People Like Them

by Samira Sedira

  In my hotel room, I fall asleep as soon as I lay my head on the pillow, in the middle of the day, for no reason. To take a break. To cease existing. After two or three hours of deep sleep, I start awake. I’m cold, terribly cold. I get up, grab my sweater from the back of the chair, immediately throw it on. Back in bed, I lean against the headboard and pull the quilt over my legs, my teeth chattering. I dreamed that you and I were making love. . . . And the indescribable pleasure making my heart beat faster troubles me all the more because I didn’t expect to find the taste of your kisses still intact. Here you are, resurrected in my memory on the day of your death.

  Tears rise. I don’t hold them back. Am I crying from shame, exhaustion, grief? I have no idea and, ultimately, it doesn’t matter anymore. At least it’s that many less tears.

  The sky grows overcast, the room suddenly plunges into darkness. None of the sounds of the city reach me here. My breathing is calm. For a reason as strange as it is confusing, Marguerite’s face invites itself into my innermost thoughts. Marguerite, her youth, her arrogance, her fierce will. But I’m not Marguerite—I had my day.

  I’d placed your notebook on the nightstand. I open it slowly, as though I’m scared it will explode. Notes in your handwriting. Sentences really. Each one numbered. Like a list of groceries or tasks to be done. There are psalms, too, taken from the Bible; you cite them each time, in parentheses.

  The prison warden told me that you’d been reading the Bible for some time, that you found comfort in it, especially David’s psalms. At any other moment, I’d have found that ridiculous. You were never religious. But today it’s different. I flip through your notebook and read a few of the psalms:

  “6:6. I am weary from groaning.” (D. Psalm)

  “3:1. How many rise up against me!” (D. Psalm)

  “22:14. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed.” (D. Psalm)

  “7:15. He has dug a hole and hollowed it out; he has fallen into the pit of his making.” (D. Psalm)

  “6:7. My eyes fail from grief.” (D. Psalm)

  “20:8. We rise up and stand firm.” (D. Psalm)

  “22:6. But I am a worm and not a man.” (D. Psalm)

  “22:26. The poor will eat and be satisfied.” (D. Psalm)

  “26:2. Examine my heart and mind.” (D. Psalm)

  “31:12. I am like a broken vessel.” (D. Psalm)

  I continue turning the pages of your notebook. I understand with a pang of emotion that it was your only company during these many months. On the last page, a sentence that you forgot to number, likely taken from David’s psalms (since it’s in quotes, too), grabs my attention:

  “I once was young and now am old.”

  You underlined it with two thick strokes. You wanted it to be noticeable, and I did notice it. I read it and reread it, and though its simplicity troubles me, it also creates a feeling of familiarity. As if I’d written these words myself. I think they must have struck you the same way. As soothing as cool water. And that’s no doubt the reason that they appear on the last page of your notebook, as if to bring an end to your reflections, to your quest, to your tragedy.

  “I once was young and now am old.”

  In its great simplicity, this sentence says everything about us. Live, and then die. Rot. And the more I read it, the more I think that in reality you didn’t forget to number it. You simply stripped it of its biblical coldness to make it something a man would say. You. And maybe that’s what I came here looking for, just this. Like you did before me. Simple words worthy of man. And I understand now, in light of this silence you’ve left behind you, what your lawyer was trying to say, the day of his closing argument, when he cited Voltaire. He had said, after taking a long breath: “One can be more criminal than one knows.”* It seems obvious now that he was addressing everyone in the courtroom, from the simple spectators to the judge, everyone, including himself, like he was flinging mud in our faces.

  I don’t know if we’re all capable of killing with as much as savagery as you had. I still don’t understand where it could have come from. That mystery will probably haunt me until the end. What I do know, however, is that no one around you was innocent. We stood back and let it happen. Like a chain reaction, each of us contributed to an outcome. A horrific act. A tragedy. Our tragedy. I also tell myself that maybe there were words that would have kept you from sinking, except we didn’t even know that we were losing you; we hadn’t understood that yet.

  Behind the window, the sun pierces through two clouds. For the first time in a long time I think about Bakary. His memory awakens others: the gentle valley, the burning thatch, the pine resin perfuming the air, the whispers of summer, at night, beneath the white moon. . . . A flood of smells and feelings. I choke back a sob.

  There’s stamping above my room, furniture being moved, a slamming door. Certainly the maid. The smell of omelets and fried mushrooms rises up the stairs. Maybe the proprietor will come knock on my door soon, invite me to her table, gesturing with her small hands. I’ll agree to join them, because today those women are the only people I have. We’ll laugh, and then Jeanne will go back to her room for a short nap. The proprietor will refuse our help clearing the table, and tonight we’ll drink to our health. And tomorrow morning, when I tell them goodbye, all of them, and they respond with See you next time, I won’t ruin anything. I’ll hug the proprietor last, because you always save the best for last, and I’ll tell her, See you next time, too, with the same warmth in my voice, the same kindness in my eyes, the same trembling humanity.

