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Part One
The Child
Our wisdom begins where the authorâs ends; we would like him
to give us answers, when all he can do is give us desires.
âMarcel Proust, On Reading
AT THE THRESHOLD OF LIFE, UNBLEMISHED BY EXPERIENCE, my name is V., and, at the grand old age of five, I am waiting for love.
Fathers are meant to be their daughtersâ protectors. Mine is no more than a current of air. More than his physical presence, I can summon up the scent of vetiver filling the bathroom in the morning; masculine belongings dotted the apartment: a tie, wristwatch, shirt, Dupont lighter; a way of holding his cigarette between the index and middle fingers, quite far from the filter; a perpetually ironic way of speaking, so I never know if heâs joking or not. He leaves early and comes home late. Heâs a busy man. Terribly elegant too. His professional activities change too rapidly for me to grasp what they are. At school, whenever I am asked what he does, I donât know what to call him, but the evidence suggestsâsince he is more drawn to the outside world than to family lifeâthat he is someone important. At least thatâs what I imagine. His suits are always impeccable.
My mother had me young, when she was twenty. Sheâs beautiful, with Scandinavian blond hair, an enchanting face, light blue eyes, a graceful, shapely figure, and a lovely voice. My worship of her has no limits; she is my sun, the source of my happiness.
My parents are so well matched, my grandmother often says, a nod to their cinematic good looks. We ought to have been happy, yet my memories of our life together, in the apartment where I briefly experienced the illusion of a family unit, are like a bad dream.
At night, buried beneath the covers, I hear my father yelling, calling my mother a âwhoreâ or a âslut,â but I donât understand why. At the slightest provocationâa detail, a glance, a single âinappropriateâ wordâhe explodes with jealousy. Out of the blue, the walls begin to shake, crockery flies, doors slam. An obsessive perfectionist, he cannot stand anything being moved without his permission. One day, he almost strangles my mother when she spills a glass of wine on a white tablecloth heâs just given her. The frequency of such scenes accelerates. He is a machine propelled by an insane momentum that no one can stop. My parents spend hours flinging bitter insults at each other. Until late one evening when my mother takes refuge in my bedroom, weeping in silence as she snuggles up against me in my little cot bed, before going back to sleep alone in the marital bed. The next night too my father sleeps on the sofa in the living room.
My mother has exhausted all her defensive artillery against my fatherâs uncontrolled bouts of anger and childish tantrums. There is no remedy for dealing with the madness of this man people describe as âtemperamental.â Their marriage is an ongoing battle, a carnage whose origins everyone has forgotten. The conflict will soon be settled unilaterally. Itâs a matter of weeks now.
Yet they must have loved each other once. At the end of an interminable corridor, screened by a bedroom door, their sexuality is like a monster crouching just beyond my field of vision: omnipresent (my fatherâs outbursts of jealousy are the daily evidence) but completely covert (I have no memory of the slightest embrace, the slightest kiss, the tiniest gesture of affection between my parents).
What I am trying to do more than anything, without realizing it, is to get to the bottom of the mystery that brings two people together behind a closed bedroom door, what is woven between them there. Like a fairy tale in which the supernatural suddenly bursts into the real, sexâin my imagination a magical process through which babies are miraculously bornâcan, without any warning, make a sudden and unexpected appearance in real life, in often mystifying forms. Whether brought about intentionally or accidentally, any encounter with this unfathomable force triggers in the child that I am an irresistible, horrified curiosity.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I go to my parentsâ bedroom and stand in the doorway crying, complaining of stomach pain, or a headache, presumably with the unconscious intention of interrupting their lovemaking. I find them with the sheets pulled up to their chins, looking foolish and strangely guilty. Of the image that precedes this, their bodies entwined, I donât recall the faintest trace. Itâs as if itâs been expunged from my memory.
One day my parents were called in by the head teacher of my elementary school. My father didnât come. It was my mother who had to listen, with deep concern, to the report of my diurnal life.
