History of Violence

by Édouard Louis

  And then Reda told me that, in his father’s story, after all this hesitation, his father did it. He rang the bell. And the door swung slowly open. But no one appeared. The ray of light on the tiled floor grew wider and wider, it changed shape, the daylight stretched into the hallway and was swallowed up; and I see him from behind, Reda’s father, I see the nape of his neck, as strong and beautiful as his son’s, I can visualize the door opening so slowly that it’s almost hard to bear. And then—no one. Nobody there. Only darkness. After peering into this darkness for a second or two, he started to wonder if anyone had opened the door at all, or whether it was just a gust of wind, the wind and nothing more, or whether in his nervousness he’d opened the door himself, by accident. But he didn’t move. Certain people freeze when they’re afraid. And in the doorway there loomed out of the darkness, ever more distinctly, the face of a man—the manager of the place—his features growing sharper and sharper, his nose hooked like a beak, his eyebrows bushy; he may have been slightly drunk, I don’t know, Reda didn’t say; maybe when he sees the man loom up and open his mouth to speak, Reda’s father feels a warm breath of whiskey on his face, or perhaps it wasn’t that way at all—what’s the difference?—maybe he never drinks, or as he would say: he never touches alcohol, maybe alcohol disgusts him and so do cigarettes, maybe he’s always scrupulously clean, maybe he gives off an unvarying scent of Marseille soap and hair tonic, as stomach-turning as the stench of whiskey breath. His father told him a lot about the manager of the hostel, but Reda told me very little except that he was a veteran; and later on I read up on the subject and discovered that most of the managers of these immigrant hostels were indeed veterans. They’d know how to maintain order, it was thought, and would understand the psychology of the immigrants, since some of them had seen action in the former colonies.

  * * *

  HE TOLD ME, TOO, that the manager treated his father a little better than he treated the others, and much better than he treated the Arabs, because he was Kabyle, and the manager thought Kabyles were worthier, braver, and actually cleaner than Arabs—and no doubt his father shared this point of view; I know Reda did, and I suppose he picked that up from his father. I have no way of knowing. But that night when we were still on the street he mentioned not liking Arabs, I can’t remember the exact slur, I can’t remember what word he used, only the violence he carried inside him; I pretended I hadn’t heard, of course I couldn’t yet think what I thought a few days later—that ultimately Reda and the police spoke about Arabs the same way (months later, when a friend pointed out that Reda was just as racist as the police, albeit for reasons of his own, it made me angry, it filled me with anger and contempt; I couldn’t stand to hear Reda insulted, I wanted to protect Reda from this friend of mine; if someone had to speak ill of Reda, I wanted it to be me and me alone; only I was allowed—because Reda owed me). That night I simply ignored anything that seemed bad about Reda, although I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing; only later did it strike me how much reality I set aside in order to keep what I liked.

  When he said his father had always described the manager as a violent and tyrannical man, all of a sudden I saw him—and it was images of Ordive that flashed into my mind; when people are talking, I can’t control the flow of memories, they simply come to me, they tunnel their way in, and they are my only access to the present; and so while I listened to Reda, I thought of Ordive, a woman I hadn’t seen in ten years, fully convinced that this manager looked like her. She was elderly. She lived alone, she was one of those grim and solitary women one generally finds in small villages, routinely associated with the figure of the witch; we’d see her on the silent roads, and since it was the North, the roads were nearly always shrouded in a light mist; up and down she went, though we never knew where she was going, maybe nowhere, perched on a bright orange bicycle that was too big for her. She was universally reviled, on that point there was unanimity. Many stories and rumors were told about her and passed down across the years, so many stories, they seemed never to fade away, they were never forgotten, no matter how she tried to bury them in her silence. I think people found her silence artificial in some way—it wasn’t that she never spoke, it was that she seemed to be keeping silent, which is a very different thing, and everyone in the village knew the stories weren’t true, but everyone repeated them all the same. The ones who told the stories knew they weren’t true and so did the ones who listened then turned around and spread them, but people told the stories anyway. And so the shared lie grew and swelled. It had been retold for so many years, I don’t know whether everyone knew it as the fruit of a mass hallucination, or whether they ended up believing their own lie and forgetting where it came from.

