Читать книгу Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir - Sylvia Kristel - Страница 30

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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.