This worry of mine seems to have grown in the days that followed. Later, in another hospital, when I was determined to win a doctor’s sympathy, to make him understand and believe me, my voice remained flat and metallic, I sounded cold and distant, my eyes were dry. I had already cried too much, I had nothing left to give. You’d better cry or he won’t believe you, I thought, you need to cry. My eyes had become the eyes of a stranger. I tried to force myself. I strained to produce tears, I called up images of Reda, his face, the gun, but nothing happened, no tears, try as I might they wouldn’t form, they wouldn’t pool in the corners of my eyes, it was hopeless, they were as dry as ever, I was just as calm as when I’d walked in, and the doctor behind his glasses nodded his head, his glasses shone on his nose.
I thought back on other scenes from my life. I dredged up other bad memories, the saddest and most painful I had, anything to make myself cry. I remembered when I heard the news that Dimitri was dead.
Didier had called in the middle of the night to tell me; I was out walking, it was late, I was alone and first my phone had rung and vibrated in my pocket. It was Didier sending me a text to ask “Can I call you?”; and right away I feared the worst, why would he ask if he could call instead of just calling? I was afraid something had happened to Geoffroy, that maybe he’d been in an accident. I was trying not to think of his body laid out on a stretcher—it was the first thought I had—and I wrote back: “Yes of course,” already trembling, my fingers shaking as they slid across the screen.
My cell rang a second time, I hesitated before I picked up, then Didier told me, his voice controlled but wavering too, wavering out of its forced artificial calm, that Dimitri, who’d had a big meeting far from Paris, and to whom I’d spoken on the phone just hours before, was dead.
I tried to make myself burst into sobs so the doctor would believe me, but the memory was too old, it didn’t touch me anymore. I was forcing myself to cry, he looked as skeptical as ever; if only these two opposing forces—my wish to cry and his skepticism—could come together, I thought, we could reach—no, we could establish—the truth; the truth lay in the clash between my wish and his skepticism, in the tension between them. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do it.
But there, that first evening, with the orderly at the first hospital, I cried easily enough. He was reassuring: “Someone’s going to take care of you, someone who can help you better than I can,” at which point I almost screamed, “I don’t think you understand.” Finally the nurse arrived. When she came up to me and asked what had brought me there, I talked, and talked some more, and went on talking.
* * *
NOW THAT’S ALL OVER. I behave differently now. Instead of trying to say everything, nowadays I realize I’m always short of breath, I feel tired and indifferent; I’m depleted, and that’s the reason I got on the train and came to Clara’s. Certain fears still rise up from time to time, fears I try not to name. Yesterday, for example, we were on our way back from a walk in the forest, and I told her how, since Christmas, I’d been haunted by a story Cyril told me—I don’t know when, it doesn’t matter—about people who thought they’d caught AIDS, or who learned they had it, back when the disease first appeared, before there was any treatment. Cyril was walking beside me. There was no treatment at the time, he told me, and these people, when they thought they had it—or knew they had it—expected to die, they expected to die right away, so some of them, he went on—and more than you might think—simply stopped whatever they’d been doing, so they could enjoy however much time they had left, even if it was just a little while. I remember we were on our way home from a party when this came up, it was late, Cyril was walking his bike beside me. They just stopped; since they were about to die, they stopped going through the motions—they stopped doing the chores they had thought of as living, but which now, so close to death, were revealed as chores. They quit their jobs, they left their apartments, they gave up sports, cultural events, their circles of friends. From now on, they said no to every constraint, even little things: no more setting the alarm clock, no more trying to quit smoking or drinking, no more hanging out with people they didn’t really like but still hung out with, no more shaking hands with people they actually despised, no more graduation ceremonies or social obligations, no more watching what they ate, no more working for somebody else, no more letting people demean them, use them, no more believing in what everyone said was life, in other words, no more time for any duty that went against their instincts. But then—some of them didn’t die; some of these people who thought they were going to die survived. Miraculously, you might say. They’d prepared for death, but death never came. After they’d made their break, Cyril added, most of the survivors never managed to go back to their everyday lives. They couldn’t stand the old job, the old apartment, the people they didn’t want to see. And ever since my night with Reda, I told Clara, I’ve been afraid I would have the same reaction, ever since I faced my own death that night with Reda, I’ve been afraid of not believing, of not believing in anything anymore, and of replacing the absurdities of my own life with other absurdities: countryside, rest, simplicity, solitude, reading, water, streams—or even: livestock, barnyards, wood fires—because that’s all it would be, replacing one set of absurdities with another; and I thought: Your being here with Clara means you’ve failed.
