*
Later, in group therapy – because he ended up going to one of those fuck-me-gently-with-a-chainsaw shrink sessions, because he was so desperate to hang on to Cécile, he would have done anything – they tried to make him say that he was simply acting out what his mother had done to him. And it was true. She did batter him. And his brother. A single woman with two sons, they were out of control. They were soundly disciplined. This was back when taking down the strap didn’t cause a moral uproar. She would beat them with a strap. Patrice never believed there was a connection. If every boy beaten by his parents grew up to be a violent man, people would know about it. His mother wasn’t an alcoholic, she never hit them for no reason, she didn’t go round changing the rules. His mother demanded respect, no more, no less.
It is a viper in the breast, it is something in the blood. It’s got nothing to do with the past. He was born this way. If he had ever known his father, he might be prepared to accept that there was a biological explanation. In the moment, all you want is that rush of power. To look into the woman’s eyes and see respect. Fear. And if the girl isn’t completely terrified, you go on punching. Only when she demonstrates that she is utterly submissive does the violence end.
Immediately after these bouts of rage, he would feel drained. He would look at his wife, huddled in a corner, and long to erase what had just happened, to take her out walking in the sunshine, have a good time, act as if nothing had happened. No words growled through clenched teeth, no punches that could smash a door in two, no raised hand, no trembling body as he stared her in the eyes demanding that she take him seriously, because for as long as there remained even the slightest flicker of defiance, he had to go further.
At first, it’s nothing. A couple of quick slaps and it’s over and already you’re making up. It escalates gradually. All the players need to know their roles. If the girl resists, if she isn’t instantly petrified, if she doesn’t immediately cower, things can turn very nasty. The essential is to instil terror, to make the woman submit. Unreservedly. He acknowledges his fault. He is a void, a wrong that can be righted only by lashing out.
Cécile was not made for such things. She didn’t leave and slam the door at first, because she was in love. When the brute inside him was at peace, they were so good together.
He hated to see her cry, to see her body crumple. Becoming the opposite of what she was: a happy, light-hearted, vibrant woman. Exactly the type of girl he went for. He had watched, devastated, as she transformed into his girlfriend: drained of life, dark rings around her eyes, bitter lines tugging at the corners of her mouth. It was almost as if destroying them was part of the pleasure.
Cécile is much better now they’re not together. You can see it. Even her hair is more lustrous. She is no longer afraid. She is still in love with him. But she will not come back. He will never get used to it, but it is better this way.
For a year after Tonio was born, he did not raise his hand to her. They both thought it was over. When it started again, she warned him: not in front of the baby. But the cycles had begun again. Violence was a demon that kept its distance just long enough for Patrice to believe he had changed. Then the demon coolly reasserted itself. Some nights, Patrice would beat her. In front of the kid. Before he was two years old, the boy had learned to crawl under his bed and curl into a ball. He never cried. He withdrew into his shell like an oyster and would stay that way for days. Nothing brought home to Patrice what he had become more clearly than the sight of his terrified son, huddled, hands clamped over his ears so as not to hear. With Cécile, there was still a part of him that managed to find excuses – it wasn’t really that bad, she was laying it on thick just to make him feel guilty, it was one of those feminist things that meant women wanted a real man but not the beating that comes with him . . . he never said these things aloud, but it was what he thought – if it was as bad as she said, she would have left him. But when he saw his son, that fearless, giggling little colossus, huddled under his bed like a terrified animal, it would take him days to calm down after a violent outburst. What kind of bullshit excuse could he come up with to let himself off the hook – that the kid hadn’t learned to be a man yet, that he would get used to it? At two years old? No, at the age of two, his son was not man enough to watch his father batter his mother with his fists. When he was man enough, he would get a rifle and put a bullet in the head of the fucker who had put him through this hell.
But still he could not stop it happening. Cécile joking with the fat lump of a waiter. What was he supposed to do? Let this bastard imagine he could fuck his wife right in front of him and he would say nothing? Cécile thought that women could flirt and joke with men without it meaning anything. It’s obvious they’ve got no balls, if they had they’d know what men were thinking when they laugh and joke. Cécile was wonderful, but there are some things that women just don’t understand. They want this utopian thing: friendship and closeness with guys. It doesn’t exist. Guys want to fuck, otherwise they would be talking to other guys. So Patrice would thump the waiter and, when they got home, he would carry on and beat his wife.
They had a second kid – they were determined to believe that by bringing so much love and joy into their home, the rage would subside out of a sense of shame. But rage is a whore, it is shameless, Patrice carried on exactly as before. Except that, while she was knocked up, he was careful not to punch her too hard in the stomach.
One day, Cécile waited for him to go to work, then she packed her things, took the kids, and walked out. Patrice was furious when he found out that she had gone to stay at some home for battered wives. Their relationship wasn’t like that, it wasn’t some cliché of domestic violence. But, as it turns out, it was. Their story is just like every other. He is a caricature.
