by Faïza Guène
The problem was both families were against their being together. Sarah's dad's family, they're from Brittany since ... I don't know ... eighteen generations, while Lila's people, they're more the traditional Algerian family worried about preserving customs and religion. So they were all worked up about it from the start and then her ex-husband's family, they weren't so thrilled with her tan, if you know what I mean. The two of them decided to get married anyway, even though their relationship was already starting to fall apart. Lila says, looking back on it, she realizes they did it more out of rebellion than love. Plus, her wedding day is still a nightmare of a bad memory. Atmosphere like death, hardly any guests on her side, and, as if by chance, lots of pork in the meal her father-in-law cooked. And who knew if he put it in the wedding cake too, just to screw with her. He was always dying of laughter from his own tasteless jokes about religion. At every family meal—at least the ones she was invited to—at 7:45 out came the atheist joke. And Lila already felt out of place...
And then one day she'd had enough—of her father-in-law's jokes, of cured sausage for an appetizer, and of her permanently unemployed husband who spent all his time slumped on the couch gawking at repeats on the TV and drinking cheap beer. So she asked for a divorce and it hasn't been easy. These days she's bringing up her little girl all by herself, but she's still hoping to meet someone who "fits" her perfectly. It made me think of an article about single moms I read in a magazine lying on the coffee table at the doctor's. In any case, I've figured out that behind that front of a supermarket cashier who cuts out trendy articles from Mademoiselle, Lila's a big dreamer.
And maybe there's something to what women's magazines say about the perfect man, after all. They have these three-page articles explaining how the right guy, meaning the one for you, is never far away, but often you don't realize it right away. There was the first-person account from Simone, thirty-nine, telling how her ex-neighbor from across the hall, Raymond, fell in love with her from day one. At first she didn't look at him at all, and now he's the man of her life. They're married and have two kids. That's how the story goes. They're happy because they've got a normal life and only have to go out once a week—to the supermarket.
For all I know, the perfect man I'm not even seeing and who I'll have two kids with later is Nabil ... Before, I gave him a hard time, said the guy was a stain and stuff like that. But when I analyze the situation, I can see he helped me for months without getting anything in return, and most of all that he had the guts to kiss me by surprise and risk getting kneed right where it hurts. I'm sure if I asked Mme Burlaud her opinion, she'd tell me to give Nabil a chance. It's true he's not as bad as all that in the end. He's maybe even a good guy. And acne doesn't usually last your whole life.
When he gets back from vacation, I'm going to talk to him for real. Not play the autistic kid like I do with everyone else to protect myself. For all I know, maybe I won't even need to say anything. It'll just happen just like in those romantic films where the leads don't talk to each other because they just understand each other straight off. I hope it'll be that way for Nabil and me. In any case it would work well for me...
I haven't talked about it with Mom yet but I think she likes Nabil because he's full of ambition. Like he wants to appear on The Big Deal and win the car. I admire that, because me, I just can't seem to see myself in the future. I should go for Shérif's technique: He's been putting money on the horses and playing the lottery for years and losing every time, but he just keeps on. He doesn't give a shit. Maybe that's the answer: Always keep a little hope and don't be scared of losing.
The news about Samra has flooded the neighborhood. Samra's the prisoner who used to live in my building and whose brother and father pushed her to the edge until she had to get out. Somebody saw her a few days ago, not too far away. Or else very far away, I don't know anymore. Anyway, they're saying she ran away from home for a boy. I'm thinking she must have had an excellent reason to dare to escape from prison. It looks like she's doing fine and that she met this guy at that toy store La Grande Récré last December. She worked there over vacation, wrapping Christmas presents. She must have had some excellent technique and maybe that's what attracted her guy—he was working there too. According to what everyone's saying, he's a toubab, as in a whitey, a Camembert, an aspirin ... So Samra's brother, who has a boxing glove for a brain, he wants this guy's skin when the only crime he's committed is giving a little love to his poor sister. I think they should have moved away and settled down farther out so people would leave them in peace. In a hideout, like runaways, totally guilty of doing something normal. Sometimes I think there are some people who have to fight for everything. It's a struggle even to love.
