Then came the predictable day when, presumably encouraged by some new girlfriend who also found me a nuisance, he simply stopped showing up at all. It was around this time that I began to develop a particular affection for café waiters, with whom, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always felt like part of the family.
SOME CHILDREN SPEND THEIR DAYS CLIMBING TREES. I spent mine in books. This was how I drowned the inconsolable sorrow in which my father’s abandonment had left me. Romance and passion filled my imagination. I was far too young for the novels I read, and I understood little of them except that love makes you suffer. Why would anyone want to be destroyed so prematurely?
I finally had a brief glimpse of adult sex one winter’s night when I was about nine years old. My mother and I were on vacation in a small family-run hotel in the mountains. Friends of ours were in the room next door. We had a large L-shaped room, and I was sleeping on a cot in the area around the corner, behind a thin dividing wall. After a few days my mother’s lover joined us, unbeknown to his wife. He was handsome, artistic, smelled of pipe tobacco, and wore old-fashioned vests and bow ties. He took no interest in me whatsoever. He was frequently irritated to find me doing headstands in front of the television on Wednesday afternoons, when he had managed to escape the attention of his employees so he could spend an hour or two with my mother in her bedroom at the back of our apartment. One day he said to her, “Your daughter is completely wasting her life. You ought to sign her up for activities instead of letting her destroy her brain cells watching garbage all afternoon!”
He arrived in the late afternoon. I was used to him turning up unexpectedly and no longer resented it, but he wasn’t the kind of man I could imagine on skis. After dinner I went to bed, leaving the adults to their perplexing conversations. As was my habit, I read a few pages of my book before I fell asleep, my exhausted muscles suddenly lighter than snowflakes, floating, swaying once more down the pristine slopes as sleep carried me off.
I was awoken by the sound of sighing, the friction of bodies and sheets, whispers; I could make out my mother’s voice and, with mounting horror, the more peremptory intonation of the man with the moustache. “Turn over” was the only fragment that my ears, suddenly exquisitely keen, managed to distinguish.
I could have put my hands over my ears, or indicated with a light cough that I was awake. But I lay there, petrified, the whole time their lovemaking lasted, trying to slow the rhythm of my breathing and praying that my heartbeat couldn’t be heard from the other end of the room, plunged into ominous shadow.
The following summer I spent the vacation in a house in Brittany belonging to a classmate who was to become my best friend. His cousin, a girl a little older than the two of us, joined us for a few days. We slept in a room furnished with bunkbeds, a playhouse, and lots of secret hiding places. No sooner had the adults left the room after one last goodnight kiss, hardly had the bedroom door closed, when, beneath our tents fashioned out of old plaid blankets, our guilty games—though still relatively chaste—would begin. We had a collection of accessories that seemed to us incredibly erotic: feathers, scraps of fabric, velvet and satin torn from old dolls, Venetian masks, silken cords. One of us would be designated the consenting prisoner, while the other two would set about stroking the powerless victim, who was usually blindfolded and handcuffed, nightgown lifted or pajama bottoms lowered, with various objects that we kept hidden under the mattress during the day. We thrilled at these delicious caresses, and sometimes even furtively placed our lips, screened by a piece of fabric, on a nipple or a smooth pubic mound.
We didn’t feel at all embarrassed in the morning; the memory of our nocturnal diversions faded away while we slept. The next day we carried on bickering just as always, playing out in the countryside with the same innocence. After we watched the film Jeux interdits at the Cinéclub, constructing cemeteries for animals—moles, birds, and insects—became our most absorbing activity. Eros and Thanatos, always.
Julien and I were in the same class, and our games went on for several years, at his house or mine. During the day, we fought like cats and dogs, brother and sister. In the evening, in the darkness of the bedroom, on our little mattresses laid on the floor, we came together like magnets, as if under a magic spell that transformed us into insatiable, lustful beings.
