The End of Eddy

by Édouard Louis

  *   *   *

  After their argument, Sylvain took the car and left without the kids, anger agitating every fiber in his body. A few miles down the road, he was stopped by the police.

  *   *   *

  My grandmother again: Yeah well of course the police knew what was up when they pulled him over. It was all a setup. They didn’t say anything right away, they pretended it was a routine stop, something unrelated. Pretending they didn’t know who he was. Asking him to breathe into the Breathalyzer, and when he did, they must have been relieved, ’cause now they had another pretext for arresting him. It wouldn’t have mattered, they would have done it anyway, but now they had an extra reason, aggravating circumstances they call it. Then because he was really living it up, he had smoked some pot, and cops aren’t idiots, they’re used to this, it’s their job after all. They could smell it right away. They did a blood alcohol test and you know Sylvain, he could throw them back. He could drink anyone under the table. Now I can’t really know for sure, but I bet the cops were taking their own time and letting him sit there and stew, telling themselves he’d just get more scared if they made him wait. The one who was doing the talking, I think it was the chief, asked Sylvain for his license and registration and then went back to his squad car to do a computer check, on that little computer they have in all the cop cars now so that they can recognize people right away. Identify them.

  *   *   *

  Then Sylvain just freaked out. He just pressed the accelerator down all the way like he was going to escape. So what did the cop do? He jumped right in front of the car, I guess to stop him from running off. I’ve got no idea what went through Sylvain’s head, something snapped, he went crazy like dogs can sometimes do when usually they’re gentle as can be and then one day they attack the little girl who’s just sitting there quietly playing with her dolls in the living room, and they rip her face off and either the girl’s dead or her face is deformed for the rest of her life, and often enough in cases like that the dog knows the little girl really well, it’s the family dog, and they’ve spent hours and hours together, and the little mutt was the nicest thing in the world. And then the parents are trying to get the dog to calm down but in cases like that you can try whatever you want, there’s nothing you can do, not a thing. Can you imagine that, the dog you raised, the dog you fed, the dog you petted over and over again, you see it right there in front of you and then one fine day with no warning at all, there it is trying to eat your kids. You throw yourself on the dog, you hit it as hard as you can, I hear that when you are really angry or really afraid you are way stronger, ten times stronger, you shout, you cry, anyway, I’m just trying to imagine something that’s never happened to me thank goodness. But the more you hit the dog, the more it sinks its teeth into your little girl’s neck, and there’s blood all over the room, it’s squirting everywhere, and your little girl is trying to scream but she can’t, you can just hear some air coming out of her mouth, I think you call that a rattle, and so then, what do I know, I’m just trying to imagine it, so then you run to the kitchen to find a butcher’s knife and you come back and stab the damn mutt. It might seem easy to kill someone like that, but really, I know this from when I kill my chickens to cook them, really it’s hard. You really have to press on the knife so that it goes deep into the flesh, you have to be strong. You have to want to do it, let me tell you. And there you are stabbing the dog over and over but it’s too late, ’cause when you’ve finally managed to kill the damn thing, you realize your little girl’s half dead too. That’s two dead bodies to deal with.

  Anyway that’s not what I was trying to say to you, that’s not what I wanted to say. Sylvain. He presses down on the accelerator, the cop gets in front of the car to stop him from driving off, but something snaps in Sylvain’s head and he takes off, he accelerates heading straight for the policeman and he hits him. The cop flies up over the windshield. It’s okay, he’s not seriously hurt, he gets straight up and he and his colleagues begin to chase Sylvain, just like the chase scenes you see on TV. But my little man knows how to handle himself, so he gets away. He loses them.

  *   *   *

  They found Sylvain a few hours later at a construction site for a new housing estate. He knew he would be arrested in the end. He went out to the site with a baseball bat that he always had in his car in case one of the boys to whom he owed money—drug dealing—snuck up on him and attacked him to get his money back. He had broken all the windows one by one, his cries resonating in the still night air. He had broken them all, tried to set things on fire and yelling louder and louder, so that you might have believed he was trying to let the neighbors (and through them the police) know he was there. He didn’t want to go to jail, to be sent back inside, just because he’d failed to respect the terms of his furlough. He wanted to do something to really deserve it. When the police arrived, they found him surrounded by shards of glass and pieces of the bricks and tiles that he had thrown against the walls. He had spray-painted F.T.P. in giant letters on the wall. He didn’t resist when they put the handcuffs on him.

