The door opened onto an untidy studio with a spartan kitchen area at one end, so poky there was barely room for a chair. It had the means to make a cup of tea, but not so much as a pan to boil an egg.
“This is where I write,” he declared solemnly. And there, on a tiny table wedged between the sink and the refrigerator, a pile of blank pages and a typewriter had pride of place. The room smelled of incense and dust. A ray of sunlight came through the window. A miniature bronze Buddha sat on a pedestal table that was missing a foot, propped up on a pile of books. A sad-looking elephant, its trunk aloft, a souvenir from a trip to India, seemed a little lost on the floor where a small Persian carpet skirted the parquet. A pair of Tunisian babouches, and books, more books, dozens of piles of books of all sizes, colors, thicknesses, and breadths, were strewn across the floor. G. invited me to sit down. There was only one place where two people could sit side by side—the bed.
Perched there, primly, my feet riveted to the floor, palms flat on my squeezed-together knees, back upright, I searched his face for a sign that would enlighten me as to the reason I was there. For several minutes my heart had been racing faster and faster, unless of course it was time itself whose rhythm had changed. I could have stood up and left. I wasn’t afraid of G. He would never force me to stay against my will, I was sure of that. I felt an ineluctable shift in the situation and yet I didn’t stand up, and I didn’t say anything. G. was moving as if in a dream. I didn’t see him come toward me, but suddenly he was there, sitting next to me, his arms around my trembling shoulders.
That first afternoon in his studio, G. behaved with exquisite delicacy. He kissed me tenderly, stroked my shoulders, slipped his hand under my sweater without asking me to take it off, though eventually I did. We were like two shy adolescents messing around in the back of a car. I lay there, languid but inhibited, incapable of the slightest movement, the faintest boldness. I concentrated on his lips, his mouth, touched his face with the tips of my fingers as he propped himself over me. Time stretched out until eventually, cheeks ablaze, lips and heart swollen with an utterly unfamiliar joy, I left and went home.
“I DON’T BELIEVE A WORD OF IT!”
“I promise you, it’s true. Look, he’s written me a poem.”
My mother took the piece of paper I held out to her with a grimace of disgust mingled with incredulity. She looked horrified but also a tiny bit jealous. After all, when she’d offered to give the writer a lift home that evening, and when he’d accepted in such suave tones, she could well have imagined that he wasn’t entirely impervious to her charms. At first, stunned by the revelation that I had, somewhat precociously, become her rival, she refused to believe it. She swiftly regained her composure, and then spat out a word I could not believe could be associated with G.:
“Are you aware he’s a pedophile?”
“A what? Is that why you offered to give him a lift home, and let him sit in the back with your daughter?”
Without missing a beat, she told me she was going to send me to boarding school. Beneath the rafters, our screams flew thick and fast. How could she think of depriving me of this, my first, my last, my only love? Did she really imagine that, having deprived me of my father (because, obviously, now it was all her fault), I was going to allow her to do it a second time? I would never agree to be apart from him. I would rather die.
THE LETTERS KEPT COMING, EACH MORE PASSIONATE THAN the last. G. declared his love for me in every possible way, begged me to come back and see him as soon as I could, vowed he couldn’t live without me, that life wasn’t worth living a moment longer if he wasn’t in my arms. Overnight I had turned into a goddess.
The following Saturday I told my mother I was going to a friend’s house to study. I rang at G.’s door. How could I resist that wolfish smile, those laughing eyes, the long, slender, aristocratic fingers?
A few minutes later I was lying on his bed, and this was something quite unlike anything I had ever known. This wasn’t Julien’s skinny, hairless body next to mine, his velvety, adolescent skin, the acrid odor of his sweat. This was a man’s body. Strong, stubbly, freshly washed and smelling of eau de cologne.
Our first encounter had been devoted to the upper part of my body. This time he ventured, intrepid, toward more intimate regions. And for that he had to undo my shoelaces, a task he undertook with undisguised pleasure, before pulling off my jeans and my cotton panties (I didn’t own any feminine underwear worthy of the name, and it appeared that nothing could have delighted G. more, though at the time I was only dimly aware of this).
In a mellifluous voice he boasted of his experience, how skillfully he had taken the virginity of several young teenage girls, how he always ensured it didn’t hurt in the slightest; he even claimed they would recall it with emotion as long as they lived, aware of how lucky they were to have met him and not another person, someone rough and careless who would have pinned them unceremoniously to the mattress so that they would forever have associated that unique moment with a feeling of regret.
Except that, as it turned out, he was unable to penetrate me. With an instinctive reflex, my thighs jammed tight together. I howled with pain before he even touched me—despite the fact this was the one thing I’d been dreaming of. In a confusion of bravado and romance, I had already secretly determined the inevitable outcome—G. would be my first lover. That was the reason I was lying on his bed. So why was my body refusing? Why this intractable fright?
G. was undaunted. He murmured reassuringly:
“Don’t worry. We can do it another way, you know.”