âYour daughterâs been falling asleep in class, itâs like sheâs not sleeping at night. Iâve had to set up a camp bed at the back of the classroom. Whatâs going on? Sheâs mentioned violent nocturnal fights between you and her father. Oh, and one of the lunch ladies told me that V. keeps going to the boysâ bathroom at recreation. I asked V. what she does there. She told me, as if it was the most natural thing in the world: âIâm helping David pee straight. I hold his weenie for him.â Davidâs just been circumcised, and he does seem to have some kind of problem with his . . . aim. I assure you that at the age of five thereâs nothing unusual about these kinds of games. I just wanted to keep you informed.â
One day my mother made an irrevocable decision. Taking advantage of the fact that I was away at camp, a trip she had organized as part of her covert plan to move out, she left my father, definitively. It was the summer before first grade. In the evenings, one of the camp counselors sat down on the edge of my bed and read me letters from my mother, describing our new apartment, my new bedroom, my new school, the new neighborhood, basically the new layout of our new life, once I returned to Paris. From the depths of the countryside where Iâd been dispatched, surrounded by the cries of children gone feral in the absence of their parents, it all seemed very abstract. The counselorâs eyes grew moist and her voice cracked as she read aloud my motherâs letters, filled with fake cheer. After this evening ritual I was sometimes found, in the middle of the night, sleepwalking, crawling backward down the staircase to get to the front door.
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NOW THAT WE WERE FREE OF THE DOMESTIC TYRANT, our life took an exhilarating turn. We were living in an attic apartment made up of a series of former maidsâ rooms. I could hardly stand up in my bedroom, and there were secret hiding places everywhere.
I was six years old. A studious little girl, bright and hardworking, obedient and well behaved, and vaguely melancholy, as is often the case with the children of divorced parents. I wasnât secretly rebellious in any way; I went out of my way to avoid committing the slightest misdemeanor. A good little soldier, my principal ambition consisted of bringing home a glowing report card for my mother, whom I still loved more than anything.
In the evenings, sheâd play Chopin on the piano into the small hours. Or, with the volume on the hi-fi turned up as high as it would go, weâd dance late into the night; the neighbors, furious, would bang on the walls and yell because the music was too loud, but we didnât care. At the weekend, my mother loved to luxuriate in the bath; she was magnificent, with a Kir Royale in one hand, a John Player Special in the other, an ashtray balanced on the edge of the tub, vermilion fingernails contrasting with her milky skin and platinum blond hair.
The housework could wait.
My father soon managed to wriggle out of paying her alimony. Things were tight at the end of the month. In spite of the regular parties in our apartment, and herâalways fleetingâlove affairs, my mother turned out to be more solitary than I realized. When I asked her one day about the significance of one of her lovers in her life, she said, âThereâs no question of me imposing him on you, or replacing your father.â She and I were inseparable. No man would ever again be allowed to intrude on our relationship.
At my new school I became best friends with another little girl, called Asia. We learned to read and write together and explored the neighborhood, a charming village with cafĂ© terraces at every corner. What we shared above all was an unusual freedom. Unlike most of our classmates, we had no one to keep an eye on us at home; there was no money for babysitters, even in the evening. It wasnât worth it. Our mothers completely trusted us. We never misbehaved.
Once, when I was seven, my father invited me to stay over at his apartment. An exceptional occurrence, which was never to be repeated. Since my mother and I had moved out, my old bedroom had been turned into a study.
I went to sleep on the sofa. I woke up at dawn, in this place where I now felt like a stranger. Idly, I inspected his library, which was classified and displayed with meticulous care. I took down two or three books at random, then carefully replaced them. I lingered on a miniature copy of the Koran in Arabic, stroked its tiny red leather cover, tried to decipher its incomprehensible characters. It wasnât a toy, of course, but it did look like one. And what else was I supposed to play with, when there wasnât a single game in the whole place?
An hour later my father got up and came into the living room. The first thing he did was survey the entire space, his gaze alighting on the bookcases. He crouched down on his knees to inspect each shelf. His behavior was a bit deranged. And then, with the obsessive diligence of a tax inspector, he declared triumphantly: âYou touched this book, and this one, and this one!â His thundering voice rang across the room. I didnât understand. What could be wrong with touching a book?
What was so horrifying was that he was right, in all three cases. Luckily I wasnât tall enough to reach the top shelf, upon which his eyes lingered longest, and from where his gaze returned to me with a mysterious sigh of relief.
What would he say if he knew that the previous evening, when Iâd gone to find something in a cupboard, Iâd come face-to-face with a life-size, naked woman, all in latex, with orifices forming horrible hollows and folds where her mouth and sex were, a mocking smile, dead eyes that fastened onto mine, squeezed between a vacuum cleaner and a broom? An image straight from hell, repressed as quickly as the cupboard door was pushed shut.
