In Lolita, Nabokov’s novel, which I read and reread after I first met G., the reader is, on the contrary, confronted with confusing disclosures. Humbert Humbert pens his confession in the psychiatric hospital where he later dies, not long before his trial. He does not go easy on himself at all.
How lucky Lolita was: at least she obtained this compensation, the unambiguous recognition of her stepfather’s guilt, in the voice of the very person who had stolen her childhood. How unfortunate that she was already dead when he made his confession.
Nowadays I often hear it said that a work like Nabokov’s, were it to be published today, in our so-called neo-Puritan era, would inevitably encounter censorship. And yet I don’t think that Lolita is even remotely an apology for pedophilia. Quite the contrary: it’s the strongest possible denunciation of it—the most compelling ever written on the subject. I’ve never believed that Nabokov was a pedophile. Obviously, his persistent interest in such a subversive subject—which he tackled twice, first in The Enchanter, in his native Russian, then, several years later, in English, with the iconic Lolita, which garnered worldwide success—raised a few suspicions. Nabokov might indeed have struggled against such a predilection. I couldn’t possibly know. But despite all of Lolita’s subconscious perversity, despite her games of seduction and her starlet’s simpering, Nabokov never tried to make Humbert Humbert pass for a benefactor, and still less for a decent person. The tale of his character’s passion for young girls, an unrestrained and pathological passion that tortured him throughout his entire life, is, on the contrary, implacably clear-sighted.
In his books, G. comes across as far from contrite or self-questioning. Not a trace of regret or remorse. Reading him, you might imagine he was brought into this world to offer adolescents the fulfillment that a culture of inhibition denied them, to open them up to their desires, reveal their sensuality, develop their capacity to give and to receive.
Such a capacity for self-denial merits a statue in the Luxembourg Gardens.
IT WAS THANKS TO G. THAT I DISCOVERED, AT MY EXPENSE, HOW books can be a snare to trap those one claims to love, how they can become a blunt instrument for betrayal. As if his appearance in my life had not been devastating enough, now he had to document it, falsify it, record it, brand it forever with his crimes.
The panicked reaction among primitive peoples when their image is captured can give rise to amusement. Now I understood better than anyone the feeling of being trapped in a deceptive likeness, a reductive version of oneself, a grotesque, contorted snapshot. To seize the image of the other with such brutality is indeed to steal their soul.
G.’s novels, in which I was supposedly the heroine, appeared in bookshops when I was between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, at a rhythm that left me no respite. After that came the volume of his diary covering the period of our relationship, including some letters I wrote when I was fourteen; two years later the paperback version of the same book; then a collection of breakup letters, including mine. That’s without counting all the newspaper articles and television interviews in which he reveled in saying my first name. Later there would be another volume of the contents of his little black notebooks, in which he returned almost obsessively to the subject of our separation.
Every one of these publications, whatever the context in which I found out about it (there was always some well-intentioned person excited to let me know), bordered on harassment. For everybody else it was the beating of a butterfly’s wings on a tranquil lake, but for me it was like an earthquake, an invisible tremor that upended the very foundations of my life, a blade plunged into a wound that had never scarred over, a hundred steps backward in the progress I thought I had made in getting on with my life.
When I read the volume of his diaries that was largely devoted to our breakup, it triggered a terrible panic attack. G. had begun to instrumentalize our relationship by depicting it through the prism that most flattered him. His brainwashing tactics were positively Machiavellian. In his diary he transformed our love affair into the perfect fiction. That of a libertine transformed into a saint, of a rehabilitated pervert, a chronically unfaithful man who got his second chance, a fiction that he wrote but never lived, published after the requisite interval—that is, the period of time necessary for life to be duly dissipated in a novel. I was the betrayer, the woman who had ruined this perfect love, who had destroyed everything by refusing to go along with this transformation. The woman who had not wanted to believe in this fiction.
I was stupefied by his refusal to recognize that this love carried within it his own failure, from the first moment, that it had no possible future because the only thing G. was able to love in me was a fugitive, transitory moment: my adolescence.
I read the book in one sitting, in a fugue state, a confused stupor of powerlessness and rage, horrified by his lies and bad faith, by his propensity for self-victimization and the way he shifted responsibility for any blame away from himself. I held my breath as I got to the final pages, as if some invisible force was pressing on my solar plexus and my throat. All the vital energy drained from my body, as though absorbed by the ink of this vile book. I only managed to calm down after a shot of valium.
I also learned that, in spite of my categorical refusal to be in contact with him, G. continued, deviously, to stay informed about what I was up to. Through whom, I don’t know. In the pages of his diary he even insinuated that after we had broken up I’d begun hanging out with a junkie, thanks to whom I had ended up in a vortex of the most abject debauchery, just as he had predicted I would when I left him. He, my protector, had done all he could to keep me away from the hazards of youth.
This was how G. justified his role in the lives of the adolescent girls he seduced. He kept them from becoming lost souls, social rejects. All those poor, hapless girls whose lives he had tried, in vain, to save!
