History of Violence

by Édouard Louis

  2.

  My sister goes on with her monologue, I can hear her sip her water, swallow, set her glass on the table; I can hear the clack of glass on plywood.

  “And that was what surprised him the most, he told me, he says: The next day I woke up and it started. Just like that (I told her I was lying on my bed, lying on my back, and when I opened my eyes my entire body went into a cramp, it felt as if there were blades between my ribs, my back stiffened like a shell), and what’s his reaction, right then and for days after? That he’ll never be able to see anybody happy ever again. The moron. I don’t remember his exact words, but that was the gist. What could I say? I just kept my mouth shut, I looked down at my shoes like I was a moron too (I tried to go back to sleep, I wanted to sleep, but my body hurt too much). And he says to me, I hated everyone, I know it’s crazy, Clara, but that morning I woke up hating everyone (and I thought: How can you hate them?).

  “Which was a weird thing to say, if you ask me. I wouldn’t call it exactly normal. But there it was. In my head I’m thinking, Get a grip, but I don’t say it out loud, he’d only take it the wrong way. He said, I hated everyone (and I thought: How can you hate them? That morning after Reda left, I woke up and my mouth tasted strange—and I was thinking I’d never be able to bear the slightest trace or sign or appearance of what people call happiness, if I’d seen someone smiling I would have slapped them, I’d have grabbed them by the lapels, I’d have shaken them as hard as I could, and I’d have shouted in their face, I’d have screamed; even children, even children, the frail or the sick, I’d have wanted to shake them and spit in their faces, I’d have scratched until I drew blood, I’d have scratched their faces off, till all the faces around me disappeared. I would have stuck my fingers into their eyes, gouged out their eyes and crushed them in my hand, and I thought: How can you hate them? and it wasn’t my fault, I would have grabbed the sick ones, lifted them up and thrown them out of their wheelchairs, my god, I could never see another smile or hear anyone laugh, outside, in the street, in the park, wherever I was the laughter pierced my eardrums and stuck in my ears, it echoed inside my skull for the rest of the day, it stuck in my skull, in my eyes, in my lips—it was as if their laughter existed to hurt me).

  “So what could he do? The trouble was he couldn’t even go outside and clear out the cobwebs, with the shitty weather they were having (I could hear the patter of the rain on the windows, it was raining, it had been raining the entire month of January). He tried to go back to sleep but he was in too much pain from the cramps, all he could do was keep replaying what had happened. He couldn’t tell what was what. It was kind of like when you go to sleep and wish you could wake up the next day and be somebody else, like you were changed—only he hadn’t wished it, anyway not like that.

  “And he felt the same even when it wasn’t real (even when it wasn’t real). Even when he saw ads on the bus or on the walls of some building, when he saw all the photos of happy families eating breakfast or sitting by a pool, you know what I mean, when he saw what they call happiness in advertisements, he wanted to take out a knife or something, he wanted to take a key out of his pocket and tear up the faces (I wanted to light them on fire). He wanted to drag them down with him, as many as he could, that’s what he told me (I told her: to spread the pain). And he told me: I know it doesn’t make any sense (I thought: How can you hate them? but it wasn’t just when I saw them smile, I told her I couldn’t stand to see unhappy faces either, it was as if their unhappiness were less authentic, less true, less profound, less real than my own).

  “It’s true she used to tell us lots of stories like that, our mother did. Maybe it did something to him, hearing those stories over and over back when he still lived at home. Who knows. The other day on Channel Two a man was saying how if a person never heard anyone talk about love maybe they wouldn’t be able to fall in love. Which, I mean, please. When I hear myself say it, I tell myself enough with the TV, it’s frying your brain. But even so. It’s been on my mind.

  “It started when she was doing the home care for the seniors, before I knew you. Oh, don’t you let anyone give you that line, about how it’s a job with a future as long as people keep getting old. She’d wash them and then she’d give them their medication—and then she’d come home and complain. My god, they never gave her a moment’s peace. But if you’re a woman what can you do? Especially now they’ve stopped hiring at the factory, everything’s gone, and now they’re saying it’ll close for good.”