After school, Asia and I often took the most roundabout way home, to delay the moment we had to say goodbye. At an intersection with two streets there was a little esplanade, at the bottom of a flight of steps, where teenagers gathered to roller-skate or skateboard or smoke cigarettes in little groups. We turned the stone steps into our observation post, where weâd sit and admire the skate tricks that the gangly, show-off boys performed.
One Wednesday afternoon we took our own roller skates there. We started off hesitant and clumsy. The boys teased us a bit, then forgot about us. Intoxicated by speed and the fear that we wouldnât be able to brake in time, we stopped thinking about anything but the joy of gliding. It was winter, and it began to grow dark early. We were getting ready to go, we still had our skates on our feet and our shoes in our hands, our cheeks were on fire, we were out of breath but euphoric.
Out of nowhere a man appeared, wrapped in a big overcoat. He stood in front of us and, with a wide movement of his arms that made him look like an albatross, drew open the flaps of his coat, leaving us speechless before the grotesque sight of his swollen penis extending through the open zipper of his trousers.
Caught between complete panic and hysterical laughter, Asia leapt up, and I followed her, but we both fell flat on our faces, thrown off balance by the skates weâd forgotten we were still wearing. By the time we stood up, the man had disappeared, like a ghost.
My father made a few more brief appearances in my life. On his return from some trip to the other side of the world, he popped over to our apartment to wish me a happy eighth birthday. He arrived with a gift I hadnât dared hope for: the convertible Barbie camper van that all little girls my age dreamed of. I threw myself with gratitude into his arms and spent the next hour unpacking it with the conscientiousness of a collector, thrilled with its banana-yellow exterior and fuchsia-pink interior. It came with over a dozen accessories, a sliding roof, a fold-down kitchen, a deck chair, and a double bed.
A double bed? Calamity! My favorite doll was single, and no matter how much she might stretch out her long legs on her folding chair, exclaiming what a gorgeous day it was, she was going to be crushingly bored. Camping on your own is no fun. Suddenly I remembered a redundant male specimen Iâd long ago put away in a drawer, a redheaded Ken with a square jaw, a kind of swaggering lumberjack in a checkered shirt, with whom Barbie would surely feel safe when she was camping in the wild.
It was nighttime. Time for bed. I placed Ken and his lady love side by side on the bed, but it was too hot. I had to take off their clothes first, so they were more comfortable, given the heat wave. Barbie and Ken had no body hair, no genitals, no nipples, it was very odd, but their perfect proportions compensated for this slight defect. I pulled the blanket over their smooth, gleaming bodies and left the roof open to the starry night sky.
My father got up from his chair to leave. He straddled the camper van as I was busily putting everything back in the miniature picnic basket, and then he kneeled down to peer under the awning. A teasing smile warped his face as he pronounced the obscene words.
âFucking, are they?â
Now it was my cheeks, my forehead, my hands that were fuchsia pink. Some people would never understand the first thing about love.
At the time my mother was working for a small publishing company whose offices occupied the ground floor of our building, three streets from my school. When I didnât go home with Asia, I liked to have my after-school snack in one of the secret corners of this lair, which brimmed with a great jumble of staplers, rolls of tape, reams of paper, Post-its, paper clips, and all kinds of colored pens. A veritable Ali Babaâs cave. And then there were the books, hundreds of them, piled up any which way on the rickety old shelves, packed into boxes, gathering dust in the windows, photographed and turned into posters to hang on the walls. My playground was the kingdom of books.
The atmosphere in the courtyard at the end of the day was always merry, especially as the days grew longer. The gardienne, the buildingâs caretaker, would bring out a bottle of champagne from her lodge, set up garden tables and chairs, and an assortment of writers and journalists would hang out there until night fell. All these beautiful people, so cultivated, brilliant, spiritual, and sometimes even famous. It was a marvelous, charmed world. Other professions, those of my friendsâ parents, of our neighbors, seemed dull and routine in comparison.
One day I too was going to write books.
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AFTER MY PARENTSâ SEPARATION, I SAW LESS AND LESS OF my father. As a rule, we would meet at dinnertime in very expensive restaurants, including one particular Moroccan establishment decorated with questionable taste, where a voluptuous woman in a risquĂ© costume would suddenly appear at the end of the meal to perform a belly dance a few centimeters away from us. Then came the moment that always filled me with horrified embarrassment: with a look that mingled pride and lust, my father would slip a banknote into the elastic of the beautiful Scheherazadeâs panties or brassiere. I donât think he even noticed how,...
