The End of Eddy

by Édouard Louis

  *   *   *

  I did as I was told. I didn’t know how to refuse. I couldn’t manage to pretend any longer that I was unwilling or disgusted. My body left me no choice but to do whatever they might ask. I ran off to my bedroom to pilfer the rings my sister kept hidden in a little purple jewel box. When I returned, the boys were still there in the shed and I said Got ’em. Show me Bruno commanded. He gave one to me and one to Fabien. You two will play the women and me and Stéphane are gonna play the men. They didn’t seem nervous anymore. It was more like they were ready to try out a new kind of game, a naughty one, but still just a game kids play, like the days on which Bruno would amuse himself by torturing his mother’s chickens. I remember chickens hanged with fishing line, chickens letting out indescribable, inimitable cries of horror, chickens burned alive, and even one chicken that spent a soccer match serving as a ball. I realized that I was being propelled into this situation by everything I was made of, by all the desire that had been repressed for so long. I was burning with excitement.

  I lay facedown on the ground, or, more exactly, facedown in the sawdust that carpeted the floor of the shed and that got sucked into my mouth each time I took a breath. My cousin pulled down my pants and handed me one of the rings I had brought Hey, put the ring on, or else it’s no good.

  I felt his penis hard against my buttocks and then inside me. He gave me directions Spread them, lift your butt a little. I obeyed his orders with the sense that I was in the process of turning into what I had always been. At every thrust he made, I got a little harder, and just like when they watched the movie for the first time, the giggles that they made during the first few thrusting motions quickly changed into imitations of the moans of the porno actors, and their lines that just then seemed like the most beautiful words I had ever heard Take it, take my cock, you know you like it. At the same time my cousin was taking possession of my body, Bruno was doing the same to Fabien, just a few inches away. I was breathing in the smell of naked bodies and wishing I could turn that smell into a substance so that I could eat it, and make it more real. I wanted it to be a poison that could intoxicate me and make me disappear, with my last memory being the smell of those bodies, ones that already bore the marks of their social class, where beneath the smooth, milky skin of children, adult muscles were starting to form, already developed because of the time spent helping their fathers chop and stack wood, because of all the physical activity, the endless soccer games played day after day. Bruno was older than us, fifteen at that time, whereas we were only nine or ten, so his penis was massive in comparison to ours and surrounded by brown hair. He already had a man’s body. As I watched him penetrating Fabien I was overtaken with jealousy. I dreamed of killing Fabien and my cousin Stéphane so that I could have Bruno’s body all to myself, his strong arms, his legs with their bulging muscles. I even dreamed of Bruno being dead so that he could never, ever get away from me, so that his body would always be mine.

  *   *   *

  This was the first in a whole series of afternoons where we would get together to reenact scenes from the movie and then scenes from other movies we managed to see. We had to be careful not to be caught by our mothers, who would come out into the backyard a few times a day to pull up weeds in the garden, dig up a few vegetables, or get wood from the shed. When one of them approached, somehow we found the time to pull our clothes back on and to pretend to be playing at something else.

  *   *   *

  We worked ourselves into a kind of frenzy. Not a day would go by when I wouldn’t meet up with Bruno, or my cousin Stéphane, or Fabien, and now not only in the shed but in any likely place, in order, as we would say, to play man and woman, behind the trees at the back of the yard, in Bruno’s attic, in the streets. Once my hands had taken on the smell of their genitals, I wouldn’t wash them; I’d spend hours sniffing at them, like an animal. They smelled like what I was.

  *   *   *

  During this period, the idea that I really was a girl in a boy’s body, as everyone had always told me, came to seem more and more real. Little by little I had become an invert. I was swimming in confusion. Meeting with the boys every day in the shed in order to undress them, to penetrate them or be penetrated by them, encouraged me to say to myself that some kind of an error had occurred—I knew that mistakes like this could be made. I had always heard, from all quarters, that girls liked boys. So if I liked boys, then surely I was a girl. I dreamed of my body changing, of one day being surprised to notice that my penis had disappeared. I imagined it fading away during the night and being replaced by a girl’s sex the next morning. I never saw a shooting star without wishing that I’d stop being a boy. There was not a single page of my journal on which I didn’t make some reference to my secret desire to become a girl—and then the fear, which was always present, that my mother would discover this journal.

  *   *   *

  Then one day it all ended.

  It was my mother. She had no way of knowing that she would indirectly contribute to the multiplication of insults at school, to the beatings. I was in the shed with the three others. Stéphane was lying on top of me, and I was wearing the sign of femininity, the ring on my index finger. Bruno was penetrating Fabien. My mother appeared. We hadn’t seen her approach, but she was there carrying a glass dish filled with grain to feed the poultry. When I discovered her there, in front of us—too late to notice the moment of rupture, the second in which she had been obliged to change from a woman feeding her chickens, a task that was part of the daily routine, into a mother who is watching her son, just ten years old, being sodomized by his own cousin, and she shared my father’s opinions about homosexuality, even if she expressed them less frequently—when I noticed her she was already standing frozen, unable to make the slightest sound or the smallest gesture. She was staring at me in the way one might imagine in a situation like this, a perfectly common one, really, the situation of a person who, with no warning, stumbles across a scene so unthinkable that she stands there unable to react, jaw hanging open, eyes popping out of their sockets.