Just as one must cross oneself with holy water before entering a church, taking possession of the body and soul of a young girl cannot be done without a certain sense of the sacred, a timeless ritual. Sodomy has its rules, and must be carefully, religiously, prepared.
G. flipped me over on the mattress and set about licking every single part of my body from top to toe: back of my neck, shoulders, back, hips, buttocks. Something of my presence in the world dissolved. And, while his greedy tongue insinuated itself inside me, my soul took flight.
That is how I lost the first part of my virginity. Just like a little boy, he whispered to me in a soft voice.
I WAS IN LOVE. I FELT ADORED AS NEVER BEFORE. AND that was enough to efface all my sullenness, and to suspend any judgment about our relationship.
After we’d been to bed, in those early days, there were two things I found particularly touching: seeing G. stand up to pee and watching him shave. It was as if those activities were, for the first time, part of my world, for too long restricted to feminine rituals.
What I discovered in G.’s embrace, the hitherto unfathomable domain of adult sexuality, was a whole new continent to me. I explored this male body with the concentration of a privileged disciple. I absorbed his lessons with gratitude, and I worked hard on my practical exercises. I felt I had been chosen.
G. confessed to me that he had until recently led a rather dissolute life, as some of his books bore out. He kneeled before me, his eyes misted with tears, and promised to break up with all his other mistresses, whispering that he had never in his whole life been so happy, that meeting me was a miracle, a veritable gift from the gods.
At the beginning, G. took me to museums and the theater, gave me records, told me what books to read. We would spend hours walking hand in hand along the paths in the Luxembourg Gardens, wandering the streets of Paris, ignoring all the looks—curious, suspicious, disapproving, sometimes openly hostile—of the people walking by us.
I don’t recall my parents often coming to pick me up from school, even when I was still at an age when I would wait, with a delicious squirm of anxiety, for the doors to open to one or the other of their beloved faces. My mother always worked late. I went home on my own after class. My father didn’t even know the name of the street where my school was.
Now G. waited outside school for me almost every day. Not right in front, but a few meters away, on the little square at the
end of the street, so that I could spot him straightaway just beyond the crowd of overexcited teenagers. In springtime, his rangy silhouette was wrapped in a colonial-style safari jacket; in winter, an overcoat like those of Russian officers in the Second World War, full-length and covered in gold buttons. He wore sunglasses, summer and winter, to protect his anonymity.
Ours was a forbidden love. Reviled by all decent people. I knew this, because he told me so repeatedly. It meant I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. I had to be careful. But why? Why, if I loved him and he loved me?
And were those sunglasses really so discreet?
AFTER EACH SESSION OF LOVEMAKING, DURING WHICH G. feasted on my body like a starving man, the two of us would lie in the calm of his studio, surrounded by so many hundreds of books it made me dizzy. He would hold me in his arms like a newborn baby, run his hands through my disheveled hair, call me his “beloved child,” his “beautiful schoolgirl,” and softly recount the long history of illicit love affairs between young girls and middle-aged men.
I now had a private tutor entirely dedicated to my education. The extent of his cultural knowledge was mesmerizing, and my admiration was, if possible, increasing, even if the reality was that the lessons I received after school were always very specifically oriented.
“Are you aware that in ancient times, the sexual initiation of young people by adults was not only encouraged, it was considered a duty? Even as late as the nineteenth century—little Virginia was only thirteen when she married Edgar Allan Poe, did you know that? And when I think about all those respectable parents reading Alice in Wonderland to their children before bed, without having the faintest idea of who Lewis Carroll was, it makes me want to howl with laughter. He was obsessed with photography, it was quite compulsive, he took hundreds of photographs of little girls, including the real Alice, the love of his life, who inspired his masterpiece. Have you ever seen them?”
In a large book of photography prominently displayed on his shelves, he showed me the erotic pictures that Irina Ionesco had taken of her daughter Eva when she was just eight years old, her legs spread, dressed only in black stockings that ended mid-thigh, her gorgeous doll-like face made up like a prostitute. (He omitted to tell me that her mother subsequently lost custody of Eva and that, aged thirteen, she was placed with social services.)
Another time, he ranted about Americans, mired in sexual frustration, persecuting poor Roman Polanski and trying to stop him from making films.
“They’re such puritans, they insist on conflating everything. That girl who claims she was raped was manipulated by people who were jealous of his success. It’s obvious she consented. And what about David Hamilton—do you think all his models would have offered themselves up to the lens of his camera if they hadn’t had one thing on their minds? You’d have to be absurdly naïve to believe such a thing.”
The litany of examples was endless. Faced with so many similarly edifying examples, how could I disagree? A fourteen-year-old girl has the right and the liberty to love whom she wants. I understood the lesson very well. And even better, I had become a muse.
TO START WITH, MY MOTHER WAS NOT THRILLED BY THE situation. But once she got over her surprise and shock, she consulted her friends and took advice from people around her; no one, apparently, was particularly disturbed. Eventually, in the face of my resolve, she came around. Perhaps she thought I was stronger and more mature than I was. Perhaps she was too alone to act differently. Perhaps she needed a man by her side, someone to father her daughter, to stand up to this anomaly, this aberration, this . . . thing. Someone to take charge.
