A Slight Case of Fatigue

by Stephane Bourguignon

  When Eddy came to the school, when he walked into the schoolyard after the Easter holidays, it was as if, from my place on the third floor, I saw myself for the first time. He corresponded to the perception I’d had of myself since my brother’s death. He was the external image of my internal feelings: an uncared-for little boy in clothes that were too big. My own body, already broad, already tall, already strong, betrayed nothing. An eleven-year-old man whose father had asked him for help tearing down the goddamn barn. Who in the fall mud, in ­torrential rain, had driven the tractor that ripped out the beams holding up the building, one by one. Whose mother sometimes came and nestled against him because his father could no longer hold anyone. Who reassured his brothers standing in front of the window at night when Papa would lose control and run screaming into the woods and Maman would go after him barefoot in her white nightgown that made her look like a ghost. A man of eleven who already never let up. When Eddy arrived in front of me, I wanted to be him and to be able finally, not even to shout, but just to whisper, that I was little, that I was swimming in a body that was too big for me.

  Already on that first day, Laurent and one of his gang were ­waiting for Eddy at the gate of the schoolyard. They didn’t like to waste time. They weren’t bad boys; they were simply part of something bigger than they were. All of us, the boys and girls of the village, had tacitly entrusted them with this task, which had a profoundly territorial meaning: not just anyone who wanted could come into our village, and ­certainly not just any way they wanted to. Eddy would be beaten until he proved he was one of us and would be loyal to us. We would beat him in order to get to know him, but above all to make sure he would meet us exactly at our level. In other words, until he no longer frightened us. And this suited the girls as much as the boys. And if the girls seemed to feel some discomfort about it, it was because the crudeness of the act offended them, not its motivation.

  The first day, I observed them from far off. The fights never caused serious injuries. More than the body, ego and pride were the targets. We would very rarely hit the face. We favoured punches to the belly and headlocks. You had to bring the newcomer to his knees, you had to make him turn red with shame and humiliation and then leave him there. The technique may seem simplistic, but there are similar ones, equally barbaric though much more sophisticated, everywhere in the world, even in major companies.

  The ritual also required that the boy who had been tacitly designated leader—in this case, Laurent—invite other boys to join him, one by one. My turn came on Friday. I had been observing Eddy from a distance for a week, since approaching the newcomer was out of the question at this “levelling” stage—it demanded total isolation—and my admiration for him had grown. I had been increasingly attracted to him, and I now felt real affection and some distress at the mere thought of our not becoming friends. In retrospect, it seems to me that if I had failed in that, I would have lost myself forever.

  Eddy had understood the world he was living in long before we did, and he went along with the exercise every day. I was beginning to think he had a strategy, that he was waiting till the time was right. At the outset, as if to give us something, he let himself be pushed around. Others before him had often tried to make their mark right at the beginning—which meant that the next day, we would have the biggest guys lined up against them. But you could see if you watched closely that Eddy had started slowly and had let himself score points little by little, a few more with each encounter. That way, when he did win, we would have to accept him as one of us. He would slowly have pulled himself up to our level.

  When he saw that Laurent had chosen me, Eddy didn’t bat an eye. I had already beat up several boys, without getting the least satis­faction from it, just to maintain my position as the biggest and strongest—but how could I hit him?

  Eddy put his things down on the ground and came toward me, ­eyeing me between two wisps of hair. I was thirty centimetres taller and had a good twenty kilos on him, but he threw me to the ground on my first attack. He was so determined that he was able to sit on my chest and raise his fist in the air, ready to pound me in the face. I remember his expression perfectly, his mouth slightly twisted, his brow knitted, his breath coming in pants. I especially remember thinking, a little later, that he could have given us this demonstration on the first day, but that he had held out and taken his lumps, and that it was me and my sympathy that had allowed him finally to carry out his plan.

