History of Violence

by Édouard Louis

  14.

  She says the three of us walked into the police station in the place Saint-Sulpice the night of December 25; she gives her husband the description I gave to her: the garlands of tinsel hanging from the ceiling, the Christmas tree in the corner, the little colored bulbs blinking green, red, blue, yellow. I’m listening less and less carefully to Clara, her digressions are exhausting.

  The officer at the front desk asked how she could help us, but I couldn’t speak. My tongue froze in my mouth. Didier answered for me: “This young man would like to report a crime.” They’ve dragged you here by the collar. She said: “What’s the crime?” They’ve dragged you here by the collar and now she’s come to join in. I answered: “Attempted murder, and rape.” You didn’t see that coming, did you? She recoiled slightly, as if she might have misheard, she looked at the three of us.

  Clara told her husband: “She was shocked.”

  I looked her in the face so she could see I meant it. I looked deep into her eyes. She understood: “Let me find someone to help you.” The two men standing next to her turned to look at me, having lost all interest in whatever they’d been doing. A policeman came up to me. “Are you the one?” He raised a hand to Didier and Geoffroy, then smiled at me and asked me to come with him. Didier and Geoffroy were not allowed to come along, they had to wait in that gloomy lobby.

  He brought me into his office, he said, “Have a seat.” He stepped out for a moment and returned. “Tell me what happened.”

  At the beginning he took down what I was saying. Then the tapping of his fingers on the keys grew intermittent. My words came tumbling out. He’d stopped typing altogether, but it took me a while to notice that the sound of the keyboard had trailed off, that it had completely disappeared. Still I went on talking. He interrupted, he said he couldn’t take care of “a case like yours.”

  “The crime is too serious, monsieur”: he was sending me to another police station, several blocks away though still in the Sixth Arrondissement. I saw myself get up, splinter the door with my shoulder, run down the hallway to the street, and out into the night, and keep running. But there I was, still sitting in the chair, and the policeman was stepping out of the office again.

  They explained that I’d have to go in a car. Two men showed up to escort me. I thought of Didier’s sweater. The other office where I had to go, they told me, was just down the street, and Didier and Geoffroy would walk over and meet me there. I asked whether I could walk with them—“That way,” I told Clara, “I’d have a minute to walk with them and talk to them, I missed them,” and I didn’t see why I should have to go in a car. The police had no idea why, either. Those were just their orders, or rather the procedure, they told me they were following procedure, and I thought: Are procedures there just to be followed, or are procedures there to make things go better? Sometime later Geoffroy told me that there was a logical explanation for the procedure, and that he’d told me and I’d forgotten.

  I hear Clara:

  “Both of them short, fat, and bald. Not good-looking at all, not big muscular cops like the ones on TV—as if. Just a couple of stooped little bald guys with potbellies. He told those two friends of his, Didier and Geoffroy, that the guys by the door were going to take him to the other station because that’s where they were making him file the report. And he told them, his friends I mean, ‘So, I guess that’s it. You can go.’”

  Stop listening. The police had told me that Didier and Geoffroy couldn’t be with me in the second police station, that I couldn’t see or talk to them, so I told them they could go home. I wasn’t thinking, of course, and they’re not idiots, so they stayed. They waited in the second police station, which was even bleaker, grimmer, and colder than the first. When I walked in, they were there waiting; while I’d been climbing into the car with the two men, while I’d been fastening my seat belt, while the officer was starting the car and releasing the brake, Didier and Geoffroy had already been sitting there, waiting; now Didier was speaking to an officer who wanted me to make an appointment with the psychiatrist for the next day. The police took me upstairs.

  At certain moments my anger at Didier and Geoffroy faded, because I was caught up in the chain of events and was no longer thinking of my anger—I even got into the game; in fact, I threw myself into it, whatever the police asked, I answered like the good student I was; after each answer I sat up like a smug A student who expects full marks—shoulders back, eyebrows raised, feeling useful and eager to please—and then the rage would return. Then I snapped out of it, and reminded myself I was there against my will, and the anger would return, but anger is a promise too hard to keep.

  “And then they had him tell the whole story all over again.”

