The narrator’s relationship with O

The narrator’s relationship with O moves from casual college proximity to an urgent, unlikely form of solidarity during the narrator’s clandestine abortion. O was not initially regarded as a close friend, and her Catholic background seemed to make her an improbable confidante. Yet when the narrator needed someone to know what was happening, O became the person who stayed beside her and helped her through the immediate crisis. The relationship’s significance lies in this gap between expectation and action: O’s presence does not erase their earlier distance or establish what she believed afterward, but it becomes the clearest instance of support the narrator recalls from that night.

Acquaintance and Assumptions

The narrator met O during her first year at college. They lived on the same floor and often went out together, but the narrator says she hardly thought of O as a friend. Their social circle’s prevailing judgment, which the narrator shared, cast O as a nagging bore. The narrator also understood O as someone eager to collect secrets and pass them along, gaining attention through what she knew. These judgments made O seem socially familiar but not trustworthy in any deep sense.

Their apparent differences added to the distance. O had a bourgeois, Catholic upbringing and followed the Pope’s teachings on contraception. From the narrator’s perspective, those commitments made her among the last people to approach about seeking an abortion. The contrast matters because the narrator does not present O as an obvious ally whose convictions already aligned with her own. At the outset, the choice to confide in her runs against the narrator’s estimate of both O’s character and her likely response.

The Choice to Confide

In December, the narrator chose O as her confidante and continued to tell her what was happening through to the end. Two other students whom the narrator considered friends had left: one had been sent to a sanatorium, and the other was training in Paris. The narrator had written to both, explaining that she was pregnant and seeking an abortion. Neither criticized her, but their alarm offered no practical help. Against that background, O’s presence was not simply a matter of friendship already established; it became consequential because she was there and knew.

The narrator later explains the decision to disclose as a response to powerlessness. Telling people was crucial even when their beliefs or possible disapproval could not be changed and the consequences of their reactions seemed immaterial. The disclosure forced the reality of the situation into the open. O’s role therefore begins before the night of the abortion: she was the person to whom the narrator repeatedly made that reality known. The relationship is shaped by this asymmetry. The narrator needed a witness, while the evidence does not establish that O understood the confidence in the same terms or wanted the responsibility it brought.

Support During the Crisis

On the night of the abortion, the narrator went with O to a showing of Battleship Potemkin at the Faluche film club. As the narrator’s condition worsened, she lost track of the film and hurried back to the dormitory. O later came to her room, sat beside her, and suggested a breathing method used for pregnant women. When the narrator called out that the pregnancy had ended, O returned to her. Neither knew what to do, and they faced the situation together, in silence and tears.

O took practical steps despite the inexperience and uncertainty the two shared. She fetched scissors when the narrator said the cord needed to be cut, and later found a wrapper for the remains. When the narrator’s condition worsened and she needed a doctor, O went downstairs to try to wake the janitor. These actions make O’s support concrete: it was not a general expression of sympathy but a sequence of improvised responses under pressure. The narrator identifies O as the only person who stood by her that night, in room 17 of the girls’ dormitory, and describes her as acting as an improvised midwife.

The assistance also complicates the narrator’s earlier picture of O. Nothing in O’s religious or social background, as the narrator understood it, had prepared her for what she did. The narrator allows that O might later have regarded the episode as a temporary aberration or might have held anti-abortion views. Those possibilities remain speculation, not reported knowledge of O’s later beliefs. What the narrative can affirm is narrower and more forceful: whatever O believed, she stayed and helped when the narrator needed her.

Memory and the Limits of the Record

The relationship is recounted through a later investigation that distinguishes documentary evidence from the less verifiable record of thought and feeling. The narrator says that a diary and an engagement book can help establish dates, while the inner experience of the past cannot be recovered with the same certainty. Material traces and lingering sensations become essential to remembering. Within that method, O’s actions are recalled not as a complete account of a friendship but as a sequence of specific gestures: sitting beside the narrator, returning when called, helping with practical decisions, and trying to summon assistance.

The later narration does not claim that this night made O a close friend in every sense, or explain how their relationship developed afterward. Instead, it preserves a sharp contrast between the narrator’s prior social assessment and O’s conduct in an emergency. O’s tears and practical care remain central even as the narrator acknowledges that O might interpret the episode differently. That uncertainty keeps the relationship from being turned into a simple story of conversion or lasting agreement. Its decisive fact is the one the narrator can attest to: at the moment when the narrator was most exposed and powerless, O was there.