  Two stories were told more often than the rest; the first was that she’d slept with Germans during the war, for money; I’d hear it over and over again: “That one made a fortune running around with the Krauts.”

  Second, they said she was partly to blame for the death of her granddaughter, who died of a terrible illness when she was still in preschool. This was a subject that came up all the time, like a verbal tic; even if no one had any particular wish to bring it up, the story came up, again and again, during card games or summer games of pétanque on the red dirt of the village pitch, as automatically as conversations about the weather. The little girl said her head hurt, and Ordive’s daughter, the mother of the child, went to the doctor, and the doctor said it wasn’t serious, “nothing to worry about,” just migraines, “it’s normal at that age, the way they run around, especially nowadays,” and it didn’t go away, the little girl would be crying with pain, she kept complaining about it at school, so Ordive’s daughter went back to the doctor, and the doctor prescribed acetaminophen. She took it for eight or ten months. Then one day they found out it wasn’t migraines, it was cancer. The news spread like a powder trail, each new person who knew told three others who told three others, and so on, and before the afternoon was over everyone had heard. The whole time the disease had been growing, and all she took was over-the-counter pills, and the bad cells had proliferated, it was too late, they couldn’t do anything to treat her. The child lived only a month or two more. For those one or two months, the impending death was on everyone’s lips, everyone had their own prediction of when it was coming, and this was always offered with a kind of false reluctance. And then one day it came.

  For months people talked about the little coffin, the horror of that sight which had come much too soon, just as predicted, the white coffin on the church square, almost as tiny as a shoe box, and then no one dared to say anything bad about Ordive, they pitied her: “Poor woman, she never deserved a thing like that,” they wept over her and for her, they gave her little gifts as a gesture of support, just to show her she wasn’t alone—generally flowers and chocolates. Collections were taken up, some people decided to take up collections to cover the cost of the funeral; and their hatred found new outlets, as if it were a feeling that by its very nature could never disappear but only pass from one body to the next, leap from one group, one community, to the next; I told Didier, hate can exist without any particular individuals, all it needs is a place where it can come back to life. And then, as if it were irresistible, people expressed less and less pity for Ordive and her daughter, and soon, a month or two later at most, no one spoke of them at all, and then you began to hear people say that Ordive’s daughter did have something to do with it after all; they said they hadn’t realized at first but new information had come to light, time had done its work and now we knew the mother was to blame and so, indirectly, was the grandmother, Ordive; they weren’t entirely innocent, they’d been careless, so people said; they hadn’t taken the right precautions, they could have saved the child—everyone knew it wasn’t true, everyone knew there was no evidence against them, but everyone went on with the proceedings; the ones who told the story knew it wasn’t true and so did the ones who listened so they could spread it later on, but they told it all the same. And
the collective lie grew and swelled.

  Ordive was hated because of these rumors and because of her attitude: years of hatred and isolation had left her corroded with bitterness, and in that time her spite had grown—as we all know, people who are hated become hateful in the end. I was no different, I hated her too. She chased after children when she saw them in the street, she chased after me, and she would cry out, over and over: “You have no manners, you should smile when you greet your elders, you should stop playing with that Game Boy or the computer all day long, you should get some fresh air, in my generation we knew how to amuse ourselves, they gave us three sticks and a piece of string and that would keep us busy till Monday,” and as much as I feel for her because of the persecution she endured, even though now I understand that her ordeal could only leave her full of resentment, that it could hardly be otherwise, at the time all I could do was hate her just as much as everyone else did; and when I imagined the manager of the hostel, hers was the name that came to my mind. Yesterday I told Clara—who was very familiar with Ordive—that it may have been cruel of me, but that giving her name to that man had seemed a kind of necessity.