At night, our bodies were drawn to each other as we sought a pleasure that was never satisfied, but the quest itself was enough to make us keep blindly reaching out with the same gestures. What began as clumsy and furtive became, as time went on, increasingly focused. We became masters of the art of contortion, and when it came to devising this new gymnastics, our imagination had no limits. We never reached the paroxysm that we intuitively sought—our knowledge of our bodies was too limited—but we would remain on the cusp of pleasure for long minutes, exquisitely attentive to the effect of our touch on the other, each filled with confused desire, the fear of a tipping point that never came.
Sixth grade signaled the end of our insouciance. One day a red viscous liquid trickled down between my thighs. My mother said to me, “Now you are a woman!” Since my father had fallen off the radar, I had begun desperately trying to attract men’s attention. It was a waste of effort. I was completely unattractive; I lacked the slightest physical allure. Not like Asia, who was so pretty, the boys whistled whenever we approached.
Julien and I had both just turned twelve. In the evening, before we moved on to more daring games, we sometimes embraced languorously, but our intimacy never took on the contours of love. There was not the slightest feeling of tenderness between us; we showed no affection to each other during daylight hours. We never held hands, which seemed more daunting than all the things we did at night in our goose-feather alcove. We were anything but “betrothed” as our parents liked to say.
In school, Julien began keeping his distance. Sometimes one of us would go over to see the other, though we might have ignored each other for weeks before that. Julien would tell me about some girl he was in love with. I would listen without letting him see how upset I was. No one liked me. I was too tall, too flat-chested, my hair hung all over my face; one day in the schoolyard a boy even told me I looked like a toad. Asia moved away. Like every girl my age, I bought a notebook and began keeping a journal. As adolescence laid its awkward hands on me, I felt it only as an all-consuming solitude.
To top it all off, the little publishing house on the ground floor of our building went out of business. To make ends meet, my mother took a freelance job proofreading travel guides from home. She spent long hours poring over pages by the kilometer. We had to be careful with money now. Turn out the lights, avoid waste. There were fewer parties; friends rarely came over anymore to play the piano and belt out songs at the top of their voices; my beautiful mother grew dull, withdrew from the world, began drinking too much and spending hours in front of the television. She put on weight, let herself go. She was in such a bad way, she couldn’t see that her single life was as much of a burden for me as it was for her.
A father, conspicuous only by his absence, who left an unfathomable void in my life. A pronounced taste for reading. A certain sexual precocity. And, most of all, an enormous need to be seen.
All the necessary elements were now in place.
Part Two
The Prey
Consent: In moral philosophy: an act of free thought
in which a person fully commits to accepting
or accomplishing something.
In law: authorization for marriage given by
the parents or guardian of a minor.
—Trésor de la langue française
ONE EVENING MY MOTHER DRAGGED ME ALONG TO A DINNER party to which some well-known literary figures had also been invited. Initially I refused to go point-blank. The company of her friends had become as excruciating to me as that of my classmates, from whom I was increasingly turning away. At the age of thirteen I was becoming a recluse. She insisted, grew angry, used emotional blackmail
: I had to stop moping around on my own with my books, and anyway, what had her friends done to me, why didn’t I want to see them anymore? Eventually I gave in.
He sat at the table at a forty-five-degree angle, a conspicuously striking presence. He was handsome, of indeterminate age; his head, scrupulously maintained, was entirely bald, which made him look a little like a Buddhist monk. His eyes followed my every movement, and when I finally dared to turn toward him, he threw me a smile, which I confused for a paternal smile, because it was the smile of a man, and I no longer had a father. With his brilliant comebacks and effortlessly well-chosen quotations, this man, who I soon realized was a writer, knew how to charm his audience, and clearly had an instinctive mastery of the strictly codified rules of Parisian social interaction. Every time he opened his mouth, his fellow guests hooted with laughter, but it was on me that his eyes—amused, mesmerizing—lingered. No man had ever looked at me like that before.
