It often seems to me that I love you.
When I asked about you, my mother told me that your father’s disappearance left the family even more destitute than before. Your mother found herself alone with six or seven children. She’d never finished school. She couldn’t find work. Peter Handke says: “For a woman to be born under such conditions was itself deadly.” And yet my mother also said you were much happier, because the man of the family had disappeared, along with his violence, and your fear of his reactions, of his masculine insanity.
What we call history is nothing but the story of the same emotions, the same joys, reproduced across bodies and time, and my mother experienced that same feeling of happiness when she threw you out of the house. One of those weeknights when you didn’t come home because you were at your brother’s or at the café, when you kept my mother waiting, she stuffed your clothes into garbage bags and threw them out the window, onto the sidewalk. I was grown up, I was eighteen, I was no longer living at home, but she told me what happened. You had gone off with your buddies and hadn’t told her when you’d be back. For years she, too, had done nothing but wait for you, the way your mother had waited for your father, but that night she’d had enough. You had lived together twenty-five years. You came home in the middle of the night but the door was locked. You pounded the walls, the windows. You shouted. You didn’t yet understand what your clothes were doing on the sidewalk, or you pretended not to understand. Through the door my mother shouted at you never to come back. Never? you asked. She repeated her words: Never ever. It was over. Once you were gone she was never, as she said herself, the same person. Not yet fifty, she went off to live in a big city for the first time in her life. She traveled. She discovered new passions and, especially, new objects of scorn. She took to saying, “Ugh, these hicks!” as if she hadn’t lived in the country all her life.
The night of the pretend concert, even though I was running out of breath, I didn’t want to let it go. I don’t know how long I kept it up, how long I went on insisting, Look, Dad, look. Finally you stood up and said, I’m going outside for a smoke. I had hurt your feelings.
You never got over the separation from my mother. It destroyed something inside you. As always happens, being apart made you realize how much you loved her. After the breakup, you became more sensitive to the world. You got sick more often. Everything hurt. It is as if the pain of the separation had opened up a wound and everything around you — your world in all its violence — came rushing in
When you were in a good mood, you used to call my mother “Choupette,” “Bibiche,” “Maman.”
You’d swat her on the ass in front of other people and she’d say, Cut it out, don’t you have any class? You’d laugh. And that would make her laugh.
She used to complain that you never gave her anything but vacuum cleaners, pans, or housewares for her birthday: After all, it’s not like I’m some kind of maid.
She told me, Every time we have a fight, your father swears he’ll change. He’ll never change. It’s like they say, a dog that’s bit before will bite again.
The night of the pretend concert, did I hurt your feelings because I chose to play the singer — the girl?
You didn’t study. For you, dropping out of school as fast as possible was a matter of masculine pride. It was the rule in the world you lived in: be a man, don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot. Only girls and those others — the ones suspected of being deviant, of being abnormal — would submit to school rules, to punishments, to what the teachers asked or demanded.
For you, constructing a masculine body meant resisting the school system. It meant not submitting to orders, to Order. It even meant standing up to school and the authority it embodied. In grade school one of my cousins slapped a teacher in front of the whole class. We always spoke of him as a hero. Masculinity — don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot — meant that you dropped out as fast as you could to show everyone you were strong, as soon as you could to show you were rebellious, and so, as far as I can tell, constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any other life, any other future, any other prospect that school might have opened up. Your manhood condemned you to poverty, to lack of money. Hatred of homosexuality = poverty.
There’s something I’d like to try to put into words: When I think about it now, I feel as though your existence was, against your will — indeed, against your very being — a negative existence. You didn’t have money, you couldn’t finish school, you couldn’t travel, you couldn’t realize your dreams. It is hard to describe your life in anything but negative terms.
In his book Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre probes the connection between one’s being and one’s actions. Are we defined by what we do? Are we defined by the projects we undertake? Are a woman and a man simply what they do, or is there a difference, a gap, between the truth of who we are and our actions?
Your life proves that we are not what we do, but rather that we are what we haven’t done, because the world, or society, stood in our way. Because verdicts, as Didier Eribon calls them, came crashing down on us — gay, trans, female, black, poor — and made certain lives, certain experiences, certain dreams, inaccessible to us.
2004 In grade school, for the first time, I hear about the Cold War, about how Germany was divided in two, how Berlin had been separated by a wall, and how the wall came down. The fact that a major city, not so far away from us, could be divided in two, practically overnight, by a wall, came over me like a storm. I was fascinated. For the rest of the day I couldn’t pay attention to anything that anyone was saying. It was all I could think of. I was trying to imagine this wall set down in the middle of a street that, just the day before, women and men could cross without a second thought.
You were already more than twenty years old when the wall was destroyed, so the entire rest of the day I fantasized about the questions I would ask you: Did you know people who’d seen the wall? Did you know women or men who’d actually touched it, who had participated in its destruction? Tell me, what exactly was this Europe divided in two, this cement wall between one Europe and another?