  For several seconds neither one of us was able to do anything at all. Then she dropped the glass dish, which broke against a pile of logs. She didn’t look at it, didn’t lower her eyes toward the dish, the way you do when something breaks. Her gaze never left mine; I don’t remember what that gaze held. Disgust, perhaps, or anguish—I can no longer say. I was too blinded by my own shame and by the idea that suddenly popped into my head that she might tell everyone everything, my father, his buddies, the women in the village whose voices I could already hear Everyone always said he was a little off, the Bellegueule kid, that he wasn’t like the others, what with all those gestures he’d make when he’d be talking, that kind of stuff, everyone knew there was a little bit of a fag in him.

  *   *   *

  My mother left without saying a word. I got dressed quickly. I wanted to get home as fast as I could, desperate to keep her from saying anything to anyone else. To beg her, if I had to.

  It was already too late.

  When I opened the door my mother was there. She had the same frozen expression on her face as five minutes before, as if it would be paralyzed for the rest of her life, as if the shock had disfigured her forever. My father was standing next to her, wearing a similar expression. He knew everything. He walked up to me slowly, then came the blow, a powerful slap across my face, with his other hand gripping my T-shirt so hard that it ripped, another slap, a third, and then another and another, with not a word being said. Suddenly Don’t you ever do that again. You ever do that again and things will go really bad for you.

  After the Shed

  For the next few weeks I didn’t hear any more about what had happened in the shed. I hoped it was just going to be forgotten. And yet the omnipresence of it felt crushing: every time my parents looked at me it was a warning; everything about their tone of voice, every one of their gestures, told me to k
eep quiet. It was not to be mentioned. No one was to be told what had happened, ever; to talk about it would be a way of making it happen again.

  So when it did suddenly reappear, it wasn’t as if it had left me. Still, I wasn’t expecting it. I assumed the shame we all shared, me, my parents, and my buddies, was too powerful, that it would prevent any one of us from mentioning it and so protect me. I was wrong.

  *   *   *

  The two boys came up to me in the corridor. It wasn’t exactly every morning that they did this. Some days they didn’t show up: they were frequently absent from school; like me and everybody else, they’d use any excuse to skip school. Other times, I would be so scared and really so tired of this endless game, as if it had always been nothing more than a game, that I didn’t want to take part anymore. Not to go to that hallway, not to wait for them there, not to get beaten up, the same way some people will just give up everything, family, friends, work, and decide that the life they’ve been leading no longer makes any sense, no longer believing in a life that was only being held together by belief. And yet I kept on going back to the library despite everything, despite the fear of seeing them show up, and my anxiety over what kinds of retaliation the next day might bring.

  *   *   *

  They seemed especially worked up. I had learned to read the expressions on their faces. After two years of being together in this hallway on a daily basis, I knew them better than anyone else. I could tell on which days they were tired, on which days less so. I swear that there were times when one of them seemed sad, and I would feel sorry for him, worried about him. I would spend the day wondering, trying to figure out what might be wrong. When they spat in my face, I could have told you what they’d been eating. By now I knew them really well.

  *   *   *

  They smiled and wanted to know if it was true, the new rumor that was going around. The thing everyone was talking about, the main subject of conversation of all the kids at the school. They wanted to know—and they almost didn’t believe it, it was too good to be true, exactly what they’d always hoped for—if in fact my cousin, yes, my own cousin, had done to me what he said he had. It’s your cousin who snitched on you, he told everyone. He said that one afternoon in the shed, when he went off in a corner to urinate, I went over to him and rubbed his penis with my fingertips. In his version, as told to me by the two boys, I pulled down my pants too, and rubbed up against him, and then I got down on my knees and took his penis in my mouth. He had told everyone that after that he had buttfucked me, that I had liked it and moaned just like a girl and that I had even brought along a ring to pretend to be a girl.

  *   *   *

  The tall redhead grabbed my throat to make me answer right away. His cold fingers on the back of my neck, the smile on my face, fear, the confession that was expected. My cousin’s making shit up. He’s a little weird, that’s why they put him in all those remedial classes with the specialneeds kids at school. I’m no fucking sissy. I wasn’t fooling anyone. Nothing would have put them off in any case, even if the whole story had been untrue. My cousin’s story fit the image they had of me too well. He got annoyed Stop lying, you fucking fruit, we know it’s true.

  *   *   *

  He didn’t spit in my face. That morning, he spat on the sleeve of my jacket, a greenish gob so thick it just sat there. The short one with the hunched back did the same thing, on the same sleeve (a thin blue running jacket with black stripes that I wore in winter; I had lost my coat and my parents weren’t able to buy me a new one Sort it out yourself, it’s your fault for losing it). They laughed. I looked at the gobs of spit stuck on my jacket, thinking at least they had spared me by spitting there and not in my face. And then the tall redhead said to me Eat the loogies, faggot. I smiled, again, just like I always did. Not that I thought they were joking, but I hoped, by smiling, to shift the situation and turn it into a joke. He repeated Eat the loogies, faggot, and hurry up about it. I refused—normally I didn’t, I almost never refused, but I didn’t want to eat the gobs of spit; it would have made me vomit. I said I didn’t want to. One of them grabbed my arm and the other grabbed my head. They forced my face down onto the spittle, ordering me to Lick it, faggot, lick it. I slowly stuck my tongue out and licked their spit, whose odor took over my mouth. With each lick of my tongue they would encourage me in a soft, paternal voice (hands gripping my head) That’s it, like that, go on, that’s it. I continued licking the jacket while they went on giving their orders, until the gobs had disappeared. Then they left.

