Читать книгу Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir - Sylvia Kristel - Страница 23

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‘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 risqué 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 compèred 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.