3.
She stops to catch her breath. She says I’d returned my bike three or four hundred meters from my apartment, on the other side of the place de la République. She says I usually returned it to a closer station, but I wanted to walk off some of the wine I’d had with Didier and Geoffroy. I wasn’t drunk. I’d had a little more than usual because it was Christmas, a bottle of wine, maybe two, I can’t remember, but I wasn’t drunk. I was carrying my presents under my arm, two books by Claude Simon—inscribed by Simon to Didier, who had just given them to me—and a volume of Nietzsche’s Complete Works including, I remember, Ecce Homo and several others, wrapped in brown paper, a present from Geoffroy, who’d got it at the Gallimard bookstore on boulevard Raspail.
“And I’ll bet you money he was carrying them right side up, like that, with the cover facing out, so everyone could see what he was reading—you know how people do. Not just that, I can tell you what he was thinking at that moment, on his way home: I’ve come a hell of a long way. That’s what he was telling himself, over and over, because he liked the sound of it, I’ve come a hell of a long way—and from what? I don’t know, from how he grew up, compared with the guys in the village—because he’s obsessed with them, they’re all he’s talked about since he got here—the guys he used to hang around with at the bus stop when they were kids.”
She tells him how she used to watch us ride our bikes in the town hall square, three of us to a bike. I’d be sitting on the handlebars while someone else stood on the pedals, and a third boy would take the seat, and we’d go around and around the square, circling the World War I memorial. Because there were three of us, we couldn’t go very fast and the tires always looked ready to pop against the asphalt. The police would make us cut it out, but then we’d start again, and when she passed by and saw us on the square she used to call out, “Hey, dickwads, you look like three frogs on a matchstick.” Because, she says, “I wanted them to know I wasn’t like the other girls who were easy and let the boys push them around. The thing with boys is you have to throw the first punch. They’re simple like that. For boys the first punch is what counts. You have to be the one that starts it. As long as you throw the first punch, they never mess with you again.”
She tells him how, when we were thirteen or fourteen, she watched us shift our base of operations from the town square to the bus stop. We’d stay out drinking pastis or whiskey from plastic cups with the car trunk open so we could hear the radio (our neighbor Brian was older than me, he had a driver’s license and a car).
“Anyway, they’re the ones he must think about, a lot. One time he even said as much. I was like, It’s abo
ut time, you idiot. Tell it like it is. It’s not like I was surprised. He once told me how, when he comes back to the village and goes to say hi to the guys, the ones he used to play gangsters with at the bus stop like I said, now that it’s ten years later he doesn’t know what to think. He can’t think if he’s aged faster than them or the other way around. He told me, We never know how old we are. Because when he sees them there—with their strollers, already having families and responsibilities, or some house they’re building in the next village, all the things that make you a grown-up, and with him still being at school—it makes him feel like he’s twenty years younger, even though they’re the exact same age. Because he hasn’t got any of that. No house, obviously no wife—good luck with that—no car, no kid, it’s like those things belong to another world. He watches, he sees how they’ve slipped into these grown-up lives of theirs, and how they’re never coming back, and he thinks, I’m a baby next to them.
