Hélène wheeled around, holding the macaroni. She wore that face of hers, the face of the devoted, self-sacrificing mother. She had been struggling to make things work for so long, and nothing did, and in the end, there was so little you could do. Over time, she could no longer stand the way other people acted, the conflicted functioning of the world, the way obstacles to her great dream of peacefulness were constantly popping up.
“You know that if you’re late, you’re considered a deserter.”
“Oh, give me a break!”
Fortunately, the timer rang just then. Hélène served lunch. Anthony didn’t lift a finger to help. He complained that the meat wasn’t salty enough. Hélène got up to get the salt.
“Here.”
“Thank you.”
“What time is your train?”
Bent over his food with an arm folded between him and his plate, Anthony ate one big forkful at a time. The food in his mouth was hot and comforting, with a taste of butter he’d grown up with.
“I’ve told you a hundred times, it’s the ten-fifteen.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t go out this evening. Stay home and take it easy. Rent a video. We could have pizza.”
“For god’s sake, Mom!”
He had straightened up and was talking with his mouth full, eyes wide, as if his gaze could compensate for his trouble speaking.
“Today’s Bastille Day,” he said. “It’s stupid to just stay home.”
“Thanks for calling me stupid.”
“I never said you were stupid!”
“How else do you expect me to take it?”
“Oh, for chrissakes…”
The meal continued in silence. Hélène barely touched her plate, choosing instead to contemplate this son of hers gulping down the food she had cooked for him, one bite after another. Just the sound of chewing, his breathing, the clicking of his fork on the plate. He served himself seconds of meat and macaroni, then ate two Danette yogurts for dessert. Finally, she told him he could do whatever he liked; it was his life, after all.
* * *
—
As she loaded the dishwasher, he turned on the TV. The Olympic Games were starting soon. You saw the same faces, big David Douillet, Marie-José Pérec, Jean Galfione, and Carl Lewis, old now but still looking great. From the air, Atlanta looked like a glittering Monopoly board, bristling with tall glass and steel towers. Everything was the color of mercury, clean, sharp, exorbitantly modern, under a blazing sun reverberating a thousand times, 104 in the shade. Fortunately, this was the Coca-Cola city, so there was no shortage of refreshments. The hum of the dishwasher forced Anthony to turn the volume up a little. When she was finished, Hélène wiped her hands on her apron and lit another cigarette. She looked at her son, then came over to sit down.
“It does feel strange, all the same.”
Anthony’s eyes were glued to the screen. With his tongue, he was trying to free a little piece of meat stuck between his teeth.
“What does?” he asked absently.
“No, nothing.” After a few moments she added: “You might want to take your things up to the attic.”
“What things?”
“All that iron junk.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Hélène meant Anthony’s weightlifting gear, the dumbbells, barbells, and weight bench, all put on a Sofinco credit card. At least he wasn’t smoking dope when he was working out.
“Not, ‘Yeah, sure,’ ” she said. “Right now.”
“Okay, okay. I’m watching the news. You can wait two seconds.”
“Right now. It can’t be done after you leave. It’s too heavy. I can’t do it all by myself.”
Anthony took his eyes off the screen for a second. His mother wore that imperious, bruised expression that had become her shield and her sword. It was her way of saying, “I may be a drag, but this is still my house.” Since the two of them had been living together, she’d given in to Anthony on almost everything, and objectively he had taken total advantage of it. That’s how he wound up with a motorbike, a PlayStation, and a TV in his bedroom, not to mention three pairs of Nike Airs gathering dust in the front hall closet. At the same time, by some mysterious phenomenon of compensation, his mother was punctilious about details, strict about schedules, and frighteningly demanding about keeping the floor clean and his closet neat. This yawning divide led to ever-renewed arguments. Like an old married couple, they bitterly endured each other. Which was also what had made Anthony decide to get the hell out.
“Now,” ordered his mother, her arms crossed and holding a cigarette.
Sighing, he stood up. But she had to have the last word:
“And don’t do it in slippers! You’ll track in all sorts of dirt.”
* * *
—
True, his equipment took up a heck of a lot of room. In fact it was because of that they parked their cars outside. He stored the weights in big tricolor shopping bags, sorted the bars, and dismantled the bench. Gradually, Anthony’s irritation subsided. He had to admit that his mother had gone through a lot. First the divorce, then his father’s trial. Patrick hadn’t gone to jail, but that had seemed the only logical outcome, and they’d dreaded it until the very end. In any case, the violent fight had cost the family what little money it had left. Patrick would be in debt for the rest of his days. It practically wasn’t even worth his working; he would never be able to pay what the lawyers and the courts demanded of him. Between the fees, the fine, and what the loss of his job cost him, he was busted for good.
Basically, it was an incredible lesson. If you step out of bounds, society has a whole set of tools to bench you for good. The lawyers and your bank are only too happy to arrange it. When you’re carrying a six-figure debt, there’s nothing to do but to go drinking in a bar with other assholes just like you, and wait for the end. Patrick Casati didn’t have the slightest excuse. He’d proven himself stubborn, drunk, and brutal his whole life. Still, the result was stunning: he’d been made an outcast, without appeal.
