History of Violence

by Édouard Louis

  Reda just stood there while I talked. Not saying a word.

  “But it was too late, Reda wasn’t listening anymore, and he was making a face and yelling, What did you just say to me? What the fuck did you just say to me? And he was so mad he was spitting on Édouard’s forehead, and Édouard’s face was covered in spit or snot, or maybe both, his face was completely wet with spit, but you get the idea, it was glistening with spit, and the guy’s like, What the fuck did you just say to me? He was bellowing, and there was Édouard’s face all shiny with his spit. Me, I’d have thrown up. But Édouard, get this, Édouard says it again. He repeats it all over again, as if Reda were asking an actual question: I think you’ve taken my phone—now he came out and said it—as if ‘What the fuck did you just say to me?’ was a question, I swear to God. He actually answered the question, ‘What the fuck did you just say to me,’ for Christ sake, and is it my fault I almost burst out laughing? I feel bad, I know it’s serious. But it was all so crazy I thought I was going to laugh and I thought, How on earth could he be so stupid to hear that as some kind of question? I pretended to be chewing on my lip so he couldn’t see me smiling, like, ‘I’m not smiling, I’m just sitting here chewing on my lip,’ but whatever. The other reason it seems so dumb is because I know what’s going to happen. I know what happens next. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, the way they always say; it’s easy for me to say I’d have done this and not that. And it’s true, here I am acting smart because I know. I’m laughing because I know Reda was a psycho, a psycho on a hair trigger, and if you’re dealing with a psycho, there are better ways to act—or you can always try getting the fuck out. But he wasn’t actually violent in that moment. All he was doing was yelling.

  “But when I say yelling, I mean he was really yelling. And he said it again, as if it were the only thing he’d ever learned to say, the one and only thing, You’re calling me a thief, I’m no thief, you’re calling me a thief you insult my mother, you disrespect my mother (this sort of anxious repetition, which went on much too long, had all the speed, all the marks of improvisation; the same thing happened again at the very end of the night when, after everything, the rape, the strangulation, covered with blood I managed to get him out of the apartment and Reda came back to the door, and pressed his face against the door, I could hear it, I could hear his beard scratching and sliding against my door, and he asked: Are you sure you want me to leave? I feel really bad about this. I’m sorry), well, and so Édouard, he told me there was an edge in his voice too, in his own voice, and he couldn’t hide it, or what’s the word, repress it; so maybe Reda heard that edge in his voice and maybe it made things worse; it’s hard to explain, the thing was, he hadn’t called Reda a thief, and it bugged him that Reda would keep on saying that; and really, actually, he was hurt. It hurt him that Reda would keep saying, You’re calling me a thief. He felt annoyed because that’s exactly what he wasn’t doing, how many times did he have to say it? Nobody was calling anybody a thief, that’s what he was trying to explain, it didn’t make him a thief if he’d taken his iPad or whatever else, and he said it in an irritated tone, Now listen—I imagine it was the kind of voice you use with your kid when you’re telling him something for the millionth time and he keeps on asking the same question, the way kids do—Now listen, I just got through saying you weren’t a thief.

  “But by now the other guy can’t even hear him. He’s just talking on his own: You disrespect my mother, you insult me, you call me—and now he says some words Édouard doesn’t understand. The guy is just checked out. And Édouard’s saying: It’s no big deal, it’s no big deal, with Reda saying, ‘You insult my mother, you insult my family,’ each one just saying his own thing.

  “Then Reda grabbed him. That’s what happened, he grabbed Édouard, and what does Édouard do? He stands there like a deer in the headlights. Reda takes the scarf and before Édouard knows what’s going on he’s wrapped it around his neck. Now Édouard can’t move. He’s got him broken like a tame horse, he’s got him at his mercy, and the guy winds the scarf around his neck and pulls it tighter, tighter, tighter, until Édouard can’t breathe. He cries out, Reda. Édouard had the scarf around his neck—and, and the guy kept pulling it tighter.”

  She pauses. Her husband doesn’t say anything. I’m tempted to lean in so I can see them through the crack of the open door, but I’m afraid the floor will creak. I stay where I am.

