The coffee, of course, I couldn’t find.

The pretext was quickly forgotten; we got down to serious business the minute we were through the door, before we even got to my room, and in no time we were on the parlour floor, between the immense coffee table with the morning papers still strewn on it and the hideous 1940s-vintage sofa inherited from the parents of Nicole Odeon, one of my three roommates.

The preliminaries proved to be complicated because of the big difference between our bodies, his long, mine – to put it mildly – rather compact. I’d never before made love with a body that took up so much space and I’m sure that I was his first midget. It took us a good while to find the movements that pleased us both, a satisfying rhythm and, as far as I was concerned at any rate, to chase away the notion, a little disturbing under the circumstances, that to an outsider we would have looked funny, if not ridiculous.

Though I loved what he was doing and was excited by what I was trying to do for him, I felt in a way detached from the tangle of arms and legs that we created on the carpet. I couldn’t help imagining what we must look like, especially me, so small in his arms, so busy between his limbs that were so far from each other, and his handsome face that I’d have liked to keep in my field of vision as long as possible. Our lovemaking, as I imagined it at least, must have looked more like a wrestling match between animals of different sizes than an exchange of intimate caresses by two consenting adults. I was afraid that I’d look like his victim and he like my torturer – a lion slitting the throat of a gazelle – and that bothered me.

In the middle of a kiss that was beginning to relax me, the acid taste of his mouth and the strong smell of his body, that mixture of patchouli and sweat that would soon affect me like a drug, gradually diminishing my ridiculous hesitations, Gilbert suddenly raised his head.

“We aren’t comfortable here. Where’s your room?”

He carried me across the apartment like a fireman saving a child from the flames – except that he was giving me a long, luscious kiss – and flung me onto the bed, saying, “Let yourself go, Céline, don’t resist … I can hear you thinking and it bugs me! Don’t think! You don’t think when you do what we’re doing!”

So I stopped resisting. Let him guide me. I cut away the part of my critical and above all, negative imagination that kept me from achieving orgasm and I opened the part of my mind whose floodgates had been closed for too long. Sensuality. I shed my analytical sense, gave myself over to the pure pleasure, stripped of any esthetic sense, that turns us back into the animals we were originally. I became an animal again – instinctive, active, energetic; I caressed, I bit, I growled, my fists pummelled a hairy chest where I could hear a heart beating in unison with mine. I was everywhere at once, acting, resourceful, or motionless, concentrating on the waves of my own pleasure, the cries emerging from my mouth so inhuman they’d have been scary had they not welled up from deep inside me, I explored parts of the human body I’d never seen up close, I devoured things that I didn’t know could be put in my mouth, scratched a skin I’d have been happy just to stroke but that I wasn’t capable of not bruising. In other words, with my mind turned off and my senses on the alert, I experienced a moment of violent and devastating grace that I’d have gladly prolonged until the end of time.

At dawn I found myself exhausted, breathless, in a ruined bed filled with spicy odours and the snores of a satiated man. He’d put his arm around me and, yes, now that I’d got my wits back I could allow myself to become critical again, I must have looked like a doll. But I didn’t care. At the age of twenty-three, for the first time I had spent an unforgettable night in the arms of a person who might very well become essential to my survival, and the smile I was wearing probably looked like that of a cat bending over a bowl of cream.