Freeman's

by John Freeman

  I sneaked a quick look at Naoki. He was staring at the veil, his face utterly expressionless.

  “You didn’t come to the funeral, so I never had the chance to tell you about it, but I always believed this day would come. Naoki, please forgive your father. Use this veil for your wedding.”

  “Nana, why don’t you try it on? Isn’t it magnificent?” Mami begged me, her eyes red and filled with tears.

  Gingerly I reached out and touched the veil. Human skin was generally considered too flimsy and delicate for garments. It looked like rough Japanese washi paper, but it was supersoft to the touch.

  “Nana, look this way.”

  My mother-in-law gently lifted the veil and put it over my head, fixing it with a small comb, so that my upper body was enveloped in its lightness.

  The veil reached down to my lower back, covering my ears, cheeks, and shoulders in my father-in-law’s soft skin. It was plain and extremely simple, but if I looked closely I could see the fine lines of the distinctive mesh of his skin, like delicate lacework. I felt as though I was swathed in an infinite number of particles of light residing in each individual cell.

  “It looks amazing on you, Nana!”

  My mother-in-law and Mami both looked enthralled.

  Faint spots and moles left on my father-in-law’s skin formed an intricate pattern, and here and there in the light the white and yellowish-brown blended to give a bluish tinge, complex hues intertwining in a way that could never be manufactured artificially. The rays of sun shining in through the window were softened by the veil as they gently filtered through and coalesced into my skin.

  With my whole body swathed in the skin-tinged glow, I felt as though I was standing in the most sacred church in the world.

  I looked at Naoki through the delicate, beautiful veil. Still looking down, he slowly raised his arm and lifted up the hem. I half expected him to rip it off, but he murmured in a low voice, “This scar . . . That was the one from junior high . . .”

  Next to his hand, I saw a small mark in the lacy hem.

  “That’s right. It’s from that time you hit him. It left a scar on his back, you know. I don’t suppose you ever knew it, but whenever he went to a hot spring he would proudly show it off and say, ‘The boy had backbone after all.’”

  Naoki stared at the veil, his expression unreadable. I watched him with bated breath, thinking he might suddenly blow up like that time he threw away his tiepin. However, he just carried on staring at the veil without saying anything.

  After a while, his pale face moved slowly toward me as though he was falling into my father-in-law’s skin.

  “Dad . . .” he muttered hoarsely, burying his face in the veil.

  “Naoki!” Mami exclaimed tearfully.

  “Son, you forgive him don’t you?” his mother said, her voice full of emotion.

  “Yes . . . of course. We’ll use the veil at our wedding. Won’t we, Nana?”

  I wasn’t sure whether I should smile or not, and just managed a weak nod. The veil trembled and softly tickled my cheeks and back with the movement. The membrane of light passing through my father-in-law’s skin shimmered over my body.

  In the car on the way home, I drove while Naoki slumped vacantly in the passenger seat. Despite the cold, he had the window wide open and was gazing outside.

  “Hey, are we really going to use that veil?” I asked him as the box rattled on the backseat.

  Naoki didn’t answer, but leaned on the open window and lightly shut his eyes, snuggled in the breeze like a child who’d fallen asleep in bed.

  “If you really don’t want to use it,” I went on patiently, choosing my words carefully, “we can always find an excuse, like the wedding planner objected to it, or it just didn’t go with the dress.”

  Naoki still didn’t respond, but just sat there as the breeze messed up his hair and clothes. Irritated, I said more forcefully, “Come on, Naoki, answer me! Which is it? Were you being honest, or lying for the sake of your family? Look, if you really do feel moved by your father’s wishes then we’ll use it, but if you feel using human skin is too barbaric, then we won’t. I don’t mind either way, so it’s up to you to say how you feel about it.”

  “Mm . . .”

  “Which is it? Come on, tell me. Are you moved, or not? Do you think it’s barbaric, or not?” I demanded, raising my voice.

  “I just don’t know what to think anymore,” he finally said. “Maybe everyone’s right and making things out of people after they die really is a wonderful, moving thing to do . . .”

  I frowned, and put my foot down on the accelerator, speeding up. “Look, only you can decide whether you’re moved by it or not, Naoki. I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “I can’t . . . I don’t . . . I really don’t know what to think anymore. Until this morning I was confident about how to use words like ‘barbaric’ and ‘moved,’ but now it all feels so groundless,” he muttered vacantly. He looked like a halfwit with his mouth hanging stupidly open, almost as if he were drooling.

  “That word ‘barbaric’ has been standing in judgment over us, though, hasn’t it? Where has its power gone?”

  “I don’t know how I could have been so confident of myself . . . but one thing I can say is that the veil really did look lovely on you. And that’s because it’s someone’s skin. Human skin really does suit people.”

  Naoki shut his mouth and said no more.

  The only sounds in the car were from the breeze and the veil’s box rattling on the backseat.

  A hundred years later, what would our bodies be used for? Would we be chair legs, or sweaters, or clock hands? Would we be used for longer after our deaths than the time we’d been alive?

