G. WENT TO SWITZERLAND FOR TWO WEEKS FOR HIS REJUVENATION cure. He left me the keys to the hotel room as well as to his studio near the Luxembourg Gardens. I was welcome to go there if I wanted to. One evening I violated the taboo and began to read the forbidden books. In one go, like a sleepwalker. I didn’t go outside for two days.

The pornography of certain passages, barely veiled by his cultural references and elegant prose style, made me retch. I stopped at one particular paragraph, in which G. described setting out on a quest for “young asses” on a trip to Manila. “Young boys aged eleven or twelve that I bring to my bed are a rare spice,” he wrote a little further on.

I thought about his readers. I imagined drooling, physically repulsive old men, transfixed by these descriptions of prepubescent bodies. Did being the heroine of one of G.’s novels mean that I too would become the medium for the masturbatory practices of his pedophile readers?

If G. was indeed a pervert, as he had so often been depicted to me—the sleazy creep who, for the price of an airline ticket to the Philippines, gifted himself an orgy with the bodies of eleven-year-old boys, then justified it with the purchase of a schoolbag—did that make me a monster too?

I immediately tried to suppress this idea. But the poison had found its way in, and now it was beginning to spread.