  *   *   *

  From that day forward, the first waking minutes of every day became more and more unreal. I woke up feeling drunk. The rumor had spread and at school I got looked at more and more. I would hear faggot more frequently in the hallways, and find little notes in my book bag Die you queer. In the village, where till now I had mostly been spared by the grown-ups, insults cropped up for the first time.

  *   *   *

  There was one summer’s evening when I was playing soccer with a few other boys in the middle of the street: sweaty T-shirts and an air thick with tension, as in all the improvised matches, where we’d mark out an imaginary playing field by laying our backpacks and sweaters on the ground. I was on a team with Stéphane and a few others.

  Fabien, Kevin, Steven, and Jordan, my buddies, would get annoyed by my incompetence and would lash out at the first opportunity. Are you fucking trying to make us lose, you can’t play worth shit. Next time no way are you on our team. I wasn’t the only person to whom those kinds of things would be said. Being irritated and cursing were part of the game.

  On this evening, however, which was a few weeks after Stéphane had told everyone what had happened, albeit reinventing certain key parts of it, things went differently. One of them said the kind of thing you wish you could forget, and then forget forgetting so that it would disappear entirely—that I’d be better off spending time playing soccer than screwing with my cousin. You should spend more time on soccer and less getting your ass fucked by Stéphane. Even my cousin laughed at this, which mystified me. Why had Stéphane told everyone this story? Why hadn’t he felt ashamed or been afraid of being made fun of? Why, on this particular evening when we were all playing soccer together, but also on all the other evenings when these same insults would resurface, why were none of the insults, none of the hatred, directed at him?

  There had been two of us, four, really, including Bruno and Fabien. But no one ever mentioned that they’d been in the woodshed too. There was nothing I could say, for fear of the consequences, and in any case, I knew that informing on them would have done no good, that they would have been spared, just like Stéphane. Logically speaking, he should have been called a faggot too. But the crime was not having done something, it was being something. And, especially, looking like one of them.

  Becoming

  I remember less the smell of the rapeseed fields than I do the burnt smell that would pervade the village streets when the farmers let manure slowly dry up in the sun. I would cough a lot due to my asthma. A layer of something formed at the back of my throat and on my palate, as if the manure that had evaporated somehow condensed inside my mouth, covering it with a thin gray film.

  I remember less the milk still warm from the cow’s udders, brought by my mother from the farm across the way, than I do the evenings when we didn’t have enough to eat, and when my mother would say Tonight we’re having milk, one of poverty’s neologisms.

  I don’t think the others—my brothers and sisters, my buddies—suffered as much from village life. But for me, because I couldn’t be one of them, I had to reject that whole world. The smoke was unbreathable because of the beatings; the hunger was unbearable because of my father’s hatred.

  *   *   *

  I had to get away.

  *   *   *

  But early on it doesn’t occur to you to get away, because you don’t know t
hat there’s anywhere out there to escape to. You don’t even understand that flight is an option. For a while you try to be like others around you, and so I tried to be like everyone else.

  When I was twelve those two boys left the school. The tall redhead began studying for a vocational certificate as a painter, and the short one with the hunchback dropped out. He had waited until he was sixteen so his parents wouldn’t lose their welfare supplement. Their departure was a new beginning for me. People still insulted me and made fun of me, but life at school changed completely the day the two of them were no longer around (a new obsession: not to go to the local high school, not to meet up with them again there).

  It seemed necessary that I stop behaving the way I was behaving, the way I had always behaved. I would have to watch the gestures I made while talking, I’d have to make my voice sound deeper, to devote myself exclusively to masculine activities. More soccer, different television programs, different CDs to listen to. Every morning in the bathroom getting ready I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again so many times that it lost all meaning, becoming nothing but a series of syllables, of sounds. Then I’d stop and start over again Today I’m gonna be a tough guy. I remember it because I would always repeat exactly the same sentence, in the same way as you repeat a prayer, in the same words, the exact same words Today I’m gonna be a tough guy. (And now I’m crying as I write these lines; I’m crying because I find that sentence hideous and ridiculous, that sentence that went everywhere with me for several years and was, I don’t think I’m exaggerating, at the center of my being.)

  Each day was a new ordeal: people don’t change as easily as that. I wasn’t the tough guy that I wanted to be. And yet I had understood that living a lie was the only chance I had of bringing a new truth into existence. Becoming a different person meant thinking of myself as a different person, believing I was something I wasn’t so that gradually, step by step, I could become it. (The calls to conform would come later Who does he think he is?)