G. PROTESTED WHEN I TOLD HIM THAT SOME OF THE people in my circle of friends called him a “sex maniac.” The expression troubled me. I considered his love for me to be of a sincerity that was above suspicion. Over time, I had read a few of his books—just the ones he recommended I read. The uncontroversial ones: the dictionary of philosophy that had just come out, and a few of the novels, though not all; he warned me off the more notorious ones. With a strength of conviction worthy of the finest politician, he swore, hand on heart, that those works no longer corresponded to the man he had become, thanks to me. Above all, he said, he was afraid that some pages might shock me. He said all this with the air of an innocent lamb.
I obeyed the ban for a long time. A couple of these forbidden books sat on the bookshelf by the bed, and their titles taunted me whenever I caught sight of them. But, like Bluebeard’s wife, I’d made a promise and I would stick to my word. Presumably because I didn’t have a nun watching over me to keep me on the straight and narrow if ever the idea of transgressing the forbidden crossed my mind.
Whenever I heard the terrible accusations made against him, some boundless naïveté made me believe that G. had created a fictional caricature of himself; that his books were a twisted exaggeration of the person he really was, that he demeaned himself in them, made himself look ugly, as a kind of provocation, like a larger-than-life character in a novel. A modern-day version of Dorian Gray’s portrait, his work was the receptacle of all his faults, a way of allowing him to return to his life revitalized, untouched, ironed out, pure.
How could he be a bad person, if I loved him? Thanks to him, I was no longer the little girl waiting on her own in a restaurant for her daddy to turn up. Thanks to him, at last, I existed.
That lack, that lack of love, like the thirst that makes a man drink down to the last drop, the thirst of a junkie who doesn’t check the quality of what he’s scored, who injects himself with a lethal dose with the conviction that it will make him feel better. Relief, recognition, rapture.
WE HAD BEEN CORRESPONDING BY LETTER SINCE THE beginning of our relationship, just like, I told myself naïvely, in the time of Les Liaisons dangereuses. G. had encouraged me to use this mode of communication from the start, partly because he was a writer, but also as a matter of security, and of course to protect our love from prying eyes and ears. I didn’t object; I was more comfortable in written than spoken language. I found it a natural way to express myself. I was very reserved with my classmates; I couldn’t bear to speak in public, to stand up in front of the class and give a presentation. I was incapable of participating in any theatrical or artistic activity that required that I expose my body to be looked at by other people. The internet and the mobile phone didn’t exist yet. The telephone inspired only disdain in G., who considered it a vulgar object devoid of any poetry. I kept the stack of flamboyant love letters that he used to send me whenever he went away, or when we hadn’t been able to see each other for a few days, carefully bound with ribbon in an old cardboard box. I know he treasured mine just as carefully. But when I began to read his books (still avoiding the most salacious), I realized that I was far from holding exclusive rights to these epistolary outpourings.
Two of his books recount G.’s tumultuous love affairs with a bevy of young girls whose advances he was apparently unable to refuse. These girlfriends of his were all very demanding, and, unable to work out how to extricate himself from them, he began juggling, in a truly acrobatic fashion, increasingly barefaced lies so that he could keep two, three, or even four trysts with his lovers in the same day.
Not only did G. not hesitate to reproduce in his books the letters he received from his conquests, but they all seemed strangely familiar: in their style, their enthusiasm, and even their vocabulary, it was as if they constituted a single body spread out across the years, in which the distant voice of a single idealized young girl, composed of all the others, could be heard. Each letter bore witness to a love as spiritual as that between Heloise and Abelard, and as carnal as that between Valmont and Tourvel. It was like reading the naïve, antiquated prose of lovers from a different century. These weren’t words of contemporary young women, but the universal and timeless terms taken from the epistolary literature of love. G. whispered them to us by stealth, breathing them onto our very tongues. He dispossessed us of our own words.
My own letters to G. do not stand out at all. Don’t all vaguely “literary” teenage girls between fourteen and eighteen write in exactly the same way? Or was I influenced by the uniform style of these love letters after I’d read some of the ones in G.’s books? I can’t help wondering if I was instinctively conforming to what you might call a “technical specification.”
With hindsight, I realize he was taking us all for fools: by reproducing from one book to the next letters from young girls in the full flower of youth, all with the same obsessiveness, G. was establishing not only an image of himself as seducer but also, more perniciously, testimony that he was not the monster people said he was. All these declarations of love were proof that he was loved, and, better still, that he knew how to love. What a hypocritical way it was of going about things, deceiving not only his young mistresses but also his readers. I eventually saw through the function of the dozens of letters he had written to me, frenetically, since our first meeting. For G., loving adolescents was also about being a writer, and the authority and the psychological hold he enjoyed were all that was needed for his nymphet of the moment to confirm in writing that she was fulfilled. A letter leaves a trace, and the recipient feels duty-bound to respond, and when it is composed with passionate lyricism, she must show herself to be worthy of it. With this silent injunction, the teenage girl would give herself the mission of reassuring G. regarding all the pleasure he gave her, so that in the event of a raid by the police, there could be no doubt that she was a consenting partner. He was, of course, a past master in the execution of the faintest caress. The unequaled heights of our orgasmic pleasure were proof of that!
