Breathless after the euphoria of the runway show had passed, I would suddenly feel idiotic, sullied by the girls’ clothes I had been wearing, or not just idiotic but disgusted with myself, stunned by the momentary fit of madness that had made me cross-dress; it was like one of those days when inebriation and disinhibition lead to foolish behaviors, regretted the next day, once the alcohol wears off and nothing is left of our deeds but a painful and shameful memory. I would imagine cutting the clothes to bits, burning them, and burying them someplace where no one would ever dig them up.
Then there were my tastes, always automatically turned toward the feminine without my knowing or understanding why. I loved the theater, female vocalists, and dolls, whereas my brothers (and even my sisters, in a certain way) preferred video games, rap, and soccer.
As I grew up, I could feel my father’s gaze, when it fell on me, grow heavier and heavier, I could feel the terror mounting in him, his powerlessness in the face of the monster he had created and whose oddity became clearer with each passing day. The whole situation seemed too much for my mother, and quite early on she gave up trying to do anything about it. I would often imagine that one day she was going to disappear, leaving a note on the table to explain that she had had enough, that she hadn’t asked for this, for a son like me, that she wasn’t able to live this kind of a life, that she was invoking her right to abandon me. Other days I would imagine that my parents were going to drive me to the edge of a road somewhere, or to the middle of a forest, and leave me there, alone, the way you did with animals. (And I knew that they wouldn’t, that it wasn’t possible, that they would never go so far; but the thought did occur to me.)
* * *
Confounded by a creature beyond their ken, my parents tried relentlessly to set me back on the right path. They would get annoyed, and say That kid’s got a screw loose, he’s not right in the head. Most of the time they would say pussy when speaking to me, and pussy was just about the worst insult they could imagine—that was obvious from the tone they used—the one best for conveying disgust, better than asshole or loser. In a world where masculine values are held up as supreme, even my mother would say about herself I’ve got balls, nobody messes with me.
* * *
My father thought soccer might toughen me up, so he suggested that I play, as he had in his youth, as had my cousins and my brothers. I resisted: even at that young age I wanted dancing lessons; my sister took those. I dreamed of being onstage, in tights, with sequins, and a huge crowd cheering for me as I bowed, gratified, dripping with sweat—and yet, knowing the shame that such a dream represented, I never admitted to it. Another boy in the village, Maxime, who took dance lessons because his parents, for reasons no one could understand, insisted on it, was constantly being made fun of. The Dancing Queen was what he was called.
My father begged me Come on, it doesn’t cost anything and you’ll be with your cousin, with your buddies from the village. Give it a go. At least try, for me.
On one occasion I agreed to go, more out of fear of the consequences I’d suffer if I didn’t than as part of an effort to please him.
I went, and then I came home—earlier than the others, because after practice we were supposed to go into the locker room to change. I had learned, to my horror and terror (and yet it’s something I should have thought of, something everyone knew), that the showers were public. I went home and announced to my father that I couldn’t continue I don’t wanna go back; I can’t stand soccer, it’s not my kind of thing. He went on trying to convince me for a while, but finally gave up.
I was with him, we were on the way to the café, when he bumped into the president of the soccer league, whom we all called Coach Cigar. Coach Cigar asked, having put a look of surprise on his face, one eyebrow cocked How come your kid stopped coming to practice? I watched my father drop his eyes and mumble a lie Well he hasn’t been feeling that great with, at that moment, that inarticulable feeling that runs through a child who is confronted in public with his parents’ shame, as if in a flash the world has lost all its foundations, all its meaning. He understood that Coach Cigar didn’t believe a word of it, so he tried to cover his tracks And well you know Eddy’s a little bit weird, I mean, not weird, but a little bit strange, he’s happy just sitting around watching TV. In the end he came out and admitted it, looking wretched and not wanting to meet the other man’s gaze I guess it turns out he’s just not that into soccer.
