In the hard-to-find house of horrors: the kitchen and dressing room for the rapists, the poison box, the family photos

The house of the “unthinkable”, where for almost ten years the seventy-two-year-old pensioner Dominique Pelicot opened the door to an army of strangers to rape his drugged and unconscious wife Gisele, is a ten minute walk from the town hall of Mazan, 5 thousand souls in the heart of Provence. The victim’s son-in-law, Pierre, who, when questioned on how no one in the family has ever suspected Gisele’s too many physical and mental disorders, attributing them to age or a possible onset of Alzheimer’s, he responded, disarmed and disarming, “it was unthinkable.”

On the tree-lined path that leads from the main street of the town to number 544 of Chemin du Bigourd, the inhabitants, bundled up in heavy jackets, take their dogs for a walk, just as Dominique and Gisele did with their Lancome pitbull until the summer of 2020. The stadium widens around a sharp bend: it is here in front, on the dirt road where mothers park to greet their children before the football match, that the exemplary husband and father asked his accomplices – at least 80 of which 51 were identified and waiting of the court’s verdict – to leave the car and continue on foot so that the neighbors would not hear any anomalous noises in the quiet provincial night. Then, five more minutes, one step after another on the pavement, and, identical to the others, there is the house of the “unthinkable”, the green postman, the ocher patio with the plastic table and chairs, the thick hedge that slopes down to the back to frame the automatic gate for the carthe tool garage that hid the shoe box full of packs of Viagra and Temesta, the powerful benzodiazepine-based sedative ordered and rearranged by the man thanks to the recipes for an ancient depression.

Beyond the closed shutters there is the kitchen, the laboratory of “correct” raspberry ice cream that Monsieur Pelicot lovingly brought to his wife to stun her and prepare her for visits, the same kitchen where the rapists were invited to silently undress and wash their hands. The double bedroom is also behind one of these windows, the wardrobe, the chest of drawers surmounted by photos of the happy family, the two bedside tables at the edge of the bed, the banal stage that journalists and the public saw as the backdrop to the representation of the unthinkable during the endless videos shown at Gisele’s request during the trial. The bed covered with a white towel and the chair with the pajamas on it that Dominique took from his wife before offering her naked to his executioners and put it back on her after the horror so that she would wake up as if nothing had happened. “A son insu”, without his knowledge, was the name of the chat in which the accomplices exchanged images, comments and advice for the abuses to come.

“In such a small town everyone knows each other, leave us alone” they repeat in the cafes and shops of Mazan. At the Café du Siecle, at the Cycles Arroundj bicycle retailer, at the Boulangerie Maison Agresti, at the Auto Ecole: there is no one here who wants to talk about the Pelicots, the fear, renewed at every hearing (even if the trial takes place in Avignon , about forty km away), is that the stigma remains attached to the entire community, a locality identified with evil, as in Italy in the case of Cogne, Novi Ligure. So much so finding the house of the unthinkable is a difficult task, it is said that it was rented, then abandoned, then who knows, it seems like the mystery of Fatima until a farmer arms himself from the tractor and points behind him, «They were there, two kind, normal people, they lived right there, but that’s enough, life goes on and we are tired of being looked at like animals in a zoo.”

Dominique Pelicot and Gisele, who until the sentence chose to be identified with her husband’s surname only so that the shame falls on him and others, they moved to Mazan in 2014, as their three children left the home, life became more peaceful and after fifty years of marriage this small town seemed like the right retreat for two who had met and fallen in love aboard a 2CV, the legendary Citroen car of which several examples can still be found here. “I was certain that I would grow old with that gentleman over there,” Gisele said during the last hearing, indicating her ex-wife to the judges. She was so certain of it that when in the autumn of 2020 he confessed to her that he had been stopped by the police while he was peeking under customers’ skirts in the Lecrerc hypermarket in Carpentras, a 15-minute drive from home, she, summoned to the police station, defended him belittling his “weakness” as the sick effect of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, a rock-solid belief until the vision of the obscene material found by the agents on the computer and in the mobile phones: 156 files, thousands of photos, over 200 pornographic videos of which she was the sole protagonist, a living but lifeless body, morbid close-ups of genital organs, disjointed legs and arms, as if made of rags.

Everything collapses that day four years ago and with the exception of the assertive strength of Gisele, a small woman indifferent to ’68 who has now become the icon of the new feminism, nothing remains, not even in Chemin du Bigourd number 544, where the children have emptied the house, leaving the walls as a reminder. The judges will express their opinion, then there will be silence. For Dominique 20 years were requested, for the other 51 defendants a sentence range from 18 to 4 years, depending on the degree of participation, from the “mildest” one of one who responded to the invitation of the Coco.fr site to only once “limiting himself” to touching Gisele at the maximum rate of an HIV-positive person who has returned six times, always without a condom. Once the verdict is pronounced, darkness will be even blacker. Outside and inside.