16.
For the first time he speaks. He says: “I better get going, they’ll be waiting for me.” She answers: “Let me finish, I’m almost done,” and it’s true, just now her voice had the sound of someone wrapping up; even though I’ve been listening less and less, for some time now I’ve known she was nearing the end.
The night of my second interview with the two police officers, before I left, the female officer told me that four men would be waiting in front of my building. They were on their way now, they’d be taking fingerprints so they could, in the end, perhaps, find Reda. I called Geoffroy. Didier was supposed to avoid moving around because he had a bad back, he’d spent too much time that winter at his computer, writing; Geoffroy said he’d catch a taxi and meet me at home. It was almost two in the morning.
The police car took me back to my apartment. Through the car window I could see the revolving blue lights. There were two men with me. They didn’t put on the radio. We came to the place de la République, they said good night; I walked a short way in the dark, I passed the pulled-down metal gates of the cafés, and soon I saw the shapes of the four men standing in front of my building, each one carrying a little aluminum suitcase. They were dressed in dark colors, parkas, jeans, a couple in sneakers, a couple in leather shoes. Just like on TV, I thought. I went nearer. I walked up to them, they peered into my face, frowning, I asked: “Are you with Criminal Investigations?” and one of them answered, “Yes, and you are Monsieur—” And I interrupted, “Yeah, that’s me.”
“He didn’t know what else to say,” Clara says. I just walked up to the door and punched in the security code and they followed. They took pictures of the door before we went upstairs; they took dozens and dozens of snapshots, the camera kept clicking away, they were talking back and forth but I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, I couldn’t see why they’d need a picture of this blue front door with its flaking paint when Reda never even touched it, or why they’d take a picture of my mailbox, which Reda had never even noticed—at least I don’t think he did, if so I don’t remember; he wouldn’t have been able to tell it apart from the others because I don’t remember having told him my last name—or why they’d take such an interest in the elevator when Reda had never been inside it, but I didn’t ask any questions, I didn’t want this to take any longer than it had to. Geoffroy must have been somewhere between his house and mine; in any case he wouldn’t be long. They asked questions and more questions: “Did he touch the intercom? The front door? Did he touch the intercom with his fingers? How about the front door?” I said no, he hadn’t touched any of those things, I was the one who punched in the code, I was the one who invited him in, I was the one who wanted him in my home; and they kept taking pictures of my staircase, where nothing in particular had happened, or of the place they kept the trash cans, which Reda had never even seen. Geoffroy would be there soon.
We went up the stairs. I climbed them two by two, and they followed. I can’t remember whether they said anything or not. They opened their metal cases in my apartment, having set them down on the floor. These were filled with equipment I couldn’t identify. The inspector, the one who spoke the most and had introduced himself as the inspector, was the one giving the orders. He was giving instructions to his team when Geoffroy knocked at the door. It wasn’t quite closed, it swung open when he knocked, and he apologized. He put his head around the door and coughed, the inspector looked at him then at me, then me, then him, and asked me if I knew him. Even before I answered, I think he could tell that I’d been expecting Geoffroy—as my sister says, I don’t exactly have a poker face. The inspector said Geoffroy couldn’t stay, he’d have to wait until they left. He said: “We have to be able to do our jobs right, monsieur, I’m sorry,” and he really seemed to mean it, as he went on to remark on the size of the apartment, saying it was too small, it was tight even for five people, which made it hard to look for prints. But Geoffroy would stay on the sofa, he wouldn’t move. I begged the inspector: he wouldn’t speak, he wouldn’t make any noise. It was Geoffroy who settled it, saying he didn’t want to get in their way and he’d wait on the landing until they finished, the same landing where I’d seen Reda for the last time the night before. He sat there on the steps, though he had to get up every seventy or eighty seconds to turn on the light, which went off automatically. Clara, who’s telling this to her husband, doesn’t know it, but after a while he’d had enough and resigned himself to darkness. He stopped getting up, he just sat there in the pitch black. I couldn’t hear him anymore.