  He got up, picked up his things, and walked away. No one tried to stop him. Things were following their normal course. The gang took the opportunity to tease me a bit. They didn’t often get a chance to do that. I couldn’t have cared less. I’ve never been proud. That’s ­probably my best quality, perhaps my only good one. It’s certainly what enabled me to greet him with a nod when I walked into the classroom the ­following Monday.

  Eddy became one of us yet remained apart from us. He was the only one who was able to do that. He already had that strength. It was as if he was doing us a favour in considering himself one of us. In fact, he was the one who had accepted us. We were all fascinated by his independence and his free spirit. Do I need to mention that the girls quickly began buzzing around him? Some of them had been lusted after for years, but Eddy was the first guy they allowed to kiss them and touch their small breasts. While the rest of us were almost all reduced to ogling Madame Drapeau’s breasts. So Eddy became a kind of hero for some, while others hated him. One thing was certain, no one would attack him as long as he had the favour of the girls. That’s how, without knowing it, the girls ruled the schoolyard.

  And then Betty broke away from the pack and the game ended. Several of us experienced it that way, as the end of a game. No one made fun of them, no one subjected them to the usual teasing. We watched them apprehensively, unable to understand what was happening. Recess after recess, the inseparable pair would sit on the ground leaning against the fence, not touching each other, not looking at each other, just talking, fingering a little piece of wood picked up off the ground. While we played soccer, showing off to each other, we’d glance furtively their way, totally uncomprehending. Their attitude was a mystery to us. What could they be talking about all this time? How could they have so much to say to each other? This mystery touched us in a very vulnerable place. I would say it was a taboo, since we never talked about it among ourselves. Had we seen a pair of lovers making wild love, it wouldn’t have impressed us as much.

  Betty was cute, certainly, but nothing more. She wasn’t very feminine either. She wore the same jeans as the boys, and the same work boots. But everyone felt she had something special, a kind of dignity. I was so fascinated by those two that I went everywhere with them. At lunch time, I’d sit near them in the cafeteria or lead them down to the river. There, I was able to make myself feel a bit important by showing them my favourite spots. I think that, unconsciously, I was trying to penetrate their mystery. Or that I was projecting onto Eddy and was vicariously living that extraordinary story.

  When the summer holidays came, they lost touch. Betty lived too far from the village for them to keep seeing each other. In September, she didn’t come back. Eddy—and the rest of us with him—looked for her every morning as we entered the schoolyard. I finally went and asked the principal and was told that she’d moved away. I never knew what Eddy thought of this or how he took it. He just went back to the way he’d been before Betty. Alone, even when he favoured us with his presence, even when he hooked up with a new girl.

  He first came to my place that fall. For some time, I hadn’t invited anyone to my house. Although my parents were slowly recovering from my brother’s death, they were still subject to momentary relapses. Eddy came to our house, and my parents, too, immediately recognized something special in him.

  Everybody liked Eddy, perhaps because you could see both his ­vulnerability and his power in his face. He was like us, and at the same time, we had the impression that with him beside us, we could do great things. My little
brothers hovered around him like flies. My mother bustled about making rich, sweet snacks for us and my father seized every opportunity to touch him: patting him on the shoulder, putting his hand on his neck, tousling his hair. When Eddy was there, it was a party, and the whole world seemed less dark.

  When I went to his house, I quickly understood why he, too, liked being at our place. The house his father rented was nice and well-­maintained. His old man left early in the morning and returned late in the evening or didn’t come home at all. Eddy was the one who took care of everything, and there was never any life in the place. We rarely stayed indoors unless it was very cold out or pouring rain. Instinctively, without ­discussing it, we would end up outside.

  They had moved to the village after his mother went off with another man. According to Eddy, that suited his father fine. Or at least, it didn’t bother him. What the old man didn’t like so much, however, was the fact that she’d left without taking the kid. The reason was very simple: he was incapable of establishing a relationship with anyone, and Eddy’s presence was a constant reminder of that. I think he would have liked to, but he just wasn’t capable. As for my friend, I ­didn’t know what he thought about his mother’s leaving, either during his childhood or in his adult life.

