Sunday, November 1, 2020
Tomorrow my son, Tom — all of six and a half years old — has to wear a mask to school. So we rehearse putting one on. Once, twice, ten times.
I post a photo of my masked boy on Facebook. Seconds later, my father pitches in: “Poor little Tom. Going back to school will be a little weird this time around. Best of luck from your Grandad, who loves you more than anything.”
My last ever exchange with my father. I just don’t know it yet. Life was so simple. At 42, I had a job I loved, a husband, a child and a house near Paris. The future was full of hope, not danger.
Monday, November 2, 2020
At 11am, my husband, who works nights, comes home while I’m working. He goes for a snooze. When he wakes, he has missed two calls, from landlines in the south of France. Two voicemails.
A message from my mother: “It’s urgent. It’s about Dominique.”
The other message is from a police lieutenant in Carpentras, a town not far from my parents’ home.
Paul calls the police lieutenant. “We’ve found videos showing your mother-in-law asleep, clearly drugged, with men abusing her. Sexually,” he says.
The words drag Paul into another world. The lieutenant goes on, calmly delivering the facts in his possession.
The abuse of my mother has been going on for at least seven years. The number of men who have abused my mother is impossible to believe: “The current count is 73. Your father-in-law organized the whole thing, taking photos and filming everything that took place. I have to tell you, the images are hard to stomach, even for us. And there’s a lot we haven’t gone through yet.”
It’s Paul my mom chose to ring. She knows he can handle it. He tells my mother to call her three children, starting with me. I can still hear the hesitation in my mother’s voice as she phones. She insists I have to be sitting down. I start to tremble. What she is saying makes no sense. What depths of dishonesty does it take for my father to have maintained the tranquil illusion, all these years, that everything was normal?
Mom hangs up. She has other calls to make — first David, my elder brother, and then Florian, the youngest. I cling to my husband. I can barely breathe. I suspected nothing.
When I reach Florian he too is in shock. He tells me about a time when he spent several days at our parents’ house with his wife and two daughters in 2018. During their last dinner, Mom’s elbow slid off the table and she collapsed like a rag doll.
My father took her to bed. “This happens from time to time — she burns the candle at both ends and then has to switch off for a while,” he said.
The truth was he had slipped a cocktail of drugs into her aperitif. That evening my father insisted Florian and his family had worn her out. They had no option but to get into their car and leave.
Anger consumes me. I contact my employers and tell them I’ll be taking time off. I try to get some sleep. I finally drift off, my husband by my side and my son’s hand gripped in mine.
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
I drop Tom off at school, telling him I’m going to visit his gran down south and will bring her back with me. In the train toilets, my reflection is haggard. Even the obligatory mask doesn’t hide the fact I seem to have aged ten years in the space of 24 hours.
Mom is waiting in front of the police station in Carpentas. She looks lost, a mere 5ft 4in tall in clothes that look too big for her, her hands hidden in the pockets of her puffy mauve jacket. I pull her into a hug. My brothers do the same. She almost breaks down. I take her hand, mothering my mother.
We enter the police station. I realize my father must be there too, in a nearby cell. The room is so tight I feel like we’ve all been lured into a trap. The officer runs through the inquiry’s conclusions. Just listening leaves us feeling soiled.
We don’t make it back to my parents’ house until four in the afternoon. As the automatic gate to the driveway opens, their French bulldog — a loyal companion to my father — lunges out, barking.
We plan to be out of this place within three days. My brothers go to work in the lounge, where the footprint of my father’s computer — now in the hands of the police — is clearly visible on his desk. He spent most of his free time glued to it, immobile on his chair, puffing on an e-cigarette.
My parents thought the house would be the perfect haven for their retirement. My father adored the bike routes that ran through the countryside. My mother prized everything about the region, even the icy winter Mistral winds. The house was the scene of our noisy games of Trivial Pursuit, our alfresco dinners which would turn into evenings of music and dance. For my son, my husband and I, it was our happy place. I had assumed the same was true for my parents.
My phone drags me back to the present. A local number. The police officer asks me to return to the station. He tells me he has something that concerns me directly. In a room at the station, photos poke out from a large file on the table.
The first picture shows a young woman with dark brown hair lying on a bed on her left side. It’s night-time, with a bedside lamp lighting the scene. She’s wearing a thick white pyjama top and beige underwear. She’s asleep, but the quilt covering her has been lifted to expose her buttocks.
I tell the officer I’m not sure. He hands over the second photo. The bedsheets seem familiar. It’s the same young woman in a different room. The underwear hasn’t changed, though. I tell them I don’t think it’s me.
The officer studies my face. “I hope you don’t mind me pointing this out, but don’t you have a brown mole on your right cheek, just like the young woman in the photos?”
I force my eyes back to the images. My vision is disturbed by a host of tiny starbursts, my ears start ringing and I jerk back in the chair. The officer calls in my brother, who’d driven me to the station.
Florian asks if he can see the pictures of me. Now we’re both in a state of shock. We hurry down the stairs, putting as much distance as we can between ourselves and the photos, as if we were running from a monster, hoping to outpace it.
