Men Don't Cry

by Faïza Guène

  None of this was my problem yet. I just inhaled the waves of vanilla perfume wafting over from Hélène, as I reflected on how much I liked her name. It reminded me of that song by George Brassens, Les Sabots d’Hélène.

  New Face

  Liliane’s apartment was rammed like a Line 6 carriage at 6.40pm, in the evening rush-hour. Now that I’m more familiar with Paris, I’m sneaking the City of Light into my similes. All Miloud’s friends had headed over, from Le Saphir Bleu as well as further afield. Mario had even broken sweat. Visible proof that he’s human, after all! I thought to myself.

  A lavish spread had been laid on for the occasion, with Miloud hiring the caterer Liliane used for important dinners. Guests were being served canapés by the waiters. Miloud’s friend Sousou, who worked in the cloakroom at Le Saphir Bleu, was savouring the food with her eyes closed. ‘Mmmmmm!’ she gushed, chewing on a mouthful of prawn as knowingly as any self-respecting foodie. ‘This is delicious! It melts in the mouth. It’s tender and salty, it’s spicy and suggestive, I mean we’re talking off the scale here, you get me…?’

  Miloud roared with laughter. ‘Haaa! Soukti! Shut up and eat! D’you think you’re on Masterchef?’

  Sousou shrugged, as if to say, ‘You’ve got no idea!’ Then she snapped her fingers at one of the waiters. ‘Hey, you, Baby Cakes, c’me here!’ And, straight up, she demanded the recipe for the prawn canapés. The waiter’s eyes bulged.

  Another faux pas: asking for the caterer’s secret recipes.

  ‘What? Don’t you understand my question? Am I speaking Chinese or something?’

  ‘I’ll find out for you, Madame…’ replied the fresh-faced waiter, looking disconcerted.

  Meanwhile, a man was stubbing out his cigarette on a sculpture by Liliane’s favourite Danish artist. Shitty ashtray he must have thought, crushing his cigarette butt against the small statuette.

  Another man was staring at a modernist painting, tilting his head to the right, then to the left.

  ‘Is it upside down?’ he asked, turning to me for help.

  I glanced at it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tfi’ch’, snorted the guy, doing something curious with his lower lip. Tfi’ch is Arabic for ‘load of old rubbish’.

  To be honest, on closer inspection he wasn’t wrong. I’d even go so far as to say Tfi’ch would make the perfect title for that painting.

  Naturally, there was raï playing everywhere. A party organised by Miloud without raï would be like an African country that has rich mineral reserves and is at peace.

  A woman with an enormous backside climbed onto the magnificent black piano in the middle of the room, transforming it into a vulgar night club podium. I could see her stilettos scratching the surface and it made me feel queasy.

  ‘Oi! You up there!’ Miloud called out, reacting at last. He was staring at the woman, who paused to look down at him from her platform.

  ‘Make some space for me!’ he added with a wink.

  Miloud clambered up and grabbed the woman by the waist. ‘Ahmed! Ahmed! Play Cheb Houcem again!’ he shouted in the direction of one of his friends. Most of the guests began chanting: ‘Cheb Houcem! Cheb Houcem!’

  According to Miloud, one of the Cheb’s songs had become the second Algerian national anthem. My cousin always has to talk things up.

  Liliane was staying in the clinic for a few days because of her facelift. Soon, there would be the unveiling of her new face.

  Miloud had the apartment to himself… not counting Mario, or the two cleaners working alternate shifts. He was as excited as a teenager planning a secret party with his parents away.

  Before the chauffeur drove his boss to the beauty clinic, I’d been treated to the heart-rending farewell scene.

  Miloud and Liliane had insisted on saying their goodbyes as if it were forever. As if they might never see each other again. She clung to him. He ruffled her hair and kissed her head, forehead and neck, over and over again, like some kind of pagan ritual.

  ‘Oh my Miloud!’ she sighed

  ‘I love you, my true love!’ Miloud ventured, with tears in his eyes. ‘You make me so happy, you’re the woman of my dreams!’ He was pulling out all the stops. If she hadn’t been post-menopausal, he’d probably have added, ‘And I want you to be the mother of my children.’

