History of Violence

by Édouard Louis

  I went back inside, I closed the door. Then Reda came back. He pressed his face against the door, I could hear him, and he said, “You’re sure you want me to leave? I feel bad about this. I’m sorry.” I answered: “Go.” It was over.

  The policeman could hardly believe it, I told Clara that the next day the policeman could hardly write down what he’d just heard, he couldn’t believe that was the end of the story; the end couldn’t be so flat, so anticlimactic and disappointing, and he asked me, “What happened then?” as if there had to be something more. “I stayed in my apartment. Looking back, I say I knew it was over, but the truth is I thought he might come back. I locked myself in my studio and I waited. I sat on the bed, there was blood all over the sheets and on the floor.” I thought of AIDS. I had to go get an emergency treatment. But what if Reda was in the stairwell. What if he was hiding and waiting for me to come out. I sat there, doing nothing, just hating him; I sat and hated him for a while, then I decided to go. I took a shower—or no, that was later, when I got back from the hospital. I put on some clothes and I walked to the hospital; I think I took an umbrella but didn’t use it. In my pocket I had a box cutter for protection, in case Reda was hiding and waiting. It was raining out, the clouds were like chunks of cement, and it was that sort of very fine drizzle, microscopic and clammy, that covers your face and soaks through your clothes. I walked to the hospital in the rain. It took me a while to find the emergency room. That peach scent, I told myself, was absurd. At the hospital in the waiting room I saw a homeless man, he was pacing back and forth.

  10.

  She had to quit working when they had their first kid. She said: “With the work they had me doing I’d just as soon stay home.”

  Her husband remains silent, mysteriously silent, and I ask myself why he hasn’t said a word since he came home. At first when she started talking I assumed it was fatigue, since he’d been working all week, or maybe it was just his usual shyness and silence—unless that shyness and silence were just the sharp edge of his role as a man in the village (manhood being associated with taciturnity, at least in the presence of a woman or child), and then there was his job, driving a tractor-trailer for a big corporation, which is to say, a job that’s had him on the road for the last ten years, by himself, with no one to speak to for five or six days at a time.

  He’s spent more than ten years on the road all over Europe and into Asia, with no company except the TV built into the sleeper of his truck, and he’s covered a lot of highway; he travels thousands of kilometers per week, with nothing before him but the same strips of concrete and the same road signs, all exactly alike except for the names of the cities, which in any case he never visits—when and how would he have the time?—and which for him are only strings of letters and names of warehouses, or at the most they signify different figures, since his salary depends on the distance between each city and France—Berlin meaning an extra hundred euros on the check he gets each month, Kraków meaning two-fifty, Riga four hundred, and so on, and just like today he never speaks a word; he has neither the chance nor the urge to speak, without the chance he never gets the urge unless it’s to order a cup of coffee in the middle of the night or acrid wine in a cardboard box from a sleep-deprived vendor at a rest stop on the highway, all alone with the smell of his own body filling the truck, a strong scent, sweated out over nights of sleep and meals in the confined space of the cab.

  One time I went with him to London. I was twelve, and he invited me along. He’d be gone two days and one night. I said yes, thinking that I would discover a country that wasn’t France and that I’d finally get to practice the few words of English I’d learned at school. I went with him, but the deeper we drove into England the clearer it became that we weren’t going to hear a word of English, that we wouldn’t see a single street or town; we would only follow our route through a series of nameless suburbs until we reached a big warehouse where my sister’s husband unloaded his freight, emptying his truck without speaking to the English workers, whom he’d call les Rosbifs, he didn’t even bother to say hello, only bonjour, and turning aside to me he said, “I’m French and I speak French.” The only thing I’ve retained from that trip we took was the fact of his solitude and his sadness, and the vision of his body as he lay beside me in the sleeper.

  She goes on with the story; he doesn’t speak. She says it was just after seven when I walked through the automatic doors of the Hôpital Saint-Louis. It was deserted. It had been less than an hour since Reda disappeared.

