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  For Didier Eribon

  For the first time my name said out loud names nothing.

  —MARGUERITE DURAS, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein

  BOOK I

  PICARDY

  (Late 1990s–Early 2000s)

  An Encounter

  From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don’t mean to say that I never, in all those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn’t fit into its system.

  Two boys appeared in the hallway, the first tall with red hair, and the second short with a hunchback. The tall redhead spat in my face How do you like that, punk.

  The gob of spit dripped slowly down my cheek, thick and yellow, like the noisy mucus that obstructs the throats of old people or people who are ill, with a strong, sickening smell to it. Shrill, strident laughter from the two boys Look, right in his face, the little pussy. It is dripping from my eye right toward my lips, ready to enter my mouth. I don’t dare wipe it off. I could; I’d only have to lift my sleeve. It wouldn’t even take a second, a tiny movement, to prevent the spit from coming into contact with my lips, but I do nothing for fear of offending them, for fear of making them more agitated than they already are.

  *   *   *

  I didn’t really think they’d do it. Which is not to say that violence was something new to me, far from it. As far back as I can remember I can see my drunk father fighting with other drunk men leaving the café, breaking noses and teeth. Or, some man having looked too directly at my mother and my father, under the influence, erupting Who the fuck do you think you are, asshole, looking at my wife like that. My mother trying to calm him down Calm down, sweetheart, calm down to no avail. My father’s buddies, who would in the end intervene—that’s the rule, what friends do, what it means to be a real buddy—jumping in to separate my father and the other fellow, the victim of my father’s inebriation whose face was now all beaten up. I would see my father, after one of our cats had a litter, take the newborn kittens and slip them into a plastic grocery bag and swing it against some cement edge until the bag was filled with blood and the meowing had ceased. I had seen him butcher pigs in the yard, and drink the still-warm blood that he was collecting in order to make blood sausage (blood on his lips, his chin, his T-shirt) It’s the best, the blood you get from an animal right when it dies. The squeals of the dying pig as my father sliced its trachea could be heard throughout the village.

  *   *   *

  I was ten years old. I was new at the school. When they appeared in the hallway I didn’t know them. I didn’t even know their first names, which was unusual in a small school like this one, barely two hundred students and where everyone got to know one another right away. They approached slowly, smiles on their faces, nothing aggressive about them, so that at first I thought they were just coming up to introduce themselves. But why would these older kids be coming to speak to a newbie like me? The schoolyard obeyed the same rules as the rest of the world: the big guys kept away from the little ones. My mother would say much the same thing when speaking about workers Us little folks are nobodies, especially to the fat cats.

  *   *   *

  There in the hallway they asked me who I was, if I was Bellegueule, the one everyone was talking about. They asked me the question that I would repeat to myself endlessly for months, for years,

  You’re the faggot, right?

  By saying it they inscribed it on me permanently like stigmata, those marks that the Greeks would carve with a red-hot iron or a knife into the bodies of deviant individuals, people who posed a threat to their community. Impossible to rid myself of this. I was shocked, even though it was hardly the first time someone had said something like this to me. You never get used to insults.

  *   *   *

  A feeling of powerlessness, a loss of balance. I smiled—and the word faggot that was echoing, exploding in my head, went on pulsing within me, matching the frequency of my heartbeat.

  I was skinny, so they must have figured that my self-defense capabilities were feeble or nonexistent. At that age my parents frequently nicknamed me Bony and my father was constantly repeating the same witticisms You’re so skinny a breeze could blow you away. In the village, being overweight was viewed favorably. My father and two brothers were obese, as were several women in the family, and people often commented No point in dying of hunger, being fat’s not the worst thing that can happen to you.

  *   *   *

  (The following year, tired of all the ribbing from my family about my size, I decided to put on weight. I got money from my aunt and used it to buy bags of potato chips after school—my parents wouldn’t have given me the money—and stuffed myself with them. Me, the person who had refused to eat my mother’s cooking when it was too greasy, precisely because I didn’t want to become like my father and my brothers—which would leave her exasperated: It’s not like it’s gonna clog up your asshole—suddenly I would gobble up anything around me, like those clouds of insects that can unexpectedly swoop down and consume whole fields. I put on nearly fifty pounds in a single year.)

  *   *   *

  At first they just pushed me with the tips of their fingers, not too roughly, still laughing, with the gob of spit still on my face, then harder and harder until my head was banging against the wall of the hallway. I didn’t say a word. One of them grabbed my arm while the other started kicking me, his smile fading, taking his job more and more seriously, a more and more concentrated expression on his face, an expression of anger and hate. I remember: the kicks to my stomach, the pain of my head hitting the brick wall. That’s one part of scenes like this that people don’t think of: the physical pain, the body suffering all at once, bruised and wounded. What people think of—faced with a scene such as this one, I mean: looking at it from the outside—is the humiliation, the inability to understand, the fear, but they don’t think of the physical pain.