* * *
Outside my house, in the northern village of barely a thousand people where I grew up, I think it’s fair to say that as a young boy I was reasonably well liked. Moreover, there were also many things that people associate with a country childhood that I enjoyed: the long walks in the woods, the shelters that we built there, the fires in the fireplace, the warm milk fresh from the farm, the games of hide-and-seek in the cornfields, the peaceful silence of the small streets, the old lady who gave us candy, the apple trees, the plum trees, the pear trees in every yard, the explosion of fall colors, the leaves that blanketed the sidewalks until our feet were lost, stuck in those mountains of leaves; the chestnuts that fell with them in the autumn, and the fights we’d organize. Chestnuts hurt a lot, and I would return home covered in bruises but I made no complaint—quite the contrary. My mother would say I hope you gave as good as you got, or better, that’s how you know who beat who.
It wasn’t unusual for me to hear someone say That Bellegueule kid is a little weird or to get smirked at when I talked to people. But finally, being the odd boy in the village, the effeminate one, I elicited a kind of amused fascination that set me apart, protected me somewhat, like Jordan, my Martinican neighbor, the only black person for miles around, to whom people would say It’s true I don’t like blacks, there’s so many around these days, always causing trouble wherever they go, wars in their own countries or coming here and burning cars, but not you, Jordan, you’re all right, you’re different, you’re all right with us.
* * *
The women of the village would congratulate my mother, Your son Eddy is so well brought up, not like all the others, you see it straightaway. And my mother was proud and would congratulate me in turn.
At School
The closest middle school, one you got to by bus, nine miles away, was a large building made of steel and those red bricks that conjure up in the imagination the towns and working-class landscapes of the North with houses crowded up against each other, piled on top of each other. (In the imagination of people who aren’t there, that is. People who do not live there. For workers from the North, for my father, my uncle, my aunt, for those people, they conjure up nothing in the imagination. They provoke a disgust at daily life, or, at best, gloomy indifference.) Those houses, those reddish buildings, those austere factories with their dizzying chimneys always spewing out a dense, heavy, bright white smoke, never letting up. If the school and the factory resembled each other so precisely, it’s because they were barely a step apart. Most of the children, especially the tough set, left school and headed straight to the factory. The red bricks were the same, the sheet metal was the same, the same people they had grown up with were all still around.
One day my mother pointed out the obvious. I didn’t understand, and so I asked, when I was four or five, with that pure curiosity that children sometimes demonstrate, that abruptness that can force a grown-up to dredge up forgotten questions, ones that, being the most basic, can also seem the most pointless.
Mom, they stop at night, don’t they, they go to sleep, the factories?
No, factories don’t sleep. Ever. That’s why your dad and your big brother go to work at night sometimes, to keep it from shutting down.
And what about me, I’ll have to go to the factory at night too?
Yup.
* * *
Everything changed when I went off to middle school. I found myself surrounded by people I didn’t know. The things that set me apa
rt, the way I talked like a girl, the way I walked, the way I held myself, called into question all the values that had shaped the kids around me, the ones who were tough. One day in the schoolyard, Maxime, a different Maxime, asked me to run, there, in front of him and the boys he was with. He said to them You’re gonna see how he runs like a fag assuring them, swearing, that they were going to have a good laugh. After I refused he made it clear that I didn’t have any choice. If I didn’t do as I was told, I would pay for it I’ll smash your face in if you don’t. So I ran for them, humiliated, fighting back tears, feeling as if each leg weighed hundreds of pounds, as if each step would be my last, they were so heavy, like the legs of someone running against the current in a rough sea. They laughed.
* * *
From the moment I started at this middle school I would hang out in the schoolyard every day trying to make friends with the other students. None of them would speak to me: a stigma is contagious; being friends with the fag would have been a bad idea.
I wandered without seeming to wander, walking with a sure step, always pretending I had something specific to do, someplace to go, and I did such a good job at this that no one could have told I was being shunned.
