IV.

We spent our first vacation in Mexico at my grandmother’s big ramshackle house. Several changes had taken place. Beyond the rubble left by the earthquake, visible everywhere, there had been collapses on the familial scale too. We found one of these small yet eloquent changes on arriving from the airport. On the way, our grandmother kept telling us that a surprise awaited us on the roof of her house. As soon as she parked the car my brother and I climbed to the third floor to see what it was. There we found Betty, who two years ago had disappeared on the streets of Amatlán. When she saw us, she started barking with joy and lovingly jumping on us. Our grandmother said it was the first time in months she had looked so happy. And later, in a tone mysterious and amused, she said to me, “They say dogs look like their masters and she turned out identical to you.”

We stayed there almost the entire summer vacation, from the end of June until late August. My mother returned to France almost immediately to start writing her thesis. Despite how difficult living together had been a few years earlier, staying at our grandmother’s house wasn’t as awful for me as one might think. This time, we were both relaxed, knowing it was only for a relatively short time. And in a few weeks my cousins would come to visit for fifteen days and the house would be happy, full of kids of all ages. Like always when our relatives came, my grandmother moved her belongings from room to room to accommodate them. Purses and shoes from the forties circulated once again through the hallways and foyer in a trajectory impossible to interpret much less predict. However, this time the wave contained a new and troubling element: among the newspaper clippings, and the hats and clothing that poked out of all those boxes, I recognized my own toys. Apparently, everything we had decided not to bring to France with us had been sucked into the maelstrom. My childhood now formed a part of that shifting past, and yet was still present in the house like a sand pit ready to swallow everything if you take your eyes off it. But the most memorable event that took place during the trip was our longed-for reunion with my father. Now that his whereabouts had been revealed, we could visit him at last.

Dad was locked up in a preventative detention facility known as Reclusorio Preventivo Norte, or RENO, a prison for those who were not yet formally charged. While awaiting his sentencing, he had the privilege of wearing beige, a vague and indistinct color halfway between excretory brown and innocent white. In the prison for the condemned, we later learned, inmates wore navy blue, a color that didn’t allow for ambiguity. My grandmother, who had already been to see him, was our Virgil into that institution, a place not exactly a hell, but more a purgatory and also a kind of casino where luck could favor you in a flash or leave you in the worst kind of ruin. Many influential prisoners, the Mafia and drug traffickers, lived there in that decade, in cells befitting their eccentric and luxurious standards of living. My grandmother decided to take us there, but not by the sterile car nor taxi cabs she often rode. She chose, and I think she was right, to carry us by the route most visitors took to get there—public transportation—which back then was old, dirty, and unreliable. So we embarked on an arduous procession across the entire city on the roads that for Luis Buñuel evoked France’s cour des miracles, districts where people lived in flimsy constructions of tin laminate or cardboard and warmed their hands over hotplates. Near the prison, you could see a display of foods, watches, bags, stuffed animals, underwear, videocassettes, and decorations for the home, similar to the kind often found around some metro stations. Our ride turned out to be effectively transitional and also desensitizing. Because of it, when we reached the prison gates we weren’t terrified, and we weren’t unnerved.

The prison was gray and fairly rectangular or square in shape, a comb-like structure as it’s often called in architecture. There had originally been ten dormitories laid out side by side, in addition to the admissions dormitory and another for observation and classification, through which every new inmate inevitably had to pass before being assigned a permanent dormitory. To get inside, we had to stand in different lines and wait our turn. At the start of each of these waits, we were asked to write our names on a list and to write the name of our imprisoned family member under a column marked “Offender,” in a strange ritual of initiation or affiliation. They also asked the nature of the relationship, and so we wrote, five or so times, the word “father” on lists with names of our capital’s alleged criminals. In that moment, it felt to me as if there had been a monumental mistake, an arbitrary injustice dealt by the hand of fate that we had to face as I had the divorce, Ximena’s death, and my mother’s going to France. I don’t know what your thoughts are, Dr. Sazlavski, but, for me, the supposed wonder of childhood that people talk about is one of those dirty tricks that memory plays on us. As different as one life is from another, I am sure that no childhood is entirely pleasant. Children live in a world of circumstances decided for them. Others decide—the people they are with, the place they live, the school they attend, and even the food they eat every day. My father being a prisoner was just more of the same. No use crying or arguing.

