The Age of Reinvention

by Karine Tuil

  * * *

  That’s when he starts going off the rails. He stops working in class and begins hanging around the housing estate. One of the guys in his building—the caretaker’s son, mixed race, with dark hair and green eyes—offers him work as a lookout. For about €40, he has to walk around the building, checking all the exits, and warn the others if the cops turn up. He does this conscientiously, but it’s not exactly difficult: in general, the police only enter the estate in convoys, the lights of their vehicles flashing, because they’re afraid of going there without backup. So he is usually able to see them coming from miles away. But occasionally, when they suspect a major drug deal or are targeting a big fish, they come more stealthily, in plain clothes, and then suddenly they rush out of vans that you hadn’t even noticed arrive, grab you, shove your face to the ground, hands behind your back, and handcuff you; they don’t worry about the charges until later. They run up the stairs and bang on doors, yelling: “Police! Open up!” It’s total panic. When that kind of thing happens, you have to react quickly, and as everyone there knows, François is the fastest thing on two legs. He can race up three flights of stairs without panting; he can run across town without ever slowing down. It is his one and only talent, and he puts it to good use.

  So, having proved his worth as a lookout, he’s offered the chance to sell hash—and he agrees. They are putting their trust in him: it’s a sort of promotion. It’s no big deal, though—just a few joints hidden under his coat. He has to hang around train stations and parking lots, spotting potential clients, and one night he walks over to two guys in a car who turn out to be plainclothes cops, and he’s arrested. He is locked up in a detention center before his trial, but he tells the judge a sob story and is sentenced to a number of hours of community service. So he ends up scrubbing graffiti off the wall of an elementary school, shoveling dead leaves and trash in the playground: empty orange juice cartons, sticky candy wrappers, dog-eared trading cards. He spends hours doing this, supervised by a twenty-five-year-old social worker, a laid-back far-left idealist, and everyone is happy. When he gets back home, he wants to get back into dealing, and by hanging around the gang leaders, he is eventually given the job of hiding weapons imported from the Balkans. This is more serious shit, but he accepts right away, no questions asked. Officially, these weapons are to protect the housing estate, but in reality, as everyone knows, they will be used to train young jihadists or will be bought by gangs of armed robbers or drug dealers. But that isn’t his problem, and selling guns is a potential gold mine for him: he would have been crazy to pass up this chance to make a success of his life, to get a piece of the action. He finds a nice, quiet spot in a nearby forest: no one ever goes there, and he sometimes even gets to shoot the guns himself. He loves that: feeling their weight in his hands, the smell of gunpowder, the deafening noise when he pulls the trigger. But most of all, what he loves is throwing grenades: pulling the pin like you’d pull the tab on a Coke can and tossing it as far as you can. It’s dangerous, of course—it could go off in your hand—but what a fucking kick.

  “It was around this time that I saw you at Mom’s place. I thought to myself: He’s made it, so can I.”

  Deep down, though, even if he likes guns, even if this small-scale arms-dealing is exciting and sometimes makes him feel like he’s living in an action movie, he knows that it is more likely to lead him to prison than to Australia, the place he has dreamed of going ever since a kid from the estate went there and made his fortune manufacturing tiger-stripe sweat suits. “So anyway, I found your address . . . and you know the rest.”

  François has tears in his eyes—he takes a long drink to hide his emotion—and Samir realizes that he’s done it: coaxed the beast from its cage, tamed it merely by listening. He tells him that he is going to help him. “Go home, and I will pay for your studies. I won’t let you fall. But you have to promise me that you won’t go near drugs or guns anymore, that you’ll be a good boy. And give it a rest with those ultraviolent video games too: that stuff messes with your head.” François nods obediently. “Okay,” says Samir. “You can stay another two or three weeks, then—I’ll take care of everything and . . .”