This wandering couldn’t last, as I well knew. I had found a refuge in the hallway that led to the library. It was always deserted, and I hid there more and more frequently, until soon I was there every day, without exception. Since I was afraid of being found there alone, waiting for recess to be over, I would be careful always to be digging around in my satchel whenever anyone passed by, as if I were looking for something, so they’d think I was busy and that I would soon be on my way.
* * *
The two boys appeared in the hallway, the first tall with red hair, and the second short, with a hunchback. The tall redhead spat in my face How do you like that, punk.
Pain
They came back. They liked how out-of-the-way the place was where they knew they could find me without being caught by the monitor. They waited for me there every day. Every day I came back, as if we had an appointment, an unspoken contract. I didn’t return in order to face up to them. It wasn’t courage or any kind of defiance that brought me back to that hallway—a short one with peeling white paint and the smell of industrial cleaners, like those used in hospitals or town halls.
There was just one idea I held to: here, no one would see us, no one would know. I had to avoid being hit elsewhere, in the schoolyard, in front of the others, I had to keep other kids from thinking of me as someone who gets beaten up. That would just have proved their suspicions: Bellegueule is a fag ’cause he gets beaten up (or the other way around, it didn’t matter). I thought it would be better if I seemed like a happy kid. So I became the staunchest ally of this silence, and, in a certain way, complicit in this violence. (And I can’t stop asking myself, years later, what the real meaning of complicity is, what the boundaries are that separate complicity from active participation, from innocence, from carelessness, from fear.)
In the hallway I would hear them getting closer, the way—according to my mother, I don’t know if it’s true—dogs recognize the footsteps of their owners among a thousand others, and from distances that seem scarcely imaginable to a human being.
* * *
A whistling perforates my eardrums as my head hits the brick wall, and I can barely keep my balance. This is the period during which endless headaches would paralyze me for days at a time. Already, at this young age, thinking that my life was going to be short, I imagined that I might have a brain tumor. (A young woman in the village I’d seen wither away. One moment thin and tall, then, suddenly, a few weeks later losing her hair and putting on weight. More and more hunched over, soon being pushed about in a wheelchair by her husband. Misshapen and no longer able to speak, she would die during my first year at this school, the winter I was ten.)
They grabbed me by the hair, always with the same relentless singsong of abuse faggot, cocksucker. Dizziness, clumps of blond hair in their hands. The fear, therefore, of crying and making them even angrier.
* * *
I thought that in the end I would get used to the pain. There is a way in which people do grow accustomed to pain, the way workers get used to back pain. Sometimes, yes, the pain regains the upper hand. They don’t get all that used to it, really, they work around it, they learn to hide it. My memories of my father who, caught up by his pain, would spend all night screaming in their bedroom next to ours because of his back problems, or would even end up crying, and the doctor who would come to give him cortisone injections while my mother worried Where do we find the money to pay the damn doctor. My mother was the one who would (also) say It’s in the genes, back problems run in the family, so then working at the factory just makes matters worse without realizing that these problems were not the cause, but rather the result of my father’s punishing workday.
* * *
The women who work the checkout lines in the shops—because that was seen as women’s work, men found that kind of thing degrading—who got used to stiffening hands and wrists, to joints worn out by the age when others are just beginning their studies, beginning to go out on the weekends, as if youthfulness were in no way a biological fact, a simple question of age, of a moment in life, but rather a sort of privilege reserved for those who are able—thanks to their situation in life—to enjoy all those experiences, all those feelings that get grouped together under the word adolescence. One of my cousins was a cashier, in the same way that many other girls from our village and neighboring villages became cashiers, and would tell me, at the age of twenty-five, that she was already worn out I can’t take any more, I’ve had it without complaining all that much, really, since she always added that she was lucky to have a job, that she wasn’t lazy Can’t say I’m unhappy, there’s others that don’t have any work or whose jobs are worse, I’m no slacker, I show up every day and I always get there on time. Every evening she had to soak her hands in hot water to soothe her painful joints, cashiers’ hands. Uneasy nights because of the way her body was sore and stiff I’m sore from getting up and down and up and down. You don’t get all that used to pain, really.