Those in line outside and in the waiting room were, almost all of them, of the female sex. They were mothers, sisters, wives, and even mothers-in-law—or, as in my grandmother’s case, ex-mothers-in-law—who came to visit the inmates. Many brought thermoses with still-warm stews, tortillas, and supplies for the week, and that’s why it took so long for things to move; each item had to be inspected to see if it contained weapons or drugs. It wouldn’t be the first time. My father told us that one woman often hid marijuana in her son’s diapers, so that her husband could live off the sales. As far as I remember, we brought neither food nor pot. But what we did do was wear more formal clothing than usual. My brother, who was nine years old at the time, had on a navy blue sports jacket and I wore a skirt and white tights—a ridiculous or at least inappropriate getup that did nothing but emphasize how we didn’t belong. We weren’t the only güeros there. Other middle- and upper-class people were also waiting in the room and stood out like white mice in a crate of squirrels. Not that there was any complicity between us; everyone acted like they had no idea how they got there. Not even within each social class in Mexico does there exist a sense of belonging or fellowship. “Solidarity” was a word virtually unknown in those days, and would soon be completely discredited by a president. Even though we didn’t have a grocery basket or bag, we still had to go through several searches of our clothing and of my grandmother’s purse. They made us take off our shoes and inspected our socks. Rough jailkeeper’s hands passed over my entire body to make sure I wasn’t smuggling anything in. After this preamble, we were at last allowed into the space of the prisoners to be reunited with my father in a huge dining hall. Those who lived in the prison often called it “Reno Aventura” in allusion to the amusement park, Reino Aventura, built a few years earlier near where the Rinaldi sisters lived.

Astonishing are the tricks of memory. I know, for example, that I must have felt sorry for my father, seeing him at one of the tables with his eyes brimming with tears and the emotion of being with us, and yet my memory would have me believe that the austere and clean place wasn’t so bad, and that being locked up in there wasn’t so unbearable, as if truncating the distant images could mitigate a pain from the past. What hurts to remember are not the circumstances, which thankfully are different today, but rather the acknowledgment of what we felt before, and that, nobody, not even amnesia, not even the strongest painkiller, can change. The pain remains in our conscience like an air bubble with contents intact, awaiting invocation or, in the best-case scenario, to be allowed to come out.

After a few minutes of happy and emotional reunion (apparently we had grown and changed a lot since the last time we met), my father started joking around about his situation. He told us the nicknames of some of the prisoners and the most shocking and strange anecdotes they had told him. He smelled different but looked healthy and well-fed, something my grandmother reiterated several times. He still had the incredible sense of humor that had always marked him and often emerged during the greatest moments of sadness in our family history—at wakes, preoperative periods, and such—to meet the agony of our loved ones. Maybe it would take a while for someone who doesn’t know him to understand: it’s not at all a flippant attitude, but an astonishing ability to distance himself from the moment at hand and to laugh at it. While he did talk about how the guards were corrupt and how hard it was to find good company, he saved the worst stories for another time. Only years later would he tell us about the incidents of mistreatment and extortion he had witnessed.

My brother, who hadn’t said a word the entire time, at last let out the question that seemed to be tormenting him:

“Dad,” he asked, “where are the murderers?”

My father explained that in Dorm Five there were drug traffickers, and in Dorm Three, murderers. It was tacitly accepted that not every manslaughter could be judged the same way—some were involuntary or negligent, others committed in self-defense and therefore necessary, and still others were crimes of passion. That said, all the inmates did condemn and scorn rapists. Whenever a man accused of rape came to the prison, he had to pass through a long makeshift gauntlet of prisoners hell-bent on hitting him in the head and face. Dad told us they had placed him in Dorm Four, “the most laid-back one,” reserved for white-collar criminals.

Around that time, they had caught two of Mexico’s biggest drug lords of the eighties, known as Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonesca and Rafael Caro Quintero, along with a whole host of collaborators, so Dorm Nine was left entirely in their charge, and the rest had to be relocated to annexed buildings. A few times a week, there were parties organized for the drug lords with a brass band that played until dawn.

My memory of the visit—once we were actually together—is rather happy and tender. It was the reunion I had so badly needed. The food in prison wasn’t as terrible as you might think. A trio played in one of the farthest corners of the patio, giving the place ambience with their romantic songs, but not to the point of annoyance. At around six p.m. they announced it was time to leave. We said good-bye, wishing out loud that our next visit would be somewhere else. Once again, we had to get into long lines with people all squished together. Our grandmother decided we’d return in a taxi and so the trip home was much shorter.