  They asked me to start over: the police from before hadn’t kept any of what they’d written, not even the beginning, not even a few lines. I just wanted to go to sleep. I spent the next month living at Frédéric’s apartment, close to both Didier and Geoffroy. I wasn’t afraid to sleep at home that first night, but the second night it was impossible—Geoffroy says this is common, this peculiarity about the second night; for some reason people don’t feel afraid the first night, only the second; this was something he heard when he was attending trials for his book on the justice system. Sure enough, when I thought of staying at my own apartment that second night I panicked, and Frédéric invited me to stay at his place for a few months. He said, “I’m on my way,” and fifteen minutes later he was waiting on the street with a taxi. I had to repeat myself, and repeat myself, all the people around me became pretexts for making me repeat myself, I no longer saw the bodies of men or women, only repetitions that had taken on the bodies of women and men; even so, half an hour later the two officers, the man and the woman, said the same thing that the officer had said at the place Saint-Sulpice, in almost the same words, for they, too, were repeating themselves, and in the same cold, distant, clinical tone: “We’re not authorized to handle a case like yours.” I had to go to yet another office that specialized in these things, I had to see other people, in the Department of Criminal Investigations to be exact, what they called the DCI. I said, “I can’t, I’m too exhausted.” The woman said, “I understand.” They mulled it over, and she picked up the phone. She told me she’d found a solution, I think she was trying to be reassuring. I waited. They could take my report and forward it to the Department of Criminal Investigations. I wouldn’t have to go over it a third time, although I would still have to speak to the DCI later that night, and they’d need to ask me a few more questions, even after they read the report she was going to send them.

  I tried to imagine my life over the next few months and all I could see was this process.

  * * *

  I WENT DOWN THE STAIRS. This time I was determined that Didier and Geoffroy should leave and go home; the female officer had said I could use one of the phones at the police station to let them know what I’d have to do next; all they had to do was write down their numbers on a scrap of paper and I could call them. I tore a sheet out of a promotional booklet, “The Police Are Recruiting,” that was lying around, there were three big stacks of them. Didier and Geoffroy wrote their numbers. The wet ink shone on the glossy paper. Even as they wrote down their numbers, they argued that they should stay. I was firm. In the end they believed me, they thought I wanted them to go. They wouldn’t go to bed, they’d wait for me to call. By then it was already quite late, maybe midnight or one.

  They walked toward the exit and I watched them go. As soon as they went through the door and disappeared into the night, I felt my organs implode, I wanted to scream but I couldn’t make a sound, the air had become unbreathable, my mouth, my throat, my esophagus, my lungs were imploding, they were shriveling up, until they felt like crumpled, deflated, veiny bits of rubber. How could I breathe? I wanted to run after them in the street till my legs came unhinged, I wanted to grab them by the arm and drag them back, I wanted to cling to them and beg them to stay and not to listen when I
asked them to leave me alone. I made myself cough, just to reassure myself with the sound. If I made a sound, it meant I was still there. For a little while I stood there in the lobby, and for the first time I noticed how cold it was; and from that moment on, that night—like the night before—would be bound up with the memory of being cold.

  15.

  These are all things Clara has heard me tell her over the last few days, since I came to stay with her: That I had to go back to the hospital the next day. That the cursory exam I’d had that morning at the emergency room wasn’t enough. That I had to submit to more tests in a larger hospital that offered a special service, it was called forensics, but generally known as the FEU, the Forensic Emergency Unit, where a doctor could confirm the attack, the beatings, and the rest of it, in other words, take the evidence from the traces on my body, which had not been done the day before at Saint-Louis because I had refused. Now I simply accepted everything they told me. I was worn out.

  They explained that a medical team at the FEU could tell precisely whether I had been the victim of an attack or of attempted murder when I was being strangled, which would change everything, “absolutely everything, monsieur.” By examining and measuring the marks on my body, they could reveal whether I had crossed that symbolic line, invisible to the nonspecialist, that separates a mere wound from near death; as for the forced penetration, they said that, too, would have to be proven: scientifically, with a medical exam.

  Clara says the appointment was made over the phone, by a policeman, the night I filed the report at Saint-Sulpice.

  Eight hours after they finished questioning me, I found myself in the Forensic Emergency Unit of the Hôtel-Dieu; it was morning. I had crossed Paris the day after a holiday: everything was moving in slow motion, the few cars, the pedestrians, even the incredibly peaceful Seine seemed to be moving in slow motion.

  On the walls of the hospital corridor, someone had thumbtacked sheets of paper with the letters “FEU” and arrows to point the way. I pushed a swinging door. I said: “Am I in the right place?” and I didn’t even have to finish asking the question, the nurse at the entrance replied that I was. She’s worked here so long that, just by looking, she can tell why I’m here, why you’re here, maybe it’s the tone of my voice or the movement of my lips. She could see the entire Christmas Eve unfold before her eyes, all the way from our meeting on the square to my escape, she could see the blue light on our bodies when we were lying down—or even that other episode I described to Clara the other day, forty-five minutes after we got to my apartment, when Reda and I were lying there out of breath and we heard a sudden noise that startled us both. It came out of nowhere, this noise, and seemed to be right beside us. We were under my thick red blanket, lying there naked; we heard someone come right up to the door of my apartment—or actually, it was more like we heard someone simply appear at the door. Neither of us moved. We looked at each other. His eyes questioned mine, and my eyes answered that I knew no more than he did. We tried to hold our breath, but that only made our breathing louder and more irregular. The voices on the other side of the door came closer and closer. They were centimeters away from my door; not speaking, but muttering, almost murmuring, we could hear the rustling of the strangers’ clothes, the sound of the fabric brushing the mahogany of the door. Reda put his hand on my chest. When I heard what I realized was a key in the lock, my anxiety peaked, the key turned but the door didn’t open, and I heard my heart in my ears, I could feel my heart in my eyes as they throbbed behind my eyelids; I thought for a moment and decided it must be Cyril, who had a key to my place and with his usual kindness must have wanted to surprise me, possibly after his Christmas dinner; or maybe he thought I wasn’t there and wanted to borrow my place for the night. We listened as the entire tiny mechanism of the lock jammed, the person behind the door was trying to shoulder it open, he kept taking out the key and putting it back in, taking it out and putting it in, he couldn’t get the door to open, but he kept pushing, he wouldn’t give up. Now we could clearly make out the voice, it was just one man. I don’t know how long this battle lasted, between the man and the door, I don’t know how much time passed between that first try with his shoulder and the moment when he realized what had happened and went away laughing, no doubt having come home drunk from a Christmas party and mixed up my door with his own. His voice faded away and he went down the stairs, to which floor I don’t know. We couldn’t hear. We were laughing too hard ourselves; and in the days to come I would remember moments like these with both terror and nostalgia.

  Besides me there were three women in the waiting room, all looking at the floor. When I walked in, they barely looked at me, and immediately, instinctively, I followed their example. I looked away without having to be asked.

  Two women were sitting side by side: both thin, pretty, heavily made up. One was wearing thigh-high boots, the other had on shiny red polka-dot flats whose color matched her lipstick, on purpose I assume. The third woman was very tall; her high heels made her even taller and gave her an arched back; her legs were mannish and hairy, with thick, sturdy, muscular calves. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt and a big coat made of synthetic fur, leopard, which was unbuttoned and hung past her knees. Her hair was short, her beard thick. She was losing her patience with the nurses at the reception desk. I focused on that deep voice of hers, such a contrast to her skirt and her leopard-skin coat. I couldn’t help being moved by her beauty, though I tried not to stare, and I suppose the others were doing the same, I think we must all have been watching her discreetly.

  “She started yelling,” Clara says. She was warning them, she’d had just about enough: “Don’t you people give a fuck? This is no way to treat a woman, I want to see a doctor and I want to see a doctor now.” She was weeping, her sobs made it impossible to understand what she was saying. And yet I felt safe in that room. I felt at home sitting next to those others. I told myself that we were in the same situation, that they could understand me with more acuity and intelligence than anybody else, which probably isn’t true, but my conviction that no one could really understand me, an idea that had hounded me since the morning of the twenty-fifth, was suspended as long as I sat there in that room.

  * * *

  CLARA LIGHTS ANOTHER CIGARETTE, I hear the click of the lighter, then the long inhalation:

  “A nurse came and called him in. When she came into the waiting room, she didn’t say his name the way they do at the normal doctor’s. She comes up to him and all she does is tap him on the shoulder—like maybe she guessed he didn’t want the others to hear his name? I don’t know. Maybe she does that with everyone. Anyhow, she guessed. She says his name in his ear. Follow me, she says. She turns and he goes in behind her and the thing is, he told me, he was carrying a copy of the report in his pocket. The cop had printed it the night before, just for him. He’d decided he would just show it to the doctor so he wouldn’t have to speak.”

  Stop listening. I followed the nurse into the office. I met the doctor, who shook my hand too hard; Clara says doctors always shake hands too hard to show you who’s in charge—Stop listening now; I sat across from him, on the other side of his desk.

  * * *

  I HANDED HIM the two sheets of paper, as I’d planned. I stood up, I leaned toward him, I took the two-page report from my back pocket and handed it to the doctor, saying, “I brought you a copy of the report.” He wouldn’t look, he barely glanced at the papers. “I’d rather hear you tell it.” I had nothing to add, and what difference did it make if I spoke. Everything was written down, printed out, right there in front of him on the paper, and I didn’t feel like talking. He said again, “I’d prefer that you told me yourself.” Why? I don’t want to talk anymore. I thought: He ought to have asked me to write it down. When I write, I say everything, when I speak I am a coward. I spoke but my eyes remained dry.

  “He couldn’t cry. When you can’t, you can’t. He thought about when his grandmother died, when he was a little kid.�
� What I thought about was Dimitri.