History of Violence

by Édouard Louis

  12.

  She had changed. The moment she realized why I was there, her voice had changed. Every time she addressed me, she looked away—she turned toward the computer screen, which cast a purple glow over her cheeks.

  “What I told Édouard is maybe she kept you waiting because she thought how serious could it be if every two minutes you kept walking back into her office. Opening the door and closing the door, opening, closing, getting up, lying back down. She must have thought you were possessed—or had ants in your pants at any rate. Or maybe the intake guy never told anyone you were there. You should never be rude to the intake people, they’re the worst. Maybe the nurse didn’t say anything either.

  “So he tells her the whole entire story. But he says he isn’t going to file a police report—but why did he go into all that then, why all the detail? What’s the point? Anyhow, she tried to change his mind.”

  But I refused. At first she pushed back: she told me that the legal procedures were there to help me, that they existed for my benefit, and I thought, How can anyone actually believe these procedures do anyone any good? What I thought was, I’m afraid, but what I said was, “I’m not interested.” What I thought was, I’m afraid he’ll come back and take revenge, but what I said was, “I don’t want to,” and I added that I had political reasons for not wanting to file a report—which happened to be true, even if those weren’t the main reasons—that it was because I hated repression, the very idea of repression, because I thought Reda didn’t deserve to go to prison. But most of all what I thought was, I’m afraid. She acted as if she hadn’t heard me, she kept looking at the screen with her purple-and-fuchsia face; she must have learned long ago, over years of experience, that her real job was to manage these moments of silence and wield them against the insanity of her patients. She handed me the prescription and reminded me that I could still change my mind the next day. When she first turned on her computer she had told me, “I see you’ve come for this medication once before.” It was true; I had taken a preventive medication for AIDS two years before. The moment after she said it, she winced: “There’s nothing wrong with that, of course”—and her nothing wrong with that meant that something was indeed wrong, that something was wrong with me; she’d said it a little too fast and a little too loud, as if someone had just said the opposite, or as if she’d had to chastise an orderly who’d called out, who had shouted, “There’s something wrong with this guy over here,” as if an orderly had got up on a desk or a hospital bed, made a trumpet with his hands, and started shouting for everyone to hear, that there was something wrong with me; she’d said, “There’s nothing wrong with that,” I told Clara, defensively, to overcome her first thought, her first reaction, the first thing that came to her mind, and she was struggling inwardly to think something else, or to forgive herself for what she hadn’t said but had thought: she said what she said precisely because she’d thought the opposite and wanted to redeem herself through speech.

  Clara says the doctor and I rose to our feet, she opened the door for me, and we walked down the corridor past the perfectly matched hospital doors, nearly all of which were shut.

  The lights in the hospital were low, Clara says. The doctor’s heels clicked against the laminated floor. The sound suited the twilight of the corridors, as if the sound emanated from the gloom; she led me to the elevator, and she said, “Go down to the basement and take the second corridor to your left. Basement, second corridor to the left. There you’ll find the hospital pharmacy, and they’ll give you the medication.” And then: “You still have plenty of time to file a report.”

  Clara:

  “She was right, you had to do it.”

  We said goodbye, I pressed the down button for the elevator, I thanked her and turned away.

  I stepped out of the elevator. There in the basement the silence was even more striking than it had been upstairs. For a second, maybe more, it seemed to me that I was all alone in the hospital and that even the doctor had slipped away once I turned my back, that everyone had hurried off, but in a silent kind of hurry, without telling me, that I had been left behind and would spend the rest of my life wandering this maze of corridors. I looked for the pharmacy. I could hear noises but they all seemed to be so far away that I might have spent hours trying to find them, running this way and that, and still never reached them, never come near them, never grasped them or touched them. All the corridors looked alike. I found the pharmacy, they gave me some capsules that I put in my pocket, and I left.

  I got home and sat down on the bed. I kept telling myself, Now there’s nothing left to do. I was numb with time. Now you don’t even know what to do with yourself. I checked the time on my iPad and waited. Geoffroy told me that’s a normal reaction, that after everything’s revved up, it takes a while to come back down; once again, it felt as if my body was a step behind reality, which had already started to change. That’s when I cleaned my apartment and went to do the laundry.