What had my father done? What crime was he accused of, exactly? This is something that I—far from being indifferent about—didn’t want to know. I could have asked my mother or grandmother, who would have answered me without hesitation, but I didn’t want to. They would have definitely given me their own versions of the facts and their own moral judgments (my grandmother’s that of 1900, my mother’s that of the seventies). I had the chance during our visit to the prison to ask my father for his own point of view and to hear his story from his own lips—and still, I chose not to know. I wanted to show the world that, like his for me, my love for him was unconditional and I couldn’t care less about whatever fault they accused him of, or whether he was guilty or innocent. This was an unspoken agreement I made with myself, and I got the feeling my brother adopted a similar attitude. I knew perfectly well who my father was. I knew he was a loving and responsible person who had always attended to and cared for his family, even his ex-wife. I knew he was a generous man with a heart of gold, who moved by a child or old woman in need would empty his pockets; who didn’t cheat at games, not even for fun; and who almost always kept his word. Nevertheless, I wonder, Dr. Sazlavski, if deep down in this stance of mine hid a great fear of discovering something I wouldn’t like, something terrible and vile. Later I learned the crime levied against him was embezzlement, a word I had never heard before and that still sounds to me more like a venereal disease than a social defect, and all it means is the diversion of funds. In the years following my father’s release, I got the chance to talk to him about his time in prison. He swears—and I believe him unquestioningly—that if he had ever had the money he was accused of taking, he could have easily bought his freedom in our corrupt society. The truth is my father was left without a cent or a place to lay his head. Part of his sentence was to give up all of his belongings and properties. Luckily, we were able to hold onto an apartment and our country house, which after the divorce had been put in my mother’s name and today represents a significant part of our family inheritance.

Our dog Betty was not happy in Mexico City. Her story reminded me of Heidi’s, the little girl from the Swiss Alps, who after having grown up in the country free to chase badgers and to run around as she pleased was forced to live cooped up in the city of Frankfurt. Despite how happy Betty was to see us again, she was thin and her doggy face wore an expression of resentment. Even though we visited her every morning, it wasn’t enough to keep her spirits up. Normally we would have taken her out for a walk twice a day like any other dog, but we weren’t allowed out by ourselves. My grandmother argued that bringing a German sheperd down the metal stairs from the roof to the house, then down the back stairs to get to the street, was not only a hassle but torture for the dog. It’s true that Betty’s body was too big, but she was also gutsy. At night we’d often hear her howling in sadness and boredom from the cement surface, where the only things to look at were a neighbor’s garden and the constant flow on the arterial road below. We were told to tether her because she had already tried to escape by jumping from roof to roof for an entire block until she found a service staircase. Betty’s attitude made great sense to me and was, at least according to my grandmother, where our resemblance was greatest.

Shortly after hearing this story, and after my first visit to jail, I climbed to the roof and untied Betty. She didn’t waste her opportunity. She immediately ran away and was missing for over a week. Seven days of remorse passed in which I confessed my responsibility to no one. Finally, one morning we found her sitting in front of the house. She was waiting for us to let her in. The vet came to make sure she hadn’t caught mange or anything of the like during her jailbreak, but the only thing our dog had gotten was irrefutably pregnant.

After that summer we returned to Aix. The heat in France was still at its peak, making it impossible to sleep under a sheet at night. I was back in the same school and entering the 5ème, which in Mexico would have been the second year of middle school, or seventh grade. That year, in filling out the registration form, my mother told us that our father’s professional occupation corresponded to the word “psychoanalyst.” “Prisoner” wasn’t a job, to begin with, and besides, it would have aroused all kinds of unfounded suspicions. What would we do if we were assigned to a social worker, “one of those witches,” as my mother called them, for a psychological evaluation? One had to think of everything. Although she never openly admitted it, I think Mom was scared, and rightfully so, that we wouldn’t pass such an exam.

