getting cold from the beach’s breeze if he wasn’t there, so I covered myself with a loose-fitting shirt. I ordered a beer and a lighter from a passing waiter and lit the cigar I had acquired from a man at the tobacco factory my mother and I had recently toured. When I looked up again, Salvador’s gaze met mine. He smiled and came up to me and stuck out his hand.
“It’s nice to see you again.”
“You too.” I said, putting my hand in his, dwarfed. Three times. My mood lightened and when he left, I took off my shirt.
I sipped at my beer and asked another waiter for a hamburger. Life can be fun and most times, it’s just a matter of outlook.
When my burger arrived, I left my notebook and pen to one side and nibbled at it. There was too much bread and the patty tasted watery. Then, Salvador passed by my table without more than a sideways glance. My appetite evaporated. He probably had a wife anyways. Or somebody waiting at home. I had a violent urge to go back to my room and masturbate. I pushed my hamburger aside and went to light the cigar. It felt like I was renouncing sustenance and punishing myself instead. It felt good. I watched him walk away. When he got to the till, perched on an island in the middle of the restaurant, he did a small double-step and thrusted his hips to the beat of the song. I groaned into my chair. It was driving me crazy — did he even like me? Or was I just imagining the attraction?
I bet if we did do it though, it’d be so good. I’d wait until the end of his shift, stealing looks and smiles throughout. After he’d cleaned up and everyone else had left, we’d kiss in the corner of the emptied, disinfected kitchen. His tongue would be warm and big, and his hands would be enormous on my body. A flickering incandescent light would shine down on us, and when he unzipped, he’d be big and smooth, and when he touched me, I’d be wet, waiting for him. He’d sit on a bucket of something, and I’d go on top, and he’d have his head buried in my neck and his hot breath would tickle in a painful way. I’d come, but not too loudly, just shivering on top of him for a minute. Then he’d have me lean over and he’d fuck me until he came. He’d zip up with a smile, his eyes fixed on me, and then we’d share a beer in silence by the sea.
In the published diaries of her all-consuming, year long affair, with a younger, married Russian diplomat, Annie Ernuax writes, “My mouth, face, and sex are ravaged. I don’t make love like a writer, that is, in a removed way, or while thinking ‘I can use this in a book.’ I always make love as if it were the last time (and who’s to say it isn’t?), simply as a living being.” Getting Lost is an amalgamation of such entries, tracking the days until she reunites with her lover and endlessly daydreaming about him, his body, and their love making in the days between meetings. This idea, that she doesn’t make love like a writer, is repeated throughout the entries. She insists that for her there is a clear divide between love making and writing, and when consumed in the act of the former, she devotes herself entirely to it. But does this mean she doesn’t write like a lover either? If making love as a writer is to think ‘I can use this in a book’ then writing as a lover is to think ‘I can use this in love’. The book is chockfull of erotic descriptions yes, but the pages are also drenched with acute pining and painful obsession, a record of every detail of her passion for another being. For this, her rigorous bookkeeping, which undoubtedly does nothing but inflame her desire, I am inclined to think that Annie Ernaux does, if not love like a writer, at least writes like a lover.
As I write about mine and Salvador’s non-existent tryst, I feel like I too am writing as a lover, but for different reasons. My writing is the only time Salvador and I have engaged in any real love making per say. I am pulling from the reservoir of my imagination — not any real experience. There was an insurmountable gap between fantasy and reality in my writing. Ernaux however, uses her real life (like she does in all her books), her real experiences, to conjure fantasies. That was a bridge I had yet to cross.
Simple Passion, published ten years before Getting Lost, is a synthesized account of the same affair. While Getting Lost is the immediate account of what happened via her diaries of the time, Simple Passion is a crafted account, picking and choosing moments that create a narrative of the events she experienced. That immediacy is the main difference between the two books. Getting Lost has an unfiltered approach to honesty and opts for airing out the dirty laundry all at once. In her prologue to Getting Lost, she writes, “I started to reread my journals from the year of my passionate affair with S. It had been five years since I had opened them. (For reasons that need not be specified here, they had been stored in a place that made them unavailable to me.) I perceived there was a ‘truth’ in those pages that differed from the one to be found in Simple Passion – something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation. I thought that this, too, should be brought to light.” Why does she think that “this, too, should be brought to light”? What’s the effect of “raw and dark” writing?
