Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir

Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir Sylvia Kristel The candid and heartbreakingly honest memoir of Sylvia Kristel, the cinema icon of the 1970s who played the lead role in the worldwide sensation erotic Emmanuelle films.1974: After a year of wrangling with the censors, the erotic film, Emmanuelle, is a blockbuster sensation on release in France and a box office triumph around the world from Japan to the States. The image that adorned cinemas across the world was of an unknown 20 year old posing naked, innocent and vulnerable on a wicker chair. Overnight Sylvia Kristel was propelled into international superstardom (at the height of her fame she was invited to address the Brazilian parliament) and turned into an icon of sexual liberation.Sylvia Kristel was born of a dysfunctional family and an impossibly strict religious education. But having won the Miss TV Europe competition in 1973 she was driven by her own ambition to be an actress on the world stage and auditioned for the part of the innocent seductress in Emmanuelle. Through the phenomenal success of the three Emmanuelle films she starred in, she became the darling of Hollywood, as she seduced and was seduced by the rich and the beautiful of the golden age of cinema. But she found herself typecast as Emmanuelle and often played roles that capitalized upon that image, most notably starring in an adaptation of ‘Lady Chatterly's Lover’, and a nudity-filled biopic of World War I spy, Mata Hari, in which she played the title role. Almost inevitably she became the victim of her own innocence as it was Emmanuelle people wanted, not Sylvia. The price that she paid for her meteoric rise was an equally rapid descent into an excess of alcohol and drugs as her tempestuous family life threatened to fall apart all together.Naked, candid and heart-breakingly honest, ‘Undressing Emmanuelle’ tells the story of one of Europe's most celebrated cinema icons and the price she paid for her beauty and innocence. UNDRESSING EMMANUELLE A memoir SYLVIA KRISTEL with JEAN ARCELIN For Arthur LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) Contents Title Page (#u6dc28449-b629-578f-97ee-e5e9151841b8)Dedication (#u9594402f-6420-59e8-a0b7-c6f6c9f9e334)List of Illustrations (#uce337bc6-edfd-532d-828a-3f7488ceec1e)Chapter One (#u9dd12230-a709-5007-a653-49f4312b3128)Chapter Two (#u2a426905-ed27-5847-98db-bedb74a6eb27)Chapter Three (#uf4845c8c-4b5c-5297-a930-3c4e33a068e3)Chapter Four (#uefdba68d-6981-501b-a117-04cfe3daa0eb)Chapter Five (#ud0d365dc-01b7-56c8-ba47-8a49f4e1e052)Chapter Six (#udc9014d2-78d0-5e98-8d60-c2f74e4ee0f6)Chapter Seven (#u0f9ade3a-30c2-5b22-9852-97582ec032c6)Chapter Eight (#u412d4d9b-4586-50c9-a989-00faca274a7a)Chapter Nine (#ueb12ffe8-d432-5ff8-a076-c0f6edb0ee78)Chapter Ten (#u091d5585-6143-55cb-8d05-11351f4c2ab9)Chapter Eleven (#u816e1f9d-7fcf-544b-9953-6458cf2f3358)Chapter Twelve (#u9b059418-0bac-5f37-8e82-d728999a8a7d)Chapter Thirteen (#ufb0a7631-fabb-5c40-b578-622e0c874c4e)Chapter Fourteen (#ud7f09e10-d01e-5f2e-8cfa-83c514c8e666)Chapter Fifteen (#u7ec0834a-8acb-529c-b22a-2384222c915a)Chapter Sixteen (#ubb163d69-3dd8-5165-9f8b-6f5fee10ff89)Chapter Seventeen (#uc572bd92-5c99-5f51-b883-769d3b025e33)Chapter Eighteen (#ua759d162-4c18-5d24-ae0f-4686a95ef74f)Chapter Nineteen (#uf35cae59-f444-59cc-8512-82e735835130)Chapter Twenty (#u66fd1eed-4005-5a6b-8dac-01d8cc96328f)Chapter Twenty One (#u2664b874-a3ff-53bd-b853-fa2f60379f11)Chapter Twenty Two (#u94b1c19d-c35d-5ad2-be80-cf4cf88ae9d7)Chapter Twenty Three (#udb7389f2-1b5f-57d2-8ffe-bbbdc8cf81f8)Chapter Twenty Four (#ua81cf468-99ea-5665-a12b-48baef44f7a8)Chapter Twenty Five (#u6c914197-a776-53d2-9217-741c950a4cb2)Chapter Twenty Six (#u6025c8a8-e1cc-574d-be56-29acf7372a86)Chapter Twenty Seven (#uc31ff64a-de1b-529f-af02-b2624e36fbbe)Chapter Twenty Eight (#ue4869095-2699-5798-9246-e471d7779630)Chapter Twenty Nine (#u62de3dd9-d8ef-50f9-91f9-3e206594cae6)Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventy Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) 1 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) Amsterdam, 2005 Bessel Kok is a major businessman. It shows: he has presence, composure, style and a keen eye. He’s a chess fanatic like my father, and a connoisseur of fine flesh and lovely women. His wife is young and ravishing, he has the pot belly of a gourmand, and his dream is to become President of the World Chess Federation. He is also generous and – as luck would have it – a nostalgic fan and kind patron of little old me! I met him a few years ago at a smart dinner after a private view. He kindly invited me to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, of which he was a sponsor. Bessel has become a thoughtful and protective friend. This summer he offered to subsidise me. ‘Why?’ ‘I will provide you with financial support for a few months, so you can devote yourself to your own project.’ ‘What kind of project?’ ‘A book.’ ‘A book?’ ‘The story of an ageing Dutchwoman, a former goddess of love, in fragile health and living in a tiny apartment …’ He laughed, adding: ‘Give it some thought …’ * The sun was shining brightly on the Amsterdam canals, and life was cutting me some slack. My mind roamed freely in my convalescing body – I had time to live, to think. My pale skin soaked up the sun, turning more golden by the day and slowly showing up a scar on my left arm. Four white spots came gradually into relief, each smaller than the last. ‘Give it some thought …’ Bessel’s words kept running through my mind, refusing to fade. I couldn’t take my eyes off this scar of mine. So old. Forgotten. Four spots, like a secret code, the code of my childhood, of my life perhaps. A code I had never tested. But now I had to; it was time. I phoned Bessel in the middle of that hot summer and announced: ‘I’m going to test the code.’ ‘What?’ ‘I’ve been frightened that I’d forgotten everything, on purpose or because I had to, but now it’s all coming back, the words are on the tip of my tongue …’ ‘I can’t understand what you’re saying.’ ‘I accept your support, Bessel! I’m ready to do the book.’ 2 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) The last train has screeched noisily into Utrecht station, as it does every evening just after nine. Daytime was over hours ago, but night arrives only with this silence. A brutal cold snap started today. ‘Winter is here, that’s for sure!’ declared a customer in the overheated hotel restaurant. Utrecht station is enormous, the biggest in Holland, a great entangled fork leading to a huge, well-ordered platform. Travellers arrive here from all countries, for a day or a month, for the cattle market, the trade fairs, the hopes and encounters of big city life. I walk slowly down the main staircase, the floorboards creaking despite the lightness of my tread. I am trying not to make any noise, in case the hotel is full – although the lights in the lobby are off. There’s only that red light seeping in through the bay windows, lending a glow to each piece of furniture, each line, to the Chinese vase standing on the reception counter. This red light blinks on and off, banishing the nighttime dark. In the hotel the dark is never black, it’s purple. The show is scheduled for ten o’clock. I cross the empty restaurant; the customers must have eaten early on account of the sudden cold. I walk towards the counter. It’s the end of the week and the customers have left, tired. I’m disappointed. I enjoy doing my little show. Usually the two of us do it together, it’s better that way – we smile and protect each other. We always use the same song, ‘Only You’ by the Platters. I get on my bicycle and pedal around the bar, turning in the wide aisle. I fix each customer with a perfectly neutral smile, neither happy nor sad. I stretch out one leg, then the other. My skirt flips back over the saddle and I turn my head slowly from side to side, trying to make the curls of my short hair flutter. Marianne is behind me on the rack, waving. I meet the amused eyes of the customers without reading them. I check that everyone is happy. The recipe usually takes – they laugh out loud, encouraging me and calling out: ‘Bravo, Sylvia! Do it again, both legs together this time!’ That’s how it usually turns out, but not tonight. I am alone and I won’t be doing a show for anyone. I decide to go back up to my room. The lounge door opens, letting in a patch of bright light. I jump. ‘Ah, you’re here, Sylvia! You came. Is it only me? Come over here, Peter! Sylvia’s going to do her show, just for us.’ I nod slowly, minimally. I can’t refuse, can’t say no to ‘Uncle’ Hans. I’m already wearing my performance outfit – the short wool skirt and a slightly faded pink T-shirt matched to my tights. Peter is still wearing his apron. He’s the sous-chef. He has a red, puffy face and large, deep-set, glittering eyes. ‘Uncle’ Hans always wears the same grey suit, unironed and too short, revealing spotless white socks. His face is round. His hair is greasy and plastered back. I can’t tell the length of ‘Uncle’ Hans’s hair. Is it long, under all the Brylcreem? As long as the hair concealed in severe buns which in the rooms at night cascades free and soft right down the backs of the women I sometimes glimpse? ‘Come on then! Start! We’ve no time to lose, sweetheart!’ ‘Uncle’ Hans turns on a table lamp so he can see me better. I get on my bike and go round once in their silence, I don’t want any music. I stretch out a leg, not looking at them. I can feel their gaze. Settled on my body like a boil. It bothers me and makes me feel tired but I carry on, neither sad nor happy, I will not stop. I twirl around, I’m an acrobat, an agile cat, a beautiful lady. I pedal around the bar. ‘Uncle’ Hans puts out a hand each time I pass, trying to catch me as if I were a fairground attraction. I skid a little but regain control. One more and I’ll stop, I’ve decided. That will be it for tonight. ‘Uncle’ Hans has stood up. And Peter. They’re suddenly in front of me, blocking my circular route. They wedge my front wheel with their feet, grab my shoulders and put a hand over my mouth. I don’t cry out. I knew it. Peter pulls my hands behind my back, takes a forgotten napkin from a table and ties them together, pulling hard, wanting me to wince but I won’t. I stand motionless, waiting. I want to see ‘Uncle’ Hans’s hair come loose, to feel his sticky hands soaked with fear. Let him sweat his desire over me, exposing himself as no one knows him. I want the boil to burst. I’m waiting. ‘Uncle’ Hans sticks out his thick, blotchy, pinky-brown tongue, waggling it like a hissing snake. He takes hold of my face – smaller than his hands – tilts it, and leans over so that his tongue can reach every part of my skin. He is slobbering, licking me slowly from neck to temple, from bottom to top, then starting again. His tongue is a thick, hot body, with a hard, pushing tip, so close but so foreign, so unknown. I don’t move. I leave my hands knotted in the napkin, leave my face to be smeared with his saliva, let him do it. ‘What’s going on here?’ shrieks Aunt Alice as she comes into the lounge. ‘Nothing, nothing!’ replies ‘Uncle’ Hans. ‘We’re playing with Sylvia!’ Aunt Alice comes closer, slender, quick and unafraid. She slams on light switches as she comes, making the bar as bright as daylight, then raises her voice. ‘Sylvia, go straight back up to your room. You need to take care of your sister, she’s not well. Quick now, it’s late!’ I turn towards her, pulling with all my strength on the napkin still binding my hands. ‘Uncle’ Hans has stood up again and is leaving the room without a word, head bent. Peter follows him. Aunt Alice watches them go, mute, then sees the napkin fall to my feet. She hides her head in her hands with a great groaning sigh and repeats, her voice softer and slower: ‘What’s going on? …’ I am out of there. I was nine years old. It was in my parents’ hotel, where I grew up – the Commerce Hotel, Station Square, Utrecht. That was the chaos of my young life. 3 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘Uncle’ Hans is the manager of the hotel, which belongs to my paternal grandmother. The whole family lives or works here – my parents, my aunts Alice and Mary, my younger sister Marianne and the baby, my brother Nicolas. The hotel boasts no stars but it is rather elegant, with its high ceilings, Persian carpets and art nouveau style. ‘Uncle’ Hans is appreciated for his rigour. He is steadfast, hardworking and clean, his nails perfectly rounded from frequent filing. He’s the right-hand man, he opens and closes the hotel with the clockwork regularity of the station trains. ‘Uncle’ Hans has that inhuman ability to repeat impeccably the same mechanical actions day after day. His face betrays neither fatigue nor pain, just a slight smile. He intrigues me. He must be a robot, resembling a man without quite having the right expression, hiding under his smooth mask and shiny head a lifeless body, activated by strings and held together by steel rods and tightly fastened screws rather than blood and tears. ‘Uncle’ Hans is not an uncle but the head employee of the hotel. He owes his nickname to the trust my parents have placed in him, to his daily presence, and to the calm and protective impression he makes. It was my mother who first called him that. With the name she gave ‘Uncle’ Hans a stake in our family, hoping to encourage that solitary man to attach himself – to us, our good fortune, and our hotel. ‘Uncle’ Hans does not like me. I am the boss’s daughter. His secret rival, an idle girl sprouting up before his very eyes with my lazy blossoming charm, the kid constantly under his feet, a growing obstacle, an unformed body arousing his desire. I often eat with him and the sous-chef in the kitchen. I am already making my preferences clear, gently but firmly. I don’t like onions, carrots or mustard, those adult items I’m supposed to force down my throat ‘like a big girl’, as he says. He likes to watch me grimace as I chew. The mustard pot is huge, family-size. It goes from table to table acquiring layers of congealed mustard on its rim, some browner than others, scored by marks where the spoon has lain. Leftovers. I don’t want any mustard. One refusal too many and ‘Uncle’ Hans’s eyes go all red. He grabs my slender neck and squeezes it until my body goes rigid, then shoves my face into the pot. When I’ve had enough to eat I push my plate towards the middle of the table with infinite slowness, looking elsewhere. I take advantage of any distractions to secretly push the plate as far away from me as possible. ‘Uncle’ Hans catches me at it, and stabs his fork into my arm. Hard. I scream and run to my room. The pain is intense. The blood is seeping through, making four red spots on my arm. I rub them as you scrub a stain, but it doesn’t make any difference. I hide the wound by crossing my arms: my first pose. I tell my mother how ‘Uncle’ Hans forces me to finish disgusting plates of food. She replies that I have to do whatever ‘Uncle’ Hans tells me, it’s for my own good. I hit on a different strategy. I decide to spend any scraps of money I earn from serving or making beds in the chip shop next door. The chips are fat, greasy and delicious; they crunch and melt in my mouth as I savour their soft hearts, alone or with my sister Marianne. We behave like starving orphans, and the kind owner gives us extra large portions. We are free, happy and sated. When my skin turns brown in the summer, the four spots from the fork are reborn – one at a time, in a neat little row, from the most distinct to the faintest. 4 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) Aunt Alice told my mother all about the scene she’d interrupted in the bar: my hands still bound, the blushing discomfort of ‘Uncle’ Hans, his tousled hair, the way he left, stooped and staggering, looking such a hypocrite. My mother told my father. ‘Uncle’ Hans was dismissed the following day, with no explanation other than my mother’s shattered and contemptuous gaze and the rage written all over my father’s closed face. My mother didn’t want to know the details, she didn’t ask me a thing. She doesn’t want any trouble. She would rather sweep away evil as she does dirt – straightforward and effective. My mother will remain shaken for a long time, thinking deeply about the roots of vice and men’s ability to conceal it, to cover evil with a pleasant mask. Can good also contain evil? My mother’s simple, two-tone world was quaking, the black and white blending to create new shades, new shadows. I watch Hans leaving. I’ve triumphed over the robot. He is deathly pale, demolished, seemingly finished. For a moment, as the door slams behind him and the freezing air floods in, I feel a tinge of regret. Is the sentence too harsh, more than I’m worth? 5 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) The two nymphets are rosy-cheeked, and go topless all year round. They don’t wear dresses, just a big sheet over one shoulder. Their hair hangs down in thick coils. They look a little sad, not yet smiling. I try to catch their eyes but never can. I watch them through the window of room 21, in the eaves of the hotel, where my sister and I sleep most of the time. The nymphs reign like Greek statues on either side of the station forecourt. On the left is the source of the red light that gives the area’s nights their bright, intermittent glow: an enormous Coca-Cola sign. I love the elegant writing with its upstrokes and downstrokes, and the funny name that rings out like a greeting in an exotic language. The light is intense and streams right into the hotel. It also tints the noses and breasts of my nymphs, making them twinkle. I sometimes stretch my hand dreamily out of the window, watching my arm flush and fade. I am a station nymph, an angel ready to depart, a little girl on a journey. About to fly out of the window like a bird. I watch my flesh become flooded with the soft light, turning my arm, opening my hand then shutting it again. I do a finger-puppet show under the Coca-Cola spotlights and the gaze of my nymphs. It’s a funny kind of home town, Utrecht: a puritanical, grey, swarming business hub whose visitors are welcomed by two naked women and a huge red neon sign. The door to my room opens, slowly. My mother pokes her head round it and is astonished to see me at the window in the middle of the night. ‘You’re not sleeping?’ ‘No.’ ‘And your sister?’ ‘Marianne always sleeps well.’ ‘The hotel is full. Wake your sister and take her to room 22, I’ve just let this one to a good customer.’ Room 22 is not a room but a cubbyhole, with a skylight in the ceiling and a single bed. When the hotel is full we spend the night there. I pick up Marianne’s hot, limp body, telling her that it’s me and there’s nothing to worry about. I carry her upstairs while my mother tidies the room quick as a flash, and calls downstairs to the customer in her late-night auctioneer’s voice. The bed in 22 is narrow and cold. The customer in 21 will enjoy slipping into the warmth left by my sister, and fall asleep easily. Not me. I tack up the pictures of Donald Duck that I drag around with me in an effort to recreate a familiar universe. The skylight is too high to see anything through it except a patch of black sky. I concentrate on this rectangle. What if my mother rented room 22? Where would we go then? 6 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) I love my little sister. I’m glad she’s here, life isn’t as cold. My mother finds it amusing to tell how when I was two years old she found me trying to strangle baby Marianne. That story doesn’t make me laugh. I was jealous, it seems. Strangle Marianne? No, I would miss her. I prefer to pull her ear or pinch her chubby cheeks, not really hurting her, just reminding her firmly that I’m the eldest, the strongest, that we are here for each other. We don’t hug in my family. Physical contact is reduced to a minimum. Touching would be letting the body express its tenderness, and what’s the point of that? Work, bustle and distance act as a substitute for everything. ‘Do you have to touch each other to make babies?’ I ask, curious. My mother is embarrassed and tells me her cabbage-patch theory. Aunt Mary cracks up. How strange, I think to myself. Tonight the hotel has lapsed into its night-time silence. I can’t sleep and I am listening out for the slightest sound, the potential movement of the china doorknob. I’m watching for my mother’s exhausted face, for it to come round the door and ask us to leave our room, whatever the time and the depth of my sister’s sleep, to go even higher, even further, into a space so small we can hardly fit, so small there could be no smaller space. We would be invisible, forgotten forever. This childhood moving of rooms orchestrated by my mother, these nocturnal migrations to make way for strangers for the sake of a few extra florins, leave me with a deep conviction that sometimes eats into me beneath my calm fa?ade: I’m in the way, too much, cheap, cut-price. I wander from room to room. 7 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘Is Hans here?’ asks the customer. ‘No, he no longer works here.’ Aunt Alice’s voice is terse. The customer is surprised, his hands trembling on the reception counter. ‘But where has he gone?’ he persists, mournfully. ‘We don’t know, and do not wish to know.’ ‘Very well …’ The customer takes his key and starts up the stairs. He hesitates, stops, grabs the banister, and brings a hand to his face. We are watching him. ‘Surely he’s not crying?’ asks Aunt Alice. ‘Do you know him?’ ‘No.’ I go off to pace up and down the lounge. Yes, I know him. I recognise that scarlet coat with the black fur collar, that skin blistered with rampant acne. It’s the man that ‘Uncle’ Hans used to kiss in the kitchen. I had walked in silently, thinking I was alone, it was late and I hadn’t eaten. ‘Uncle’ Hans was holding the man by the neck, clasping him, eating the man’s mouth. Their movements were intense, they seemed to be hungry for each other. The man had his back to me. ‘Uncle’ Hans was facing me. He saw me immediately, paused for a moment, then resumed his gobbling of the man’s mouth. They were moaning a little. ‘Uncle’ Hans held my fixed gaze, then shut his eyes, and reopened them straight onto me. He stared as if he wanted to scream something at me, his suppressed rage perhaps, his desire to see my bubble explode, my sheltered, mute, dreamy little girl’s world. I was witnessing desire and I didn’t like it. I was hearing pleasure and it wasn’t nice. I inched imperceptibly backwards, holding ‘Uncle’ Hans’s gaze. My soles skated along the lino as I noiselessly left that invisible circle created around two bodies that wanted each other. I had walked into intimacy and I walked straight back out again. I often ask myself about this world that comes to life so noisily behind closed doors. What are they doing? Personally, I always prefer a bit of light, a door ajar, so I can glimpse other people’s lives, like old people at windows. Doors close on intimacy, desire, secrets. I pay attention to everything. I have noticed that there’s an energy stronger than anything else, which brings people together at nightfall, when work and the noise of the city cease. It magnetises them. In the bar I watch bodies touch each other under tables, see women offer up their necks. It’s an adult energy about which I am curious. Why are my mother and father exempt from this energy? Why don’t they come together? My mother doesn’t offer her neck up like the other women. No, my parents don’t embrace, not even behind their bedroom door. I know. My brother sleeps in their room. I walk in there without knocking, quietly, apparently innocent and lost, determined to find out the truth. My parents are rarely in there together. Callas the dog growls and guards my father closely. My parents are always heading in opposite directions. When my mother goes to bed, my father gets up. When my father undresses, my mother is waking up. There is no circle around them, no intimacy. 8 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) Aunt Alice is as upright and well behaved as Aunt Mary is unpredictable, unique and crazy. Aunt Alice is my mother’s sister. She arrives early each morning by train from Hilversum (about fifteen miles away) to work at the hotel. She lives with her mother, my pious, Protestant, austere, taciturn, good grandmother. Sometimes, I leave the bustle of the hotel to seek refuge with her. I took the train by myself for the first time aged four. With the wind in the right direction I could hear the train departure announcements quite clearly. I thought they were calling me so I left without a word, a little doll, small, resolute and self-propelled. ‘Stand back from the platform edge, the Hilversum train is about to depart!’ This time I am on board, a little girl who intrigues the other passengers. My grandmother has principles. In contrast to the murky busyness of the hotel, she gives clarity and rules to my childhood: something to lean on. No noise on Sundays at Granny’s house, no bicycle. The table is a place of quiet, not a station chip shop. You must meditate and pray so as not to burn in the flames of hell. You thank God at every meal as if He were providing the food Himself. It’s strange. I sense that my questions would not be welcome in this slightly strained silence, so I keep quiet, I obey, that’s why I’m here. There’s a three-sided mirror in front of my chair. I always make sure I can see it, training my curiosity on myself. I peer at my reflection, discovering myself a little more each time. An often solitary child, I am interested in myself. I look at my profile, the top of my head, the usually invisible parts of myself. I also watch myself grow. And the bigger I grow, the more I watch myself. I like looking at myself. When my grandmother isn’t there I go right up to the mirror, so close I could kiss it. My breath creates a light mist that I wipe away with an arm so I can find myself again. I move each of my features in turn, making all kinds of false faces that I hold for a few moments. Pretending is easy. I’m intrigued by the colour of my eyes, by the family resemblance. I don’t know the name of this colour. Grey, pale green …? My grandmother doesn’t like my narcissistic ways, my poses. This lengthy contemplation of my face, its discovery from every angle, distracts me from my prayer and is really too much. So one day Granny stands up, tacks some newspaper over the mirror and looks at me with kindly authority, not saying a word. Deprived of the sight of myself, for a few days of the holidays I surrender to my grandmother’s good, serene orderliness. 9 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) Aunt Mary is manic-depressive, like her father. ‘She’s not very well in the head,’ my mother whispers. Before she came to the hotel we used to visit this bizarre aunt in hospital. She seemed normal, all smiley and sweet. Aunt Mary enjoyed our visits and always made sure to put on a good show, to prove her sanity and that she shouldn’t be locked up. Depending on her state she was either drowned in lithium or subject to electroshock therapy to achieve an artificial stability. I was little, and struck by the size of the nurses. ‘They’re animals!’ she would say, quietly so they wouldn’t hear. In a bid for survival she set her bed on fire and was asked to leave. My father went to get her. He signed a document, paid for the burnt bed and brought Aunt Mary back to the hotel. She was shouting ‘Tell me I’m not crazy, tell me!’ as she left the hospital, furious at having been pharmaceutically gagged, reduced to a state of continual and hazy smiling. She jabbed a vengeful finger at the huge, impassive white figures. ‘No, you’re not crazy,’ my father replied, squeezing her hand. ‘Come on, let’s go!’ ‘Manic-depressive’ is an odd, complex word, with an intellectual sound to it. It is always said clearly but quietly, accompanied by sorrowful discomfort on my mother’s face. It must be a failing that needs to be hidden, a rare defect that has affected our family, of which my aunt is the vivid proof. Aunt Mary spends half her life in the air and the rest on the floor. She lives mostly at night, when the contrasts show less. She sometimes laughs and sings for days at a time, buying extravagant presents on credit and exclaiming at how wonderful life is, and how short. Aunt Mary gives her love in huge bouquets, or else goes to ground, at her slowest moments, like the victim of a broken dream or departed lover. Then one day she comes back to life, believing in it again, more fervently than ever. Giving us her sense of humour, her regained appetite and her temporary zest for life. When I grow up I’m going to be manic-depressive. It’s so much fun, so entertaining. I adore my aunts. So opposite to each other, but always there for little love-starved me. They are the warm, lively figures of my daily life, weaving a palpable web of love around me every day. Aunt Mary runs the hotel bar, that pivotal space she often doesn’t close until morning, that hub of routine, ritual debauchery. She doesn’t sleep much, or drink at all. Aunt Mary is always sober as she witnesses the spectacle of the daily drinking sessions. The customers feel relaxed around this kindly, changeable woman – to the extent that some of them think her as drunk as them. My mother is a regular, discreet, efficient customer at the bar. She drinks constantly, serving herself wine or sherry. She can hold her alcohol – I take after her. She never seems drunk. When she is, she hides away or tells me to go to my room. That’s all my mother seems able to say whenever she is vulnerable, moved or surprised. My mother is incapable of expressing emotion. She sup-presses it as a weakness, a threat. Life is hard and dangerous, you have to be on guard. My mother fears feelings, as a never-ending wave sure to sweep her away. She prefers control, and uses drink to make this inhuman state bearable. My father frequents the bar for the same reasons as my mother, but he also hosts the space. He plays the piano and the synthesiser, a sort of modern music box that reproduces the sounds of other instruments as well as bespoke rhythms. It is magical, mysterious, cheerful. My father occasionally and impatiently teaches me a little. The customers like the hotel bar, where everyone drinks until they are laughing uncontrollably at nothing; deep, throaty laughs that resonate through the whole building. Some fall over, and weep, then get up again and sing, badly. They shout unknown names – faraway lands they will visit, women they will love. 10 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) Alcohol has been part of my life since the day when, before I was weaned, my mother got me to sleep by putting a cognac-soaked cloth wrapped around a lump of sugar to my lips. Alcohol made my father loud and cheerful. He played, sang, acted the fool; he was my clown. Alcohol broke through my mother’s Protestant restraint, brought her out of her silence, freed up unknown, vicious words, the words of a different person. Emotions burst forth, and then my mother would disappear. Alcohol gave life. It was the song, the blood, the bond of the hotel. My father would drink up to forty beers a day. I practised my maths by counting them. To arrive at different totals I would then add each whole glass of cognac and each Underberg to the beers. When he was sober, my father didn’t speak. I preferred alcohol to silence. 11 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) Kristel is my real name, from the word ‘crystal’. It suited my father’s fragile luminosity. There’s not always a reason for fragility, it can just be a part of someone’s nature. My father was fragile but he hid it, drowning and destroying himself in alcohol and noise. My father adored clay-pigeon shooting and hunting, and his carpentry machines – the screaming metal beasts that lived in his refuge, the attic. He would listen to the intolerable mechanical roar of these carving tools without ear protection. When out hunting he would fire his gun often, right next to his ears, shooting rebelliously in the air out of a taste for loud noises. By middle age he was almost deaf, which suited him. The voices of the women, the cries and screaming of the children, these signs of life slowly disappeared, growing fainter like an echo, vanishing into his silence and leaving him in his chosen solitude. My father had not been a child. He was sent to boarding school at four years old. I imagine him as a brave little chap, clever, forced to act grown up, to make his bed without creases, not to cry at an age when that’s all you can do. He grew up alone, with no protection, never carefree. He discovered desire before love, and alcohol first of all. My father drank, hunted, loved the sea, sport, flesh and chess. In Dutch chess is called schaken, which also refers to the abduction of a sweet young girl by a nasty man. Perhaps my father thought he was nasty, but he wasn’t. Just broken and mostly absent. In his attic he makes chess figurines. There are hundreds of them, arranged according to size and by category: queens, castles, pawns, bishops. The best ones in front, the flawed hidden behind. There’s no end to this manic creativity, or to my father’s obsession with this game, this strategic battle, this checkmate. Sometimes when I’m bored I go up there to see him, daring to enter. He stops his machine and sits motionless, looking at me. I smile at him, feeling like his prettiest figurine. He points out his new creations then quickly starts work again, and I clear off to escape the racket. My father was Catholic, the son of a hotel-owner and a musician. My grandfather ran an orchestra, and once brought back with him from a trip to Switzerland a strange, unique