In the 5ème, I was still a withdrawn girl, borderline antisocial, but in my homeroom there appeared an individual similar to me in temperament and interests, and with whom, oddly enough, I immediately hit it off. His name was Blaise. He was blond and pretty short. Until this year—and since time immemorial—the boys had been shorter than the girls. But now, beginning with the grade above us, most of them were showing noticeable changes: upper lips started to cover in a dark fuzz; voices, once tinged with strange and incontrollable modulations, stabilized; and limbs, along with backs, in many cases took on more bulk. That’s why many of the girls my age arranged themselves at recess at strategic points in the yard from which they could watch the rugby or handball games whenever the competitors were the boys from the 3ème and 4ème (grades in France go down, not up). Those who made the biggest fuss over testosterone were the Reunionese Kathy and her friend Mireille, originally of Pontoise, whose skin, milky and covered in acne, made her look like one of those cheeses that have been aged too long and grown bulgy. Her blue eyes were the only truly human element in the shifting surface of her face. Both girls fervently admired the male gender of almost every generation, including the professors and other students’ fathers. Into their textbooks they would often slip gossip magazines targeted at girls our age that published advice on how to use makeup and weild accessories. I had a good relationship with them but not a close one. Sometimes, when class was particularly boring, or when I looked nervous about an exercise on the blackboard in algebra class, they would see to it that one of these magazines was passed from hand to hand to land on my desk. I remember in particular one notable article that discussed the right way to practice kissing with tongue, which in French we called “rolling a shovel.” The author advised practicing solo for a while with half a squeezed orange in order to develop the necessary dexterity and sensitivity in the lips. However, for the real thing, you couldn’t forget to stick your tongue out far enough to meet his tongue, but not so far that it would be uncomfortable for him. At that moment you would begin the spinning that in a French kiss seemed to be at the heart of the matter. It was important to find synchrony in spinning with his tongue, to strike the same speed, and to hit reverse. I remember that when I finished the article I lifted my head and looked at the entire class pretending to be absorbed in the equation. I looked at my classmates, trying to figure out how many of them, and especially who, had already been through this critical and defining ritual. It needs to be said that, had I done a survey, most of them would have lied; at that age, it was mortifying to confess a lack of experience. The words pucelle and puceau, which both referred to someone who was still a virgin, were the worst insults you could receive at my school. You could be a top pucelle or bottom pucelle: “top” meant you’d never kissed and “bottom” meant you’d never slept with anyone. Most of the girls, with the exception of the boldest, preferred to assign themselves to the latter category, almost none to the former, and never to both unless your family was extremely religious. Despite her deformed face, I was sure that Mireille had already kissed several boys. You saw it in the confidence she had talking to older boys, the very confidence the rest of us lacked; it was like she knew them inside and out. Kathy, for her part, was one of the sexiest girls in the whole school and there were rumors that for a few months she’d been dating a boy in the 4ème, but from a different school. There was also Ahmed, a boy from Algiers who had been held back two years and ended up in our class, and who pursued my classmates like a rooster in a henhouse. Except for these three experts, it was hard to guess if anyone else had any significant experience with the opposite sex. To me, the idea alone was equal parts enticing and repulsive. I was dying to be in the arms of one of those 4ème guys and to kiss like I was eating an orange in the sun, but the whole business with the tongue and spit, and the fragility and the exposure in the moment bordered on unbearable.

Blaise was not one of the boys who were all muscle, not at all. I didn’t like him in the least and it was clear that he felt something similar toward me. I guess that’s what made us close. Some swear that genuine friendship between men and women doesn’t exist. I’d like to know your opinion, Doctor, because it’s a notion I completely disagree with. Throughout my life I’ve succeeded in establishing a strong complicity with some men, almost as strong as what I now have with my best female friends. Blaise’s presence that year meant a way out of solipsism. By October, we were sitting together for almost every subject. We also sought each other out in the free time between lunch and class. Recess, however, I spent alone, walking from one end of the playground to the other, greeting the kids I knew but never feeling good enough with any group to stick with them for more than five minutes. I remember that on one of these restless mornings, Cello, the older boy with whom I shared my lunch table, came up to me out of nowhere oozing friendliness. After making small talk for a few minutes, he told me he had a confession: Sebastien, his best friend, wanted to meet me and had asked Cello to make it happen. The recess bell cut short what he was saying.

“Anyway, come over one of these days and I’ll introduce you,” he suggested before leaving.