It would also have helped if the cultural context and the times had been less liberal.
Ten years before I met G., toward the end of the 1970s, a large number of left-wing newspapers and intellectuals regularly came to the defense of adults accused of having had “shameful” relationships with adolescents. In 1977, an open letter in support of the decriminalization of sexual relations between minors and adults, entitled “Regarding a Trial,” was published in the newspaper Le Monde, signed by a number of eminent intellectuals, psychoanalysts, well-known philosophers, and writers at the peak of their careers, largely from the left. They included Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Glucksmann, and Louis Aragon. The letter argued against the detention of three men awaiting trial for having had (and photographed) sexual relations with two minors aged thirteen and fourteen: “Such a lengthy preventative detention to investigate a straightforward affair of ‘morality,’ in which the children were not in any way victims of violence—indeed, on the contrary, they assured the judges that they were consenting (even if the current law denies them the capacity to consent)—seems to us genuinely scandalous.”
The petition was also signed by G.M. But it was not until 2013 that he revealed that he had in fact both initiated and drafted it, and, furthermore, that he had encountered very few negative responses in his quest for signatories (notable among those who refused to sign were Marguerite Duras, Hélène Cixous, and . . . Michel Foucault, who was not exactly the last person to denounce all such forms of repression). The same year, another petition was published in Le Monde, entitled “A Call for the Revision of the Penal Code Regarding Relationships Between Minors and Adults,” which garnered even more support (to name but a few, Françoise Dolto, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida added their support, along with most of those who had signed the earlier petition; the open letter was signed by eighty people, including some of the most high-profile public intellectuals of the era). Yet another petition appeared in 1979 in Libération, in support of one Gérard R., accused of living with girls aged between six and twelve, also signed by several well-known literary figures.
Thirty years on, all the newspapers that had printed these exceedingly dubious opinion pieces went on to publish, one after the other, their mea culpa, arguing that in any period of history, the media merely reflects the ideas of the time.
So why did all these left-wing intellectuals so passionately defend positions that today seem so shocking to us? Particularly the relaxing of the penal code concerning sexual relations between adults and minors, and the abolition of the age of consent?
The reason is that in the 1970s, in the name of free love and the sexual revolution, everyone was supposed to be in favor of the liberation of physical pleasure. Repressing juvenile sexuality was considered to be a form of social oppression, and limiting sexual relationships to those between individuals of the same age range constituted a form of segregation. The fight against any curb on desire, any kind of repression, was the watchword of the era; no one spoke up against it, except for a few straitlaced puritans and reactionary tribunals.
A generation adrift, suffering from a blindness for which nearly all the signatories of these petitions would later apologize.
During the 1980s, the intellectual circle in which I was growing up was still marked by this vision of the world. When she was an adolescent, my mother told me, the body and its desires were still taboo, and her parents never talked to her about sex at all. Having just turned eighteen in May 1968, she first had to free herself from her corseted upbringing, and then from the hold of an unbearable husband whom she married far too young. Like the heroines of Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Sautet’s movies, she now aspired above all to live life according to her own rules. “It’s forbidden to forbid” remained, it seemed, her mantra. It’s not easy to escape the zeitgeist.
This, then, was the context in which my mother eventually came around to the presence of G. in our lives. It was utter madness for her to give us her absolution. I think, deep down, she knew that. Did she also realize that she risked one day being severely criticized, first and foremost by her own daughter? Was I so fiercely obstinate that she was unable to stand up to me? Whatever the reason, her only intervention was to make a pact with G. He had to swear that he would never make me suffer. It was he who told me this. I can just imagine the scene, the two of them loo
king each other straight in the eye with great solemnity. “Say it: ‘I swear!’”
She sometimes invited him for dinner in our little attic apartment. The three of us would sit around the table, eating lamb and green beans, as though we were playing happy families, daddy-mommy, reunited at the end of the day, with me sitting radiantly between them, the holy trinity, together again.
As shocking and abnormal as it might seem, perhaps G. was for her, subconsciously, the ideal paternal substitute, the father she had been unable to give me.
And on top of it all, this kind of scandalous situation was not entirely displeasing to her. There was even something gratifying about it. In our bohemian world of artists and intellectuals, deviations from conventional morality were viewed with a certain level of tolerance, even admiration. And G. was a well-known writer, which made it altogether rather flattering.
In a different social circle, one in which artists didn’t exercise the same fascination, things would no doubt have turned out differently. The monsieur would have been threatened with being sent to prison. The girl would have been sent to a psychologist, might perhaps have brought up a buried memory of the snap of elastic on a tanned thigh in a Moroccan restaurant, and the whole thing would have been dealt with. End of story.
“Your grandparents must never find out, my darling. They wouldn’t understand,” my mother said to me one day, quite lightly, in the middle of a conversation.
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