* * *
The tall redhead, and the other with the hunchback, deliver their final blow. Then suddenly they would leave, already talking about something else. Banal, everyday talk—and noticing that detail hurt me even more: I mattered less to them than they mattered to me. I devoted all my thoughts to them, all my anguish, from the moment I woke up. Their ability to forget me so quickly hurt.
A Man’s Role
I do not know if the boys from the hallway would have referred to their own behavior as violent. The men in the village never used that word; it wasn’t one that ever crossed their lips. For a man violence was something natural, self-evident.
* * *
Like all the men in the village, my father was violent. And my mother, like all the women in the village, complained about her husband’s violence. She complained, in particular, about his behavior when he was drunk You never know what’s going to happen with your father when he’s plastered. Either he gets horny, and then he’s a total pain in the ass, all over me, wearing me out with kisses and his I-love-you-so-much talk, or else he gets mean. That’s what he is mostly and I’ve had it up to here, ’cause then it’s like you fat bitch and you old bag. He won’t leave me alone. Sometimes, like that Christmas Eve when my little brother annoyed him by asking if he could change the channel on the television, his bad mood would turn into a kind of fury. On days like that he would stand up. Then he would just stand there, without moving. He would clench his fists tight and his face would suddenly turn purple. There’s more: the tears that would fill his eyes (no tears for him unless he was drunk; on other days, he kept himself under control: be a man, don’t cry) and the incomprehensible muttering. He’d begin by pacing, circling the table. Not the pacing of
somebody killing time or thinking something over, but the pacing of a man who doesn’t know what to do with his anger. Then he would head toward a wall, seemingly at random, and punch it hard with his fist. After twenty years of this, the walls were full of holes. My mother would cover them up with drawings that my little brother and sister would bring home from preschool. His fingers, brown from the clay walls, would start to bleed. He would apologize Lot of good it does getting mad, no reason for you to get scared, don’t be scared of me, I love you, you’re my kids and my wife, don’t you worry, I only ever punch the walls, I won’t ever punch my wife or my kids, I might fuck up all the walls of the house, but I won’t do what my dickhead of a father did, and mess with the faces in my family.
His obsessive need to distance himself from the image of his father led him to have a lot of problems with my big brother, who was violent himself, even with people close to him. My father judged him harshly for this, with hatred, even. Once my big brother got his mechanics BEP, a certificate for training factory workers, he dropped out of school and rapidly took to drink. He was a seriously mean drunk.
We learned this from one of the girls he had been hanging out with for a few months. She called my parents in the middle of the night and let the phone ring until they woke up. My mother answered. I heard her—there weren’t any doors—talking in the kitchen (family room, dining room…). She kept asking for things to be repeated, and was getting angry. What did you say, what, say it again, I can’t believe it, what an idiot. Followed by various shouts and interjections.
She called my father, stunned, shocked. This was the first time it happened, the first in an endless series, each time the same—down to the tiniest details.
She would shout Get out of bed, he’s made another fucking mess, but this time it’s serious, really serious. He got drunk and hit his girlfriend and she was just on the phone telling me I’m bleeding, I’m all black and blue, my face is all messed up she said, Really I like your son, I respect you and don’t want to cause trouble but this time I’m gonna have to report him, I have to because I have kids too to think about and maybe him hitting me is one thing, but hitting the kids is another, I’m scared for them. You know your son gets violent when he drinks, he beats me, it’s not the first time, but this time he went too far. I didn’t tell you about it the other times ’cause I didn’t want to bother you. My brother’s girlfriend went to see a doctor so he could officially report that she’d been beaten, that her body was covered with bruises. She filed a complaint and yet again my brother had to do some hours of community service.
The End of Eddy Page 2
