Laura
Becoming a boy necessarily involved girls. I had met Laura in the same year that the two boys left the school. She had just moved in with a foster family in a neighboring village. Her mother had decided to give her up. I don’t know if there was a specific reason for this. Maybe she was tired of being a mother, the way mine was. Maybe she was so tired of it she couldn’t go on. Laura simply told me My mom doesn’t want me no more, I wish I could live with her but she says no.
Laura had a bad reputation at school. She was one of those city girls—because she and her mother had lived there when she was young—who show up in the village and provoke hostile reactions because of the way they talk, their lifestyle, the way they dress, all of which people in the countryside find shocking. There were the women waiting in front of the school: A young girl shouldn’t be dressing like that at her age, it’s disrespectful, then the schoolkids: Laura’s a slut. These rejections made her feel more approachable to me. I had chosen her in order to complete my metamorphosis.
* * *
I first approached her through an emissary, one of her closest friends, who lived near me. I told her I liked Laura. I knew how these things were done. Everything was very codified, even with young kids like us. It was customary to write each other letters; that was the way of making contact with a girl. I grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled a few words, or rather a long declaration of love that took up several pages. I ended with a question of the type Do you want to go out with me? followed by two check boxes marked Yes and No, and I even carefully added a postscript Check the correct box for your reply. I went over to her, I crossed the schoolyard and handed her the letter I’ll be waiting for your answer. This phrase too was, along with the letter, part of the code.
* * *
Then I waited. She took her time to reply. I could see the signs of her hesitation, the way she would lower her eyes when I walked by. Days went by with no sign and no note. I knew why she didn’t reply. There were moments when I would have liked not to say, not simply to say, but to scream at Laura in the middle of the schoolyard, perched on a bench, a tree, wherever, to scream that she was a coward. That she didn’t want to have anything to do with me because accepting my offer would have meant sharing my shame.
I persevered. I wrote more letters. In the end she accepted.
She sent me a few words by way of one of her friends. We agreed to meet in the roofed-in part of the schoolyard, after school but before everyone caught their bus. This was the area where couples met at the same time each day to make out. The student monitor had tried to chase everyone away at the beginning Where do you think you are, this isn’t the place to be kissing like that, for everyone to see. This is a school but in the end she gave up.
* * *
Laura was waiting for me. She wasn’t alone. People had heard, so others were there to witness the scene. They wanted to see me kiss a girl, to see if what they had heard was true. I walked up, silent and trembling. I kissed her; I put my lips up against hers until I realized that she was trying to put her tongue in my mouth. I went along with it. The kiss lasted a few minutes—I was counting the seconds as they passed, wondering when this was going to end, and if, as a boy, I should take the initiative to end the kiss, take control, or wait. At the same time, I wanted the kiss to go on; I wanted it to be seen by the others, by as many eyes as possible, by crowds, by hordes of students. I wanted witnesses, so they’d all feel like idiots, so they’d be ashamed of the way they had covered me in opprobrium, so they’d think that all along they’d been making an absurd mistake, so they’d feel discredited and hurt by their mistake. The kiss ended and I walked off, wishing that I could run. I had found the whole exercise repulsive, foul.
* * *
On the bus I sat by myself and tried to get Laura’s saliva and her smell out of my mouth, spitting quietly under my seat, rubbing my teeth and my tongue with my fingers to scrape off the odor that had stuck to them. I dreamed of putting an end to it. I thought of telling Laura the next day that it was already over. That evening when I met up with my cousin Stéphane he started asking me questions Is it true that you’ve got a girlfriend now, that Laura’s your girl, the one everyone says is a real slut. I noticed in his question a kind of admiration, of manly complicity that I had never shared with him before. It was even better for my reputation that I was going out with a slut. She transformed me into a macho guy who had joined the set of guys-who-Laura-went-out-with. This conversation with my cousin made me change my mind.
* * *
And so I went on meeting Laura day after day before getting on the bus. More and more kids heard that we were going out. I would kiss her, and the kisses would last a long time, not only after school, but also during recesses, and in the morning when I saw her. I savored the questions others asked me about her and me, about being a couple, about our relationship.
* * *
Laura wrote me letters and I made a point of leaving them in the pocket of my pants so that my mother would find them when she did the laundry. One night when we were eating, she couldn’t stop herself from saying something. Of course the ritual was that no one spoke during dinner; we all silently watched television or else my father would get angry Put a sock in it! Zip it! My mother: So Eddy now that you found a girlfriend, you should learn to take better care of your love letters. I pretended to be embarrassed. In reality, I was doing the best I could to hide the pride and joy that were bubbling inside me. At least for one evening I had managed to banish my mother’s doubts. Her face looked relieved.
* * *
I would spend a couple of hours on the telephone with Laura every night, making sure to warn my parents that I was going out that evening, so they wouldn’t worry. My parents had no phone line and no Internet connection, as was true of the majority of people living in the village, and as is still the case for my mother as I write these lines. That meant I had to go to the phone booth near the bus stop for these calls with Laura. She would call me on her foster parents’ phone.
