There is always light. Sometimes I hope that one night it will go out, that something will happen. The women were always wondering where it came from. I never really understood their explanations of power stations, pylons, conductor wires, and I have never seen anything corresponding to their hazy descriptions. I have seen only the plain, the cabins, and the shelter where I am ending my days. I have long since stopped trying to imagine things I do not know. I have spent a lot of time studying the objects on the shelves in the corridor, but I have learned nothing. They are perhaps weapons, or a means of communication that would have enabled me to contact humanity. Too bad. I gave up reading and rereading the books and treatises on astronautics. So few things happened during all those years of walking. I found the bus, I lost the road, I arrived here. In any case, I had to die some day. Even if I’d led a normal life, like the women before, I would still have found myself at the dawn of my last day. Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they’d known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive? If I hadn’t fallen ill, I think I’d have set off again all the same, and would still be walking, because I have never had anything else to do.
I know, even when I pretend the contrary, that I am the only living person on this planet which has almost no seasons. Only I can say that time exists, but it has passed me by without my feeling it. I saw the other women grow old. I go over to the mirror and look at myself: I suppose I didn’t use to have those lines across my cheeks and around my eyes, but I don’t remember my face before the wrinkles. The women had explained to me what photos were, but I don’t have any. All I know about time is that the days follow on from one another, I feel tired and I sleep, I feel hungry and I eat. Of course, I count. Every thirty days, I say to myself that a month has gone by, but those are mere words, they don’t really give me time. Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones and producing, occasionally, just enough flowers to make a single seed which will fall a little way off – not far because the wind is never strong – where it may or may not germinate. The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven’t experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come – I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.
Most likely no one will come. I shall leave the door open and my story on the table, where it will gradually gather dust. One day, the natural cataclysms that destroy planets will wipe out the plain, the shelter will collapse on top of the little pile of neatly arranged pages, they will be scattered among the debris, never read.
I found out I was ill three months ago. I was on the toilet, passing a motion, when I experienced a new sensation: something warm was trickling down my vagina, that part of my body which had always been so silent that I never thought about its existence. I leaned over the bowl and saw a big black clot, with yellowish filaments. Before I had a chance to panic, I lost a stream of blood, and the pain was so acute that I passed out. When I came to, I was lying on the floor, and it no longer hurt. I got up without too much difficulty, I felt a little giddy, perhaps because of the haemorrhage, but it quickly wore off. I washed, then I cleaned the bloodstained floor, and, remembering what Anthea had taught me, I grilled a piece of red meat to make up for the loss.
The women had talked of the menopause, but I don’t suppose that it affected me, because I’d never reached puberty. However, there’s no reason to suppose that I don’t have a uterus, or ovaries, even if they haven’t developed normally. I was puzzled, then I told myself that there was no point worrying and tried to forget the incident. I’m not adept at this kind of mental activity, and even if I had been, it would not have served me for long. The same thing happened the following day. My symptoms were similar to those of Mary-Jane, who according to Anthea, had a cancer of the sexual organs and went and hanged herself from the bars when she could no longer stand the pain. There was no other alternative, and I wouldn’t receive any different treatment. Anthea had told me that they performed operations, gave morphine. Perhaps there are medicines in the corridor, but I am unable to identify them, and I’ve never found anything that looks like those bottles from which the guards sometimes took white pills when someone had a temperature.
The pain has been excruciating from the beginning, and it is becoming too frequent. I am suffering more than half the time, it takes away all pleasure from life and I’m unable to enjoy the moments of respite because I am so weak. I can no longer climb the stairs in one go and, when I get to the top, I am cold. After a quarter of an hour’s walk, I have to rest. Probably the fact that I no longer eat much doesn’t help, but if I force myself, I feel nauseous. I am nearing my end.
I am all alone. Even though I sometimes dream of a visitor, I have walked backwards and forwards over the plain for too long to believe it possible. No one will come because there are only corpses. How could the father of Prince Hamlet, if he was dead, appear and talk to him? The dead cannot move, they decompose on the spot and are eventually reduced to bones that will crumble at the slightest touch. I have seen hundreds, and none of them has ever come and talked to me in the middle of the night. I would have been so happy if they had! Anthea had tried to explain to me what the Christians meant by God, and the soul. Apparently, people believed firmly in it, it’s even mentioned in the preface to one of the books on astronautics. Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: ‘Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.’ Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity – which I wonder whether I belong to – really had a very vivid imagination.
I can’t be very old: if I left the bunker at around fifteen, I’m not much over sixty. The women said that, in the other world, life expectancy was more than seventy. But it required medical care. There, I’d have had periods and children, and my useless womb wouldn’t have rotted. I often have haemorrhages, my womb is disintegrating, I know better than to hope that one day it will be reduced to nothing and I’ll regain my health. For some time I have been coughing and I have chest pains: Anthea had told me about metastasis. In any case, it would soon be time to take a hand, but I shan’t wait, I will do it in a little while, because I have almost finished my story and, after the final full stop, there will be nothing to hold me back.
As soon as I realised I was ill, I thought about ways of killing myself. I don’t want to hang myself and dangle mummified on the end of a rope for ever. I
want to be lying with dignity, like the man sitting between the folded mattresses; I want to be looking straight ahead of me, but if the pain is too great, I risk something unpleasant. I don’t have either enough time or strength left to go to the bus and retrieve one of the guns that I placed on the tombs, so I sharpened a knife for a long time. If I brush my finger against it, I cut myself. The blade is thin, flat and sturdy. I know where to plunge it so that it goes in straight between two ribs, pierces my heart and stops it. When the pain leaves me in peace, I find it hard to believe that I will do it, when it rampages, my doubts vanish.
I will sit on the bed, and arrange the cushions and blankets rolled up around me so that my body is firmly supported. Everything will be perfectly clean and tidy. I hope there’ll be no blood, which I know is possible. Perhaps nobody will ever come, perhaps one day, an astounded human being, arriving at the foot of the stairs as I did so long ago, will see the dark wood-panelled room, the neatly arranged bed, and an old woman sitting upright, a knife in her heart, looking peaceful.
It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men.
VINTAGE – home to the world’s greatest authors and books. Where new writers are discovered, bestselling books are found and yesterday’s classics revived for a new generation of readers.
Our authors represent the very best in creativity and quality and have won the most prestigious prizes the book world has to offer including the Man Booker, the Samuel Johnson and the Nobel.
Born in New York in 1974, and arriving in London in 1990, VINTAGE publishes beautiful books with the very best design for people who love to read.
@vintagebooks
penguin.co.uk/vintage
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Editions Stock 1995
English translation copyright © Ros Schwartz 1997, 2019
Introduction copyright © Sophie Mackintosh 2019
Cover Design © Anna Morrison. Photograph © Shutterstock
Jacqueline Harpman has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in France with the title Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes by Stock, Paris in 1995
First published in the United Kingdom with the title The Mistress of Silence by The Harvill Press in 1997
First published in Vintage in 2019
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473570801
I Who Have Never Known Men Page 17