My bewilderment was such that when the lines started forming in front of the door, I remained in the same spot in the middle of the playground. I had to struggle to piece together the fragments of my awareness to make it back to homeroom. I had seen Cello’s friend many times and could easily place him. He was, in my opinion, one of the most attractive boys in school, which made the supposed confession seem unlikely. Why would this boy, who had his choice among the different African and blond queens of the school, have his eye on one of the untouchables who surreptitiously prowled the playground? I couldn’t believe it, so I decided to seek counsel. Mireille and Kathy looked at each other in astonishment. They too easily placed the candidate.

“It doesn’t makes sense,” I said, trying to be realistic.

“But neither does love,” responded Mireille, in a decidedly optimistic tone. “Even if you don’t know it,” her cheese-mouth added, “you’re a very pretty girl.”

“Maybe he’s interested in Mexico,” remarked the less enthusiastic Reunionese girl.

It had never occurred to me that being Mexican could make me interesting to a boy in the 4ème.

Then I remembered the dialogue with Marcela in Villa Olímpica, in front of Oscar’s building, a few years before. I didn’t want the same thing to happen again and to make Sebastien feel rejected without giving him a chance.

“Why don’t you write him a letter?” Kathy suggested. Her friend agreed.

“A letter! Why?” I asked, taken aback.

“To tell him that you like him too, but that you’ve never gone out with a guy and don’t have a lot of experience.”

I had never mentioned my experiences with boys to those two. I told myself that if it was so obvious to them that I was a stupid pucelle, it would be to him too. Why add insult to injury?

“That way you break the ice,” assured Kathy. “If you want we can help you, but not with spelling.”

That same afternoon, at lunchtime, instead of meeting up with Blaise in the study hall, I sat down on a bench to draft the famous letter. The girls reviewed it later and changed a few irrelevant phrases. I finished cleaning it up after dinner, while pretending to focus on my homework. I decorated the page with butterfly stickers that I had in my desk drawer to symbolize what I was feeling inside. That night, when the lights were turned off in our living room, I told my brother what had happened. We weren’t very close in those days, but we always had the unspoken rule that for things serious and imponderable we could count on each other. He patiently listened to the details of my account and to a summary of the letter.

“You don’t have a chance,” he said emphatically. “Sebastien has never taken you seriously.”

“How do you know?” I asked, trying to hide how offended I was.

“He’s in the 4ème, he’s the best rugby player in the school, all the girls are after him. You’re in the 5ème, you’re a pucelle, and besides, you’re pretty ugly.”

“You’re a minot in the 6ème with a pea-brain,” I retorted, “who doesn’t know anything about love and how illogical it is.”

I couldn’t sleep that night. With a light beneath the quilt, I spent almost eight hours reading The Ice People by René Barjaval, a novel Blaise had recommended to me. Even though it was science fiction and took place at the North Pole in a future era with great advances in space technology, the story could not have been more romantic. It only heightened my level of expectation about the encounter I believed to be in the making.

I gave Cello the letter the next day, in the cafeteria, and he looked at me with a complicit smile.

“How about you come over and I’ll introduce you right now?” he suggested. I didn’t have the nerve for that; the letter had used up all the bravery at my disposal.

Three days went by before I had any word from the boys. As a precaution, I spent those recesses with my council. I was with them when we saw Cello pass the letter to his friend. After all that time he hadn’t done it yet! Sebastien read it out loud, and from afar I recognized some of my carefully chosen words on his lips. By the time he finished, both of the boys were bent over in laughter next to the playground gate. I didn’t know where to hide.

“Couple of idiots,” said Kathy, indignant.

My bad advisors made me turn away without saying a word about what had just happened and, worst of all, without explaining to me how I was supposed to sit at the same table as Cello at lunch, that afternoon and all afternoons to come. How was I supposed to keep coming to school?

From what I have been able to observe, it seems that when an event hurts us there are two general tendencies in confronting it: the first being to go over it an infinite number of times, like a video we project again and again on a screen in our minds. The second is to tear apart the filmstrip and forget indefinitely the painful event. Some of us employ both techniques in the editing of our memories. I know that at first the episode of the letter to Sebastien obsessively occupied my thoughts and now, when I try to conjure it up, the details escape me. I know, for example, that I avoided the cafeteria for several days. I preferred fasting to the humiliation of another encounter. I even asked the principal to assign me to another lunch table, but since I didn’t dare explain the real reasons for my request, it was refused as insubstantial. Sooner or later I had to return and somehow, with all the strength in the world, keep my head held high. Luckily, Cello never held it against me, and the only time he brought it up I pretended that it wasn’t the least bit important to me. The art of craftiness has always been one of the trilobite’s greatest weapons. As far as I know, Blaise never knew anything about the letter. If he did, he kept it to himself in friendly silence.

