* * *
(My older sister, at the moment I speak, has begun taking the necessary steps to buy back my grandmother’s house for a ridiculously low price, and my grandmother has left to spend the rest of her life in public housing.
She called me to tell me about it and to talk about the serious renovations that are needed, given the hovel my grandmother lived in, where the ceiling had a hole in it nearly six feet wide And then you know I really love grandma so I don’t want to say bad things about her, but boy it stank in there. There were turds from god knows what all over the place, and mold. It’s gonna take a long time to fix it all up. My sister, who will never see anything but the village for her whole life, at the age of twenty-five already owns property that will need endless renovation.)
* * *
My grandmother, just like the monitor’s, took in lots of dogs. It made her feel less lonely, and she could curl up with them at night to share a little of their warmth. At least my legs are warm when I sleep with them, and they keep me company, otherwise I’m all alone and I get bored. She adopted five of them, or six, sometimes more, and it really annoyed my father. He found her behavior irrational, adopting dogs when she could barely afford to feed herself And you can’t even go out for a walk anymore ’cause the dogs trash the house while you’re out. You think I didn’t see they’ve torn down the curtains, torn up the sofa, pissed on the TV. And on top of all that, like I said, you don’t have the money to feed them. She made excuses They’ll eat leftovers, but—and everyone saw this happen—she bought food for the dogs and even less for herself. She was the one eating their leftovers, so in the end she wasn’t just cold, she was also hungry.
When my grandmother ran out of wood, she would head for the forest that surrounded the village. She would take her big green-and-blue shopping bag with her, riddled with holes, as she finally had to admit: It’s ’cause the dogs chew up everything. She would scavenge for small branches to take home with her. My mother would do the same thing herself to have a fire in the fireplace or to cook meat on the grill when there was no charcoal, part of her maternal pride My kids will never go hungry, they’ll never be too cold. To keep us from seeing it as shameful, my mother would turn it into a game. We knew it was because we were poor and had no money; children understand that faster than people think. My mother would say Let’s go collect some firewood, we could use a walk and it’ll be fun.
We pretended to believe her and she pretended to believe that we believed her.
Sometimes my mother would get tired and stop pretending. She’d give up all her efforts to protect us from reality and she’d make me go to the shop in the village to start a tab, to buy on credit what we needed to eat. You have to go because if it’s you who asks for credit she’ll say yes because you’re a kid, but if I go it’s a sure thing that the old bitch who runs the shop will say no. I tried to get out of it until my father intervened, Get your ass in gear and get down there before I give you what’s coming to you. He was so terrifying that I would do as I was told in silence. Children are better at inspiring pity and I had been designated as the one most likely to succeed at that game in order to get us some food; it wasn’t only the shop I’d be sent to, some days it was also our neighbors, or others in the village, to ask for some bread, a box of noodles, or a little cheese. The humiliation of waiting to be rung up, and then saying in a low voice so that the other women from the village who were there wouldn’t hear My mom asked could you please put this on our account and then the woman who owned the shop would take great satisfaction in raising her voice so that, on the contrary, everyone would be sure to hear her words. It can’t go on like this, your parents are gonna have to pay because I can’t just go on running a tab for them. If they’re short on money they should work a little harder. Now, you be sure to tell them what I said, I’m here at work every day at dawn, from eight in the morning till eight at night, that’s the only way to get ahead. Okay, okay, this is the last time you can use your account, I’m warning you, the very last time, and only because I can’t bear to see you leave empty-handed. There I was, lowering my gaze, hating the shop owner, wanting to cut her face open with some sharp, pointed object Thank you ma’am, thank you.
* * *
Other times when we had no money we would eat fish that my father caught. He had always been a fisherman, it was a hobby of his; boys went fishing or else hunting. He went fishing all the time in the ponds near the village, even more after the accident at the factory that lost him his job. He would bring the fish home to the house and my mother would clean them and then freeze them, wrapped in newspaper or in plastic bags from the supermarket. A horrible sight for me: opening the freezer door and finding these cadavers wrapped in a layer of ice. The most troubling part was seeing their eyes, imprisoned in ice after having been frozen by death. Then there was the smell that hovered about the family room for days after my mother had been cleaning fish. At the end of the month, when my parents didn’t have enough money to buy meat, we would eat fish several days running. My disgust began back then. Nowadays my stomach is still turned by fish, a dish so prized in the social circles into which I wanted to move.