  Naoki was leaning back in the seat, arms hanging limply, just as if he’d become a material object. The breeze was ruffling his hair and eyelashes. Beneath his sideburns, there was a slight scar where he’d once cut himself shaving. That scar would probably still be there if he ever became a lamp shade or book cover one day, I mused.

  Quietly taking one hand off the steering wheel I took his hand lying abandoned there. It was warm, and squeezed mine back. The sensation of his skin against mine was similar to how I’d felt earlier enveloped in the veil. The faint wriggle of finger bones and pulsing of veins beneath his skin were conveyed through my fingertips.

  Right now the live Naoki, not yet converted into a material, was holding my hand. We were spending our very short time as living beings sharing our body heat. Feeling this life was a precious momentary illusion, I squeezed his slim fingers even tighter.

  Born in the north of France in the 1990s, Édouard Louis has published two novels, The End of Eddy and History of Violence, both best sellers translated into more than twenty languages. He is also the editor of a scholarly work on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of “Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive,” published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

  Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a number of books on modern French literature, including Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust. He is also the translator of Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims and Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy, among other works.

  History of Violence

  ÉDOUARD LOUIS

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MICHAEL LUCEY

  On days when I felt calmer I would imagine myself picking out someone I didn’t know in some public place, on the sidewalk or in the aisle of a supermarket, and telling them my whole story, everything that had happened. In these visions, I would walk up to this unknown person, who would shrink back, and I would just start talking, as casually and routinely as if we had known each other forever, without telling them my name, and what I would say to this person was so horrible that there was nothing they could do but stand there and listen until I was done; they’
d listen and I would watch their face. I’d spend my time fantasizing about scenes in which I’d do this. I didn’t tell Clara, but this fantasy of shamelessness and self-display kept me going for weeks.

  The fact is that I was unable to stop talking about it. I had told what had happened to most of my friends during the week after Christmas, but not only to them; I had also told people to whom I was much less close, acquaintances, or people I had only ever spoken to once or twice, sometimes only on Facebook. I would become annoyed when people tried to respond, when they would show too much empathy or offer some kind of analysis of what had happened, as when Didier and Geoffroy speculated that Reda wasn’t really his name. I wanted everyone to know but I wanted to be the only one among them who could see the truth of it, and the more times I spoke about it, the more I said, the stronger my feeling was that I was the only one who really knew, I was unique, in stark contrast to what I considered to be the laughable naïveté of everyone else. It didn’t matter what the conversation was about, I would find a way to bring Reda into it, to have him appear, to bring it all back to him, as if any topic of conversation had logically to lead back to my memory of him.

  The first week of February—barely a month after Christmas—I went out to meet an author who had written to me and proposed that we have lunch together. I didn’t know him, but I said yes, and I knew why I had done that. He wanted me to write a piece for a special issue of a literary journal he was editing (a few days later, I sent him a really poorly written text, for obvious reasons), and I behaved in exactly the same way with him. This was a period in which I really wasn’t in touch with the words I spoke. The author arrived at the restaurant where I was waiting for him, where I was already quivering in my seat obsessively playing with the eraser on the pencil that happened to be in my pocket; he sat down, he took off his flannel jacket, he shook my hand and was barely settling into his seat, yet already my lips were burning to speak to him about Christmas. I thought to myself: No, you can’t speak about that right now. Wait a bit. Not right away. Be polite. Wait a bit. At least pretend to talk about something else. The reflection of the gray-blue sky outside could be seen on the walls of the buildings, something I remember not because the sky interests me, but because I wasn’t listening and instead gazed out the window, distracted and uninterested, whenever I wasn’t the one who was talking.

  We had exchanged a few sentences and for about ten minutes I held my breath, barely able to contain myself; I could feel Reda’s name on my lips. I held back, pretended to engage in the usual kind of conversation for a meeting like this, I played my role, got him to talk about his work, his books, his projects, but I didn’t listen to anything he said. I replied to his questions on the same topics but I no more listened to my answers than to his; making myself stay calm was all the more difficult in that everything he said and everything he got me to say with his questions, any observations he made, felt like an indirect invitation to speak about Christmas. What I mean is that I found connections everywhere, that everything I perceived and therefore my entire view of reality was conditioned by Reda. So I spoke fearing that the words Reda or Christmas might slip out, too early, against my will.

  Then I did speak. It felt to me that the time had come, and I thought Now I’ve held back for long enough, now you’ve earned the right to speak and I did what I’d been waiting to do since he arrived at the restaurant: I monopolized the conversation, only I spoke for the rest of our lunch, and he barely got in a few brief comments between two mouthfuls of food: “That’s terrible, how horrible, oh my God, etc.,” which only added to my exultation. At the end of the meal I begged him not to repeat anything I’d said; on top of all that I couldn’t figure out why, and I said I was sorry for this too, this was something else I went on apologizing for, why I had told him everything, why him, someone I barely knew, how could I have behaved so inappropriately, as I knew I had, how could I have been so rude. It’s along those lines that I existed, that I spoke, that I acted during the weeks that followed the assault.

