The Age of Reinvention

by Karine Tuil

  Law student attempts suicide in class

  What happens after this? He has no memory. Maybe he drank, fell asleep, but in any case when he wakes up, Nina is in their bed and the documents have vanished. She smiles at him, asks if he’s slept well. Something has changed, he can tell: she is no longer against his idea; in fact, she seems amused by it. Does she want to test out her powers of erotic attraction, twenty years later? Is it the danger that excites her? The possibility of love? Of history repeating? She borrows some clothes from a stylist who works at one of the catalogues she models for: the designs are simple, the materials cheap (rayon, acrylic), but she likes them. All she has to do is find the right size and pick out her favorites—the ones that have been withdrawn from sale by management because they weren’t popular enough. Nina buys a large plastic bag with a zip and arranges her chosen clothes inside it. When she gets home, she places her things on the living room table and puts on an old Otis Redding song. “Are you ready?” Amazement in his eyes: “They lent you all those?” She tries on a black dress in fake lace, a red ruffle dress, a green dress with a fitted waist . . . it goes on for a long time, this fashion parade. Samuel undresses in turn and she passes him a suit. “Look at me!” She changes again, slipping on an ultra-tight black number that she wears like a second skin. The two of them are transformed as they admire themselves in the mirror. They look so elegant, parading and strutting around the apartment, like movie stars. They take selfies together. Dressed up/in swimwear. Indifferent/in love. Then they store the images of their fake success on their laptop in a folder entitled Us.

  * * *

  The lure of exhibitionism. On the Internet, they seek out elements of their mystification and create accounts on various social networks in case Samir googles them.

  Lie.

  Write that you work for a bank, a publishing house, a television channel.

  You love traveling, movies, books.

  You have ambition, friends, contacts. Show your influence. It’s a game. Nina scrolls through a series of photographs displaying all her artificial glory; she rereads each piece of information, polishes, cuts. Finally, she chooses her profile picture. Her eyes edged with kohl, complexion illuminated. It excites her to play at transformers, and to find she is so good at this new game. The genie is out of the bottle now—Samir is no longer the only one with the power of reinvention.

  7

  He’s too excited, so Samir first opens the message sent to him by Elisa Hanks. “Hugely promising!” she has written. “Let’s meet somewhere.” He hesitates before replying. He is desperate to get together with this girl in the efficiency he rents on the top floor of a building located a few blocks away from his office, a minimalist fuckpad that he found about one year after his wedding, when he realized that he would never be faithful and that he ought to organize his sex life within parameters that he himself had defined, in a place chosen for its discretion, rather than running the risk of being caught in flagrante delicto coming out of a hotel room or kissing on the street, with witnesses everywhere, perhaps even private detectives, hired by his rivals. He thinks of all the things he could do to this girl if he could find the strength to leave his apartment: it is nearly two a.m. and he is tired and a little drunk. But Elisa Hanks is insistent. She sends him another text: “Damn Sam, you are full-on sexy!” She is one of the most influential women in New York and she is creaming her panties for him—it’s maddeningly sexy to a guy like him, someone whose biggest turn-on is overturning the balance of power. And she’s hot! That severe look, with her hair always up in a bun or in braids, dressed in perfectly tailored clothes, always in dark colors (black or navy blue); a well-bred American girl who never forgets to take the day off work so she can prepare the Thanksgiving turkey herself, never wears lipstick, allows herself only one brand of cologne (made by Amish women), would never miss church on a religious holiday, but who has no objection to being fucked by the young wolves of the New York bar—Jews by preference, with unpronounceable names, the kind of men her father always warned her about. Samir waits a few minutes before sending her this message: “Keep your pussy warm for me—I’m on my way!” He goes back into the apartment, puts on pants, a shirt, and shoes, and exits noiselessly. Ruth is asleep. She must have taken a sleeping pill, so there’s no chance she’ll be waking anytime soon. By the time he picks up his car keys from the valet,1 he has completely forgotten the message from his mother.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, he is standing in front of the door to his efficiency. He sent the girl his address by text, and she is waiting for him there, dressed in a little cotton spaghetti-strap dress. He pushes her inside, kisses her, unties her hair, slides the straps off her shoulders, and takes her—all of this lasts no more than a few minutes. They lie on the couch for a moment afterward. Elisa Hanks smokes a cigarette. Damp blond hairs stick to her face. Tahar turns toward her, borrows her cigarette, and takes a few drags before returning it. And it is then, as he turns, that she sees the scar on his neck. She hadn’t noticed it before. But just as she is about to touch her fingers to the wound, Samir grabs her hand rather roughly: Don’t touch me! He gets up from the couch and quickly dresses, his expression strangely blank. She doesn’t give up: she asks where he got the scar, but his only response is to order her to leave right now. “Already? But I just got here . . . I thought we could hang out for a while.” “I’m tired and I have an early start tomorrow,” he says, starting to pick up the room. The girl sits up, covering her breasts with her hands. He can see that she’s upset, can sense she’s on the verge of tears. She puts on her dress and gets to her feet. For a moment, she stands there, motionless, in the middle of the room, as if waiting for something, while he continues to tidy the room with fanatical care, placing the cushions in a perfectly symmetrical arrangement, scrubbing at a stain on the coffee table, picking up a fallen hair clip and handing it to Elisa: Here, this is yours. But he’s wrong—it’s not hers. She doesn’t wear hair clips. It must belong to another girl, the one before her. When was that? A few hours ago? Yesterday? A display of jealousy—exactly what Tahar hates most. He can accept such fits from his wife, but from this girl he barely knows, to whom he owes nothing? No chance. He moves toward her, brushes a lock of hair behind her ear, kisses her on the cheek rather coolly—a stranger to her body, to her odor, to everything that, a few minutes earlier, had driven him to a rage of desire. Why bring emotions into something that lasted only a few minutes and that neither of them will even remember a year from now? At the door, though, she still has to ask: “Will you call me?” “Sure, sure,” he says distantly, secretly furious. Anyone who makes demands on him, who questions him, he automatically eliminates from his life. As soon as she’s gone, he airs the room and finishes tidying it. Then he leaves. A police siren screams through the night. He smokes a cigarette as he walks to his car, and it is only behind the wheel of his Aston Martin, driving at eighty miles per hour, that he remembers the message his mother sent him a few hours earlier. At a stoplight, he grabs his phone and finally reads her text: “Samir, call me back, I beg you. It’s about your brother.”