Such declarations, from the young virgins who ended up in G.’s bed and hadn’t the slightest point of comparison, were actually rather comical.
Which was too bad for those devoted readers of his published diaries who let themselves be taken in.
BOWING TO FINANCIAL NECESSITY, G. PUBLISHED, WITH the precision of a metronome, one book a year. For several weeks he had been writing about us, our love story, and about what he called his “redemption.” It was to be a novel inspired by our meeting, which would, he said, be a magnificent account of a “stellar” love affair, of the way he had turned his dissipated lifestyle around for the beautiful eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl. What a romantic subject! Don Juan, cured of his sexual frenzy, determined no longer to be dominated by his urges, vowing that he was a changed man, upon whom mercy had alighted along with Cupid’s arrow.
Happy, excited, and focused, he sat at his typewriter writing up notes from his black Moleskine notebook. The same one as Hemingway used, he told me. I was still strictly forbidden to read his diary, which was both private and literary. But since G. had begun writing his novel, reality had swapped sides: I was gradually turning from a muse into a fictional character.
G. WAS SUBDUED AND UNSMILING, WHICH WAS NOT LIKE him at all. We’d met up in one of our favorite cafés, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. When I asked him what was eating him, he hesitated for a moment before admitting the truth. That morning he’d received a summons from the Juvenile Squad, after an anonymous letter concerning him had been received by them. It appeared we were not the only people to be sensitive to the charms of epistolary communication.
G. had spent the afternoon stashing all my letters and photographs (and quite possibly other things that were similarly compromising) in a safe-deposit box at his lawyer’s office. The summons was for the following week. Obviously, it concerned us, me. Legally, the age of consent was fifteen. I was a long way from turning fifteen. The situation was serious. We had to be prepared for every possible scenario.
Had times changed? Were attitudes less liberal now?
The following Thursday my mother, her stomach in a knot of anxiety, sat waiting for news of the interview. She was aware that her responsibility as a parent was at stake. Having agreed to cover for the relationship between me and G., she also risked prosecution. She might even lose custody of me, in which case I would be placed in a foster home until I reached the age of majority.
She picked up the phone as soon as it rang, palpably apprehensive. After a few seconds her expression relaxed. “G.’s on his way over, he’ll be here in ten minutes, he sounded okay, I think it went well,” she said in a single breath.
G. came straight from the police station on the Quai de Gesvres, looking rather amused and pleased with himself at how he’d managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the police inspector and her colleagues. “It all went very well,” he crowed as soon as he arrived. “The police assured me it was just a bureaucratic formality. ‘We receive hundreds of letters denouncing high-profile people every day, you understand, Monsieur,’ the inspector told me.” As usual, G. was convinced it was all thanks to his irresistible charm. Which was, indeed, not implausible.
At the police station he was shown the letter that had alerted them. Signed “W., a friend of the girl’s mother,” it described in minute detail some of our recent activities. The specific showing of a movie we’d been to. The day and time I’d arrived at his apartment, and my return to my mother’s apartment two hours later. The detailed account of our debauchery was punctuated by judgments along the lines of, “Have you any idea how shameful this is? He genuinely appears to believe himself above the law,” and so on. A classic anonymous letter, a model of its kind, virtually a parody. I was horrified. In one strange detail, the letter made me a year younger than I was, presumably to accentuate the gravity of the facts. It spoke of a “young girl of thirteen called V.” Who was it who could have spent so much time spying on us? And then there was this strange signature, like a clue placed there for us to guess the author. Otherwise why the initial?
My mother and G. immediately began wildly speculating. We considered every single one of our friends as the potential author of this poison pen missive. Perhaps it was our neighbor on the second floor, an elderly lady who used to be a literature teacher, and who sometimes used to take me to the Comédie Française on a Wednesday afternoon when we didn’t have school. Might she have caught us kissing each other full on the lips on the corner of the street? She would have recognized G. (don’t forget, she was a literature teacher), and of course she had lived through the Occupation, when plenty of people shamelessly informed on their neighbors in anonymous letters. But it was the “W” that confused us; it was a bit too modern for her. Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood would definitely not have been included in Madame Latreille’s literary pantheon; her references would only have gone up to the end of the nineteenth century.
What about the famous literary critic Jean-Didier Wolfromm? He was probably skilled at literary pastiche, as is often the case with people unable to write in the first person. Or unable to write at all, even though it’s their profession. “It has to be him,” said G. “Look, it’s his initial. And he’s a friend of your mother, and he took you under his wing.”
It was true, Jean-Didier did occasionally invite me to lunch, and he encouraged me to write, who knows why. “V., you must write,” he often used to say to me. “To write, well, perhaps this is going to sound idiotic, but you start by sitting down and then . . . you write. Every day. Without exception.”