  I’d told her about the hospital that morning of December 25, how muffled and calm it was, and Clara explains that a nurse appeared after twenty minutes. She walked over to me, she was tall and elegant, and she handed me water in a little white translucent plastic cup. I started to cry. I told her my story several times, and I cried. She showed no sign of impatience or annoyance; she remained serene, professional, imperturbable. “You were very brave. And what you went through is like facing death.” She asked whether I had any family I wanted to call; I told her no. When she stepped out of the examination room, I don’t remember why, but I rubbed my fingernails against the raised circles on the plastic cup; I had an urge to scream, and although I did all I could to master it, I had an impulse to overturn every piece of furniture in the room, a violent impulse to write on the walls, to tear the sheets, to run wild and sink my teeth in the pillows and shake my head from side to side until they tore open and the feathers came out and drifted across the room, I wanted to see them falling gently over my head and shoulders—and then to see the terrorized face of the nurse when she walked back in.

  The nurse told me that a doctor would be with me momentarily, in just a few minutes, slightly longer than the usual waiting time; “Obviously,” she said, because it was Christmas morning and they were short-staffed, “doctors have a right to their holidays, too,” and I acknowledged what she said, I would wait. “Can I bring you anything else?” I didn’t need anything. I thanked her profusely, I went on and on. I thanked her for letting me live. There was nothing I could do now but wait; I went so far as to say: “I’m so lucky to have walked in and found someone like you.”

  There was graffiti on the walls of the examining room, drawings, a sentence here and there, and as I lay there on the dusty bed, which creaked whenever I made the slightest movement, I wondered who exactly had the time to do that, who overcame the fear of getting caught, who had overcome the fear that the doctor might come in and catch them in the act. I’d never have been so bold. But no one came, the doctor never appeared despite what the nurse had promised. I complained in a tone that was soft and smiling and was meant to sound threatening; I crossed the corridor and told them, “I’m afraid I can’t wait much longer.” Then I went back and waited. I got up and walked around in circles, around and around and around—then I had to go throw up. I told the nurse in the office across the hall, where I had now been several times, that I was sick to my stomach, I said, “If the doctor comes I’m in the men’s room,” but what I thought was: Because of you. I have to go throw up because of you. I’m sick because of you, because you’re leaving me to die.

  In the men’s room, standing across from the sink with his greasy hair plastered down over his forehead and across his face, there was the homeless man. He was leaning down and had his head underneath the automatic hand-dryer, which was blasting hot air. Clara describes him: bent over, head under the machine. He opened his mouth and let the air in so it puffed out his cheeks, deforming them, the way a kid will stick his head out the window of a speeding car, the way I liked to do until I was twelve or thirteen when I went for a ride with my father; the homeless man opened his mouth, revealing a chaos of black and yellow teeth, though really it was more like a series of little brown rocks, like a chain of tiny mountains, their jagged slopes separated by great empty arid spaces where once upon a time there must have been other teeth. He let out a few small groans of pleasure, he sighed. He didn’t notice me standing there. I rinsed out my m
outh, still coated with vomit, in one of the sinks. I lifted my head. I saw myself in the mirror, my eyes were a brighter blue than usual, “I found them beautiful,” I told Didier and Geoffroy that same night; I spat a few bits of yellowish slime into the drain while he, in a world of his own, went on with his long lament, drunk on the warm air in his mouth. On his way out he smiled at me. I saw his teeth again, I imagined him biting into a piece of raw meat, the blood on his chin and lips. Ten minutes later I was back in the examining room. Still no doctor. In my impatience, I tightened my jaw and my fists, I thought: Now it’s too late, you’re sick, you’re sick because of them, I got up and started walking around the room in circles again. Now it’s too late.

  Clara says:

  “He went across the corridor. He wasn’t going to tell them again.”

  She says I went back to the room across the hall, I didn’t realize the doctor was sitting right there. Once more I asked when the doctor was going to arrive, and the other nurse at the back of the office—whom I’d never spoken to but who had been there the whole time, at least I thought she was the other nurse, the one who hadn’t introduced herself and whom I automatically thought of as the other nurse, whom I had baptized “the other nurse” in my conversation with myself—now spoke to me, explaining that she was the doctor: “I’ll be right with you.” She had been there all along; they’d asked me to be patient, they had told me the doctor was on the way and that it was taking longer than usual because it was Christmas, and now I realized that the doctor had been there from the very beginning; since the moment I stepped into that phantom hospital she’d been sitting here in this office, across the hallway from the room with the graffiti, just a few meters away; she was playing solitaire on her computer while, inside my body, with every passing second, the AIDS was probably germinating and had begun to wreak its pitiless destruction on my immune cells.