During the trial, old Bouali was called to testify. He answered all the questions politely and softly in his beautiful, gravelly voice. He came across as both overwhelmed and dignified, which greatly appealed to the judge. At the end, she gave him the chance to talk directly to Patrick, his former workmate. Did he want to tell him or ask him anything? Bouali answered that he had nothing to say. His passivity looked like wisdom. But maybe he was simply tired.
“What about you, Monsieur Casati? Do you have something to say to Monsieur Bouali?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“But you do know each other, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right…” she concluded, twice tapping the file before her with her ballpoint pen.
Each side departed with its story and its grievances. Their failed meeting weighed heavily when the verdict was delivered.
After the period of the trial, Hélène Casati had to face further indignities. The management of the company where she’d been working for twenty-five years decided to reorganize its administrative functions, now newly renamed support functions. Her supervisor made her take a battery of tests to be sure she knew how to do the job she was already doing. Then an outside auditor, a guy from Nancy who wore Ted Lapidus suits and used hair cream, decided she didn’t, quite. So she had to drive all the way to Strasbourg for training, her stomach in knots, to relearn what she already knew. She became a child again, gently rebuked, who needed to be helped along and introduced to new tools in a changing world. When all was said and done, her job still consisted in tracking salaries, that is, adding lines that produced a total down on the lower right-hand side of a page. Only now the whole surrounding apparatus had abruptly changed, becoming opaque, sententious, and anglicized.
A new manager soon showed up at the office. She was twenty yea
rs younger than Hélène, had ideas, and had just earned her MBA in the United States, a fact she pointed out every chance she got. She was forever lamenting the pointless obstacles that in France still stood in the way of the essential forward march of a whole civilization. In Berlin, a wall had fallen. Since then, history had been made. It was now time to use office software to overcome the final remaining difficulties and organize the peaceful melding of the world’s five billion human beings. The promise of endless progress and the certainty of amazing unity were on the horizon.
It didn’t take Hélène long to figure out that she was one of the brakes slowing this historic movement. Which led to a feeling of resentment and in turn to a two-month work hiatus and a prescription for antidepressants. When she returned to her job, she found that her office had been given to colleagues two levels higher on the food chain, newly hired marketing staffers. She was assigned a desk in an open-space work area. She’d had to write a registered letter to the work inspection service in order to be allowed to display a green plant and photo of her son on her desk.
From then on, Hélène didn’t do much. She was forgotten. She kept boxes of cookies, candies, and peanuts in a locked drawer, and nibbled. She gained twenty-five pounds. Fortunately, she had a healthy metabolism, and the recently acquired fat was spread around in a fairly harmonious way. Besides that, she was diagnosed with thyroid problems and put on Levothyrox. She often felt tired, depressed, uninterested in anything. She felt hot, but her office mates didn’t want to open the window, since they had air-conditioning. She found a new boyfriend, however. Jean-Louis wasn’t all that bright and his glasses were constantly sliding down his nose, but he was nice. He worked in a restaurant and always carried a whiff of French fries. At least he was good in bed.
It took Anthony nearly two hours to lug all his gear up to the attic. After that, he needed to take another shower, but decided to deal with his bag first. Time was marching on. It was already three o’clock.
When he went into his bedroom, he found all his things laid out for him. On the bed stood a stack of ironed T-shirts, two shirts, underwear and socks, a clean pair of jeans, and a brand-new toilet kit. He opened it and saw that there, too, everything was in perfect order: razor, deodorant, toothpaste, cotton swabs, et cetera. His mother had thought of everything. She annoyed him. He was touched.
He took his big sports bag from the closet and started stowing his things in it. When he picked up the pile of T-shirts, he found two Snickers bars underneath. He picked them up, and his throat tightened. This time he was leaving for good. Childhood was over.
Anthony had certainly taken advantage of it. How many times had people told him, “You’re lucky you’re a minor.” All those years of looking for trouble, getting involved in drug deals, stealing scooters, hanging out and skipping classes, and cheerfully degrading the built urban infrastructure. But being a minor has this ambiguous virtue: it protects you, but when it ends, you’re suddenly tossed into a world whose ferocity you hadn’t suspected. From one day to the next, the reality of your acts is shoved in your face, you don’t get second chances, and people are fed up with you. Anthony had dreaded that turning point without really believing in it. The army was another bosom where he could go hide. There, all he had to do was follow orders.
Most of all, it was the way to escape. He wanted to leave Heillange at all costs, and finally put hundreds of miles between himself and his old man.
After the trial, Patrick had been forced to move again. He now lived in a two-hundred-square-foot ground-floor studio apartment in a converted barracks on the highway out of town toward Mondevaux. From his window he had a view of the health services office, a roundabout, railroad tracks, and a billboard urging him to shop at Leclerc or Darty, depending on the day. Anthony once found himself doing community service in the neighborhood and saw his father coming out of the grocery store carrying a case of beer. Check it out, said Samir, the guy who was pulling weeds with him. Patrick staggered under the case’s weight. It was Aldi, cheap beer. He went to open his apartment door, put the beer down, searched his pockets, found his key, opened the door, and forgot the case outside. Two minutes later, he came out to get it. Samir laughed.
