On Why Men Don’t Trust Doctors
Pressured by my father’s insults and remarks, I eventually started hanging out with a couple of boys from the village. If I called them my buddies, the gang, anyone could have told that this was pure fantasy, and that I was actually an isolated unit orbiting around them. I never managed to become fully integrated into groups of other boys. There were many parties that I never heard about, soccer games no one asked me to join, the kinds of things that wouldn’t matter to an adult but that leave a kid scarred.
* * *
A couple of times each week we would meet up in our neighbor’s woodshed, with no particular plans in mind. It was a huge shack right in the middle of the yard, imposing, as if it had been thrown together in a hurry or had survived a terrible storm, and was on the verge of collapse. Something like this existed in nearly everyone’s yard, made out of large, thin pieces of sheet metal people got from the dump. In those days—not so long ago, in fact, just at the dawn of the twenty-first century, but the village, far from the city with its movement and activity, was also sheltered from the passage of time—chain-link fences hadn’t yet come to divide one yard from another, so we all shared a huge communal yard behind the houses that allowed us to meet up easily, without letting the adults know, without being seen by anyone.
We’d spend the afternoon playing amid the woodpiles and the sawdust, evidence of the hours men spent cutting up logs to feed their stoves and heat their houses. I’d walk around barefoot in the midst of rusty nails and pieces of bark covered with fungus, my mother screaming You don’t go walking around barefoot, it’s dangerous, there’s nails in the wood, you’ll get tetanus or an infection. What’s going on in your head that you can’t put some shoes on and pay attention. Or: He may be good at school, but he’s still a bit slow, that one.
One day, just as she had predicted, I stepped on a nail. Out of shame, or pride, really, I couldn’t let her know she was right. I decided not to tell anyone and to hide the wound in my right foot made by the nail. A few days later an oozing black mark appeared on my foot and seemed to become increasingly serious, growing larger, spreading like a spot of ink on fabric. A few more days passed during which I became consumed with worry, as when a realization dawns too late and plunges you into inertia. It was one of those cases where the more time passes, the less able you are to correct your mistake or to set right some embarrassing situation, and so it becomes harder and harder to react. I did finally decide—having made a mighty effort to wrench myself into action, to stop merely contemplating this ever more serious, not to say dangerous, situation—to start disinfecting the wound every day (multiple times a day, in fact, since by now I wasn’t just worried, I was panicked by that endlessly resonant word about which I knew nothing, or next to nothing: tetanus) with perfume—the cheap, revolting-smelling perfume that my mother wore. When she smelled the perfume on me, she asked me if I’d gone crazy, wearing a woman’s perfume, the one my own mother wore. She came up with the hypothesis of madness in order to avoid pronouncing that other word, faggot, in order not to think about the possibility that I was gay, to push it aside, to convince herself that I’d lost my mind, which would be preferable to having a fairy for a son.
* * *
I had inherited from my father this heedlessness where health problems were concerned. In fact, it was more than simply heedlessness, it was mistrust, it was hostility toward doctors and medicine. It would take me years, even after I was grown up, even after I had left the village behind, to accept the idea of taking medicine. Even today, I cannot help feeling a sort of repulsion at the idea of ingesting antibiotics or of calling a doctor. In a more general way—it wasn’t just my father—men didn’t like that kind of thing. They made a principle out of it You won’t see me popping pills all the time, I’m no pussy. I was shaped by this resistance to medicine, especially given my obsessive desire to identify with or to mimic—to ape, you might say—masculine characteristics. “Someone who does not feel himself to be a man will all the more wish to appear one, and someone who knows his own inner weakness is all the more ready to exhibit displays of strength.”
* * *
My uncle had paid the price for this masculine neglect. He had smoked his whole life, never worrying about what was excessive or what was a reasonable limit, never thinking about moderation. His teeth were yellow from tobacco, more black than yellow, his clothes reeked of Gitanes. He had smoked, but also he’d drunk a lot after work, like my father, in order to forget the exhausting days of hauling around cases and crates, of having fifteen minutes in which to eat, with your eye on your watch, the lousy warmed-over lunch your wife had prepared the night before and put in your lunch tin. Then there was the noise of the sorting room, deafening, a kind of assault, even. There was barely enough time to sit down for lunch, and if you went a minute over, the foreman started to yell. My mother would tell me about his increasingly pronounced drinking habit That’s how he became an alcoholic, your uncle did, like all the others, they’re really all the same, not a single one of them who holds the others back. More and more often he’d be seen staggering down the street, yelling insults at the other villagers, making obscene remarks to the younger women Hey baby, bring that pretty ass over here, and let’s do it, come on you little slut, you know you want it going so far as to undo his clothes and expose himself in public. My aunt tried to keep her dignity, pretending not to know about her husband’s behavior when she saw the other women in front of the school.
* * *
In the end, someone found him facedown, unconscious, in the street, nearly dead, his face a mess, the skin scraped raw by his fall, and his nose broken. It was an alcohol-induced coma. The person who found him called the paramedics.
