Consent

by Vanessa Springora

  For a while now G. had been insisting on the gap between fiction and reality, between his writing and his real life, which he claimed I was unable to grasp. He was always trying to throw me off the scent, to thwart the sixth sense I had that enabled me to detect his lies. Gradually I was discovering the extent of his talent as a manipulator, the mountain of falsehoods he had built up between us. It was an extraordinary strategy, the way he calculated every minute detail. His entire intellect revolved around satisfying his desires and then transposing them into one of his books. Every single act was guided by these two motives: writing and coming.

  AN UNSETTLING IDEA HAD BEGUN TO GERMINATE IN MY mind. An idea that was made even more unbearable by the fact that it was entirely plausible; indisputably logical, even. Once it had surfaced, it proved hard to shake.

  G. was the only person in our social circle whom I’d never suspected of being behind the series of anonymous letters. Yet their frequency and their intrusiveness conferred on the beginnings of our love affair a dangerous, novelistic glamour: we were alone against the world, united in the face of the revulsion of decent, law-abiding people; we’d had to brave the suspicions of the police, submit to their inquisitorial looks, we’d even suspected all my friends and acquaintances, who’d turned into a single enemy, a monster with a thousand pairs of jealous eyes trained upon us. Who other than G. would these letters have benefited? Not only did they bond us to one another better than the hatred between two Sicilian families ever could, but, after having definitively alienated me from every person who might be even vaguely critical of him, G. would be able to recycle them into his next novel, and publish them in their entirety in his diary (which is precisely what he went on to do, as a matter of fact). Of course, it was a risky endeavor. He might have been sent to prison. But even that would have been worth it: what a plot twist, what a coup de théâtre, what material for a book! If he were arrested, he could count on my devotion; he knew I would shout my love for him from the rooftops, I’d shriek at the top of my voice how in a more tolerant country we would be allowed to marry, I’d demand my legal independence from my parents, alert officials and celebrities who would rally around our cause. What a fabulous spectacle it would have made! In fact, as it turned out, the police were rather less suspicious than one might have imagined, and all the decent, law-abiding people returned to their daily lives without worrying unduly about “little V.,” and the occasional fits of indignation of those around us gradually faded away. Thinking about it, it seems obvious to me now—though my memory might be playing tricks on me—that it was precisely during this period, when the police, at last, began to leave him alone, that boredom, and the incipient, though initially imperceptible, loss of interest in our relationship, began to worm its way inside him.

  ONCE, JUST ONCE, I DARED TO ASK HIM A QUESTION THAT up until then had never even occurred to me. I felt compelled to ask this unwonted question in spite of my youth—unless it was, rather, precisely because of my youth. Once it had occurred to me, it nagged at me insistently, and I held on to it like a life preserver, because it offered me the hope that I might somehow recognize myself a little in G. I had to ask him this question, as sensitive as it was, without lowering my eyes from his, without trembling, without looking away.

  We were lying alongside each other in his room in the sleazy hotel, sharing a moment of intimacy and tranquility, without quarreling or griping, tears or doors slamming. Something sad now lodged between us. The knowledge that the end was coming, the exhaustion from constantly hurting each other. G. ran his fingers through my hair. I started to speak.

  Had there been an adult during his childhood or adolescence who’d taken the role of his “initiator”? I deliberately avoided using words like “rape,” “abuse,” or “sexual assault.”

  To my great surprise, G. admitted that yes, there had been someone, once, when he was thirteen: a man, a friend of the family. There was no affect in this revelation. Not a trace of emotion. And I don’t think I’m mistaken in noting that there is no evidence of this memory in any of his books. Yet it is surely an enlightening element of his autobiography. As I had learned at my expense, the aim of G.’s literary process was to distort reality to flatter himself. It was never about revealing even a scrap of truth about himself. Or if it was, it was always cloaked with too much narcissism to lay claim to any genuine honesty. This infinitesimal instant of candor, these unexpected words addressed to me were his unwitting gift to me. I became a person again in my own right, rather than simply the object of his pleasure. I was someone in possession of a little secret about his past, someone who could hear him, perhaps, without judging him. Someone who understood him, perhaps, better than anyone else.

  YOURI’S GENTLE PRESENCE, HIS THOUGHTFULNESS, THE very few faithful friends I’d grown apart from over the previous two years with whom I was timidly reviving our friendship, and the longing to dance and laugh with people my own age began to supplant G.’s hold over me. Our emotional bond was coming loose, and the jungle in the depraved kingdom was opening up to a different world where, against all the odds, the sun shone and was just waiting for me to show up for the party to begin. G. went away for a month. He needed to make some progress with his new book. In Manila, there would be no distractions, he swore to me disingenuously. Every day Youri tried to persuade me to leave G., but it was impossible to confront him before he left. What was I afraid of? I vowed to take advantage of his absence by writing to him. Our love affair would end as it had begun: by letter. Deep down inside, I was sure that he was expecting our breakup. That he wanted it, even. A strategist beyond compare, I reminded myself.

