The List of My Desires Read Online Free PDF Page A

sit down for five minutes and then I’ll be all right, I’ll be fine. You’re so hot, he said, feeling my forehead. I’ll be fine, I tell you, and anyway I’m having my period, that’s why I’m hot.
    Period. The magic word. It puts most men off.
    I’ll warm up something for you, he suggested, opening the fridge. Unless you’d rather order a pizza. I smiled. My Jo. My dear Jo. Or we could eat out for once, I murmured. He smiled and got himself a Tourtel. I’ll put on a jacket, my beauty, and then I’m your man.
    We ate at the Vietnamese restaurant two streets away. There was hardly anyone there, and I wondered how the place kept going. I ordered a light soup with rice noodles ( bun than ), Jo ordered fried fish ( cha ca ), and I took his hand in mine the way I used to when we were engaged twenty years ago. Your eyes are shining, he whispered with a nostalgic smile.
    And if you could hear my heart beating, I thought, you’d be afraid it was going to explode.
    Our orders arrived quite quickly. I hardly touched my soup, and Jo looked anxious. Are you sure you’re all right? I cast down my eyes.
    There’s something I have to tell you, Jo.
    He must have sensed that it was important. He put his chopsticks down and wiped his lips with the cotton napkin – he always made an effort in a restaurant – and took my hand. His dry lips were shaking. Tell me it’s nothing serious? You’re not ill, are you, Jo? Because . . . because if anything happened to you it would be the end of the world . . . Tears came to my eyes, and at the same time I began laughing, a restrained laugh that sounded like happiness. I’d die without you, Jo. No, Jo, it’s nothing serious. Don’t worry, I whispered. I just wanted to tell you I love you.
    And I swore to myself that no sum of money would be worth losing all this for.

W e made love very gently that night.
    Was it because of my pallor, my new fragility? Was it because of the unreasonable fear he’d had of losing me a few hours earlier in the restaurant? Was it because we hadn’t made love for quite a while, and he needed time to relearn the geography of desire, tame his masculine forcefulness? Was it because he loved me enough to rate my pleasure above his own?
    That night I didn’t know. I do know now. But oh God, it was a beautiful night.
    It brought to mind the first nights lovers spend together, nights when you’d be happy to die at dawn, nights that care only for themselves, far from the world, its noise, its nastiness. And then, as time goes on, the noise and nastiness come your way and it is difficult to wake up, the disillusionment is cruel. Desire is always followed by boredom. And only love can defeat boredom. Love with a capital L; we all dream of it.
    I remember crying at the end of Albert Cohen’s novel Belle du Seigneur . I even felt angry when the lovers threw themselves out of the window of the Ritz in Geneva. I threw my own copy of the book in the rubbish bin, and in its brief fall it took the capital L away with it.
    But that night it seemed to have come back.
    At dawn Jo went out. For the last month he’d been on a course from seven-thirty to nine every morning, in order to become a foreman and get closer to his dreams.
    But now, my love, I thought, I can make your dreams come true; they don’t cost as much as all that. A flat-screen Sony 52-inch TV set: 1,400 euros. A Seiko watch: 400 euros. A new fireplace in the sitting room: 500 euros plus 1,500 euros for fitting it. A Porsche Cayenne: 89,000 euros. And your complete set of James Bond films, all 22 of them: 170 euros.
    This is dreadful. I’m thinking I hardly know what.
    Whatever’s happening to me, it scares me silly.

I have an appointment at the French Gaming headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt, up in Paris.
    I caught an early train this morning. I told Jo I had to see my suppliers Synextile, Eurotessile and Filagil Sabarent. I’ll be home late, I told him, don’t wait up for me, there’s a chicken