AFTER G.’S RETURN FROM SWITZERLAND, RAGING HARPIES began turning up at all hours outside his room at the hotel. We would hear them weeping in the corridor. Sometimes a girl might slip a note under the doormat. One evening he went out to talk to one of them, closing the door behind him so that I couldn’t eavesdrop on their conversation. Shouting and crying, then strangled sobs and whispers. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he managed to reason with the Valkyrie, who turned and raced back down the stairs.
When I asked G. for an explanation, he pretended they were fans who had followed him down the street, or that they’d somehow managed to obtain his address, mostly through his publisher (a convenient scapegoat), who apparently was insufficiently concerned about his peace of mind.
Then he told me he was going away again, this time to Brussels, where he had been invited to do an event at a bookshop and to speak at a literary festival. I’d be on my own at the hotel again. But a couple of days later, on Saturday, I was walking down the street with a girlfriend when I saw him, arm in arm with a girl on the opposite sidewalk. Like an automaton, I turned on my heels, trying to wipe the image from my mind. It was impossible. G. was in Belgium, he’d sworn to me he was.
I MET G. WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN. WE BECAME LOVERS WHEN I was fourteen. Now I was fifteen and I had no means of comparison, since I had never known any other man. And yet it wasn’t long before I became aware of the repetitive nature of our sexual relationship, the difficulties G. had in maintaining his erection, the laborious subterfuges he used to obtain it (frenetically masturbating when I turned over), the increasingly mechanical nature of our lovemaking, the boredom I was beginning to feel, the fear of letting slip anything that might be construed as criticism, the almost insurmountable difficulty of indicating any desire that would not only break our routine but might actually enhance my pleasure. Since I had read the forbidden books, the ones in which he flaunted his collection of mistresses and detailed his trips to Manila, something tacky and sordid now tarnished these intimate episodes in which I could no longer discern the slightest trace of love. I felt degraded and more alone than ever.
And yet, apparently, our love was unique and sublime. He repeated it so often, I ended up believing in its transcendence. Stockholm syndrome is not just a theory. Why shouldn’t a fourteen-year-old girl be in love with a man thirty-six years her senior? I turned this question over in my mind a hundred times, without realizing it was the wrong one. It wasn’t my attraction to him that needed to be interrogated, but his to me.
The situation would have been very different if at the same age I’d fallen madly in love with a fifty-year-old man, who, having had several relationships with women his own age, and in spite of knowing it was morally questionable, had succumbed to my youth, fallen madly in love, and yielded just this once to his love for a teenage girl. In that case, I admit, our extraordinary passion might have been sublime, if I’d been the one to push him to break the law for love—if not for the fact that G. had repeated the same story a hundred times already. It might indeed have been unique and infinitely romantic if I could have been sure of being the first and the last—if I had, in short, been the exception in his love life. If that had been the case, how could anyone fail to pardon his transgression? Love has no age limit. That was not the issue.
In reality, in the context of G.’s life, I now knew that his desire for me had been repeated an infinite number of times, was pathetically banal, and revealed a neurosis that took the form of an uncontrollable addiction. I might have been the youngest of his Parisian conquests, but his books were peopled with other Lolitas who were fifteen (barely a year older; it hardly made much of a difference), and if he had been living in a country that was less vigilant about protecting minors, my fourteen years wouldn’t have been worth a mention next to an eleven-year-old boy with almond-shaped eyes.
G. was not like other men. He boasted of only having had sexual relations with girls who were virgins or boys who had barely reached puberty, then recounted these stories in his books. This was precisely what he was doing when he took possession of my youth for his sexual and literary ends. Every day, thanks to me, he satisfied a passion frowned upon by the law, and prepared to brandish this victory triumphantly in his new novel.
No, this man was not driven by the best intentions. This man was not a good man. He was precisely what we had learned to fear when we were children: an ogre.
Our affair was a dream so powerful that nothing, not a single one of the few warnings I received from those around me, was enough to awaken me. It was the most perverse nightmare. A violence that had no name.
