The Age of Reinvention

by Karine Tuil

  * * *

  As soon as he gets there, he feels uneasy. The place is a vision of horror—his childhood home befouled. He feels as if he is entering a zone of absolute ruin. How is it even possible to find such poverty, one hour from Paris? All he sees is the degradation of the place, the walls covered with obscene graffiti and misogynistic insults, the trees engraved with penknife lettering, the disemboweled carcasses of cars, surrounded by wastelands invaded by scalpel-sharp brambles and greenish black stinging nettles. Everywhere he looks, there are spare parts, scraps of metal, and fragments of wood sharpened into stakes, and kids of ten or twelve roaming the sidewalks, patrolling, on the alert, swear words filling their mouths, lips set in scowls, ready to rip into anyone who goes near. The vandalization/bastardization of language. The drug-dealing and poverty. He saved his descendants from this, at least, took them away from the determinism, the fatalism. He got what he wanted. He needed to know that his children would be protected, sheltered from want, benefiting from the very best that the world has to offer. That they would not be exposed to the violence of society. And what’s wrong with that? He doesn’t believe in the virtues of suffering, the advantages of being tested. He doesn’t believe that you are made tougher by enduring life’s slings and arrows, overcoming difficulties in order to succeed, experiencing poverty and humiliation and abuse. On the contrary, he feels certain that poverty makes you fragile. Deprivation weakens you, physically and morally. At best, it makes you resentful—and anger can be an energy, of course. Sometimes it can help smash down doors. But if you go through those doorways, you’ll soon see how your rage stigmatizes you. Go through those doorways and you will immediately become a mimic, you will choose a form of conformism that does not exclude originality but gives you a chance to belong. Because, for the social elite, it is not rage that rules but self-control. Here is the true capacity for resistance. This is how you really stand out. And this self-control—Samir understood this when he met Ruth—although perhaps connected to mental strength, is essentially a question of education. Learning to keep your emotions in check—everywhere, all the time. Never complaining in public.

  He thinks of his children. The advanced training they are receiving. Their delicate manners. Their extraordinary intellectual aptitudes maintained by the hours of weekly classes given to them by handpicked emeritus professors—retirees from Harvard or Stanford, concert musicians from the finest orchestras. They have everything. And on Sunday mornings, it’s Samir himself who gets up at dawn and, even before he does his daily hour of exercise, makes them recite their lessons, checks their knowledge. He overdoes it, of course, and not only with his children. His friends and colleagues gently mock him for his obsession with performance, which he doesn’t even try to conceal. He knows how to produce members of the elite. He succeeded with himself, didn’t he? And in these moments of satisfaction, of personal glory, he is able to persuade himself that he made the right choices; he is able to feel strong and proud. But quickly this feeling is followed by shame . . . shame and humiliation . . . the shame of having betrayed the memory of his father, ignored his family’s history, rid himself of their suffering . . . the shame of not having admitted what he is . . . the shame of having built his success upon a lie . . . the shame of having capitulated . . . the shame of having abandoned his mother . . . the shame of never having found her a better place to live . . . That is her choice: she never wanted to leave her apartment, despite his repeated proposals. Her life is this ghetto. Her life is this pile of shit. But it’s a pile of shit swarming with life, and her neighbors are close by if there’s ever a problem, and the local kids do her shopping for her. She’s not alone here, whereas if she lived among rich people, they’d let her die. They wouldn’t even know I exist. It’s different here. Yeah, sure, he thinks. The truth is it’s dog-eat-dog wherever you live.