The bus that took me home dropped me at the village square, but for once I didn’t dawdle as long as possible or loiter in the street. I didn’t pray that your car wouldn’t be out front. I ran — I’d never run so fast — my head filled with all my questions.
I asked you all the questions that had piled up in my head. Yeah, yeah, you answered vaguely. It’s true, there was a wall. They talked about it on TV. That was all you said. I waited for more, but you turned away. I insisted. But tell me, what was it like? What exactly was it? What did the wall look like? If you loved someone who lived on the other side of the wall, could you never see them again, ever? You had nothing to say. I started to see that my nagging was causing you pain. I was twelve, but I used words you didn’t understand. All the same, I pushed a tiny bit more and you lost your temper. You snapped at me, told me to stop asking questions. But it wasn’t the way you usually lost your temper. It wasn’t normal, the way you snapped. You were ashamed because I was confronting you with a school culture that had excluded you, that had wanted you out. Where is history? The history they taught at school was not your own. We were learning world history, and you were left out.
1999 I’m counting on my fingers: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Soon I’ll be eight years old. You asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I told you: Titanic. The videocassette had just come out. We kept seeing the ad on TV. They played it over and over, several times a day. I don’t know why I was so drawn to the movie. I couldn’t say. Was it the love story? Was it Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s shared dream of becoming a different person? Was it Kate Winslet’s beauty? I don’t know. But I was already obsessed with this movie I hadn’t yet seen, and it’s what I asked for. You answered that it was a movie for girls and that I shouldn’t want something like that. But I’m going too fast — f
irst you begged me to want something else: Wouldn’t you prefer a remote control car or a superhero outfit? Think hard now. But I said, No, no, Titanic’s what I want, and it was only after I insisted, only after you failed, that your tone changed. In that case, you told me, I wouldn’t get anything, no present at all. I don’t remember whether I cried. The days passed. The morning of my birthday I found, there at the foot of my bed, a large white box and on it, written in golden letters, Titanic. Inside was the cassette, but also a coffee-table book about the movie, maybe also a model of the ship. It was a collector’s edition, certainly more than you could afford, more than we could afford, but you’d bought it and put it beside my bed, all wrapped up. I kissed you on the cheek and you didn’t say anything. You let me watch that movie almost a dozen times a week for more than a year.
The night of the pretend concert, did I hurt your feelings because I played the part of a girl and because you thought your friends would judge you for it — because they’d hold you responsible for having brought me up like a girl?
You were afraid of rats and bats. I don’t know why those animals in particular.
You’d eat fistfuls of grated cheese, your mouth over the wide-open bag. I’d see the bits of cheese falling back into the bag — falling from your mouth back into the bag — and I’d complain: I don’t want to eat cheese that’s been in your mouth!
You dreamed of working in a morgue. You used to say, At least the dead don’t bust your balls.
After the pretend concert, I found you outside chain smoking. You were alone, in a tee shirt. It was cold, the street was empty, and I felt the almost infinite noiselessness, the silence, filling my mouth and my ears. You looked at the ground. I told you, I’m sorry, Dad. You took me in your arms and said, It’s nothing. Forget it, it’s nothing.
*
For five years you tried to be young. When you left high school — just a few days after you started — you were hired at the village factory, but you didn’t stay there long, either, barely a couple of weeks. You didn’t want to repeat the life of your father and his father before him. They’d gone straight to work the moment childhood was over, at fourteen or fifteen. They had gone, without any transition, from childhood to exhaustion and getting ready to die, without ever having been granted those few years of oblivion toward the world and reality that others call youth (even if that’s a silly way of putting it, those few years of oblivion others call youth).
But for five years you fought for youth with all your might. You went to live in the south of France, telling yourself that life would be better there, less oppressive, if only because of all the sunshine. You stole mopeds, you stayed out all night, you drank all you could. You lived as intensely and aggressively as possible, because you felt that these experiences were stolen — and this, this is my point: there are those to whom youth is given and those who can only try desperately to steal it.
Then one day you stopped. I think it was a question of money, but not only that. You stopped everything you were doing and went back to the village where you were born — or the one right next to it — and you got yourself hired by the factory where your whole family had worked before you.
A classic pattern: because you felt that you hadn’t lived your youth to the fullest, you spent your whole life trying to be young. That’s the trouble with stolen things, like you with your youth: we can never quite believe they are really ours, and so we have to keep stealing them forever. The theft never ends. You wanted to recapture your youth, to reclaim it, to resteal it. Only those who have always had everything given to them can truly feel what it is to possess. A sense of possession is not something one can acquire.