THE SPELL WAS BEGINNING TO LIFT. IT WAS ABOUT TIME. But no Prince Charming came to my aid to slash through the jungle of creepers that bound me to this kingdom of darkness. Every day I awoke to a new reality. A reality that I was still unable to accept in its entirety, for it risked tearing me apart.
But in front of G., I no longer bothered to hide my qualms. What I had found out about him, what he had tried to hide from me up till then, appalled me. I tried to understand. What pleasure did he get from picking up kids in Manila? And why this need to be sleeping with ten girls at once, as he boasted in his diaries? Who was he, really?
When I tried to get an answer, he parried with an attack, calling me an insufferable pedant.
“Who do you think you are, with all your questions? A modern version of the Inquisition? Have you become a feminist all of a sudden? That’s the last thing I need!”
From then on, G. assailed me every day with the same mantra:
“You’re mad. You don’t know how to live in the present, just like every other woman. No woman is capable of savoring the moment, it’s as though it’s in your genes. You’re all chronically unsatisfied, forever imprisoned by your hysteria.”
And just like that, there they lay, on the garbage heap of history, all those tender words, all those my darling childs, my beautiful schoolgirls.
“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m only fifteen, as you are perfectly well aware, so not quite yet what one would call a ‘woman’! Anyway, what do you know about women? Once they’re over eighteen, you’re no longer remotely interested in them!”
But I was no match for him when it came to verbal sparring. I was too young, too inexperienced. When I confronted him, the writer and intellectual, I found myself cruelly lacking the necessary vocabulary. I wasn’t familiar with the terms “narcissistic pervert” and “sexual predator.” I didn’t know there was such a thing as a person for whom the Other does not exist. I still believed that violence was only ever physical. And G. manipulated language like others manipulate swords. With the simplest expression he could deal me a fatal blow that would destroy me. It was impossible to do battle with him on equal terms.
Nonetheless, I was old enough to discern the hypocrisy of the situation and recognize that every oath of fidelity, every promise he made to leave me with the most marvelous memories, was just one more lie in the service of his books and his sexual desires. I surprised myself with how much I hated him for trapping me inside the fiction that was being written, constantly, in book after book, in which he always gave himself the best role: a fantasy bolted to his ego, which he then displayed in public. I couldn’t bear the way he made a religion out of dissimulation and lies and used his vocation as a writer as an alibi to justify his addiction. I was no longer taken in by his games.
He, meanwhile, began to resent even the most offhand remark I made. His diary became my worst enemy, the means by which G. filtered our love affair, transforming it into an unhealthy and entirely one-sided passion that I had single-handedly crafted. At the first hint of a reproach, he would rush to uncap his pen: “You shall see what you shall see, my pretty one! What a portrait I’m going to sketch of you in my little black book!”
Because I was turning against him, because it no longer gave me any joy to slip under the sheets between lessons, he had to get rid of me. With the power of the written word, he turned his “little V.
” into an unstable teenage girl eaten up with jealousy. He said whatever he wanted; I was just a character now, living on borrowed time, like every other girl who’d come before me. It wouldn’t be long before he erased me completely from the pages of his wretched diary. For his readers, it was merely a story, words. For me, it was the beginning of a breakdown.
But what is the life of an anonymous adolescent worth compared to a work of literature written by a superior being?
The fairy tale was over, the spell was broken, and Prince Charming had revealed his true face.
ONE AFTERNOON AFTER SCHOOL I WALKED THROUGH THE door into his room in the hotel. It was empty; G. was shaving in the bathroom. I put my schoolbag on a chair and sat down on the mattress. One of his black notebooks had been casually tossed onto the bed. It was open at the page where G. had scrawled a few lines in his signature turquoise ink: “4:30 p.m. Picked up Nathalie from school. When she caught sight of me on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, her face lit up. Surrounded by all these other young people, she looked as radiant as an angel . . . We spent a delicious, divine time together. She is extraordinarily passionate. I wouldn’t be surprised if this young girl were to end up having a more significant future in these diaries.”
The words detached themselves from the page in a swarm, like a crowd of demons, as my whole world collapsed around me. The furniture in the bedroom became a heap of smoking ruins; cinders floated in the air that I could no longer breathe.