  * * *

  AND IT WAS WORSE than she lets on, it was harder than she said, because our mother didn’t have a driver’s license and she had to compete with all the other women—and there were a lot of them—who wanted the work just as badly, partly to bring home a paycheck, partly just to get away from their husbands. She had to fight to get that job, when by a miracle they were hiring, she took her bicycle, which she got fixed especially for the occasion, and she rode it from one office to another, she dressed up and she pinned up her hair and she took time with her makeup, and put on a little more than usual even though our father didn’t like that and he’d scold her or even forbid it, “You look better without it,” “That crap is for whores,” and she would go back and knock on those office doors, and she kept going back, again and again, even when they told her no, even when she thought it was a lost cause, even when she felt it slipping through her fingers, she kept going back just to show how determined she was; she’d go back in the rain or snow, always on her bike, she’d send letter after letter, she’d call on the phone to say she was worried when she hadn’t had any word. And it worked, for a few years that’s what she did. She’d come home and tell us how, out of what must be some animal instinct, the old people whose houses she cleaned would descend into unspeakable behavior, as if they wanted to take their death out on everyone around them, as if they were willing to face death as long as they could leave behind some nasty souvenir of their existence; they’d break everything in the house; they’d pull the tablecloth off the table, smash the souvenirs on the floor, throw the dishes against the walls.

  * * *

  “AND EVERY DAY it was the same thing all over again. Every day there’d be knickknacks flying every which way, picture frames, snow globes from Lourdes, place mats they’d picked up on vacation. They crushed, they just shattered everything. You’ve never heard anything like the shit they’d yell in our mother’s face, you never have and you never will, some of it you carry with you and never forget, oh, even the women who used to call themselves ladies and go around with their noses in the air. Don’t kid yourself, they weren’t any better than the rest. Those ones are the dirtiest of all because finally for once in their lives they can let themselves go. They’d go shouting their dirty songs, It’s Dudule’s giant dick, The slut’s going to wash your filthy ass, I swear, and then other days, the bad days, they’d do their business all over their own damn house, my mother told me, on the kitchen table, on the floor, everywhere. They’d just have at it while she was there on her knees, doing her best to bathe their flabby, crumply old asses and them sitting there in a living room chair and her with nothing but a scratchy old bath glove and a cheap plastic basin, their bodies so flabby it was like they were overflowing and melting right into the chair. And when our mother got home she’d be in tears after her day at work. She couldn’t take it anymore. She would cry: She just shat everywhere, old Madame Millard, and she wiped with the dining room curtains—I can’t take it anymore, how long can I go on? She told us, There was shit all over, I had to clean it up and you know I can’t stand the smell of shit, it’s always disgusted me, more than anything there is, I never could stand the smell of shit and I still can’t. I thought I’d hurl, I held it in but it was all I could do not to throw up everywhere, all over everything and then just leave and never go back—and we’d say, Don’t worry, Mother, the next heat wave will take care of them. That would calm her down. And so with Édouard—not that he’s as badly off as they were, I don’t mean
to say he is—but for a long time after that Christmas he’d have these nervous breakdowns of his, when he wanted to drag everyone down with him, like those old ladies our mother took care of. And he told me: It got harder every day. In the end he decided to just stay home, all by himself, he never left the house. He closed the blinds. He locked himself in. He put his hands over his ears and he’d press them tight so he wouldn’t hear the neighbors’ voices coming through the walls or the handyman having his conversations in the courtyard.”

  * * *

  ON MY CALMER DAYS I imagined going up to a stranger in some public place, on the street or in the aisles of a supermarket, and telling the entire story from beginning to end. The way I imagined it, I would walk up, the stranger would be startled, and I’d start talking, as casually as if I’d known him all my life, without ever saying my name, and what I’d tell him would be so ugly he’d have no choice but to stand there and listen till the end; he would listen, and I would watch his face. I spent my time dreaming up scenes where I did this. I didn’t tell Clara, but this fantasy of utter shamelessness and self-exposure sustained me for weeks.

  The reality was I couldn’t stop talking about it. Within a week after Christmas, I had told the story to most of my friends, but not just to my friends; I had also repeated it to people I wasn’t close to, acquaintances or people I’d hardly met, sometimes people I only knew on Facebook. I bristled if they tried to respond, if they tried to empathize or give me their analysis of what had happened, as for example when Didier and Geoffroy suggested that Reda wasn’t his actual name. I wanted everyone to know my story, but I wanted to be the only one among them who possessed the truth of what had happened, and the more I told the story, the more I talked about it, the more I felt that I was the only person, the only one, who knew what had really happened—this in stark contrast to the laughable naïveté of everyone around me. No matter what the conversation was, I found a way of bringing it back to Reda, of dragging him back in, of connecting everything to him, as if every topic of conversation must logically lead to my memory of what he’d done.