Some weeks after I had left the Dominican Republic and had slept with a real boy, I sat at my desk and tried to write. I was met with an incredible amount of resistance from within myself. I couldn’t bring myself to write about the real thing. It seemed like writing like a lover, writing about sex, to me, had to remain in the realm of the imagination.
It was my last weekend in Madrid, and I was at the club dancing, bidding my farewells. My friends and I had been doing drugs in the bathroom of a bar before heading to Café Berlin to dance. It was a reunion of sorts, T and S were university buddies whom I hadn’t seen for some time. I was ecstatic. I was wearing a dazzling top that had been collecting dust for over two years, scrunched up in a corner of my drawer. I felt as if something could really happen that day; the climate was just right.
The music in the venue was a groovy mix of house and disco. It was funky and the crowd’s energy was infectious as everybody wiggled about. As we made our way to the front, S went off to dance with a girl in a nearby group. T and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. When he returned, S got close to me and with a flush in his cheeks asked me if I’d seen anyone who’d caught my eye. Not yet, I replied, but only then started to look. Nobody in the vicinity fit my requirements (hands, hair and eyes are where my eyes stray to for an initial reconnaissance) so I let my body go lax and concentrated on the music again. I got between T and S, and we pressed up against each other. My hands went up in the air. There were very few consequences to my actions. I felt freedom like I hadn’t for a long time. I was ready to put myself in situations.
Then, T looked to one side and gestured to me, look. I turned and saw a boy’s profile; he was tall and had a nice haircut. He was dancing with his eyes closed and his hands were big and beautiful. I angled myself so I was next to him, and he turned to me and with a wild look in his eyes and asked me if I liked the music.
“It’s great.” I replied and looked at him.
“When did you get here?”
I didn’t get the question, whether it was supposed to be flirtatious.
“Around 2.”
“My friend was DJing earlier!” he exclaimed and then turned away and continued to dance. He had an accent and a nose ring. He was high on something. I liked him.
I had a hard time continuing writing from there. I didn’t want to write about our kiss on the stairway of S’s house after picking up my stuff, or the Uber ride back to his place where we played music for each other; what I wanted to write about was the sex.
He moaned and thrusted his hips hard into mine.
We shared a full night and day of undeniably great sex, but the question that kept on plaguing me was: why was I writing this? I’d had my fill, my desire had been satiated, what was the function of this writing? What was writing helping me accomplish? Perhaps I could use it to write the erotic, to capture the gasping, breathless nature of sex?
When I woke up the following morning, which was already the afternoon, I turned to one side and looked at him. He had tattoos that fanned out everywhere over his body. When he smiled, which he did often, his face split in half. There were the typical misunderstandings of new lovers; meaning lost in subtleties, accents blurring words together, jokes that didn’t land. So for the most part, we let our bodies do the talking. After a bowl of warm pasta on the sofa we went back to bed and he fell asleep with his hand on my crotch. As I felt his breathing get longer and deeper, his hand still lay over me, clutching me. I held my breath, my heart racing.
I stopped writing there. I felt that, like masturbation, this writing should be kept private. In other words, I did not feel like this should be “brought to the light”.
Annie Ernaux too, brings up this matter of the abject. However, in her case she uses the adjective to describe the affair itself: “Yesterday, as usual, a slight taste of the abject. The last time we went upstairs: the acrid smell of beer, him saying, ‘Help me’ (to ejaculate). Then after the car trouble, once more, in the vestibule, half-dressed, against the radiator, and in the kitchen.” If she felt any qualms about the subject of written masturbation, she evidently got over them and decided to go for the home run. In fact, she says she finds the “chasm – between imagination, desire and reality – is unbearable.” The experience of one – imagination, desire – can never replace the experience of the other – reality, but can it not? In the absence of real experience, can fantasy, writing, not placate some of the desire broiling inside? Ernaux writes endlessly about how desire and longing keep her from working or concentrating on anything other than her lover: “Desire returns quickly, absolute, and keeps me from working (or is that I want to preserve the desire and so I do not work?).” It seems that although she separates the two, love making keeps on getting in the way of her writing and consumes her entirely. Not even she can write about sex and remain entirely unscathed, it seems.