  “After he did the laundry he came home and opened the window. He thought it would help purify the place, to air it out—whatever, he wasn’t in his right mind, he thought he needed to let in new air that Reda hadn’t breathed. So he stands at the open window, he holds on to the curtains, and he blows out as hard as he can. He breathes. He made himself cough just to get rid of the air that was moving around inside him. He was worried about where the oxygen came from, if you see what I mean. I made myself cough, he told me, because I was convinced the air in my lungs was the same air Reda had inhaled and exhaled and now I had inhaled it and so on, and now it was all just sitting there in my lungs. Naturally he couldn’t have that, Reda’s air in his lungs. So there he stood at the window getting rid of the air, breathing, spitting, and coughing.”

  Henri was already up. When I turned on my iPad I’d seen a little green dot next to his name on Facebook; I’d sent him a message. He invited me over, and after my second message, saying I didn’t want to intrude—which obviously he didn’t believe—I walked to the closest bike station, got on a bike, and went to his apartment. I pedaled in the cold, eyes tearing, knuckles red on the handlebars. Didier and Geoffroy were still asleep.

  I got to Henri’s place and we lay down on the bed; I told myself I should make love to him, I was about to beg him to make love to me, as one more way to rub out the trace of Reda, so that Reda wouldn’t be the last person this had happened with. I thought it would be another step toward his liquidation; I didn’t want “Reda was the last person I slept with” to be a possible sentence, and I wanted to make it impossible right away.

  Geoffroy wrote to me a few hours later. I was lying there beside Henri with my eyes closed. It was around noon.

  “Naturally they couldn’t meet up at the place de la République,” Clara says. I left Henri’s apartment, I thanked him. He said, “I’m here for you anytime, day or night.” I waited for Geoffroy alone at a bus stop near the Gare de l’Est. Each time I saw a face come out of the metro, or a cab, or through the doors of the station behind me, I thought: He’s found me. I had to stare at the face for a long time before I could be sure it wasn’t Reda: I saw him everywhere, that morning every face was his, and even if the person rising up from the metro looked nothing like him, even if it was a woman or a much taller man—Reda wasn’t tall—it took a long time for my heart to stop racing and for Reda’s face, which I plastered on every face I saw, to disappear, to fade, to dissipate, to evaporate, and for me to see the real face of the person walking toward me.

  Clara goes on, she says I looked at the clock above the bus stop—and I thought: Hurry, Geoffroy, hurry, I’m counting to one hundred and twenty-five and if you’re not here by the time I get to one hundred and twenty-five it means Reda’s going to find me. He didn’t come. Now I’m counting to ninety-two and this time if you don’t show up, then it’s definite, this time it’s for sure, Reda’s going to find me. And then he did come. We took a taxi to go meet Didier; Geoffroy said he’d pay for a taxi because it was faster and he�
�d guessed I’d be afraid of running into Reda in the metro. In the taxi we tried to talk about other things, but words kept changing their meaning; a kind of coded language did the talking for us; he asked what I’d like to have for lunch and suddenly lunch meant “scarf,” he asked the driver to turn up the radio and suddenly music meant “gun,” Didier meant “Reda.”

  13.

  Didier was waiting at Le Select. He was wearing the sweater I’d given him the night before, I could see it from far away; he was sunk in the banquette at the back, behind the coatracks, with a cup on the table before him. He looked distressed—this distress, which was once a solace, has since become unbearable. Toward the end of a documentary Clara and I watched yesterday on Channel Five, a voice-over mentioned the rapes committed against black women during the days of slavery; when the voice-over said the word rape I could feel Clara’s embarrassment, I saw her mouth tighten, her eyes narrow, and I hated it, I hated her distress, the way it forced me back into the past, I thought: She will never understand that, as much as I cling to my story, it is also the thing that seems farthest from me and the most foreign to what I am; she can’t understand that I clutch it to me for fear it will be taken away, but that all I feel is disgust, the deepest disgust, if someone comes to me and whispers that it’s mine; the moment they remind me, I want to cast it into the dust and leave it behind.

