“Elle” a.k.a. “Her” in Hiroshima Mon Amour says she won’t ever go back to Nevers (never will she ever) because that was where she was the youngest. Some people have fond memories of their youth, would do anything to recapture it. Elle wants nothing more than to forget it ever happened. Because, as many people would attest, it tends to be true that the most traumatic things are done to us when we’re young. This extends to, évidemment, first love. Something, it can be argued, that is “done to you” by someone else. By the person who either pursues you or radiates their pheromones at you, etc. Sure, “it takes two to tango,” as they say, but, more often than not, the bloke is the one initiating the so-called tangoing. As Elle’s German soldier (read: Nazi) appeared to, catching sight of her riding her bike one day near the Loire River.

From there, Elle seems to recount her romance to “Lui” a.k.a. “Him” in flashes, describing how “at first we met in barns. Then among the ruins. And then in rooms. Like anywhere else.” But Nevers was not like anywhere else. Not for Elle. Just as Auvers-sur-Oise wasn’t for Vincent van Gogh, or Norwalk for Marilyn Monroe. The former would end up dying in that town after his stint under Dr. Gachet’s “homeopathic” care, the latter would see her mother institutionalized at a state hospital in the abovementioned LA County jurisdiction. The point is, no place is “just a place” to some people. Some places are trauma epicenters (sometimes merely on a personal level and sometimes on both a personal and global level, like Hiroshima). Try as Elle might to trivialize Nevers, and what it meant to her. And it’s because of what it meant (and still means) to her that Lui becomes so fixated on it, initially trying to tell her it’s for no reason in particular that he wants to know more about the town, and her German enemy of a first love. 

She quickly gets him to confess, however, that the real intent behind his questioning stems from the belief that, “It was there, I seem to have understood, that you were so young…so young you still don’t belong to anyone in particular. I like that.” It’s odd, of course, that he should see it from this perspective. For some might argue that it is when we are young that we “belong” the most to someone: our family. In particular, our parents. In fact, it is Elle’s parents who she “belongs” to so much that they control what she does in the aftermath of her romance with the German soldier, relegating her to the cellar like some kind of contaminated animal. On the other hand, Lui isn’t wrong in his Paul Varjak notions of romantic belonging in terms of how it’s easier to “find” a girl to “belong” to you when she’s younger, and as of yet “unformed.” At least, that was the running misogynistic viewpoint “back in the day” (and one that continues to reign supreme in a shocking number of men’s minds, even now). For “possession” is all that any man can “dare” to dream of when it comes to women (once you possessed me, it was as though you thought to yourself, “Mission accomplished” and then left). Even someone as theoretically “sensitive” and who has been through as much trauma as Lui.

But no, what it’s really all about for him—this “unshakeable” “attraction” to Elle—is the titillating thought of being able to “own” her in some way. Even if only her trauma…and this purely because she admits to him that she’s never told anyone else what happened to her in Nevers with the soldier. This excites and delights him to no end, after which he ends up remarking, “In a few years, when I’ll have forgotten you, and when such adventures, from sheer habit, will happen to me, I’ll remember you as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness. I’ll think of this adventure as of the horror of oblivion.”

And so, too, will I when I think of you. Or when I occasionally remember to. But only when triggered, of course. When the memory of you bubbles up like vomit against my will, unasked, unconjured. It happens, as you might guess, when I least expect it. I could be doing something as innocuous as checking the ripeness of a piece of fruit, or sitting in a park reading. In the first instance, the thought of you came as a I squeezed a pear and went into a trance thinking about how you used to compliment my body all the time, calling out its classic pear shape and how it turned you on. Evidently, not enough to stick around though. In the second instance, I was reading, of all things, Marguerite Duras’ La Maladie de la Mort (the book she was arguably at her most alcoholic while writing…deciding to dry out upon finishing it so she could proofread). I couldn’t imagine what had prompted me to pick it up off my shelf after so many years…until it hit me: I had been with you at the bookstore we always used to frequent when I bought it; it was you who suggested I make the purchase. Even though you yourself had never read it. But perhaps something in the plot summary made you think of us—mainly the part where the woman in the story tells the man that he’s incapable of love. 

So you see, I will be out at these non sequitur places doing these non sequitur things, and, all at once, there you’ll be, in my mind’s eye. And yes, I have yet to meet any man who will take our relationship’s demise as his blessing, his boon. I doubt I’ll ever hear a man tell me, as Lui tells Elle, “It was [in Nevers], I seem to have understood, that I almost…lost you…and that I risked never knowing you.” For it’s true, had the soldier stayed alive and the pair managed to run away together and get married in Bavaria, Elle surely would not have met Lui. Would likely not have been compelled to become an actress and go to Hiroshima to film a movie. The deeper she gets in rehashing her trauma to Lui, the more she executes the act of transference, confessing her feelings to Lui as though he were the dead German soldier she so loved. And yet, for as much as she loved him, she’s ashamed to admit, “Oh it’s horrible! I’m beginning to remember you less clearly. I’m beginning to forget you. I tremble at the thought of having forgotten so much love.” The kind of love that can only really be so passionate and all-consuming when it is first love. The way you were my first love.

Unfortunately, I have no one available to help with the transference method of “healing.” Even though I don’t really believe that Elle healed. I believe that for her, the soldier and Lui will become, sooner or later, interchangeable. And, in many ways, already are (apart from how she speaks to and of both men as though they are a fused entity). Just two examples of love that could not endure, for one reason or another. “Due to circumstances out of one’s control,” as people like to say. By way of consolation, I guess. But there is no consolation for losing you. There’s no consolation when anyone experiences the loss of someone they love. It doesn’t have to be a loss caused by Death. In truth, sometimes I think it’s worse to lose someone as a result of their sudden apathy for you. While you yourself maintain the same level of ardor as you did from the very start. 

Yes, toward the end, it felt like I was always screaming while you stood there, stone-faced. I keep thinking about how, in recounting the story to Lui, Elle eventually screams, too, and with unmistakable bitterness in her voice as she laments, “Oh how young I was, once!” As though to say that her youth had been squandered or wasted with that pain she was made to suffer through. Useless pain. For what was it worth compared to holding on to the man she loved? It’s the kind of agonizing pain that they like to tell you will only make you stronger. The debilitating pain that made her suddenly feel so old, so out of time with the rest of the world. That’s how I feel now, after you. 

“In Nevers, I was younger than I’ve ever been.” Elle says this as though she’s speaking both literally and metaphorically. For she was also “young” in the sense that the death of her first love hadn’t yet jaded her. She was, for that brief blip in Nevers, not yet wizened by the trauma of her loss. I might never have been “jeune à Nevers,” but I have been jeune à New York. The place that is just like any other place (despite what the non compos mentis enthusiasts say) in that it is tainted. Tainted with the memories and, worse still, the inability to exorcise them. All they do, instead, is possess. Especially once I’m trapped in that geographical location. Which I have presently made sure never to be. Never again à Nevers for Elle and never again à New York pour moi.