  But, as things turned out, it was quite the opposite. After he returned from the Philippines, he wrote to tell me how devastated he had been by my letter. He didn’t understand. I still loved him: every single word I wrote betrayed my real feelings. How could I draw a line under our love affair, the most beautiful, the purest love story that had ever been? He pestered me by phone, in letters, began following me down the street again. He was outraged by my decision to leave him. The only person he loved was me. There was no other girl in his life. As for the Philippines, he swore blind he had behaved with irreproachable chastity. But that wasn’t the problem now. I didn’t care about him and his escapades anymore. It was my redemption I was seeking, not his.

  When I told my mother I had left G., she was momentarily struck dumb, then she said, sadly, “Poor thing, are you sure? He adores you!”

  Part Five

  The Imprint

  It is curious that a first love, if by the frail state in which it leaves our heart it opens the way to our subsequent loves, does not at least provide us, in view of the identity of symptoms and sufferings, with the means of curing them.

  —Marcel Proust, The Captive

  G. GREW TIRED OF FIGHTING, GAVE UP PURSUING ME WITH his letters, and stopped calling my mother, whom he had been imploring day and night to stop me from severing contact with him.

  Youri took his place in my life. He gave me the courage to leave G. and to resist all his frantic attempts to make me go back on my decision. I turned sixteen and moved in with Youri, who still shared a small apartment with his mother. My own mother didn’t argue. We weren’t on very good terms. I frequently reproached her for having failed to protect me. She would answer that my resentment was unjustified; all she’d done was respect my desires and let me live my life as I wished.

  “You’re the one who was sleeping with him and I’m the one who’s supposed to apologize?” she said to me one day.

  “So the fact that I hardly ever go to school anymore, the number of times I’ve nearly been expelled, it was a symptom of something, no? You might have noticed that my life hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses.”

  But the conversation was impossible. Logically, the fact that she had accepted my relationship with G. meant that she considered me already an adult. Which meant that my choices were entirely my own.

  Now all I wanted was to h
ave a normal life, the life of someone my own age: under no circumstances to rock the boat, to be like everyone else. Now things ought to be easier. I was in high school. I was going to start going to school again. I was determined not to draw sidelong glances from certain students; I’d ignore the rumors that were starting to circulate among the teachers. “That new girl, apparently G.M. used to come and pick her up every day after class. I know some of the teachers at her old school—you know she was at Prévert—they told me. Can you imagine? And her parents just turned a blind eye!” One day I was having a coffee at the counter of the bistro where all the students used to hang out between classes. A teacher came and sat down beside me. He told me I was the subject of discussion in the teachers’ lounge. “You’re the girl who was dating G.M., aren’t you? I’ve read all his books. I’m a big fan.”

  It would have been extremely satisfying to turn around and answer, “So you’re a disgusting pervert, right?” But now I had to make a good impression. I smiled politely, paid for my coffee, and left, trying to ignore the lewd way he stared at my breasts.

  It’s not easy to regain your virginity.

  Another day, a man stopped me on a side street, not far from my school. He knew my name. Told me he’d seen me several times in the neighborhood with G. a few months earlier. Unleashed a torrent of obscenities, lavish details about everything I presumably knew how to do in bed now, thanks to G. A heroine straight out of Sade!

  Nothing excites these old men more than the thought of a completely depraved teenage girl.

  I ran. I was crying by the time I got to school.

  Youri did what he could to stave off my bouts of despair, which he was beginning to find oppressive, not least because he thought they were unjustified. “Come on, please, you’re young, your whole life is ahead of you. Smile!” Except that I was nothing but a ball of rage exhausting myself by acting like everything was fine, trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. I did everything I could to suppress this anger, concealing it by turning it back on myself. The guilty party was me. I was the dropout, the slut, the good-time girl, the pedophile’s accomplice, the young woman whose besotted letters served as a kind of approval for the charter flights to Manila carrying perverts who masturbated over photos of boy scouts. And when I could no longer mask my distress, I sank into a depression, where all I wanted was to disappear from the face of the earth.

  Only Youri, perhaps, could see it. He adored me, with the youthful ardor of a twenty-two-year-old, and what he loved more than anything was making love. Who could blame him?

  When it came to sex, I oscillated between feeling all-powerful and completely apathetic. Sometimes I was filled with a feeling of intoxication—all this power! How easy it was to make a man happy. And then suddenly, at the point of orgasm, I’d dissolve into tears for no apparent reason. Too much happiness, was all I could tell him when he showed concern at my sobs. For entire days I couldn’t bear for him to touch me. And then the infernal cycle would begin again. I would recall my mission in life: pleasuring men. That was my condition, my status. And so I would offer my services anew, with renewed zeal and a simulated conviction that I even managed to convince myself was real. I faked it. Faked enjoying sex, faked my pleasure, faked knowing what the point of it all was. Deep down I was ashamed of being able to do it all so instinctively, when others had barely experienced their first kiss. I knew perfectly well I’d skipped a stage. I’d gone too fast, too early, with the wrong person. I wished I’d experienced all those moments of intimacy for the first time with Youri. I wished he had been my initiator, my first lover. Yet I didn’t dare admit it. I didn’t have enough confidence in myself, or in him.