No one told me at the time that I could press charges, sue his publisher, that he didn’t have the right to publish my letters without my consent, nor to write about the sex life of someone who was a minor at the time of the relationship, making her recognizable, not just by the use of her first name and the initial of her last but with a thousand other little details. For the first time I began to see myself as a victim, though I couldn’t put my finger on the word for that hazy feeling of powerlessness. I also had the vague sense that not only had I been used to satisfy his sexual urges during our relationship, but now I was being used to cast a favorable light on him, enabling him, through no efforts of my own, to continue to broadcast his literary propaganda.
After I read the book, I had the profound sense that my life had been ruined before I had even lived it. With a stroke of his pen my history had been erased, carefully wiped away, then revised and rewritten in black and white, and published in an edition of a thousand copies. What link could there be between this paper character, fabricated from beginning to end, and the person I really was? Turning me into a fictional character, when my adult life had barely begun, was a way of preventing me from spreading my wings, of condemning me to remaining trapped in a prison made of words. G. must have known this. But I suppose he simply didn’t care.
He had immortalized me; what could I possibly have to complain about?
Writers do not always profit by becoming famous. It would be wrong to imagine they are like other people. They are much, much worse.
They are vampires.
I gave up any literary ambition I’d ever harbored.
I stopped keeping a diary.
I turned my back on books.
I no longer had any interest in writing.
PREDICTABLY, ALL MY EFFORTS TO GET BACK ON THE RIGHT track failed. My anxiety attacks returned with a vengeance. I began skipping school regularly. After two disciplinary hearings, the school principal, a woman who up until that point had only shown me extraordinary kindness, called me into her office.
“I’m sorry, V., but with the best will in the world, I cannot continue to fight in your favor. The teachers
have taken against you. Because of your repeated absences, the way you reject their authority, deny them their role.” (They weren’t wrong: the way I thought about adults was beyond anything they might have imagined.) “On top of everything else, you’re setting a bad example for your classmates. Some of the other students are beginning to emulate your behavior. We have to put a stop to this situation.”
If I didn’t want to be expelled from school, which would have gone into my academic dossier and been bad for my future prospects, she suggested that I leave of my own accord, for “personal reasons.” I could sit my baccalaureate examinations as an independent candidate. After all, attending school is not compulsory after the age of sixteen.
“You’ll do fine, V. I’m not worried about that at all.”
I had no choice. I agreed. I was used to an unconventional lifestyle, without structure or framework. And now I would no longer be constrained by school hours. No matter! I’d spend my final year of high school sitting in cafés and studying via correspondence.
I spent my nights dancing and drinking. I had the occasional unpleasant encounter, of which I have no recollection. I left Youri; I couldn’t bear putting him through my depressions anymore. I met another boy, intelligent and gentle, but horribly damaged, someone like me who was silently falling apart, whose sadness could only be chased away by artificial highs. I copied his behavior. Yes, G. was right, I was on the road to perdition. He had made me lose my mind. And I was doing everything I could to stay in character.
IT HAPPENED WITHOUT WARNING, ALMOST FROM ONE day to the next. I was walking along an empty street, an unsettling question going around and around in my head, a question that had wormed its way into my mind several days earlier that I couldn’t shake off: What proof did I have of my existence? Was I even real? In an attempt to figure this out once and for all, I had stopped eating. What was the point of nourishing myself? My body was made of paper, ink flowed through my veins, my organs didn’t exist. I was a fiction. After a few days of fasting, I began to feel the first flutter of a kind of euphoria replacing my hunger. A lightness I had never felt before. I was no longer walking; now I was gliding along the ground, and if I’d flapped my arms, I would surely have flown away. I felt no emptiness, not the slightest stomachache, not even a vague tug of hunger at the sight of an apple or a piece of cheese. I was no longer part of the material world.
And because my body could cope with the absence of food, why would it need to sleep? From dusk to dawn I kept my eyes open. There was nothing to break the continuity between day and night. Until one evening when I went to check in the bathroom mirror that my reflection was still there. Curiously, it was still there, but what was new, and fascinating, was that now I could see right through it.
I was disappearing, evaporating, slipping away. A dreadful sensation, like being ripped from the realm of the living, but in slow motion. As though my soul was leaking through the pores of my skin. I began wandering the streets all through the night, searching for a sign. Some proof of life. Around me, the city, misty and otherworldly, was taking on the sepia hues of an old film. If I raised my eyes, the railings of the public garden in front of which I was standing seemed to be moving on their own, turning like a magic lantern, three or four images a second, like eyelids blinking, slowly and regularly. Something inside me was still in revolt. I wanted to scream: Is anybody there?
Two people emerged from the door of an apartment building. They were carrying heavy wreaths of funeral flowers. Their lips were moving, I could hear the sound of their voices addressing me, yet I couldn’t make out any intelligible meaning in their words. Just a few seconds earlier I had been thinking that the sight of living beings would help me grasp hold of reality, but this was worse than the immobile landscape of the sleeping city. In the space of a moment, so elusive that I might have dreamed it, I said to them, as if to reassure myself,
“Excuse me, do you have the time?”
“There is no time for the weak,” one of them replied, his back bowed by the weight of the wreath, whose luminous colors cast a glow up his arm. But perhaps what he’d actually said was, “There is no time for weeping.”