G. came out of the bathroom. He found me in tears, my eyes bloodshot, gesturing in disbelief at the open notebook. He turned pale, then flew into a rage and exploded.
“What? How dare you make a scene! How dare you disturb my work! I’m in the middle of writing a novel! Can you imagine for a moment the pressure I’m under? Can you even remotely conceive of the energy and concentration required? You have no idea what it is to be an artist, a creator! It’s true I don’t have to clock in at a factory every day, but the agony I go through when I am writing, you haven’t the slightest idea what it’s like! What you’ve just read is just the outline of a future novel—it has nothing to do with us, nothing to do with you.”
This lie was the last straw. I might have only just turned fifteen, but I couldn’t help seeing what he said as an insult to my intelligence, a wholehearted rejection of me as a person. This betrayal of all his fine promises, this revelation of his true nature, winded me like a punch in the gut. There was nothing left between us. I’d been cheated, tricked, abandoned to my fate. And I only had myself to blame. I hoisted a leg over the window balustrade and prepared to jump. He pulled me back in at the last moment.
I slammed the door as I left.
I’D ALWAYS HAD A PROPENSITY FOR WANDERING, AND A perplexing fascination for the local drifters I stopped to chat with at the slightest opportunity. That afternoon I roamed the neighborhood in a daze for hours, looking for some kindred spirit, a human being to talk to. Beneath a bridge I sat down alongside a down-and-out and dissolved into tears. The old man barely raised an eyebrow and mumbled some words in a language I didn’t recognize. We sat for a while in silence, watching the barges as they floated by. Then I stood up and went on my way, not heading in any particular direction.
Almost mechanically, I eventually found myself in front of an elegant apartment building where one of G’s friends lived—Emil Cioran, a Romanian-born philosopher whom he had introduced to me at the beginning of our relationship as his mentor.
I was filthy, my hair was a mess, my face smudged with dirt from the hours I’d spent sitting on the ground in the neighborhood whose every bookshop, every crack in the sidewalk, every tree reminded me of G. I pushed open the heavy door of the building. Trembling, dirt beneath my fingernails, sweating, I must have looked like a vagabond who’d just given birth behind a bush. Tiptoeing, my heart thumping, I made my way up the carpeted staircase and rang the bell, my face burning as I held back tears. A diminutive middle-aged woman opened the door. She looked at me with a guarded expression. I said I was sorry to disturb, but I’d like to see her husband if he was home; all of a sudden Emil’s wife’s expression turned to horror as she took in my disheveled appearance. “Emil, it’s V., G.’s friend!” she shouted toward the other end of the apartment, then bustled down a corridor that led to the kitchen, and from the metallic sounds I guessed she was putting on the kettle to make a cup of tea.
Cioran came into the room, one eyebrow raised, a discreet but eloquent indication of his surprise, and invited me to sit down. That was all it took for me to burst into tears. I wept like a baby howling for its mother, pathetically using my sleeve to try to wipe the snot from my nose. Cioran handed me an embroidered handkerchief.
The blind confidence that had led me to him was predicated on a single thing: his resemblance to my grandfather, who was also born in Eastern Europe. He had the same white hair with a receding hairline, combed toward the back of the head, the same piercing blue eyes, the same hooked nose and accent that could be cut with a knife (“Tzitrón? Tchocoláte?” as he poured the tea).
I’d never managed to finish any of his books, even though they’re extremely short, composed as they are only of aphorisms. He was known as a “nihilist.” And, it turned out, in this regard he did not disappoint.
“Emil, I can’t bear it any longer,” I said, hiccupping between sobs. “He tells me I’m crazy, and I shall end up going crazy if he carries on like this. His lies, the way he just disappears, all the girls who keep turning up at the hotel. I feel like a prisoner. I’ve got no one else to talk to. He’s alienated me from my friends, my family . . .”
