Who Killed My Father

by Édouard Louis

  When I came home that night I told you. You listened, already stiffening, breathing hard, and you told me you’d take revenge. I asked you not to. I was afraid of the consequences of your revenge (I know how these things go), but it was too late. The next day you waited in the village square. You got on the bus when it stopped, you grabbed the driver by the throat and told him never to touch me again. The other children seemed to admire you. They even smiled at me: your strength reflected on me. But the next day, the kids who had seen you threaten the driver told me I didn’t know how to defend myself, that I needed my father to defend me. For several months they teased me and before I could say anything back, before I could react, they’d say: What are you going to do, call your father?

  (though I almost never called you)

  On the train to that town where you live now, I wrote the other day: Other people, society, the law never stop avenging us, unaware that their vengeance, far from helping us, destroys us. They mean to save us by their vengeance, but they destroy us.

  II.

  I wasn’t innocent. In 2001 my big brother tried to kill him — tried to kill my father. It was a few days after the World Trade Center attacks, and that’s why I remember the date it happened. Or rather, why I can’t forget. My big brother and I had watched the twin towers catch fire, implode, then collapse. My brother drank a whole bottle of whiskey in front of the TV, trying to drown his grief, and he wept and wept. I remember him saying Now the bastards are going to kill us all. That’s what he said. They’re going to kill us all. They just started a war, I’m telling you. Get ready, because I’m telling you, we’re all going to die. The next bomb they drop, it’s going to be on us. On the French. And then, I’m telling you, we’re fucked. For a long time I thought it was my father who had said these things, but now I remember it wasn’t him, it was my brother. I was nine years old, and I was crying, too, the way a child does when he sees his family cry, without really understanding, precisely because of my own inability to understand, because of this void, crying because I was afraid of death and because I was too young to realize that my brother’s words were only the expression of his own violent and paranoid impulses. They were the words of a man I would come to hate two or three years later.

  A week later, with no connection to the attacks apart from the proximity of the dates, which lets me place the murder attempt in time, my big brother, right in the middle of dinner, grabbed my father by the throat in front of our whole family and started slamming his back against the kitchen wall. He was killing him. It wasn’t the first time those two had fought. My father was yelling, and begging him — I’d never seen my father beg before — and my big brother was screaming, You son of a bitch I’ll fucking murder you, the same words, the same phrases over and over again. Meanwhile my mother and Deborah, a girl whom my brother had just met, tried to shield me. I can still see my mother. She was throwing glasses at my big brother to make him stop, but each time she missed, and the glasses shattered on the floor. She was yelling, too, Don’t do it, you two, please for fuck’s sake, calm down. She was — I don’t know how to put it, she was braying, she was bellowing, He’s going to kill his father, he’s going to kill his own father, then she whispered to me, Don’t look, baby, don’t look. Mommy’s here. Don’t look.

  But I wanted to look. Because I was the one who had started the fight between my brother and my father. I’d done it on purpose. It was my revenge.

  The story of my revenge begins very early one morning. You have to imagine the scene: I’m having my hot chocolate in the kitchen, sitting next to my mother and big brother. They’ve just woken up, and they’re smoking and watching TV. They’ve only been awake for twenty minutes, but already they’ve smoked three or four cigarettes apiece, and the air feels saturated with their thick cloudy smoke. I cough. My mother and brother laugh at the TV, wheezily, and smoke some more. My father and my sisters aren’t there.

  I tell my mother that I have to go see a friend in the village, I’m supposed to help fix his bike. She nods without looking away from the TV. Silently I get dressed. I leave the house. I hear her laugh again. I close the door behind me and venture out into the cold, into that world of red and gray brick and the smell of dung and fog, and then I realize that I’ve left something, I don’t remember what, in my bedroom, so I turn around.

  When I enter the house, without knocking, I see, next to the crackling stove, the silhouettes of my mother and brother enveloped in smoke. They’re sitting closer together than before. What’s more, I can tell what’s going on: my mother is giving my big brother money. She’s taking advantage of the dim light, and the fact that the others are away, to give him some money. And I know my father has forbidden my mother to do this. He has ordered her never to give my brother any more money, ever, because he knows that if my brother has money he’ll buy alcohol and drugs and, once he’s drunk and stoned, he’ll go out and tag supermarkets and bus stops or set fire to the bleachers in the village stadium. He’s done it several times before. They could have put him in jail. My father told my mother, Don’t let me catch you giving that delinquent any money. So when my mother sees me standing there, she gave a start. She comes up to me, in a rage, and says, You better not tell your father or you’ll be sorry, then she hesitates. She hesitates over which strategy to adopt. She tries another tack, and changing her tone, she starts over in a gentler, more imploring voice. Your brother needs money for his school lunch, but your father can’t get that through his head. Be nice to Mommy and don’t tell Dad. You know how he can get. So I agree not to say anything. I promise I won’t say a word.

