Tessel had stopped starving herself; that had met with too much resistance from those around her. Now she ate in accordance with a strict, clockwork regime of small quantities of low-fat, low-calorie foods. Her inner resistance to such stultifying discipline resulted in eating jags, moments at which she allowed herself a brief respite of complete excess, when she could let herself go and bury her sorrow beneath an avalanche of cookies, marzipan, chips, ice cream and chocolate. And, in regret at having violated her own rules, she then vomited it all out into the toilet.
A layman could have diagnosed it as bulimia nervosa.
Commonly, the image the bulimia patient has of her own body is out of synch with its actual girth. Those around her see normal proportions, but the patient herself looks in the mirror and sees a swollen monstrosity. Puking is the only way to control the monster, and the resulting feelings of shame aggravate the sense of loneliness. For women who suffer from bulimia, the world is a twisted mirror in which they constantly try to adopt the correct pose.
Those who only rarely vomit think this must be a painful, intensive activity, but it is very easy for the puke girl. She has trained herself to vomit in a way that remains hidden from the outside world: we see no red eyes, smell no sour breath. She sticks toothbrushes and spoons down her throat or, with no other means available, presses two fingers against her uvula. The toilet seat is raised, the view fills her with disgust, but she braces herself and thinks: OK, here we go.
In Tessel’s case, the detrimental effects of gastric acid on the teeth (the rapid destruction of tooth enamel results in cavities) was only a minor problem: her father was a dentist.
With that, my final doubts were swept away; the only figure presenting itself from within this description was P.J. Eilander. Her secret lay spread before me on the table.
Tessel now controlled her weight with the most invisible form of self-mutilation: vomiting. Within her grew an existential void and a sense of her own intrinsic worthlessness. These were her last authentic emotions. In the outside world she reacted to the emotions of others with behaviour that she had copied: she knew that comforting went with sorrow, and that joy had to be met in turn with confirmation of that joy. She herself knew only the derivatives of emotions, echoes from the days when she was fat and miserable. Her inner world was a cold, blasted place; calling out to her from the ruins were pudgy boys and girls, drowning in their own fat.
The special thing about Tessel was that the course of her life had been cut in two: one part — far away, on another continent — in which she had been fat and miserable, and another in which she was desirable and where — outside her own family circle — no memory existed of who and what she had once been. Inside herself she exterminated every memory of the former character, of the life that had caused pain, along with feelings that were deep and real. None of this was visible on the outside: one saw only an intelligent girl with an above-average sense of humour, a pleasant person to be around.
Her sexual development was normaclass="underline" she kissed boys on occasion and lost her virginity at sixteen to a young Turk in the resort town of Alanya, where she was on holidays with her parents and a girlfriend. Her first real boyfriend she found at the age of seventeen, a boy from her village without a ghost of a chance. She held him completely in her sway; Tessel had discovered the limitless power of beauty and unscrupulousness. When she went off to university she forgot the boy as carelessly as she might have lost a hairpin. He had served his purpose; Tessel had used him to reconnoitre and refine the possibilities of sex as a weapon. She was ready for bigger things.
This was Tessel when I met her. When she introduced herself to me at the annual literature meeting of the Faculty of Letters, there was electricity in the air. Four days later we slept together for the first time; lying in my bed was a perfectly beautiful, perfectly heartless monster.
I thought back on P.J.’s behaviour in Mousetown, when she had tormented that frightened mouse and isolated it from the rest. Independently of each other, Joe and I had both had our misgivings; that ungirlish cruelty had revealed a side of her we would rather not have seen.
I was happier than I had ever been in my life. Tessel combined a touching gentleness with pornographic sexual abandon. She was, without a doubt, the funniest woman I had ever met. She was a dream, because she gave me everything I longed for: she supplied to order. This was the miracle of which she was capable. To her parents she was the ideal daughter, to her teachers a talented student, and to her drinking friends a lecherous bitch who danced on café tables and wound men around her finger. And to me. . to me she was Love with a capital L. She showed me what I wanted to see most, and I wanted to believe in that. She nourished hope — of love that was meant to be, of two separate halves that find each other amid a crowd of millions.
In every social situation she unerringly reflected that which was expected of her. Her mimesis was perfect, except in one regard. One area of life was inaccessible to her, because she neither knew nor understood it: intimacy. This she could not imitate, in the same way a chameleon cannot turn white.
Sex was Tessel’s substitute strategy for intimacy.
How was I to know that, from the very first day, she slept with other men as well? When I found a text message one day that proved she had at least one other lover, I punched her in the face twice.
To be desired by many men was Tessel’s magic charm to ward off her mother’s curse: that her sexual market value was low and that she would attract only fat boys. When, by a complete fluke, I found out that that first act of unfaithfulness had not been the last, I hit her again and this time raped her as well. She wept as she came, and told me it was the best sex she’d ever had. There were nine other men. Each cock that penetrated her confirmed that she was wanted, and pretty. The liberation was always short-lived, for she lacked the inner conviction of her own beauty. She would go looking again, be desired again, again the wings of ecstasy would spread and again she would return disillusioned to the gorged, quivering image she had of herself. By way of necessary counterbalance she always had a lover to come home to safely, to uphold the appearance of normality.
Somewhere in those turbid times I told her: ‘You could not have dealt me a harder blow.’
She thought about that for a moment. Then, in utter calm, she said: ‘Oh yes, I could have.’
I asked no further.
Tessel was the Whore of the Century.
I had to stop reading, I was shaking too badly. Here was a man who was asking himself in despair how he could have loved a woman who was merely the reflection of what he expected from a woman. He had dissected the cadaver with a sure hand. It was fabulous and frightening.
First Metz, and now it was Joe’s turn. And I was the only one who held all the pieces of the puzzle; I had known P.J. before she knew Metz, I knew who she was with now, and — although I experienced a moment of doubt — Joe had to read this, he was headed for catastrophe.
The next time he came to see me I slid the book solemnly across the table. He picked it up, looked at the cover (a detail of some fuzzy painting representing a female body), read the blurb and put it back on the table. He frowned.
‘I don’t know why you read shit like that,’ he said.