  * * *

  The chauffeur dropped him off a few hundred yards from the ghetto: he didn’t want to go any nearer, said it was too dangerous. Didn’t want to have stones thrown at his car. Samir walks quickly across the wasteland, feeling conspicuous in his gangster’s clothes, his arms laden with white roses, carrying a Chanel bag. People call out to him, then yield when they see who it is—Oh, it’s the big boss. He still has connections here: he’s untouchable and he knows it. People touch knuckles with him, kiss his cheek—Welcome, my brother—let him pass, he’s one of ours. He takes the stairs—the elevator’s broken—and passes a woman of African origin, in her thirties, a child tied to her back with multicolored cloth, a bottle of water in her left hand, a bottle of milk in her right. She lives on the fifteenth floor. It’s like this all the time. Samir offers to help her, just avoiding a puddle of urine. He carries the bottles to the door of her apartment and then, breathing hard, goes back down to the eighth floor, wondering how she survives. He arrives at the door of her apartment and breathes in for courage, breathes out to loose his anxiety. He feels emotional. He rings the doorbell once. She must have been waiting just behind the door, because she opens it immediately—and as soon as she sees him, the floodgates open and she starts to weep (and she’s not pretending: these are real tears) and kisses him as if he is more than a mere mortal. My son . . . my son . . . “Okay, Mom, take it easy! You’re suffocating me!” He feels oppressed by displays of affection. Come in, come in, yaouldi. And he follows her and—wham, there it is! Childhood, like a boomerang, hits him in the face, memories hurtling past him as he walks. He hands her the flowers, the bag. She cries even harder: “Oh, it’s too much, you shouldn’t have, it’s so beautiful, too expensive [and what she means is: too expensive for a woman like me], why did you spend so much money? You’re too generous, such a good son”—and now she says, as if echoing what she had written to him: “And a good Muslim too, I know.” Here it is, oozing from him once again, the panic whenever she pronounces those words. His heart pounds, he can hear it: boom boom, boom boom. What if he died right now? Who would explain to his wife, to his children, what he was doing in this woman’s apartment? If he died now, here, what would happen? His mother wouldn’t tell anyone. She would have him buried in the closest cemetery, in the middle of the Muslim section. Ruth would find out a week later, from Pierre Lévy, perhaps. This is where he’s buried. The shock. The anguish. Quick, a chair. He sits down. On the table are dozens of salads and some bread that she made herself that morning: a sort of thick, crumbly corn pancake that he adores. But now, suddenly, he has no appetite. His stomach is in knots—the emotion, perhaps. She bombards him with questions about his work, his life in New York, and reproaches him for the fact that he has never invited her there, not even once—Just so I can see where you live, a mother has the right to know that, doesn’t she?—that he has never told her about his life, his house, his girlfriend, that she knows nothing about him. All he ever tells her are the superficial things, but she wants to know EVERYTHING about him—You’re not ashamed of me, are you?—how and where he lives, what he eats, what he does, who his friends are, his partners . . . But today, Samir answers quickly because he can guess, from the distracted way she asks him all this, that she really only has one subject on her mind: the reason why she wanted to see him—François.

  “So tell me about him: What’s happening? What’s the problem?” The problem is him. His difficult personality, the people he hangs around with, his fragile nature, his wanderings. “He does nothing all day. He’s not like you: whatever he tries to do, he fails. He gave up school at fourteen. He’s never managed to stay in a job for longer than a week. He was offered a job at a market stall, but he couldn’t get up in the mornings. He just hangs around, basically. He says he can’t find anything. It’s like he’s doing it deliberately, or maybe he’s just unlucky, I don’t know . . .” “Mom, he’s twenty-four. He’s an adult. Just let him live his life.” “But he’s not that old in his head, believe me. I worry about him all the time.” Furtively, Samir strokes his mother’s shoulder. “It’s terrible for a mother to have two children, one of them a succ
ess and the other one . . .” she says in a voice made hoarse by suffering. “If you had children, you’d understand . . .” Samir stiffens. How has he been able to keep silent for so long about the existence of his children? He thinks about them now. How he would love to be able to call them and say: “Here’s your grandmother.” Several times, his children have asked him about his parents, but his answers have all been lies, inventions. In the story he told them, his mother was a beautiful intellectual feminist and his father a tall and overly strict university professor.

