Language has always been an exclusive domain. Who owns language owns power.
—Chloé Delaume, My Beloved Sisters
I WORKED A RANGE OF JOBS BEFORE I FOUND MYSELF caught up in the world of publishing. How wonderfully cunning the unconscious can be. It’s impossible to escape its determinism. After having turned my back on books for many years, at last they were my friends again. Now I made my living through them. After all, books are what I know best.
I was trying, I suppose, feeling my way toward repairing something. But what? How? I put all my energy into texts written by other people. Unconsciously I was still trying to find some answers, a few sparse fragments of my history. I was hoping that in this way the mystery would somehow be resolved. What happened to “little V.”? Has anyone seen her? Sometimes a voice used to arise from the depths and whisper in my ear: “Books are lies.” Now I no longer heard it, as if it had been wiped from my memory. Every now and then, a flash. A detail, here or there. I would think yes, that’s it, that’s a piece of me, between the lines, behind those words. I gathered them up. I collected them. I put myself together again. Books can be excellent medicine. I’d forgotten.
But every time I thought I was finally free, G. would find me again and try to renew his hold on me. Even when I became an adult, whenever someone mentioned his name to me, I would freeze, turn back into the adolescent I had been when I first met him. I’ll be fourteen years old for the rest of my life. That was my fate.
One day my mother handed me one of the letters that, as he didn’t know where I lived, he persisted in sending to her address. My silence, my refusal to communicate with him in any way, hadn’t discouraged him at all. With astonishing nerve, he was writing to ask permission to publish photographs of me in a biography of him that one of his admirers was working on for a Belgian publisher. A lawyer friend of mine wrote him a threatening letter on my behalf. If G. persisted in any way in using my name or my image in the context of a literary work, legal action would be taken against him. G. did not pursue the project. At last I was safe. For now.
A few months later I discovered that G. had an official internet site that featured, in addition to a chronology of his life and work, photographs of some of his conquests, including two pictures of me at the age of fourteen, captioned with my initial, V., which encapsulated my identity from then on (to the point that I still sign my e-mails that way).
The shock was unbearable. I called my lawyer friend, who recommended a colleague more experienced than he in image copyright law. The affidavit we requested was expensive enough and, after lengthy research, my new adviser told me that unfortunately there was not much we could do. The site was registered not in G.’s name, but in that of a webmaster domiciled somewhere in Asia.
“G.M. has taken care of things so perfectly that he can’t be deemed owner of the content hosted by his dummy corporation, which is completely outside French jurisdiction. Legally, the site is the work of a fan, nothing more. It’s a totally cynical move, but it’s absolutely airtight.”
“How could a stranger living in Asia possibly have managed to get hold of photos of me at the age of fourteen? Photographs that belonged to G.? It doesn’t add up.”
“If you haven’t got copies of the pictures, it will be hard to prove they’re of you,” she said, deeply apologetic. “By the way, I made some inquiries: G. has recently become the client of a leading light in intellectual property, one of the most redoubtable lawyers around. Getting into a legal battle with him would be a fool’s errand. It could cost you not only your annual salary but also your health. Are you sure it’s really worth it?”
With a heavy heart, I dropped the case.