I MET G. WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN. WE BECAME LOVERS WHEN I was fourteen. Now I was fifteen and I had no means of comparison, since I had never known any other man. And yet it wasn’t long before I became aware of the repetitive nature of our sexual relationship, the difficulties G. had in maintaining his erection, the laborious subterfuges he used to obtain it (frenetically masturbating when I turned over), the increasingly mechanical nature of our lovemaking, the boredom I was beginning to feel, the fear of letting slip anything that might be construed as criticism, the almost insurmountable difficulty of indicating any desire that would not only break our routine but might actually enhance my pleasure. Since I had read the forbidden books, the ones in which he flaunted his collection of mistresses and detailed his trips to Manila, something tacky and sordid now tarnished these intimate episodes in which I could no longer discern the slightest trace of love. I felt degraded and more alone than ever.

And yet, apparently, our love was unique and sublime. He repeated it so often, I ended up believing in its transcendence. Stockholm syndrome is not just a theory. Why shouldn’t a fourteen-year-old girl be in love with a man thirty-six years her senior? I turned this question over in my mind a hundred times, without realizing it was the wrong one. It wasn’t my attraction to him that needed to be interrogated, but his to me.

The situation would have been very different if at the same age I’d fallen madly in love with a fifty-year-old man, who, having had several relationships with women his own age, and in spite of knowing it was morally questionable, had succumbed to my youth, fallen madly in love, and yielded just this once to his love for a teenage girl. In that case, I admit, our extraordinary passion might have been sublime, if I’d been the one to push him to break the law for love—if not for the fact that G. had repeated the same story a hundred times already. It might indeed have been unique and infinitely romantic if I could have been sure of being the first and the last—if I had, in short, been the exception in his love life. If that had been the case, how could anyone fail to pardon his transgression? Love has no age limit. That was not the issue.

In reality, in the context of G.’s life, I now knew that his desire for me had been repeated an infinite number of times, was pathetically banal, and revealed a neurosis that took the form of an uncontrollable addiction. I might have been the youngest of his Parisian conquests, but his books were peopled with other Lolitas who were fifteen (barely a year older; it hardly made much of a difference), and if he had been living in a country that was less vigilant about protecting minors, my fourteen years wouldn’t have been worth a mention next to an eleven-year-old boy with almond-shaped eyes.

G. was not like other men. He boasted of only having had sexual relations with girls who were virgins or boys who had barely reached puberty, then recounted these stories in his books. This was precisely what he was doing when he took possession of my youth for his sexual and literary ends. Every day, thanks to me, he satisfied a passion frowned upon by the law, and prepared to brandish this victory triumphantly in his new novel.

No, this man was not driven by the best intentions. This man was not a good man. He was precisely what we had learned to fear when we were children: an ogre.

Our affair was a dream so powerful that nothing, not a single one of the few warnings I received from those around me, was enough to awaken me. It was the most perverse nightmare. A violence that had no name.