I caught his Slavic-sounding name in passing, which immediately aroused my curiosity. It was just a simple coincidence, but I owe my own surname, and a quarter of my blood, to the Bohemia of Kafka, whose Metamorphosis I had just read, enthralled; moreover, at this precise point in my adolescence, I considered Dostoyevsky’s novels to be the absolute apex of literary achievement. A Russian surname, the lean physique of a Buddhist monk, preternaturally blue eyes—that was all it took to seize my attention.
Normally, during dinners like this, I would disappear off to another room, where I would let myself be lulled by the murmur of conversation, half listening, apparently distracted, but in reality acutely attentive. This particular evening, I had brought a book to read, and after the main course I took refuge in the small sitting room off the dining room where cheese was now being served (the interminable succession of courses, at no less interminable intervals). I was trying to read my book, but the words grew blurred, it was impossible to concentrate, and I suddenly sensed, from where he was sitting all the way at the other end of the room, G.’s eyes caressing my cheek. His voice, with its slight lilt, neither masculine nor feminine, insinuated itself inside me like a spell, an enchantment. Every inflection, every word, seemed addressed to me alone. Was I the only person to notice?
His presence was electric.
It was time to go. The moment—that I was afraid I’d only dreamed, the confusing feeling of being desired for the first time—was almost over. In a few minutes we’d say goodbye and I would never hear his name again. And then, as I was putting on my coat, I saw my mother flirting with the charming G., who was openly flirting back. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Of course! How could I ever have imagined that this man could be interested in me, a teenage girl who was as unattractive as a toad?
G. and my mother exchanged a few more words. She laughed, flattered by his attentions, and then turned to me.
“Are you coming, darling? We’re going to drop Michel first and then G. He lives quite near us. Then we’ll be home.”
G. sat next to me in the back seat of the car. Something magnetic passed between us. He had his arm against mine, his eyes on me, and the predatory smile of a large golden wildcat. All conversation was redundant.
The book I had taken along with me that evening, the one I’d been reading in the small sitting room, was Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, which was to become, thanks to a play on words of which I was for a long time completely oblivious, the title of the human comedy in which I was to play the principal role: l’ingénue grandit—“the innocent grows up.”
THE WEEK FOLLOWING OUR FIRST MEETING, I WAS DESPERATE to get to a bookshop. When I did, it was to buy one of G.’s books, though I was surprised when the bookseller advised against the one I’d selected at random and pointed me to a different work by the same author. “This one would be more suitable for you, I think,” he said, rather enigmatically. A black-and-white photograph of G. punctuated a long frieze of portraits of writers in the same format, a shrine to all the important authors of the day, which ran around the four walls of the bookshop. I opened the book at the first page, and my eyes fell upon another unsettling coincidence: the first sentence—not the second, not the third, but the very first, the one the text opens with, the famous beginning with which generations of writers have struggled—began with my exact date of birth, the very day, month, and year: “On Thursday, 16 March 1972, the clock in the Luxembourg station chimed half past twelve.” If that wasn’t a sign! As excited as I was surprised, I left the bookshop clutching the precious volume under my arm, pressing it against my heart as though destiny had gifted it to me.
I devoured the novel over the next two days. Though it contained nothing shocking (the bookseller had chosen well), it did contain open allusions to the fact that the narrator was rather more susceptible to the beauty of young girls than that of women his own age. I stared into space, thinking how privileged I was to have met such a talented man of letters, so glamorous too (in truth, it was the memory of the way he looked at me that made my heart soar), and I began to see myself differently. Looking in the mirror now, I thought I was quite pretty. The toad, whose reflection used to make me flee what I saw in shop windows, vanished. How could I not feel flattered that a man—not any man, an actual “man of letters”—had deigned to lay his eyes on me? Since childhood, books had been my siblings, my companions, my tutors, my friends. With my blind veneration of the “Writer” with a capital “W,” it was almost inevitable that I would conflate the man with his status as an artist.
