Cats

Cats serve as a compact, recurring image for the distance between private desire and ordinary family life in Annie Ernaux’s account of her affair with A. The image first makes the narrator’s estrangement from her sons startlingly explicit; later, a cat trainer remembered through A becomes one of the fragments by which the narrator measures memory’s fading power.

The sons as grown-up kittens

The narrator has told her sons, who are students and stay with her from time to time, only the practical details needed to manage the affair. They must call before coming to stay, and if they are already at home, they must agree to leave as soon as A announces a visit. The arrangements seem not to trouble them, but the narrator would rather have kept her children entirely outside the liaison, as she had once kept her own parents outside her romantic life, partly because she feared their judgment.

She reflects that parents and children are poorly placed to accept the sexuality of those closest to them, and therefore remain inaccessible to one another in this part of life. Her image of a mother cat longing to prowl, while her grown-up kittens mean nothing to her, gives animal form to a temporary but severe displacement: passion absorbs her attention so completely that her children can feel irrelevant to her. The comparison does not describe their actual behavior so much as the narrator’s divided attention and the limits of what family members can know about one another.

A remembered cat trainer

Later, as the affair belongs increasingly to the past, the narrator remembers A’s account of a visit to the Moscow Circus and his remark that its cat trainer was “incredible.” The detail arrives unexpectedly, like a brief return from a dream: for a moment she feels calm, as though everything were back to normal, before recognizing that the remembered words belong to another winter and an outmoded reality. The cat trainer is not an encounter of her own, but a small, specific piece of A’s life preserved because he told her about it.

A name heard on the Metro prompts another such recollection. The narrator connects Barbizon to A’s story of a Sunday spent there with his wife, then sees this memory alongside the cat trainer, a toweling bathrobe, and other details that once formed the private signs of the affair. These fragments had accumulated in her mind into an unwritten novel of passion; now they begin to separate and lose their living force.

From living detail to remainder

The two feline images mark different points in the narrator’s experience. The grown-up kittens embody passion’s present-tense claim on her attention, a claim that pushes family relationships to the margins. The circus cat trainer, by contrast, survives as a recollection whose former immediacy has begun to expire. What once seemed charged with meaning becomes one element in a dissolving collection of words, images, and gestures.

The book itself is described as only a remainder, a minor trace of that once-living arrangement of signs. In this movement from the prowling mother cat to the remembered circus detail, cats help disclose both the self-absorption of desire and the eventual distance that memory creates. No longer continuous, the passion can be recalled through particulars—but those particulars, like the world they preserve, may one day mean nothing to the narrator.