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off a few cars on the way. The drivers agree on a destination, a line of cars forms and is spotted by others who join it, but then the line is too long and it is wiser to limit the number of participants. One night we drove around for such a long time that it felt like the beginning of a journey. One driver knew of a place, and then he admitted that he was no longer sure of the way.
    Through the rear window I could see the pairs of headlights behind us navigating left and right, disappearing and reappearing. There were several stops, and several discus- sions, and eventually—in the bleachers of a sports stadium somewhere in Vélizy-Vil- lacoublay—I had the pleasure of the patient pricks of those who had not gotten lost along the way.
    Drifting could have been another theme. Cars trundle along, stop, set off again, brake abruptly like remote-control toys. Little ploy at the Porte Dauphine: we eye one another up from one car to the next, and the pass- word seems to be “Do you have a place?” So some cars leave the circle, and we start on a sort of chase to an unknown address. Once, and it’s true it was only once, the search went on a bit too long and we ended up doing something foolish. I am with a group of friends who don’t know the Bois very well; there are six of us squashed into a Renault,
    and we’re getting ready to go home after driving around in circles. We spot two or three cars down one of the many roads, we park alongside them and I, the brave and boastful little soldier going ahead in the name of all the others waiting behind me, go and give a blow job to the driver of the car behind us. As luck would have it, two police- men come and take up positions in front of me when I withdraw. They ask the man, who is awkwardly buttoning up, whether he paid me, and they take down everybody’s name and address.
    Even when a memory centers on physical facts, it is less the sensations than the atmo- sphere to be evoked first. I could gather to- gether a good many anecdotes concerning the use to which, for years, I put my anus and, as frequently, if not more so, my vagina. In a beautiful apartment behind the Inval- ides, during a small-scale orgy, in a room on a mezza-nine floor with a long bay window
    and floor-level lighting like you find on American film sets, I am taken in that orifice by the tool of a giant. Is it because the coffee table in the sitting room is a giant resin mod- el of an open hand in which a woman could stretch herself out luxuriously that the place itself somehow feels disproportionate and unreal? I’m frightened of this great Cheshire cat’s organ when I understand the route by which he is planning to penetrate, but he manages it without forcing too much, and I am amazed, and almost proud, that size rep- resents no obstacle. Neither does number. Was it because I was ovulating or had a touch of the clap that at another orgy, a much larger one this time, I chose to fuck only with my ass? I can see myself at the foot of a very narrow staircase, in the rue Quin- campoix, hesitating before deciding to go up. Claude and I were given the address by chance. We didn’t know anyone. The apart- ment was very dark with a low ceiling. I
    could hear men nearby putting the word about, whispering, “She wants it up the ass,” or warning someone who’s heading the wrong way, “No, she only takes it from be- hind.” That particular time it did hurt at the end. But I also had the personal satisfaction of having had no feelings of restraint.

Imaginings

    As I read through the previous pages, still older images have come back to me, and these images were fabricated. How I con- ceived them, way before having my first ex- perience and a very long time before I shed my innocence, constitutes a seductively ap- pealing mystery. What shreds of the real world—photographs in Cinémonde; veiled comments of my mother’s, like the time we left a café in which there was a group of young people, only one of whom