  *   *   *

  Sylvain appeared in front of the judge. He looked very calm, just as when the police had arrested him. Less agitated than one might have thought and than he might have been before. The prosecutor asked him the usual questions: why he had done it, why in that exact way, questions about his past, his children, his private life As for your father whom you never knew and your mother who abandoned you, do you think that all of that, that all those details from your past, had anything to do with your delinquent behavior? There were other questions he couldn’t understand because of the language used, not just the legal language, but the language of individuals who had some education Can you affirm that your acts are imputable to external influences of some kind or is it your feeling that you were in full control of yourself during this incident? My cousin stammered that he hadn’t understood the question and he asked for it to be repeated. He wasn’t embarrassed, he didn’t feel the violence the prosecutor was exercising, the class violence that had excluded him from the world of education, the violence that had, in the end, led him to the courtroom where he now stood. In fact he must have thought that the prosecutor was ridiculous. That he spoke like a faggot.

  *   *   *

  The final question in the series the prosecutor asked him was—and this was a mere formality since everyone was sure they knew—what he had meant to say with F.T.P. My family had been discussing it ever since the arrest You know it’s true he could never stand the cops, he really just hated the sight of them. The prosecutor asked him why he hated the police so much, why he had made a point of going to his car for a can of spray paint while he was in the middle of ransacking the construction site (fragments of glass, brick, and slate) so that he could spray F.T.P., which, as everyone could tell, meant Fuck the Police, on the wall, since that was an act that required premeditation and—consequently—didn’t seem consistent with the deranged state suggested by Sylvain’s behavior at the construction site. But Mr. Prosecutor, sir, you’ve got it all wrong. F.T.P. doesn’t stand for Fuck the Police. It stands for Fuck the Prosecutor. That affront to the prosecutor’s dignity still makes people in my family shudder when they tell the story He really had balls, that one. He went back to jail with a sentence of six years. Then he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. He refused treatment. He was found dead in his prison cell one morning. He wasn’t even thirty years old.

  *   *   *

  (I went back to spend two days in the village where I grew up to gather some information about my family. My plan was to see my grandmother and to ask her questions about Sylvain. I met with her in her new home in a little low-income housing development, where all the houses are exactly alike. She had moved out of the house she had always lived in and sold it to my sister. This was only the second time I had visited her in the new place. The first time I visited it was clean, bu
t this time I had the sense that my grandmother was slowly taking the place over. It smelled filthy; it smelled of filthy dogs—and she did have a small dog with her in her house of three hundred square feet, whereas all the dogs from her old house had since died. I don’t quite know how to describe this odor of filthy dogs, but you often smell it around town, including at my mother’s house. She offered me something to drink and I said yes. She gave me a dirty glass. I remained silent. I didn’t dare say anything. I took the glass into which she poured a little strawberry syrup. Then she went back to the kitchen, where she rinsed out an empty bottle of detergent and then filled it up with water. I realized she was going to use it as a pitcher. I tried not to let my disgust show, and said nothing when she poured a little of the water into my glass, horrified by the flakes of detergent that were in it. For two hours I asked her questions about our family, but never took a sip. She kept throwing furtive and questioning glances toward my glass.)

  BOOK II

  FAILURE AND FLIGHT

  The Shed

  This happened not long after the two boys first hit me. A few months later at the most.

  *   *   *

  It all began on one of those days we spent in our neighbor’s woodshed. That afternoon Bruno had suggested we all go to his house: his parents weren’t home. He suggested we go into his room and watch a movie; he was quite insistent You’ve got to see this, it’s something else. We did whatever he said because we were five or six years younger than him, and he had us call him the boss.

  *   *   *

  He told us to sit on his bed, on a mattress that had been white once, or off-white, but was now brown and orange with dirt, producing clouds of dust when we sat down, and had a shut-in kind of smell, like a damp closet. He disappeared for a few seconds. When he came back he had a videocassette in his hand, a pornographic film A porno movie I stole from my dad, he doesn’t know it, ’cause if he did he’d kill me for sure. He suggested we watch it together. The other two, my cousin Stéphane and Fabien, Bruno’s other neighbor, agreed. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to. I said it was impossible, we couldn’t do that. I added that it seemed weird to me, and even kind of perverted, for guys to watch a porno movie together. My cousin then made a suggestion as if he were amused by it, in a voice just playful enough that if we reacted badly, he could claim to have been joking, that his suggestion had been meant as a joke, that he would never seriously have gone through with it, but also with just enough seriousness and authority in his tone that we would understand that he actually meant it, suggesting that we all masturbate together while we watched the film. There was a moment of silence. Everyone was observing everyone else, trying to figure out how to react. No one wanted to risk giving an answer that set them apart, or made the others laugh at them.

  I don’t remember who risked it first and accepted my cousin’s offer, which led to general agreement. But I couldn’t accept I really don’t wanna see your guys’ dicks, I’m not a fucking faggot.