*
He loathed group therapy – he is nothing like the other guys who go there. His father didn’t fight in Algeria, his mother didn’t abandon him, he is perfectly capable of talking to his girlfriend – but the worst thing about listening to them was their phoney self-awareness. You could hear it, the group moderator was a big fan of childhood stories. He would swallow any old shit. But Patrice was not so easily fooled. All the guys who came to the group were liars. They said what they thought people wanted to hear. Some of them were smooth talkers. The devil is a hell of a dancer – why else would anyone join him on the dance floor? The guys sitting in a circle were old hands looking only for excuses and explanations, pretending to be relieved that they could finally express their emotions. But the only time these scumbags cried real tears was when they were feeling sorry for themselves. Patrice could see into their souls.
He had done the “anger diary” thing. Every time he raised his voice during the day, every time his rage became too much to handle, he would write down what had just happened, like an idiot, noting the time and the severity of the outburst on a scale of one to ten. He would find himself reaching for this fucking diary every day. It came as something of a shock: he could suddenly see with his own two eyes just what a bastard he was. The neat tally of his rages and the reasons for them made him seem more of a pathetic loser than even he had imagined.
Group therapy was all bullshit. It never got to the heart of the problem: without his rage, what would he be? A guy who keeps his trap shut when someone steals the parking space he’s waited ten minutes for? A wimp who doesn’t say shit when some fifteen-year-old arsewipe disses his girlfriend in the street? A pushover who says nothing when a colleague lands him with a sackload of shit that isn’t even his responsibility? He spent all day being fucked over. What was he supposed to do? Just let it go, knowing that he was part of the social class of punchbags, doormats and pissant pussies? The guy leading the group would say that it was important that you didn’t lump everything together – politics, feelings and petty frustrations. You try sorting them out.
One day during group therapy he spoke up: if I give up violence, what have I got left? It’s not like I’m a fucking dentist �
�� he used this example because among them was a prosthetist, a bastard who was sickly sweet and full of remorse here in group when it was blindingly obvious the guy was low-life scum. I’ve got no professional status. I’ve got no professional future. If I quit being violent, when do I ever get to feel like I’m the master? Come on, who’s going to respect a submissive pleb?
He enjoys bar fights. He likes a punch-up, has done ever since he was a kid. Last year, in the Métro, he was sitting next to this skinny, puny black kid. When the doors opened, two other kids about the same age, but well built, came into the carriage and went for the kid, intending to take his money and administer a savage beatdown. Two hulking brutes against this scrawny kid, Patrice had not even tried to make sense of it. He had grabbed them and punched them out. Slick job. That day, in the Métro, he had been the hero – his fellow commuters were happy to have a psychopath in their midst, no-one was thinking he should be in group therapy. They were congratulating him. The whole carriage was ecstatic. When would he ever feel alive, feel happy, if he did not have his rage?
The sons of bitches in the group were all dirtbags who beat their wives, but most of them would never dare to beat up a guy. Patrice might be guilty of a lot of things, but not of being discriminatory. He would punch anyone. He enjoyed it – he was not afraid of anyone. When things kicked off, everyone else had to back down, he was perfectly happy to die rather than admit defeat.
*
Luckily it is a Saturday when he wakes up with this horrendous hangover. He would not be able to go to work today. He has managed to hang on to this job for four months. Usually he doesn’t make it past three. Fixed-term contract working for the post office delivering mail. It’s hard fucking work. He is sorry he has always been so down on postmen. First off, it’s hard not to steal stuff. But the main problem is all the walking. And it’s an obstacle course, working out where people mount their letter boxes . . . If it were left to him, he would have regulations in place like a shot – the fuckers already get their mail delivered for free, the least they can do is have standard-size letter boxes situated in the same place. Make things move faster. People take public services for granted – they’ve been spoiled. People need to make sure they have their letter box in the right place, that there are no vicious dogs barring the way, they need to realise how lucky they are to have a postman come by every morning. Otherwise, it’s a mess, and people are forever shouting the odds.
It’s long, a postal route. The old-timers are devastated to see what the postal service has come to. It’s like everything else. They’re witnessing the systematic dismantling of everything that worked, and to top it all they get told how a mail distribution system should work by wankers straight out of business school who have never seen a sorting office in their lives. Nothing is ever fast enough for them. The skeleton staff is too expensive. Tearing down a system that already works is quicker. And they’re happy with the results: they are good at wrecking things, these bastards.
*
Vernon folds away the sofa bed, keeps his things in a neat pile in a corner, leaves nothing lying around the bathroom, folds his towel and rinses down the shower. He’s a guy doing his best not to get in the way. He knocks back two coffees then pretends that he is off to see some friends, asks what time he can come back. You want to have dinner here? Why not come back for a drink beforehand, whaddya say? It’s raining. If there is nothing to do, he spends the day in the cinema and wandering round a shopping centre. Let him sort out his own fucking problems – just because the man’s crashing here doesn’t make Patrice his mother.
