In the village it’s as if women have babies in order to become women, as if they can’t be women otherwise. People take them for lesbians, or frigid.
The other women are always discussing this topic outside the school That one hasn’t had any kids yet, it’s not normal, there’s something wrong with her, she must be a dyke. Or frigid, she’s never had a good lay.
Much later I would come to understand that in other places an accomplished woman is one who knows how to take care of herself, to look out for herself, for her career, who doesn’t rush into having children prematurely, when she’s too young. It might even be all right for her to experiment with being a lesbian as a teenager, not for too long, but for a week or two, for a few days, just for fun.
* * *
My sister, who is direct and very tough (she needed a strong disposition, just as my mother did, to survive in a man’s world), would complain that my mother had never been maternal, that they never spent time one-on-one, that my mother never took her shopping, or did any of the other things that mothers and daughters were supposed to do together. And my mother, because she was ashamed, would get angry, ending the conversation Give me a fucking break or else she wouldn’t say anything in front of my sister, but then later she’d tell me in private that she didn’t understand why my sister was so mean to her, that she would have liked to take her shopping, but that—and your sister knows all this, we live in the same damn house, and she’s not stupid—she was too exhausted with everything that had to be done around the house, with her little brother and sister to take care of, meals to fix, a house to clean, and in any case what would the point have been, spending their days in the shops, when she couldn’t have bought anything anyway.
* * *
My mother smoked a lot in the mornings. I suffered from asthma, and sometimes I would have terrible attacks that left me more dead than alive. Some days I couldn’t go to sleep without thinking I would never wake up again; it took enormous and indescribable efforts for me to fill my lungs with a little oxygen. If I told my mother that cigarette smoke made it harder for me to breathe, she would blow up They tell us we all have to stop smoking, but all that shit, all that smoke that spews out of the factory and that we all have to breathe, it’s no better for you than this, these cigarettes aren’t the real problem, they don’t make any difference. She was easily annoyed and always losing her temper.
She was often angry. She’d take any occasion to voice her indignation, railing, day in, day out, against the politicians, against the new regulations reducing welfare payments, against the powers that be, which she hated from the deepest fibers of her being. And yet she would not hesitate to invoke those same powers she otherwise so hated when she felt ruthlessness was called for: ruthlessness in dealing with Arabs, with alcohol, with drugs, with any kind of sexual behavior she didn’t approve of. She would often remark that What we need is some law and order in this country.
Years later, while reading the biography of Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig, I will remember the people who lived in the village where I grew up, my mother in particular, when Zweig speaks of all the furious women, worn out by hunger and poverty, who, in 1789, descended upon Versailles to protest, and who, at the sight of the monarch, spontaneously cried out Long live the King!: their bodies—which had spoken for them—torn between absolute submission to power and an enduring sense of revolt.
* * *
Although she is an angry woman, she is not one who knows what to do with the hatred that never leaves her. She rails when alone in front of the TV or with other mothers outside the school.
Imagine a scene taking place every day: a small square (recently paved) with a monument in honor of those who died in the First World War, similar to other monuments in other villages, covered in moss and ivy at its base. The church, the town hall, and the school form the borders of the square. For most of the day, the square itself lies empty. Around noon the women assemble there to pick up their children as they leave school. They don’t have jobs. A few do, but most of their time is spent on child care. I take care of the kids, and the men they’re at work at the factory or elsewhere, but mostly at the factory that was the main employer for the village, the brass factory, my father’s workplace, which regulated the entire life of the village.
* * *
Each morning she turned on the TV. Every morning was the same. When I woke up, the first image that came to mind was that of those two boys. Their faces engraved themselves in my thoughts, and, inexorably, the more I focused on their faces, the more the details—their noses, their mouths, their eyes—escaped me. All that remained was my fear.
