There is no way Pellicott could have anticipated the scale and brutality of Dominic’s operation. But when the truth came out, she and her family were filled with troubling memories, jarring moments that seemed to fade away on their own, as if waiting to be understood. One came forward for the daughter-in-law – Dominic said he wanted to “play doctor” with his young grandson. Pellicote remembered a cocktail that tasted strange. She remembered examining a patch of bleach on her pants and jokingly asking her husband, “You’re drugging me, aren’t you?” He started crying bitterly. She writes, “I wonder now whether perhaps, in some inaccessible part of me, I did not trust him completely, because I accused him, even if in the tone of a bad joke.” A rift with a close friend will suddenly become clear. This friend, Pasquale, one day warned him about Dominic: “You put him in a high place, but you have no idea what kind of person you are living with.” Pellicote did not ask for any further information. He immediately ended the conversation and they did not talk to each other for the next 11 years despite working in the same office. Pellicott now looks at his behavior with surprise: “Was it because the structure was already beginning to falter that I threw Pascal out of my office in such anger? Did it only take one word from him to bring it down? I didn’t want to hear anything about it.”
Every scandal, every public scare, leaves in its ashes the same sharp questions: Who knew? Who turned his eyes away? What Pellicott does brilliantly and subtly is to ask the most avoided question – not who, but How? With a kind of coolness and thoughtfulness that one feels aided by age, she explores the mechanisms by which one can practice warding off unwanted knowledge. And it is most devastating when presented with what she still cannot cope with.
Dominic Pellicote cautions record. Among the evidence of his crimes – around 20,000 images and videos – were two snapshots of his daughter Caroline sleeping. The discovery of these images really dismayed Pellicote. When describing her husband’s attacks against her, she often uses the word “unimaginable” in the sense that they are hard for her to contemplate. With Caroline’s photos, she uses a different word: “unbearable.” The photographs – and his “incestuous gaze” – could not be tolerated; His mind still retreats from knowledge. Caroline became convinced that her father had drugged her and even raped her. (Dominic denied touching Caroline, as well as taking photographs.) Pellicott did not subscribe to his daughter’s story. Out of a desire to protect her daughter from further suffering, she said, she needed more concrete evidence. Caroline took her mother’s denial as indifference to her shock and confusion. The two women were separated for some time but later reconciled. However, Pellicote’s refusal to accept his daughter is a notable moment in the book, handled with an awkwardness – and there is no different example.
Dominique Pellicot regularly babysat her grandchildren. After news of the gang rape broke, Pellicott’s eldest son David filed a report that his son had also been abused. Pellicote behaved strangely at the time, and she behaves strangely in the book as well. In life and in these pages, she could not stop emphasizing how happy her children and grandchildren were, how loved they were. She insists that she never saw the boy running away from his grandfather. And when she reported disturbing dreams, he very clearly dismissed her – and for her own well-being. She explains, “I told Nathan that a dream is not a reality, that one has to be careful not to treat it as a true, accurate memory.” “I wanted him to keep moving forward, to keep swimming.” This is the same author, mind you, who presents her dreams in a fantastic way. It’s an ugly moment in the book, but he has one Chosen To include, almost like saying: Look at me. The system is working here. See how I handle information I haven’t been able to assimilate yet. See how I justify it in the name of love and safety.
But paying attention to the book’s hidden textures requires a willingness to look more carefully at memoirs of sexual violence in order for its aesthetic and stylistic choices to be meaningful. “A Hymn to Life” gives the reader several narrative threads to follow: the trial, Pellicott’s childhood and marriage, the breakdown and rebuilding of her relationship with her children, the rise of a political consciousness, finding love again. Getting through them all is another story, borne out by Pellicott’s careful use of contrasts and language. The book we hold in our hands is the result of a woman regaining control of her mind and becoming newly sensitive to its workings. Her attempts to understand herself feel like an offering, even a blueprint. Consider this: Dominique Pellicot enjoyed involving other men in his hobbies; He gave them sedatives and instructions to drug, rape and pass on their wives. After the arrests, police alerted the men’s partners that they could be victimized like Pellicot, and offered to test their hair for the presence of drugs. Every woman refused.
Source photos for the above illustration: Manon Cruz/Reuters; Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images; Benoit Peruc/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images.