They questioned me; they wanted to know where they might be able to find fingerprints; and they thought of the sheets, but I’d washed them all, and the clothes, too, I’d washed those at the highest temperature. I’d thrown my pants and my underwear away in a public trash can when I was on my way from my place to Henri’s. All I had was my shirt and sweater, but they weren’t any use, there were no prints on them, I’d taken them off myself five minutes after Reda got there, and he’d hardly touched them.
The only fingerprints they could find were on the vodka bottle—but had Reda touched it? I couldn’t remember, I didn’t think so—and on the pack of cigarettes that had fallen out of his pocket when he got dressed. The bottle was still in the trash can downstairs where I’d put it that morning. And I hadn’t washed the glass he drank from, either. I have no idea why, but when I’d scrubbed every centimeter of the place to exorcise his presence from my apartment, I hadn’t done the dishes and I hadn’t washed the glass he’d drunk from, and this was something I didn’t realize until I was back at home with the men from criminal investigations. I’d washed everything, I’d used bleach and anything else I could find; to me the stink of the bleach was reassuring, but the glass where he’d put his lips remained untouched, and the most incredible thing, more incredible even than the glass, was that I’d left his pack of cigarettes on the floor—that, and a pocket dictionary that had fallen out of his clothes. I’d tried to get rid of every trace of him, I’d washed the floor, but somehow I’d worked around the pack of cigarettes and the pocket dictionary, lying there side by side; you could actually see where I’d mopped. I’d made a circle around the pocket dictionary and the cigarettes and you could clearly see this circle of darker parquet in the middle of the clean, freshly washed parquet, and in this circle, at its center, the two objects, which hadn’t been moved by so much as a centimeter. You’d overlooked them, even though you washed the slats of the blinds one by one, the blinds he’d never touched, you polished the doorknobs, you emptied whole bottles of bleach into the toilet but you left the pack of cigarettes and the dictionary. There they are, in the middle of the room, and you’d overlooked them. The inspector asked me why I’d left the cigarettes and the dictionary sitting there, under the chair, but I didn’t know what to say. He suggested that I go downstairs and look in the garbage for the vodka bottle. Geoffroy smiled as I went past. I had no trouble finding the plastic bag; there it was, untouched, wrapped in the odors of rotten fruit and the stink of dirty diapers. Two four six eight. I counted the stairs as I climbed them. I gave the bag to the policemen, they extracted the bottle slowly, using just the tips of their fingers. They were wearing plastic gloves. They used a special powder that they spread over the bottle with what looked like a shaving brush. They couldn’t find any prints. They found a couple of smudges but they said those were illegible and almost certainly wouldn’t yield any information, they might not have belonged to Reda anyway. All that was left was the glass, unbelievably left where it was, and the pack of cigarettes and the little book. They didn’t find any prints on the glass either, or on the cigarette pack, which surprised Geoffroy afterward, though I didn’t think about it at the time, I was too tired to be surprised by anything. Their voices said the prints weren’t in good enough condition. In my heart I prayed they wouldn’t find anything. I was helpful, just as I’d been helpful at Saint-Sulpice, I helped them look for clues, I went down to the garbage to get the bag,
I answered their questions, I cooperated; I didn’t say the bag was gone, which would have been simple enough; but then suddenly I’d pull myself together and start inventing memory lapses—to say either that I was a participant in what happened or else that I resisted would be equally true and false; neither version would capture the reality. They stayed an hour and during that hour I had as many contradictory feelings as they had questions.
I’m not listening to Clara anymore.
They spread out into every corner of the apartment, their sneakers squeaking on the floor, which was still sticky from all the cleaning products I’d used that morning. In several places they sprinkled black powder—on the cigarette pack, on the metal bed frame, on the dishes. First they’d pour it out, then they’d use little clear adhesive strips which, together with the powder, would make fingerprints appear. The powder would sit there, untouched by me, for more than a month, since it was early the next day when I went to stay at Frédéric’s. When I came back to the studio in February there was black powder everywhere, as if a storm of ash or charcoal had swept in while I was away.