It was impossible for me to concentrate, and my mother could not—by which I mean, was really not in a position to—imagine that anyone could fail to be interested by the TV. TV had always been part of her world. We had four of them in a relatively small house, one in each bedroom and one in the only common room, and whether or not you liked television was not a question that anyone ever asked. Television was something, like language or the ways we dressed, which was just taken for granted. We didn’t buy the television sets; my father got them from the dump and then repaired them. When, later, during high school, I end up living alone in town and my mother sees that I don’t have a television, she will think that I’ve lost my mind—her voice betraying real anxiety, the palpable uneasiness of someone who finds herself face-to-face with someone who seems crazy But what do you do with yourself all day without a TV?
She tried to make sure I would watch TV just like my brothers and sisters did Turn on the cartoons, they’ll make you feel better, it’s relaxing before school. I don’t know why school gets you so worked up anyway, it’s not worth it. Get ahold of yourself.
* * *
In the end, these ongoing morning panic attacks made my mother worried and she called the doctor.
It was decided that I would take a few drops of medicine a couple of times a day to calm me down. (My father made fun of this Just like in the loony bin.) My mother would say, when people asked her, that I had always been the nervous type. Maybe I was even hyperactive. It was just school, she couldn’t see why I let it get to me so much. She would tell me that my being so nervous, my fidgeting in my seat, made her nervous, so she’d smoke even more in our little common living area while I tried to focus on the cartoons. She’d cough, more and more violently, I’m gonna kick the bucket if this keeps up. I’m telling you, I can hear death knocking at the door.
* * *
Sometimes I’d start trembling, shivers that went from the base of my spine up to my neck, movements that were imperceptible to my mother but during which it felt to me as if I were in the grip of irrepressible convulsions. I thought I could get time under my control. I would carefully program each morning task. (Go to the bathroom, make some hot chocolate—with water if there was no milk—brush your teeth—not every day—wash yourself, but no shower, my mother had warned me. She told me over and over We can’t take a bath every day, can’t take showers, there’s not enough hot water. The water heater’s tiny and there’s seven of us, it’s a lot, it’s too much for an itsy-bitsy little tank. And no fancy lip, don’t you dare start talking back to me. You don’t talk back to your mother, you do what she says. End of story. Don’t go telling me you just go refill the tank after a bath and turn the heater on, I can already hear you thinking it, you think you’re so clever. I know how you are. But just you think how much water costs, how much electricity costs, you know we can’t afford it—and then the joke that my mother couldn’t help making: There are bills to pay, and I don’t have a boyfriend at the electric company. On days when we did take baths, my mother insisted that we not empty the tub when we were done, so that all five kids could use the same water and not waste electricity. The last person—and I did everything I could not to be last—was stuck with water that was dirty brown.)
Each of these dai
ly tasks I would execute as slowly as possible. Anything that might put off my arrival in the schoolyard and then in the hallway. Every day I hoped, but never really believed, that I might miss the school bus. It was a little lie I told myself.
A few times a month my mother let me skip school so I could help her with chores around the house Tomorrow you’re not going to school, you’re staying home to help me clean the house because I am sick of doing all this housework on my own, I have to do everything. I’m tired of being everyone’s slave in this dump. She’d also let me stay home if I helped my father chop wood for the winter and stack the logs in a shed he and my uncle had built for exactly that purpose—northern winters, long and hard ones, required several weeks of preparations because houses were poorly insulated and were heated with firewood—or if I took care of my little brother and sister, Rudy and Vanessa, so she could spend the evening at our next-door neighbor’s house. She’d come home with the woman from next door, both drunk and making lesbian jokes I’m gonna eat you out real good you dirty girl. Missing school was my reward.