  * * *

  She says she’s not eating, not sleeping anymore. “I need you, Samir. Please, don’t leave me on my own. He’s my child. You could be a good influence on him. I’m worried he will do something bad. He’s been hanging around the wrong kind of people recently. Ten men were arrested near here for an armed robbery, and I found weapons in his room. I didn’t tell you on the phone because you didn’t want me to. But why didn’t you, Samir? You don’t have any problems with the police, do you?” “Of course not, Mom. But I’m a lawyer, and some of my cases are sensitive. It’s possible my telephone line is tapped, that’s all. I’m careful.” “Come with me—I’ll show you what I found.” He follows her through the hallway that leads to the bedrooms, glancing at the pictures of her and François hung on the wall. In the photographs, the first thing you notice is the incongruity of their family bond: her so dark-skinned and him milky white; her dressed in old-fashioned clothes, her body hidden under baggy gandouras (only in the apartment, though: outdoors, she never wears anything but dresses she makes herself with fabric bought by the yard in Saint-Pierre Market), him in XXL Nike sweatshirts. When he sees his brother’s bedroom, he recoils slightly. The bed is made, the windows have been cleaned, but there are objects scattered all over the place: newspapers, documents, empty boxes, clothes, scrunched-up cans of Red Bull and beer. “He doesn’t like me touching his things,” she explains when she notices the look of disgust on Samir’s face. In the corner is a collection of Nike sneakers, including several pairs of high-tops that must have cost more than $100 each; a PlayStation console with ultraviolent video games; dozens of horror DVDs; and a few porn movies that François has not even attempted to conceal. Where has he gotten the money to buy all this? And how does he dare leave it here so brazenly when he knows his mother goes into his room every day to clean it? When he’s not hanging around with his friends, he locks himself in his room and spends the whole day playing video games. But recently, I’ve realized that he’s been doing something else in there . . . With these words, she kneels down and, pointing at the floor, asks Samir to come closer. “Look,” she says, revealing a large hole hidden under the grayish, stained linoleum, sliced through with a box cutter in places. “Come closer,” she urges. And, with a little flashlight that she takes from the pocket of her apron, she illuminates the interior of the cache so that Samir can see the revolver, the knife, the grenade, the billy club, and the various other sidearms whose names she doesn’t know but which clearly scare her. “See all that?” she asks, her eyes wide and filled with tears once again. “If he doesn’t have those things to threaten people, or rob them, or kill them, then why does he have them?”

