History of Violence

by Édouard Louis

  7.

  I no longer recognized what I was saying. I no longer recognized my own memories, when I spoke them out loud; the questions I was being asked by the police made me describe my night with Reda differently than I’d have chosen, and in the form that they imposed on my account, I no longer recognized the outlines of my own experience, I was lost, I knew that once I went forward with the story, according to their cues and directions, I couldn’t take it back, and I’d have lost what I wanted to say; I felt that once the right moment to say something passes, it disappears for good and can never be retrieved, the truth slips away and out of reach; I felt that whenever I spoke a word in front of the police, other words became impossible, now and forever; I understood that there were certain scenes, certain things, I must never discuss if I wanted to remember all that had actually happened; I understood that the only way to remember was to forget, and that if the police forced me to talk about those things, it would mean forgetting everything.

  * * *

  REDA HAD SPENT TWO HOURS AT MY APARTMENT.

  “They were lying under the covers, they were talking, and Édouard kept asking questions and the guy kept saying: Later. I’ll tell you later. I can’t understand why Édouard didn’t start to suspect that something wasn’t right. The guy was acting weird.”

  And then she says yes, in the end she does know why I didn’t suspect anything, it’s because I latch on to people too quickly, I can latch on to anyone, it’s been that way since I was little, and I haven’t changed; but she wouldn’t say this to my face, she wouldn’t express this idea in front of me, because she knows I’d say I behaved that way, and still do, because of how alone I was, because I was always rejected by our family, and she says she doesn’t want to hear that. Because it isn’t true.

  “So then Reda says he has to go. He was some kind of off-the-books plumber. He had to start early the next day. You know the kind of thing, little jobs here and there, plumbing or wiring or fixing engines, same as the guys do here (like those friends of your father’s who’d do little repairs in somebody’s backyard and then split the bottle they got as a thank-you present, their hands black with the grease from the power tools or the engines they’d been working on, grease that took days to wash off completely, or else the hard skin of their fingers would be covered in little white cracks, like tiny blisters, because of the kerosene they used to get rid of the grease).

  “He said he had to go—and even if we’ll never really know the truth, I’m pretty sure that he had it all mapped out in his head. All the stuff he did later on. All of it. He wasn’t really about to leave, he was buying time and getting ready for what came next (I don’t believe it. Or maybe he planned to steal something, yes, he must have planned that part, but really I don’t think Reda had any idea what would happen over the next few hours, over the rest of the night, not that this makes it any less violent or evil, but I think the whole thing happened in a stumbling, accidental, hesitating way, without any premeditation; I think he behaved the way a person does who’s trying to adapt to his immediate surroundings, from moment to moment; I think one improvisation led to the next, and that he was—I won’t say as bewildered as I was, but that he, too, had lost his way, that he was at a loss. Once the situation changed, there was something improvisatory about his manner—I was there; I saw it—something that gave the entire scene an air of slapstick; there was even something funny—though of course I see this only in retrospect, when I look back—about his look of bewilderment; he kept looking embarrassed when he realized whatever it was he’d just done, it was as if he kept falling into a trap of his own making, as if he were helplessly carried along by a series of present-tense moments. I think each decision made that night, by me or by him, instantly made other decisions impossible, that each choice destroyed other possible choices, and that with every choice he made he became less free, just like me in my interview with the police). (Clara remarked the other day that none of these theories hold—he had a gun.)

  “He asked Reda if he wanted to take a shower. He’d tried to ask for his number, but Reda wouldn’t give it to him, he said no—and that right there, if you ask me, that shows he had the whole thing planned all along, Édouard disagrees but he’s wrong. He’s wrong. This wasn’t his first time, he knew what to do and what to avoid and that’s why he didn’t get in the shower with Édouard. No way was he about to do anything that might trip him up later on—things you or I would do without thinking, because when you don’t have a plan in mind, you don’t think, you just do what you do and time flies by, but he was counting the seconds. He was doing the math.”

  I asked for his number, I promised I wouldn’t bother him; but that seemed to irritate him somehow, and he looked away. I thought he must have a good reason, I assumed there must already be someone in his life, a man or a woman, and that he must be afraid they’d see a text from me if someday he left his phone lying around on a bureau or a table. Clara says I’ll do anything to believe he wanted to give me his number, that for some reason it wasn’t up to him. Yesterday she said I’m fooling myself, telling myself he was somehow acting against his will—when his will was exactly the problem. No doubt she’s right.

  He told me we could see each other again at this one café, he was always there; it was an old Parisian café where he liked to go and play foosball with his friends. He told me the name of the café. I never went to see whether it existed, but I did repeat the information to the police, and I’ve regretted it ever since.