* * *
Another of our neighbors, Anaïs, who always wanted to be nice to me, would come over so we could walk to the bus stop together. I couldn’t find a way to make her understand that I hated her doing this. She forced me to hurry, whereas all I wanted was to walk as slowly as possible, making a few detours. Because she was a girl, it wasn’t such a big deal for Anaïs to be friends with me. Girls can usually talk to fags and get away with it. The few friends I had back then were all girls. It was either Amélie or Anaïs that I’d meet at the bus stop or in the fields around the village where we’d play for a few hours. My mother found this disturbing (little boys should have buddies to play soccer with instead of playing with girls), and would try to find ways to reassure herself and everyone around us. And yet I could still perceive something that wasn’t really uncertainty, but more like a kind of uneasiness whenever she would talk about the subject. She would say to the other women, as if to banish her usual, private thoughts on the matter Eddy’s a real Romeo, he’s always got girls around him, never boys. They are all after him. No chance of him turning out gay, you can be sure of that. Anaïs, in any case, was a somewhat odd girl, who didn’t care at all what anyone else said. She had learned not to care from hearing over and over again what all the women said about her mother when they gathered together in the town center Your mom will bang anyone, she cheats on your dad, everyone’s seen her sleeping with the workers from the town hall construction site. She’s a whore.
* * *
We’d be passing, Anaïs and I, in front of the factory, in front of the workers having a smoke before beginning their shift, or else on their break if they were part of the shift that started during the night.
They would be there smoking in all kinds of weather, in the thick northern fog or in the rain. Even if their workday hadn’t really begun yet, their faces—their mugs—their sorry mugs would already be haggard, drooping with fatigue even though they hadn’t even started working. Still, they’d be laughing, telling their favorite jokes about women or Arabs. I would watch them, eagerly imagining myself in their place, desperate to be done with school as soon as possible, counting up—several times a week, several times a day—the number of years that separated me from my sixteenth birthday, when I could finally stop setting out for class each morning, imagining myself where they were, at the factory, earning money and no longer enrolled in school. I’d no longer see the two boys. My mom couldn’t hide her annoyance when I’d tell her I wanted to quit school as soon as I turned sixteen Just so you know, there is no way you are dropping out, ’cause if you do they’ll cut my benefits and that’s just not going to happen.
If, on those days, her most spontaneous reaction came from the daily desperation (money worries) she had to deal with, she would also, from time to time, let me know that she really wanted me to continue my schooling, to go further than she did, she’d practically beg I don’t want you to have to kill yourself with work the way I do, I just messed around back then and now I’m sorry, got knocked up at seventeen. Then the only thing for me was to work my tail off, that’s all I’ve done and I’ve never amounted to anything. No traveling, nothing. I’ve spent my whole life doing housework, stuck at home, cleaning up my kids’ shit or else the shit of the old people I take care of. I screwed up my life. She thought that she had made mistakes, that without meaning to she had closed the door on a better future, on a life that was easier and more comfortable, one far from the factory and from the constant stress (no: the constant state of anxiety) of making sure she didn’t mismanage the family budget—where a small misstep could mean no food on the table at the end of the month. She didn’t understand that her trajectory, what she would call her mistakes, fit in perfectly with a whole set of logical mechanisms that were practically laid down in advance and nonnegotiable. She didn’t realize that her family, her parents, her brothers and sisters, even her children, pretty much everyone in the village, had had the same problems, and what she called mistakes were, in fact, no more and no less than the perfect realization of the normal course of things.
Portrait of My Mother from the Stories She Told
My mother would spend a lot of time telling me stories about various episodes from her life or my father’s.