  *   *   *

  The kicks to my stomach knocked the wind out of me and I couldn’t catch my breath. I opened my mouth as wide as I could to let in some oxygen. I expanded my chest, but the air wouldn’t go in, as if without warning my lungs had filled up with some dense kind of sap, with lead. They felt heavy all of a sudden. My body was shaking, as if it had a mind of its own, as if I had no control over it. The way an aging body that is freeing itself from the mind, or is being abandoned by it, refuses to obey it. A body becoming a burden.

  *   *   *

  They laughed when my face began to turn purple from lack of oxygen (a natural response from working-class people, the simplicity of those who possess little and enjoy laughing, who know how to have a good time). My eyes filled with tears reflexively, my vision became blurred as usually happens when you are choking on saliva or a piece of food. They didn’t understand that it was because I was suffocating that I had tears in my eyes; they thought I was crying. It annoyed them.

  *   *   *

  I could smell their breath as they got closer, an odor of sour milk, dead animals. Like me, they probably never brushed their teeth. Mothers in the village weren’t too concerned about their children’s dental hygiene. Dentists were expensive and as usual a lack of money came to seem like a matter of ch
oice. Mothers would say There’s way more important things in life. That family negligence, class-based negligence, means that I still suffer from acute pain, sleepless nights, and years later, when I arrived in Paris and at the École Normale, I would hear my classmates ask me But why didn’t your parents send you to an orthodontist. I would lie. I’d say my parents, intellectuals, slightly too bohemian in their outlook, had spent so much time worrying about my literary education that they sometimes neglected my health.

  *   *   *

  In the hallway, the tall boy with red hair and the shorter one with the hunchback were shouting. Insults came one after the other with the blows, and unfailingly I kept silent. Faggot, fag, fairy, cocksucker, punk, pansy, sissy, wimp, girly boy, pussy, bitch, homo, fruit, poof, queer, or homosexual, gayboy. On some occasions we would pass each other on a staircase packed with students, or in some other place, in the schoolyard. They couldn’t hit me in front of everyone else, they weren’t that stupid, they could have been expelled. An insult would do, just faggot (or something like it). No one looked over, but everyone heard. I’m sure everyone heard it, because I remember the satisfied smiles that would appear on other kids’ faces in the schoolyard or the hallway, from the pleasure of hearing the tall redhead or the short hunchback deliver a sentence, saying out loud what everyone else thought in secret, and would whisper as I walked by, and that I would hear Look, it’s Bellegueule, the homo.

  My Father

  My father. In 1967, the year he was born, women from the village didn’t yet go to the hospital. They gave birth at home. When she had my father, his mother was lying on a dirty sofa covered in cat and dog hair along with the dirt from shoes constantly caked with mud and never taken off at the door. There are, of course, paved roads in the village, but also trails that are still heavily used, where children go to play, tracks made of dirt and unpaved stone that run alongside fields, paths of beaten-down earth that become like quicksand when it rains.

  Before I started middle school, I would go out several times a week to ride my bicycle on these trails. I’d attach a little piece of cardboard to the spokes of my bike so that it would make the sound of a motorcycle as I pedaled.

  *   *   *

  My father’s father drank heavily, pastis and wine from five-liter boxes, as is usual for most men in the village. It’s the alcohol found at the grocery store, which also serves as a café and a place to buy cigarettes and bread. You can buy anything at any time of day, by just knocking on the owners’ door. They’ll always help you out.

  His father drank heavily and, once drunk, would beat my grandmother: he would turn toward her all of a sudden and start insulting her, throwing anything he could reach at her, even his chair sometimes, and then he would beat her. My father, small as he was, trapped in the body of a scrawny child, watched them, helpless. He stored up his hate in silence.

  He never told me any of this. My father never spoke, at least about those kinds of things. My mother took that on as part of what women were supposed to do.

  One morning—my father was five years old—his father left for good, with no warning. My grandmother, another keeper of the family history (again the role of women), told me about this event. It would make her laugh years later, happy, finally, to have gotten free from her husband Left for work at the factory one morning and never came home for supper, we waited. He was a factory worker, he brought the money into the house, and when he disappeared the family found itself broke, with barely enough to eat for six or seven children.

  My father never forgot, saying in front of me That fucking son of a bitch who abandoned us, left my mother with nothing, I’d piss all over him if I had the chance.

  *   *   *

  When my father’s father died thirty-five years later, on that day we were together as a family watching television in the main room.