  * * *

  1. James Liver, forty-three, a poker player who dreams of winning the big prize that would “change my life.”

  8

  How his mother can write “your brother,” Samir has no idea. He knows nothing about this person, doesn’t want to know anything. He is not his “brother” but his “half brother”—they do not have the same father, or the same identity. For him, this man is nothing, he is a stranger. He is twenty-four years old and looks/acts about eighteen. He still lives with their mother. A tall, thin man with reddish blond hair and blue eyes: a European type, nothing like Samir at all. Whenever she was with him, his mother (dark hair, black eyes) would always be asked: “Are you the babysitter?” “No, I’m his mother.” And Samir had to reply: “He’s my brother—François.”

  Three years after the death of his father, in the first months of 1982, his mother disc
overed she was pregnant. By whom? How? She didn’t say anything to begin with: she hid her pregnancy, vomited secretly at night or out in the street, cried alone and in silence. She bought baggy clothes, size XL—ponchos, lots of black—and claimed she was getting fat: it was stress-related, hormonal. She covered the dark rings around her eyes with thick layers of foundation, but it did no good: they stayed purplish, like bruises, while her legs became heavy and swollen, in spite of the support stockings that her pharmacist recommended. She was on her feet all day long. Her employers noticed nothing, or pretended to notice nothing: they didn’t want to have to give her a day off, an hour of rest. As she came toward the end of her pregnancy, however, it finally became impossible to hide. She might give birth any day—on the sidewalk, in the bus, in the dirt, like a dog . . . Samir had seen that happen once: a little, short-haired, blood-smeared mongrel, hiding behind the trash cans, three or four damp puppies curled up beneath her. He must have been eight years old at the time. He had wept with rage. Later that day, he saw the bitch wandering the streets alone. Apparently the garbage collectors had thrown the puppies into the dumpster, laughing as they did so, all of them crushed together in a little mass of flesh, and the same thing might happen to her if she didn’t say something. It could happen at any moment—and then what? Samir found some papers in her underwear drawer: her maternity folder, containing ultrasound images, blood tests, etc. He was so shocked, he made her confess, holding the pictures up to her, and she whispered (tearfully): “Yes, I’m pregnant.” Then, a few seconds later, in a solemn voice: “That’s all I can tell you for now.” “That’s all you can tell me?” A single mother, in the ghetto . . . he feels ashamed. They’ll be a target for the prudes now, the religious freaks, the Islamists—there are more and more of them around these days, watching over those they consider too modern, too free, those who expose too much bare skin. Opprobrium is guaranteed. They have to get out of here, and fast. They steal away one night, like thieves. Not a word of goodbye. The neighbors will be gossiping about this for months. Samir has no idea where they’re going: his mother won’t tell him until they get there. All she says is that they will live in Paris “from now on”—that phrase speaks of change, a break from the old, a promise of the new. Pumped with excitement, they carry their suitcases and Tati bags onto the Métro. The bags are worn and frayed. People stare at them as if they’re gypsies. In silence, they eat the tuna and candied lemon sandwiches that Nawel made, checking every ten minutes that they are still on Line 10. They get off at the Porte d’Auteuil station, as the woman from the RATP explained to them: she took pity on them when she saw them standing in front of the map on the wall, their faces showing panic like children lost in the woods. We’re almost there. They bump shoulders as they heave the bags—no wheels, loaded with their poverty—along the sidewalk. Samir takes the heaviest ones: Nawel is weak now, her belly huge. “This is it.” She points to a tall building in cut stone, decorated with marble statues. The place is luxurious! Samir’s never seen anything like it. This is where we’re going to live? There are no names on the intercom, only initials. Samir is impressed. They enter the lobby and he goes into raptures—have they won the lottery or what? But disenchantment sets in quickly. There is an elevator, but it’s private: you can only enter it with a key. Samir is leaning on the call button as hard as he can when a man in his sixties appears and explains that he can’t use it: “You have to be an owner, and you have to have paid for the elevator’s installation. Anyone who didn’t vote for it at the last general assembly has to take the stairs.” With these words, he enters the elevator and the door slides shut in front of their eyes. Nawel motions with her hand: Don’t get mad, son. Don’t react. At every landing they reach, Nawel says: “It’s a bit higher.” By the time they make the sixth floor, they are panting, soaked with sweat, dry-mouthed and damp-palmed: they don’t have enough strength even to complain when they discover the place where they’re going to live from now on: a tiny attic room, ten square meters, the only light source a window in the roof. The ceiling is low, the space divided by exposed beams. They have to lower their heads like penitents as they walk—but what sin are they expiating? Samir says nothing. He looks for the bathroom. What century is this? He finally finds it out on the landing, at the end of a dark, narrow hallway: it’s a Turkish toilet, the enamel filthy and the stink pestilential. The door has no lock. Samir goes inside, pulls down his pants, and, standing there—legs parted, gaze fixed on the jet of urine to make sure he doesn’t get splashback on his shoes—he begins to cry. When he has finished—pissing and weeping—he goes back to the room and helps his mother rearrange things. The advantage of living in such a tiny space is that this does not take long. His mother manages to cook a chicken with olives to celebrate their new home. Ten minutes after she switches off the camping stove, there’s a knock at the door. They open it to two students who live in neighboring rooms.1 In a panic, Nawel apologizes to them for the noise, the smells—we didn’t mean to disturb you; she spends her whole damn life apologizing—but in fact, they have not come to complain. They were attracted by the aroma, they’d never smelled anything like it, and she invites them in to share the meal. After that, the four of them will often eat dinner together. The students bring drinks and cakes. The food is wonderful, the air warm, and everyone laughs.