She found her own life boring and she spoke to me as a way of filling the void of her existence, which was no more than a series of boring moments and exhausting forms of work. For a long time she was a stay-at-home mother, as she would have me write for her on official forms. She felt insulted, sullied by the fact that my birth certificate said none on the line for mother’s occupation. When my younger brother and sister were old enough to take care of themselves, she wanted to get a job. My father found the idea demeaning, as if it would call his masculinity into question; he was the one who should be bringing home the paycheck. It was something she had a fierce desire to do, no matter that the only lines of work open to her were hard: the factory, housework, or working the register at a supermarket. She fought for what she wanted. In a way, she was also struggling against herself, against an elusive, unnameable force that encouraged her to think it was degrading for a woman to work when her husband had been forced to take unemployment. (My father had lost his job at the factory, I’ll come back to this.) After much discussion, my father finally agreed and she began working as a home aide helping elderly people bathe, getting around the village from house to house on her rusty bicycle, wearing a red parka of my father’s from a few years back, now moth-eaten and of course (given my father’s size) too big for her. The other women of the village laughed at the sight Look how stylish she is, that Mrs. Bellegueule, in her great big parka. When on one occasion it turned out that she had earned more than my father, a bit more than a thousand euros for her and a bit less than seven hundred for him, he couldn’t take it anymore. He told her there was no point and that she should quit, that we didn’t need the extra money. Seven hundred euros for seven of us would be enough.
* * *
She spoke to me a lot, in long monologues; I could have left someone else in my place and she would have gone on with her story. All she wanted was a pair of ears to listen to her, and she ignored anything I said. I would turn on the television while she was talking to me. It didn’t faze her; she just went on talking. I’d turn up the volume. It made no difference. My father couldn’t stand it anymore Give it a rest, you silly cow, don’t you ever shut up? She’d drone on just like all the other women to be found in the village center, to the point that a person might have thought that there was some kind of contagious disease they had all caught from each other. When they would all gather there in front of the school, a string of endless tirades would arise, one on top of another, with no one actually listening.
* * *
Here is one story she often told to anyone who would listen: Before she had me, she lost a child. It was unexpected, she
lost the baby in the bathroom, just like that, with no warning, one afternoon when she was trying to clean the house, where it was impossible ever to get rid of all the dust—because of the nearby fields and the tractors going back and forth all day, leaving mountains of dirt, the same dirt that sifted into the house, the crumbling walls of the house, and the despair in my mother’s voice No matter what I do, it never gets clean, why bother cleaning a place as run-down as this dump anyway.
* * *
He just fell into the shitter.
It was a story that, years later, she got a laugh out of telling. The laughter on her face accentuated her aging, yellowed skin, her deep, rough smoker’s voice, a voice that was also too loud, so the others told her (and sometimes my father let me tell her too) Stop shouting! Put a sock in it, lady! Zip it, zip it good.
My mother likes a good laugh. This was a point of pride with her I like to have a good time, I don’t pretend to be a lady, I am what I am, ordinary.
I don’t know how she felt when she said things like this to me. I don’t know if she was lying, if she was suffering. But why else repeat it so often, like some kind of justification? Maybe what she meant was that obviously she wasn’t a lady because there was no way she could be. To be ordinary, as if pride were not the first manifestation of shame. She even said as much from time to time, Look, when your job is wiping old people’s asses, that’s the expression she’d use, I make my living wiping old people’s asses, old people with one foot in the grave (then the inevitable joke, always the same one, at this moment of the story All it would take is a heat wave or a flu epidemic and I’d be out of a job), every evening up to my elbows in shit in order to earn enough to keep food in the refrigerator, the fridge (and all the regrets my mother couldn’t stop herself from expressing Five kids, I should’ve stopped earlier, seven mouths to feed, it’s too much). The difficulties she had speaking French correctly because of her disagreeable, humiliating experience at school After your brother came along, I couldn’t manage anymore, and in any case it wasn’t any fun for me. She didn’t always say I could have gone further with my education, I could’ve gotten a credential, she would say, now and then, that in any case school had never really interested her. It took me a long time to understand that she wasn’t being incoherent or contradictory, but rather that it was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values—values I’d adopted precisely in order to construct a self in opposition to my parents, in opposition to my family—that incoherence appears to exist only when you fail to reconstruct the logic that lies behind any given discourse or practice. I came to understand that many different modes of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, as she would say, she’d made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids, and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other.
The End of Eddy Page 4