  This mad flood of speech had begun at the hospital. It was only an hour or two after Reda had left, and I had run to the emergency room close to where I live to get a postexposure prophylaxis against HIV. The hospital was nearly empty on Christmas morning; a homeless man was walking up and down in the waiting room. He wasn’t waiting but simply wanted to be inside out of the cold. He said, “A very Merry Christmas to you” when I sat down a few feet away. That A very Merry Christmas to you, so odd, so improbable in these surroundings and after what had just happened, made me laugh. An uncontrollable burst of laughter took hold of me, a laugh that was loud and full and that resonated in the empty waiting room, as I remember it, a horrible laugh that bounced off the walls, as I bent forward, holding my stomach with both hands, unable to breathe, and replied between two bursts of laughing, all out of breath, “Thanks very much, thanks, and a very Merry Christmas to you too.”

  I waited. No one appeared. I went on sitting there. I had the feeling I was playing a role in a story that wasn’t my own. I applied myself relentlessly to remembering in order to stop myself from thinking, not that nothing had happened—how could I have thought that?—but that it had happened to someone else, to a different person, and that I had watched it all from the outside; I thought to myself: That’s where your obsession comes from. That’s why you are always obsessively asking yourself what the child you used to be would have thought of the adult that you’ve become. I thought: Because you’ve always felt like this, that your life is taking place outside yourself, in spite of yourself, that you’ve watched from the sidelines as it’s been constructed and that it’s not at all suited to you. Today’s not the first time. When you were little and your parents took you to the supermarket you would watch the people go by with their shopping carts. You’d stare at them, a strange habit you’d acquired from who knows where. You’d take in their clothes, their way of walking, and you’d say to yourself: I hope I end up like that, I hope I don’t end up like that. And you’d never have imagined becoming what you are today. Never. You’d never even have thought of not wanting to turn out this way.

  I craned my neck to try to see through the little windows all around the waiting room; it was a way of passing the time. Time slowed to a snail’s pace. I was waiting for one of the security doors to open, I was waiting for a doctor to appear, I coughed, sniffed, I pressed the red button of a little buzzer that was on the reception desk, and a nurse arrived, twenty or thirty minutes later. That’s when the torrent of words began. Its first manifestation, let’s say. I had already had to restrain myself from talking to the homeless man, who was obviously drunk, once he had said Merry Christmas, from replying to him that what he had said to me seemed a bit ironic given that here it was December 25, and I was at the hospital, which is to say at a moment when I should have been somewhere else, just like him, I had to restrain myself from beginning to tell him everything that had led up to my being there, in the emergency room. But this time I didn’t hold back, and so I told everything to the nurse, who only wanted to know which department to send me to—although thinking about it, he probably wasn’t a nurse, but maybe an attendant, or a receptionist, or a switchboard operator. I didn’t hold back my tears. I didn’t even try to hold them back, since I was convinced that if I didn’t cry he wouldn’t believe me. My tears weren’t fake; the pain was real. But I knew that I had to play the role well if I wanted anyone to believe me.

  Obviously, all this anxiety only went on getting worse in the days that followed. Later, in a different hospital, despite my determination to move the doctor so that he would understand and believe me, my voice remained stuck in a metallic monotone, I spoke coldly and with distance, my eyes stayed dry. I had cried too much already, I had no tears left to offer. If you don’t cry he won’t believe you, I thought to myself, you need to cry. But my eyes seemed now to belong to a stranger. I made a huge effort. I tried to force the tears to come, concentrating on images of Reda, his face, the gun, so
that the tears would flow, but there was nothing to be done, the tears wouldn’t come, my efforts were all to no avail, no tears welled up at the corners of my eyes, my eyes stayed resolutely dry, I was still as calm as I had been when I first arrived and the doctor nodded his head behind his glasses, which were slipping down his nose.

  I turned to other scenes from my life for help. I brought back to mind other painful memories, the saddest and most painful I had, in order to produce some tears. I thought back to hearing the news of Dimitri’s death.

  Didier had phoned me in the middle of the night to tell me Dimitri had died, on a night when I was out walking, alone in the dark night when the telephone first buzzed and vibrated in my pocket. It was Didier sending me a text asking: “Can I call you?”; and I feared the worst since normally he didn’t ask if he could call before calling, I was afraid something serious might have happened to Geoffroy, I was imagining an accident of some kind. I forbade myself to think of his body lying on a stretcher, but the image still appeared, and I wrote back: “Of course,” already trembling, my fingers unsteady on the screen.

  My cell phone rang for a second time, and I hesitated, and then Didier announced, in a voice that was both controlled and shaking, shaking precisely with a calmness that was too overdone, too artificial, that Dimitri, who had been traveling for an important meeting far from Paris, and to whom I had spoken a few hours earlier on the phone, was dead.

  I was doing my best to provoke a bout of crying so I could convince the doctor of what I was saying, but it was too far in the past, it didn’t affect me any longer. I was compelling myself to cry and he, on his side of things, was holding on to his skepticism, and I felt that these two opposing forces meeting in the same moment could allow us to establish or rather to reestablish the truth of the matter, that the truth was to be found in this meeting, and that it would be born out of this tension. I did everything I could to cry but I didn’t succeed.