“Other times it’s just the opposite. Because he’ll be watching them and he’ll realize they’re all wearing the same clothes they wore when they were kids and they played together, I mean they’ve got on the same Airness tracksuit Édouard used to wear—my god, how he loved that tracksuit—they’ve got the same fake Louis Vuitton bags dangling around their necks, they’ve even got the same jobs, so then he thinks they’re the ones who never grew up. Even if they’ve got kids of their own, you think they’ve changed? Please. They still hang out, maybe not at the bus stop now, but they hang out in the houses they’ve built, drinking the same Koenigsbier and saying the same things they used to say when they’d be drinking, That’s not beer, that’s donkey piss. Suck it down, they’d say, and that’s what they did, they sucked it down, they didn’t drink, they didn’t know how to drink, they never learned how to drink, they only suck it down. They think they’re men, but they don’t even know how to drink right. They do the same thing every weekend, they talk about girls and they race each other—maybe not on their scooters anymore, now they’ve got cars and can drive, but what’s the difference, it’s just another pair of wheels. So when Édouard realizes that it’s all exactly the same, then he feels like he’s the one twenty years older and all of a sudden he’s ancient—older than twenty anyhow—even though they’re all the same age. It makes me feel ancient, those were his words. I’m even ashamed of my body. He stands up straight and he’s careful how he walks. He looks at his reflection in car windows to check out the way he’s walking, because next to them he thinks he walks like a little old man. He tries to walk younger. Then every time he comes here—and he hardly ever does, god knows what he’s got against us—every time he comes here, he goes on about how he can’t decide if he’s twenty years older or twenty years younger than the kids he grew up with. One day he thinks: Twenty years older, the next day: Twenty years younger. That’s why he says you never know your own age.
“So there he was walking along, telling himself, so help me God, I’ve come a hell of a long way. And when he thinks that way, I know it applies to me, too, at least sometimes. You think in his mind I’m special? Please. He’s always reassuring himself, he’s always telling himself, I’m different from her now, I’ve come a long way. I’ve come a hell of a long way. Honestly, it just kills me—that he could think a thing like that.”
* * *
I STAND THERE LISTENING—am I holding still out of concentration and willpower, or have the shame and pain of what she’s said left me paralyzed, frozen and stiff as the door that stands before me?
* * *
“AND DON’T MISUNDERSTAND ME. I’m not saying I blame him. I’m not saying he’s done wrong. I’ve been around, I know we all have thoughts like that. If somebody was to tell me these things never crossed his mind, I’d say they were a liar. Listen, I remember things of my own from time to time. I’ll go off by myself just so I can think back on old friends I used to see. I sit in a corner all by myself and I think of them, and I think: You’ve done all right. In the end it’s the ones I had to get away from, the ones I hated the most, who I think about the most. That’s just how it is. I bet it’s the same for everyone. You pat yourself on the back, you say, I’m not like them anymore, I’ve made it this far, I must be doing something right. But as I was saying, there he was walking along.”
* * *
I NEVER SAID MUCH about the dinner, only because my memories were so disjointed. I saw us, Geoffroy and me, walking among the Christmas lights in the street, the red and blue bulbs over our heads, with the wind nipping our ears. We were surrounded by people laden down with bags, all I could see were bags instead of bodies, the foot traffic was halting and slow, I couldn’t hear any voices, only echoes, snippets, and I loved this crowd in motion, out of clumsiness I stepped on somebody’s feet and they laughed it off. Then, next image: we ducked out of line and squeezed our way into an overheated shop to buy tarts. The warmth inside the shop seemed to settle over our cheeks like a radiant second skin; the cold skin stayed cold underneath. Then, next image: Didier is there, there are three of us now. We’re sitting down. An hour or so has passed since the scene in the street. I open a bottle of wine. When Didier hears the pop of the cork he laughs and says, “They’re playing my tune,” the expression I taught him, and I laugh too, the laughter fades, Geoffroy serves us pieces of vegetable tart. We start to eat. Then I’m standing, dinner is almost over, I can see the crumbs scattered on the empty plates, Didier is holding out one of the books that are for me, I’m overwhelmed, I read the first words out loud, “heavy all dressed in black head covered by a black scarf she crossed the deserted beach once she came near the water’s edge she sat.” Geoffroy asks me to go on reading, he encourages me, he tells me I’m a good reader. I can’t remember whether I did read any more. Then the book has disappeared from my field of vision, I don’t know where it is, I can see the computer screen, the computer’s on and it’s playing songs, arias from an opera but I don’t remember which, maybe it was Massenet, the death of Werther, then something else, then something else again, and suddenly we’re having dessert, each of us holding a glass, and we’re singing, we’re singing, we know the arias by heart. Now we’re in a different room, now we’re propped up on pillows in the bedroom. Then finally, two hours later, the wind is whistling in my ears, the trees are flying by, the streetlights flash across my eyes, the streets are empty. I return the bike to the station at the far end of the place de la République so I can walk.
