I ran through the streets of the village, carrying my backpack—setting my pace so that my father would be able to follow me, feeling him a hundred or so feet behind me. He yelled my name only once, so that no one would hear and there wouldn’t be any kind of a scandal with the women talking about us outside the school the next day, tongues wagging. I hid behind a bush. He ran right past me, without seeing me. He hadn’t seen me. Suddenly I was terrified that he’d lose my trail and leave me there. Would I have to spend the night outdoors? In the cold? What would I eat? What would happen to me? I coughed loudly so that he would hear.
He turned and saw me. He grabbed me by the hair You little shit, you little fucking moron, what the hell do you think you’re doing, you little asshole. He grabbed the sleeves of my T-shirt and shook me so hard that it tore.
Later my mother would tell this story while laughing Oh my god that day your dad really gave you what you had coming but you just stood there and took it.
* * *
He dragged me back to the house by the arm, on which he had a fierce grip. He sent me to my room, where I cried, and I was still crying when he came in several hours later. He sat down at the foot of the bed. You could smell the alcohol. (My mother the next day: What with you running away, it went to his head even quicker than usual, it really got to him, your running off.) Then he started crying You can’t do shit like that, you know we love you, you can’t just run away.
Strait Is the Gate
I had to get away.
At this point I was in the last year of middle school, and it was time to decide what track I would follow. I absolutely refused to go to the nearby high school in Abbeville as would have been usual. I wanted to get far away from my parents and I didn’t want to run into the two boys again. The idea was to end up somewhere new, saying to myself—this was my hope, given the progress I had made—that people wouldn’t think of me as a faggot there. I could start over from the beginning, I could be reborn. My theatrical experience in the middle school drama club offered me an unforeseen way out. I had put a lot of effort into the theater. This was partly because it annoyed my father and because I was already beginning, at that age, to define everything I did in relation to (in opposition to) him. It was also because, since I showed some talent for acting, theater was a source of validation for me. I would try anything to get people to like me That Bellegueule kid really cracks you up when he’s onstage in the play at the end of the school year. It made my big sister proud Maybe you can be the next Brad Pitt.
* * *
I remember one night we were putting on a show in the village hall near the middle school at the end of the school year, a little play that I had written for the occasion. It was a kind of a cabaret piece where different characters followed each other onto the stage and introduced themselves, told their story, and sang a song. I was playing the role of Gérard, an alcoholic whose wife had left him, who was on his way to being homeless, and who sang
Germaine, Germaine
Let’s do a waltz, let’s do a tango
Either one, you know
Means I love you
And I love my Kanterbrau, ow, ow, ow.
I remember that the two boys were in the audience that night. They were off at high school by this point, but they must have come to see the other kids in their family, or else they just came for fun.
I remember the fear I felt when I saw them, imagining that they’d be waiting for me when I left. The hall was small, which meant I could see their faces clearly even in the dark. I performed my act, terrified that they might yell out faggot during a moment of silence, in between two lines, in front of my mother and everyone else. Somehow I made it through to the end. When I was finished, they both stood up and yelled exuberantly Bravo Eddy, bravo!
* * *
They started chanting my name Eddy, Eddy until all the villagers present joined in, around three hundred of them who were all suddenly chanting my name, clapping their hands in rhythm and staring at me with delight. Getting everyone to quiet down was difficult. When it was time for the curtain calls and I was onstage with all the other members of the troupe, they started calling out my name again. I didn’t see them after the show. I think that was the last time in my life that I ever saw them.
* * *
The school principal came to see me after one of my classes to speak to me about Madeleine Michelis High School, which was in Amiens, the largest city in our area and one that I had barely ever visited, because I was too frightened. My father always said, over and over, that there were lots of colored people there, and that they were dangerous Amiens is full of black people, Ay-rabs, towelheads, you go there and it’s like being in Africa. Best to stay away, you’re just gonna get robbed if you go. He had always said these kinds of things to me, and even if I told him that he was just being racist—making a point of always contradicting him, being different from him—still his words managed to leave me feeling uneasy.
* * *
Madeleine Michelis High School had a theater program leading to the baccalaureate. You had to take an exam to get in, and then turn in an application and audition. When the principal, Mrs. Coquet, suggested that I try out, I had never really even thought of trying to get a baccalaureate, even less to aim for a track that prepared you for college. No one in my family had done this, no one in the village either, except maybe for the children of the schoolteachers, the mayor, or the woman who owned the store. I mentioned it to my mother; she barely knew what we were talking about (Oh so now the intellectual in the family is gonna try and take the bac).