  “Excuse me.”

  She clears her throat.

  “At first he doesn’t take it seriously. I mean when Reda puts the scarf around his throat and pulls, the second he does it, he doesn’t think he means it. And for that first second, when you can think a million thoughts—at least that’s how it seems when you look back, which is what our mother said when I told her—he didn’t think he was actually being strangled. He can’t believe it. Because until now he never thought of Reda as a thief, much less a killer (for all I know I didn’t think he wasn’t a killer, for all I know I didn’t think anything at all, for all I know nothing passed before my eyes, no reflection, no memory, maybe my hands gripped the scarf out of a purely reflexive resistance to dying. They say we can never leave language behind; they say language is the essence of being human and that it conditions everything; they say you can’t go outside it, for language has no exterior; they say we don’t think first and then organize our thoughts into language later on, for language is what allows us to think; they say it is a condition, a necessary condition, of reason and human life—but if language is the essence of being human, then for those fifty seconds when he was killing me I don’t know what I was). (And by a strange reversal, today the exact opposite is true, all I have left is language, I’ve lost the fear, I can say “I was afraid” but the word can only be a failure, a hopeless attempt to retrieve the feeling, the truth of the fear.) That first second he told himself this was just a man acting a little too rough, but he didn’t take it more seriously than that. He came up rough himself. We all did. He wasn’t going to be scared by some scarf around his neck. By some little scrap of cloth. And he must have thought it was a joke—or not a joke, that’s not the word, but a warning, I guess, a way for Reda to look tough and impressive, the way men do, because they’re idiots. The point being that Édouard would shut up and Reda could walk off with the phone, and go downstairs, and run away knowing Édouard wouldn’t call the cops.

  “Not that I could ever say any of this in front of Édouard. He can’t stand it. However you try to put it, he gets mad and says it isn’t true and that you’ve made it all up. I guess it’s too close to the bone.

  “So since I know it will only get him worked up, I keep it to myself. But there’s no doubt in my mind, if he behaved that way that night, if he was reckless, it’s partly because he came up rough and was taught one too many times not to be afraid. And sometimes that comes out. He can say whatever he likes, it’s still there. He’s changed less than he pretends. I know I’m right. I’ve seen how he acts when he comes to visit, the first few days, when he puts his things in his room and acts so prissy. It’s like he’s trying to prove he’s not one of us, he wants us to think he’s different—he wants us to think he’s new. That he’s too good for us. When he gets here, I think he actually lays it on thicker than when he’s with those friends of his, Didier and Geoffroy, back in Paris. I’m sure when he’s in Paris and he’s feeling relaxed he swishes around less than when he gets here and suddenly won’t eat meat, because he says meat grosses him out—or then he’ll get up and wash his hands every five minutes because he’s petted the dog, as if my dog had scabies or fleas when, I beg your pardon, my dog is cleaner than anything they give you in those city restaurants; all that swishing around that city people do, it gets on my last nerve, and Édouard does it all. But just you look, two days later and it’s a completely different story. He stops queening it up and the act fades away. He calms down, he even starts saying a few words in Picard. He stops saying Ça va and starts saying Cha-vo-ti, just yesterday after dinner he said
Chétouaite fin bouen, and maybe he said it for a joke, but still he said it, he stops saying tomber and says tcher, and he stops being afraid to laugh when some woman, any woman, gets up to go to the toilet and says Pardon me while I toss my salad, all the things he used to say before he became a snob, and so he laughs, while in those first days he’ll say he doesn’t want to hear that kind of talk. He’ll say it made him laugh when he was a kid but it’s only for kids and now it puts him off his food. He says he’s outgrown it. Maybe that’s why he always wants to leave so soon. I think he wants to leave because he’s afraid of turning back into the kid he used to be. But anyway, as for that night, that’s why he acted the way he did. Because he was brought up like we all were, not to take any shit, and if he’d grown up with money you can be sure he’d have gotten the hell out of there—there’s no way of knowing, but I bet.