Over the last two years, Anthony had several times found his father asleep in his bed, fully dressed and half comatose. It was a sickening sight. The stained pillow, the open mouth, the sleep like death. After checking that he was still breathing, Anthony took the opportunity to do some housekeeping. He filled twenty-five-gallon bags with empty bottles, vacuumed, changed the sheets, ran the washing machine. He left when he was finished, locking the door behind him; he had the key. From time to time he also came by with food that his mother had cooked. Patrick didn’t drink when his son was there. Anthony heated the plate of lasagna and watched him eat it. He didn’t stay long. At the end of the meal Patrick rolled himself a cigarette. His hand was steady. He was scarred, but that was it. Somewhat thin in the arms and legs, a puffy face, eyes that occasionally vacillated. He was still Patrick, only harder and more secretive. Anthony watched him vanish in the smoke of his hand-rolled cigarette and said, “Okay, I’m on my way.” “Go ahead,” said his father. It suited him, he was thirsty.
During this whole period, night and the pleasure of riding his motorbike helped Anthony keep it together. He went putt-putting along, precisely driving down streets that over time had become written in his guts. He’d been roaming the area since he was a child and knew every house, every street, every development, even the rubble and the potholes. He’d gone on foot, by bicycle, on his motorbike. He had played in that alley, been bored sitting on that wall, French-kissed in this bus shelter, and wandered the sidewalks along those huge warehouses where in the evening refrigerator trucks waited in dead silence.
In town, he saw the little stores that sold clothes, furniture, and household appliances and that would soon be killed off by the new des Montets enterprise zone. There were the well-crafted apartments downtown, rented for a song to professors and prefecture officials. Palatial houses that stood vacant now that the noncoms had shipped out with their regiment. And this was without counting all those little shops along the street, IT service outlets, clothing stores, bakeries and pizzerias, kebab stands, and a good fifteen cafés open to the sidewalk, with foosball, pinball, TV, scratch-off games, a few newspapers, especially the local ones, and often a dog lying in the corner. Anthony made his way through a landscape that was as familiar as a face. Speed, the gray blur of building facades, the intermittent flash of streetlights, oblivion. He would then find himself on the departmental highway and would continue straight ahead, there, to the end. From school to the bus stop, from the swimming pool to downtown, from the lake to McDonald’s stretched a world, his world. He covered it without letup, at top speed, pursuing a risk, a straight line.
Tonight he would take his 125 out for the last time; he would go to the party. He would drink and dance. And tomorrow at 10:15, the train. Ciao tutti.
The phone downstairs rang again. His mother answered it. Then he heard her call up to him:
“Anthony!”
“What?”
“It’s your father.”
2
When Hacine woke up, his first thought was for Coralie. His second was for his teeth, which weren’t in his mouth anymore. He had spent the night on the living room sofa bed, and his back felt a bit sore. The curtains were flapping, framed by the open window. In the distance, you could hear the low rumble of cars driving across the aqueduct. Hacine lay there for a moment without moving. He was thinking.
Seb, Saïd, and Eliott had come by yesterday and spent the evening. The first two left around three in the morning. Eliott stayed and slept over. He was still sleeping, stretched out on an inflatable mattress on the other side of the coffee table. He had kicked off the sheet in his sleep, revealing his fat chest, white underpants, and legs as thin as a corpse’s. They were skin and bones, with a crop of very bla
ck hairs.
Hacine raised himself on his elbows and was immediately hit by the terrible smell filling the room. He looked around. The dog must have shit in the corner again. They’d had him for nearly two months now, and despite their walking him, punishing him, and rubbing his nose in it, he couldn’t stop. Just the same, Hacine thought it funny, and smiled as he imagined the little wretch quietly doing his business while everyone was asleep.
His pals had arrived around eight, as they had every evening since Hacine and Coralie got back from vacation. It was the same routine as usual: blunts and pizza, followed by playing FIFA Soccer on the PlayStation and drinking Tropico. The living room carpet was littered with Domino’s pizza boxes, overflowing ashtrays, game controllers, and scattered clothes. Hacine contemplated this war zone with a touch of melancholy. He was going back to work tomorrow. They had spent their last laid-back evening together; the vacation was over. And Coralie hadn’t given them any grief, for once. She let them play the World Cup without saying a word. Anyway, you could always negotiate with her if she had her dog and got the blunt when it went around. At one point they had to change to Super Mario Bros. That was kind of a drag, because without a three-way splitter box, the change involved unplugging the PlayStation to switch to the NES, a maneuver that could take up to twenty minutes when they were really stoned.
Hacine fetched a garbage bag from the kitchen and started collecting everything that was lying around loose. He wanted the place to be clean before Coralie got up. She had fallen asleep on the sofa bed a little after midnight, her usual time, and he’d carried her into their bedroom. For Hacine and his friends, that meant the party could really get started. Being just among guys, with Eliott continuously rolling super-loaded blunts, they could talk shit and laugh until their sides ached. Especially since Seb still dreamed of winning the World Cup with Cameroon.
“No way, man, not even if you played for a hundred years!”
And Their Children After Them Page 30