“Of course, Monsieur M.”
G. gestured in my direction, and said, “Would you mind if I just say goodbye to this young student who came to speak to me about my work?” He shook my hand and gave me a slow wink.
“It’s only a routine visit,” said the woman.
“Ah, so you mean you haven’t come to arrest me.” Laughter.
“Of course not, Monsieur M. We’ll be back tomorrow, if that suits you.”
G. didn’t need to worry about them conducting a search. His studio no longer bore the slightest trace of my presence in his life. But, if I had understood correctly, we had only just avoided being caught in flagrante delicto.
Why did neither of the police officers pay any attention to me? I was a teenage girl. The letters all talked of a “young girl of thirteen called V.” Admittedly I was actually fourteen, and perhaps I looked a little older.
All the same, it’s astounding that it didn’t even occur to them.
G. TOOK OUT A LONG-TERM RENTAL OF A HOTEL ROOM for a year to escape further visits from the Juvenile Squad (which he called “intimidation”). The hotel he chose was modest but ideally located—not only was it across the road from my school, but it backed onto the brasserie where G. was a regular, with his own napkin ring. A generous benefactor, a great fan of his work, put up the money for this substantial investment. How else would he be able to write, with the cops on his back? Art takes precedence over everything else.
As in his tiny studio near the Luxembourg Gardens, the first thing one saw upon entering the hotel room was an enormous bed that had pride of place in the center of the room. G. spent more time lying down than sitting or standing; his life, like mine, permanently tended toward the bed. I was spending the night more and more often in this hotel room, only going back to my mother’s apartment when she insisted.
One day G. was told that he had a nasty fungal infection in his eyes. The initial hypothesis was that it was HIV. We waited a long, stressful week to get the test results. I wasn’t afraid; I rather fancied myself a tragic heroine: if it had to be this way, what an honor and a privilege to die for love! This was what I murmured to G. as I wrapped him in my arms. For his part, however, he appeared somewhat less than reassured. One of his friends was dying of the disease, which had attacked his skin and covered it in a horrible kind of leprosy. G. was only too aware of the merciless nature of the virus, the ensuing decline, the inevitability of death. And nothing filled him with more horror than the idea of physical deterioration. His anxiety was palpable in his every gesture.
G. was hospitalized for the raft of tests he needed to be prescribed the appropriate treatment. AIDS was ruled out. One day the phone rang. I was sitting by his bed in his hospital room, so I answered. A distinguished-sounding woman wished to speak to G. I asked who she was, and she replied in a solemn tone of voice, “The president of the Republic is on the line.”
Later, I found out that G. kept a letter in his wallet at all times, in which the president waxed lyrical about G.’s prose style and the immense scope of his cultural knowledge.
The letter was G.’s talisman. In case he was ever arrested, he was sure it would have the power to save him.
IN THE END, G.’S STAY IN THE HOSPITAL WAS BRIEF. AFTER having put to bed the rumor that he had AIDS (easier once he knew for sure he didn’t), he took to sporting even larger sunglasses, all the time, and carrying a cane. I began to understand the game he was playing. He loved to dramatize his situation, look for sympathy. Every episode in his life was an opportunity to be instrumentalized.
For the launch of his new book, G. was invited onto the most celebrated books program on television, a mecca for authors. He invited me to go with him.
In the taxi taking us to the television studio, my nose pressed to the window, my distracted glance tracked the century-old facades as they unspooled in the glow of the streetlamps: monuments, trees, passersby, lovers. It was dusk. G. was, as usual, wearing dark glasses. But behind the opaque lenses I could sense his hostile eyes on me.
“What made you decide to put on makeup?” he said finally.
“I . . . I don’t know . . . this evening, it’s such a special occasion, I wanted to look pretty, for you, to make you happy—”
“And what makes you think that I want to see you looking like a painted lady? You want to look like a ‘grown-up,’ is that it?”
