For Lucien, this secrecy on Pascal’s part was a referendum on their friendship. Lucien found it hurtful that Pascal didn’t trust him, and it did not occur to Lucien, as he talked to me about his feelings, that I might have a vested interest in the question of Pascal’s guilt or innocence, an interest that was quite separate from Lucien’s feelings.
My own feelings were neutral; I do not care what people do. It was my job to find evidence that the Moulinards were a threat. Whether they were a serious threat was irrelevant. Either I would locate evidence, or I would locate a way to implicate them, so that police could raid this backwater and shut down their little commune.
We were at a river bend where the water was deep, a beloved local swim hole that Pascal said might be gone forever if the state had its way.
We paused to watch a group of boys taking turns on a rope swing looped to a branch of a massive plane tree. Each boy climbed up short boards that were nailed into the tree’s trunk, while holding on to a rope. At the highest step, each was given instructions by a boy on the ground, who seemed to be the leader.
“Push off as hard as you can. Don’t let go of the rope too early,” this boy hollered. “But don’t let go too late, or you’ll swing back and hit the tree.”
His hair was in two French braids that went past his shoulders, and he was the tannest and smallest and looked to be the youngest. He wore a necklace made of white beads. He kept touching the beads, bringing them to his mouth.
One by one, the boys pushed off, swung out over the river, let go, and dropped into the water. One or two seemed skilled at this activity, but most of them let go of the rope awkwardly, flailing as they plummeted, hitting the water at odd angles. One of the boys did not disengage all the way and burned the insides of his legs from rope friction. He emerged yelling in agony. The others laughed at him.
The boy in braids and the beaded choker, who had been instructing the others on where to stand, when to let go, took his turn last. He climbed up without the rope, and at the highest step in the tree, he grabbed a tree limb and began going higher and higher, moving from branch to branch until he was at the highest tree limb over the river. He must have been forty feet above the surface. He touched the beads at his neck, crossed himself, and jumped. His body was still and straight and upright, like a person riding downward in an elevator.
The boy shot up from the river’s dark surface, sunlight forming a veil of diamonds in his braids.
“He was one of the students in the open-enrollment school we started,” Pascal said, “but we had to ask him to leave.”
I’d read about their school. Modeled on some crazy place in England in the 1960s, no rules nor hierarchies. Children as young as four designing their own curriculum. Everyone sitting on the floor.
I asked what happened.
“He impregnated his schoolteacher,” Pascal said. “It’s been a drama. At first, I’ll admit I defended her. When does childhood end, and adulthood begin? Age eighteen? Age sixteen? Puberty? What love is adult love? But the precepts we are raised on are difficult to shake. People felt she’d crossed a line. She was asked to leave the commune.
“The boy’s parents are not part of Le Moulin. They’re locals. His father maintains some of the vacation homes closer to Boulière, and the parents run a market booth selling crêpes in the summer. We are trying to solve our own problems here, through dialogue and compromise. The boy’s parents agreed not to go to the authorities if the teacher gave up the baby and let them raise it. The teacher is young. She wasn’t ready to be a mother. She could have faced serious charges, and she agreed. In a way, the boy’s parents were quite humane and reasonable about the whole thing. They sent the boy to his grandparents and took in the teacher until she was ready to give birth. They are raising that baby now. They said she could visit, and she told them she had no interest. We never saw her again. I heard she moved to Corsica.”
“How old is the boy?”
He was pussyfooting up the river’s bank, stepping over rocks and tree roots. Water streamed from his tan, slim body as he high-fived his friends.
“Now he’s thirteen,” Pascal said. “This was a couple of years ago. He was eleven.”
I’D RECENTLY SEEN an Italian documentary from the 1980s that featured a child with alarming sexual confidence, a boy of nine named Franck. Vito had recommended it. If Vito and I agreed that Italian foods and wines were subpar, we also agreed that Italian films were superior, but we partly insisted on this as a way of challenging Serge’s and Lucien’s bias toward French cinema.
“Does this ship take passengers,” Vito and I would say to each other, in emulation of Monica Vitti in Red Desert, a despairing housewife clutching her coat, looking for an escape from her neurosis. Does this ship take passengers? she asks a sailor from a docked boat. There is no vessel that can remedy what ails her, but the sailor cannot understand her question, doesn’t speak Italian, and responds in untranslated Turkish.