Another policeman used cotton swabs and a liquid product to take DNA samples from the rim of the glass Reda had used. “It won’t be easy, the sample isn’t very good, I’m not getting much, oh, but wait, there’s a good one, yeah, I think that one’s going to work…” While they were looking for fingerprints, I sat waiting on the bed. They’d already finished with that part of the studio, and now and then I’d go out to Geoffroy on the landing and apologize for making him wait. He lied: “It’s no problem at all, I’m very comfortable out here.” The inspector asked me to stop going outside, he said he needed me to stay put.
I went back and sat on the bed. I didn’t even have my phone so I could pretend to read my messages.
They’d finished their work and were getting ready to leave. The inspector apologized for all the black powder on the dishes and everything. It didn’t matter, it was all right, I was going to clean up anyway. I wanted to roll in that black powder. The cases were all packed up; they said good night, they shook my hand and went out the door. Just as they were leaving and Geoffroy was getting up to come into the apartment, they asked whether Reda had taken a shower, since then they might find some prints on the shower partition or the bottle of liquid soap; and I didn’t lie. I don’t know why not, but I didn’t lie, I said yes, and because of me they turned around. They went into the bathroom, where they spent another ten minutes. Time dragged by. Ten minutes later they left for good, but not before one of them asked, for the last time, “You’re sure there’s nowhere else we could look?”
Now Geoffroy could join me inside the apartment. He sat down on the bed next to me, and neither of us could think of anything to say. This never happened with us, at least it had never happened before; very often, in fact, we talked too much when we were together, we were liable to interrupt each other, our words would pile up or collide, in the space of a breath one phrase would find its way inside another and explode it and jolt the conversation into an entirely new direction. But that night, alone in the apartment reeking of bleach, we had nothing to say. No noise came up from the courtyard, there was nothing but silence and the smell of detergent.
He said: “You must want to get some sleep.” That, too, he’d understood, but I hadn’t had the courage to say it. I hadn’t had the courage to tell him to go home and leave me alone after he’d spent an hour, maybe longer, on the landing, in the dark, sitting there on the cold stairs. “You’re not afraid to stay here by yourself?” No, I wasn’t afraid. I couldn’t manage more than three or four words at a time. I wanted to be alone. I told him again: “No, I’m not afraid.” He told me he could stay beside me and wait until I fell asleep. Once I had, he would leave without a sound, he would sneak out, on tiptoe, without banging the door, and the next day he’d come back with Didier.
It turned out that it is impossible to write about happiness, or at least I can’t, which in this case amounts to the same thing after all; happiness is perhaps too simple to let itself be written about, I wrote, as I am reading right now on a slip of paper that I wrote then and from which I am writing it down here; a life lived in happiness is therefore a life lived in muteness, I wrote. It turned out that writing about life amounts to thinking about life, and thinking about life amounts to casting doubt on life, but only one who is suffocated by his very lifeblood, or in whom it somehow circulates unnaturally, casts doubt on that lifeblood. It turned out that I don’t write in order to seek pleasure; on the contrary, it turned out that by writing I am seeking pain, the most acute possible, well-nigh intolerable pain, most likely because pain is truth, and as to what constitutes truth, I wrote, the answer is so simple: truth is what consumes you, I wrote.
Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child
ALSO BY ÉDOUARD LOUIS
The End of Eddy
About the Author
Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, Édouard Louis is a novelist and the editor of a scholarly work on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of “Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive,” published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Interlude
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Also by Édouard Louis
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2016 by Éditions du Seuil
Translation copyright © 2018 by Lorin Stein
All rights reserved
Originally published in French in 2016 by Seuil, France, as Histoire de la violence
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Louis, Édouard, author. | Stein, Lorin, translator.
Title: History of violence / Édouard Louis; translated from the French by Lorin Stein.
Other titles: Histoire de la violence. English
Description: First American edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054132 | ISBN 9780374170592 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Louis, Édouard—Fiction. | Rape—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ2712.O895 H5713 2018 | DDC 843/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054132
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e-ISBN 9780374716400
The translator wishes to thank Scott Auerbach, Tash Aw, John McGhee, and the author for their good counsel. Any errors are his own.
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