  *   *   *

  I stayed away from anything that seemed even a little bit gay. One night, we were at the municipal sports ground—in those days, before the renovations that would come later, it was really little more than a large expanse of green grass with a few rusty goalposts rising up out of it—where we’d climb over the fence to get into it at night when we weren’t supposed to be there. We’d go there from the bus stop to drink our beers. On that night, my cousin Stéphane, who had been drinking, began to say crazy things about himself and about how strong he was I’m a monster, you guys, a beast, I’ll kill anyone who touches me. Then he took off all his clothes, piece by piece, in order to show off the powerful physique he was talking about, until finally he was totally naked. In the village, men would do this with some regularity when they were drunk, my paralyzed uncle was one example before his accident, or Arnaud and Jean, who would end up totally naked at the end of the annual municipal celebration, standing on top of the row of tables that had been assembled so that the villagers could socialize together around platters of french fries and grilled sausages. The grilling had been done by Fabien’s father, Merguez, who got his nickname because he took charge of the grilling during the village celebrations and at the flea markets. Fabien also got called Merguez: nicknames were hereditary.

  *   *   *

  The others were all laughing He is so shit-faced, he’s feeling no pain, barking at the fucking moon. My cousin was running from one end of the field to the other, naked, showing off his penis, whose remarkable size made me uncomfortable. Then the other boys, laughing wildly, joined the game and started getting undressed. They were all running around, playing with themselves and with the other boys. Their penises would flop back and forth from one thigh to the other along with the movements of their bodies, slapping against one leg, then the other, then their bellies. They would rub up against each other, skin to skin, as if they were having sex. Boys enjoy laughing about things like that.

  *   *   *

  One of them asked me why I didn’t join in. I answered in a voice loud enough to be heard by all of them that I wasn’t into these sorts of games, and once again, as with the film that Bruno had found, I said this kind of thing makes me want to puke, and that as I looked at them, in the state they were in, all naked, I couldn’t help thinking they were behaving like a bunch of fags. The truth was that the display of all these bits of flesh was driving me a little crazy. I was using words like fags, fairies, queers to keep my distance from them. I used these words against the others in the hope that they would stop invading every inch of my own body.

  I remained seated on the ground, disapproving of their behavior. Pretending to be gay was their way of showing that they really weren’t. You would really have not to be a fag to be able to spend an evening pretending to be one without running the risk of attracting insults.

  *   *   *

  What I thought didn’t matter much. Decisions were, as was always and everywhere the case, the prerogative of men, and I wasn’t one of them. The decision had to be made by Bruno and the others. I don’t remember if they told me to be quiet or if that process of silencing functioned without anyone really noticing it. They hadn’t listened to me and they put the cassette into the VCR. When the first images appeared they joked around a little, but then the agitation slowly began to shift in nature. Their breathing became more and more halting. Bodies sweaty, eyes glued to the screen, eagerness perceptible on everyone’s lips, which trembled slightly, especially at the corners of their mouths. They unzipped their pants and started playing with themselves. I can still hear the moans, real moans of pleasure. I can still see the dampness on their cocks.

  I said I had to leave and that I didn’t want to be part of this game, it was too messed up. I didn’t say that I was unsettled; I tried to keep that hidden, to display composure. When I got home I broke down in tears, torn between the desire the other boys had provoked in me and the disgust I felt toward myself, toward my own desiring body.

  *   *   *

  I went back and spent time with them as soon as the next day. We didn’t talk about the movie right away.

  We got together in the shed just like on the other days, to make wooden weapons by carving up the logs that were there. On this particular day, my cousin interrupted the noise of the saws and the hammers Damn that was hot, that movie we watched, fucking hot (my heart is beating so loudly as he says these words that I have the impression that each heartbeat could be fatal, that my heart won’t be able to tolerate such beating much longer); he continued Too fucking bad that we can’t do the same things the actors were doing. He waited for a few seconds, then went back to work (on his log), before adding In any case we don’t have enough girls to do it, and the girls around here are too uptight anyway (sound of a hammer, then a heartbeat, sound of a hammer, then a heartbeat; the two together combine in an infernal symphony).

  *   *   *

&
nbsp; When, shortly after that, he asked the question, it came almost out of nowhere. My mother would have said It just appeared, like when all of a sudden you need to pee. My cousin suggested We could try the same things they do in the movie. The reactions were less reticent than one might have expected from kids who, according to their own words, and already when they were only ten years old, when they were too young ever to have seen many, or even one, hated all fags. Man, that would be totally wild, that would be awesome. Bruno asked where we could play these games, where we could do it, and then suggested we just stay there in the shed. The smiles they fixed on their faces remained as a kind of insurance that they could at any moment turn this delicate plan into a huge joke. They spoke in hushed tones, as if their words were bombs that had to be handled with extreme caution and that could, if they raised their voices, destroy them in a second. My cousin kept reassuring himself and us: it was only a game we were going to play, one afternoon only We can just do it, you know, for fun. He suggested that I go steal some jewelry from my older sister Eddy, go on, it’ll make it even better, it’ll make it more, you know, you could steal some rings from your sister, and that way the person who puts on the ring can be the one who plays the woman, who gets fucked, just for messing around, because like without the rings we might get mixed up, it’ll make it more realistic. With the rings we’ll know who’s who.