  “The thing is, after four or five seconds with the scarf around his neck, there was no way not to understand. It sank in that this wasn’t just somebody acting tough, this wasn’t some kind of warning. This wasn’t an act, it was murder. The guy was trying to kill him. He realized he was going to die there in his room on Christmas Eve, and Édouard told me how when he thinks back to that moment, to what happened, it feels like he’s looking at a photo, he sees Reda standing in front of him and he sees himself sitting on the edge of his bed where Reda made him sit—not by telling him to sit, just by moving toward him so he could strangle him. Reda forced him to sit because he had to take a step back when Reda came at him holding the scarf, and he pulled back and then he was sitting down. Then he finally thought, He’s strangling me.”

  I did become aware of what was actually going on, and yet the feeling of unreality persisted, and even afterward, even just three seconds after it ended, the memory was drained of all its reality the way you blow an egg through a hole pierced in the end; in the first second, the memory seemed an hour old, as if it had been, for some reason, transferred, pushed back, projected to an hour before; in the next second, I felt that it had happened several days earlier; by the third and fourth seconds, several years seemed to have risen up between that memory and myself.

  “He gave Reda a kick, instinctively. That’s when he got those marks, the ones on his neck. The purple marks (you clumsily tried to camouflage them with an ascot that you bought when you first got to Paris, the ascot you stopped wearing years ago when you realized how ridiculous you looked. You had moved to Paris, this was four years ago, and stupidly you wanted to look like a bourgeois, so as to hide what you saw as your poor provincial origins—the self you were afraid of, the self your fear made you see—but your idea of a bourgeois was a hundred years out of date, precisely because of your distance from that world, and you’d bought this ascot as well as a three-piece suit that you wore everywhere, often with a tie, even to go to the supermarket or to class. Every morning when you put on your out-of-date clothes, the anxious way you held yourself revealed the past you were trying so hard to bury; you didn’t notice that Parisians and the children of the bourgeoisie didn’t wear that kind of thing; not ascots, polo shirts and jeans yes, but no ascots; you weren’t fooling anyone. One day you finally understood, or rather Didier pointed it out, and you never wore it again).

  “His temples were throbbing. Boom boom boom. The blood had gone to his brain, it was beating in his head, and the other guy started in again, Édouard couldn’t stop him: I’m going to take care of your ass, I’m going to take care of your ass, and boom boom boom, You disrespected my mother, I’m going to take care of your ass, and the blood going boom boom boom. And that’s what scared him the most, the shouting (the noise was the scariest part. Ever since that night I can’t go looking for a quiet place without the sense that what I’m doing in fact is trying to escape the sound of his shouting, as if there were shouting scattered all around, ready to spring up, as if shouting existed before there were human beings, and humans were merely tools invented to give it an outlet).

  “So that’s what he needed the most, he needed silence. He needed to make the guy shut up. I asked what he decided to do after he kicked him, and he told me: I dropped my voice. That was his response. I know it’s crazy, but there it was: I decided to lower my voice, I needed there to be less noise, so I did the only thing I could do, and what could I do? I could speak softly. So that’s what I did. He decided to whisper. He hoped Reda would adjust his own voice, that he’d whisper too—don’t ask me where he gets his ideas. While Reda was pacing around the apartment and heading toward the dirty knives in the sink, it seemed to him that if he whispered, Reda would do the same. He could have grabbed a knife, he was shouting, shouting, shouting, it looked like he was about to slice him up. And Édouard responds by lowering his voice.

  “What I’ll never understand is, it worked. Reda followed his lead. He turned back to Édouard and he did like him. He whispered. I have trouble believing it myself, I’m sorry, it sounds so weird, but that’s what he told me, I whispered and I swear he whispered; he came up to me, he walked toward me, and he gently touched my arm and he murmured, under his breath, the way you talk to a kid you’re trying to get to sleep; and he could hardly understand what Reda was saying, now that his voice was so soft, now that he was so calm, now that everything about him seemed so calm.”