  My mother makes a fatal blunder fifteen days later. She has no way of knowing that, by the end of the day, she will pay. That she’ll suffer. That morning I’m alone with her. Neither of us is speaking. I’m getting ready for school, and when I open the door to leave she says to me, for no apparent reason, between two drags on her cigarette, something she’d often said to me before but never so harshly and never so directly, until then: Why are you like that? Why do you always go around acting like a girl? Everyone in the village says you’re a faggot, it’s a goddamn disgrace. They all make fun of you. I can’t see why you do it.

  I don’t answer. I leave the house, I close the door without speaking and for some reason I don’t cry, but the rest of the day tastes of my mother’s words. The air tastes of her words. My food tastes of ashes. All day I keep from crying.

  That same evening I come home from school. My mother serves dinner, and my father turns on the TV.

  And then suddenly, right in the middle of dinner, I start to shout. I shout very fast and loud, closing my eyes, Mommy gives money to Vincent, she’s still doing it, I saw her give him some money the other day and she told me not to tell you, she said whatever you do don’t tell your father, she wanted me to lie to you and — But my father doesn’t let me finish the sentence. He interrupts before I can get to the end. He turns to my mother and asks her whether it’s true. Is this some kind of joke? He raises his voice. What the fuck is he talking about? He stands up, clenching his fists. He looks around the room. He doesn’t know what to do, not yet. I was sure this was how he’d react.

  I look over at my mother. I’m too curious not to. I want her to suffer for having humiliated me in the morning,

  I want her to suffer, and I know that starting a fight between my brother and my father is the best way to make her suffer. When my eyes meet hers, she says, You really are a rotten little shit. She doesn’t try to lie. She looks ready to vomit with disgust. I bow my head. I start to feel ashamed of what I’ve just done, but for now the pleasure of revenge is uppermost in my mind (later, shame will be all that’s left).

  My father explodes. He can’t contain himself. Whenever we lie to him he goes crazy. He throws his wine glass, breaking it on the floor. He yells, I call the shots in this house, nobody fucking goes behind my back. And he shouts so loud that it frightens my mother. It frightens even her — who any othe
r time, any other day of her life, will tell you that she’ll never be scared of a man, other things maybe but never a man, she’s not like other women. She takes me in her arms and she hides my sisters behind her. She wants to get him to calm down, Everything’s going to be all right, honey, I’ll never do it again. But he doesn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. He keeps yelling and now my mother loses her temper, too. Are you out of your fucking mind? I warn you, if you hurt a single one of my kids with that broken glass, I’ll cut your goddamn throat, I’ll fucking destroy you. My father starts punching the wall, and he says, What in God’s name did I do to deserve a family like this, between that one over there —

  — he means me —

  between that one over there, and this drunk over here who can’t do a fucking thing except drink, and drink,

  and drink,

  just look at him,

  he points his finger at my brother,

  the loser. And it’s then, when the word loser comes out, that my big brother stands and lunges for my father. He hits him to make him shut up. He slams my father’s body against the wall, with all his mass, all his weight. Then cries of pain, insults, and cries of pain. My father doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t want to hit his son. He takes it. I felt my mother’s warm tears falling on my head. I thought: It serves her right, it serves her right. She kept trying to hide my eyes, but I contemplated the scene from between her fingers. I saw the crimson blood stains on the yellow tiles.

  I came close to being the one who would kill you.

  III.

  Peter Handke says: “No matter what happened my mother seemed to be there, openmouthed.” You were not there. Your mouth wasn’t even open, because you had lost the luxury of astonishment and horror, nothing was unexpected anymore bec ause you no longer had any expectations, nothing was violent because violence wasn’t what you called it, you called it life, you didn’t call it, it was there, it was.

  2004 or maybe 2005. I’m twelve or thirteen. I’m walking around the village with my best friend Amélie and we find a cell phone on the ground, on the asphalt. It was just lying there. Amélie was walking along and she tripped on it. The phone went skittering down the road. She bent down, picked it up, and we decided to keep it to play with, to send messages to the boys Amélie met online.

  Within two days the police called to tell you I’d stolen a phone. I found the accusation overblown: we hadn’t stolen anything, it was there on the street, by the side of the road, we didn’t know who it belonged to. But you seemed to believe the police more than you believed me. You came to my room, you slapped me, you called me a thief, and you took me to the police station.

  You were ashamed. You looked at me as if I had betrayed you.

  You didn’t say anything in the car, but once we were sitting before the policemen, in their office plastered with incomprehensible posters, you were quick to defend me, with a forcefulness I’d never heard in your voice or seen in your eyes.

  You told them that I would never have stolen a phone. I had found it, that’s all. You said that I was going to become a professor, or an important doctor, or a government minister, you didn’t know what yet, but in any case that I was going to get a degree and I had nothing to do with delinquents [sic]. You said you were proud of me. You said you had never known a kid as smart as I was. I had no idea that you thought all those things (that you loved me?). Why had you never told me?