“G., no, I just wanted to look nice for you, that’s all—”
“But I like you to look natural, don’t you understand? You don’t need to do that. I don’t like you like that.”
I swallowed my tears, humiliated in front of the driver, who must have thought my father was quite right to tell me off like that. All tarted up, at my age! To go where, again?
Everything was ruined. The evening was going to be a disaster. My mascara had run and now I really did look terrible. I would be introduced to new people, adults who’d look all knowing when they saw me on G.’s arm; I’d have to smile to make him look good, like I did every time he introduced me to his friends. And all the while I felt like slitting my wrists there and then; he’d broken my heart saying I was no longer to his taste.
An hour later, in the studio where the recording was to take place—after we’d kissed and made up, after he’d covered me in kisses and called me his “beloved child,” his “beautiful schoolgirl”—I took my place in the audience, overflowing with pride.
Three years later, in 1990, G. was invited back onto the same program, called Apostrophes. This time he was called out. I watched part of it several years later on the internet. This episode is rather better known than the one I saw live, because this time G. had not been invited to talk about his inoffensive philosophical dictionary, but the latest volume of his diaries.
In an extract that can still be seen online, the celebrity presenter of the program reels off a list of G.’s conquests, teasing him, in a tone of mild disapproval, about “the stable of young lovers” G. boasts about in his diary.
As the camera cuts away, you see the other guests laughing, not even pretending to disapprove, as the presenter, all fired up now, remarks wryly: “You are, it must be said, something of a connoisseur of teenage girls.”
It’s all very lighthearted up to that point. Knowing laughter, G.’s face flushed with false modesty.
Suddenly one of the guests lashes out, destroying this delightful harmony and unceremoniously launching a full-frontal attack. Her name is Denise Bombardier. She’s a Canadian writer. She says she’s scandalized by the presence of such a vile person on a French television channel, a pervert known for defending pedophilia. Citing the age of the best-known of G.M.’s mistresses (“Fourteen!”), she adds that in her country such behavior would be unimaginable, that Canadians are far more progressive when it comes to children’s rights. And how do the girls he describes in his books get on with their lives afterward? Has anyone given a thought to them?
G. appears taken aback by her attack, but his response is instantaneous. Coldly furious, he corrects her: “There is not a single fourteen-year-old girl among them; a few are two or three years older, which is absolutely the appropriate age to discover love.” (She can’t argue, he knows his criminal code.) Then he suggests that she is fortunate to have come across a man as polite and well-mannered as he, who will not stoop to her level of abuse, before finishing up by saying—as he waves his hands around in that feminine way he has that’s meant to make him seem quite unthreatening—that not a single one of the young ladies has ever complained about her relationship with him.
Game over. The famous male writer has beaten the virago, who is dismissed as a sex-starved harridan, jealous of the happiness of young women so much more fulfilled than she.
If G. had suffered such an attack in my presence on the evening when I was listening in silence in the audience, how might I have reacted? Would I instinctively have come to his defense? After the recording, would I have tried to explain to this woman that she was wrong, and that no, I
was not there against my will? Would I have understood that it was I, hidden among the other spectators, or another young woman like me, whom this woman was trying to protect?
But on that first occasion there was no altercation, no false note to disturb the great event. G.’s book was too high-minded; it didn’t lend itself to that. A concert of congratulations, then a drink backstage. G. introduced me to everyone, as was his wont, with undisguised pride. Another nice way of confirming the truth of what he wrote. Adolescent girls were an integral part of his life. And no one appeared in the least bit shocked or embarrassed by the contrast between G. and my plump, girlish cheeks, bare of makeup and any signs of age.
With hindsight, I realize how much courage the Canadian writer must have mustered in order to stand up alone against the complacency of an entire era. Today, time has done its work, and this clip from Apostrophes has become what’s known as a television “moment.”
It’s been a long time since G. has been invited onto a book program to flaunt his schoolgirl conquests.