But good, now she's with the guy she loves, far away from that detention center that served as her home, and she can do what she wants. The main thing is that she's free, right. Well, more or less ... It's just that he'd better not dump her. If after a year of being together, he suddenly tosses her stuff onto the landing, shouting: "Get out of my house!" she can't do anything except leave, without fighting back, resigned, like a fool ... She would live in some pitiful hotel room that she'd pay for out of her ironing salary from the Farandole laundry. Most of all, she wouldn't believe in anything anymore. Not men, not love.
My wisdom teeth are coming in. It hurts crazy bad. I have to go and see Madame Atlan, the dentist around here. With her, you can't be scared. She's very friendly but she must have learned her job in the trenches, like during the Gulf War or the Turkish invasions, I don't know. Point is, she's kind of brutal, this lady. Once, she nearly ripped out my whole jawbone. I was trying to shout and wave my arms around in her chair so she could understand I was in pain, and she, all calm, keeps on going and says:
"You're a brave chick, come on, you can take it!"
Then since I was still in awful pain, she tried to take my mind off it:
"Do you like couscous balls?"
When she was a teenager, she must have had to choose between wrestler, riot cop, and dentist. It can't have been easy to decide, but she picked the one job out of the three that combines violence with perversity. No doubt it was more fun for a psychopath like her.
I can really picture her at my age, depressed teenager, a little bit masochist around the edges. She must have dressed like Action Man, listening to heavy metal to fall asleep at night and snacking on instant coffee powder by the teaspoon. And then one day, while buying a packet of rice at the supermarket, she falls in love with the old black American man in the photo on the orange box. He was called Uncle, this ia6 raiza quéne guy, and his family name was Ben's. Uncle Ben's, he's been on that package of rice for years, so he must have the record on being old. For all we know, he's been dead for years and nobody knows. Maybe Uncle's rice company hid his death from the whole world because they didn't want to disappoint thousands of customers. Poor Uncle, he may have died anonymously, all alone in the middle of a rice field. That makes me think of the kid in the Kinder egg photos. Goes back at least twenty years! Today the guy must be thirty, easy, a manager in a lavender toilet-deodorizer business, married to a stacked blond, and living in the United States in one of those trendy suburbs where the houses all look the same with a swimming pool and the Jeep parked in front. And best is the dog that doesn't bite, yeah, him again, all well-behaved in his kennel with his name written above: Walker.
I wonder why they're called wisdom teeth ... The more they grow, the more things you learn? Me, I've learned that it hurts to learn.
This one, I have to say I wasn't expecting it at all. Sarah's the one who told me everything. If she weren't four years old, I'd never have believed it. So while I was reading one of Lila's magazines, she plopped in front of me, looked at me in her "I-know-something-you-don't-know" way and said:
"So Mommy's in love with that big man who has gross teeth."
Lila and Hamoudi! I thought I was going to have an asthma attack. How could they have done that to me? I felt like I was in a TF
1 report, on that show Seven to Eight presented by TV's own Brainy Ken and Smart Barbie.
It starts like this:
Fifteen, and disenchanted already. For her, life is just a brief illusion. From birth, she is an enormous disappointment to her parents, particularly her father, who was expecting a little boy to come out of his wife's belly, weighing in at seven and a half pounds, measuring twenty inches, equipped with a thingy of average size, perhaps he wanted a boy to reinforce his own virility.
Alas, so goes life's drama, he brought into the world a little girl already wondering what the hell she was doing there...
Then you see me appear on the screen, my face blurred out and my voice disguised, like a cartoon. I turn to the camera and start pouring my heart out:
Anyway, I mean, what's the point of living? I still don't have breasts, my favorite actor is gay, there are pointless wars and inequality between people. And now the cherry on top: Hamoudi's fooling around with Lila and he hasn't said a word about it to me. Yeah ... I'm right, our lives are shit.