  She saw me after I’d been waiting in anguish for more than an hour; she didn’t apologize, she didn’t say she was sorry, she didn’t seem embarrassed that her colleague had lied. “You are Monsieur Bellegueule, yes?” She told me I had a funny name, and once she’d made this tasteless remark, I replied coldly that it was no longer my name. I wanted to be done with her as quickly as possible. I counted: Count to five hundred and you’ll be done with her. She sat facing the computer, a few steps from the bed, and before she could even ask the first question, I interrupted. I had to tell her the thing I’d been afraid of all morning—that if I died they would inform only my family in the most restricted sense, my biological family, the ones on my birth certificate, I was terrified that no one would tell Didier or Geoffroy or any of the other friends I live with here in Paris, having left that other family far behind.

  11.

  (DETAILS OF A NIGHTMARE)

  Clara didn’t know about this either: the horrid vision I had of my own funeral, probably inspired by another Christmas present from Didier, Claude Simon’s novel The Acacia, though in any case I guess it’s natural to imagine one’s own funeral; Geoffroy says everybody does, at least once, and I don’t know whether to feel ashamed that I’m so ordinary or relieved that I’m not abnormal. In any case, I told her—I told the nurse—about this nightmare of mine, where everyone who mattered to me would be absent, while the actual audience would have been absent from my life—various cousins who wouldn’t be able to understand the circumstances of my death, who would ask the same questions as the policeman: “But why would he take a stranger up to his apartment in the middle of the night, what was he thinking, the person must have forced his way in, he had to have forced his way in or something happened that we don’t know about, nobody takes a stranger up to his apartment in the middle of the night, it doesn’t hang together, I’m telling you it doesn’t hang together,” or worse, in the same vision, some of the men would say, “I’m going to kill that dirty Arab who killed him, I’m going to skin him alive, I’m going to tear his balls off,” and other men would say, “I always told him, Be careful, but what’s the point, he never listened, he was such a little know-it-all,” and the men who knew, or at least who knew a little more than the others, would take the shameful secret to their graves, because the truth about how I died wasn’t something they could talk about at work or in the village; instead they’d say, “He was killed, he was attacked, it was an Arab, he was strangled by that filthy sonofabitch Arab” (since anyone from beyond Spain is an “Arab”—the Portuguese, Greeks, even the Spanish themselves), “but you couldn’t tell him anything”; they’d never say “He took a guy home with him” or “He met another guy like him on the street” for fear of betraying themselves.