FIRST THERE WERE THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS OF DENUNCIATION, then the fear that we both had AIDS: successive threats that crystallized our love for each other. We’d have to hide, disappear, flee the intrusive glances of witnesses, jealous people; I’d have to scream across a courtroom, as they handcuffed my beloved, that I loved him more than anything. We would die in each other’s arms, our skin covered in sores, stretched tight over our bones, but with a single heart that beat solely for one another . . . Life with G. was more than ever beginning to resemble a novel. Would it have a tragic ending?
Somewhere, surely, there was a path to follow, or to locate. That’s what Taoists and Buddhists believe. They call it the “middle way.” The right word, the perfect gesture, the irrefutable feeling of being in the right place at the right time. Where the naked truth lies, in a way.
When you’re fourteen, it’s not normal for a fifty-year-old man to wait for you outside your school. It’s not normal to live with him in a hotel, to find yourself in his bed at teatime with his penis in your mouth. I was aware of all that; I may have been only fourteen, but I wasn’t completely lacking in common sense. In a way I constructed my new identity out of this very abnormality.
On the other hand, I instinctively understood that the fact that no one ever expressed surprise at the situation meant the world around me was out of kilter.
And when, later on, the different therapists I saw did all they could to explain to me that I’d been the victim of a sexual predator, even then it seemed to me that this wasn’t the “middle way” either. That this wasn’t quite right.
I wasn’t yet done with ambivalence.
Part Four
Release
Unless it can be proven to me . . . that, in the infinite run, it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
G. WAS WRITING DAY AND NIGHT. HIS PUBLISHER WAS EXPECTING the delivery of the manuscript by the end of the month. It was a stage I’d learned to recognize. This was the second book he was preparing for publication since we’d met the previous year. From the bed, I observed the angular line of his shoulders, bowed over the little typewriter salvaged from the studio we’d run away from. His back, naked and perfectly straight. The fine musculature, the narrow waist wrapped in a towel. I now knew that this slender body came at a price. Rather a high price, in fact. Twice a year, G. went to a specialist Swiss clinic where he ate only salad and grains, and where alcohol and tobacco were forbidden. He came back each time looking five years younger.
Such vanity didn’t quite fit with the image I had of a man of letters. Yet it was this body, so smooth and hairless, so slim and lithe, so blond and firm, that I had fallen in love with. But I would have preferred not to know the secrets of its preservation.
In a similar register, I discovered that G. had a terrible phobia of any kind of physical blight. One day in the shower I noticed my chest and arms were covered in red welts. Naked and dripping, I rushed out of the bathroom to show him the marks. But when he saw the rash on my body, he looked utterly horrified, shielded his eyes with one hand, and said, without looking at me:
“Seriously, why are you showing me that? Are you trying to turn me off you completely or what?”
Another time, I was sitting on the bed at the end of the school day, staring at my shoes and crying. There was dead silence in the room. I’d made the mistake of mentioning the name of a classmate who’d invited me to a concert.
“What kind of concert?”
“The Cure. It’s New Wave. I was so embarrassed! Everyone knew who they were except me.”
“The what?”
“The Cure.”
“Would you like to explain what you plan to do at a New Wave concert? Apart from smoking joints while you jiggle your head up and down like a retard? And what’s this guy doing inviting you? Is he hoping to grope you between songs, or even worse, corner you in the dark and kiss you? I hope you said no, at least.”
As I approached my fifteenth birthday, G. had taken it into his head to control every area of my life. He basically appointed himself my moral guardian. I had to eat less chocolate so I didn’t get acne. Watch my figure, in general. Stop smoking (I smoked like a chimney).