Then, the guy doing the voice-over takes the lead again, with all this really tearjerker music in the background.
The kid's not wrong ... It's true, our lives are shit. I think I'm going to stop doing voice-overs for TV. It's a crappy career, you never get any recognition for what you do, meaning nobody ever asks for your autograph in the street, it doesn't make you a celebrity, it's a fool's career. I'll set up a group: Voice-overs Anonymous, because no one ever reads my name in the credits at the end of the show. I've had enough, I'm over this...
But while I'm still on air, I'd like to take this opportunity to let you know I'm selling my car if anyone's interested, it's a green Twingo in good condition, practically new, only seven years old...
And to find that out from Sarah ... I mean, what's next? Why didn't Hamoudi say anything to me? He still takes me for a kid? Maybe he thinks I don't understand this kind of stuff? I've been able to understand stuff a lot more complicated. I've always filled out all the paperwork for Mom, and even when my dad was around, it was me who did it. Even when I'd had enough, because tax forms are like gobbledy-gook. Once, I asked my dad how he and Mom managed before I could read and write. He thought I was being a smartass. He hit me. And not just a little. He hit me hard for a long time. But I never cried. At least, not in front of him, because my dad was like Hamoudi's: He thought girls were weak, that they were made for crying and doing the dishes.
Luckily not all dads are like that. Take Nabil's, he's nice. He has never hit him and he talks to him all the time. They even go out for walks together when the weather's nice. He's lucky, Nabil: His parents are cultured, they can read and write, and for his thirteenth birthday they bought him these kick-ass Rollerblades I've dreamed about all my life. I used to cut pictures of them out of the Christmas catalogs so I could get a closer look.
Hamoudi didn't get it at all. I'm not a kid anymore.
Mme Burlaud's got a point: With time, lots of things change. Sometimes I think she should have gone into Chinese proverbs for a career. She was saying this about Mom, who found a new job thanks to her training. When she told me, she had this happy look on her face and it's been forever since that happened. She's a cafeteria lady for the city. She serves the kids at the Jean-Moulin elementary school. She even has her name written in pink on her shirt: Yasmina.
There's just one thing that bugs her: At the cafeteria, especially on Tuesdays, she serves pork and she thinks she's going to hell because of it. She made a big confession to me. She told me that the haâlouf-—that's pig to you and me—looked surprisingly tasty ... That cracked me up. But she felt way guilty for daring to think that and for telling me.
I don't know what they did to her in that course but she's not the same. She's happier, more radiant. That's what they said in Paris-Match magazine about Céline Dion, right after the birth of her baby René-Charles. And she's starting to get by better in reading too. She reads the syllables more correctly now. All of a sudden, she'll stop in the street to work out what's written on billboards or shop signs. The other day, she even bought the newspaper. Yeah, OK, so it was Charlie-Hebdo—that political cartoon magazine—because it's got lots of pictures, but it's a start ... Even Cyborg Services noticed she was making progress.
I mention her because she came over to the house the other day, sort of unexpectedly. She asked lots of questions about Mom's work, then she started talking about my sense of purpose and my future in hairdressing. What did she think? That playing around with people's hair was my big passion in life? What a ***** (I'm doing some self-censoring here)! She didn't underline the positive sentences in our stupid twelvedigit file. She still doesn't understand it was hairdressing or nothing. Fool. At one point, she thought she was being really smart, and looked at me and said:
"It's too easy not to choose and to let others decide for you, Doria..."
That's when I broke out my best imitation of the Hollywood film star. I stared straight into her eyes and said with emotion in my voice and tears in the corners of my eyes:
"Are you sure about that?"
That knocked you off balance, didn't it, Miss Cyborg Services? After that she didn't have anything to say, so she started talking about the war in Iraq with Mom.
