Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir

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.

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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.

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‘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.

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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.

*

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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.