There are subjects that are more sensitive than others, so delicate to handle. Subjects that give nightmares and that touch on the insidious violence, the one that dirties the being because it makes believe that it is chosen. There are books on these difficult subjects that one reads as a child or teenager, and which put balm in the heart, heart to fight and to grow. There is a time that liberates from the unsaid, from denial and allows certain works to be born, such as The lengths by Claire Castillon, who subtly took up the theme of pedophilia.
Alice’s father left her mother when she was 7, and he left for America to start another family when she was 8 and a half. If He comes to see her from time to time, it is an absence. She would have seen as a father-in-law a great friend of her mother, Georges, known as “Mondjo”, a funny, kind, patient forty-something. He manages a climbing wall associated with a sports hall. She starts climbing at the club, he also keeps her from time to time. She was eight and a half when he taught her the “Gouzgouz”, “caresses in the back of the end of the nails”. She is ten when he manages to get her to sleep with him in the same room on the occasion of a competition, then to come alone with him at sea during a holiday in Sardinia. “His bar makes his jersey lift. He tells me the story of hospitality. He asks me if I know what it means to welcome someone.
Alice is now 15 when she tells. She never told anyone. Her mother, who nevertheless pampers her and with whom she has a good relationship, saw nothing. The adult abused his power, swore him to secrecy about the “guzguz” and all the rest. The child believes it is love and thinks that they will marry one day, as he promised her. But Mondjo throws her fits of jealousy, pushes her friends out of her life, can’t bear to see her grow up. Alice vomits often. “It’s not vomiting like you’ve eaten too much or eaten badly, it’s like anger that springs up. Afterwards, it’s better.” Like terrible stories, we wonder how it will all end and we cross our fingers. The beginning of the tunnel begins when one manages to exteriorize the evil that is in oneself. We support her, Alice, and we breathe a little, when she finally manages to tell Emilie what she has been going through since the age of 8 with Mondjo: “He wants to destroy you, this guy!” But it’s not so simple, between the affection we believe we have for our executioner, the guilt he has managed to germinate in ourselves and the shame in relation to others… Claire Castillon has managed to write a novel true, told from the child’s point of view, written in short, dry, snapping sentences, which speak of innocence, silence, disarray. And the possibility of getting out.
The lengths, by Claire Castillon, Gallimard Jeunesse «Scripto», 185 pp., € 10.50.
.