  * * *

  She is in a panic, convinced that François took part in the armed robbery she mentioned. The police have been searching other apartments in the building. “They were here, I saw them, all of them carrying guns like soldiers. I’m scared, Samir. I’m scared that he’s done something bad, that he’ll go to prison . . . oh, the hchouma!” “The word is shame, Mom.” “No, for me it’s a hchouma! Some words have more power in Arabic. ‘Shame’ sounds too smooth—it’s not violent enough. It’s a lying little word. ‘Hchouma’ is a harsh word—it comes from the throat . . .” And she bursts into sobs again, screaming: “What a maktoub he’s had!” Automatically, Samir translates in his head: “What a fate!” She’s right: “fate” is such a small, quiet word; “maktoub,” with its k clacking under the tongue, translates the weight of violence, the threat of inevitable doom, so he doesn’t correct her this time. She cries out: “Oh, my son! I’m so glad you are here! Don’t leave me alone with him, yaouldi, I beg you!” She’s hysterical, he thinks, bored. He has never been able to stand these exuberant displays of feeling, these exhibitionistic shows of rage. He has lived his life secretly, with discretion as his watchword, and in moments like this he detaches himself from this woman with whom he seems to have nothing in common. His life is so different from hers now, with a set of behaviors and beliefs that is almost diametrically opposed; a lifestyle more in keeping, he thinks, with the man he has become: the respected/famous/role-model lawyer. In a quiet voice, he asks her to calm down. She sobs and hiccups, gasping that she’s going to die, and he says nothing. She starts to tear at her clothes, to scratch at her skin until it bleeds—You want to see me suffer?—so, coldly this time, in a metallic voice, he tells her: “Enough, Mom. What do you expect me to do? He has his life, I have mine. I can’t solve everyone’s problems. And can you imagine the repercussions on my own life? Can you imagine how it would look if someone found out my brother had an arms cache in his bedroom? I have too much to lose. I understand that you’re worried. I’ll talk to him. I’ll try to help him, as far as I can, but I can’t do any more than that without the risk of compromising myself—and that is out of the question.” “Please, Samir, I’m begging you—do something!” At what point did Samir realize that he has to keep his distance from this affair, to separate himself definitively from his mother and his brother? When the word “prison” was pronounced? When he discovered the weapons? Or even earlier than that, as he walked through the ghetto? He feels hot suddenly. He knows what the risks are if he is discovered here, in the proximity of those weapons. His whole body is clammy with sweat. He takes off his jacket and tie and tosses them on François’s bed. “You must not mention this to anyone, you understand? No one must find them! I don’t know what I can do, to be honest—reason with him? You know as well as I do that I’ve never had any influence on him. I barely even know him. We only lived together for about five years! We have nothing in common, and you know it. The only one who might have any influence on him is his father. Maybe you should talk to him about it?” At the mention of François’s father, Nawel really does collapse, sliding to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. Samir does not react. His face is impassive. But she continues to weep—nothing seems to calm her—so he speaks again: “I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t call Brunet—it’s his son, after all. You’ve spent your whole life protecting him, but what are you scared of? All he has to do is help his son, find him a job—he has the resources to do that, the contacts, the money. And it’s his duty. Why should I be the one to take all this on? I’m not his father! You had this child with him, and you took it upon yourself to raise him single-handedly when that man should have helped you. It’s his problem, not mine!” Just then, there is a thud in the hallway, the sound of a door banging, and footsteps on the linoleum. A voice calls out: “Mom?” “It’s him,” Nawel whispers, her face a mask of fear. Swallowing her tears, she closes the lid on the arms cache, stands up, and leads Samir to the hallway, where François is waiting impatiently. “Mom! Where are you, for fuck’s sake?” “I’m coming!”

  * * *

  Every time Samir sees his brother, he feels the same shock. Physically, they have nothing in common. François is wearing jeans with rips in the knees and the backside, a round-necked black T-shirt, and garishly colored high-top sneakers. Seeing Samir, he moves toward him, fist-bumping him like a teenager, and crowing sarcastically: “Ah, His Lordship is here!” Samir does not reply. He detests this familiarity, the fist-bumping. He follows his mother, who asks them to sit at the table. The tension. The aggression. The mistrust. All these forces he has to struggle against each time he finds himself in the same room as his brother, as if Samir were battling the darkest, most sordid part of his past: not of the shame of poverty, but of this brother whose existence h
e never wanted, and with whom he shares nothing. Intellectually, socially, they are in absolute opposition. François gave up school after failing his professional exams in mechanics; he writes and speaks poorly—a savage, thinks Samir, watching him rock backward on his chair, use his fingers to eat, make strange noises while he drinks.

  “So? What’re you doing here?”

  “I came to see Mom.”

  “Come to visit the prisoners, have you? We’re in here for a life sentence, but you come for twenty minutes, talk to us through the Plexiglas window, and basta! See you next time, bro!”

  “You seem to know a lot about incarceration . . .”

  “No, believe it or not, I’ve never gone down. Amazing, eh? I’ve messed around, but I’ve never been to prison.”

  “Don’t speak too soon.”

  “What? Have you come here to threaten us?”

  “Are you incapable of speaking without being aggressive?”

  “You’re the one who’s aggressing me! You turn up, preach a sermon, and then you fuck off again . . .”

  Samir does not reply. François continues chewing noisily.

  “Could you try to eat more quietly?”