Village Stories
We weren’t the poorest family around. Our closest neighbors, who had even less money and a house that was always dirty and falling apart, were the object of my mother’s scorn and that of others as well. Being unemployed, they belonged to that segment of local inhabitants who were called slackers, people who lived off welfare, sat on their asses all day. There is a will that exists, a desperate, constantly renewed effort to place some people on a level below you, not to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Dirty laundry was all over their house; dogs urinated in all the rooms, soiled the beds; the furniture was covered in dust, and not just dust, really, more a kind of filth that no word quite captures: a mixture of dirt, dust, food scraps, spilled drinks, wine or Coke that had dried up, dead flies or mosquitoes. They were dirty themselves; their clothes were smudged with dirt or something similar; their hair was greasy, their nails long and blackened. Something else my mother was always repeating with pride: Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t be clean, we may not have much money but the house is clean and my kids’ clothes smell fresh, they’re not dressed in filthy rags. Our neighbors would go into the fields around the village to steal corn and peas, exercising the necessary caution not to be caught by the farmworkers, Keep an eye out for the rednecks. I spent a lot of time at their house, in the kitchen that smelled of kerosene because of the storage tank in the next room. It had originally been the room with the sink and bathtub, but since the neighbors didn’t think such a room was necessary, they used it to store kerosene. We’d make popcorn from the corn they’d stolen from the rednecks. And the stories we made up, as only children can: stories sewn together from lies, elements that got added or invented, exaggerations. Episodes in the imaginary life of our neighbor And right at that very moment the redneck appeared out of nowhere and started chasing me with his tractor but I ran faster and faster and he never did manage to catch me.
We would tell each other the stories that were going around the village and making life less dull.
One of those stories really struck me. It had to do with the death of a man in the village. He had no money left and had run up debts in all the cafés. My father likes to say that back then there were twelve cafés for a village of barely five hundred people. I say a man in the village, but I knew him well.
* * *
Loneliness and hunger—the old man must have been sick of his life. He was tired of living but he didn’t exactly kill himself, it was almost as if even making that effort would have required too much of him.
* * *
But then people in the streets began to notice the smell.
* * *
I smelled it myself one day when I was out walking with my cousin. He said It smells like something die
d around here. I spent lots of time with my cousin. He needed me to tie his shoes for him or scratch his back: his disability kept him from moving normally. When he was a child, as his growth spurt was coming to an end, his spinal column kept on growing, grew in an abnormal way, up into his brain, causing irreversible damage. It was a serious disability. He walked crooked and the hump in his back distorted the clothes he wore. The hunchback of Notre Dame, the villagers would chortle. He lost his teeth at a young age; they started falling out one after the other when he was about twenty, and some days, for reasons no one really understood, his skin would grow yellowish, or even completely yellow. On days like that he had such a high fever he couldn’t get out of bed, and it would last for weeks. He was disabled but no one in the village would say this word in front of him or his mother. We couldn’t tell if his mother—my aunt—was pretending not to know how bad his condition was or if she actually didn’t understand the situation. “Parents are always the last to admit that their son is crazy.” I remember our amazement when one day, and it was the only time, we heard her say, as if she were confessing something, as if she were teaching us, telling us something we didn’t already know You know, my son is disabled. When his mother wasn’t around, on the other hand, the locals talked freely about his disability Your poor cousin, how terrible, you’re a good kid to look after him. When I would go to see the doctor, he’d warn me Spend time with your cousin while you can, you know he won’t be around for much longer. Then there were the jokes: Your cousin the hunchback, the village cripple. The Mongoloid.
There were more people with disabilities in my family than in others. Or maybe we hid it less, or had less medical attention, or didn’t know how to handle it. Or perhaps it was just the lack of money for appropriate medical care, that and a hostile attitude toward medicine. There is my cousin born with a cleft palate, another cousin who is always getting sick and is allergic to antibiotics, to detergent, to grass. There’s the aunt who pulls out her own teeth with a pair of pliers when she is drunk, for no reason, just for the fun of it—a pair of pliers like a mechanic would have. She is drunk often enough that, inevitably, she runs out of teeth to pull.
* * *
So on that day my cousin said, It smells like something died. He was right, something was dead. I wouldn’t have known that it was the smell of death. The old man had decided to stay home, never to go out again. No more glasses of pastis, a drop of the yellow, at the village café where the men congregate in the evenings after work—or after a day at home, watching television, when they are out of work. He stayed home waiting to die, fixed, motionless in his bed. Rumor had it, I don’t know if it was true, but they said he died in his own excrement. He died in his own piss and shit, but he wouldn’t even get out of bed, he didn’t go to the bathroom anymore, he just covered up the puddles of piss and piles of shit with sheets of newspaper, a last little gesture of hygiene before dying. They said his socks were stuck to his flesh, he hadn’t taken them off for months, and with all the piss and the pus the socks just little by little began to get absorbed into his skin, glued on until they became like part of his body. And then, silence. The process of the body’s decomposition. The women of the village: The worms were eating him, and the stench that spread through the streets. A crowd gathered (it was the same day that my cousin had identified, albeit unwittingly, the presence of death—because it smells like something died was an expression we were always using to describe foul smells) in front of the house emitting the smell of the rotting body. Even though it was nearly impossible to breathe, the women used Kleenex to cover their noses so they could keep watching, so they could stay, so they wouldn’t miss their chance to witness such an event, so they could escape for a few minutes from a daily routine that held no surprises, or even the expectation or hope of a surprise. Given his fragile constitution, my cousin threw up a lot in the course of the afternoon.
