THE SPELL WAS BEGINNING TO LIFT. IT WAS ABOUT TIME. But no Prince Charming came to my aid to slash through the jungle of creepers that bound me to this kingdom of darkness. Every day I awoke to a new reality. A reality that I was still unable to accept in its entirety, for it risked tearing me apart.

But in front of G., I no longer bothered to hide my qualms. What I had found out about him, what he had tried to hide from me up till then, appalled me. I tried to understand. What pleasure did he get from picking up kids in Manila? And why this need to be sleeping with ten girls at once, as he boasted in his diaries? Who was he, really?

When I tried to get an answer, he parried with an attack, calling me an insufferable pedant.

“Who do you think you are, with all your questions? A modern version of the Inquisition? Have you become a feminist all of a sudden? That’s the last thing I need!”

From then on, G. assailed me every day with the same mantra:

“You’re mad. You don’t know how to live in the present, just like every other woman. No woman is capable of savoring the moment, it’s as though it’s in your genes. You’re all chronically unsatisfied, forever imprisoned by your hysteria.”

And just like that, there they lay, on the garbage heap of history, all those tender words, all those my darling childs, my beautiful schoolgirls.

“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m only fifteen, as you are perfectly well aware, so not quite yet what one would call a ‘woman’! Anyway, what do you know about women? Once they’re over eighteen, you’re no longer remotely interested in them!”

But I was no match for him when it came to verbal sparring. I was too young, too inexperienced. When I confronted him, the writer and intellectual, I found myself cruelly lacking the necessary vocabulary. I wasn’t familiar with the terms “narcissistic pervert” and “sexual predator.” I didn’t know there was such a thing as a person for whom the Other does not exist. I still believed that violence was only ever physical. And G. manipulated language like others manipulate swords. With the simplest expression he could deal me a fatal blow that would destroy me. It was impossible to do battle with him on equal terms.

Nonetheless, I was old enough to discern the hypocrisy of the situation and recognize that every oath of fidelity, every promise he made to leave me with the most marvelous memories, was just one more lie in the service of his books and his sexual desires. I surprised myself with how much I hated him for trapping me inside the fiction that was being written, constantly, in book after book, in which he always gave himself the best role: a fantasy bolted to his ego, which he then displayed in public. I couldn’t bear the way he made a religion out of dissimulation and lies and used his vocation as a writer as an alibi to justify his addiction. I was no longer taken in by his games.

He, meanwhile, began to resent even the most offhand remark I made. His diary became my worst enemy, the means by which G. filtered our love affair, transforming it into an unhealthy and entirely one-sided passion that I had single-handedly crafted. At the first hint of a reproach, he would rush to uncap his pen: “You shall see what you shall see, my pretty one! What a portrait I’m going to sketch of you in my little black book!”

Because I was turning against him, because it no longer gave me any joy to slip under the sheets between lessons, he had to get rid of me. With the power of the written word, he turned his “little V.” into an unstable teenage girl eaten up with jealousy. He said whatever he wanted; I was just a character now, living on borrowed time, like every other girl who’d come before me. It wouldn’t be long before he erased me completely from the pages of his wretched diary. For his readers, it was merely a story, words. For me, it was the beginning of a breakdown.

But what is the life of an anonymous adolescent worth compared to a work of literature written by a superior being?

The fairy tale was over, the spell was broken, and Prince Charming had revealed his true face.