A feeling of overwhelming grief broke over me.
I looked at my hands and I could see right through to the bones, nerves, tendons, flesh, and even cells teeming beneath my skin. Anyone could have seen through my body. I was nothing but a powdery cluster of photons. Everything around me was fake and I was no exception.
A police van appeared around the corner. Two men in uniform got out. One of them came toward me.
“What are you doing here? You’ve been walking around this garden for the last hour. Are you lost?”
Because I was crying, and because I backed away, frightened, the man turned to his colleague, who rummaged around the front seat of the vehicle and returned with a sandwich in his hand.
“Are you hungry? Here, have this.”
I didn’t dare move. He opened the back door of the van and said,
“Why don’t you get in and warm up?”
He was trying to sound unthreatening, but when he pointed to the two parallel benches in the back, I saw an electric chair, waiting just for me.
How long had it been since I lost all trace of myself? Why did I accumulate so much guilt, to the point of believing that I merited a death sentence? I had no idea. At least that’s how it seemed to me when, in the early hours of the morning, I found myself in a gloomy hospital where a bearded professor, who was clearly revered by the junior doctors who were listening to him as if he were the Messiah, was interrogating me about the experience that had led me to this sad shelter for mad, crazed, anorexic, suicidal, desperate people. There was a video camera set up at the back of the room.
“Mademoiselle, you have just experienced a psychotic episode, with a phase of depersonalization,” said the bearded man. “Please ignore the camera. I want you to tell me what happened.”
“You mean all this is true? I’m not . . . fiction?”
IT WAS AS THOUGH I HAD LIVED SO MANY DIFFERENT, fragmented lives that I could barely find the slightest link between them. My former life was infinitely far away. A vague recollection from that time occasionally surfaced, then vanished almost immediately. I was endlessly trying to piece myself together again. But apparently I was not going about it the right way. The cracks were still gaping.
I treated myself as best I could. Years of the talking cure. First with a psychoanalyst who saved my life. Who saw no problem with me refusing the drugs I was prescribed at the hospital. Who helped me when I decided to go to university, even with the wasted year after I passed my baccalaureate.
A miracle: thanks to a friend’s intervention, who pleaded my cause with the head of my former school, I was accepted into the school’s classe préparatoire, an intensive post-baccalaureate course of study for entry into the elite French universities. I can never thank both of them enough. I was back on my feet, though I felt like a blank page. Empty. No depth. I had a reputation. In order to fit in, to live a normal life, I put on a mask, concealed who I was, went to ground.
Two or three lives later, the same first name, last name, face, of course, but none of it mattered. Every two or three years I’d change my life completely. I’d find a new lover, new friends, a new job, a new way of dressing, a new hair color, a new way of speaking. I even changed countries.
Whenever anyone sounded me out about my past, a few flickering images would emerge from a thick fog, without ever consolidating. I wanted to leave no trace or impression. I had no nostalgia at all for my childhood or adolescence. I was floating above my own self, never where I should be. I didn’t know who I was, or what I wanted. I let myself drift. I felt like I’d been alive for a thousand years.
I never spoke about my “first time.”
“How old were you, who was it with?”
Ah, if only you knew.
I had a few close friends who’d been witness to that time of my life, but they rarely brought it u
p. The past was the past. We all have a history to overcome. Theirs had not always been straightforward either.
Since then, I have been with many men. Loving them wasn’t hard. Trusting them was another story. Always on the defensive, I would ascribe intentions to them that they didn’t necessarily have: that they wanted to use me, manipulate me, deceive me, that they cared only about themselves.
Whenever a man tried to give me pleasure, or worse still, tried to take his pleasure through me, I had to fight against a kind of disgust crouching in the shadows, about to swoop down on me, against a symbolic violence, which wasn’t really there, that I imputed to every gesture.
It took me a long time to be able to sleep with a man without the aid of alcohol or psychotropic drugs. To be able, without any hidden agenda, to surrender myself, with my eyes closed, to another body. To find the path to my own desire.
It took me a long time, many years, to finally meet a man with whom I felt completely secure.
Part Six
Writing
Language has always been an exclusive domain. Who owns language owns power.
—Chloé Delaume, My Beloved Sisters
I WORKED A RANGE OF JOBS BEFORE I FOUND MYSELF caught up in the world of publishing. How wonderfully cunning the unconscious can be. It’s impossible to escape its determinism. After having turned my back on books for many years, at last they were my friends again. Now I made my living through them. After all, books are what I know best.
I was trying, I suppose, feeling my way toward repairing something. But what? How? I put all my energy into texts written by other people. Unconsciously I was still trying to find some answers, a few sparse fragments of my history. I was hoping that in this way the mystery would somehow be resolved. What happened to “little V.”? Has anyone seen her? Sometimes a voice used to arise from the depths and whisper in my ear: “Books are lies.” Now I no longer heard it, as if it had been wiped from my memory. Every now and then, a flash. A detail, here or there. I would think yes, that’s it, that’s a piece of me, between the lines, behind those words. I gathered them up. I collected them. I put myself together again. Books can be excellent medicine. I’d forgotten.
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