“V.,” he interrupted me, in a very serious tone of voice. “G. is an artist, a great writer, and one day the world will recognize him as such. Or perhaps not, who knows? If you love him, you must accept who he is. G. will never change. It is an immense honor to have been chosen by him. Your role is to accompany him on the path of creation, and to bow to his impulses. I know he adores you. But too often women do not understand an artist’s needs. Did you know that Tolstoy’s wife spent her days typing out the manuscripts that her husband wrote in longhand, tirelessly correcting every single mistake? She was utterly self-sacrificing and self-effacing, which is precisely the kind of devotion that every artist’s wife owes the man she loves.”
“But, Emil, he never stops lying to me.”
“But literature is all about lying, my dear young friend! Didn’t you realize?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was this really him, the great philosopher, the wise man, uttering these words? Was he, the supreme intellectual authority, really asking a fifteen-year-old girl to put her life on hold for the sake of an old pervert? Telling her to zip it, once and for all? I couldn’t take my eyes off Cioran’s wife’s chubby little fingers gripping the handle of the teapot. I managed to restrain myself from releasing the flood of invective burning my lips. All dolled up, her blue-tinted hair matching her blouse, silently nodding at her husband’s every word. Once upon a time she’d been a successful actress. At some point she stopped making films. No need to ask when that was. The only practical observation that Emil deigned to offer me—more enlightening than I realized at the time—was that G. would never change.
SOMETIMES AFTER SCHOOL I USED TO BABYSIT A LITTLE boy, the son of one of my mother’s neighbors. I helped him with his homework, gave him a bath, made his supper, played with him a bit, then put him to bed. On evenings when his mother was going out for dinner, a young man took over from me.
Youri was a twenty-two-year-old law student who played the saxophone and worked part-time to pay for his studies. Coincidentally—or not—he also had Russian origins, through his father. At first we merely crossed paths. We’d greet each other, exchange a few words, to start with, anyway. But after a few weeks, I began staying a little longer before going home. We were growing fond of each other.
One evening the two of us were leaning on the windowsill looking out as it grew dark. Youri asked me if I had a bo
yfriend, and I found myself confiding in him, timidly at first, and then eventually divulging the details of my situation. Again, I spoke of myself as if I were a prisoner. At the age of fifteen I was trapped in a labyrinth, unable to get back on track, my daily life an endless round of arguments followed by pillow talk, our time in bed the only moment I still felt loved. It drove me crazy, on the rare occasions I went into school, to compare myself to my classmates, who went home to listen to their Étienne Daho and Depeche Mode records and eat bowls of cereal, while I was satisfying the sexual urges of a man who was older than my father, because my fear of being abandoned was stronger than reason, and I persisted in believing that this abnormal situation made me interesting.
I looked up at Youri. His face was puce with anger and his features were twisted into a violent expression that I wouldn’t have imagined him capable of. He took my hand with an unexpected gentleness and stroked my cheek. “Do you not realize how much this bastard is exploiting and hurting you? You’re not the one to blame, he is! You’re not crazy and you’re not a prisoner. You just have to get your confidence back and leave him.”
G. COULD SEE I WAS SLIPPING AWAY FROM HIM. IT WAS obviously intolerable for him to feel that I was no longer under his thumb, although I had said nothing to him about my conversations with Youri. For the first time, G. suggested that I go with him to the Philippines. He wanted to prove to me that the country was nothing like the devil’s lair that he described in his books. Most of all he wanted the two of us to go somewhere far away, to the other side of the world, anywhere out of the world. To get close to each other again, to love each other like the very first time. I was paralyzed. The thought of agreeing terrified me, and yet I had an irrepressible longing, an absurd hope, that I would see my nightmare dissipate, would discover that the sickening descriptions in some of his books were just phantasmagoria, provocations, narcissistic boasts. That in fact there was no child sex trade in Manila. That there never had been. Deep down I knew it wasn’t true, deep down I knew that it would be crazy to go there with him. Would he expect me to share our bed with an eleven-year-old boy? In any case, my mother, to whom he had boldly made his absurd request, had the presence of mind to refuse point-blank. Since I was a minor, I couldn’t leave the country without her permission. Her refusal took a great weight off my shoulders.
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