I first saw Rodin’s immaculate white sculpture, ‘The Kiss’, more than twenty-five years ago. At the time, I was a French teacher at a private girls’ school in Cape Town, newly married and newly returned to the city of my birth, leading a group of nine girls to Paris and Angers on a month-long language and culture tour, accompanied by my then husband.

One of the girls asked if we could visit the Rodin museum during our three-day visit of Paris. I knew very little about Rodin except what I had learnt from watching a film about his lover, Camille Claudel, but I was happy to include a stop at the museum in our itinerary.

I have no visual memories of my first viewing of the life-size statue, which shows two naked lovers in a passionate embrace, but it touched a thread of sensuality deep in the core of me. Somehow it embodied everything I longed for in terms of relationship and sexuality. It seemed like the perfect representation of loving desire, and symbolised everything that I had hoped to find in my marriage.

I bought a poster of the statue, intending to have it framed for the bedroom that I shared with my husband. But I never did frame or hang it. I think that doing so would have been seen as an affront by that angry man, who had already found enough in me to offend him. Our eighteen-year marriage, dogged by his accusations that I lacked sensuality, that I wasn’t a sexual being, eventually that I was frigid, seemed to put the lie to the longing that had been awoken in me by that statue. I’m not even sure what I did with that poster, which came to represent all the disappointment, conflict and bitterness of my marriage, but I got rid of it at some point.

Years later, when excitedly planning a short visit to Paris with Chris, it came as no surprise to me that the Rodin museum was the one place that we had both already visited, but wanted to see again. The same thing had happened in Amsterdam the previous year, when we had both independently specified the Van Gogh museum as the one attraction that we wanted to visit during our short stay in that city. What a joy that visit had been! It was my first experience of the delight of visiting an art gallery with a person who ‘felt’ the artworks in the same way that I did, who was happy to wander the rooms separately and together, and who opened his heart to me, the artist and his work in the same way that I had longed to all my life.

The Rodin museum looked very different from the outside. The entrance had been upgraded to cope with the increased number of visitors. We stood in a long queue, moving through a security check that certainly hadn’t been there all those years ago. We bought our tickets and walked over to look at the sculptures in the rose garden to the side of the house before entering through the front door at the centre of the simple but splendid façade. As we walked through the rooms of the ground floor, up the stairs and around the top floor, I looked carefully at the sculptures, but it was as if I was being led onwards to what my heart knew was at the centre of the museum, the day and myself: ‘The Kiss’.

I see from the photos that Chris and I took on that day that I didn’t take a photo of the sculpture on that first circuit of the museum. I hadn’t even mentioned the significance of the visit to him, but over lunch, I found myself telling him the story of that earlier visit, my response to the statue and the way in which the part of me that it had touched had shrivelled through the years of my marriage. I talked about how good it felt to revisit that place with the man I loved, with the man with whom I had experienced pleasure and satisfaction the likes of which I had never even dreamt when I first glimpsed the sensuality implicit in those entwined figures. Chris pays such close attention to moments like these that he recognised the significance of this one. He urged me to go back into the house on my own and spend some time with the statue, rewriting the story of the humiliation and pain with which it had become associated, and taking all the photos I hadn’t been able to earlier.

As I look at those photos nearly three years later, the incandescence of that embrace shines out of the white marble in which it is encased. There is such purity and focus in that kiss. I know the feeling of that man’s hand on my hip, holding, loving, desiring, protecting. It is so familiar to me. I know that yearning and reaching in my own body. I know what it is to love and be loved like that.

When I went out into the garden to reunite with Chris, there was great lightness and celebration in my heart. We walked into the gift shop together to see if there was some memento that we could take home to replace that long-forgotten poster and the shame that it had carried. We left with a carrier bag containing a small marble replica of the larger statue. It had cost a lot, was bulky and weighed a ton, but Chris had insisted that it was the only suitable commemoration of the joyful rewriting of my story. He never complained as he carried it along with his laptop bag and suitcases (when has this lion of a man ever complained?) as we boarded and disembarked from trains and taxis on our journey, which took us to Eindhoven and then on to Amsterdam. He argued its way through security at Schipol airport, and finally, when we were home in our Cape Town bedroom, he unpacked it and set it below the photo that I always think of as our own Kiss, taken on the beach on our last evening in Naxos the year before.

A year later, I was lucky enough to be in Paris with Chris once again. On the day that he was teaching in a suburb of Paris, I journeyed back to the Rodin museum. I wanted some marker of that day to hang in my own flat where I could be reminded of it even when I was not with him. There were no posters of ‘The Kiss’, but I was able to buy a large postcard-type photograph of it, which I finally had framed three months ago. One more piece of a painful past has been rewritten in a joyous present.

It seems to me this morning that every single painful memory from that past has been transmuted into gold.

NEXT