  Liliane was frightened of going under the surgeon’s knife. The first time, when she was 13 and on holiday at the house of her great-uncle (who happened to own the finest vineyards in Champagne) she had undergone an emergency operation for acute peritonitis. That was when she discovered a fear of dying, which would never leave her.

  The second time was for the birth of Edouard. A caesarian with complications. She said the scar was still painful sometimes, like a son’s absence.

  Liliane’s remark turned my thoughts towards my own mother. Deep down, mothers are all the same, or nearly. They suffer. They love with their guts. ‘El kebda, el kebda.’ Liliane also had organs that oozed maternal affection. The difference was that she didn’t wring out her bleeding liver in front of her son at the first opportunity. Then again, my mother didn’t frequent sleazy clubs on the arms of a blédard almost 30 years her junior. She didn’t plan on getting her cheeks scalped either.

  My mother’s cheeks are soft and still plump. Her wrinkles are the lines of the book she’s never been able to write. Her life story is drawn in the corners of her eyes. The creases on her brow trace all the worries, the times waiting up after dark and the health scares.

  A mother is like a great destiny: beautiful and harsh at the same time.

  Rue Michel-Ange, the party was in full swing and everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves. That said, this crowd would have enjoyed itself wherever it was.

  A young man who couldn’t stop laughing was sprawled on Liliane’s armchair, sucking on a shisha pipe. He was trying to blow various smoke rings, reminding me of the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.

  ‘Want some? It’s green olive and candied lemon flavour!’ he laughed, holding out his shisha in slow motion.

  ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

  That didn’t stop him laughing. Huh huh huh went his laugh. Huh huh huh is the laugh of an observer. Journalists, shrinks and sport commentators go huh huh huh.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Take a good look at them. What I’ve noticed is the less secure their legal status, the more they throw themselves about. The undocumented ones are wild: they knock back the drink, dancing and laughing with their mouths wide open. Those on student visas and short-term visas are more laid back, they laugh quietly. But check the most relaxed of all: the ones with ten-year residence permits. Watch ’em! Ten years! Chill! They smoke, they sit comfortably, they think they can reshape the world because they belong to it.’

  ‘What about me?’

  He burst out laughing again.

  ‘Huh huh huh! You’re going round and round in circles.

  You switch rooms. You leave, you come back. You’re trying to find where you fit in and it’s no fun. I reckon you were born here.’

  The Freud of the party.

  To prove him wrong, I decided to dance. To relax and let go. To throw myself around with wild abandon like someone undocumented.

  I’d only just started trying out my moves when a girl stared at me and sniggered. She was petite and blonde with several centimetres of black roots.

  ‘Boiii!’ she said. ‘You’re like a sick goat!’

  Luckily, I’m not the touchy type. I carried on dancing and laughing away, pretending I hadn’t heard. She came and put her hands on my waist to show me what I was meant to do. Those warm hands made me blush. I think she found my shyness amusing.

  ‘What’s up with your hips? Have they got a sick note from the doctor, or what? Come on, move! Listen to the music!’

  No matter how much I tried listening, I couldn’t catch the rhythm.

  ‘I don’t believe it, you keep missing the beat! It’s not like it’s difficult.
In the rain, you’d be the only one to stay dry! You’d be passing between the raindrops! I’ve never seen anything like it!’

  She turned her back on me with a scornful shrug of her shoulders.

  I gave up dancing. For good.

  The woman with the enormous backside was still perched on the piano-podium. She held her silver clutch bag to her chest while raising the other arm to the ceiling, glass in hand. A Statue of Liberty who’d overdone it with hot dogs.

  I caught up with Miloud in heated discussion with his pals. One of them was giving him a hard time. My cousin kept staring uncomfortably at his feet, without saying anything. Every so often he would shake his head.

