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was a girl, and my mother muttered that the girl must
    be sleeping with everyone; or the fact that my father came home late at night, funnily enough having just come from that café—did I pick up and thread together, and what in- stinctual material did I formulate so that the stories I told myself as I rubbed the lips of my vulva together so accurately prefigured my future sexual adventures? I even remem- ber a criminal case: the arrest of a rather ob- scure, aging woman (she must have been something like a maid on a farm) who was accused of killing her lover. I have forgotten the details of the murder because what really struck me was that among her belongings, they found notebooks that she had filled with memories and into which she pasted little relics—photographs, letters, locks of hair—connected with her lovers, who turned out to have been extraordinarily numerous. As a child I loved sticking bits of plants and flowers into my holiday project book, and I had a tidy scrapbook with precious
    photographs of Anthony Perkins or Brigitte Bardot, so I admired the fact that the woman had managed to collate this treasure, these traces of the men she had known, within a few simple notepads, and a secret corner of my libido was even more disturbed by the fact that this woman was ugly, and ended up alone, wild and outcast.
    There are major structural similarities between situations I have lived and those I have imagined, even though I have never act- ively chosen to reproduce the latter in my life, and the details of what I have lived have had little part in nourishing my imaginings. Perhaps I should just assume that the fantas- ies forged in my earliest youth predisposed me to widely diverse experiences. Since I never felt ashamed of these fantasies, and I reworked and embellished them rather than trying to bury them, they offered not opposi- tion to what was real but rather a sort of mesh through which real-life situations that
    other people might have found outrageous struck me as quite normal.

    My brother and I were rarely taken to play in the park, but there was a little one that we crossed on the way to school. Down one side of the square there was a long wall with three pretty lean-tos along it. They were made of brick and wood, painted green and surroun- ded by shrubs. One was used for gardening tools, the other two housed the public toilets. There must have been groups of boys hanging about in the square. In any event, the very first narrative that accompanied my masturbating—and one that I used again and again for many years—put me in a situation where I was dragged into one of these shel- ters by a boy. I saw him kissing me on the mouth and touching me all over as his friends came to join us and they all started
    fondling me. We always remained standing, and I revolved in the middle of the tightly knit group.
    Most Sunday mornings our parents would alternate on taking us to the matinee per- formance at the local cinema, whatever they were showing, and fleeting, barely-under- stood sequences glimpsed in romantic films and trailers; fired my imagination. I fantas- ized that I was allowed to go to the cinema alone. There were lots of people lining up. Suddenly someone would squeeze my ass. And again everyone else around me in the line would follow suit, and when I reached the ticket desk, the salesgirl could see that my skirt had been lifted up, and I would talk to her while someone rubbed themselves against my buttocks; I wouldn’t have any panties on. The excitement would rise. My top would be off by the time I had crossed the foyer (I formulated an image of myself as an adult blessed with substantial breasts, an
    image I still resort to in my fantasies, where- as my breasts are actually average size). So- metimes the manager of the theater would ask us, calmly but with some authority, to wait until we were in the auditorium to get on with our disheveled embraces. At first I would wriggle about with one boy,