* * *
My uncle found facedown on the asphalt, my uncle taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Within a few minutes at least half the village had gathered around his motionless body. My aunt came to see us that same evening, her face hard and impassive, her eyes dry. She told us it was bad. My uncle had smoked too much, drunk too much, his appallingly unhealthy way of life had led to a stroke. He was paralyzed The doctor said to me that maybe he won’t even wake up, but I always told him to stop drinking, I told him but he didn’t listen to a word I said. Too damn foolish, that’s what he was.
* * *
Two weeks later I learned that there was a word hemiplegia and what it meant. The entire left side of my uncle’s body was paralyzed. He would be bedridden for the rest of his life—and, as the doctor specified with the sad look on his face that doctors have under these circumstances, he didn’t have much time left. His condition got worse and worse. Coughing fits would last for hours, he’d cry out all day, and even more at night, when he would wake my aunt to have her change his position, turn him another way because his limbs had fallen asleep, pins and needles in my arms. My aunt: I’ve had it, I’m about ready to kill myself, I can’t take it anymore. There were his fits of dementia, most likely brought on by the situation, by the boredom of being bedridden in his own front room. There wasn’t enough room in the bedroom to install the hospital bed there. He would insult my aunt Bitch, you can’t wait for me to die, it’s all you dream of.
* * *
My aunt: And when he says that to me it’s not fair, ’cause if I wanted to I could’ve had him sent to a home, I could’ve and I didn’t, I wanted to be with him and take care of him, and I’m gonna take care of him till he dies, after all, I’m his wife.
Despite everything my uncle refused to take care of himself.
My aunt, again: And there’s nothing I can say to him, he’s got his pride he never liked pills, and he’s a man there’s nothing I can say. So tough luck for him because if he goes on like that there’s things that could happen to him, just like what happened to Sylvain.
Sylvain (An Eyewitness Account)
Sylvain was very much adm
ired in my family. My cousin Sylvain, ten years older than me, a real tough guy, had spent much of his youth stealing mopeds, organizing break-ins where he stole televisions and game consoles in order to resell them later, vandalizing public buildings, blowing up mailboxes. He had several arrests for dealing drugs or driving drunk with his kids in the backseat He was getting into trouble. He wasn’t like you, he couldn’t stand school. Whenever my aunt or any other relative spoke of Sylvain’s exploits, any worry or disapproval they felt was always outweighed by their pride at having such a truly tough guy in the family Sylvain better cool it a bit or he’ll lose custody of those kids.
* * *
Sylvain had been raised by our grandmother after his mother lost custody of her children because, I think, of her alcoholism. She had already come to the attention of Family Services because she had had most of her children with her own cousin.
After a series of petty convictions of various kinds, and because he was always getting into the same kind of trouble, the court made the decision—for months already the sentence had been hanging over his head—to send him to prison for eight months. My grandmother would come back from visiting him and tell us about all the difficulties he was having: fights with the other inmates, daily life in prison, which was especially hard on the poorest inmates. Everything there had to be paid for Can you believe he even has to pay for toilet paper. It’s disgraceful. And also there was something my grandmother couldn’t really bring herself to say, something she could only insinuate and that made her blush and lower her eyes, which was that some inmates raped other ones—like, as it turned out, Sylvain. She wasn’t totally certain about this because Sylvain would barely let out a word on the subject, just like her. A humiliation shared without words.
* * *
After he’d spent a few weeks in prison, the court allowed him a weekend’s furlough, long enough to see his family and friends, for good behavior, my grandmother said. He had planned a schedule down to the minute, he’d spent hours, whole nights dreaming about it in his bunk, organizing his days of freedom like an excited child as the weekend got closer and closer and the schedule he was planning became more and more concrete. (Here I am simply trying to imagine, to reconstitute what must have been my cousin’s state of mind at that moment.) He had told my grandmother how happy he felt during his furlough. He realized that someone who had gone through so many difficulties was better able to experience happiness than anyone else. He had understood that one existed only in relation to the other, and that people who had always lived comfortably, who had never known want or humiliation, were missing out. As if they’d never really lived.
He had been able to make love to his wife, play with his children, choose when and what to eat. He went to McDonald’s pretty damn quick, he’d been missing it.
* * *
My grandmother told us the rest of the story, looking miserable as she did so.
When he came to see me—it was at night the day before he was supposed to go back to his prison cell—I saw it right away. I could see it in his eyes, that something was bothering him, because I know my Sylvain well, I’m the one that brought him up. I’ve learned. He looked sad, but then, at the same time, I don’t really know how to say it, it’s hard to explain, he also looked pleased, because he knew he wasn’t going back. He’d already made up his mind. You know I even think that the second he opened the door and walked in, that very second, in the blink of an eye, I knew he had made up his mind never to set foot in that place again. What was I supposed to say, tell me, it’d been a long time since I’d seen him anywhere near to as happy as he was then, my Sylvain, and it would’ve done no good, you know how he is. No one has ever made him change his mind.
He’s tough.