Blaise was the son of a famous French cartoon artist who lived in Paris and had lived there for years. Blaise and his mother lived in Aix, but in a much cleaner and nicer neighborhood than ours. Blaise liked reading graphic novels and was well informed about the new works as well as the classics of the genre. He was also interested in literature, but not to the same degree. Now and then we’d exchange reading recommendations, always thinking of the other’s interests and tastes. I suggested he read Émile Ajar’s The Life Before Us and The Portrait of Dorian Gray, but would never have lent him The Four Daughters of Doctor March, as I knew perfectly well that it would have disgusted him to the point of nausea. He recommended Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and the book by René Barjaval, but never suggested The Hobbit, which he kept beside his bed. My trust in Blaise was also selective. I abstained from telling him about the letter affair, but I revealed to him aspects of my life I’d never told anyone, such as how much I liked writing. I told him about how I’d earned the respect of my classmates in elementary school in Mexico by writing horror stories about them. I even read him a fragment of my diary.

“You should seriously write for real,” he suggested, as if he were an expert. “Why don’t you write a novel about your life?”

“But I’m only thirteen! Nothing’s happened to me yet.”

“Write about what is happening to you right now.”

What I didn’t tell him or anyone else was the story of my father. It was a way to protect us from the judgment of others. For my classmates, my father became a Lacanian psychologist who lived in Chula Vista in San Diego, California. We spent half our summers in Mexico and the other half with him. That’s how I responded whenever someone asked me, but I never said so spontaneously or because I enjoyed lying. Nevertheless, that’s what inspired the mimetic habit that has since governed a good part of my life. It wasn’t hard to speak about San Diego. I’d been there several times for ophthalmologist consultations and to visit my aunt. But beyond describing the landscape, imagining a parallel life wasn’t such an easy task. To sustain it, I needed to remember each and every one of the facts and descriptions I’d uttered previously. Any discrepancy could raise suspicions. And don’t forget that my brother—even though he was in a different class and year—could contradict me with his own version of the facts. Rather than exciting, the entire situation ended up being pretty uncomfortable in the long run. To tell you the truth, I would have liked nothing more than to be finished with the pseudo-secrecy I had placed myself in. That kind of isolation—when pooled with the hormones of adolescence that were operating in my brain with cataclysmic force—had me spending entire afternoons collapsed on my mattress with my face buried in the pillow, sobbing violently and wanting to withdraw from the world. It was then my mother decided to hang green blinds from both our beds, which we could pull shut to delineate our own territory, and which we called the “simulacra of privacy.” It was no longer necessary to have a flashlight under the covers in order to read, and I returned to self-gratification with the zealousness of one seeking salvation.

