An ingenious dive between truth and lies.
Upon learning of Marc-Alain Gauthier-Gagnon’s death in the newspaper, the narrator begins to write this twenty-year-old story. A story he hardly ever thinks about. Yet there are things to be said. To say that at seventeen, he was already too old for Marc-Alain, who was thirty-seven. To say that he lived with him for two years, desiring him in vain, waiting for him. To say that he discovered, long after the breakup, Marc-Alain’s sexual crimes, accused of luring minors by posing as a sixteen-year-old girl on the Internet: Cindy_16.
Were the crimes already taking place at the time? Could we have known? Did we have any suspicions? Were we ourselves victims of Marc-Alain? In Cindy_16, this story resurfaces, with its gaps and doubts. It is a burning issue, told from a distance, with the right words and the right tricks. It takes all kinds of tricks to tame language and its effects. It takes all kinds of inventions to avoid shame and reality.