  Didier urged me to talk. He told me to talk as much as I needed to, but to move on as quickly as I could to another topic—not to forget, no, for forgetting wasn’t possible, and even if it were, that might not be something to wish for, but in any case it wasn’t; and he was right, I know from experience that the isolation of those who try to forget the past is as terrible as the isolation of those for whom the past is an obsession; I’ve learned that the question is never whether or not to forget, that this is a false dichotomy; the only question, as I told Clara later—this week actually, almost a year later—the only question is how to remember the past without repeating it, and since that night of the twenty-fourth, or rather the next day, that’s what I’ve tried to do, just as I promised Didier: I’ve been trying to construct a memory that would let me undo the past, that would amplify it and destroy it, so that the more I remember and the more I lose myself in the images that remain, the less they have to do with me.

  But the next thing Didier said was: “You have to file a report with the police.” I didn’t want to. I focused on the details of the sweater he was wearing; he was already wearing it, out of kindness I knew, for my sake, to show me how much he valued my gift. I told myself it looked good on him. I wanted to tell him I thought that color suited him, he ought to wear it more often. He said again: “You have to file a report.” And I didn’t understand. After what he’d just said, he was contradicting himself, and it made me very angry, I hated him. This had never happened before. Geoffroy was more reserved, more hesitant; for several months he’d been writing a book on the justice system, a critique of judgment, which would be called Judge and Punish, we discussed his book practically every day, I knew more or less what was in it, and for that reason I assumed he would defend me. I expected him to be on my side, but in the end he said it was important, important that I go file a report, despite all his reservations, and I thought, Important for whom? I thought: In any case, you can’t send someone to prison, you can’t do that, you’re not capable of that—I had no ally, no support, but my own arrogance, I looked around me and that was all I had, I seized it, I clung to it, and I thought: They don’t know what prison is actually like, but I do, I’ve seen a prison, they never have, they don’t know, you went to visit your cousin Sylvain in prison and you remember, you remember everything, he told you how they lived; and he’s not the only one. He’s not the only one. You’ve seen the worn, ravaged, lacerated faces of the other prisoners, the devastated, ravaged faces of the families leaving the jail, ravaged as if they were trying to share the burden, but these two don’t know, they can’t know, they haven’t seen—arrogance, come to my rescue—they haven’t seen, but I remember clearly, they’ve never seen the prison gate, they don’t know what they’re talking about, they haven’t seen the brick wall, they haven’t seen the shadow of the wall, they haven’t seen the families lined up before the wall, begging and groveling, waiting for the guard to call their name, waiting to file inside. But I restrained myself and kept from speaking. I said Reda would find me after he got out of prison, if they arrested him, he would hunt me down and take revenge, and Didier answered, “But that never happens.” He said Emmanuel had once explained to him that this never actually happened, and Emmanuel knew because he was a lawyer, “he knows more about it than you do,” he was an expert and he said this sort of revenge didn’t exist. I looked down at Didier’s cup, where it was sitting in front of me, and I thought: But that doesn’t make my fear any less real, that doesn’t make me feel less overwhelmed, and they should be worrying more about your fear and less about probabilities, and they should be thinking of your fear above all else, but they’re not, they’re not, they’re not thinking of you or your fear, and I said none of this out loud, obviously I said nothing, all I said was that I didn’t want this business to stretch out for months and months. I explained that if there were a trial I’d have to go over it again and again, that what had happened would become that much more real, that what had happened would inscribe itself that much more deeply in me, in my body, in my memory; I had no idea how badly I’d want to talk about it later on, I couldn’t have guessed that the way I’d spoken to the nurse that morning prefigured the person I’d become over the next few weeks—not that this had any bearing, since being allowed to speak of a thing and being obliged or summoned to speak are utterly separate things, are as different as they can be. I now know that these two things we call “speaking” have nothing in common, that sometimes what we call speaking is more like suffering, or being silenced, or throwing