  The following year, to make things easier for himself, his father decided to enrol him as a boarding student in a private school. I ­didn’t know how I would be able to get through five years away from him. Out of the goodness of their hearts, my parents agreed to tighten their belts a little more and do without my pair of hands on the farm. And so Eddy and I set off together, an impossible pair, and those were the best years of our lives. The only thing missing was girls. And boy, did we miss girls!

  We would go home for weekends and holidays. Very often, Eddy would come directly to our house. My parents and my brothers—my poor ­little brothers—were always delighted to welcome him. Even his father seemed relieved to know that his son was in a hospitable ­environment. Slowly, without knowing it, Eddy healed my parents’ ­sorrow. Until the day they died, they considered him a blessing. Without actually being their deceased son, he had been loaned to them—he had been their surrogate son.

  Five years. And when we left the village for good, almost men, it had become too small for us. The winter before, the train station had been closed, and on June 24 when we came back, we went to the opening of a new snack bar there. It was our last summer in the village. We were going away in the fall to study in the big city. Those who loved us took full advantage of our presence.

  And then Betty reappeared. I was with Eddy when he saw her. She was sitting on the terrace of the Old Station chatting with two old friends. When she saw Eddy, her laugh froze in the sun, and everything that was new in her, everything that hadn’t existed six years before, started to quiver. And the emotion she stirred was intensified. At that moment, I felt something I understood only later: they had an extra­ordinary destiny.

  They went back to their routine again, talking for hours and hours. If the village had become too small for Eddy, I believe the whole world was already too small for Betty. Their virginity disappeared somewhere along the river one July evening, and Eddy came back with a smile that was too wide and a mosquito bite on his ass. My own lasted a few weeks longer … until, one Friday evening in the neighbouring village, where a certain barkeeper agreed to sell me alcohol even though I was underage, I met an older woman who took me home with her. And I made love for the first time. There, my hands full of hips, thighs and ass, my mouth full of lips and breasts, I decided never to stop. The next day, I told Eddy and Betty all about it. I didn’t even hide the fact that it was Madame Drapeau, which shows just how little pride I have. But she was okay, Madame Drapeau, she helped Eddy, Betty and me find an apartment in the city, and she took us to the seashore, and in return, we only had to not talk about our years in primary school. Which we didn’t feel like doing anyway. It was perhaps the best summer of my life.

  When Betty announced to her parents that she was leaving for the city, her mother threw such a fit that her father had to beat her up. For good measure, he beat Betty up too. As soon as we found out about it, we headed over there—I remember our determined sixteen-year-olds’ strides on the gravel of the driveway—and Eddy swore to the old man that if he ever again touched a hair on Betty’s head, he would pound him to a pulp. Meanwhile, I was standing there like an oak tree in the doorway, and he had no way out.

  The city, finally. Girls galore. School was really a pretext. The city at night, the city at dawn. Two part-time jobs to be able to take advantage of it. And a quick visit to the country to say good morning to my parents and brothers and, especially, goodnight to Suzanne. She would hold me, forcing my head onto her shoulder as if she understood something I, a child, didn’t even suspect. A few minutes of rest, finally. The way the girls my age acted was the opposite. They would lean on me to replenish their strength, while I went to Suzanne Drapeau to replenish mine. And I have to say, the girls my age weren’t nearly as good at giving a blow job.

  One year later, we got a major lesson in chemistry. Betty began ­dropping her courses, then she dropped her new friends, and finally she refused to even stick her nose outside. She slept and slept. And when she wasn’t sleeping, she was crying. The apartment was filled with an incredible tension and the air was as thick as gelatin. Eddy would sometimes turn the music down without warning, to listen in the hope of hearing the deep breathing of her sleep rather than hiccups and ­sobbing. When she got up, we immediately dropped our eyes to the floor so as not to burden her with our gaze, not to see her changed features, not to notice that she’d gotten even thinner. Eddy also withdrew. He again became the distant, volatile boy I knew when he was younger. He was used to people leaving, he knew how to prepare for it.