  And the village women, in the little village square, in the square surrounded—surrounded and defined—by the church, the town hall, and the school, in the square where the women went to gossip, they wouldn’t be fooled. “Le sienne Bellegueule (le sienne meant the son or the daughter of. I was often called le sienne Bellegueule, that is, the son of Bellegueule—my father—just as my brothers were sometimes called le sienne Bellegueule and my sisters were called le sienne Bellegueule and even my father, in the presence of older people from the village who’d known him since he was a boy, was called le sienne Bellegueule), le sienne Bellegueule, don’t you know, he was killed by an Arab he brought home so they could mess around, I always said he was that way, and then to take home an Arab … What did he think was going to happen! May he rest in peace! Poor boy, he didn’t deserve a thing like that, he always did so well at school and was so polite, he always said hello, always, when you saw him at the bakery, he was never rude, he always made a point of saying hello. Even if he was on the other side of the street, he’d always wave, sometimes he’d even cross just to say hello,” and meanwhile in Paris, Didier and Geoffroy would have no idea where I was. I told the nurse: they’d have no way of knowing I was dead, they’d wonder why they hadn’t heard from me in three days, when usually we exchanged a few dozen or even a hundred texts and e-mails every day; they’d come knock on my door, they’d inquire with the superintendent, but they wouldn’t get any answers. They’d find out what had happened only after the funeral, and then it would be too late. And in my nightmare—I could just see it—they’d have to take a taxi from the Abbeville station, once they’d got off the train from Paris, because it’s another seventeen kilometers by car across fields of rapeseed, beets, and potatoes, and there they’d be at this unfamiliar station, in this unfamiliar country. Geoffroy would be clutching an impressive bunch of flowers, which he’d have just bought from the florist across from the station (no matter if Didier said, “Why buy flowers when he’s dead, flowers he’ll never see”), flowers he’d have bought from a helpful, smiling, raw-handed little woman, with whom they’d have exchanged a few words, and inevitably, in the little station, where he and Didier would be waiting for the taxi, everyone would stare at Geoffroy because of the great big showy bouquet, not to mention the loud crinkling of the cellophane it had come wrapped in, and inevitably he would start to feel like a fool. He would have bought a towering, an absurdly big bouquet, “he always loved that sort of thing” (it all sounds so ridiculous out of context, without the emotional charge that gives it life—but it’s only funny from a distance). The two of them would engulf themselves in a taxi, if only to get away from the onlookers, who would wonder what that odd pair of men were doing there, looking so out of place; in a little working-class village like that one sees so few Parisians, they look like clowns in their overcoats, with their little round glasses, waiting for a taxi, because nobody ever takes a taxi, it’s too expensive—unless it’s for medical reasons in which case the government will reimburse you—and they wonder: “What on earth are those two freaks doing here?” and some, one imagines, might observe them with compassion; compassion is not at all out of the question, especially when it comes to the women, who were brought up to be more compassionate, and have learned to empathize more easily, and are more intelligent—they may be touched, guessing that these must be flowers
for a funeral, that these are friends who have come all the way from the city for a funeral. The two men would finally install themselves in the taxi, which would take them to the village cemetery, but in the taxi they’d be cramped by the immense, the unaccommodating bouquet, and exasperated by the driver, who would be smoking—because here, so far from the centers of things, so far from any big city, so far from political life, one is also far from any health codes—so there they’d be, crammed inside a taxi with a chain-smoking driver and Didier gasping for breath, since he can’t stand cigarettes and never could, but not saying anything because he doesn’t dare. Maybe they weep, or maybe their throats are too tight, too pinched and dry, for them to share anything beyond the scraps of their quiet grief, and each time one says the same few words, the other nods almost invisibly and offers a gentle mm-hmm.

  Then they arrive. After forty-five minutes in the taxi they pull up outside the cemetery, and the driver—who has thought of nothing else this entire time, who has been staring at these two in his rearview mirror, and screwing up his nerve, and persuading himself that these two Parisians won’t give him any trouble—the driver demands an outrageous, a truly indecent fare considering the distance they’ve traveled, seventeen kilometers. He gets so few fares he has to work a second job on the side; driving doesn’t pay the bills; so why, he asks himself, should he hesitate to overcharge a couple of Parisians, why should he go without; it’s normal, it’s a kind of wealth redistribution; and besides, he hates these Parigots, you don’t know whether to laugh or look away (he remembers the playground taunt Parigots têtes de veaux, Parisiens têtes de chiens). Didier pays without a word. He knows the driver is cheating him, but he can’t be bothered to argue. They get out of the cab and walk through the mud, with each step in the puddle-soaked earth their shoes release brown flights of bubbles. It’s raining, obviously—it’s the North—and the unending rain beats down on their faces and lends the scene an even more pathetic air; they open a little rusted steel gate, which you can tell used to be deep green before the paint flaked off (the rain, always the rain). When they close it behind them it gives a sharp squeak, a rusty sound, and they walk on side by side without exchanging a glance or a word, heads lowered in search of a name hidden among the concrete markers, most of them neglected and covered with ivy and moss. The grave is there, invisible under the flowers left by the village women (“Poor boy, and so young too”), so they can’t find any place to put their bouquet and they leave it on a neighboring grave, what can you do. “To think we weren’t there,” they keep saying, “to think we missed the funeral.”