* * *
I worked with the principal’s daughter, a young actress, to prepare the scene for my audition. Her mother allowed me to skip class and gave us permission to use a classroom. I worked until I was exhausted. I couldn’t let this chance to escape slip through my fingers. I could board at this high school, which meant putting even more distance between me and the village.
My mother warned me You’re only going to your drama school if they pay for room and board ’cause we can’t pay, so otherwise you go to Abbeville, one high school is the same as another. And then my father I don’t see why you can’t go to Abbeville like everyone else, you’ve always gotta be different.
* * *
It was no easy task to convince my father to take me to the train station on the day of the audition Wasting gas for this theater shit of yours, really why should I. The train station was ten miles from the village. For several days he insisted there was no way he would take me to the station and that there was no point in getting my hopes up. On the last night he changed his mind Tomorrow don’t forget to set your alarm, I’m driving you to the station.
* * *
He would do this kind of thing often, saying no right up to the last minute, and only giving way after I’d given him the satisfaction of watching me cry and beg for hours on end. He enjoyed it. When I was seven or eight years old, for no apparent reason he gave my stuffed animal—the one I slept with and carried with me everywhere, as all children do—to the neighbor’s children. I screamed and carried on, hollering all around the house. He sat and watched with a smile on his face. On December 31, 1999, on the Feast of Saint Sylvester, New Year’s Eve, he told me that at midnight an asteroid was going to strike the earth and we were all going to die. No one would survive. Make sure you enjoy life right now because before you know it we’re all gonna die. My tears flowed all night long. I moaned, not wanting to die. My mother protested, saying he couldn’t treat me that way on New Year’s Eve, leaving me sitting on the steps of the house feeling miserable, unable to enjoy the new millennium. She tried to reassure me Don’t you listen to your dad, he’s making it all up, come watch TV with us, they’ll show the Eiffel Tower. It made no difference; I only believed my father’s words; he was the man of the house. That night too, the common room in our house would echo wit
h his laughter.
* * *
The next morning he walked by my bedroom half an hour before the time we had agreed on Get your ass out of bed. If we’re early you can wait at the station. I ran to the bathroom to get ready. I didn’t brush my teeth. My father wasn’t in the bathroom, since he never washed in the morning. He just put on a T-shirt and a pair of pants and splashed some water on his face, then he lit a cigarette and sat down in front of the television to watch the news or the shopping network.
* * *
Once we were in the car, we had an hour to cover ten miles. We said nothing to each other. To break the awkward silence, I asked him to turn on the radio. He knew all the songs by the famous French singers, and belted them out. Sometimes between two songs he’d start up again To think I dragged my own ass out of bed at this hour for this theater shit of yours, I mean really … (My mother: Your father is always complaining but don’t pay any attention, he doesn’t mean it. It’s just his way of passing the time and because he doesn’t know what else to say.)
* * *
At the station he told me to get out of the car, then changed his mind and told me to wait. I was looking at him, surprised, waiting for him to say something disagreeable. He stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a twenty-euro note. I knew this was far too much, more than he could or should be giving me. He told me I’d need it You’re gonna need to eat lunch. I don’t want you feeling ashamed in front of any of the others or feeling different ’cause you don’t have enough money. You spend all of this this morning, you don’t bring any back with you, I don’t want you to be any different than the others. But you watch out, ’cause there’s gonna be lots of Arabs around. If one of them looks at you, you just look down, you don’t try to be smart, don’t you be any kind of a big shot, ’cause people like that always have their cousins or their brothers hanging around nearby, so if you start something they’re all there to gang up on you, and you’re dead. If there’s one of them who asks you for money, you give him everything. Your wallet, your phone, everything. What matters is staying alive. Now get going, and don’t fuck up the audition.
* * *
I took the train to Amiens. I was nervous, expecting a gang of Arabs to appear at every station and steal all my belongings.
To get to Michelis High School I walked fast and kept my head down. Each time a black person or an Arab walked on the same side of the street as me—although there weren’t really that many of them—I would be gripped with fear.
* * *
There were others waiting in the hallway with their parents. I was happy to be alone; it made me feel more grown-up—and I was also bitter, jealous of these other young people who seemed so much a part of a closely knit family. I thought their parents themselves seemed somehow like teenagers when they spoke to their children, as if the happiness of their lives were reflected in the gentleness of their character.
A tall man with white hair stepped out of the room where the auditions were taking place and called out my name Bellegueule, your turn. Everyone else laughed. Even the grown-ups. Bellegueule. Prettymug. This was the first part of the selection process, before I performed the scene I had prepared. I had to answer questions about the theater and about why I wanted to come to this high school. I had thought about all my answers well ahead of time: my passion for the theater, the importance of art in our society and throughout history, my wish to broaden my horizons. A bunch of clichés.