  Clara tells her husband that I walked over to my desk, I took a piece of paper that I’d torn out of a notebook, and I wrote down the name and address of the café where I went to write almost every day I lived in Paris, the same café where, a month before, I’d finished my first novel, The End of Eddy. He told me he’d come; I’ve never been back there again.

  Reda got up and took a shower. We didn’t shower together, we took turns. I watched him bathing through the steamed partition. I could make out the contours of his body, shifting with the motion of his hands as he lathered himself—but only just, because the shapes were blurred by the steam and drops of water on the plexiglass. I wished I could be his hands.

  “So it turned out he wasn’t in such a big rush after all. He showered and then he let Édouard take a shower. He gave him time to get out, and dry himself off, and put on underpants and turn on the light and say goodbye. It’s strange, he could have just slipped out while Édouard was in the shower, but he didn’t leave. He stuck around and he waited to say goodbye. He waited for Édouard to get dressed, and dry off, and turn on the light. And all that time he could have left. I mean, please … So don’t let anyone try to tell me he was just … I’m sorry. Anyway, Édouard got out of the shower and he went to check the time on his phone. It’s a thing with him. Ever since he got here, every five minutes he has to check the time on his phone. Otherwise he says he loses his bearings, he says he literally can’t lift a finger, it’s like he doesn’t know where he is, like he’s lost in time, like he’s paralyzed, for Christ sake, and when he talks that way I want to tell him, Why does everything have to be a drama? Lost in time, my ass. That kid and his notions. God only knows the things I’ve heard. But I was nice about it, the way I try to be. And so that’s why he looked in his pocket, to check the time. But the phone was gone. The phone wasn’t in his pocket—and Reda hadn’t left after all, he was still there in the apartment and he was standing absolutely still. He was standing right beside him, not moving.”

  8.

  On some level I knew why my cell phone had disappeared, but I didn’t dare say it, much less think it; in fact, I was doing all I could to avoid that thought.

  Clara describes to her husband how, for no conceivable reason—since the phone obviously wasn’t there—I kept feeling around in the empty pocket, as if I might suddenly make the phone reappear through sheer willpower and the movements of my fingers.

  The next day, when I came to this part of the story, the female officer said:
“Yeah, here at the precinct … most of the robberies we see … they’re usually committed by foreigners, by Arabs.” I didn’t say anything, I didn’t insult her because I didn’t want to spend any more time there than I had to, and because I knew she was trying to bait me. I was looking for my phone, which I’d turned on before I got into the shower so I could check the time. I told the police, “I thought it must be the wine I’d had before. Or that I must just be tired and that’s why I couldn’t find my phone.” I hadn’t actually thought it was the wine, or my fatigue. I’d wanted to think those things, but deep down I had my own idea—I hated it but there it was, rooted in a deeper place. My mind generally knows which of my thoughts are true and which ones I’ve made up to please or flatter myself. Even when I pretend otherwise. And I thought: You must have put the phone down without thinking. You must have dropped it on the pile of laundry by the sink. I remember telling myself I could find my phone in the morning, but I didn’t believe that, either.

  Reda was still standing there, a few steps away. I went to kiss him one last time and when I put my hands on his coat (why did I put my hands on his coat?), which was warm because he’d left it next to the radiator, I felt something hard and rectangular. I saw, sticking out of his coat, the gray and shiny corner of my iPad. I hadn’t noticed it was missing. I looked over at the table where it was supposed to be. It wasn’t there.

  * * *

  “HIS FIRST REACTION WAS, It made sense he should steal something. Reda, I mean. Which, please. That was a little too much. I said, Exactly how would it ‘make sense’? Because really, that pissed me off. I said, You lost me there, because frankly I don’t see how it ‘makes sense’ to go ripping somebody off. Maybe I’m just stupid, but I just don’t see it. I don’t. No matter how I rack my brains. They disgust me, thieves (it’s another of her obsessions, she grew up in a family where someone or other was always being accused of some wrongdoing, and it’s still that way today, because various cousins and even our older brother are always getting in trouble with the law, and in reaction she developed a sort of anxious code of honesty and a tendency to judge, as if to distance herself from these realities, because they were too close).

  “And he told me: Maybe it wasn’t fair. I’m not saying it was fair. No, he told me, I’m only saying it made sense, if he was actually going around doing odd jobs under the table, trying to scrape together a few euros as a handyman, and if he was struggling and had to ask people he knew, if he had to ask his friends, to give him work? Having to be pushy like that? Having to humiliate himself? Because it is humiliating, you know it is: Isn’t there anything you need done around the house, or, If you hear of anyone who needs a painter … So when Édouard saw that Reda had stolen from him, he thought, in his shoes he’d do the same. He wouldn’t have acted any better. He thought it would have made less sense if Reda hadn’t stolen from him.

