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1. Numbers
As a
child I thought about numbers a great deal. The memories we have of solitary
thoughts and actions from the first few years of life are very clear-cut: they
provide the first opportunities for self-awareness, whereas events shared with
other people can never be isolated from the feelings (of admiration, fear, love
or loathing) that those others inspire in us, feelings that, as children, we are
far less able to identify or even understand. I, therefore, have particularly
vivid memories of the thoughts that steered me into scrupulous counting
exercises every evening before I went to sleep. Shortly after my brother was
born (when I was three and a half), my family moved into a new apartment. For
the first few years we lived there, my bed was in the largest room, facing the
door. I would lie staring at the light that came across the corridor from the
kitchen where my mother and grandmother were still busying themselves, and I
could never get to sleep until I had visualized these numerical problems one
after the other. One of the problems related to the question of having several
husbands. Not the possibility of the situation, which seems to have been
accepted, but the circumstances themselves. Could a woman have several husbands
at the same time, or only one after the other? In the latter case, how long did
she have to stay married to each one before she could move on? What would be an
“acceptable” number of husbands: a few, say five or six, or many more than
that—countless husbands? How would I go about it when I grew up?
As the
years went by, I substituted counting children for husbands. I imagine that, in
finding myself under the seductive spell of some identified man (in turn, a film
star, a cousin, etc.) and focusing my wandering thoughts on his features, I
perhaps felt less uncertainty about the future. I could envisage in more
concrete terms my life as a young married woman, and therefore the presence of
children. More or less the same questions were raised again: was six the most
“acceptable” number, or could you have more? What sort of age gap should there
be between them? And then there was the ratio of girls to boys.
I cannot
think back to these ideas without connecting them to other obsessions that
preoccupied me at the same time. I had established a relationship with God that
meant I had to think every evening about what he was going to eat, so the
enumeration of the various dishes and glasses of water I offered him
mentally—fussing over the size of the helpings, the rate at which they were
served, etc.—alternated with the interrogations into the extent to which my
future life would be filled with husbands and children. I was very religious,
and it could well be that my confused perception of the identities of God and
his son favored my inclination to counting. God was the thundering voice that
brought men back into line without revealing him to them. But I had been taught
that he was simultaneously the naked pink baby made of plaster that I put into
the Christmas manger every year, the suffering man nailed to the crucifix before
which we prayed—even though both of these were actually his son—as well as a
sort of ghost called the Holy Spirit. Of course, I knew perfectly well that
Joseph was Mary’s husband, and that Jesus, even though he was both God and the
son of God, called him “Father.” The Virgin was in fact the mother of the Christ
child, but there were times when she was referred to as his daughter.
When I was
old enough to go to Sunday school, I asked to speak to the priest one day. The
problem I laid before him was this: I wanted to become a nun, to be a “bride of
Christ,” and to become a missionary in an Africa seething with destitute
peoples, but I also wanted to have husbands and children. The priest was a
laconic man, and he cut short the conversation, believing that my concerns were
premature.
Until the
idea of this book came to me, I had never really thought about my sexuality very
much. I did, however, realize that I had had multiple partners early on, which
is unusual, especially for girls, or it certainly was among the milieu in which
I was brought up. I lost my virginity when I was eighteen—which is not
especially early—but I also had group sex a few weeks after my deflowering. On
that occasion I was not the initiator, but I was the one who precipitated
it—something I still cannot explain to myself. I have always thought that I just
happened to meet men who liked to make love in groups or liked to watch their
partners making love with other men, and the only reaction I had (being
naturally open to new experiences and seeing no moral obstacle) was to adapt
willingly to their ways. But I have never drawn any theory from this, and
therefore have never been militant about it.
Excerpted from THE SEXUAL
LIFE OF CATHERINE M.
© Copyright 2001 by Éditions
du Seuil, Translation copyright © 2002 by Adriana Hunter. Reprinted with
permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN:
0-8021-1716-3
