“What captivates me is not so much a specific sex, but rather extreme youth, the age between ten and sixteen, which seems to me to be—more than what we usually mean by this phrase—to be the real “third sex.”
—G.M., “Under Sixteen”
THERE ARE NUMEROUS WAYS TO STEAL A PERSON’S SELFHOOD. Some appear quite innocent at the outset.
One day, G. decided he wanted to help me with an essay. My grades were usually very good, especially in French, and I never felt the need to discuss my schoolwork with him. But that afternoon, obstinate as a mule, and in a particularly cheerful mood, he had already and without asking opened my homework notebook at my task for the following day.
“Have you done your essay yet? You know I can help you. You’ve left it a bit late if you’re to hand it in tomorrow. So . . . let’s see: ‘Describe one of your achievements.’”
“No, don’t worry, I’ve already thought about it, I’m going to do it in a bit.”
“But why? Don’t you want me to help you? It will take less time, and the sooner you’re done, the sooner . . .”
He slid his hand under my shirt and gently stroked my left breast.
“Stop it! You’re obsessed!”
“Well, let me tell you, by the time I was your age I’d done something truly extraordinary. Did you know I was a three-day event champion? I was! And one day . . .”
“I don’t care. It’s my essay.”
G. scowled, then ensconced himself against the pillows at the end of the bed.
“Very well, as you wish. I shall read a bit, since my adolescence doesn’t interest you.”
Contrite, I leaned over him to give him a kiss, in the guise of an apology.
“Of course your life interests me, everything about you interests me, you know that.”
G. sat up again.
“Is that true? So, you do want to hear! And we’ll write it at the same time!”
“You’re impossible! You’re like a kid! Anyway, my teacher will know immediately that I didn’t write it.”
“No, we’ll make it about a girl, and we’ll use the kind of words you use, she won’t notice a thing.”
So, hunched over a piece of A4 paper with large pale blue squares and a thin red line for the margin, I began to take down G.’s dictation, in my delicate, neat handwriting, studious as always, the story of a young girl who managed to jump ten extremely challenging obstacles in a few minutes without knocking down or even brushing a single bar, sitting straight up on her mount, cheered on by a crowd of spectators transfixed by her proficiency, elegance, and precision of movement. I learned an entire vocabulary hitherto unknown to me, words whose meanings I had to keep asking him, for I’d only been on a horse once in my short life, and afterward I’d been rushed off to the doctor covered in eczema, coughing and weeping from the edema that had made my scarlet face swell to twice its size.
The next day, I shamefacedly handed my essay to my French teacher. The following week she returned it, exclaiming (whether or not she suspected anything I shall never know):
“You’ve surpassed yourself this week, V.! Nineteen out of twenty, there’s nothing to add, it’s the best grade in the class. Listen to me, the rest of you, I’m going to pass your classmate’s homework around and I would like you all to read it carefully. And let it be a lesson to the lot of you. I hope it won’t bother you, V., especially as your friends will find out what a brilliant horsewoman you are!”
And so the dispossession began.
After this, G. showed no more interest in my schoolwork, never encouraged me to write, or pushed me to think about what I might like to do with my life.
He was the writer.