Like me, Blaise didn’t talk a lot about his father. He idolized the man and at the same time felt an incurable resentment toward him for his absence and separate life in Paris. From the bitterness that crept into his smile whenever he described supposedly happy vacations, I gathered they were as false as my own. I, who came to know Blaise very well, avoided asking about his father, but many of our classmates were fans of his father’s work and would often inquire, at which point Blaise would proudly report the latest news on his father’s books, prizes, and translations that had come out in recent months. Blaise didn’t have any problem talking to people, nor did he harbor any prejudices against the North Africans as did many of the Franco-French students at our school. The affluent kids didn’t intimidate him, either. He was a free spirit that way, and I guess that’s why people found him so easy to be around. For me, his friendship was a gateway to meeting people I probably never would have met on my own. Such was the case with a mysterious-looking girl. Her name was Sophie Roy and we met her during the winter, shortly after it was announced that The Cure were coming to Marseille. Blaise was into the band and one afternoon when we were walking together, he went up to the black-clad girl to ask if she’d heard about the concert and if she knew the exact date. Based on her physique, as much as the look on her face, Sophie seemed much older than the rest of us. It was rumored—and it was true—that she’d previously been expelled from two private schools, and that her tenure at Jas de Bouffan was the last chance her parents were giving her before having her committed. Every day she showed up at school dressed entirely in black, in antique high-quality clothing. Instead of a coat or jacket, she wore a cape like Arthur Rimbaud, whose work we were studying that year in French Language and Literature. Underneath it, she wore an extremely tight skirt that clung to her silhouette, which was rather chubby and boasted curves that looked like they were about to burst out of the fabric. And she wore a button-down sweater, tight around her enormous breasts. Her blond and curly hair was always pulled into a chignon at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were large and pale blue, and she lined them with black kohl and a heavy coat of mascara. Her features and limbs were round and a little coarse, like those of a peasant woman or the baker from French fairy tales. There was something porcine about her extremely pug nose, which according to my brother looked like an electrical socket. A visible scar running down the length of Sophie’s cheek cast doubt on the innocence of her face. Still, the general impression she gave was that of a sexy and disturbingly peculiar girl. In spite of the prejudices that a nerd such as myself could have against a girl of her appearance, Sophie was neither a cruel nor ill-intentioned person. From the start she was really friendly with us and even suggested that we go see The Cure with her and a group of friends she was gathering, friends from a different school because she didn’t have any at Jas. The concert was three months away, so it cost nothing to accept the invitation and to keep hanging out in the meantime. It was in that moment, at lunchtime, that Blaise and I began to form a trio with the girl in black. Her presence never felt like an intrusion to us; on the contrary, her way of being made us feel included. Even though she lived in Éguilles, she almost never rode the school bus that took kids back to their towns, but would use public transportation to go downtown after class to spend a few hours with a former classmate of hers. When it would start to get dark, she’d take a city bus from the gare routière. Unlike the other girls in my class, she never judged the way I dressed, which the others considered old fashioned and unattractive. Instead, Sophie enthusiastically approved of my difference. On my way home from school one afternoon, I came across her leaning against the back gate I always went through as a shortcut.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, intrigued.

“I’m cutting class. You?”

“Going home.”

Then she asked a question that terrified me and I didn’t know how to react: “Can I come over?” she said.

I never brought people to our apartment and avoided mentioning the neighborhood we lived in as much as possible, since hearing its name immediately made most people suspicious. I tried to get out of it, but she wouldn’t let me.

“Are you embarrassed of your house or your family?” she asked me bluntly.

Instead of answering the question, I tried to dodge it:

“It’s a very dangerous neighborhood. Have you heard of Les Hippocampes?” I said, slowly pronouncing the name of the place as if it were a magic spell, knowing there wasn’t anybody who hadn’t read about it in the papers.

“You live there?” she cried. “Why didn’t you say so! I’ve been wanting to go to that neighborhood for years, but I’ve never known anyone there.”

I had no choice but to bring Sophie home with me. But the neighborhood didn’t live up to her expectations. She had imagined a much darker and more forbidding place. Naturally, she complained about the smell of disinfectant and said it was disrespectful to force it on us. When we went into the apartment, Sunil was brewing a vanilla tea he’d just brought back from his island, and Sophie questioned him about all of his customs, including the caste system, things which my brother and I had observed but tactfully never asked about. With his newly acquired communist ideology, Sunil was delighted to answer her questions. The conversation became passionate but was cut off suddenly when my mom came in. With a stern face and as much friendliness as she could muster in that moment, Mom threw the intruder out and sent me to take a bath.

“I had a good time at your house,” Sophie said to me the next morning, outside at recess. “Too bad your mom is so jealous.”

Little by little, I realized that my friendship with Sophie was gaining me respect from the other students. I must have had something—something that no one had discovered yet—for this girl who was so much more mature and more wealthy than all the rest of us to have chosen me out of everybody. Suddenly they all wanted to find out what it was. I went downtown with her a few times, but I never had the chance to meet her other friends. Where I did get to go with her—and this I considered a huge demonstration of her trust in me—was on one of her visits to the doctor who managed—I found this out that same afternoon without any kind of preface or introduction—her detoxification therapy. It was the first time I saw her bare arms, covered in scars and needle tracks. I also heard her weight and blood pressure, and finally her age: thirteen. Same as me. For six months of her life, she went to that place every week and had to answer the same questions.