* * *
The teacher who was interviewing me, the man with the white hair, Gérard, who would become my theater teacher once I got in, did not share my experience of this admissions interview. He would confide in me two years later—with his characteristic quiet irony—that I had begged him to admit me to the school. That I practically got down on my knees. He imitated me: Please, sir, help me get out of where I am, for god’s sake. He told me I never stopped smiling. It didn’t seem natural to him, but he was moved by the strong will, or perhaps we should call it desperation, that emanated from me. He told me that I had done the same thing in the second part of the admissions process, while performing my scene There was an imploring quality in your voice at every moment.
* * *
During the audition process I met a young man named Fabrice. We chatted and promised that we would be friends that autumn if we were both admitted. Fabrice haunted my thoughts all summer. In truth, I was thinking less about Fabrice himself than about the possibility that I could have a circle of friends in Amiens, friends who were boys, as a boy should have, and not girlfriends anymore.
* * *
All summer long I waited for the letter to arrive that would let me know if I had been accepted. There was no sign of it. My parents assured me that they hadn’t received anything Stop asking, you’re driving us crazy.
Nothing. I was in a state of despair. I finally resigned myself: they hadn’t even bothered to let me know they had rejected me. I lay awake all night imagining I would have to go to high school in Abbeville, run into the two boys again, and relive the same scenes from middle school.
I began to think of dropping out.
* * *
After supper with my parents one night, in early or mid-August, I was watching television in my room, when my father called me into the main room.
He announced that he had received a letter about a month ago, but he hadn’t thought to show it to me until now. As he said this his face took on an amused expression that let me know he wasn’t telling me the truth, that he had hidden the letter so that I would have to lie around waiting all summer.
I grabbed the letter Monsieur Bellegueule, Madeleine Michelis High School is pleased to inform you …
* * *
A second later I was running out of the house. I barely had time to hear my mother say What is that crazy fool up to now?
I didn’t want to be around them; I refused to share this moment with them. I was already far away; I had already left their world behind; that’s what the letter had told me. I went off into the fields and walked for most of the night, in the cool of the North, on the dirt paths, with the odor of rapeseed, strong at that time of year, all around me.
The entire night was spent imagining my new life far from here.
EPILOGUE
A few weeks later,
My departure.
I have prepared myself for boarding school
It’s not a big suitcase
but a large gym bag that had belonged first to my brother and then to my sister.
My clothes too, most of them, are hand-me-downs from my brother and my sister, some from my cousins.
When I arrive at the station,
the fear of black people and Arabs isn’t as bad as it was before.
I want to be far away from my father already, far away from them
and I know that this begins with turning all my values upside down.
The place where I board is not at Michelis High School itself.
It is farther away, on the south side of the city.
A mile and a half or so
I didn’t know this, so I arrived at the high school with my navy blue sports bag and Mr. Royon, the dean of students, laughed
Oh no, my boy, your dorm is on the other side of town. You need to take the bus, bus number 2.
My mother didn’t give me money for the bus fare.
She didn’t know either
I walk along the side of the road
I stop the passersby
Excuse me, excuse me, can you tell me how to find …
No one will answer
I see the annoyance and the worry on their faces.
They think I’m going to ask them for money.
I find the dormitory at last—
my fingers are raw, nearly bloody from walking those miles while carrying my suitcase, my bag.
Now
I remember, there is even a pillow in a plastic bag that I am carrying under my arm.
I must seem ridiculous, people must be mistaking me for a homeless person
At the dormitory I am told that I’ll be in a room by myself, separate from the other boarders.
I will see very little of those other boarders.
The dormitory is part of a different high school, but they have agreed to house me.
Too overjoyed to be disappointed
I tell myself that the dormitory isn’t important, that I will meet my friends at my high school, that the dorm is just something that helps me get that much farther away
The first days of the school year,
Loneliness,
Everyone already knows everyone else, they come from the same middle schools.
And yet they still talk to me
Do you want to sit with us at lunch today, what’s your name again, Eddy?
That’s a strange-sounding name, Eddy, is it a nickname?
Isn’t your full name Édouard?
Bellegueule, man, that’s quite a name, Bellegueule,
do people make fun of it a lot?
Eddy Bellegueule, holy shit, Eddy Bellegueule, what an unbelievable name
Now I learn—
something I had already suspected,
that had already crossed my mind.
Here boys kiss each other on each cheek when they say bonjour, they don’t shake hands
They carry leather satchels
They have gentle manners
They would all have been called fags at my middle school
Bourgeois people don’t exhibit the same kind of bodily habits
They don’t define virility the way my father did, the way the men at the factory did
(this will be even more apparent at the École Normale, all those feminine bodies belonging to middle-class intellectuals)
The End of Eddy Page 13