At the bus stop I would find my buddies. They’d say to come on over. It was so wonderful to be able to tell them that I couldn’t because I had to talk with Laura, my girl, and then spend four, even five hours in the phone booth talking to her, while they were right next door.
* * *
On one occasion when we were kissing in that roofed-in part of the schoolyard, I noticed a warmth growing at the base of my spine. I felt myself getting an erection, and the longer we held the kiss, Laura and I, the harder I got. I was experiencing desire: a desire that was manifesting itself physically, one that you couldn’t just imitate or fake. I had a hard-on, like when I was in the shed with my buddies, like the men in the porno movies that my father watched in his room, as he would let us know I’m going into my room to watch some porn, so make sure none of you bothers me. I had never felt aroused by a girl before. I thought I was succeeding at my project, that my body was giving in to my will. We are always playing roles and there is a certain truth to masks. The truth of my mask was this will to exist differently.
* * *
At last I was cured. On the way home, on the route from the school to my house, I reveled in my sense of victory, as if it were a refrain that I was listening to on a continuous loop, growing more powerful each time, not fading, since, to the contrary, I could feel my body was growing more and more excited, even wild. When I arrived home, I wondered if my parents could see the transformation (I’m cured, I’m cured). I told myself that perhaps bodies could go through sudden transformations, that perhaps my body had suddenly changed into a tough guy’s, like my brothers’. I was sure they’d see a difference.
They didn’t see a thing.
What I remember about the end of that afternoon: my heart pounding in my chest on the bus ride home (I’m cured, I’m cured), the rhythm of my breath, less, in fact, w
hat you’d call a respiratory rate and more a series of suffocations, the tiny bits of gravel that were stuck under the door to the house and that made for a high-pitched squeak as I opened it. In my enthusiasm, I greeted my father How’s it going Dad?
Shut the fuck up, I’m watching TV.
The Body’s Rebellion
Blinded by the sense of having freed myself from what had seemed up until then to be an incurable disease, I forgot for a while the body’s resistance. It hadn’t occurred to me that wanting to change, or telling lies to yourself, wouldn’t suffice to make the lies come true.
* * *
I was together in the schoolyard with Laura when Dimitri came up to us. He was one of the truly tough guys, and he practically glowed with an unmatchable prestige thanks to his behavior: insolence, bad grades, and all the rest. He spoke directly to Laura, pretending not to see me Why are you going out with Eddy, I mean why go out with a homo. Everyone’s saying the same thing, you’re a homo’s girlfriend. A smile blanketed Laura’s face, not at all a smile that was meant to hide some shame, I could tell, but rather a smile of complicity to let him know she didn’t disagree with him, that she was aware of all that; other people had already told her. I lowered my head and, for a moment, felt like I wanted to apologize to her, to tell her I was sorry that I had made her share part of my burden.
It was moments like these that showed me the trap I was in, the impossibility of really changing while I was still inside the world of my parents, of school.
* * *
The ultimate betrayal by my body happened one night when I went to a club with a few of my buddies. They were older than I was and had their driver’s licenses; they’d say Let’s go to the club and pick up some girls, let’s find us some tail tonight.
They all took the driver’s exam as soon as they were old enough, thinking it would set them free from the confines of the village, that they’d be able to travel (which they never did), to take short road trips (whereas they never went more than a few miles away to nearby nightclubs or to the ocean).
Often they would have to work for a whole summer at the factory—when they weren’t already employed there—in order to be able to afford that precious square of pink paper. They didn’t realize that this driving license was, on the contrary, one of the many things, many factors, that kept them here. That now they would simply spend their nights drinking, not at the bus stop, but in their cars—where it was warmer, with the radio playing music. I had refused to take the exam, refused to go work for a month in the factory where I had finally promised myself I would never set foot. By the time I was eighteen I would in any case be far away from them.
* * *
On that night, the club—the place was called the Top Hat—was packed with hundreds of kids from all over the region, who formed an enormous compact and mobile mass that swallowed you up the moment you walked in. A local celebrity was giving a rap concert. In this moving crowd—moving in a way that made it seem like a single mass, a single immense body, like the body of a sluggish giant—people’s sweaty bodies bumped and rubbed up against each other. Muscular bodies, most of them, smelling not only of sweat but of the cheap aftershave that I was also wearing.
I made my way toward the stage so I could see the singer who had managed to draw this crowd. Using my elbows, I was able to create a little space for myself near the stage, which had been set up for the event. The ground was sticky because of all the drinks that had been spilled by the boys who were already pretty wasted and all jostling each other. Behind me was a man, much older, who had helped me make my way to my spot. I was probably the youngest person there, and he could see that. He had wanted to help me.
* * *
He was around thirty.
He was wearing an Airness tracksuit—just as many of the boys from my village or from nearby villages did on every kind of occasion, just as I had for a long time, since it was the brand everyone wanted then—with a cap stuck crooked on his shaved head and a heavy, gold-colored chain around his neck. His T-shirt had a wolf’s head on it with an enormous snout. As I think back on it, this T-shirt seems hideous and vulgar to me. But on the evening itself I found it pretty impressive.
He had the breath of an ox, heavy, scented (of pastis), and I felt it on the back of my neck.
* * *
The singer came out onstage; the crowd went wild and moved in tightly toward the stage. The man’s body ended up pressed against mine, glued against mine, and each movement of the crowd rubbed our two bodies against each other. We were pressed more and more tightly together. He smiled, embarrassed and amused, his body giving off the odor of sweat.
I noticed a change in him, as he started to get an erection that went on getting harder and harder, knocking up against the base of my spine, as if following the beat, the rhythm of the music, each time a little bigger, a little harder. I could feel its shape precisely because of the tracksuit he was wearing.
* * *
I was overtaken by a fever that night.
Even though I hated the music I didn’t move, so that I could keep my body pressed up against his. After that evening I would go on listening to that same song over and over again in an attempt to reconstitute, at least in my thoughts and my dreams, the memory of that man. The lyrics have been engraved in me forever:
Girl, sure you tell me you love me while I’m giving you
all I’ve got as we dance together horizontally.
Oh girl, we trip on hash elegantly like no one can
till we reach that peak and I give in to your deadly beauty.
It’s Saturday night, I’m getting in the mood.
I see a pretty young girl in the dark.
I go up to her, I say I’ll buy her a drink.
She says, “First let’s get to know each other, show me what you’ve got.”
When I got home, I tore off my clothes and started stroking myself, panting and moaning uncontrollably as I tried to be quiet: my sister was sleeping in the same room, in the bed underneath mine. My whole body, from my ears to the damp nape of my neck, including every pore of my skin, was shaken by my orgasm.
After that event, my body was always rebelling against me, reminding me what I really wanted, and demolishing all my ambitions to be like everyone else, to like girls the way everyone else did.
* * *
Often, after this night, on nights when I was alone in the house I would stretch out on my older brother’s bed or on my own. My parents would go to the neighbors’ to have a few drinks and the visit would last well into the night We’ll be back in five minutes, we’re just going next door for a quick drink. Soon they’d have run out of pastis and my father would take the car to go get more from the store (Really I drive better drunk than I do on an empty stomach). My mother would call to tell me not to worry, they were just spending some time relaxing with the neighbors, What else do you expect, she would say, what with the days your father has at the factory and me here doing housework all day long, I’ve earned a little time off (then when my father lost his job—after the accident—my mother would say With all the housework I have to do all day long and your father sitting there in front of the TV, never moving, and me having to put up with him, I deserve a break). I shouldn’t worry and I could, if I wanted, make myself something to eat from the cans in the cupboard or the fries left over from lunch that I could warm up. She didn’t realize that these evenings when they were gone were precious moments of freedom for me.
My brother hid porn magazines under his mattress. Everyone knew about it, and in fact he didn’t really hide them, since he was in a certain way proud of them—just like my father, who kept his X-rated movies borrowed from Titi and Dédé in the kitchen cupboard where everyone could see.
Stretched out on my bed with the magazines, I’d find the photographs of naked women, their legs spread, their genitals on display, damp, sometimes with
fingertips pressing on the fleshy lips to make them all the more visible and to make the clitoris stand out. Then their breasts, which I thought of as two excrescences, abnormal growths, masses filled with pus that you’d see on the bodies of sick people. Confronted with these naked women, I would squeeze my own genitals harder and harder, even imitating the back-and-forth motion of masturbation. I would spend entire hours, using all my concentration, thinking up every scene imaginable. My body would grow more and more damp, the clothes would be sticking to my body, drenched because of my furious efforts. I wanted, I ordered myself to have an orgasm even though I knew, because this is something I had known quite early, when I was still very young, I might even say that it is something I’ve always known, and that the opposite possibility never even occurred to me, I knew that it was the sight of a man’s body that aroused me.
I never managed to come, not once, and because I tried so hard my penis, raw and blistered, would usually hurt for days afterward.
A Final Attempt at Love: Sabrina
Then Laura broke up with me in a letter. She had had enough of taking part in my shame and she must also have suffered from the distance I kept between us despite myself, even if she couldn’t quite explain it. A few weeks later she would meet another guy. It was a guy from the town where her mother lived, whom she went to visit a couple of times a year during school vacations. She would tell me about the evenings she spent with her new boyfriend, the movies they would watch together before reenacting certain sequences, the wild days in which they’d make love five or six times in a row, because they saw each other so rarely, the knightly exploits of this Kevin of hers, who broke another guy’s nose The guy whistled at me and said You’re hot so Kevin went up to him, he told him You don’t talk to my girl like that, you need to show her some respect. So then the guy answers him back and then all at once Kevin bashes his head in right in front of all these people who were looking out their windows.
The End of Eddy Page 11