  * * *

  AS SOON AS Reda’s father had spent an hour at the hostel, he knew all there was to know. He had met others who had been living there forever, he could tell from their knowledge of the place and how it worked and the schedule, and he could also tell—though Reda’s father couldn’t have said quite how—because they all looked, stood, talked, watched, laughed the same, apart from a detail here or there, they were like men produced by one single thing, born from the belly of one woman, one person, one creature: the hostel.

  Within an hour he knew everything; he knew that for a few years he would have to sleep with four others in a tiny room—four men were given bunk beds, and the other one, the fifth, slept on a mat stretched out on the damp and moldy linoleum floor. He understood that fires would be part of life in the hostel, that sometimes they’d be fatal—afterward, if the fire had been hot enough, they would find charred bodies two or three times smaller than their actual height, shriveled up in a puddle of solidified human fat, which dripped from the body when it burned. So I imagine. He knew that he could be deported for any reason, for “bad behavior,” as the manager called it (without anyone knowing what “bad behavior” might actually mean), that he would be deported if he showed up late to the factory—of course his father’s schedule was monitored, almost to the minute, Reda said; they told him no women, they couldn’t have women in their rooms, or men from outside, friends from the factory for example, because the manager was afraid that without women, the men would make do with other men. His father must have realized that this power structure would force him to lie, he knew he’d have to lie to his family back home, to whom he sent money, he knew he would lie out of pride, and that when he went back he’d have to let them believe that his life in France was prosperous and basically pleasant, that all was well (and what is power if not this machine for creating lies, for forcing others to lie?).

  Now and then the manager would invite Reda’s father to visit him in his private apartment, when his wife and children were away. Reda’s father would show up at nine on the dot, the manager would greet him at the door, glass in hand. He would offer him a seat. He would ask Reda’s father if he minded a little music, and before he could answer, the manager would get up and turn on the radio. Reda’s father hated this music. He found it obscene. But he said nothing. He didn’t move, he sat frozen on the sofa each time this scene was repeated: for two hours the manager alone would talk, then would send him away when he got bored, saying, “Some days I wonder what the fuck I’m doing here,” saying, “Sometimes I want to get the fuck out and never see another brown face in my life,” saying, “Sometimes I tell myself there has to be a country where you can do what you want and nobody fucks with you, no one tells you what’s right or wrong, where you can walk around bare-ass naked and no one can say a thing—that’s the country where I’m headed when I get out of here,” and Reda’s father would sit there silent, stony-faced, disgusted by the music, disgusted by the man across from him.

  But the worst part of his daily life wasn’t the filth of the place or the authoritarianism of the manager, it wasn’t the cramped rooms, though these were rarely more than five or six meters square, it wasn’t the lack of any place to put your things, or the stench that spews from those toilets as if from the center of the earth, through moldy pipes and foul sewers, and which spreads everywhere in those buildings. It wasn’t the insects, the roaches hidden in every crack, every fissure, under the rickety furniture, or the fires that punctuate life in the kitchens because of the faulty wiring. It wasn’t even the sexual deprivation, or the resulting dreams, the obsession with women (or in some cases men), and the erections, hard and damp under the sheets, so hard they hurt when you wake up. What made life unbearable in the hostel, above all, was the noise. Everyone who’s lived in one will swear to you, if you ask, that the absolute worst thing about a hostel is the noise. When they talk among themselves, that’s what they talk about—the noise.