  * * *

  Samir has figured it out. The attic room belongs to his mother’s boss, François Brunet. He must have bought it to accommodate a young au pair who would give English or German lessons to his sons. He must have bought it to “invest in real estate because it’s the only sure bet,” or maybe to fuck his parliamentary assistant.2 Whatever he bought it for, it was not to provide accommodation for his cleaning lady, her son from a first marriage, and his child with her. Samir doesn’t ask questions—he is happy to have escaped the ghetto—and enrolls in the Janson-de-Sailly high school, where he is surrounded by spoiled rich kids, Catholics with double-barreled surnames, and bling-ridden Jews. It’s like a foreign country and he loves it. He fits in from the first day, as if he’s always belonged to this world. He tells the others he’s the son of a Saudi businessman, that he has come from Dubai and will be staying in Paris for only two or three years before returning to his palatial home life, his megabucks allowance, his thousand-square-meter house, his servants and sports cars, Living the dream, man! He reinvents himself and they believe him. He buys his clothes for peanuts from other kids who are slaves to fashion: they get bored of their latest acquisitions, he takes them off their hands, and in two months he’s better-dressed than an American movie star. Where do you live? Samir struts across this minefield: things were too tense in the palace—his father has three wives. This explanation goes down very well in the right-wing circles he now frequents. Life is good here in the land of things left unsaid: no one asks him who his father is. Lying is good: what prospects for integration and personal evolution it offers! Life is a fiction, each day a new chapter. And he is the hero of this story. All those possessions he’s invented for himself—and his ability to evade blows, no matter how violent the attack. Even he is amazed by this capacity to bounce back. With an imagination like his, he could be a writer, but even now, at fifteen, he is too fascinated by money and the freedom it brings to commit himself to an artistic career, which he feels sure would end up a cage. I want to succeed/I am going to succeed, he thinks, even if I have to invent an entire life to do it. As he watches his mother struggling under the weight of her baby, slaving away in the tiny attic room, he vows that, one day, he will give her everything.

  * * *

  The night her contractions begin, he is hugging her in front of the TV. It is nearly midnight. She tells him it’s time. Unfortunately, the medical students are on duty—no way to contact them—so Samir and his mother put on coats and rush out to the street, where they walk, keeping close to the walls like gangsters. It’s dark and his mother is breathing more and more heavily, practically panting. They head to the Métro and then suddenly,
halfway down the steps, she collapses. Samir thinks about that dog again—he is afraid she is going to die, afraid he will be left alone, placed in a home—and rage rises suddenly inside him like bile. “Help!” he yells, and people do. Five minutes later, the ambulance arrives. His mother is put on a stretcher. The contractions become more violent: she had forgotten how terrible the pain was—as if she were fighting to the death against a huge, heavy object inside her. A few minutes after that, sirens drowning out her screams, she gives birth in the ambulance, between two firefighters.3 She weeps with shame. They tell her: it’s a boy. She hadn’t known; she hadn’t wanted to know; she had hoped it would be a boy. The firefighters ask if there is someone they should call—“like the father”—but she shakes her head and says she will do it herself, a little later, when I feel better, when I have enough strength, adding inwardly: to bear his coldness.