The following spring, she is ten years old, and gets a white hoodie. She’s happy to wear something other than crew necks and smocked dresses, for once. One of the coolest, most popular girls on the playground compliments her outfit, and her heart overflows—she, who feels so worthless so ugly so fat, she, who has already forgotten how to see herself except through other people’s eyes.

 

At a friend’s birthday party, they play hide-and-seek. Her boyfriend pulls her behind one of the heavy living room curtains. They stare at each other. She blushes. He comes closer to her little lips. She closes her eyes, breathless—and then, suddenly, she freezes. Something has coursed through her whole body, gripping her, something disgusting. A coldness, too terrifying to be described.

Disappointed, he will go off and kiss someone else.

 

Her mother takes her to see her aunt, a nutritionist; she has gained a lot of weight. She’s supposed to write down everything she eats in a little notebook, but sometimes she leaves things out, or changes the amounts. She finishes the food on everyone else’s plate when no one can see her, eating the leftovers instead of throwing them away. She’s always the first one up to clear the table, smiling and helpful, off to degrade herself in the kitchen.

 

Day after day, the jellyfish tentacles spread.

 

Her mother takes her to a big police station on the banks of the Seine. The policemen show her a binder stuffed with photos of men; she has to look at them carefully, one by one. She wishes she could tell them, That’s him, but the anonymous faces hold no meaning or memory for her. She’s too afraid to ask if all these men, all these hundreds of paper men staring out at her, are pedophiles, too.

 

In her sixth-grade history class, the students have to do a presentation on a time period of their choosing. She picks the Holocaust. She spends hours at the local library, looking at pictures of meek, dull-eyed skeletons smiling toothlessly at Red Army photographers. She doesn’t tell her parents that she’s also checked out Night and Fog; she waits until she’s home alone one afternoon to watch it. Her report is so meticulously detailed that it takes up four hours of class time, and the history teacher calls her parents to express his concern.

 

She’s lively and cheerful when other people are around, and whenever she can escape the prying eyes, she eats. She laughs a lot, maybe even more than before. Her heart is so heavy that when happiness does approach, she jumps in with both feet.

 

She and her mother go back to the big police station by the Seine again. A police officer takes her into a dark room; on the other side of a windowed partition, five men with wary expressions are lined up facing her, gazing at her. She’s very afraid. It’s a one-way mirror, the policeman reassures her, they can’t see you. She doesn’t understand. A one-eyed mirror. She forces herself to smile, to go a little nearer to the window, to look closely at the men. She wants to be helpful, but the faces still don’t mean anything to her.

That same day, or maybe it’s another day, she has to describe the man in the stairwell. How was his face shaped? Oval? Long? And what about his hair? A bizarre catalogue of body parts scrolls by on the screen of a big grey computer: chins, noses, eyes, foreheads, cheeks, mouths, ears, eyebrows. After a lot of hard work on everyone’s part they finally come up with a face; a strange face, like a cadaver’s face, with no body and no significance attached to it. A face she still doesn’t recognize, even after all that.

 

She receives a Catholic education, which stamps on her memory an image of the Devil and his temptations. Of sin, and the all-seeing eye of God, fixed on her. Of Hell. Lectures on the primacy of the soul teach hatred of the body, rejection of one’s feelings. This comforts her; she despises her body, seeing it only as a vehicle imposed on her, a cesspit. She wants desperately to have a pure and virgin soul, united with God, torn away from this body inhabited by Satan.

She masturbates often, in the Latin sense, manus stupratio, defiling herself with her hand. She doesn’t know when she started doing it, or where she learned these movements, which are always the same. She doesn’t know what they’re called. She only has to be alone for a moment for the Devil to come and pull down her underpants. Then, she thumps her vulva mechanically, compulsively, with her hand, until it’s swollen and painful and she falls into a dazed, boneless torpor. She doesn’t tell anyone about it; she knows it’s wrong, but she can’t keep herself from doing it. She needs the weightless feeling that always comes afterward. In churches she avoids the hollow eyes of the sculpted imps on the capitals of the columns; always watching her, sneering at her. She is one of them. She punishes her body, stuffing it, striking it. She tries to exist outside of it, and she prays, de profundis clamo ad te Domine; she prays with all the ardor in her young heart for God to come and help her. De profundis clamo ad te Domine. De profundis clamo ad te Domine. De profundis clamo, clamo, clamo ad te Domine. De profundis. 

 

She reads Les Misérables, and it isn’t Cosette’s childhood or Gavroche’s death that moves her the most; no, she sobs with gratitude all through the chapter in which Hugo explains how the sewers of Paris fertilize the fields of the countryside.

 

During long road trips she sits in the very back of the family car, her forehead pressed to the window, her gaze riveted to a point far in the distance, deep inside herself, in a place where her thoughts fragment and drift apart, where her daydreams have no sense or structure. While her parents listen to Radio Classique in the front and her brother and sisters squabble in the middle row, sitting in the very back, she is no longer there.

 

On weekends, she cocoons herself in the silence of her bedroom in their country cottage and reads. Reads everything, anything, for hours and hours. Sometimes she wrenches herself away from a book she is in the midst of, and then there is pain—pain in her throat, in her jaws; so much pain that she buries her head beneath the pillows and tries to scream it out, to vomit it out, spit it out, to get it out of her body at last; she opens her mouth as wide as she can until she is exhausted, but nothing comes out, ever; not even a murmur, no noise at all. Nothing. So she swallows the pain back down and, nauseated, goes back to her book. Page by page she consoles herself, and forgets herself, and flies away.

 

She tries to be good. To avoid disappointing anyone. She gets sadder and sadder, and she doesn’t know why. She smiles, and lies, and fools everyone. She feels shame. Above all, she mustn’t ever let anyone realize it; no one must ever guess. Nothing must ever, ever show.