Personal History – On Cancer and Desire

Images from a complicated year.

- By Annie Ernaux. Ilustration by Cecilia Carlstedt

I saw M.’s sex for the first time on the night of January 22, 2003, in the entryway of my house, at the foot of the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. There is something extraordinary about the first sight of the other’s sex, the unveiling of what was hitherto unknown. So that is what we’re going to live with, live our love with. Or not.

We’d had dinner together in a restaurant he knew well on Rue Servandoni, near the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had just left the woman he’d been living with for several months. During the meal, I said, “I’d like to take you to Venice,” and immediately added, “but I can’t at the moment because I’ve got breast cancer, and I’m having an operation next week at the Institut Curie.” He showed none of the signs—the almost imperceptible retraction, the sudden stiffening—through which even the most educated and composed people let their horror show, despite themselves, when I told them I had cancer. The only time he seemed disturbed was when I revealed that my new hair style, which he’d complimented many times, was a wig, and that I’d lost my hair as a result of chemotherapy. He was no doubt disappointed, even mortified, to learn that the object of his admiration was a hairpiece.

(Now it occurs to me that I said to M. “I’ve got breast cancer” in the same abrupt way that I’d told a Catholic boy, in the sixties, “I’m pregnant and I want an abortion”—in order to throw him into it, giving him no time to put up his guard and prepare his response when confronted with an unbearable reality.)