instrument that made the sound of a fairy tale: a xylophone. It drew people from all around. My mother came from a humble peasant background, she was a Calvinist and very beautiful. She was brought up strictly by her widowed mother, to an extremely harsh religious code. Fear of divine punishment replaced a father’s discipline. I remember my mother when she was young; she was fluid as a bohemian dancer, charming and stylish as a movie star. My parents met at a ball. They danced together for a long time, floating, dazzled. My father loved women, and beauty; he loved my mother from that first dance. Mum loved dancing, it was her element. Her other loves were dressmaking, work and my father. She wasn’t very religious. Marriage gave her an escape from religious excess and the fear of God. She preferred profane to divine love, and converted to Catholicism out of faith in my father. My mother didn’t go to Mass, but made us keep that weekly ritual in her place. I loved this Sunday outing. At the end of the ceremony I would smile angelically and sidle up to the collection plates to pinch the money I sometimes found there. I would shake the collection boxes and force open their ridiculous little lids, then take my sister to the movies to watch Laurel and Hardy. Much more fun. 12 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) Once she was a wife and mother – just a few years after that first ball – my mother stopped dancing. She worked. My mother no longer did the thing she loved. She became obsessed by the beneficial effects of hard toil, austere as a matter of duty, irritable, often sad as she witnessed my father’s slow flight. She concentrated on her daily tasks, on the hotel and her children. She concerned herself with our homework, our health, our cleanliness and the perfect ironing of our clothes, which she often made – with some skill – herself. My mother was unable to express her affection other than through faultless material care. We were scattered around so as not to disturb hotel business. I was often in my bedroom, Marianne with our neighbours – kind, cigar-selling shopkeepers – and my brother wherever he pleased. He was the family’s little man; he called the shots. People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They travelled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone. 13 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘Mrs Kristel?! Mrs Kristel?!’ The man in the hotel lobby is getting upset. It’s Mr Janssen, who runs the newspaper shop across the street from the hotel. Aunt Mary hurries off to find my mother, who comes down looking surprised, a chrome thimble on her finger. ‘Yes, Mr Janssen, what can I do for you?’ she asks nervously. ‘Keep your girls under control, Mrs Kristel! Keep them under control!’ ‘Whatever do you mean?’ ‘How old are they, now?’ ‘Sylvia will be ten this autumn and Marianne is eight, why?’ ‘Ten and eight … well, it doesn’t augur …’ ‘What doesn’t it augur?’ My mother is getting impatient. ‘It just doesn’t augur well, that’s all!’ My mother turns towards me and starts interrogating me. ‘What have you done?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Nothing?!’ Mr Janssen interrupts me. ‘Mrs Kristel, since the beginning of the summer your daughter and her little sister have been cavorting on the tables of your restaurant. At around 3 p.m., when the room is empty. Laughing, singing, gesticulating –’ ‘But they are children, Mr Janssen!’ my mother cuts in. ‘Children do play and dance!’ ‘Yes, but not naked! Totally naked! They undress and parade around, stroking themselves and wiggling about so outrageously that passers-by stare, and then bash into the telephone box! Look, the glass panel has broken! Your daughters find it amusing, especially the older one. If the collision is violent, they leap off the table like fleas and scarper. I’m the only one who’s seen what they’re up to. Don’t you hear them?! They sing their heads off, which is to say they screech. I can hear them through an open window on the other side of the road! I haven’t said anything until now, but I’m warning you –’ My mother interrupts Mr Janssen again. ‘OK, Mr Janssen, OK. Please forgive us, I’m very sorry. Sylvia sometimes likes to draw attention to herself, you know how they can be at her age, and her sister is still young and easily influenced … but it won’t happen again.’ The neighbour goes off, shaking his head and still muttering: ‘Ten and eight …’ My mother is bright red. Her time has been wasted and her local reputation trashed. She runs around the hotel screaming and foaming at the mouth. She is tracking me down, full of threats. ‘Sylvia! Sylvia! If you don’t come here right now …’ But I’ve been out of there for a while. It had been obvious that Mr Janssen wasn’t coming over to discuss the day’s gossip. I am crouched down in my new hiding place, the cupboard on the half-landing of the stairs. Aunt Alice knows but she doesn’t let on. She has seen me and has stationed herself just in front, with her back to the cupboard. ‘Where is Sylvia?! Do you know where she is, or what?!’ My mother’s rage isn’t passing. She has armed herself with the big willow carpet-beater she uses on the mattresses, and of course her long pointy nails that pierce the skin like staples. She threatens Aunt Alice, throwing her hands up in the air and yelling that she ‘didn’t deserve this’! I stay in that cupboard for two hours, not making a sound. My mother is bound to calm down eventually. It is a matter of time. Soon she will get out the little steel goblet she hides in her sewing box like an oversized thimble, and drink dozens of small sips of sherry or white wine, sometimes even the whole bottle – but by thimbleful, persuading herself that these sips added up to less than the whole. She will fall asleep, shattered, beaten and drunk. She will forget. I will escape the willow whip. So Mr Nosy’s nose exploded like a ripe fruit? Tough luck. I am up for anything to avoid boredom and get some attention. My brother has found another, effective way of getting attention. He shapes his faeces into little geometric sculptures that he attempts to stick to the walls, laughing and running off with dirty hands and stripes on his face like an Indian. My mother swears and rages, apologises to the customers, pleads her helplessness with a sponge in her hand. Marianne spends more and more time at the neighbours’ house with her friend Anneke. They are as thick as thieves. When I bump into her in the hotel she smiles at me. She gives off a mysterious smell of tobacco these days. She seems happy with her life next door. 14 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘I hate penetration! Do you understand?’ My mother is drunk. She has taken me by the shoulders and is staring at me fixedly, repeating: ‘I hate penetration. I can’t stand your father coming back from hunting or wherever, reeking of alcohol, sweat and blood, slipping into my bed while I sleep and wanting to penetrate me. I’m sleeping, tired, and he is all dirty and excited and wants to penetrate me. I don’t want it, I can’t do it. I’m too tight, do you understand?!’ ‘No, I don’t understand, Mummy.’ ‘You do, you do understand! And anyway, there isn’t just penetration, there are other things you can do …’ I wriggle out of her arms, put my hands over my ears and shout, as I run away: ‘I don’t understand! I don’t understand what you’re talking about, so stop talking to me like this, leave me alone, Mummy!’ When she is drunk, lost and abandoned, when my father has gone off, when she has refused herself to him, my mother talks to me without any concept of the child I still am. She is confiding in a human being, perhaps the closest one to her, confessing her pain. I run away. I cannot hear these adult words, nor contemplate that my father and mother can no longer stand each other. My mother insists that she has never made love with my father. She denies any physical relationship, any contact. She doesn’t know how we were born; not from her body in any case. I am the eldest. I have two years on Marianne and four on my brother, but I still can’t remember my mother pregnant. Perhaps she hid her round belly under artfully loose homemade dresses? She must have bound her belly, smoothing it out like a mouldable paste, moulding us too, rejecting this evidence of the other’s body, this visible proof of her penetration, her lack of restraint. I have no memory of childbirth, or preparations, or a wait, or her absence; just squalling, ugly newborns who scared me and were presented by Aunt Alice as holy marvels. 15 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) I am jealous of my sister. She has found in the neighbours a warm and loving foster-family. I am occasionally invited to dinner. I hang around, trying to get myself adopted too, but I am already big and independent. I have my own friend, but she is cruel. Her parents own one of the very first televisions in Utrecht. I am fascinated, bewitched. She knows it, and invites me over when she wants to and pointedly not when I am dying to go. I am devastated. My mother feels sorry for me and understands that she can make up for her absence by providing me with this piece of modern treasure. My mother buys a television! A box of marvels, a miracle; never-ending pictures. It lives in my parents’ bedroom. I watch it as much as I can. My mother puts limits on my hypnosis, especially in the evenings. I must go to bed. Once in my room I keep quiet for a few moments, giving the impression that I’ve fallen asleep, then tiptoe back out again in the direction of the television. The door of my parents’ bedroom is closed but glazed, with a multicoloured stained-glass window in the middle. I stand stock-still a few feet behind the door, just able to see the TV, distorted but in colour. I am growing up alone these days. Marianne is almost never around, Nicolas spends his life outside and my parents are becoming invisible. I don’t deal with it well. I rebel. At school, I refuse to go to the toilet during the allotted break times. My bladder becomes infected but I still refuse to go. I won’t hang my clothes on the coat rack. I hate the squirrel design on it, that pseudo-sweet animal with claws like my mother’s staples. I become a stubborn, contrary child. I never do what I’m told, rejecting everything wholesale. Hierarchies and orders remind me of my mother. Growing up is a dead end. I won’t take the boring educational path I’m being shown, won’t heed the stupid, abstract advice, ‘you should do this, a big girl must do that …’ But what is a big girl? A woman who works herself to the bone? A woman who has forgotten how to laugh or dance, who says she isn’t a woman? Nothing about grown bodies or adults holds my interest. I like only my childhood books, my continuing dreams at the window, my Walt Disney pictures, the movies and TV. I become lazy, indolent; I still am, sometimes. I have a need to lie down and do nothing, motionless, watching the time passing, experiencing idleness, gazing around the room with slow-motion eyes, my only activity the gentle coming and going of air in my chest. I like being inert, touching the slow moment. I am congealing in torpor, in rest, becoming stunted. I convince myself of my innocent stillness, my different fate: I am not behaving like my mother, am not trapped in the industrious rhythm of life, on and on until death. It’s around then that I start dreaming of a job in which I do nothing. A task that won’t exhaust, won’t cause black rings under my eyes, on the contrary will make them shine. A soft, joyful job, rather languid and voluptuous. Marianne no longer comes to the hotel even at night. I sleep alone. I bumped into her today on my way to the chip shop. She looked my way so I slipped my arm through hers. She looked at me nastily and said: ‘Let me go! I’m not your sister! I am Marianne Van de Berg, Anneke is my sister, not you!’ I let go of her arm, fled to the hotel and wept. I’ve got a new book: Billy Bradley Goes to Boarding School. Good idea. I’ve nothing left to lose, it can only be better than here. I ask to go away to school, an immediate escape. 16 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘May I have a cognac, please?’ I speak up to hide my nervousness. ‘A cognac?! You must be joking, my girl! And you’ll sing a little lower, if you don’t mind!’ This funny Flemish expression means ‘lower your voice’. I wasn’t singing, I didn’t feel like it. I am afraid of this new life, afraid that I have lost my head and made a bad decision. I am eleven years old, it’s my first night at boarding school and I can’t sleep. This is the first time I’ve been refused a cognac. They’ve also refused to take my bags up. What is this place? ‘Straight to the sickroom with you, my girl!’ Sister Assissia is shocked, and wants to be sure I am of sound mind. I am sane and realise for the first time, from the astounded look of this strict but kindly adult, that the relationship between alcohol and the body is an unnatural one, that the two are not bound together like the body and water. Alcohol is not merely a bracing liquid that stings and warms, leaving you dizzy and making you sing even if you’re tone-deaf. Alcohol is not natural, not good. I am returned to my room. ‘So, no cognac, my girl. But three Hail Marys and two Paters will send you to sleep just as well!’ Sister Assissia shows me my room, shuts the door behind her and rushes off, bemused, thinking of the vast amount of work that will be needed to sort me out. This is a religious secondary boarding school, not far from Utrecht. I am now in a finishing school for smart young ladies preparing for life as upper-class wives. At the hotel, when I couldn’t sleep I used to either serve myself a small cognac or finish off the customers’ glasses, making crazy mixtures that knocked me out fast. I was sometimes upset in the evenings, left alone to face the issues confronting a growing girl. I would feel sad when I heard them announce the departure of the last train for Hilversum. The girls in the other rooms must be asleep but I am not. I open the window. There’s no station here, no noise, the silence is total. The air is so bracing and clean it makes my head spin. I cannot believe Utrecht is only a few miles away. I’m in the middle of nowhere, here. A few bats beat the night sky slowly with their pointy wings. No red Coca-Cola signs; just a faint gleam, down and to the left at the entrance to the school, lighting up the notice ‘Do not walk on the grass’. You have to take the gravel track, the straight and narrow path that leads to the road and the trees, the tall, dark, still trees waiting to take back their earth. No walking on the lawn, no cognac, no being up at this late hour. I come from a world in which anything is allowed, except dancing naked and slobbering on my cheek. The change is harsh. Sister Assissia is doing her rounds. I can hear her tired step and the clink of the crucifix that hangs down her front. I quickly turn off the light and slip under the covers fully dressed. I lie still, listening to the doorknob creak like at the hotel. The door closes and the steps move away. I will not have to change rooms. I am alone and without alcohol. The merry-go-round in my head spins ever faster. The Square’s neon sign is a bright flame that dazzles me when I close my eyes. My father’s laughter and the cries of the station make me dizzy. I am discovering silence, and absence. I didn’t see much of my parents but I knew they were there, at the end of the corridor or in the attic, and my aunts were close by too. At the hotel there were bits of love scattered around like jigsaw pieces, for me to put together again each day. It was my bright red fairground, the unique place in which I had landed. I had got used to it, as only children can. I will get used to these prison-bar trees, this forbidden lawn, the holy water. I am eleven years old, I will get used to anything, just about. I find the 6 a.m. wake-up call hard. Fasting through Mass every day so as to be pure before God makes me weak. The costumed people, the high-pitched, loud singing and the mysterious dance in a mist of incense all combine to make me dizzy. After a few days of this the tired, upset and lazy girl faints. Back to the sickroom, pale and limp but away from Mass and the wake-up call. At night, with a torch under the covers, I read a book about cowboys and Indians – free, lively and wild. 17 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘Kristel! Stand up straight! Always stand up straight, girls! The world is not on your shoulders but under your feet!’ Sister Marie Immaculata strives to teach us good manners. Marie Immaculata … what a pretty name. Pure and dignified, like her. Is it an adopted name, a stage name? What is the real name of this pale, virgin Marie Immaculata? Who is she? ‘Stand tall! Hold your head high! It’s not what’s on the ground that’s nigh!’ Sister Marie Immaculata is uncompromising, and good. I have always stood up straight. I find it impossible to slouch – Sister Marie’s classes have helped me to hold myself well throughout my life, whatever the situation. Stay upright, look strong, give the impression of being so at all times. My dancer’s bearing has given my chaotic life some style, some tautness, a slightly aloof elegance that has borne me aloft, held high, out of reach of the vulgar and commonplace. I stood straight, but I was clumsy. I struggled to hold a fork well, and the whole class used to laugh at me. Food spurted easily off my plate, I was always staining my neighbours’ clothes. I was happy to learn grace but not to bend myself to these daunting and ridiculous rules about table manners: start with the outermost knife and fork, then, with each dish, move in towards the plate, then, delicately, take the water glass by its stem, not the wine glass first like a drunkard, then, delicately, bring it to your lips. ‘And not the other way round, girls!’ I was distracted. I would go straight to the fish fork, which had the least sharp teeth. I didn’t like the other one; it was ‘Uncle’ Hans’s fork. I would bump the stem of my glass, creating a rhythm as shrill as my grandfather’s xylophone, driving the priestess of good manners crazy. On Saturdays the daughters of ministers and diplomats drove off in a lovely, dreamlike procession of limousines. I stayed put, or took the train for my Utrecht station. 18 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘Kristel! Post!’ Sister Marie Immaculata has a pseudo-strict manner that belies her sweetness and helps her keep order. She knows how important post is – it’s obvious from the silent gathering of usually boisterous girls. The unruly herd has miraculously transformed into waiting rows of ramrod-straight little grey stakes. We all want to know if we still exist in the outside world. My mother has written to me, as she does every week, the content always similar – what’s happening at the hotel, Dad, Aunt Mary’s moods, and the weather in Utrecht, as if it were different to here. I should have had a postbox at the hotel. Would my mother have put a daily letter in it? Perhaps she needs this modest distance, this absence, in order to write the words she doesn’t say. My mother’s letters are colourful. Aunt Mary knocked out a drunken customer who wanted to take her upstairs. The hotel boiler broke suddenly, making the temperature plummet and the customers flee. My father is away more and more, likewise searching for a little warmth. I like these letters. The softness of the paper, my mother folded between my fingers. Often there are crossings-out and the faint smell of sherry, and stains blurring her neat handwriting. I wait eagerly for these letters, this belated attention. My mother never saw how happy her dull words made me, how I wrung my hands as I waited and smiled when my name was called. Every week I hung on the pretty lips and perfect diction of Sister Marie Immaculata. I have a good time at this strange boarding school, imposing my passive rule, spending cheerful, normal, sporty years there. Running, swimming, jumping. Letting off steam, making my changing body move and sweat. I start smoking. Even the sisters smoke on Sundays. Like my father I favour filterless Camels, whose strong smoke scratches my throat. I am proud of this adult act that I can accomplish without coughing, tough like him. Is there any option but to behave like your father, and mother? Can one break with this need to belong? Perhaps with age and the ravages of poor imitation. The maths teacher is called Hees Been. He has a gammy leg which makes him wince when he stretches it out. He is fairly young, and more interested in the changing curves of our bodies than in geometry. He has a long lock of plastered-back hair, on which he unconsciously wipes his snot when he sneezes. I enjoy playing with this easy prey, making him pay for my disgust. I fold over my waistband to make my skirt as short as possible, then retrieve imaginary bits of chalk from the floor, bending gently in two, sensing the top of my thighs becoming visible, feeling the cool air on the lower parts of my bottom and watching the teacher’s face turn red. He says nothing, he is watching me, my buttocks are a vision to behold. His confusion and my power make me feel good. Everyone is laughing and I smother my own giggles with my back to the class. Then, stunned and naive, I sit back down in the first row, inhabited by the short-sighted and those whose surnames begin with A. I am delighted with my demonstration – if not mathematical then at least physiological. Sister Gertrude speaks to us in perfect Queen’s English. I like the language, and soon realise that it’s the key to getting away. Sister Gertrude’s hairstyle is a black-and-white rectangle perfectly aligned with the dark arm of her steel spectacles, making her resemble a shoebox. Sister Gertrude is ugly, but kind. My father says you have to be ugly to become a nun. Sister Marie Andr?e teaches French and history. She tells us about the war in her warm, solemn, captivating voice. With her class unusually silent she describes the never-forgiven invasion, the suffering of a nation, the confiscated bicycles, the people starving to death and eating grated tulip bulbs. That cruel, intimate image stayed with me for a long time. Lovely bright tulips, twofold and useful. At flower shops I sometimes imagine being given the option: ‘Would you like your tulips grated, Ms Kristel, or in a bouquet?’ My mother talked to us about the war, too. At a very young age she used to go off on her wooden-wheeled bicycle – there weren’t any tyres left – and cycle for hours to swap a piece of silverware for some potatoes. One night, exhausted and empty-bellied, she had knocked on a farmhouse door and pleaded her hunger. The generous peasant woman sat her down at the table and gave her a melted-cheese pancake so rich, so big for that concave belly that my mother was ill for several days, and had to stay at the woman’s house. My mother used to say that she was going to find her, so she could thank her and take the opportunity to have her to stay instead. Dutch people are thrifty and they bear grudges; on holiday in Germany they’re still prone to exclaim, ‘Give me back my bicycle!’ Mine had stayed at the hotel. Just as well – I was always falling off because I was so dreamy and lazy I had forgotten to pedal. Father Gianotten is so modern and believes so much in love – ‘because God is love’ – that he has married one of the schoolgirls. Sister Christine bears the heavy burden of our sexual education. She is clearly overwhelmed by this unrequested mission, and speaks in a brittle monotone of a threatening world. Men are governed by uncontrollable urges due to the hormones that run through their veins like poison, and women spend their lives trying to escape these male urges. The rest – the detail, the reproductive technique necessary for humanity’s survival – is in Latin. Those whistling words are messengers from another world; they leave me pensive. 19 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘Kristel! Post!’ The tone of my mother’s letter is new, the stains many, the words hard to decipher. Have they been blurred by alcohol, or tears? I cannot understand them all. My mother is devastated, screaming her despair: my father has a mistress, not a passing fling but a woman who is winning his heart, who wants him. The words are rough, coarse, my mother is wrecked. I am terror-stricken. Sister Marie Immaculata grabs my letter, reads it and turns pale. ‘These words are not appropriate for you, Sylvia. I will call your mother and speak to her. Calm yourself.’ I forget the letter. It will soon be the holidays. I perfect my manners and carry on having a good time. ‘The man must enter the restaurant first!’ ‘But isn’t he supposed to hold the door for the ladies, Sister?’ ‘No! The man protects the woman. When entering an unknown space he is firstly making sure that people’s attention will fall on him rather than the naturally shy and reserved woman. Yes, I am saying shy and reserved! Secondly, he is checking that there are no crooks inside. Evil is everywhere, and the man protects the woman from evil …’ I have always waited at restaurant doors to check whether the man had manners. Whether he would protect me or let me walk in as if brandishing a trophy. I now have a little group of followers at boarding school. They gaze at me, and listen rapt to my risqu? stories. I tell them about the hotel, its pulsating, unusual life, everything I’ve seen there, everything I’ve learned about men and women. The striptease customer with her boa, who comp?red the staff party and tried in vain to seduce ‘Uncle’ Hans. The secret world of transitory customers, freedom re-found for a single night in an isolated space – a hotel room is a parallel, distant world. I mime the faces of the chambermaids as they discover stains while stripping the beds. I reveal the complex stories of my world, so different to the one in which we live. I speak of life as it really is, not in theory, not in Latin. The nuns reprimand me: ‘There’s nothing to be proud of about coming from such a circus, my girl!’ They want to protect me, in their simple, boundaried way, from a confused adult world in which I might go astray. One must pray for life to be nothing but love. 20 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) It is summer and I’m back at the hotel. We’re going to the seaside for a few days; my father has rented us a sweet little house. Aunt Mary is coming too. In the car my mother says nothing. She opens the window, taking great gulps of the warm air and staring fixedly at the clear sky. My father regularly informs us of the number of miles still to go. His voice is unusually monotonous. Marianne is sad to have left Anneke, and my brother is leaning on the back shelf guessing the makes of the passing cars. Aunt Mary is dozing. I watch the treeless fields rush by, perfectly fenced flat rectangles in single but various colours. Night is slowly falling. What silence, for the holidays! We have barely arrived when my father tells us that tomorrow morning he will be making an important announcement, for which he will wake us up. But now it’s bedtime. Aunt Mary is prostrate; she’s in a low phase. My mother goes straight to her room without checking the house as she usually does, without sweeping or inspecting the fridge. The furniture is covered in sheets. I entertain myself by waving them through the air in a great cloud of dust that makes Aunt Mary cough. At last some movement, some noise! In the bedroom Marianne is not asleep. She asks me about boarding school. Do I have any new friends? She has grown up, and tells me that she’s already tried smoking. I scold her, smiling, happy that she’s sharing my room as before. I grab her ear in gentle revenge for her desertion. She pretends that it hurts. We have a singing competition; she starts with a musical film she’s already seen three times, The Sound of Music. I laugh – I’ve seen the film and it’s delightful, but it’s a kids’ film! My sister doesn’t understand the English words but the rousing, simple tunes – joyful lullabies – have seeped into her like a divine message. Marianne stands on the bed and apes Julie Andrews in that scene where the kindly governess attempts to distract seven half-orphaned children terrified by the storm: ‘Cream-coloured ponies and crisp applestrudels … these are afew of my favourite things … when the dog bites, when the bee stings …’ Julie teaches the children that when life becomes hard you have to think of simple, good things to drive away the fear. I tease my sister but I must admit that many years later I can still remember every word of that wonderful song, which I’ve sung far more often than I’ve ever prayed. ‘Krim kolor poni! …’ Marianne sings her beloved gobbledegook over and over again. I interrupt to launch into my grown-up Beatles songs, demonstrating my mastery of English to this uncultured little kid. Then I tell her it’s time to sleep – and Marianne obeys me. I go to the window, the sea is rough and the gulls are circling and crying. ‘Stormy weather, stormy weather …’ mutters Aunt Mary in the corridor, sounding like a ghost. I can’t sleep. My father wants to make an important announcement. Is he going to sell the hotel? Is he ill? Does he not want us any more? I am worried, tossing restlessly as if I were at sea. I have left the door open and can hear my mother’s voice, much quieter than usual. I move towards the corridor and listen to her whispering on and on. I can’t make out the words but I get a sense of the tone. She seems to be questioning my father, who isn’t replying; she is pleading with him. It is morning. I haven’t slept much. My father comes in and wakes us rather curtly. My mother is in the kitchen, she hasn’t put on her flowery, sleeveless summer dress. She seems to be cold, and kisses us without looking at us. There’s a ring at the door. I jump, the chime is loud and unexpected. Aunt Mary suddenly wakes up on her chair, grumbles and goes to answer. I hear shouting. We rush to the door to see a white-faced woman. Hanny’s eyes are outlined in black, her lips are thin and bright red and her backcombed hair has been pulled up into a huge round beehive on the top of her head, and sprayed solid. I take a step backwards, she looks like a witch. My father moves Aunt Mary out of the way and invites the woman in. My mother comes out of the kitchen, stands behind my father and looks away. ‘Children, this is my new wife!’ My mother doesn’t say anything. She has known for a few days, and she has relented; she accepts everything, it seems. Aunt Mary screams and flies into a rage, grabbing the sherry bottle by the living-room door and whacking the woman on the head with it, like in a cartoon. The woman emits funny little shrieks and extricates herself, unhurt. Her beehive has acted as a buffer. My father grasps his sister round the waist and takes her to her room, then sits down wearily. The woman is looking at me with a faint smile. It’s not possible. It can’t be! In this moment, right here, right now, if I rush at my father, telling him how much I love him and begging him to keep my mother, he will do it. He has to, he will listen to his daughter. I jump on his knee and plead. ‘Daddy, no! You can’t do this!’ I shake his heavy shoulders. He bursts into sobs, avoiding my kisses and saying in a broken voice: ‘But I’m weak, my little one, weak …’ My father has chosen. The woman continues to smile. Her hair is slightly dishevelled but she is standing firm, solid. Blood rushes to my brain. I see red. I am full of rage, concentrated and built up over fourteen years. I am a bloodthirsty lion. I pounce on the witch, punching and scratching her, pulling at her plastic bun, calling her a whore – that new, never-spoken word. I want to kill her, slaughter her, exterminate her. My mother and father eventually manage to control me. The woman is knocked to the ground but is not crying. Tough, despicable creature, uncrushable insect. I am shut in my room for the rest of the day. I bash on the door, yelling and crying, then suddenly stop. I take myself back in hand. Hold my head high. ‘Stand tall, hold your head up …’ I tell myself that there’s no point, that I must accept this split as an inexplicable but possible and natural part of life. Tomorrow the rough sea might be smooth as velvet. My father is leaving. It must be the time of year. You think you can control love, life, bonds, you think you are building something, but in fact it’s all just seasons passing. What will happen now? I don’t know. I’m afraid of the next phase in this dissolved life. You have to accept that there’s no sense to life, that nature is absurd and changeable. You have to carry on, struggling along between sun and bad weather, between the first ball and the last dance. 