  “I never told on him to our parents, because I knew he’d get a beating. They’d have beaten the shit out of him and I have to say, they’d have been right. But I know when he was younger, Édouard stole things, too. He started stealing because he needed the money (of course her code of honesty breaks down when it comes to family).

  “I used to see him do it. He didn’t know I was watching, but I saw him. He’d go out with his friends, the ones from the bus stop. They’d go out, five or six of them in the one little car. In the middle of the night. No problem, one would just have to sit on somebody’s lap. So they’d pack themselves in and they’d open the windows because six kids in one car, maybe you’ve never tried it, but it’s no picnic, with them steaming everything up and their BO, and no one can breathe, it’s like sitting inside a tin can. You can’t even see through the windshield. I mean, please.

  “Everyone would have a hammer. Édouard would take our father’s red hammer from the toolshed. I’d already noticed when he started going out to the toolshed with his backpack, since frankly the toolshed had never been his favorite place to go. He spent more time in the bathroom, if you know what I mean. But one night after the news came on and we were doing the dishes I realized he’d gone out to the toolshed, even though he never missed the news. And then I thought: Who takes a backpack into a toolshed? Then and there I knew something was up, I could tell he had something to hide. I’ve got a nose for that kind of thing.

  “One day I secretly watched him. I hid behind the curtain and I waited for him to come out of the toolshed. I thought: You’ll see, you’ll just see. You’re going to find out what happens when you get up to stupid shit. You’ll see. And you better believe I was hidden behind that curtain. I was peeking through the fabric without touching so he couldn’t see. I’d thought of everything. When you see a curtain move that’s it, game over, especially those curtains we had. I was even breathing softly, to make sure the curtain wouldn’t blow around. To keep it from trembling. And so then I went out to the toolshed. I’d already checked it out the day before, so I knew exactly what there was and where everything was kept, where it sat on the table or hung on the walls. I’d set my trap. That’s how I figured out he was taking the hammer, and I started my little investigation and soon I had him dead to rights.

  “Now our father would have lost his mind. He’d have gone apeshit—you don’t steal a man’s hammer. A man’s hammer is sacred. But really, at the end of the day, even though he’d have been furious, because he always said how stealing was the worst, how it was for hoodlums and bums, and how he’d never put up with stealing in his house, I just know he couldn’t have helped seeing it as good news. Secretly. Not that he’d have said so, he was a father after all, he had his pride and couldn’t have come out and said it, but he’d have been relieved because for him stealing a hammer would have turned Édouard into a man. It would have meant he was tough. And even if he’d hollered and shouted and given Édouard the beating of his life—and there really would have been hell to pay—I just know it would have made him smile, kind of, when he found out and even afterward, when he was giving him the belt, because he would have been able to say: Now that he’s stolen, now that he’s disobeyed his father, Édouard has finally become a man. He’s taken action. He’s done something dangerous, like a man. At long last. He’d have thought both things at once, and why not? Say what you like, I’m sure it would have made him kind of smile. But we’ll never know, because I never told, so there was no beating and no smile. What can you do.

  “I kept my mouth shut because I wanted to protect him. I didn’t want him to get in trouble. Even if in my own mind it was wrong what he was doing, I’m not like that, I never was a tattle-tale. He was still a baby so I thought, Give it time, it’s just an urge, like having to pee, so let him piss it out of his system. He must have been fourteen or fifteen, the others about the same, one or two years older at the most. Only Brian was older, he was the one with the car because he was old enough to drive. He had a car of his own. He’d pick up the other boys and they’d go tearing off like a bunch of lunatics to some dump. They could have had an accident, they could have killed somebody, driving that way at night, but they were too selfish to think of other people, they just had to go tearing around. You could see them coming a mile away, if you wanted to. All you had to do was look, because they were pretty much the only ones on the road at that time of night, with everyone asleep. When I knew what they were up to, I’d look down from my bedroom window and watch the car driving away, windows open, toward old man Bailleul’s cornfields. I’d see the headlights get smaller and smaller until they disappeared in the woods, and the sound got invisible too.

  “So off they’d go. They’d wear dark colors and when they got to the dump they’d hop the fence. They’d give each other a leg up, so I learned, and they’d bring bolt cutters for the padlock, but their only light was the moon. Just the moon. When they came home they’d have such filthy clothes. He was a bad driver, Brian, because he got his license in the army and an army license is meaningless, all you need is a pulse. And what would have happened if one of them had
fallen, trying to get over the fence, what if one of them got impaled on a spike like some of those fences have? It happens all the time, just read the paper. Exactly how smart would they have looked then? People do die for some very stupid reasons.