  And more than anything, I couldn’t tell him that the image I couldn’t get out of my head whenever we made love was G.

  Yet G. had promised to bequeath me the most wonderful memories.

  For years, however tender and considerate the boys with whom I attempted an uncomplicated sexual relationship, I found myself unable to get back to the point Julien and I had reached—the moment of innocent discovery and shared pleasure between two equal beings.

  Later, with a little more maturity and courage, I opted for a different strategy: to tell the entire truth, admit that I felt like a doll lacking all desire who had no idea how her own body worked, who had learned only one thing: how to be an instrument for other people’s games.

  Every time, this revelation brought the relationship to an end. No one wants a broken toy.

  IN 1974, TWELVE YEARS BEFORE WE MET, G. PUBLISHED an essay entitled Under Sixteen, a manifesto of sorts calling for the sexual liberation of minors, which simultaneously caused a scandal and made him famous. Though the scandal was extremely damaging, it endowed G.’s work with an inflammatory dimension that increased interest in his writing in general. While his friends thought it would be social suicide, it turned out that on the contrary, the book gave his literary career a boost, bringing him to the notice of a broader public.

  I hadn’t read it and I didn’t grasp its import until many years after our relationship ended.

  In the essay, G. championed the theory that the sexual initiation of children is a positive act that should be encouraged by society. The practice was widespread in antiquity, evidence of the ancients’ recognition of the right of adolescents to their freedom of choice and desire.

  “The very young are tempting. They are also tempted. I have never stolen so much as a kiss or a caress by coercion or force,” he writes.

  He must have forgotten the times when those kisses and caresses were paid for, in countries less punctilious about underage prostitution. If one were to believe the descriptions he jotted down in his black Moleskine notebooks, one might even be persuaded that Filipino children threw themselves at him through sheer greed, the way a child might pounce on a strawberry ice cream. (Unlike all those bourgeois Western children, the children of Manila are liberated.)

  In Under Sixteen he militates for a complete liberalization of morals, an open-mindedness that would at last authorize an adult not to orgasm over an adolescent but with an adolescent. What a worthy project. Or the worst kind of sophistry. In the essay, and in the open letter that G. went on to publish three years later, when you look closely at what he says, it becomes clear that he is not defending the interests of adolescents, but those of adults “unjustly” convicted for having had sexual relationships with them.

  The role that G. liked to give himself in his books was that of benefactor, responsible for the initiation of young people into the joys of sex; a professional, a veteran; in other words—if one might dare to be so bold—an expert. In reality, this exceptional talent was limited to not making his partner suffer. And where there is neither pain nor coercion, there is no rape. The challenge of the undertaking consists in respecting this golden rule, without exception. Physical violence leaves a memory for a person to react against. It’s appalling, but tangible.

  Sexual abuse, on the other hand, is insidious and perverse, and the victim might be barely aware it is happening. No one speaks of “sexual abuse” between adults. Of the abuse of the vulnerable, yes, of an elderly person, for example. Vulnerability is precisely that infinitesimal space into which people with the psychological profile of G. can insinuate themselves. It’s the element that makes the notion of consent so beside the point. Very often, in the case of sexual abuse or abuse of the vulnerable, one comes across the same denial of reality, the same refusal to consider oneself a victim. And indeed, how is it possible to acknowledge having been abused when it’s impossible to deny having consented, having felt desire, for the very adult who was so eager to take advantage of you? For many years I struggled with the very idea of the victim, and was incapable of seeing myself as one.

  G. was right about the fact that puberty and adolescence are periods of explosive sensuality: sex is everywhere, you’re overflowing with desire, it invades you, it’s like a wave, it has to be satisfied straightaway; all that’s needed is an encounter w
ith another person to share it with.

  But some differences are simply irresolvable. With all the goodwill in the world, an adult is still an adult. And an adult’s desire can only ever be a trap for an adolescent. How can both have the same level of understanding of their bodies, their desires? What’s more, a vulnerable adolescent is always going to seek love before sexual satisfaction. Sometimes, in exchange for an indication of affection (or the sum of money their family needs), an adolescent will agree to become the object of pleasure, thus renouncing, for a long time to come, the right to be the subject, actor, and master of their own sexuality.

  What characterizes sexual predators in general and pedophiles in particular is the refusal to acknowledge the gravity of their acts. They tend to present themselves either as victims (they were seduced by a child, or a female temptress) or as benefactors (who did only good to their victims).