Patrice likes to do the cleaning on Saturdays. He has binge-watched every series of “The Walking Dead”. He cues up Season Two on the video projector. Wherever he is in the apartment, he can see a section of the living-room wall. The video projector is something he got through Sandrine, a girl he worked with when he was temping doing the inventory at Muji. Her sister worked for a computer company, she would walk out with video projectors and flog them for a hundred euros – a sixth of their retail price. So, anyway, he likes to do the cleaning on a Saturday, usually he will put on the original soundtrack to keep his English up to scratch. When he was young, he took a master’s in English. He enjoyed university. The classes, the canteen, the students’ union, the parties, the exams.
Now, there’s another example: how would he have managed to get a room in the halls of residence as a student if he hadn’t been violent? It was only by scaring the shit out of people that he got what he was entitled to. Otherwise, he would have been trampled over, the way so many people were trampled over, and he would have given up. In therapy, the little gayboy running the group didn’t like it when he said that if he’d been rich, he wouldn’t have been violent. Yada, yada, yada has nothing to do with social background because yada, yada, yada has no bearing on the position one holds in the economic matrix. And my fist in your face you lying fucking retard, I suppose that’s got nothing to do with me being a full-time, working-class, underpaid lackey? You think it wouldn’t make any difference if I dragged my arse out of bed every morning without having to worry about some piece of fucking registered mail I’m going to get landed with or having to rush around wondering how I’m going to sort out this, to pay for that, you really think it wouldn’t improve my mood? I’d still feel vulnerable if I was minted? You sure? I wouldn’t be any less afraid? Are you taking the piss? If I didn’t have to spend all day keeping my trap shut, with my body aching from the hell I put it through and still not make enough to send my sons on a school skiing trip, would I be the same person? I don’t think so! On the contrary, I think I’d make the effort not to jump out of my car to pound on the window of the driver who tried to cut in front of me. I’d calmly let him be an arsehole, I’d think about my plans for the weekend, I’d think about my new suit, I’d think about my kid on the tennis court, I’d think about my ex-wife living in the hundred-square-metre apartment I gave her when we split up, I’d think about the contracts I was negotiating. I would have less time to think about cutting the throats of rich wankers who only get to live well because they’ve taken everything from me. From me and mine. Taken everything.
He had watched a documentary about Africa at some point during the holidays. An oasis, all the animals drinking together. Zebras, giraffes, ostriches, hippopotamuses, the whole lot. Until a gang of lions shows up. All the animals make a run for it, sharpish. The bully boys have entered the oasis. As far as he is concerned, he would rather be a wolf. Lone. But he likes the feeling it produces – the good guys hightailing it, running for help. If he had money, he wouldn’t compare himself to an animal. He would be eminent in his field and on days when his self-esteem is low he’d go hang out in a bar in a fancy hotel where the staff would remind him that he is someone, that there is more to life than the place reserved for him: time, luxury, people to pamper him. He was a parking valet, years ago, at Closerie des Lilas. You had to suck up to the customers. He used to look at them, before climbing into cars that stank of farts, dirty feet and cold cigarette ash. Drive them into the car park so that they didn’t have to walk two hundred metres unaided. Tips at the customer’s discretion. From tight-fisted to extravagant – the important thing was that it was according to their largesse. What they chose to give according to their mood. Whatever they felt like: their largesse. A fat slab of hate would have been obvious. The thought that bastards who paid tens of thousands in tax every year might feel the urge to punch anyone seemed extraordinary to him. They could just fuck off and get massaged by whores in Mauritius, give everyone a bit of peace.
He would like to see these vultures forced to pay back all the money they’ve stolen to the people before he dies. See Mélenchon in power. The result of a revolution. He would like to see the suburbs in flames, but not so someone could hoist a green-and-white flag, he wanted to see black flags flying. For his rage to have meant something – if there were barricades in the street tomorrow, a civil war against the profiteers, he would be seen as a he
ro. He is getting old, his strength is declining. But he’s still a fine figure of a man. He so wishes he had seen blood spilled. Bankers, C.E.O.s, billionaires, politicians . . . Fuck’s sake, in time of war guys like him are heroes. That’s why he is so pissed off with people busting his balls for being violent. He is convinced that if there were a half-decent riot, he would never have to hit a woman. Cécile would have made a fine soldier’s wife. She’s tough, she’s got a good head on her shoulders.
*
He did his weekend cleaning, grateful that Vernon had picked up on the fact that it was best to give him some space on his day off. Having to see his face all the live-long day brings back a different world. He has a sneaking admiration for rockers, the way they manage to go straight from juvenile to senile without pausing at mature. It’s obvious that Vernon – like a lot of guys – has never had doubts about anything in his whole life. Group therapy, sessions with a shrink, the responsibilities of fatherhood, he sailed past them, piece of piss. He’s exactly like he was at twenty, it’s like he’s been preserved in formaldehyde.
*
When Vernon shows up again, he looks shattered. He insists on making gratin dauphinois, he has calculated the shopping down to the last centime. Patrice will never understand people’s obsession with food. The only dish whose poetry he understands steak frites.
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