Back at the house my mother has a blank look on her face. “Are you absolutely sure it’s you?” she says. Maybe her doubt is an unconscious attempt to shield herself, but it hurts.
Eating feels impossible. I manage to spoon down a little soup and resume going through the drawers of my father’s desk. I find fines for driving offences late at night on distant motorways, bill reminders and debt notifications. Where did all these debts come from?
My mother can’t answer me. She says my father insisted on gathering up all the mail that poured into the house. He would pounce as soon as the postman left. He would even push her back if she tried to help.
She didn’t even handle the grocery shopping. My father pretended it was for her sake. Aside from the odd walk with her friend, her social life had shrunk to almost nothing. I realise how far she had fallen under my father’s control.
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
Mom is in the kitchen with a bowl of black coffee. It’s 7.45am and her eyes are fixed on the patio door. Maybe she’s waiting for my father to come in from one of his early-morning bike rides.
She tells me about leaving the police station after she was shown images of herself naked, unconscious, with men she didn’t recognize. She went back home. She washed, dried and ironed clothes for my father, packing them up to take to the station so that he had something to change into. Classic dissociation — isolating a traumatic experience to make it easier to bear. Her defense mechanisms had kicked in.
I remove my father’s paintings from the walls. One gets special treatment: a portrait of a naked woman. I take it out to the patio and smash it against one of the garden chairs. It splits in two. I spot something written on the back in pencil. A date — August 2016 — and a title. He’d called it Under My Thumb. That night I don’t sleep a wink.
Friday, November 6, 2020
When I wake up, I can’t speak. My voice has vanished, just like my life before. Over breakfast, I take out the file of financial documents I brought with me from the house in Mazan. It takes me an hour and a half to get an overview of the situation. It’s really bad. The debts are huge. She keeps repeating, “He was in charge of all that.” I lose my patience.
When my mother says not to worry, she’ll take care of it, I can barely restrain myself trying to shake some sense into her. The more I learn about the way my parents lived, the more I realize how successfully my father had become her puppeteer and how meekly she had accepted it. Exhausted, I go and lie down. I see no way out of this nightmare. I doze for a few hours. When I awake, my head is throbbing. Mom has been out for a walk. The short autumnal day is coming to an end. She seems relaxed, and I feel guilty about the way I scolded her. I promise to myself that I’ll treat her more gently from now on.
Paul nods towards the kitchen, indicating that I should follow him discretely. I stiffen. What is it this time? He points to his laptop, open on the counter. I can tell he’s nervous. “Read that.” It’s an article from a news site called Actu17 that reports on criminal activity all over France. The headline screams at me: “Carpentras — he drugged his wife, brought in strangers every night to rape her, and filmed it all!” When my mother sees it she sags against Paul, who has to carry her to the nearest sofa. I can’t protect her against this. An avalanche of similar articles online is inevitable.
Who is this man who’s been hiding inside my father for so long? I once had a father who looked out for me, took care of me. Where’s he gone? Where’s the man who walked me to school, encouraged me on the sports field, pushed me to study, helped me with my projects, talked me through my career choices? Where’s the man who watched over and played with his grandchildren, basking in their love? How can you lead such a double life? How can you pull the wool over so many eyes for so many years?
Paul comes up to me. I slap him. For the first time in our life. I’ve no idea what I’m doing. I’ve gone off the rails. My mother tells me to get a grip on myself. I don’t even know where to start. My nerves are shattered. I lose control of my body as my muscles start to spasm. I cry out for help. Later on, Paul will tell me that this moment — this hysterical outburst — left him terrified. An ambulance pulls up.
In the hospital, I spend half the night on a stretcher in a corridor and the other in a bed. Twice, a doctor comes to see me. They should never have let me walk out of the police station in Carpentras, left to my own devices. If some kind of therapeutic support had been put in place it would have stopped me falling into this abyss, kept me out of this hospital.
When will the justice system learn that a victim’s need for support and protection doesn’t stop when an arrest has been made and charges brought? How can we tell traumatized individuals to go back home as if all was well, particularly in cases of sexual assault?
Saturday, November 7, 2020
I’m in an emergency psychiatric ward. Two doctors come in. They suggest I take “something to relax me” before the consultation. I accept a pill. Minutes later, my body starts to slip away from me. As I tell them my story, my arms and legs grow heavier. I topple over onto my left side, unintentionally adopting the same position as the two photos taken by my father.
Later on, I look up the drug they gave me — a treatment used in some cases of schizophrenia. The nurse tells me: “You’re in a fragile state. Your nervous condition is too unstable for you to go home. You should spend at least one night here, under our care. Tomorrow morning, the duty doctor will review your situation.” Hell, no. If I stay paralyzed like this, my father will emerge from the shadows, scrutinise me, take photos, play with me like a toy, maybe even summon up other men. I’m not going to let it happen. I try to get up, but I’m caught in a trap, locked inside a body I don’t control. I’m wheeled into a steel cage, which turns out to be a lift. Fear grips me as I’m taken through corridor after corridor, an endless series of whitewashed walls. I hear screams, crying, protests. Scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest run through my mind. Except this is no film.
Caroline Darian is an advocate for victims of sexual violence
