Consent by Vanessa Springora

Author:Vanessa Springora [Springora, Vanessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

FIRST THERE WERE THE ANONYMOUS LETTERS OF DENUNCIATION, then the fear that we both had AIDS: successive threats that crystallized our love for each other. We’d have to hide, disappear, flee the intrusive glances of witnesses, jealous people; I’d have to scream across a courtroom, as they handcuffed my beloved, that I loved him more than anything. We would die in each other’s arms, our skin covered in sores, stretched tight over our bones, but with a single heart that beat solely for one another . . . Life with G. was more than ever beginning to resemble a novel. Would it have a tragic ending?

Somewhere, surely, there was a path to follow, or to locate. That’s what Taoists and Buddhists believe. They call it the “middle way.” The right word, the perfect gesture, the irrefutable feeling of being in the right place at the right time. Where the naked truth lies, in a way.

When you’re fourteen, it’s not normal for a fifty-year-old man to wait for you outside your school. It’s not normal to live with him in a hotel, to find yourself in his bed at teatime with his penis in your mouth. I was aware of all that; I may have been only fourteen, but I wasn’t completely lacking in common sense. In a way I constructed my new identity out of this very abnormality.

On the other hand, I instinctively understood that the fact that no one ever expressed surprise at the situation meant the world around me was out of kilter.

And when, later on, the different therapists I saw did all they could to explain to me that I’d been the victim of a sexual predator, even then it seemed to me that this wasn’t the “middle way” either. That this wasn’t quite right.

I wasn’t yet done with ambivalence.

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