At first he sat down and acted like there was nothing going on. He asked me, and he never did this, he never did this in nearly thirty years, so that was just one more clue, he asked me what I’d been up to that day. What a stupid question. It was dumb because he already knew. But I played along. I told him: I went to get some bread at the bakery, I fed the chickens, and then I just watched TV on the sofa. Just like usual. There he sat, like a piece of furniture. Then there was this long silence. You know those kinds of moments, when the silence seems to last forever. It’s almost like you start counting the seconds and each one lasts an hour. It makes you nervous. I mean, usually, around Sylvain, I’m not nervous. Ever. I’m the one who raised him, so when there’s a silence, a minute later you forget about it. It doesn’t mean anything, that’s how life is. It’s not even that you don’t care, you don’t even notice. But that day, that day was different.
* * *
At the end of that long silence, my cousin spoke. What made it so hard was that he knew my grandmother had understood. She’d already guessed what he was about to say. And what if he said it wrong, so that she didn’t understand him? The point wasn’t to reveal something to her, but to make sure she would accept what she already knew. So he simply declared that he wasn’t going back to prison. He didn’t say that he didn’t want to, as if it were a question of will, as if there were a choice to be made, but simply that he couldn’t, it just wasn’t possible. He couldn’t go on eating that same food day after day I swear Gran, people always go on about what they feed you in hospitals, but in there it’s even worse. To have to see the inmates he hated, or even the friends he had made there, the ones he hung out with during breaks in the yard, the ones he spoke to about his wife and kids, the ones who had become a second family for him, the ones he called my clan, the ones who protected him, helped him, and whom he protected and helped in return, he hated them too, if he thought about it (as if others, individual people, were always associated with a place, a space, a particular time, from which they could never be disassociated, as if there were a geography to bonds, to friendships, and hating a particular place would inevitably, inexorably imply hating the people who were found there). He couldn’t bear the stink of the cellblock, or the sound of the crazy guy upstairs who beat his fists against the wall every night, rattling not the metal bars, because those hardly exist in modern prisons, but the metal doors that have replaced them. Sylvain was upset less by the noise the crazy guy would make than by the fear that someday that could be him, that someday he would be the one who, worn out from being locked up in that tiny space for so long, would tip over into madness.
* * *
My grandmother: So he told me, Gran I’m really sorry but I won’t be going back there. He looked me straight in the eyes. And I didn’t look away. I looked right back at him to show him that what he was saying was something I could understand okay, I wasn’t shocked. He didn’t need to choose nice words to talk to me. Don’t matter that I’m a woman. So what did I do? I made a face to make it look like I was thinking it over, or a little angry, so I could be sure if his mind was really made up about what he wanted to do. He knew what I was doing. Suppose I’d have said no, that he had to go back, he would’ve told me, and really he wouldn’t have been totally wrong, he would’ve said: You want me to die in jail, you want me to croak in there? I couldn’t let myself do that. I asked him,
Your mind’s made up, are you sure? He replied: Yes Gran ’cause if I go back there you’ll never see me again, that’s for sure. I was pretty shook up when he said that. I was trying not to cry and I’m not the kind of woman who cries easily. I pretended to blow my nose saying it’s the damn hay they’re cutting that gives me allergies. He gave me a kiss and then he left.
* * *
Sylvain went home after that. He celebrated his freedom with a few friends. For a while, everything went fine; the police didn’t come looking for him right away. He must have imagined, given all the television series he watched, at least for a moment, that the police would arrive in a dozen cars and maybe even a helicopter, that they would surround the house and declare through a megaphone Mr. Bellegueule, we have the house surroun
ded and you are under arrest.
* * *
When he had gotten really drunk (I’m doing some serious drinking tonight to mark the occasion), he went to find his kids, who were in their bedroom watching a video Come on kids we’re going for a drive. My father was the same: as soon as he was drunk he had to get behind the wheel. He dared himself to do it. The kids were thrilled; they didn’t think to ask why now, why at this hour of the night. They just went to put their shoes on, still in their pajamas. His wife said No way. She told him he’d had too much to drink and done too many drugs for the night, and that he wasn’t thinking straight You don’t really want to go out and smash yourself up and smash the kids up with you. They got into a fight. Sylvain told his wife she shouldn’t be saying things like that. She should know better. She didn’t know what he’d been through in prison, what he’d had to put up with, that no matter how hard she tried, she’d never be able to imagine what it had been like. Words he could only have said drunk came out, the kind of things where you never know if they’ve been lurking deep inside of the person who says them, or if there’s no truth to them at all And anyway it’s your own fault that I ended up in jail, ’cause you didn’t know how to love me, if you had I wouldn’t have needed to do all the shit I did, I was just trying to make up for the love no one ever gave me, starting with my mother who left me, in fact everyone has always left me if you stop to think about it. The kinds of things talk show psychologists would say, which my grandmother had put into his head. She had already told me that Sylvain’s wife didn’t know how to take care of him and that this made her in some way responsible for his behavior. In the village responsibility for men’s behavior was frequently assigned to women, whose duty it was to keep them under control, as, for instance, during the fights at the end of evening dances As for that wife of his, she didn’t give a fuck about him. A real bitch.
The End of Eddy Page 8