I got off at Barbès. Like last time, men were idly waiting, clustered at the foot of the Métro overhead. People were trudging along the pavement with pink shopping bags from the discount store Tati. I turned into the Boulevard Magenta and recognized the clothes shop Billy, with its anoraks hanging outside. A woman was walking towards me – plump legs sheathed in black stockings with a bold pattern. The Rue Amboise-Paré was almost empty until you reached the vicinity of the hospital. I made my way down the long vaulted corridor inside the Elisa wing. For the first time I noticed a bandstand in the courtyard running along the glassedin corridor. I wondered how I would be seeing all this on the way back. I walked through door 15 and up two floors to the reception area of the screening unit. I handed the secretary a card with my number. She consulted a box of files and pulled out a brown envelope containing documents. I held out my hand but she didn’t give it to me. She laid it down on the desk, instructing me to take a seat and wait for my name to be called out.

The waiting room consists of two adjoining areas. I chose the one nearer the doctor’s office, where there were more people. I began marking the essays I had brought with me. Soon afterwards, a very young girl with long blonde hair handed over her card. I made sure that she too was not given an envelope and was told to sit down and wait. The people already waiting there were seated far apart: a man in his thirties, fashionably dressed with a receding hairline; a young black guy with a walkman; a middle-aged man with weathered features, slumped in his seat. After the fair-haired girl, a fourth man strode into the room: he settled confidently in a chair and pulled out a book from his briefcase. Then a couple arrived: the girl in leggings stretched over a pregnant stomach, the man in a business suit.

There were no magazines on the table, only a few leaflets on the nutritional value of dairy produce and ‘How to come to terms with AIDS’. The woman in leggings was speaking to her companion; she kept standing up, embracing him, caressing him. He remained silent and motionless, both hands stiffly resting on an umbrella. The girl with sandy hair was staring at the floor, her eyes half-closed, a leather jacket folded over her knees; she seemed petrified. At her feet lay a large overnight bag and a small backpack. I wondered if she had any particular reason to be worried. Maybe she had come to pick up her results before going away for the weekend or visiting her parents in the country. The doctor emerged from her office – a young woman, slim, vivacious, in a coral skirt and black stockings. She called out a number. No one stood up. It was someone from the next room, a boy who hurried by; I glimpsed a ponytail and glasses.

The young black man was summoned, then someone from the other room. No one moved or spoke, except the woman in leggings. The only time we all looked up was when the doctor appeared in the doorway or when someone left her office. We would follow them with our eyes.

The telephone rang several times – people wanting an appointment or inquiring about opening hours. At one point, the receptionist left the room and came back with a biologist to answer a call. He kept saying, ‘no, your count is normal, perfectly normal.’ His words rang out ominously in the quiet room. The person on the phone was bound to be HIV positive.

I had finished marking my essays. I kept picturing the same blurred scene – one Saturday and Sunday in July, the motions of lovemaking, the ejaculation. This scene, buried for months, was the reason for my being here today. I likened the embracing and writhing of naked bodies to a dance of death. I felt that the man whom I had half-heartedly agreed to see again had come all the way from Italy with the sole purpose of giving me AIDS. Yet I couldn’t associate the two: lovemaking, warm skin and sperm, and my presence in the waiting room. I couldn’t imagine sex ever being related to anything else.

The doctor called out my name. Before I had even entered her office, she flashed a broad grin at me. I took this to be a good sign. Closing the door, she immediately said, ‘the tests are negative.’ I burst out laughing. I paid no attention to what she said after that. She seemed in a happy, mischievous mood. I rushed down the two flights of stairs and walked back the same way in a trance. I told myself that once again I had been saved. I wondered if the girl with long blonde hair had been saved too. At Barbès station, crowds stood facing each other across the platforms, with occasional bursts of pink Tati bags.

I realized that I had lived through these events at Lariboisière Hospital the same way I had awaited Dr N’s verdict in 1963, swept by the same feelings of horror and disbelief. So it would appear my life is confined to the period separating the Ogino method from the age of cheap condom dispensers. It’s one way of measuring it, possibly the most reliable one of all.

In October 1963, in Rouen, I waited for my period for over a week. It was a warm, sunny month. I felt heavy and stuffy in my winter coat, especially in the department stores where I had taken to browsing and buying stockings, waiting for classes to resume. When I got back to my room in the girls’ halls of residence in the Rue d’Herbouville, I would still hope to see a stain appear on my panties. I began writing in my journal every evening – the word NOTHING in big, underlined capital letters. I would wake up in the middle of the night and instinctively know that ‘nothing’ had happened. The year before, around the same time, I had started work on a novel; now this seemed faraway, something that was not to be pursued.

One afternoon I went to see Il Posto, an Italian film in black and white. It was the slow, sad story of a young man working as an office clerk – his very first job. The cinema was almost empty. As I watched the frail figure of the boy in his cheap raincoat, the humiliations he suffered during his pathetic existence, somehow I knew the bleeding would not come back.

One evening I was talked into going to the theatre by some of the girls who had a spare ticket. They were putting on Huis clos by Jean-Paul Sartre and I had never been to see a contemporary production. The theatre was packed. I stared at the brightly lit stage at the back, obsessed with the fact that I no longer had my period. All I can remember about the play is the character called Estelle, a blonde girl in a blue dress, and the Boy dressed as a manservant, with red, lidless eyes. In my journal I wrote: ‘Fantastic. If only I didn’t have this REALITY inside me.’

By the end of October I had given up hope. I made an appointment to consult a gynaecologist, Dr N, on 8 November.

(...)