  Suzanne understood right away that Betty was depressed and needed to see a doctor as soon as possible. Betty, of course, didn’t believe in anything anymore, neither in words nor in love. Eddy and I escorted her, one on each side, and she hardly touched the ground the whole way there. The first doctor sent us to the psychiatric hosp­ital right away, and the endless round of antidepressants began. It was taking them so long to find the one that would be right for her that one morning, while waiting to cross the street with Eddy, Betty ran out of patience and threw herself in front of a car. At the moment of impact, Eddy was still holding her right hand. She got out of the hospital two months later, with a wheelchair and three little bottles of pills as ­souvenirs. Her mother took advantage of the situation to get her mitts on Betty once more and make certain she wouldn’t go away again. With Betty there with her like a broken doll, she would be able to play the mother forever.

  For a long time, I felt there was something suspect about our ­village. I believed we were all a little defective. And then I finally understood that the disease was everywhere. Eddy went back and forth twice a week in the beginning, but Betty slowly pushed him out of her life. Anyway, she was no longer the same Betty. Her parents had won. From her birth, they had constantly repeated that she would not survive outside their house. Now that she had disobeyed them and gone to try her chances elsewhere, she could thank her lucky stars that she had only lost the use of her legs. In September, Eddy went to university to study translation. It was one way of trying to understand what was happening in this godforsaken world. I never knew how he took the loss of Betty. He never wanted to talk about it.

  One morning, walking into the cafeteria, I noticed a girl who looked solid but who actually was in need of a strong man. So I stopped going to see Suzanne and I took Claire on my shoulders. In exchange, she gave me her love and her body and, especially, gave me back, for ­better and for worse, my definition of myself as a protector. A big, strong, sturdy man who takes care of others—one possible definition, one I hadn’t really chosen but that, in the end, I accepted as the obvious one. Out of love for me, Claire resigned herself to not having children. The little I knew of life was killing me, and I
certainly wasn’t going to have a child and be forced to learn more.

  Eddy lost himself for a while in meeting girls, lots of girls, always with his little air of detachment, and then he happened upon Véronique, who very quickly pulled him together. Subtly, without anyone really knowing how she did it, she got him back into one piece. She turned him back, the way sheep dogs do, as soon as part of him seemed to want to break away from the herd. It was a mixture of sex and comfort that was not at all like the relationship he’d had with Betty. There would be no great drama at their house. But I think Eddy, who was used to seeing the women in his life disappear, felt safe with Véronique. Immediately after university, they both landed jobs, and they bought a house in the suburbs. Maxime was born a year later. Eddy went from being a satellite to being the nucleus of a family. Véronique, God only knows how, had managed to create a perfectly heterogeneous amalgam out of the three of them.

  When they separated, Eddy started to fall apart again. I don’t know what could have caused their marriage to fail. Time? Their increasingly divergent views of the world? Or the fact that, being used to seeing the women in his life leave, Eddy couldn’t tolerate the idea that Véronique would never abandon him?

  Couples. I’ve always known that Eddy wouldn’t last in a couple, and that I would. Tenacity, determination, perseverance. I’ve never abandoned anything in my whole life. I can carry extraordinary loads. I’m a superman. I take after my father with a dead child in his arms weighing ten thousand tons. Of course, I’ve cheated on Claire on a number of occasions. It’s so easy at my office, and women are so lonely. It’s my way of replenishing my strength. You might think I’m giving them pleasure, but that’s not true, I’m taking, I’m commandeering and I’m nourishing myself. That way, I can go home and take care of Claire as if she were a bird. I love her deeply and I don’t know what she’d do without me. Even so, my adventures were long a source of pain to me. Until I understood why I needed them so much. To replenish myself so that Claire would later have something to draw on.