  But no, François wants to go back to France right away. He is pale; he looks like he’s about to throw up. And it is now that he confesses to Samir that he is in trouble. He tells him what happened outside the club the other night—the woman he messed with. He regrets it now, and he’s scared—scared that she will press charges or tell someone. He was drunk that night: You got me drunk—I’m not used to drinking that much. He has forgotten what really happened—did he hurt her? He doesn’t see why he should be punished for something he doesn’t even remember, and anyway, She was asking for it, he yells: She was like a whore in her miniskirt, her blouse hanging open so you could see everything. They’re all asking for it, those sluts, so you give ’em what they want and then they blubber about it! I don’t get it—are you supposed to ask their permission, when their whole attitude says come and fuck me? Samir, I’m scared now—she might make up anything. She might say I raped her when I hardly even touched her. They’re crazy, those bitches, they might do anything. I want to go home. Samir is disgusted by this speech. Did he rape that girl? Did he try to touch her? He wants to shake his brother until he remembers, until he confesses. Let him spend the rest of his life in prison. But he doesn’t say any of this. His single most pressing preoccupation is to get François as far away from New York as possible, to keep him at a distance from his family and himself. He persuades him that staying in the United States would be dangerous: “You’re right to be scared. She might well press charges. You have no idea what kind of risk you’d be running if you stayed here. Cops specializing in sex crimes—and believe me, they’re the worst—could turn up at your hotel tomorrow with DNA samples that would put you in jail. You’d get twenty years, and even the best lawyer in the world wouldn’t be able to reduce that sentence. You’d have all the feminist groups on your back. You’d have public opinion against you. And you’re French, on top of everything else. Listen, you’re right—you need to go home.” He is going against his deepest convictions, he is betraying himself—but fear is dictating his every word now. “Hang on,” says François, “what am I supposed to do when I get home? I need money—I can’t go on like this. I want to put my life straight. No more messing around.” He came to America to ask for help, to try to escape his situation, “not to go back to being a small-time dealer.”

  “I’m going to help you.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why? You told me yourself that I’m nothing to you.”

  “If you don’t believe I’m doing it for you, then think about it this way: I’m doing it for Mom. So she won’t have to worry about you constantly anymore. So she won’t wake up in the middle of the night, panicking that you’re not home or that you’re drunk or high. So she won’t call me to say she’s not eating because all she can think about is you and what you’re up to and how she’s scared that the cops will arrest you and her reputation will be ruined—honor is important for her, you know. For all these reasons, I will provide you with money. But in exchange, you have to promise me that you’ll stay there and find a job or even go to college. Promise me you won’t use this money to buy drugs or blow it all in a casino.”

  “You’d find out from Mom, I guess?”

  “I’ve got better things to do than spy on you, François. I have a job, a family. I prefer to trust you.”

  This word—“trust”—removes all the tension between them, and it is François who continues, in a calm, relieved voice:

  “The best thing would be if you paid me a certain amount every month. That way, I couldn’t blow it all.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know . . . what do you . . .”

  “No, go ahead, I’m listening. Work out how much you really need . . .”

  “Two thousand euros a month? That woul
dn’t kill you. You’d get to live in peace, and so would I—I’d have enough to pay all the bills, and to get something nice for Mom occasionally. So, I’ll go back to France and leave you in peace . . .”

  Samir feels so relieved, he laughs. Two thousand euros is nothing for him—he could have asked for eight thousand and he still would have said yes. He nods his agreement.

  “But how will you do it? Get me the money, I mean?”

  “I’ll just open an account in France and put money into it every month. I can sort that in a couple of days.”

  “What if your wife finds out?”

  “Oh, you’re worrying about me now, are you?”

  “I don’t want you to lose everything because of me . . .”

  “She won’t find out. I’ll do it discreetly. I have contacts in the banking world. It’s not a problem.”

  “Samir,” François asks, “why do you let Mom rot in that hellhole when you have enough money to set her up in a nice apartment?”

  “She refuses to move. It’s her choice, not mine.”

  “I bet I could persuade her . . .”

  “You want more? Isn’t this enough?”