When we left the doctor’s office that afternoon, we sat down in a quiet little square to have a coffee like the university students did. She told me briefly about how she had spent the summer in Aix living with an eighteen-year-old boy named Adam, but had to break up with him when she decided to quit and get clean once and for all. She never talked about it again. Nor did she tell me what the scar on her face was from. I, in turn, talked about Sebastien, whom I continued to dream about in secret, and the mortifying letter incident. Compared to her story, mine was embarrassingly childish, but she still listened to it with the same seriousness and respect with which I had listened. The visit sealed our friendship—a friendship marked by a large number of differences, but for that our few similarities became stronger. What were they? First and foremost we were outsiders, and we both had several uncomfortable secrets that couldn’t be shared. We were both going through a tough time. But I was wrong to think these similarities and the tacit complicity between us also implied loyalty or some kind of commitment. This I would figure out later, not that afternoon, nor in the following days which I passed under the happy illusion of having found a true friend.

One night, while we were eating dinner with some hippie women and forty-year-olds at Lisa’s house, it got into my mother to condemn my behavior: she said that ever since I had been spending time with certain friends, I had started acting like a seductress, and that my body language, the intonation in my voice, and my linguistic expressions now responded to a stereotype—the cliché of a showgirl or little pin-up doll. It is enough to analyze how I felt in those days, just a little bit, to know that nothing could have been further from reality. But, Dr. Sazlavski, if it had been true, wouldn’t it have been more deserving of applause and encouragement? The ability to seduce another human being is one of the most powerful instruments a woman can acquire, better than mastering a foreign language or culinary skills. If I had actually started to practice that subtle discipline, wouldn’t it have been better to let it develop fully, rather than to inhibit my attempts? Of course her friends took her side—the most attractive women hypocritically—saying they would have to educate the next generation so that we wouldn’t fall into the mental prisons imposed by our consumerist society. Maybe deep down it was hard for my mother to accept a possible competitor and she preferred that I keep hunching my shoulders like a defensive little insect.

A few months later, I went to one of the first parties in my life. It was in the beach house of one of the girls from school, in the city of Martigues, twenty minutes from Aix. My mother had a few friends in Martigues and arranged to spend the evening with them so she could pick me up later. I took the trip there with Sophie, Blaise, and his mother. Behind the party house there was some kind of grotto, maybe a wine cellar at some point or an unused granary. It was decorated to look like an eighties nightclub with spinning colorful lights and dry ice. There was also a bar with enough beer and pastis to get you wasted. The music was typical of those years: Depeche Mode, Europa, Aha, George Michael, Prince, and Madonna, among others. Blaise, Sophie, and I took over a corner by the bar. I felt happy to be with them. If individually we were like insects on the verge of extinction, together we formed a pretty strong group. It was as if our strangest characteristics—my crossed eye, Blaise’s stature, and Sophie’s scar, to name a few—were actually markings we had chosen, like piercings or tattoos. At some point during the night, they played “Just Like Heaven” by The Cure, now our favorite band, and the three of us got up to dance. Our enthusiasm caught on and all of a sudden the dance floor was full of kids with dark aspirations. Sebastien was among them. He’d come to the party without his best friend Cello and his attitude seemed much less arrogant. When the song ended he came over and offered the three of us beers. He went from group to group a few times but he always came back to us. All the friendliness from him started to make me tense. I hadn’t forgotten what he and his friend had put me through just six months earlier, and I didn’t trust him. But at the same time, he was so attractive. His attitude that night was so different from the one he showed off around his Italian friend. How could I not want to believe him? I was thinking about it all while waiting in line for the bathroom, trying to spot him from a distance. Then I saw him dancing with Sophie to one of those romantic songs teenagers put on at parties so they can put their arms around each other. I don’t really remember what the song was about. All I know is that I couldn’t go into the bathroom or move anywhere. I stayed there glued to the wall like someone expecting a huge boot to stomp down on her body. Then they both disappeared. Blaise, who had remained unaware of my history with that boy, came up to me with a glass in his hand and delivered the fatal blow:

“Sophie went home with someone. I think we’ve lost her.”

And in a way I did lose her that night. Because even though I still talked to her and stoically accepted her silence on the topic of her adventure with Sebastien, our relationship was never the same. She never offered to explain, much less apologize. Nor did she date him, not publicly at least. She didn’t even mention his name. Her behavior was the same as before the night of the party, as if she had no idea what she had done. Little by little I distanced myself from her. It was almost summer break and I pretended to be studying for final exams, until one day I just stopped saying hi.