  The first week of February—barely a month after Christmas—I went to meet an author who had sent a note inviting me to lunch. I didn’t know him, but I accepted the invitation, and I knew why. He wanted me to write a piece for the special issue of a journal he was editing (the piece I turned in a few days later was very bad, for obvious reasons), and I behaved as I’ve just described. In those days the words I spoke were not quite my own. The author walked into the restaurant where I was waiting for him, already quivering in my chair, fiddling with the pencil eraser I’d found in my pocket; he sat down, he took off his coat, he reached to shake my hand, and no sooner was he in his chair than my lips were burning to tell him about Christmas. I thought: No, you can’t start in on it yet. Give it a moment. At least pretend to talk about something else. Outside, the gray-blue of the sky was reflected in the glass façades of the buildings; I remember this not because I care about the sky but because I wasn’t listening and I was looking out the window, distracted and bored, whenever it wasn’t my turn to talk.

  We exchanged a few words and for maybe ten minutes I held my breath, feeling that I might explode if I didn’t say Reda’s name. I contained myself, I pretended to be having the sort of conversation people like us would normally have, I played my part, I got the author to talk about his work, his books, his projects, but I wasn’t listening. I didn’t listen to a word he said. And when it was my turn, I answered his questions without listening to my answers; what made it even harder to maintain control was that everything he said, everything he made me say, every observation he made sounded like a roundabout invitation to talk about Christmas. Which is to say, I created connections everywhere, everything I perceived and therefore my entire construction of reality was conditioned by Reda. And whenever I opened my mouth, I was afraid that the words Reda or Christmas would come out, too soon, against my will.

  Then I spoke. I decided it was time, I thought: I’ve held back long enough, now you’ve earned the right, and I did what I’d been waiting to do since he walked into the restaurant: I monopolized the conversation, I held the floor for the entire remainder of our lunch and he said nothing, apart from a few brief comments between mouthfuls of food: “How terrible,” “What a nightmare,” “My god,” etc., which only added to my jubilation. At the end of the meal I begged him not to repeat anything I’d said; what’s more, I didn’t know why I’d gone into all that, and for this too I apologized, for this too I excused myself, why had I gone into all that when I hardly knew him, how could I have been so inappropriate—for I realized what I’d done—how could I have been so inappropriate, how could I have been so rude? And this was more or less the way I existed, spoke, acted in the weeks after the attack.

  * * *

  THE MANIC TALKING had started at the hospital. It was an hour or two after Reda left, I had hurried to the closest emergency room to get a dose of antiretrovirals. The hospital was nearly empty that morning of December 25; a homeless man was pacing back and forth in the waiting room. He wasn’t waiting for anything, he was just there to get out of the cold. He said, “Merry Christmas, monsieur,” when I sat down a few feet away. This Merry Christmas, monsieur, so incongruous, so odd in that setting and after what I’d been through, made me burst out laughing. I was seized by a fit of insane, helpless laughter that echoed, loud and jarring, through the empty waiting room, I can still hear my terrible laughter bouncing off the walls; I was doubled over, holding my stomach with both hands, I couldn’t breathe, and between shouts of laughter I answered, out of breath: “Thank you, monsieur, thank you, Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  I waited. But nobody came. So I sat there. I felt like an extra in somebody else’s story. I tried desperately to remember, to ward off the idea, not that nothing had happened—that would have been out of the question—but that the whole thing had happened to someone else, to some other person, and that I had observed the scene from outside; I thought: That’s where this obsession comes from. That’s why you’re always asking what your childhood self would think of the adult you’ve become. I thought: You’ve always felt your life was happening somewhere else, in spite of you, and that you were just a spectator, you never recognized your life as your own. It’s nothing new. When you were little and your parents took you to the supermarket you’d watch the people go by with their shopping carts. You’d stare at them, you did this as long as you could remember, you used to look at their clothes, the way they walked, and you’d say to yourself: I want to be like this one, I don’t want to be like that one. And you would never have imagined becoming the person you are today. Never. Not even as a thing you didn’t want.

  I craned my neck so I could look out the windows of the waiting room, just to pass the time. Time dragged. I waited for one of the security doors to open, I waited for a doctor to appear, I coughed, I sniffled, I pressed the red button of the little buzzer on the reception desk, and after twenty or thirty minutes of waiting a nurse appeared. That’s when the talking mania began. At least, that anyone could notice. I had already had to restrain myself from talking to the homeless guy, who was obviously drunk, after his Merry Christmas, and I had to actively keep from telling him that what he’d said was ironic since here I was at the hospital on December 25, that is, on a day when we ought to have been somewhere else, him and me both—and I held back from telling him all about what had brought me there, to the emergency room. But now I didn’t hold back, and when the nurse asked how he could help me—actually, I think he probably wasn’t a nurse but maybe an orderly, or an intake person, or a switchboard operator—I told him everything. I didn’t restrain my tears. I didn’t even try, I was convinced that if I didn’t cry he wouldn’t believe me. Not that my tears were put on, the pain was real. But I also knew I’d have to act the part or no one would believe me.