  ‘You think she’ll agree to marry you, this old Froggie of yours? That she’ll get your papers sorted for you? Dream on, Miloud! You’re a thing, to her, an object. Like her vases or her armchair, or that ugly picture hanging on the wall. When she’s had enough of you, she’ll kick you out and find herself a new toy. What are you going to do if something happens to your parents, eh? They’re old! Your mother’s diabetic! D’you realise she has to have insulin injections every day? Have you sent her any money instead of blowing everything the old hag gives you on clothes and cars? Your family’s counting on you! D’you realise that?’

  Miloud lowered his head again. Any further and he’d break his neck.

  ‘Wakey-wakey! It’s shameful! Everyone here’s thinking the same thing. But no one dares tell you!’

  Miloud couldn’t take any more of Moral Highground guilttripping him.

  ‘You’d have done the same in my shoes!’

  ‘Never!’ protested Moral Highground. ‘By everything I cherish! Never! May Allah be my witness! I hold to my values and my upbringing! Where’s your nif? Eh? Call yourself Algerian? The pride of a true Algerian has no price! You traded yours for a set of new teeth and a Mercedes! H’chouma, Miloud!’

  Miloud was offended, big time.

  ‘Stop! Calm down!’ the other guys kept telling them.

  Moral Highground put on his coat, his mutterings drowned out by the music. I figured he was Sousou’s boyfriend from the way he jerked his head in her direction, indicating ‘Yallah, let’s go!’ This didn’t stop her from insisting the fresh-faced waiter wrap a few servings of prawn in foil as a takeaway.

  The next day, poor Mario, the perennial pre-dawn riser, had cleaned the apartment from top to bottom as well as preparing a hearty breakfast. Not a hint of tiredness on his deadpan face. Even the heel marks on the piano, left by the woman with the enormous backside, had vanished. The man was a magician.

  As for Miloud, he was poleaxed by a strong migraine and couldn’t get out of bed. He’d fallen asleep in his jeans, with his shirt half-unbuttoned.

  ‘An aspirin, cuz, I’m begging you!’ he pleaded through half-closed eyes, when I popped my head round the door. His tongue was furred and white and he struggled to finish the soluble tablet I gave him.

  ‘Too many worries inside here,’ Miloud explained, putting the glass on the bedside table and pointing to his head. I nodded and tried to look sympathetic.

  ‘I’m going to call my mum today,’ he added in a last-ditch effort.

  At breakfast, Mario brought me the day’s papers. On the back cover of a major daily, Dounia’s smouldering eyes, her chin in the palm of her left hand, and that gaze which seemed to say, ‘You can’t imagine how intelligent I am.’

  The title of the interview was The New Face of Feminism. The journalist, one Anne-Marie Sistitis, asked Dounia about her ‘authoritarian, change-averse, illiterate father’ and about her mother who ‘reproduced, in spite of herself, an upbringing aimed at destroying any sort of self-realisation, encarcerating her emotions inside the rich sauces of the dishes she cooked, inside the cakes she baked, forcing Dounia to eat every last morsel at mealtimes’.

  And so I was led to understand that my mother would have forced Dounia to grow fat, with the sole aim of destroying her daughter’s body image and distancing her forever from her own desires as a woman. A diabolical plan shrewdly executed.

  I wondered if there was anything in the penal code about ‘premeditated force-feeding’.

  Perhaps one day we would see this journalist, with that infected name of hers that cried out for a dose of antibiotics, interviewing my mother, who would in turn have written her own book, entitled: Fed Up Of Being Sexually Objectified? Try Morbid Obesity!

  Following its stratospheric success, of the kind not seen since Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, she would be urged to follow-up with volume two: Made To Feel Like A Piece Of Meat? Eat More Beef!

  I was sad to read so many humiliating remarks about my family. Dounia wasn’t faring any better than the faceless woman in Courbet’s painting, I figured. At least the artist’s muse ended up finding her own face, even if it did take centuries.

  In this ‘heartfelt’ interview, Dounia expained that she had gone into politics to change things, and that in order to succeed she needed to operate from inside the system.