  François does not reply to this. He grabs his sports bag and announces that he is going to take the subway to the airport: he wants to leave right away. But Samir refuses: he wants to accompany his brother (less out of affection than the desire to know for sure that he really has left). In the airport, they hug as his flight is called, and Samir pats his shoulder. Forget what happened. Have a good trip! Samir watches him walk toward security, waving and calling out, See you soon! when all he really wants is never to see him again.

  13

  It is a question writers are asked all the time: How long does it take you to write a book? As if writing had some sort of connection with architecture and construction, as if it were possible to forecast deadlines and delivery dates. But writing, because it has no rules, is not so easily constrained. There is something asocial in the act of writing: you write against. Given all this, how is it possible to establish the basis of any kind of social contract? Samuel has never managed it: that is why he chose to be a social worker—to stay in a place filled with people who are suffering just as much as he is, in different ways, perhaps, but all of them wounded, cracked. Since Nina left, his life has been structured around solitude. Writing enables him to keep depression at a distance. He writes in order to survive, to not fall sick. Working and working, he catches a glimpse of the building’s shape, and is now able to answer: “One year.”

  Another question, asked less often, is nevertheless at the very center of the creative process: At what point do you know that a book is finished? Samuel has been trying to answer this question every day for the past month. He rereads, adds, cuts, corrects . . . His emotional stability now depends not on the love of a woman but on the position of a word or a semicolon, the rhythm of a sentence. The musicality of language. This need to be connected to writing as if you were mining your own soul (but mining it for what?): he has never found anything as intense that can make the chaos of existence bearable. When Samuel can read what he’s written without annotating it, he knows the book is finished. There is nothing more to say. He can send it out. Here and there, he notices a dip in the tempo that might destabilize the reader; he senses the parts that people might not like. But he doesn’t change anything. Writing means accepting that some people won’t like it. He hates perfectionism, that obsession with “good writing.” Literature is disorder. The world is disorder. How else can writing describe its brutality? The words don’t have to be in the right place. Literature exists in precisely this area of precariousness.

  * * *

  Samuel is not aiming for anything in particular; his only ambition is to write, feeding his story every day as if it were some insatiable predator. Crazy, isn’t it, the way his mental and emotional equilibrium depends on putting his own fiction into words?

  * * *

  His greatest regret is never having been recognized as a writer. Several times, at different moments of his life, he attempted to get his work published, but he remembers that dreadful period as if he had contracted a serious illness, some terminal disease that twisted his entire being with violent pain. Yes, he remembers it as a time when he felt the constant desire to put a bullet through his brain. He collected rejection letters—his novel did not correspond to the editorial line; the publishers regretted to inform him that . . . etc.—and he read and reread a quotation by Singer: “I thought about killing myself almost every day. What tormented me most of all was my lack of success as a writer.” He wasn’t even a writer at all.

  * * *

  He never felt he had succeeded at anything in his life.

  * * *

  Samuel no longer fears his novel being rejected. Something inside him, some sort of ambition, has simply died away: not literary ambition—he still feels the same obsession with creating his own personal language, a language that is identifiably his, a strong voice that will carry far—but social ambition. He no longer seeks fame/recognition. He has given up on that furious, destructive fixation. The desire to elicit admiration, to be loved for his achievements, to have a clearly identifiable social position . . . he gave up on all of that as he neared forty. And he has to admit it’s a relief no longer to be dependent on others’ approval for his own happiness: the pressure has eased, and he feels as if he has passed to the other side. Yesterday, it was still possible; yesterday, it was an obligation, an imperative: SUCCEED! A social norm to which everyone had to submit (or be marginalized, excluded from the society of men). But today, it’s over, and he can say that without anger, without the fear of being judged. His promise has been shattered, and it lies now in fragments . . . all that remains of his ambition, or the ambition that his parents had for him: the construction of an EXCEPTIONAL being, a member of the ELITE. What a joke! What a hoax.

  * * *

  And so, when he sends his manuscript to four publishers, he has no expectations at all. He is calm, lucid. He knows that no one can succeed in literature. To write is to be confronted on a daily basis with failure.

