Testing negative for HIV

Testing negative for HIV is the turning point in Annie Duchesne’s visit to Lariboisière Hospital: a brief medical verdict interrupts months of fear and brings the emotional structure of her earlier abortion crisis back into view. The result settles the immediate question, but the experience also reveals how waiting, bodily uncertainty, and the prospect of being judged have recurred in her life.

Arrival and the waiting room

Duchesne reaches the hospital by way of Barbès metro station. The route passes the discount store Tati, the clothing shop Billy, and the long interior passage of the Elisa wing. At the screening unit, she gives the receptionist a card bearing her number. The receptionist retrieves a brown envelope but sets it aside rather than handing it over, and tells her to wait until her name is called. This small deferral establishes the visit’s central condition: the answer exists, but she cannot yet possess it.

She chooses the waiting area nearer the doctor’s office, where more people are seated, and marks the essays she has brought. Other patients wait separately, including a very young fair-haired woman, several men, and a couple whose woman is visibly pregnant. The room’s silence is interrupted by the repeated appearance of the doctor and by telephone calls about appointments and opening hours. When the receptionist brings in a biologist to answer one call, he repeatedly assures the unseen caller that their count is normal. Duchesne interprets the exchange ominously and assumes the caller must be HIV-positive; this is her anxious inference, not information confirmed by the hospital.

Fear and the remembered encounter

While waiting, Duchesne keeps returning to a blurred memory of a weekend in July: an encounter with a man she had only half-heartedly agreed to see again. The event had remained buried for months, but now she understands it as the reason for her presence at the hospital. She fears that the man, who had come from Italy, might have deliberately exposed her to AIDS. The thought expresses the intensity of her alarm, not an established fact about his intentions or her health.

The imagined connection between that past encounter and the waiting room is difficult for her to make. She cannot readily join the remembered intimacy of the weekend to the present medical setting and its possible consequences. That division helps explain why the test result carries such force: it must answer a question she has struggled even to hold clearly in mind. Her essays are finished, but the scene continues to occupy her attention as she waits.

The result and its immediate aftermath

When the doctor calls Duchesne’s name, she smiles broadly before Duchesne has entered the office. Duchesne takes the expression as a promising sign. Once the door is closed, the doctor tells her that the tests are negative. Duchesne bursts out laughing and pays little attention to what follows. The result resolves the immediate fear; the account does not specify further medical discussion or treatment.

She hurries down the two flights of stairs and walks back along the route she had taken to the hospital, feeling as if in a trance. She tells herself that she has been saved again, then wonders whether the young fair-haired woman in the waiting room has been saved too. The relief is therefore personal but not sealed off from the strangers who shared the room. At Barbès, the opposing crowds on the platforms and the flashes of pink Tati bags return her to the ordinary city, even as the test’s outcome continues to shape her sense of what has just happened.

Recurrence, memory, and time

Duchesne explicitly connects the hospital visit to her wait for Doctor N’s verdict in 1963. In both situations, she experiences horror and disbelief while waiting for a medical answer about her body. The comparison does not make the events equivalent: one concerns the fear of HIV, the other the crisis that preceded her abortion. What recurs is the suspended interval in which the body is uncertain and another person appears to hold the answer.

The earlier crisis took place under the criminal prohibition on abortion. Duchesne recalls how the law could make doctors unwilling to help women without money or connections, leaving them to seek dangerous alternatives. Her later hospital visit is not presented as subject to that same legal situation. Instead, the retrospective comparison reveals a longer personal chronology, which she measures from the Ogino method to the age of cheap condom dispensers. The test result belongs to a different moment, but its waiting-room atmosphere recalls how earlier sexual and reproductive risks had been shaped by limited knowledge and constrained choices.

The event also belongs to Duchesne’s account of how memory becomes legible through physical traces. She regards marks in a blue-ballpoint address book and lingering sensations associated with people and objects as evidence capable of anchoring the past. In the hospital scene, the route, the waiting room, the doctor’s expression, and the journey back supply concrete particulars around an interval that might otherwise remain only fear. The negative result ends the immediate uncertainty, while the return of the earlier medical wait makes the experience part of a continuing history of bodily vulnerability and survival.