Every room in his apartment was filled to overflowing with books. I always left with a pile under my arm, copies he’d been sent by the publicity departments of publishing houses. He’d make me a little selection. Give me suggestions. Even though he had a reputation for being ungenerous and vindictive, I liked him enormously. He was terribly funny, often at others’ expense, but I really couldn’t imagine him doing something like this. Attacking G. was the same as attacking me.
I suppose because my father had now completely abandoned me, Jean-Didier had started keeping a benevolent eye on me. I knew he was lonely. I’d seen the tub in his apartment, violet-stained from his daily permanganate bath to treat a ghastly skin condition: his face and hands were red and inflamed, crisscrossed with light cracks. He had extraordinary hands. They fascinated me; he was so comfortable holding a pen, even though his hands were contorted from polio on top of everything else. Curiously, I wasn’t repelled by his physical appearance; I always gave him a warm hug. Behind the suffering and the cruel facade, I knew there was someone kind and generous.
“I’m convinced it’s that bastard,” G. thundered. “He’s always been jealous of me because he’s a monster. He cannot stand the fact that it’s possible to be both handsome and talented. I’ve always found him quite repulsive. And I’m sure he fantasizes about sleeping with you.”
But wouldn’t signing himself “W.” make it a bit obvious? He might as well have signed his full name. I tried to defend poor Jean-Didier, even though privately I had to admit that he probably was sufficiently twisted to have thought up such a ruse, if the objective was to have G. thrown into prison.
“Or might it be Denis,” G. speculated. Denis was a publisher, yet another friend of my mother.
One evening he’d been invited for dinner at our apartment with some other guests. When G. arrived, he stood up and aggressively confronted him. My mother had to ask him to leave. He didn’t need to be asked twice. He was one of the very few people—perhaps the only one—who ever tried to get between G. and me, who expressed his outrage publicly. Might he have written this poison pen letter? It wasn’t really his style. Why, having attacked G. to his face, would he employ such underhanded tactics?
“What about my old primary school teacher? She still lives in the neighborhood, and we’ve stayed close. I’ve never told her about you, but perhaps she spotted us in the street holding hands. She’d be just the type to throw a fit like that. Or the other publisher, Martial, the one with the office on the ground floor where we live, in the courtyard: he’s had a hundred opportunities to spy on us coming and going.” We hardly knew him. Was it possible that he was the friend of the girl’s mother?
My classmates from school? Too young to do something so sophisticated. Not their style.
But what about my father? I hadn’t heard from him at all since he’d made that scene at the hospital. A few years earlier he’d been thinking of setting up a private detective agency. Maybe he’d decided to put his plan into operation in order to have his daughter followed? I couldn’t help thinking that was a possibility. I concealed from G., and presumably from myself too, that deep down this idea gave me a certain pleasure. After all, isn’t a father’s role to protect his daughter? At least it would indicate that I still mattered to him. But why use the convoluted means of an anonymous letter, rather than simply going straight to the Juvenile Squad? Absurd. No, it couldn’t be him. But then again, anything was possible. He was terribly unpredictable.
In two hours, we went through all our acquaintances, conjuring up the most unlikely scenarios. By the end of my first council of war, my entire social circle had become suspect. Not a single one of G.’s enemies was suspected of being the author of the letter. Too many details about me. “It has to be one of your friends,” G. declared, fixing my mother with an icy glare.
G. was summoned four more times to the Juvenile Squad. The police received a whole series of letters like the first, but increasingly loaded, filled with more and more intrusive details, spread out over several months. G. would have been shown most of them, if not all.
As far as my mother’s close friends were concerned, our relationship was an open secret, but beyond those favored few, we were obliged to exercise great caution. We had to be exceedingly discreet. I was beginning to feel like a hunted animal. The sense of being constantly observed gave birth to a sentiment of paranoia, to which was added a persistent feeling of guilt.
; I kept my head down when I was in the street, took increasingly convoluted detours on my way to see G. We made sure never to arrive at the same time. He would get there first, and I would turn up half an hour later. We stopped holding hands when we were together. We no longer walked across the Luxembourg Gardens. After the third summons to the prefecture on the Quai de Gesvres, still “merely a formality,” according to the police, G. was starting to seem genuinely nervous.
One afternoon I had just left his apartment, his bed, we were both hurrying down the stairs, I was late, and I almost bumped into a young couple who were on their way up. I politely nodded a greeting to them and continued running down the stairs. When they reached G., I heard them address him. “Monsieur M.? We’re from the Juvenile Squad.” Apparently even the police watch literary programs on the television, because these two clearly recognized him immediately, even though they had never met before. “It is I,” he replied, in a voice that was suave and relaxed. “How may I help you?” I was amazed by his composure. I was trembling like a leaf. Should I run out of the building, hide in the stairwell, call out something in his defense, loudly declare my love for him, create a diversion so he could escape? I realized almost immediately that nothing like that would be necessary.
The tone of the conversation was cordial.
“We were hoping to be able to speak to you, Monsieur M.”
“Of course, but as it happens, I have a signing at a bookshop. Might you be able to come back another time?”
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