  His father told him that, compared with the noise, everything else seemed almost easy to deal with, because noise is one of the few things you can’t get away from or do anything about. You can fix a wobbly bed, you can get hold of a new coffeemaker, even if it’s against the rules, you can find stuff for killing roaches, but what can you do about noise? You can’t grab hold of it, if you went and slapped your neighbor because he slammed his door, what would it matter? The noise is everywhere, every hour of the day or night, and is practically autonomous compared with the people who are supposedly making it, the noise penetrates the body by way of the ear and reverberates in every cell, the noise troubles the silence of the inner organs. The tiny rooms where the immigrants slept, including Reda’s father, had once been much bigger rooms, which were then subdivided, for lack of space, using thin boards and plywood. Some work the day shift, some the night. The incessant back and forth between work and the hostel, the creaking doors, the snores, the shouting in their sleep, the groaning beds, all their misery comes out in noise. It is impossible to rest; as the sleepless nights and restless sleep accumulate, fatigue makes them even more sensitive to the noise.

  * * *

  HE WAS KABYLE. When I repeated this, and explained that his being Kabyle had profoundly affected the course of the evening, the officer—I can’t remember whether it was the man or the woman—interrupted and said, “So Arabs are your thing?” They waited for me to answer, and I didn’t say anything at first, then, in the idiotic way one does, I answered—as if the question had been a real question, as if it had been appropriate, as if it were acceptable—that he wasn’t an Arab but a Kabyle, that I had studied that part of the world, and that thanks to my studies I was familiar with certain elements of Kabyle culture. I could even speak a few words. I’ve forgotten them now, but that night they were very present in my mind. I had told Reda that I knew a lot (“a lot” was an exaggeration) about Kabyle culture. He was amazed. But the police officer still looked skeptical, and he or she said: “You’re sure he was Kabyle? Obviously he could have been lying, and in fact the odds are—”; this time I stopped them, I said: “When I spoke a few words to him in Kabyle, he recognized what I said.” He identified the words and translated them. I was concentrating, trying to get it right. My bad pronunciation amused him, he made fun of me. And I repeated this saying: Azka d Azqa. The coincidence, and his cynicism, seemed too overwhelming to be true, which is why I never mentioned the moment to Clara. Reda made me say it again. He said, “This speaks of tomorrow, of the grave and of death.” I asked Reda to tell me about his mother. He said he’d tell me about her later on.

  6.

  This whole time the grain of the door has filled my field of vision. I’m calm. I’m trying to stay calm. At this point, Clara tells her husband, I look Reda in the eyes and congratulate myself on having met him; I congratulated myself for having demurred when Geo
ffroy offered me another drink. Geoffroy had wanted to give me one last glass of wine before I went home, and I said no. I don’t know why, but without thinking I pushed the bottle back when he passed it in my direction, I must have felt tired. After my night with Reda, I admitted to Clara, I wasted a lot of time on useless questions that led nowhere, dead-end questions, questions that had no answers—although they did manage to fill my days and keep me from doing anything besides asking them over and over again, while I limited myself to only the most mechanical tasks so I could keep my mind on the questions, for example making the bed even though I’d made the bed already several times that day, or finding something to pick up off the floor, a pen, a stray hair, or arranging the forks in the drawer; I wondered if what had happened with Reda would have happened if I’d said yes to that drink with Geoffroy and crossed the square five minutes later; I would become convinced that some little detail, something tiny and insignificant—if I’d had one more glass of wine, or if I’d stopped to tie my shoelaces a few meters away from the place de la République, or if I’d gone down a street I like better, because it’s a nicer walk, because it’s more picturesque, because it’s more interesting—could have kept me from bumping into Reda, I would ask myself whether such a meaningless decision could have derailed the events of the night and the months that followed. I know in spite of everything that, even if it hadn’t taken place that night, it would have happened sooner or later, in more or less the same way, that it was geographically inevitable.

  * * *

  WE CAME TO A BRIGHTLY LIT INTERSECTION, where the rue du Faubourg-du-Temple meets the quai de Valmy, and I slowed down, hoping we could talk just a little bit longer before I went home to bed. I’d barely met him, and still I was ready to beg him not to leave me; and I thought, He’s only interested in you because the streets are empty; and I thought, It’s because there’s nobody else around. It’s because you’re the only one still out on the street.