One of those attempts to be young again — to be young at last — took place when you were with your friend Anthony. Do you remember? The two of you were in the car and you spotted the police behind you. You’d both had a lot to drink. They would have taken your license away if they’d stopped you, and would never have given it back. You thought they were tailing you, so you hit the gas. You took off, as if they were in hot pursuit. You ran lights, you went faster and faster. I imagine you were acting out the chase scenes you watched all night on TV, with American cops and robbers: even in the most intense moments of our lives, it seems to me, we continue to act out scenes and roles we’ve seen in books or movies. You drove till you came to a river. You both leapt out of the car and into the water to keep from getting caught by the police (I’m not sure if the police were ever actually chasing you in the first place). You swam — you, who were more frightened of water than anything, who were afraid of taking a bath, that’s how bad your phobia was, you swam in the freezing water, and together you climbed out a few hundred feet downstream. For a long time you waited there, up to your ankles in mud, soaked to the skin, hoping the police would go away, and then you came home to my mother’s, your clothes soggy with water smelling of muck and of fish. The water was pouring off you, off your bodies onto the floor, the drops streaming down the fabric of your clothing and puddling in silence at your feet. You didn’t use to tell this story yourself, since you never talked much, but when my mother told it — as she often did, two or three times a month — you would smile and say, It’s true we had a good laugh. You had managed to retrieve a moment of your youth.
You were fascinated by all technological innovations, as if, through the novelty they embodied, you could infuse your own life with a newness to which you were not entitled. You commented, in a voice part envy and part admiration, on ads for new phones, tablets, or computers. You didn’t buy them, they cost too much. You made do with gadgets traveling salesmen hawked at the village market: a watch that went backwards, a machine for making Coke at home, a laser that could project the image of a naked woman on a wall a hundred yards away. In general, these memories are inhabited more by things than by people.
You lived out your youth through the youth of these things.
And another thing: every September the village set up amusement rides for the harvest fair, with shooting galleries and slot machines. You’d spend our monthly budget in four days — the money that was meant to cover our food, our bills, our rent. My mother used to say, I didn’t marry a man, I married a kid.
(I speak of you in the past tense because I don’t know you anymore. The present tense would be a lie.)
An image: It’s summer. It’s nighttime in the middle of the day. Darkness covers the immensity of the earth. It covers us, you and me and the cornfield where I stand beside you. It may be noon but it’s dark out. You tell me, Solar eclipse. You tell me, Don’t take off your glasses or the moon will burn your eyes and you’ll never see anything again. You tell me, This is a one-time thing. The next time something like this happens on Earth we’ll all be dead. All of us. Even you.
(you’d given me that watch that went backward, the one you bought at the market. I lost it.)
Another image: You’re driving. I’m sitting in the seat behind you. It’s just us, and you say, We’re going to drive on the waves. I don’t know what that means. I’ve never heard this expression before. You say it again, We’re going to drive on the waves, and you take off straight for the sea. You drive us onto the sand and the sea comes closer and closer. The waves are coming toward us. I think you want to kill us. I think you want to die and that you want to take me with you. I scream No Dad, no, please! I close my eyes, I don’t want to die. You get even closer, and then, just at the water’s edge, you give the steering wheel a neat, quick turn — and now you’re driving us, no longer into the waves, but alongside them, two wheels on sand and two in the water, with part of the car submerged by a foot or a foot-and-a-half. I slide over in my seat. I look out the window and it’s true: all I can see is water and your car driving over it, over the surface of the water. Nothing else. See? Just like I said. We are driving on the waves.
I’ve forgotten almost everything I told you when I came to see you for the last time, but I remember all the things I didn’t tell yo
u. In general, when I look back on the past and our life together, what I remember most is what I didn’t tell you. My memories are of what didn’t take place.
And after all those years of fighting for your right to be young — you got married. Everything happened in sequence.
When my mother met you she already had two children by her first husband, the one who preceded you. Right away you wanted to treat them as your own. You slept beside them when they were afraid at night, even though they were already big kids. You suggested they take your last name. Was this a desire to pass for a good father in the eyes of others, or was it pure love? The line between these two things is always too fine for anyone to call. You slapped me the time I said my big brother was only my half brother. He’s your brother, you said. There are no half brothers in this house, none of my kids is a half.
2006 I’ve nearly finished: I have hardly anything left to tell. This is one of the last scenes — after this it’s all blank. The scene takes place on a bus, on the seat of a school bus upholstered in a kind of grimy blue-and-green carpeting. There I sit. Down the aisle, three or four rows ahead of me, is my cousin Jayson. He’s laughing. But he’s not laughing in a normal way. He sings. He shouts. The driver tells him to knock it off. Jayson won’t. He doesn’t understand what’s being said to him, he’s having one of his seizures. He was born with a handicap that makes him have seizures several times a month, though it’s impossible to predict when they’ll come, and he can’t stop, he can’t hear what’s going on around him. The driver tells him a second time to knock it off, and Jayson laughs even harder, in a more and more unruly way, so the driver stops the bus with a jerk. He pulls the hand brake, gets out of his seat, and comes toward my cousin to hit him. He had already grabbed Jayson by the back of his tee shirt when I understood what was going on, what was about to happen. He had lifted his other hand to hit him across the face, but just then I stood up (I don’t know what happened, it wasn’t like me, I wasn’t a brave person) and told him he shouldn’t pick on a kid with a handicap. His hand stops in midair, he spins around, and comes toward me. I don’t move. And I’m the one he slaps.
Who Killed My Father Page 2