Nor was my spiritual health to be overlooked. Every evening he made me read the New Testament, after which he would test me to see if I had understood the meaning of Christ’s message in each parable. He was astonished at the extent of my ignorance. I was an atheist, I hadn’t been baptized, I was the daughter of a feminist of the May ’68 generation, and I was rather mutinous regarding the treatment of women in the text that overall I found not only misogynistic but also repetitive and obscure. But fundamentally I was not displeased with this introduction. The Bible is, after all, a literary text without equal. “No,” G. objected when I said this, “it is the book from which all others flow.” Between embraces, he also taught me to do the Hail Mary in French and Russian. I had to know the prayer by heart and recite it to myself at night before going to sleep.
But good Lord, what was he afraid of? That the two of us were going to hell?
“Church is for sinners,” was his response.
G. WENT TO SWITZERLAND FOR TWO WEEKS FOR HIS REJUVENATION cure. He left me the keys to the hotel room as well as to his studio near the Luxembourg Gardens. I was welcome to go there if I wanted to. One evening I violated the taboo and began to read the forbidden books. In one go, like a sleepwalker. I didn’t go outside for two days.
The pornography of certain passages, barely veiled by his cultural references and elegant prose style, made me retch. I stopped at one particular paragraph, in which G. described setting out on a quest for “young asses” on a trip to Manila. “Young boys aged eleven or twelve that I bring to my bed are a rare spice,” he wrote a little further on.
I thought about his readers. I imagined drooling, physically repulsive old men, transfixed by these descriptions of prepubescent bodies. Did being the heroine of one of G.’s novels mean that I too would become the medium for the masturbatory practices of his pedophile readers?
If G. was indeed a pervert, as he had so often been depicted to me—the sleazy creep who, for the price of an airline ticket to the Philippines, gifted himself an orgy with the bodies of eleven-year-old boys, then justified it with the purchase of a schoolbag—did that make me a monster too?
I immediately tried to suppress this idea. But the poison had found its way in, and now it was beginning to spread.
8:20 A.M. FOR THE THIRD WEEK IN A ROW, I FAILED TO GO into school. I got up, took a shower, got dressed, gulped down my tea, pulled on my backpack, and ran down the staircase in my mother’s building. (G. was still away.) It was fine down to the courtyard. But as soon as I went o
ut into the street, things got bad. I was afraid of people’s glances, afraid of bumping into someone I knew, someone I might have to speak to. A neighbor, a shopkeeper, a classmate. I clung to the walls, took ridiculous detours along the least populated streets. Each time I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window, my body stiffened, and I found it almost impossible to move it again.
But today I felt resolute, determined, strong. This time I wasn’t going to give in to panic. Then that sight as I entered the school building: guards lurking in the shadows, checking all the students’ IDs, dozens of backpacks knocking into each other as the kids rushed toward the noisy, messy hive that was the central schoolyard. A teeming, hostile swarm, impossible to avoid. I turned right around and headed down the street in the other direction, toward the market, gasping, my heart thumping, sweating as if I’d committed a crime. Guilty and defenseless.
I took refuge in a local bistro, which was where I spent my time when I wasn’t at the hotel. I could spend hours there and no one would bother me. The waiter was always very discreet. He would watch me blackening my journal or reading quietly in the unlikely company of some of the regulars at the bar. He was never anything but tactful. Never asked me why I wasn’t in school. Never insisted that I consume more than a single cup of coffee and a glass of water, even if I sat there for three hours in the chilly, anonymous room, where you could sometimes hear the sound of the pinball machine over the clinking of glasses and coffee cups.
I tried to catch my breath. Forced myself to focus. Breathe. Think. Make a decision. I tried to piece together a few sentences in my notebook. But nothing came. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up—to be living with a writer and not have the slightest inspiration.
It was 8:35. Three streets away, the bell rang. The students went up the stairs, sat down in pairs, took out their schoolbooks and pencil cases. The teacher entered the classroom. Everyone stopped talking as he took attendance. When he got to the end of the alphabet, he said my name without even bothering to raise his eyes to the back of the class. “Absent, as usual,” he said, in a bored tone of voice.
Consent Page 6