I used to pick up the mail every day and take it up to the apartment. The gardienne would hand it to me when I walked in from school. One day, among a handful of official-looking envelopes, I saw my name and address inscribed in turquoise ink, with beautiful handwriting that sloped upward and slightly to the left, as if the words were trying to take flight. On the back, in the same cerulean ink, I read G.’s first and last names.
It was the first of what would be a great many letters, exquisitely charming and dripping with compliments. There was one important detail—G. always used the formal vous, just as if I were a grown-up. This was the first time that someone in my circle, apart from my schoolteachers, had ever used vous to address me, and it flattered my ego while at the same time instantly placing me on an equal footing with him. I didn’t dare reply. But G. was not a man to be so easily discouraged. He sometimes wrote to me twice a day. I took to dropping into the gardienne’s lodge morning and evening, terrified that my mother would come across one of these letters, which I kept on me at all times like a secret treasure, careful never to mention them to anyone. Eventually, after repeated solicitations, I plucked up the courage to pen a response to him, prim and shy but a response all the same. I had just turned fourteen. He was almost fifty. What of it?
No sooner had I nibbled at the bait than G. pounced. He began looking out for me in the street, wandering back and forth all over the neighborhood, trying to bring about an impromptu encounter, which occurred soon enough. We exchanged a few words, and then I walked home, dazed with love. I grew used to the possibility of bumping into him at any moment, so much so that his invisible presence accompanied me on my walk to school, on my way home, when I went shopping at the market or hung out with my friends. One day he sent me a letter arranging to meet. The telephone was far too dangerous, he wrote, it might be my mother who answered.
He asked me to meet him at Saint-Michel, by the number 27 bus stop. I was on time, and on edge, sensing that I was committing an enormous transgression. I’d imagined us going to a café somewhere in the neighborhood. To chat, get to know each other a bit. But as soon as he arrived, he told me he wanted to invite me to “afternoon tea” at his apartment. He’d bought some delicious pastries from a prohibitively expensive patisserie, whose name he uttered with greedy relish. All for me. Nonchalantly, he carried on talking as he crossed the street. I followed him mechanically, light-headed with words, and found myself at the stop for the same line going in the other direction. The bus pulled up. G. motioned me to get on,
saying with a smile that I mustn’t be afraid. His tone of voice was reassuring. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you!” My hesitation seemed to disappoint him.
I wasn’t prepared for this. Incapable of reacting, caught off guard, I simply could not bear to seem like an idiot. Nor could I bear to be taken for a little kid who knew nothing about life. “You mustn’t pay any attention to all the dreadful things people say about me. Come on, get on!” My hesitation had nothing to do with anything that anybody I knew had said. No one had said anything dreadful about him because I hadn’t told anyone about our meeting.
As the bus sped down the Boulevard Saint-Michel and past the Luxembourg Gardens, G. smiled at me beatifically, threw me amorous, knowing glances, gazed at me adoringly. It was a beautiful day. Two stops later we pulled up to his apartment building. This wasn’t what I had imagined either. Couldn’t we walk for a while?
The staircase was narrow, there was no elevator, and we had to climb up to the sixth floor. “I live in a maid’s room in the attic. I expect you imagine all writers to be very rich men; well, as you shall see, literature rarely provides enough to sustain a person. But I am very happy here. I live like a student and that suits me perfectly. Luxury and comfort do not breed inspiration.”
There wasn’t room to walk up six flights side by side. On the outside I was dreadfully calm, but inside my chest my heart was thumping like a drum.
He must have guessed I was afraid because he went ahead of me, presumably so I didn’t feel trapped and still felt I could turn around and go back down. For a moment I imagined running away, but as we walked up the stairs, G. carried on chatting cheerfully, like a young man excited to be inviting a young girl up to his studio for the first time, having only just met her ten minutes earlier. His gait was agile, athletic; at no point did he appear out of breath. The physical condition of a sportsman.
Consent Page 2