  Author’s Note

  Perhaps the most fascinating thing about headline-grabbing stories—think “true crime”—is their power to connect us. They get us talking, but also reading. Whenever a scandal or a crime makes the news, people concoct hypotheses, discuss, take sides, and argue, until the mystery is solved and order restored.

  Restore order. That’s what authors try to do as well, albeit in a very specific way. As Roland Barthes suggests, the incidents that capture our attention—the infamous faits divers, as the French call them—defy neat categorization; they “begin to exist only where the world stops being named.”* Literature fills in those blanks, naming the unnameable. It dwells in darkness and tries to bring forth light. The writer doesn’t take the place of justice; that’s not their role. They mustn’t judge, or choose a side, or even presume to deliver justice. They offer one version—theirs—and attempt to get closer to the shadows.

  People Like Them is loosely inspired by a mass homicide committed in 2003 in a village in France’s Haute-Savoie region. At the time it made headlines, no news articles or radio or television shows mentioned any racist motives. Or at least I can’t remember any that did. Why such an omission? I still can’t figure it out. The refusal to take into consideration one of the essential keys to understanding that tragedy is incomprehensible. I’m not saying that racism is the only factor that drove the murderer to kill a family of five—it’s infinitely more complex than that—but it quickly became clear in my mind that the father’s skin color must have played a decisive role.

  In my novel, Bakary’s powerful charisma, as well as his social status, drives Constant mad with jealousy. In Constant’s mind, the normal order (an order that persists in the collective unconscious) has been altered—reversed, in fact. The Black man is powerful while the white man has been diminished, both physically and socially. This reversal of roles is intolerable to Constant because it doesn’t correspond to anything he knows. In an attempt to restore order—a notion that keeps coming back—he murders Bakary. Sylvia and the children, viewed by Constant as an extension of Bakary, aren’t spared.

  The casual racism at play here is invisible and insidious. It’s not outright, it doesn’t look you straight in the eyes; this racism only reveals itself obliquely (e.g., stereotypes, inappropriate remarks, clumsy comments). The phenomenon is all the more paradoxical gi
ven that there’s not a single foreigner in Carmac. The villagers’ fears and speculations are fed by the media-propagated specter of a foreign threat. Oftentimes, in these villages “protected” from invasion by outsiders, people end up fighting invisible enemies and defending themselves from abstractions.

  I wasn’t entirely faithful to the facts. The news story in question was primarily a reference point. I kept the quintuple murder, the friendship between the two men, the clash of two social classes, the hiring of the murderer’s wife as a housecleaner by their neighbors, and the financial scam. All the rest is fictional.

  Constant has nothing. He could have had everything, but life decided otherwise. His career as a great athlete ended abruptly, leaving him physically impaired and robbed of a bright future. He is a weakened man. A shell of a man. The arrival of Bakary—a man who does have everything: money, happiness, health—disrupts Constant’s entire existence. At first, their friendship boosts his self-esteem, but when that relationship is marred by betrayal, Constant feels such humiliation that his only response is to eliminate those he considers responsible for his unbearable suffering.

  When you dive into the murky waters of a true story, some self-searching is also involved. Class relations have always fascinated me. I come from a family of very modest means and was forced to deal with social injustice from an early age. I witnessed my own parents’ distress as they confronted daily humiliations and the lack of steady employment. Later, in adulthood, on the heels of a rich acting career, I was compelled by financial reasons to clean people’s homes. I was forty-four years old and I hadn’t planned on going backward. I was never ashamed of having grown up in the milieu I come from, but, like everyone, I wanted to move onward and upward. For that matter, I was raised to strive to “do better.” Our parents repeated that constantly: “Do better than us!”

  I cleaned houses for three years. What sticks in my mind about that strange and painful experience is a certain look. A look that doesn’t register your presence. As if the person doesn’t see you, or your outlines are blurry. A look that makes you invisible and that, from the start, defines you as “worthless.” That look was different in every way from how I had always been regarded in my career as an actress. Actors are loved, admired, and envied. You don’t elicit the same reaction when you’re a housecleaner. You abruptly go from everything to nothing, from visible to invisible, for the simple reason that you no longer hold the same job. Everything that makes you who you are gets downgraded—absolutely everything. This happens because we exist in a brutal society whose sole reigning values are work and money. And yet nothing inside you has really changed.

  That experience—a drop in social standing, humiliation, distrust (often involuntary) from employers—helped shape the characters of Anna and Constant. Everything has been set up to grind them down.

  I don’t judge my characters, nor do I intend to condemn them. Criminals—even murderers—serve as mirror images; they reflect our own fallibility. Viewing them as monstrous aberrations prevents us from understanding human nature. There’s no such thing as monsters. Only humans.

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  *Voltaire, Oedipus: A Play in Five Acts, trans. Frank J. Morlock (Cabin John, MD: Wildside Press, 2012).

  *Roland Barthes, “Structure of the Fait-Divers,” Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 185.