  My father got a call from his sister, or else from the hospice where the old man finished out his days. The voice on the telephone said to him, Your dad just … —sorry, I mean—your father passed away this morning. Cancer. And also a hip that had been fractured in an accident, the wound got worse, we tried everything but it wasn’t possible to save him. He had climbed a tree to cut off some branches and he had cut off the one he was sitting on. My parents laughed so hard when the person on the telephone told them that detail that it took them a while to catch their breath Cut off the branch he was sitting on, what a dumbass, how could anyone be that stupid. The accident, the fractured hip. Once he had been informed, my father was filled with joy, he said to my mother He finally kicked the bucket that piece of shit. He added: I’m buying a bottle of something to celebrate with. He was going to celebrate his fortieth birthday a few days later and he was the happiest I had ever seen him, he said he’d have two events to celebrate one right after the other, two occasions to get hammered. I spent the evening with them, smiling like a child who imitates the state he finds his parents in without really knowing why. (On the days my mother cried I also imitated her without understanding; I cried.) My father even remembered to buy me some soda and some of my favorite crackers. I never knew if he suffered, silently, if he smiled at the news of his father’s death the way someone might smile after someone else spits in their face.

  *   *   *

  My father dropped out of school at an early age. He preferred evening dances in neighboring villages and the fights that without fail broke out at them; rides on the motor scooter—moped, it was called—out to the ponds, where he would spend several days fishing; days in the garage working on modifications to the scooter, tricking out his bike, to make it more powerful, faster. Even when he was attending school he was in any case usually suspended because of inappropriate conduct toward the teachers, insults, absences.

  He would often speak of the fights I was one of the tough guys when I was fifteen or sixteen, always getting into fights at school or dances, and my buddies and I were always getting wasted. We didn’t give a fuck, it was fun, and back then, it’s true, if the factory fired me, I found another one, it wasn’t like it is today.

  He had indeed given up on his high school vocational diploma in order to start working in the factory in the village that made articles out of brass, as had his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him.

  The village tough guys, who embodied all the much-touted masculine values, refused to conform to school discipline, and it was important to him that he had been a tough guy. When my father would say of one of my brothers or my cousins that he was tough, I could hear the admiration in his voice.

  *   *   *

  One day my mother announced to him that she was pregnant. It was in the early 1990s. She was going to have a boy, me, their first child. My mother already had two others from her first marriage, my older brother and my older sister—conceived with her first husband, an alcoholic, dead from cirrhosis of the liver and found only many days later, lying on the floor with his body half decomposed and crawling with worms, notably his decomposed cheek with larvae wriggling around and through which the bones of his jaw could be seen, a hole, there, the size of a hole on a golf course, in the middle of his waxy, yellow face. My father was happy to hear it. In the village it was important not only to have been one of the tough guys but to know how to make your boys into toughs. A father reinforced his own masculine identity through his sons, to whom he was duty-bound to transmit his own virility, and my father was going to do it, make me into a tough guy, his pride as a man was at stake. He had decided to call me Eddy because of the American shows he watched on television (the omnipresent television). Combined with the family name he passed on to me, Bellegueule, and all the past that went along with this name, I would thus be called Eddy Bellegueule. A tough guy’s name.

  Mannerisms

  All too soon I shattered the hopes and dreams of my father. The problem was diagnosed early, in the very first months of my life. It would seem I was born this way; no one has ever
understood the origin, the genesis, the source of the unknown force that got hold of me at birth and that imprisoned me in my own body. When I began to express myself, when I learned to speak, spontaneously my voice took on feminine inflections. It was higher-pitched than that of other boys. Every time I spoke my hands waved frenetically every which way, twisting about, stirring up the air.

  My parents referred to my fancy ways; Stop putting on those fancy ways they’d say to me. They would ask themselves Why does Eddy always act like such a girl? They’d tell me insistently: Calm down, can’t you lose the queeny gestures? They thought I’d chosen to be effeminate, as if it were some personal aesthetic project that I was pursuing to annoy them.

  And yet I too had no idea why I was the way I was. I was dominated, subjugated by these mannerisms, and I had not chosen that high-pitched voice. I had not chosen my way of walking, the pronounced, much too pronounced, way my hips swayed from side to side, or the shrill cries that escaped my body—not cries that I uttered but ones that literally escaped through my throat whenever I was surprised, delighted, or frightened.

  *   *   *

  Every so often I would sneak off to the kids’ bedroom, which was dark because we hadn’t installed lighting in it. (Not enough money to install a real fixture, or some kind of ceiling light or even simply a bulb: a desk lamp was all the room had in the way of lighting.)

  I’d pilfer some of my sister’s clothes and put them on and parade around, trying on anything that I could: short skirts or long skirts, ones with spots or stripes, clingy T-shirts or low-cut ones, worn-out ones, ones that were full of holes, lace bras or padded ones.

  These performances, for which I was the only spectator, seemed to me the most beautiful I had ever seen. I found myself so beautiful that I could have cried tears of joy. My heart could have exploded, it beat so fast.