  Several years later, once I’d fled the village and gone to live in Paris, when I went out at night and met men in bars and they’d ask how I got along with my family — it’s an odd question, but they ask it — I would always tell them I hated my father. It wasn’t true. I knew I loved you, but I felt a need to tell other people that I hated you. Why?

  Is it normal to be ashamed of loving?

  When you’d had too much to drink, you’d lower your eyes and say that no matter what you loved me, that you didn’t know why you were so violent the rest of the time. You would cry, admitting that you couldn’t make sense of the forces that came over you, that made you say things you’d instantly regret. You were as much a victim of the violence you inflicted as of the violence you endured.

  You cried when the twin towers collapsed.

  Before my mother you’d been with a woman named Sylvie. You had tattooed her name on your arm, yourself, in India ink. When I asked you about her, you wouldn’t answer my questions. The other day a friend said, because I’d been talking about you, Your father doesn’t want to go into his past because the past reminds him that he could have become a different person, and didn’t. Maybe he’s right.

  Those times I got in the car to ride along with you when you went to buy cigarettes, or something else, but usually and very often cigarettes, you’d put a pirated Céline Dion CD on the stereo — you’d written Céline on it in blue marker — you’d slip in the disc and you’d sing at the top of your lungs. You knew all the words by heart. I’d sing with you, and I know it’s a cliché, but it’s as if in those moments you could tell me things you could never tell me at any other time.

  You used to rub your hands together before you ate.

  When I bought sweets at the village bakery, you’d take one from the bag with a little guilty look, and you’d say: Don’t tell your mother! All of a sudden you were the same age as me.

  One day, you gave my favorite toy, a board game called Doctor Maboul, to the next-door neighbor. I played with it every day, it was my favorite game, and you’d given it away for no reason. I howled, I begged to have it back. You only smiled and said, That’s life.

  One night, in the village café, you said in front of everyone that you wished you’d had another son instead of me. For weeks I wanted to die.

  2000 I remember the year because the Y2K decorations were still up around the house: crepe paper, colored lights, the scribbly drawings I’d brought home from school with gold letters spelling out good wishes for the new year and the dawn of the new millennium.

  It was just you and me in the kitchen. I said, Look Papa, I’m an alien! and I made a face using my fingers and tongue. I never saw you laugh so hard. You couldn’t stop laughing, you were gasping for air. Tears were running down your cheeks, which were bright, bright red. I’d stopped making my alien face but still you went on laughing. You laughed so hard that after a while I started to worry, frightened by this laughter that wouldn’t stop, as if it wanted to go on for ever and echo to the end of the world. I asked why you were laughing so hard, and you answered, between two laughs, You’re the damnedest kid I’ve ever seen, I don’t know how I could have made a kid like you. So I decided to laugh with you. We laughed together, clutching our bellies, side by side, for a very, very long time.

  The problems had started in the factory where you worked. I described it in my first novel, The End of Eddy: one afternoon we got a call from the factory informing us that something heavy had fallen on you. Your back was mangled, crushed. They told us it would be several years before you could walk again, before you could even walk.

  The first weeks you stayed completely in bed, without moving. You’d lost the ability to speak. All you could do was scream. It was the pain. It woke you and made you scream in the night. Your body could no longer bear its own existence. Every movement, even the tiniest shift, woke up the ravaged muscles. You were aware of your body only in pain, through pain.

  Then your speech returned. At first you could only ask for food or drink, then over time you began to use longer sentences, to express your desires, your cravings, your fits of anger. Your speech didn’t replace your pain. Let’s be clear. The pain never went away.

  Boredom took up all the space in your life. Watching you, I came to see that boredom can be the hardest thing of all. Even in the concentration camps a person could get bored. It’s strange to think about: Imre Kertesz says so, Charlotte Delbo says so, even in the camps, even with the hunger, the thirst, the death, an agony worse than death, the ovens, the gas
chambers, the summary executions, the dogs always ready to tear a prisoner limb from limb, the cold, the heat, and the dust in the mouth, the tongue hardened to a scrap of cement in a mouth deprived of water, the desiccated brain contracting within its skull, the work, the never-ending work, the fleas, the lice, the scabies, the diarrhea, the never-ending thirst, despite all of it, and all the other things I didn’t name, there was still room for boredom — the wait for an event that will never come or has been too long in coming.

  You’d wake up early in the morning and turn on the TV while you lit your first cigarette. My room was next door. The odor of tobacco and the noise drifted in to me as the odor and noise of your being. The people you called your buddies would come drink pastis at our house in the late afternoon. You’d watch TV together. You’d go to see them from time to time, but more often, because of your back pain, because your back had been mangled by the factory, mangled by the life you were forced to live, by the life that wasn’t yours, that wasn’t yours because you never got to live a life of your own, because you lived on the outskirts of your life — because of all that you stayed at home, and usually they were the ones who came over. You couldn’t get around anymore. It hurt too much to move.