  As Reda walked toward me whispering, I stood up and in a rush of temerity, I began to speak—not that there was anything especially brave about the way I stood or the words I said, but in that moment I experienced the simple fact of getting up and daring to speak as an immensely difficult and brave act, the only thing I did that entire night that I would call courageous—I told him that this had gone far enough. It was still dark out. “It’s not too late, you take your things and some money if you want it, leave, and I won’t tell anyone, I won’t call anyone, I swear, just go home.” That was the kind of thing I said, weak, predictable, cliché, the only things I could think to say; “You are so young, if you commit a real crime they’ll track you down”; and I didn’t say the word police, just that vague, generalized “they” in my effort to keep him calm and avoid words that might fuel his anger. I said, “You’ll end up getting caught, everybody does, and you’ll ruin your life. They’ll put you in jail for life, forever, it’s so stupid, do you know what prison is like?” But now he was backing away again: “You’re going to pay, I’m going to kill you, you dirty little faggot, I’m going to take care of your ass, you faggot,” and I thought, So that’s it—and here’s what I thought in the moment, though I’m not so sure today: He hates himself for wanting men. He wants to redeem himself for what he did with you. He wants to make you pay for his desire. He wants to make himself believe that the two of you did all the things you did, not because of his desire, but as a strategy for what he’s doing now, that you didn’t make love, but that this has all been part of a theft.

  We adapt quickly to fear. We live with it much more easily than we might suppose. It becomes no more than a disagreeable companion. For a few minutes, maybe less, he alternated between shouts and whispers. More and more, I mastered my fear. He kissed me, he murmured: “Don’t be scared, I’m sensitive, I can’t stand it when people get scared or cry.” He stroked my hair. I felt safe, in that moment nothing could harm me, his capacity to reassure me and protect me were proportional to his violence.

  There was no escalation of violence. There were these intervals when he grew peaceful, when his attitude changed completely and he was calm and lowered his voice; he murmured, he hesitated, he made promises: “Everything’s going to be okay, there’s nothing to worry about.” He kissed my ears, my cheeks, my lips. I spoke to him about his future but that was no good.

  Clara described to her husband how desperately I tried to find something else, another vocabulary, another line of argument, since his future meant nothing to him.

  “He thought of talking about his family.”

  When we first met on the square, he had talked to me about how much family meant to him; I remembered that, and I p
retended that my parents’ numbers were in my phone—I wanted to get the photos of Didier and Geoffroy, the photos I’d taken with them. I said I didn’t know where my parents were living and that I had no other way of getting in touch besides the numbers saved on my phone. Geoffroy told me the next day: “You should have let him leave with the phone, a phone is nothing.”

  Clara remembers this, too:

  “His buddy Geoffroy told him the next day, You should have let him leave with the phone. A phone is nothing, just a piece of plastic. Meanwhile Édouard doesn’t know why, but for some reason he can’t let it go about the phone. He starts up all over again asking the guy to give it back. Instead of leaving or changing the subject now that the guy’s calmed down, what does he do? He asks for the phone. He won’t let it be, but if you ask me it’s not really about the phone. That friend of his Geoffroy is way off the mark, but how could he understand? He doesn’t know him as well as I do. I’m telling you, it could have been anything, a pencil, a jewel, or even a person, a hostage, whatever, it would have been the same to Édouard because it wasn’t about the phone, it’s about these fixations he gets, it’s a kind of insanity, no matter what it was, it would have been the same—not for me, mind you, I’d have gotten the hell out of there a long time ago, but for him (before the night you met Reda, you would think the way she does, but now you know better; before that night, I had always imagined that if I were facing death, if I were trapped in a burning house or with a murderer, whatever the circumstance might be, I would have done everything I could to extricate myself, that I’d never have given up. I’d thought the imminence of death would have doubled my strength and my courage, would have revealed a power, an ability to shout, to fight, to escape, to run, to defend myself, that even I had never suspected. Of course, in the movies, in newspapers and magazines, I’d seen characters capitulate to their own deaths, and surrender, but I thought I was different, and these images always filled me with a wave of disgust and contempt as I watched them give up the fight so quickly. I thought: I’m much stronger than they are). It was pure insanity, believe me. He kept on asking and asking for that phone, and I bet he asked for it more than he even let on.”