"It's always the women and children who suffer, especially in war. It's horrible! Hmm ... Right. By the way, I hear you've managed to pay the rent on time this month?"
Still feeling queen bee, I went into the kitchen to clean the gas burners before Cyborg did her inspection, because they were truly disgusting.
Maybe that's what I should do. Acting. Making films is class, right. I'll have glory, money, big prizes ... I can see myself already at the Cannes festival, striking a pose and smiling at the herd of flashing photographers, dressed like Sissi in that fifties film Sissi impératrice. In some casual motion, I'd salute the crowd that had come to cheer for me. Because all those people, they'd be there for me, not for Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts ... No, just for me. And Mom, all choked up, interviewed by the TV networks: "Iz a looong time I dream of my dotter climbing ze staircase at Cannes, iz woonderfool, zank you very much..." Not the staircase, Mom, the steps ... While I'm walking up them, I'd be secretly hoping the ceremony would be broadcast on Moroccan television and that my father the Beard would just happen to see it. He'd be spitting his own nails for leaving because now his daughter's a star. Not a peasant woman. During the awards ceremony in the great room at the Palais, in the front row I'd see my mom, Hamoudi, pregnant Lila, Sarah, and Mme Burlaud. Robert De Niro would call out my name to present me with the prize for best actress. That player would make the most of it by kissing me and sneaky-like slipping his cell number into my cleavage. Everyone's on their feet. Me, in front of all those people. Standing ovation! Thinking ahead, I've written a brilliant speech. And, just to feel more comfortable, more natural, more me, right, I've learned it by heart:
"...and finally, I'd like to thank the social services office in Seine-Saint-Denis for sponsoring my trip to Cannes ... Thank you, oh dear fans!"
That's not all. But I realize, instead of daydreaming, I'd be better off putting more energy into scrubbing this freaking stove because it's still totally scuzzy. They piss me off with their surprise visits.
Our dear Cyborg Services, after doing her nice little inspection, left the apartment.
We thought that was it. Cut. Wrap for the day. Everyone clear the set. But no. Fifteen minutes later she's back again, out of breath because she's hoofed it up all those stairs—the elevator's still out of order—and is completely panicked. She explained how someone just jacked her Opel Vectra, which she'd parked in front of our building. She'd come back up to our place to call a taxi. Kind of stunned, Mom said: "But, madame, our telephone iz cut off two or three months ago..." That social worker, I swear, it looked for sure like she'd seen the devil: "But that's not written in your file..."
The other evening, I saw Hamoudi and he told me about his deal with Lila. At first I wanted to h
ave a serious grown-up conversation with him about the fact that he didn't tell me anything ... But in the end, I didn't dare say a word. He looked so in love. I didn't want to break him out of the spell. He talked about nothing but her for two hours. Lila's replaced Rimbaud. He's shown the poet the door. Go on, out, skip it ... He's even planning to take her on a weekend trip with his drug money.
Then he started talking about fate. That again. In any case, here everything's linked to fate. For better or worse. And me, I'm realizing fate doesn't like me so much right now. Like Mme Burlaud says, I haven't finished being disappointed yet. She's worse than insightful, this lady, she's got super x-ray vision. It's true: She said that to me before summer break. The result? I spend my whole summer banging my head against a brick wall.
So seeing how I have nothing to lose, I decided to prepare myself psychologically for Nabil's return. I was really expecting a sensational event, like a movie: Nabil, The Return 2. Yeah, that's it, Nabil's return. Nabil, the fat lame-o.
I told myself that when he got back, I'd be able to tell him how my feelings were all muddled up and heavy inside me. Meaning I was ready, right ... And him, that little acne-faced ass, he gets back from vacation all tan and doesn't know me anymore. Yeah, ever since Nabil got back from Djerba, I don't rate with him. He walks right past me without even saying hello. And he's got an earring and some whiskers on his chin now. He grew up, he's showing off, here we go.
