THE LETTERS KEPT COMING, EACH MORE PASSIONATE THAN the last. G. declared his love for me in every possible way, begged me to come back and see him as soon as I could, vowed he couldn’t live without me, that life wasn’t worth living a moment longer if he wasn’t in my arms. Overnight I had turned into a goddess.

The following Saturday I told my mother I was going to a friend’s house to study. I rang at G.’s door. How could I resist that wolfish smile, those laughing eyes, the long, slender, aristocratic fingers?

A few minutes later I was lying on his bed, and this was something quite unlike anything I had ever known. This wasn’t Julien’s skinny, hairless body next to mine, his velvety, adolescent skin, the acrid odor of his sweat. This was a man’s body. Strong, stubbly, freshly washed and smelling of eau de cologne.

Our first encounter had been devoted to the upper part of my body. This time he ventured, intrepid, toward more intimate regions. And for that he had to undo my shoelaces, a task he undertook with undisguised pleasure, before pulling off my jeans and my cotton panties (I didn’t own any feminine underwear worthy of the name, and it appeared that nothing could have delighted G. more, though at the time I was only dimly aware of this).

In a mellifluous voice he boasted of his experience, how skillfully he had taken the virginity of several young teenage girls, how he always ensured it didn’t hurt in the slightest; he even claimed they would recall it with emotion as long as they lived, aware of how lucky they were to have met him and not another person, someone rough and careless who would have pinned them unceremoniously to the mattress so that they would forever have associated that unique moment with a feeling of regret.

Except that, as it turned out, he was unable to penetrate me. With an instinctive reflex, my thighs jammed tight together. I howled with pain before he even touched me—despite the fact this was the one thing I’d been dreaming of. In a confusion of bravado and romance, I had already secretly determined the inevitable outcome—G. would be my first lover. That was the reason I was lying on his bed. So why was my body refusing? Why this intractable fright?

G. was undaunted. He murmured reassuringly:

“Don’t worry. We can do it another way, you know.”

Just as one must cross oneself with holy water before entering a church, taking possession of the body and soul of a young girl cannot be done without a certain sense of the sacred, a timeless ritual. Sodomy has its rules, and must be carefully, religiously, prepared.

G. flipped me over on the mattress and set about licking every single part of my body from top to toe: back of my neck, shoulders, back, hips, buttocks. Something of my presence in the world dissolved. And, while his greedy tongue insinuated itself inside me, my soul took flight.

That is how I lost the first part of my virginity. Just like a little boy, he whispered to me in a soft voice.