My favorite work of Italian cinema is La Dolce Vita, for its bleak ending, Marcello Mastroianni jaded and lost, won over by the void of a shallow life, and numb to the call of the angel smiling at him from across the beach. This documentary that Vito recommended (he gave me a thumb drive; it wasn’t the kind of thing you could stream) was unknown to me. In it, various subjects talk about love, including this nine-year-old, Franck, who leans on one elbow and chews gum with rhythmic and casual machismo, as he recounts a recent sexual pursuit.
“We began to kiss each other,” he says. Chew, chew. “And we touched each other’s bodies. I asked her if she wanted to make love.”
“She was also nine?” This was the off-screen voice of the filmmaker, behind his camera.
“Yes,” the boy said, “same as me.”
“And what did she say?”
“She had never, you know, been with somebody. Been with a man, I mean. But she wanted to try it, with me. I was her first. Afterward, she told me she had never felt anything like this before. We were both very happy.”
Chew, chew. Leans, to get more comfortable on his propped elbow. Lets out a sensuous and long sigh.
“We made love,” chew, chew, “and then we went outside to play. We were playing together, simple fun, a boy and a girl, just as we had played before we had started to kiss. Our game was the same, but we, how do I say it”—he repositions his propped elbow, overgrown bangs falling in his eyes—“we were different. We played better with each other, after making love.”
As little Franck talks about why he thinks adults are afraid of children’s sexuality, someone in the background rides by on a loud motorcycle. Franck turns his head to look. He’s nine, but his body language is that of a teenager: he wants to know what’s going on around him, to be on the scene, to not miss out, while he’s stuck talking to this documentary filmmaker. But at least he gets to talk about his sexual pursuits and libertine values. He tells the filmmaker that grown-ups are full of fear. Children should not be in school, Franck says into the camera. They should be out in the world, traveling around, experiencing joy.
“What do you imagine your life will be like when you’re older?” the filmmaker asks him.
“I’ll get home from work. My wife and I will take a shower together and soap each other’s bodies. A nice long, hot shower. Then we will dry each other. We will eat dinner, watch TV, go to bed. In bed, we will make love. It’ll be nice for both of us. The next day, it will be the same. Giusto?”
He says “giusto” throughout, to mean, Right? You with me? Understand? Giusto?
I wondered what had become of him, which is what we say of people who have made an ominous impression. If you wonder what became of someone and they turned out normal and undistinguished, it is disappointing. Asking what became of Franck could be suitably answered only with scenarios like:
Franck was killed in the commission of a bank robbery in Milan.
Or Franck works with the Catholic Church in sub-Saharan Africa, preaching abstinence.
Or Franck became a leftist insurgent in central-southwestern France, and masterminded the kidnapping of the Franco-Iberian subminister Pablo Platon y Platon, who was never seen again, his body never found, and Franck is now in prison, possibly for life.
While those answers might be okay, the most satisfying answer, the only answer that would not disturb the early impression of Franck and his terrifying sexual confidence at age nine, would be:
Franck never grew up. Franck’s precocious sexual appetite resulted in the magic trick of permanent youth. Franck looks now as he did at the time he appeared in this film—button face, brown hair with overgrown bangs. Franck continues to be nine years old, to chew gum and say “Giusto,” and to talk about the relaxing and healthful benefits of sexual intercourse among children.
After watching that documentary, I’d looked up Franck. I found his Facebook page. As a non-friend, I could see only the profile photo and banner image he had chosen. The profile photo was his face, a grown version. It’s painful what happens to children’s faces when they get older. In my sole fantasy of motherhood, where I raise a baby that I find in a dumpster, the baby has no awkward phase. As the baby grows, it retains the blurry softness of perfect youth, but in fact people lose that as they mature. They take on the hardened lines of adulthood, which blurs them in a different way, into the vague category of grown-ups banished from their own youthful cuteness.
We should destroy all the photographs of the awkward phase. Put the ugly photos in a common incinerator and release the smoke of our traces into the higher atmosphere. I myself have already done that. I did it for professional reasons. But everyone should do it, for aesthetic reasons. Save only the most charming and angelic of baby pictures, like the one of Guy Debord that I found in Pascal’s file. There could be one universally shared image, a photographic commons, that becomes the symbol of our perfect beginnings.
The banner photo on grown-up Franck’s Facebook page was of a race car. It would be acceptable to me in the what-became-of-Franck genre if he were a race car driver. But this was a commercial photo, an advertisement for Lamborghini, a make whose broad fan base has never owned and will never own actual Lamborghinis. Lamborghini fans own a poster or calendar. They have a T-shirt.