When I started reading Getting Lost, I was in the throes of a similar obsession. I’d met an Italian (who arguably did to me what Russians do to Ernaux). I couldn’t stop thinking about him or his mouth, for days on end. On Tuesday, a couple of days after we met, I wrote the following in my journal, “Focus is better today. I went to bed at 10:30 last night and well, so far, I’ve had coffee, toast with avocado and an egg, and I’m making good progress through the pages of Close to the Knives.” The following Tuesday, 7 days later, I wrote, “Feverish dreams of him arranging a day to see me, which is the thought that dominates all others. Worried about the next couple of days as I’ll be very busy, out and about, and thus less available. I just wish I could explain all this to him candidly but he’s so sparse with words (which excites me for everything will be more difficult – like this, arranging a day) that I find it hard to find the moment. Do I want to see him so wildly to ignite a passion? So that I can write? Do I desire to be driven crazy? Desperately keeping my Thursday afternoon available in the vain, vain hope of meeting.”
Ernaux often writes down the time of the day she is writing in and like that keeps track of the hours spent waiting for S, “10 p.m. He calls from a public phone, which isn’t working. Now I know because of the time of day that it’s him. He can’t come until next week. The words are always the same, ‘You’re well?’ – ‘Yes and you?’ – ‘I’m fine,’ etc.” When Thursday arrived and I sat at home waiting for the Italian to message me, I did the same.
“8:05 p.m. No news from him since 6pm. If by 9 he hasn’t said anything I’m to suppose he won’t be making an appearance. What will be my reply then?
Perhaps he is rushing through his affairs to hurry over and that’s why he hasn’t messaged. Fanciful thought.
8:30 I’ve put on my lucky underwear and lathered my body in lotion just in case.
8:43 Message alert – from a friend. Rage.
9:14 I’m just so focused on him I can’t really do anything else.
Will he come and stay over? Well, I’ll try to read…”
He didn’t come. However, I felt accomplished through the exercise, the writing, the waiting – I had done something with my desire. I’d inhabited Ernaux’s writing space as an experiment to test my writing, and my yearning. I experienced it as a release.
Melissa Febos, in her book Body Work, writes, “From what mysterious place in us does our most inspired work emerge? I believe from some creative intelligence that resides beneath our intellect, a close neighbor to the place where our worst impulses are born.” Is this “creative intelligence” the same “raw and dark” writing that Ernaux was referring to in her prologue? To write like a lover is not always pretty, however infatuated one is with its subject. To write like a lover you must yield to shame, to embarrassment, to “the place where the worst impulses are born.” You need to interrogate, prod, shake, and desire, inevitably, is mired in contradictory sensations: pleasure and pain, release and containment. I suppose that, in the same way, acting on a desire can be equally as challenging. How does one overcome the shame of voicing one’s desires? Honesty, even with the self, is a reflex that needs to be worked on.
So, how does Ernaux do it, overcome the shame? First of all, all we know about Ernaux’s Russian is that he is taciturn, loves driving cars and drinking vodka. He is never described physically. He calls her every few days to arrange the next meeting and when they meet, they have sex and exchange very few words. The way she writes about him is telling — appealing not only for the aura of mystery that she cloaks him in, but when considered within the wider implications of writing from real experience too. Who he is isn’t as important as how he makes her feel. In preparation for this essay, I spoke to a friend about my reservations about making public what was private, particularly when it concerned experiences involving other people. She told me to write it first and then chew over any reservations. So I did. Anonymity, of course, is of paramount importance. But above all, I learned that what I was most interested in when writing about other people was the inner processes occurring within me. After all, passion can be as one-sided as delusion allows. The matter for me then, became about the intention behind the writing, and not the content itself. Was I doing something with the desire?
“I prefer to read books that evidence this kind of emotional confrontation with the self. […] I want to feel on the page how the writer has changed. How the act of writing changed them,” Febos writes in Body Work. Perhaps then, my attempt at writing the ‘real thing’ felt unproductive for its descriptive function, rather than dealing with something deeper, linked to my emotions. If Salvador and the Italian were exercises in working with and from desire, my time with the Café Berlin clubgoer, having had my desire satiated, was a mere description of a physical act. To write like a lover means, after all, to write from a place of abundance, where there’s a surplus of longing.
The frustration, that verges on pain, of unconsummated desire is a motorized force for writing. While all-consuming and at times paralyzing, a surplus of desire begs to be tended to like a child tugging at your sleeve. And once you mobilize that excess created by the imagination and tip it all onto a page, a transformation occurs. The desire becomes bodily and like the body, it’s filthy, yet sacred. To be a desiring body is to stand naked at the crossroads between beauty and shame. It is to recognize that the unknown is hot, that possibility is sexy. And when you impulse that transformation from body to page, you understand that to desire and to write are one in the same.