We told that story often, we thought it was funny.
A Good Education
My parents were making sure I got a good education, not like the thugs and the Arabs from the projects. Here was a source of pride for my mother: My children are brought up right, I teach them how to behave, not like the scum out there or—and I have no idea where she got her information from, maybe from things her father, who had fought in the war in Algeria, had said to her—My children are brought up right, not like the Algerians, the Algerians are the worst, you know, if you look close you can see they’re more dangerous than the Moroccans or the other Arabs.
* * *
Having been constantly told by my mother that I was better than Arabs or than our impoverished neighbors, it was only after I left middle school that I realized I was less privileged than I had imagined. I knew, even before then, that there were other worlds where people had it much better than in mine. Like the bourgeoisie that my father railed against, or the village shopkeeper, or the parents of my friend Amélie. It was even something I thought about fairly often. But since I had never actually been faced with the existence of these other worlds, since I had never been plunged into them, my knowledge was on the order of intuition or fantasy.
This is something I will discover much later, particularly in my conversations with my former teachers—teachers at the middle school who were powerless, beaten down by the ways that parents in the village raised their children, and who would talk about my situation in the teachers’ lounge Really the Bellegueule kid has a lot of potential, but if he keeps on the way he’s going, not doing his homework and missing class so often, there’s no way he’ll get ahead.
* * *
I belonged to the world of children who turn on the television as soon as they wake up, play soccer all day long in the quieter streets, in the middle of the road, in the pastures that lie behind their houses or at the foot of their apartment buildings, who watch more TV in the afternoon and evening for hours on end, between six and eight hours a day. I belonged to the world of children who spend hours in the streets, evenings and nights, just hanging out. My father—always awkward when it came to questions of schoolwork—would warn me that I could do what I wanted but that I’d have to face the consequences Go out when you want, come home when you want, but if you fall asleep in school the next day it’s your own damn fault. If you play at being grown up you get what’s coming to you, whereas the children of the teachers, of the doctor, of the grocer were made to stay home and do their homework. He might ask me several times in the course of a single week if I’d finished my homework. He didn’t care what I answered, just like my mother when she asked me how my day at school had gone. It wasn’t really him asking the question; asking it was part of a role he was playing, and sometimes the role got the better of him, against his will, as if he were accepting, or rather internalizing, the fact that it was preferable, or that it was more legitimate, for a child to do his homework well.
* * *
Going out always involved the bus stop, the center of a boy’s life. We spent our evenings there, sheltered from the wind and the rain. I think that it has always been that way: teenage boys gathering there every night, to drink and to talk. My brother and my father both put in their time there, and when I’ve returned to the village I’ve seen boys there who were only eight years old when I left. They had taken up the place that had been mine a few years earlier; nothing ever changes.
* * *
We would talk on endlessly through the night: about what was going on in the village, as if it were a world unto itself, isolated from all knowledge from outside, from elsewhere; about pranks, the mailboxes we would kick over just for the fun of it; about Jeanine, the old lady who lived across from the bus stop, and who would call the police when we made too much noise and we’d hurl insults at her you old whore, you crazy old bitch, before we ran away. We would buy cases of beer and drink until we puked, videoing ourselves on our cell phones.
* * *
I
remember from a very early age, thirteen or fourteen, having to deal with people passing out, falling into alcohol-induced comas. Calling the paramedics, propping up one of my buddies on his side so he wouldn’t drown in his own vomit. When it happened to me, the morning after the night of drinking (we would say Let’s get plastered this Saturday again), I would wake up in a tent we had made a point of pitching in one of the pastures around the village, with my clothes stiff with dried puke, in a dirty sleeping bag that reeked, almost indescribably, of the food that my irritated stomach had thrown up, my belly aching and my skull pounding, as if my heart and lungs had switched places with my brain for a day. My buddies would laugh and tell me that I’d nearly died, that I could have drowned in my vomit, could have swallowed my tongue.
* * *
I tried hard to hang out with boys as much as possible for my parents’ sake. The truth was I found spending time with them boring. And often enough when I told my mother I was heading off to play with them, I was actually going to meet Amélie. One of my favorite games was to do her makeup, using lipstick and all sorts of different powders. I hardly dare imagine the terror that would have gripped my parents if they had known. I felt a need to reassure them, to act in such a way that they’d stop asking me questions I wished would simply go away.
* * *
Fights were a frequent feature of these evenings. At the bus stop, cheap whiskey and pastis joined the liters of beer. The festivities lasted through the night right up until the break of day, hours of free time, of waiting for the time to pass or really for it to arrive. It was also built from red bricks, the bus stop, and tagged Fuck the dam pigs, Kill the fuckin fagots.
The End of Eddy Page 6