Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Anne F. Garréta

literary types—bores you out of your mind, and you avoid it as best you can. Y*, for her part, was on the road to becoming what she now is: revered, feared, and hated all at once, as a power in the field where those prized careers play out. All that, for her as for you, was still to come. Her passion was palpable in her words. She had traveled, lived elsewhere (which in your milieu was the exception rather than the rule). Your tastes seemed similar; your attitude with regard to your tastes even more so. You imagined that this first feeling of closeness, of complicity, could only deepen with time. Desire wasn’t far off. You got into the habit of thinking of her as a friend. Friendship seems to you today the most difficult thing in the world. You attempt it, and almost always doubt its reality. Thus the turn to desire, we resort to it, believing it will give form and flesh, the tangible weight of certainty, to phantoms and chimeras and through desire we dispel them, imperceptibly. You had always known her to fall for strange affairs that seemed to captivate her entirely, distant and absorbed at the same time. She was then the lover of *** who, years later, would confide in you that her fears regarding her dominion over Y* had revolved at the time around two rivals, you

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