21 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) My parents got divorced. That’s it, that’s what’s happened. Disunited, for life. It was my brave mother who officially told me. I am the oldest, entitled to responsibility, to scolding and to announcements, from the most trivial to the most serious. My parents have divorced. I am a neutral, one-way receptacle of news, of sharp wounds and of this announcement which has broken the thread of a life, devastated its shape and coherence. We had been a scattered family, rather drunken, our bond one of industrious indifference and chaste, silent proximity. Work, introversion, the impossibility of really meeting and an incapacity for warm-heartedness had kept us at a distance from each other. We had been a family as bruised and divided as war veterans, but a family nonetheless. My mother says that it doesn’t matter, that God will take care of us. God won’t do a thing, and neither will my mother. I see how hurt she is: she trembles all the time and her eyes shirk contact, blinking away her tears so they don’t fall. My mother wants to be strong and to keep thinking that she understands life, its organising principles. She clings to her rigid, protective framework but it is cracking, like an old sea wall that has been leaking for a long time. My mother realises the power of love when he leaves. My father’s love, which she had thought hers, has settled on another woman, another body, and my mother is doubled up in pain and will be for the rest of her life. My parents loved each other, I know that now. But they suffered from the same wound: their ability to love had been sealed over and undermined for years, since well before they met. Their love was boxed in. Sex was a separate thing, disassociated from love: a compulsive, substitute act for my father; remote, imposed and impossible for my mother. My mother loved my father – his sudden fits of joy, his silence, his zest – but she refused his desire and his strength. She wanted a man’s tenderness only. Protestant traits were strong within her – a taste for limits and similarities, for smoothing people out, pushing away their desires and differences. The difference was my father’s penis. My mother enjoyed their alikeness but not this big, hard penis, not my father’s sturdy body, his pungent smell, his weight on her, pressing down on her silky curves. My mother liked to dance, to whirl around gracefully, but she did not like to be shaken by the desire of a man. My parents loved each other without saying so, avoiding each other to escape their love without being able to actually leave it behind. They did sometimes help and console each other, furtively and in secret. My father liked the way my mother took care of him. She dressed him, washed him, made sure that his cotton shirts were spotless and well ironed and that he was always served good food and cold beer. But good food was not enough. My father cheated on the wife who refused herself; he would go off but always come back, and she got used to these departures because there was always a return. At night, my mental merry-go-round kept coming back to the same question. What is this thing that unites us all? The initial love from which everything follows? That was my question, and when I realised that I had no answer, no clue, when nothing that day had been tender or resembled love, then I would dream of somewhere else that was softer, of flying away, of a land where love would be the focal point of the day, of those films where everything is straightforward and always ends with a kiss so blissful it seems nothing could follow it. I don’t know if there’s anything more violent than the refusal, the physical rejection of one’s own body by another person. The refusal of its skin, flesh, shape, existence. To be simply denied, held at a distance by a stiff hand or closed lips. That’s violent. For my father it was unbearable. It reminded him of being sent away, of boarding school, of his mother’s cold, dry hands. My parents were not able to say to each other what I am saying today. They were not able to understand each other, to see each other clearly, to join together love and the body. My parents’ love never hatched. People either emerge from hurt stronger, or they drown. It depends on their nature, and also on luck. My parents drowned, though they pretended to carry on living. My father remarried, my mother never did. I think she waited for my father for the rest of her life, sitting in the living room watching television. I could see that my mother was waiting from the jumpy way she looked up whenever there was a knock at the door, the way her lips gasped apart each time the doorbell rang. The man would come back to her and she would welcome him, take him into her arms, into her body, she would do it for him. She would forgive him everything. She would have thought things through. She would keep loving him, and life without him – those years spent waiting – would have been a bubble, just a bubble that would burst and disappear as soon as my father came back. I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I – supposed fruit of their love – no longer exist. I am sliced in two, separated, fragile. It happened almost forty years ago, yet to me nothing is sadder than my parents’ divorce. 22 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) We return from our holiday sooner than expected. Not to the hotel but to a new apartment my father has bought for us. Everything has been organised, foreseen. We are at the end of a separation process that was begun several months ago. Everything has been planned. Our things and a few bits of furniture have already been moved from the hotel to the apartment. My mother asks to pass by the hotel again. The whore tells her it’s not necessary, that everything has been moved. My mother insists – all this is so sudden – and my father ends up saying yes. My mother has a few hours in which to say goodbye to the place she has managed and held together for fifteen years. She walks from room to room in a daze, her every movement tracked by the new mistress who keeps an eye on her possessions. My mother retrieves a small jewellery box she had hidden under a pile of tablecloths. The contents are checked and my mother is allowed to take away her memories. My mother is calm, strong. In her distress she does, however, forget some basic items. Towels and sheets, such everyday items in a hotel, are left behind. We sleep in sleeping bags for the first few nights. My mother is shocked, driven out, humiliated, but she doesn’t falter. I follow her protectively. In defiance I feign indifference. I feel so close to my mother, on the same team for the first time. On her way out, hurried to the door, my mother puts a hand on the Chinese vase in the lobby, coming to a halt by this familiar object which has witnessed her comings and goings for so many years. She often used to stroke it as she walked past, it was a reference point, she loved its beauty and refinement. She opens her arms, deciding to take it in a fit of bravery; it will be her souvenir, her link, proof that life has not come to an end but is continuing under another roof. Every glance at the vase will recreate the earlier setting and my mother will be able to believe, as she focuses on the magic vessel, that her lonely new life is a temporary hell. Hanny screams, and snatches back the vase. ‘That’s not yours!’ This woman is simply evil. She wants to hurt, to take revenge. But on what? My mother is not fighting, the battle is not equal. She is emptied while the other is full of venom. I go to take the vase, but my mother holds out her hand to me. ‘Come on, let’s go …’ ‘Take the vase!’ I look up; my father has been watching the scene from the top of the stairs. He avoids my eyes and returns to his attic. We don’t close the hotel door when we leave. My mother is holding the vase like a pregnant belly, and my arms are stretched around the jewellery box as if it were plunder. 23 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) The apartment is a little cramped but we are at home, immovable. My brother and sister argue all day long. Marianne is now a serious, determined, devoted girl. Nicolas is still a roaming kid, his hair has grown and my mother often threatens him with her sewing scissors but can’t catch him. My mother is trying to create some semblance of order, to put on a brave face. She has found work. The judge decreed that my mother had no need of maintenance and must work for her living. She does, working hard as is her way, altering clothes in a smart boutique. ‘We’re a real family now! We’re going to eat healthily, and we DO NOT ARGUE!’ My mother hammers out the words to get the attention of Nicolas and Marianne, who are squabbling even as she is making these resolutions. My mother has changed, become softer, warm. She is making a real effort. It’s a bit late, but it’s nice. ‘Better late than never’ is her new motto. By repeating these banal words she is trying to get a grip on time and on this wait; she is living in hope. My mother is bringing us up at last. She is aware we are all she has left and that nothing will change this. She encourages me, telling me I can do anything, that I have the potential to succeed. What? I listen to this sudden promotion. I wonder, and cling to it. It’s so different from the old indifference, from what I used to feel, but I try to believe in it. I will need my mother to tell me from morning till night, sober and drunk, happy and unhappy, for every remaining day of her wretched life, that she loves me and that I have talent, the real talent, the talent to be loved, for me to – hearing it so often – start to inhabit this new love, and believe that these words, this change in the air, are more real than what went before. My mother managed a year of healthy living, without alcohol. She went back to it with the passing time and the never-ending wait. Slowly, gradually, surreptitiously; in a few months she was back to her old levels of consumption. Alcohol and tobacco would be her pastime, her painkillers, till the end. 24 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) The Mercedes convertible has the top down and is speeding along the school drive. The beast groans, beeps, leaps onto the lawn and skids to a standstill a few yards from Sister Marie Immaculata, who is stiff with fear and fury. A big patch of her short green lawn has just been scalped. Her eyes are dark with unfamiliar anger; gentle Sister Marie looks about to attack in defence of her land. ‘It’s my father,’ I say, ashamed and glad. I have been waiting for him since this morning. My father jumps out of the speed machine as soon as it stops and walks quickly towards me, holding out his arms. I run up and hug him. Hanny is in the car. Her make-up is a caricature of femininity in which my father thinks he can find an easy, simple life. She must like penetration. She steps out of the car, avoiding me and cornering Sister Marie, who takes a step back. ‘Mother!’ shouts the woman. ‘Sister!’ corrects Marie. ‘Sister, I am the new Mrs Kristel, so I’m telling you’ – she grabs Sister Marie Immaculata by the arm and leads her away – ‘with me, there’ll be no more problems! No more drinking! I will be personally overseeing the education of my husband’s girls …’ My father takes my hand, smiles and leads me towards the car. Hanny is having an animated discussion with Sister Marie, who is keeping her at a distance by gently pushing her back at regular intervals. My father takes advantage of this to escape for a few minutes, taking me for a short drive. It’s Sunday, the spring colours are bright and the air is warm. I lean my head back and let myself be lulled by the regular, mechanical noise of the engine, a noise I have missed. My father is quiet, happy, and I am dreaming away with the top down. When they’ve gone Sister Marie Immaculata concludes: ‘There’s only one thing to do, my girl: pray!’ 25 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) I have come to say goodbye to Sister Marie Immaculata. I’ve passed my baccalaureate and want to tell her. Unusually, she strokes my cheek, and tells me she knew I would. I talk to her about my plans, because you have to have plans. ‘I want to teach, to share …’ My voice tapers off; I’m struggling to convince even myself. ‘That’s good …’ says Sister Marie, limply. She doesn’t seem convinced either. She knows me well, and knows all about pious hopes, too. But what ought I to do? I’d like to do nothing. Wait for life to paint itself. But that’s not possible, you have to have a plan, to make the first brushstroke. Becoming a teacher seems to me easy, obvious, noble. I’ll have free time, and hang around with children, remain with them; it’ll be joyful, I’ll stay like them, I can grow up later. ‘How is your mother?’ ‘Well. We have new rules at home. We’re a proper family now. Mum is always saying “Better late than never”!’ ‘Your mother is wise; that’s the definition of hope!’ Sister Marie is surprised at her own philosophical words and soon returns to more practical advice. ‘Late is perhaps OK, but not backward. Never be backward!’ Sister Marie makes a quick summary of all she has taught me over the years – guidance on how to live well, to be dignified, to take pride in oneself, to win at life. Then she pauses, and reminds me of the thing she’s worrying about: ‘Finally, promise me you’ll see a doctor if it hasn’t come within a year.’ Sister Marie Immaculata is a bit embarrassed, waving at my abdomen. I am tall but not fully developed. It bothers her. I promise. ‘Right then, run along, my girl!’ Sister Marie hugs me, turns quickly round and walks away. She will smile at other girls, she will carry on. It’s summer, a beautiful day. I have my bac, I refuse to be sad. I still see Sister Marie Immaculata. She’s old now but almost unchanged, lovely inside and out. She has remained curious, hungry for life. She has followed my career with interest and circumspection. She has never seen me at the movies, only on television programmes and in the national newspaper Volkskrant. She’s even cut out a few articles. She says she always knew that my life would be out of the ordinary. ‘You were different. A kind of angel, innocent and impish at the same time. You were keen to learn, I could see your wings growing without knowing where they would take you. You were beautiful, you still are, my girl, graceful, soft and vivacious, funny and sad, different.’ She keeps a few photos of me nearby; she praises my bearing and claims it as her work. She has prayed for me, she says. 26 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) My body has sprouted but I am not a woman. This suits me fine. I am seventeen years old, with a few baby teeth still. I look as if I’m grown-up. I watch myself in mirrors more and more, playing, angling several mirrors to create infinite reflections of myself. People tell me I’m pretty, and I am establishing whether this is true. What is it to be pretty? My body earns me more and more compliments. People stop me in the street, stare at me, whistle. I am back in the realms of that energy that bound together the men and women in the hotel bar. I feel other people’s desire, but not my own. Attracting desire is power over the other, and I discover my power. I am finally the centre of an attention which is strong yet soft, and widespread. It sits on me like silk, never a burden. It warms me then soars up like a kite, with me holding the strings. The connection is there, I will not drop it. ‘I don’t know anyone who loves themselves as much as you,’ my mother often says, intrigued by this egocentric young girl so different to herself. ‘I’m not in love with myself, I’m discovering myself. One can’t love oneself, one loves other people.’ ‘Maybe, but I think you’re the exception.’ * I have enrolled at a Protestant teacher training college. The classes hold no interest for me. The disciplines are too many, too diverse and contradictory: literature, maths, history, biology … my mind is elsewhere. I stare fixedly at the globe that my teachers spin in their hands, travelling in my mind. I meet the eyes of those who gaze at me in class. I examine the beautiful shape of the young woman sitting in front of me, a dead ringer for Greta Garbo. I reply to a boy’s insistent stare by dropping my eyes. I am waiting. 27 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) ‘But where’s the Virgin?’ I ask, surprised. The minister chokes, then scolds me. ‘Miss Sylvia Kristel, there is no Holy Virgin, only the mother of Jesus.’ ‘OK, but where is she?’ ‘Dear girl, I think you had better learn the basic principles of Protestantism before coming back to this Sunday school. Off you go, please!’ I leave the classroom without a word. I find the class boring, and the man sad and austere. I need images, need love to be personalised. I like the way Mary is depicted – her pure, slightly sad face, her blue, gold and white robes elegantly draped, her clasped hands, her goodness. It all seems too abstract without this image, this holy mother. I like the female icon who makes everything seem softer and more serene. 28 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) My mother is back in her hellish cycle of working and drinking. She likes her job. She has a new friend, a gentle, supportive woman who will be around for the rest of her life. Marianne and Nicolas are fighting even more. Marianne grumbles as she cleans him up. Nicolas complains about the food – not enough meat and fish, his growing body needs flesh. It’s his way of reproaching my mother for a break-up that none of us can handle. Someone has to pay. I miss my father. I imagine him as a victim, as weak as he claimed to be. His last words – ‘Take the vase!’ – were tender, brave, unusual. Perhaps I could help him, try once more to convince him? My mother is going slowly downhill. She has met a Philips salesman, who spends more and more time at our place. He is solitary, kind, and always brings her flowers. But she doesn’t want him, she treats him badly, merely accepting the distraction he provides, and the feeling – which she had lost – of being a living being, useful and wanted. I am growing up, a young woman, rebelling against this other woman whose example I don’t wish to follow. I can no longer deal with this situation. I want to cut through it, make it burst. Things must change; so must I. This misery is not for me. ‘If you’d had sex a little more often, Dad would have stayed!’ My mother has had a few drinks but she still receives each word like a blow, in silence. My cruelty is a reflection of my suffering. She gulps down the contents of the small glass glued to her fingers and stands up in front of me. I hold my head high, facing her down, not taking back what I have said. She moves towards me, then suddenly stops dead right in front of my face. A warm gust of alcohol and tobacco hits me. My mother is hurt. She clutches my arm, digs her nails into me and shakes me, trying to make me see sense. I resist, still staring into her eyes. Suddenly my mother lets go, yelling, ‘Get out! Just get out!’ It’s late at night. I leave straight away, I’m out of here, this isn’t my life. Where can I sleep tonight? At the home of that nice boy who changes colour as soon as he catches my gaze? No, that just isn’t done. At my dad’s place! At the hotel, in my room. When I arrive, the first-floor light is on. I can see silhouettes moving. I knock on the reception door and shout: ‘Dad! Dad! It’s me, Sylvia.’ Sure of myself, looking forward to seeing my dad again. The lights go out one by one. The bedroom is suddenly plunged in darkness, everything completely silent. I wait. ‘Dad! It’s me! Sylvia! I’ve seen you! Open up!’ Not a word, not a sign. Nothing. He must be there, she must have warned him, told him not to move, he must be obeying her, weakly. What should I do? My father is there, mute, behind this door he is not going to open. I don’t exist. All of a sudden I scream: ‘If you don’t open the door, I’ll kick it down, do you hear me?! I’ll kick it down!’ The light goes on. I hear raised voices. Then she comes down and the two of us talk for a long time. She tries to convince me to leave, for everyone’s sake, but I won’t. Where would I go? ‘If you stay, you’ll pay for your room like anyone else.’ ‘OK.’ The charge for my old room, 21, is a hundred florins. I will work to pay my rent, I can waitress in the exhibition centre. I’ve watched people serve all my life – my mother, my aunts, the staff. It’ll be like second nature, an aptitude gained as a young child, from watching. My father spends his days in the attic. I see him on Saturdays, when she goes to the hairdresser for a full hour of back-combing. He is happy to see me for this hour a week. If she weren’t so obsessed with having a wedding-cake hairstyle to make her look even taller on her hooker’s heels, he would never see me alone at all. I sometimes watch her without her knowing. Trying to understand my father’s attraction. It’s true that she has a nice body, slim, with shapely female parts. Perhaps that’s enough. She dictates and organises everything in a threatening, monotonous voice. Perhaps my father needed to be reprimanded, educated, constrained; men can lose themselves in their freedom. Everything has changed here. I already knew that. Aunt Alice has been driven out; Hanny claimed she was stealing. One evening she humiliated her. ‘Open your bag!’ In it she found a lump of cheese and a little coffee. She convinced my father that Aunt Alice stole frequently and had done so for ages. My father said nothing. Aunt Alice left, mortified. Aunt Mary flew off the handle, badly this time. She couldn’t bear the changes. She put an end to her overly quiet convalescent life, leaving for Italy in an unknown car, with no luggage. She thought she’d escaped. She spent a fortune. Then she came back, saying she had seen paradise, had discovered a country where everything was song and sparkle. She gave herself to one of the locals in a similar fit of enthusiasm. Having thought herself infertile she fell pregnant aged forty. Her rounded belly put a constant smile on her face. Hanny decided to complete my father’s isolation by throwing Aunt Mary out on the grounds of immorality. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black – I found out she’d met my father in a seedy bar where she worked as an occasional hostess. By day she was an accountant, by night she hunted for prey – and she wasn’t the type to come home empty-handed. She’d never had a child. Perhaps she couldn’t. She hated childhood. * 29 (#uc2f878fe-b6cf-5fe5-b702-b8b39062d1aa) I’ve had enough of Hanny badmouthing my mother, loudly enough to ensure that I’m aware of her daily discrediting campaign and continual bewitching of my dependent father. She walked in on him and me laughing today. It must have been too much for her. ‘It’s Sylvia or me!’ she tells him. There’s talk of placing me with a foster-family. I phone my mother in tears and she responds: ‘Come back, your coffee’s waiting.’ She couldn’t just say ‘I’m waiting’. My mother hid herself behind stock phrases. Her coffee – hot, strong, and always ready – was given as if it came from her own body. It was her attention, her warmth; it was my mother. I came back, after six months at the hotel. When my mother opened the door she opened her lips too, giving me a wide, unfamiliar smile. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/sylvia-kristel/undressing-emmanuelle-a-memoir/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.