up; I know today that language lies; and Didier replied that I would forget much more easily if I filed a report; I thought: That’s not true and he knows it, they want to lock you up inside a story that’s not your own, they want you to carry around a story you never asked to have, it’s not your story, and that’s what they’ve been telling you since you sat down, that’s what they keep saying: file a report, because that’s what they want, they want you to bear witness, they want you to bear it on your back and if you spend a few months bent double under its weight, tough luck for you, tough luck if it breaks your bones, tough luck if this story is too much to bear, tough luck if it cracks my ribs, splits my skin, tears my joints, and crushes the organs inside me, and Didier and Geoffroy kept talking, only now I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I was so furious I couldn’t even see them, I only felt them as admonitory shadows beside me; they were no longer Didier and Geoffroy, they were no longer the two people who had saved my life so many times; those two had ceased to exist, and I thought: They’re just like Reda. They are Reda. If Reda is a name for the moment when you had to endure what you never wanted to endure, if Reda is a name for deprivation, for silence, for your disappearance, if Reda is a name for the time when you had to do what you never wanted to do, to cross a line you never wanted to cross, to be what you never wanted to be, then you don’t see the difference, try as you might, I thought, I don’t see the difference, try as I might, they are only extensions of Reda, they are Reda, I had stopped looking at them or trying to make out their faces and I thought: They are Reda, they are Reda, if that night Reda took away your movement, if what Reda took away was your freedom, your freedom of movement, the freedom of your body, they are doing exactly the same thing, and you’re begging them for mercy the same way you begged him for mercy. You’re begging them to stop but they won’t, they’re strangling you, they’re suffocating you and no matter how you beg them to stop, they won’t. And Didier said: “If you don’t file a report, he’ll do it to someone else, he’ll do the same thing to someone else, and you have a fundamental duty of solidarity to protect every—
” But why should I have to pay? Haven’t I been through enough? and I kept quiet, He has his own interests at heart, not yours, and then I thought, No, not even, he has nothing to gain if you file a report, what’s he got to gain? Nothing. He’s repeating what he’s been taught but he hasn’t even got anything to gain—and Geoffroy went after me, he assailed me, he drowned me under the weight of the story I wanted nothing to do with, he plunged my face in the mud I’d been trying so hard to escape, he insisted: “You got lucky, but the next one will get killed—” But you’re not the one who’ll have to pay, you don’t have to pay all over again, you don’t have to sacrifice yourself, it’s somebody else’s turn, don’t listen, tear out his tongue so he’ll stop, cut out his tongue, you don’t need to pay a second time, I thought, Why should the losers have to bear witness to history—as if being the losers weren’t enough, why should the losers have to bear witness to their loss, why should they wear themselves out repeating the story of their loss, and go on repeating it even then, I’m nobody’s keeper, it’s not fair, and I thought, without ever saying a word: No, it’s just the opposite of what they say, you should have the right to remain silent, those who have survived violence should have the right to keep it to themselves, they alone should have the right to silence, it’s the others whom we should blame for not speaking up, and Didier wouldn’t stop, and Geoffroy backed him up with more and more excitement, more and more conviction, more and more noise, even if he was still the more reserved. I looked down in shame, because of course I was ashamed, and I kept telling myself: He’s forcing me at gunpoint, and I couldn’t say it because I thought they would laugh despite the aptness of the words, and I thought: They don’t want you to get away, all you want is to get away but they’re telling you not to move, all you want is to get out of the apartment where you are with Reda, and they don’t want you to get out, they don’t want you to elbow Reda in the side and get away; the more they scolded me, the more I felt my throat closing up, my temples throbbed, their words ran down my thighs. And then, in exasperation, after my silence, because I felt I had no choice, I said: “All right, give me some time to think, let’s eat and when we’ve finished I’ll give you an answer, but while we’re eating I’d like to talk about something else, let me eat my lunch in peace, if that’s not too much to ask.” At the end of the meal, we paid and we walked toward the police station, but my body was not my own, I watched it lead me there.