4.
They were doing street work on the place de la République and the ground was covered with mud: or rather the ground was mud, that’s all there was, the torn-up streets were waiting for the workmen to pour their cement and turn them into a pedestrian walkway, and every day I got dirty when I crossed the square, I’d come home with the bottom of my pants covered in sandy dirt. It wasn’t the brown, the nearly russet mud I knew from my country childhood, mud that smelled of fresh earth and gleamed like clay, mud so clean and wholesome that you’d happily spread it on your face, this was the gray, austere, gritty mud of city construction.
On the square there were cranes standing idle, immense and skeletal, and the entire work site was walled off with green sheets of metal, which in a matter of days had been covered with political posters—one I can still see: “We won’t pay for their crisis, we’ll tear capitalism down”—plus ads and theater posters, and these metal sheets marked the borderline between the work already under way and the work that hadn’t yet begun.
So: it’s Christmas Eve, I’m walking in the dark, I cross the chaos of the place de la République, shoes covered in mud, grayish spatters and droplets on my legs as if it were raining, not from the sky, but from the ground, my Nietzsche and Simon tucked under my arm.
Suddenly I hear a sound behind me.
But I didn’t react. I kept walking. And I didn’t turn around. And not on purpose either—I just happened not to turn around. The pace of the sounds behind me quickens, coming closer, moving faster, I knew the sounds were coming closer but it didn�
��t occur to me that this phenomenon had anything to do with me, and only when he came up beside me did I identify the sound as his approaching, quickening footsteps. He was the first to speak: “What’s up? You don’t do Christmas?”
Reda smiled. He had stopped to my right and was walking now, out of breath. I could see only half his smile and half his face, the other half was in shadow, swallowed up, subsumed by the night. He asked again why I wasn’t celebrating Christmas, why I was out so late—and I told Clara I liked the sound of his breathing, I wanted to take his breath in my fingers and spread it all over my face. And yet I said nothing when he smiled.
I don’t answer, I keep my head down and try not to look at his half-face; I want to start the books that Didier and Geoffroy just gave me, it was as simple as that. I told my legs to go faster. I kept my mouth shut. I was overwhelmed by his beauty. Clara said, “To like the way somebody breathes—I mean, really.”
But I’d decided to go home and go to bed, despite his beauty, despite his breath. For strength, I focused on the books in my right hand. I knew I couldn’t hold out long. But for a few meters it worked, I managed to ignore him, but my shoulder brushed against his, his footsteps splashed my pants with gray mud; and I didn’t say anything (Nietzsche Simon Nietzsche Simon). He asked, “What, you don’t want to talk?”
* * *
I SUMMONED UP MY MEMORIES for the two police officers, a woman and a man, both facing me—him at a computer, her standing beside him. It was less than twenty-four hours after I first met Reda.
The interview had just begun, I was still in the dark. I still had no idea how intensely I would come to hate myself for having gone to the police.
In any case, it was too late for second thoughts. That’s what I learned when, in my fatigue and my dismay at the turn the night had taken, I told the police I was having second thoughts and wanted to go home. The male officer chuckled. It wasn’t a cruel laugh, he laughed the way you do when a child says something funny. Then he drew himself up, and he cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry, monsieur, but now this is a criminal proceeding. It’s out of your hands.” That night I didn’t understand how my story could stop belonging to me (which is to say, I was at once excluded from my own story and at the same time forcibly included, because they kept forcing me to talk, over and over again; which is to say, the exclusion and inclusion were one and the same, it could even be argued that the exclusion came first, at least that’s how it seemed, since it was through exclusion that my fate was first revealed to me, the fate in which I was now included and from which I was no longer allowed to withdraw).
History of Violence Page 3