  14

  And so he returns to his calm and perfectly compartmentalized existence: two apartments, two women, two lives. Nina has shown signs of impatience, it’s true—she is weary of this isolation, she’s not happy—but Samir reassures her: she has an important place in his life. This place is off to the side, admittedly; it is a quiet and shadowy place, but no less important for all that. And, he explains in order to appease her: “The most intense feelings, the greatest love stories, are always played out in the shadows, in secret.” “But I feel there’s something missing, don’t you understand?” No, he doesn’t understand. “Look at it objectively: you have everything.” Everything: money, material comfort, sexual closeness. That should be enough for her, he thinks. What he experiences with her every day belies all Berman’s prophecies of doom: never has he felt so serene, so free of the anguish and confusion and guilt engendered by the mechanics of imposture. He has entered that phase of personal and social euphoria where everything he attempts is successful: he wins all his cases with a new authority, his mind ramps up in a frenzy of excitement. He plays, he wins.

  This lasts for some time.

  * * *

  Samir and Nina live in a vacuum, disconnected from the outside world. She sees no one but him. Samuel is right: she lives like a geisha. That is what she tells herself—like a geisha, not like a whore—but deep down, she has her doubts. (What does she do apart from wait for him? Obey his desire? Does she have any independence at all? No. Sometimes she wants to rebel against him, but she always suppresses this urge.) For a long time, her sole ambition was to be loved by Samir, but her desires have evolved (a fact not unconnected with Samuel’s harsh words): now she wants a child. She has been living like a recluse in this beautiful apartment for nearly a year now; she wants for nothing, of course, but her status as a kept mistress—which had suited her perfectly well a
t the beginning, in the first flush of romantic rapture—that status (which she can sense will be gradually downgraded and marginalized) is no longer something she can bear. She can no longer be at the mercy of Samir’s desires and availability, in the shadows; she wants more than that. But there is something else: the fear of aging. The fear of aging and of being supplanted when he grows tired of her—that insidious threat that Samuel evoked, out of jealousy perhaps, in order to make her suffer, and yet that does not make it any less true. She knows it is true because she is aware of Samir’s lust for young women. When they are out in the street together, he doesn’t attempt to conceal his roving eyes; she even saw him give his card to a salesgirl barely out of her teens while she was trying on underwear that he had chosen for her. She knows it is true because she heard him tell a story about one of his clients, who said: “I’m leaving my wife now, because she’s still young enough to be able to find someone else.” He had laughed, but for her it was tragic. It is tragic to realize that, after a certain date, your ticket simply expires. No matter how fiercely women struggle against the passing of time, no matter how hard they try to appear younger and more desirable, it is a battle that, in a man’s man’s man’s world, is lost before it begins. Nina might hope that this relationship lasts two, maybe three years, but what happens afterward? The truth—which she does not want to hear—is that Samir will ultimately leave her. He is too in thrall to the excitements of change, of new love, of easy sex. In all things, he is a consumer, a pleasure-seeker. He has always loved the company of beautiful women—the most beautiful women, those whom other men do not dare even approach. She is sure of all this, and she thinks that a child would save her—it’s a form of insurance, isn’t it, and hardly an original one. He should have anticipated this situation; it was entirely predictable. Sooner or later, the question of maternity always rears its head. And Nina planned it all. One evening, she is particularly delicious in bed—playing the imaginative, racy mistress: exactly what he loves best—then, after they have made love, she makes the announcement: she wants a child. She does not say that she is seeking some sort of legitimacy; no, that will come later—naturally, she thinks—once the child is born. Samir had dreaded this moment: he thought perhaps she’d gotten over her desire for children, hoped so anyway—she hadn’t mentioned it for so long. But now here it is again. He reminds her that it’s impossible. They are together: he loves her, they love each other; and they are free, no attachments; so why create a problem? A child would only complicate things. A problem? She insists: “You promised me before I left France.” Maybe he did promise, but the words came out in a burst of trust and love. She has to be realistic: