History of Violence

by Édouard Louis

  * * *

  IT WAS ALMOST OVER. They measured and photographed the marks around my neck, the nurse used a long measuring tape like a tailor’s. She stretched it over me. She called out the lengths of the marks to the doctor, who wrote them down.

  She placed the measuring tape against my skin, it felt cold and rough, and the doctor took some pictures. He talked to himself, for himself: “I’m going to take one with the flash off, there we go, that’s better … and one more,” only he didn’t say “there we go,” he said “theeeeeere we go,” drawing it out, while the nurse guided him: “There are some more marks there, and there, and there.” He asked me to lean over, tilt my head, lift one arm, then the other so he could take pictures of all the lesions and not miss any; he pressed here and there, he asked whether it hurt, and how much on a scale from one to ten, and each time I wanted to answer fifteen; what I said was seven or eight. On his desk I saw little framed photos of children skiing, they must have been his children, I hadn’t been skiing in a long time. I thought of the scent of peach. They spent a long time on the purple spots around my neck; he told me, “I can confirm that he must indeed have strangled you quite hard and for quite some time.” The sentence sounded ridiculously pompous, but I told myself: There was no need for tears, my body was enough.

  He asked me to take off my clothes and instantly I felt the return of my old shame; it was the shame I had felt all my life; even in elementary school, checkups had been an ordeal. So were class trips to the pool: I’d run from one pool to the other, hands clenched over the crotch of my bathing suit and over my penis, curled beneath the fabric; my body sickly and almost deformed; my skin so embarrassingly white, so pale you could see the veins underneath. I undressed as slowly as I could.

  The doctor and nurse were both watching and waiting, with no pretense of looking away, and one of them pronounced the inevitable words: “You can take everything off,” and even knowing those words would be said, even expecting them, did nothing to soften my shock. He told me to get on all fours on the examination table, which was covered with that brown scratchy paper like sandpaper. “You will feel some discomfort.” He was going to use a spatula to examine the deeper cuts and wounds. Later I told Clara that this was not humiliating, because to admit otherwise would have doubled the humiliation. He pushed the spatula in. He took photographs, They’re photographing the inside of my body. I heard the little click of the camera every time they took a picture, and the doctor murmuring to the nurse, lesions, hematomas. Clara says he asked me, “Have you had much bleeding?” I had been bleeding a lot. It would start without any warning. I told the doctor: “You can’t even trust your own blood. It gives you away.” It left stains on my pants. I said: “If anyone wanted to find me, they could just follow my trail.” He didn’t laugh at my joke. He let it go. I felt an urge to laugh. I don’t know why I felt like laughing, I made other attempts at humor, each one a failure, each one stupider than the last, and they left a taste of self-loathing in my mouth. I felt inappropriate, vulgar, and he never cracked a smile, but I couldn’t stop, each time I made a joke I felt furious with myself, but right away I’d start doing it again. I knew I wasn’t being funny, and each time he stiffened even more. At the end of the exam, he recommended that I see a psychiatrist, there was one available in the hospital.

  I was sure that if I kept acting like a trauma victim, that’s what I’d become—the effects would be even worse and would last longer. Meanwhile my body knew exactly what was going on. I told Clara: there’s no way to ignore the blood, there’s no way to ignore the fear of being in my apartment. I can’t ignore the fatigue that is a side effect of my medication, or the marks on my body, or the way my heart races when I’m walking down the street at night by myself and someone, a man, walks up behind me and I’m scared by the sound of his footsteps. But I knew I had to lie to myself. I don’t mean that lying was a solution, and I don’t know whether this would work for anyone else, but what I needed was to pretend with all my might that I wasn’t traumatized, to tell myself I was all right, even if that was a lie.

  * * *

  IT WASN’T THE FIRST TIME I was saved by a lie. Looking back, I’ve often felt most free in moments when I could lie, and by lying I mean resist a truth that was forced on me, on my tissues, on my organs—a truth that was already rooted inside me, that had been rooted inside me for a long time, but that had been planted there by others, that came from without, like the fear that Reda had injected into my body, and I realized that lying was the only power I could call my own, the only weapon I could trust completely. There’s a sentence of Hannah Arendt’s that I happened to read on the train from Paris, although I haven’t repeated it to Clara, who makes fun of me whenever I talk about philosophy; Arendt writes: “In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth—the ability to lie—and the capacity to change facts—the ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination. It is by no means a matter of course that we can say, ‘The sun shines,’ when it actually is raining…; rather, it indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts. We are free to change the world and to start something new in it.” That’s what saved me—my ability to deny the facts.

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH I’D REFUSED to see a psychiatrist, I had one last appointment—the very last one, they promised—with the doctor who would prescribe the rest of my treatment. I preferred to go alone. The corridor that led to the office of this second doctor was illuminated by huge bay windows, and as I walked along I let myself be engulfed by the sunlight, and I thought: Count down from twelve hundred and it will be over. Twelve hundred. One thousand, one hundred ninety-nine. One thousand, one hundred ninety-eight. The sunbeams poured into the corridor, filling it with blinding light, a light too bright and too pure, a mocking light. I came to the door of the office where they were expecting me. I put my ear to the door to make sure it was my turn, to make sure that, when I opened the door, I wasn’t going to interrupt one of the three people I’d met, or rather glimpsed, in the waiting room, talking or weeping with the doctor. All I heard was my own heartbeat in my ear.

  I knocked. From the other side of the door the doctor told me to come in. She was tall and thin, with hollow cheeks, a nose that was pinched and bony, and slightly trembling hands—she had the face of a civil servant. She indicated a chair and told me to sit. She spoke very softly, as if it might shatter me if she raised her voice. I thought she was laying it on too thick. She didn’t ask many questions, for which I was grateful. She said that what I’d gone through was like a kind of death. On the contrary, I was relieved to have survived and couldn’t understand why she’d bring up a thing like death.

  * * *

  CLARA RISES. I hear her cross the room. She goes to the sink, she fills her water glass. I hear the sound of the water running, the sound of the water filling the glass, the sound of her swallowing when she drinks. She sets the glass down. I hear the chair squeak against the floor as she takes her seat. I’m still behind the door.

  “I hate the—”

  Stop listening.

  Time slowed to a crawl. After I left the doctor’s office with my prescription, I wandered on my way to the pharmacy, hoping to kill time and get back to Frédéric’s later than if I walked at a steady pace; I didn’t want to face an entire day. The pharmacist read what was on the prescription. There was no way he could know that the treatment was only preventive; it didn’t say so on the prescription, as far as I know. He gave me a sad, pitying look, the look of an undertaker, and I would have rather he shuddered with disgust than give me that maudlin look.

  I walked to Frédéric’s. He was in the United States for work and had left me a set of keys. I took the narrowest streets, the longest and most winding, and even so I got there earlier than I wanted. I didn’t see how I could have made it back so quickly when I walked so slowly and took so many
detours. I collapsed onto the sofa and I thought: What was my life like before Reda?

  I had gone through all the tests, taken all the mandatory steps, both the official ones, those required by the criminal justice system, and the unofficial—that is, the doctors, the clinical exams, the police, the Department of Criminal Investigations, the quasi-psychiatric doctors and their advice, and also my own fear, my oscillations between speech and silence, my bursts of self-protective arrogance, as if these, too, were obligatory institutions.

  My life was a series of hours. As I told Clara this morning, I couldn’t seem to fill up the space left behind when those appointments suddenly came to an end, and it seemed to me unthinkable—unthinkable, and impressive—that for years I’d managed to fill up all the hours of the day from the morning, or at least the afternoon, from whenever I opened my eyes, until evening. I spent my days counting down the hours, I would think, More than five hours to go before the day ends, more than three hours to go, I would think, If I take a long enough shower, that will be half an hour. If you don’t brush your teeth in the shower but do it after, you’ll waste another three minutes. If I got out of the shower and saw that it had been less than thirty minutes, I would bite my tongue as punishment, I’d pinch my forearm, and I’d think again: If you go to the post office and come back at a reasonable pace you’ll kill another twenty minutes. Twenty whole minutes, easy; I used subterfuges, strategies, tricks to trap myself. What was there before all these appointments, before the taking of statements, before the Hôtel-Dieu? It’s not that I was sorry when the questioning and the medical exams were over, I didn’t miss them; on the contrary, I was relieved; my sense of freedom, now that I could remain silent, or at least stop speaking when I wanted, was like nothing I’d ever felt.

  * * *

  THE DAY BEGAN AROUND NOON, when I got up; the odd thing was that I never knew how to fill up the day and yet the smallest task, the smallest obstacle, like opening up my laptop, or even just seeing another person, disgusted me—in any case, I hated everyone, just as Clara said. I could spend two or three days in a row sitting on Frédéric’s sofa asking myself which was worse, to be bored or to do something I hated; so I didn’t do anything. I looked out through his curtains into the courtyard of his building. Although I was agitated, it’s not as if time sped up. I never found myself thinking, after some long pointless deliberation, that the time had flown by; on the contrary, my immobility was slow, as if time itself had slowed to a crawl.

  After I woke up, I’d spend a few hours in bed, just lying there, or turning over and trying to go back to sleep. The sunlight, coming through the blinds, would reach my face at a certain hour and cover it in warmth that left me feeling even more listless and oppressed.

  I wouldn’t exactly sleep: I would doze, and even as I dreamed I would retain a vague sense that I wasn’t actually asleep. Sometimes, when I was in that space between reality and dreams, I could have sworn I was able to change the things that happened in my dreams. I was dreaming, but inside the dream I knew that I was dreaming, and I could modify the landscape, I could make certain people appear around me and make others disappear, and nothing could frighten me, I could jump off a cliff, off the sixtieth floor of a high-rise, or burn down a forest just to admire the mysterious beauty of its destruction: if something bad happened, I’d wake myself up and I’d be alone again, in my bed.

  * * *

  THE INDIVIDUAL I HAD BECOME would carefully place the three pills of his antiretroviral medication on a sheet of newspaper spread out next to him in the bed, where it remained all night. Then, when he woke up, he would take his medication. He would have cut the pills into little pieces the night before so he could swallow them more easily in the morning. This routine allowed him to stay in bed, so he didn’t have to get up and go to the medicine cabinet. He kept a bottle of water in the bed, next to him on the mattress, all night long, and he would tuck it in as if it were his child, and now and then it would roll against his body and wake him up, when he felt the coolness of the water in the bottle against his back. He left it there to wash down the big pills of Kaletra and Truvada, since even when he took them separately, broken into two or three pieces, they were still painful to swallow and scratched his esophagus. If he had forgotten to put his bottle of water in the bed beside him the night before, he would take his pills without water rather than get out of bed, and for hours he’d feel them stuck somewhere between his gut and the back of his mouth. He’d swallow over and over, trying to make them go down, but he was only swallowing air and he’d burp it up again; he’d try to bring them down into his body by contracting his throat and esophagus. And yet the doctor had warned him: under no circumstances should he take his medicine on an empty stomach, not unless he had breakfast right after. And in fact, very often, when he took his pills on an empty stomach, the first thing he did was limp to the toilet so he could throw up, holding his hands out before him like a bad actor imitating a blind man, still between sleep and waking, eyes squinted shut, mouth gummy from sleep. The acid odor of the vomit would wake him. He hoped this didn’t interfere with the treatment, he hoped the pills had had time to dissolve in his stomach and spread through his tissues and bloodstream between the time he’d swallowed them and the moment when he found himself on his knees against the toilet, leaning over the bowl, hands firmly planted on the plastic seat—because he was afraid of drowning in the toilet bowl, drowning in the water and the rejected contents of his stomach, and his body would be racked with spasms, and there would be nothing left to throw up since he hadn’t eaten, and his body would contract, arch, and twist the way you wring out a damp rag to squeeze out the last drops of water. Even if he didn’t throw up, the nausea would persist from morning to night. Often he took a nap in the afternoon. He’d get up at noon, wander around the apartment, then go back to bed at two, get up at six, and nervously wait for dark so he could go back to bed again. He had to follow the course of treatment, his body didn’t tolerate it well, and since it began his nights had stretched from eight hours to fifteen or sixteen hours per day, and the whole time he kept thinking, After all you’ve been through.

  He would plan little returns to normal life. He secretly called these his sorties. He liked to make up code names, code expressions to use in his communications with himself; he never shared these communications, he never told anyone about them but kept them jealously private; he would murmur to himself, “Today it’s time to make another sortie.” And he would leave the apartment. He would force himself to go. He would go down to the café and spy on the others around him. He would go to the café wearing an old hoodie, the oldest he had, one that was frayed and full of holes. He wouldn’t take a shower. He’d yank his hood down over his dirty, greasy hair. He dressed as badly as he could, thinking, I want to look the way I feel, I want to be as repulsive as the thing that happened to me.

  There was something else, too.

  I had become racist. Suddenly I was full of racism—the one thing I had always considered most alien, most “other” to my mind. Now I became one of those others. I became exactly the thing I had always rejected becoming—because you don’t become anything without excluding other possibilities, and now one of those possibilities had reared up from my past.

  A second person took over my body; he thought for me, he spoke for me, he trembled for me, he was afraid for me, he inflicted his fear on me, he made me tremble over terrors of his own. On the bus or the metro I lowered my eyes if a man who was black or Arab or possibly Kabyle came anywhere near me—because it was always men, and this was another absurd feature of the racist fantasy that colonized my being: the danger always came in the shape of a man. I would lower my eyes or turn my head and silently beg, Don’t attack me, don’t attack me. I never bowed my head if the man was blond or redheaded, or if he had very pale skin.

  I was traumatized twice over: by fear and by my fear.

  This lasted two or three months.

  There was Istanbul. Cyril had invited me to
come with him to Turkey just after Christmas. I hesitated. I didn’t know if it was a good idea, and one day when I went for my blood tests at the Hôtel-Dieu I asked the nurse what she thought. She’d said: “It will do you good to get away a few days and clear out the cobwebs.”

  I flew to Turkey with Cyril. I slept in my seat on the plane. Only I didn’t sleep, I pretended to sleep so I wouldn’t have to talk. I did it all very carefully: I pretended to wake up when the wheels of the plane touched down, I stretched my arms, I rubbed my eyes, I yawned, I inhaled and exhaled voluptuously, as if I were waking from a dream. From the moment I set foot in Istanbul, at the airport, I counted the days until it was time to leave. Immediately I realized what a mistake it had been to come on this trip; I multiplied the number of days by twenty-four to get the number of hours I’d have to spend there. I multiplied the total by sixty using the calculator on my phone to figure out the number of minutes I’d have to stay. I started counting.

  I saw menace everywhere. Whenever Cyril looked at me, I felt sure he was about to discover the contemptible, shameful reason for my fear. I hid my face so no one could read my features. The city amplified everything I was afraid of: the call to prayer, echoing through the streets, chanted my impending doom; the sun had been invented to burn my face, the pressing crowd that jostled along the great pedestrian artery existed to crush and trample me, the world was a production staged against me. I tried to keep Cyril from seeing that I felt safer when I walked beside someone I took to be a white American or white German. I walked closer to them, thinking they would protect me in case of an attack; and I was disgusted with myself. But I did it.

  Even in the taxi from the airport, my paranoia had invented all kinds of scenarios. The driver glanced at us through the rearview mirror and asked us questions about our lives, our jobs, France. Cyril answered for me, and each time he opened his mouth I braced myself, thinking he was about to go too far, that he’d give something away that would offend the driver. I kept shooting him stern looks full of hatred. He didn’t notice, he was too absorbed with the taxi driver, since he’s always eager to meet new people and talk with strangers. I saw the driver take us on a long trip, over crumbling and interminable roads, to the edge of a forest of sunburned trees. The trees weren’t brown or green, but yellow, dry, incandescent, as if they were on fire from root to branch. The driver took us there, we asked him to take us to the hotel and he took us to this forest, and I knew what he had planned, but Cyril was smiling, oblivious, and he kept talking to the driver and saying things he shouldn’t say. I wanted to warn him, but in my vision I didn’t warn him, because I was afraid it would hasten the inevitable. Then he realized. But now it was too late. The driver stopped the car. He forced us to get out, he ordered us in broken English, Go off, go outside the car, first calmly, then more and more nervously, until it sounded like a furious insult, Go out, then he opened the door to get us out faster, and he kicked us, and finally he pulled out a gun that looked like Reda’s, that was exactly the same, in the dream I recognized it perfectly. Then he shot us. Nothingness. The driver had dropped us in front of the hotel, and I had given him a large tip.