  ‘You don’t need to taste the pepper to discover it’s hot,’ Big Baba often used to say. ‘Just sniff it and your eyes will weep already.’

  I resolved to dip back into my sister’s book, The Price of Freedom. By my reckoning, the price she had paid was exorbitant. Plus, she hadn’t specified that this was a group tariff. We were all paying for her shitty freedom, and we’d been doing so for years.

  An article like that in a national newspaper was going to be difficult to ignore. I suspected that plate tectonics would trigger reactions as far away as Nice and beyond.

  It was Sunday morning and I bit down hard on one of those succulent rhubarb brioches, which might one day become my Proustian madeleine.

  The Tank

  First floor. Room 107. A line of disorderly teenagers. My Year 7s, shoulders hunched under the weight of their schoolbags, had formed small army oiled with sebum ready to do battle with me. There they stood, grown-ups in-the-making – I could picture them, in ten or 15 years’ time, their shoulders even more stooped under the weight of worries.

  I had already spotted two or three of them in the playground, watching me as I parked the car. Now, seeing the same kids whispering as I made my approach, I realised it was a bad idea to bring the Mercedes. It was Miloud who had insisted I borrow it.

  Mourad, chill out, be zen, I told myself, trying to get a firm grip on my classroom keys. But they began dancing in my clammy hand, threatening to slip away at any second.

  ‘Good morning!’ I said opening the door and avoiding eye contact.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ a few replied.

  Immodium. Immodium. Immodium. Immodium.

  I pushed open the door, trying not to think about my laxophobia, and stared coldly at my students.

  ‘Come in!’ I said.

  They filed calmly into the classroom, one behind another, in such orderly fashion it felt like I had won the lottery.

  ‘Sit down!’ I ordered, trying out the next intruction.

  No sooner said than done. Holy shit, I recall thinking, they follow orders! This was deeply satisfying, but it was also as if I were watching myself in action. For someone who was meant to embody authority, I sensed I was an impostor.

  I wrote my name on the board, making sure to curl the C of Chennoun nicely. I began by writing my name because, in all my classroom memories, the teachers began by writing their name in big letters on the blackboard. They stamped us with it for life, like livestock: Remember this name.

  I asked my students to do the same thing on half sheets of paper. Some of the girls wrote in pink, and drew hearts where the dots should have been on their i’s, or added little flowers around their first names. Others, at the back, wrote in insect-sized handwriting and I couldn’t begin to make it out.

  A girl in the front row was slouched at her desk, playing with her cornrows, as I tried to decipher her half-page.

  ‘Cassandra!’ I said in my newly-appointed-boss voice, “Sit up, please!”

&
nbsp; It worked a treat, because Cassandra sat up straight for the rest of the lesson and, for all I know, will continue to do so for the rest of her life. ‘Have you noticed?’ she’ll ask her osteopath, when she’s 30. ‘My spine is flawless! It’s all thanks to my French teacher, who said to me one day…’

  In that moment, I felt I could expect anything of them: rigour… excellence… the moon.

  But I didn’t have a clue, so what I asked them was: “Right, what do you think we’re going to do this year?’

  ‘Reading and writing…! Spelling…! Grammar…!’ came a few answers fired from different parts of the classroom.

  I responded by scribing their replies, to enjoy the feeling of chalk gliding across the board, ‘Reading and writing! Yes! Spelling! Very good! And Grammar! Yes!’

  This meant that the first interruption caught me off-guard, and with my back turned.

  I could hear one of my female students acting the troublemaker. Or perhaps it was one of my male students; they can be hard to distinguish at that age.

  The voice struck me in the back: shrill, sharp as an arrow and singing, ‘Shine bright liiiike a diamond!’

  Laughter all round to the effect that this was the joke of the century. As well as being ugly, teenagers have a sense of humour that sucks.

  For a split second I wondered what to do. This was their way of testing me. The famous test. How could I ever have thought I’d dodge it? I carried on staring at the board, playing the person who wouldn’t be knocked off balance, not even by an earthquake measuring eight on the Richter scale.