G. COULD SEE I WAS SLIPPING AWAY FROM HIM. IT WAS obviously intolerable for him to feel that I was no longer under his thumb, although I had said nothing to him about my conversations with Youri. For the first time, G. suggested that I go with him to the Philippines. He wanted to prove to me that the country was nothing like the devil’s lair that he described in his books. Most of all he wanted the two of us to go somewhere far away, to the other side of the world, anywhere out of the world. To get close to each other again, to love each other like the very first time. I was paralyzed. The thought of agreeing terrified me, and yet I had an irrepressible longing, an absurd hope, that I would see my nightmare dissipate, would discover that the sickening descriptions in some of his books were just phantasmagoria, provocations, narcissistic boasts. That in fact there was no child sex trade in Manila. That there never had been. Deep down I knew it wasn’t true, deep down I knew that it would be crazy to go there with him. Would he expect me to share our bed with an eleven-year-old boy? In any case, my mother, to whom he had boldly made his absurd request, had the presence of mind to refuse point-blank. Since I was a minor, I couldn’t leave the country without her permission. Her refusal took a great weight off my shoulders.

For a while now G. had been insisting on the gap between fiction and reality, between his writing and his real life, which he claimed I was unable to grasp. He was always trying to throw me off the scent, to thwart the sixth sense I had that enabled me to detect his lies. Gradually I was discovering the extent of his talent as a manipulator, the mountain of falsehoods he had built up between us. It was an extraordinary strategy, the way he calculated every minute detail. His entire intellect revolved around satisfying his desires and then transposing them into one of his books. Every single act was guided by these two motives: writing and coming.