Who Killed My Father Read online

  Who Killed My Father

  Copyright © 2018 by Édouard Louis

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Lorin Stein

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Originally published as Qui a tué mon père by Éditions Le Seuil

  First published as a New Directions Book in 2019

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Louis, Édouard, author. | Stein, Lorin, translator.

  Title: Who killed my father? / Édouard Louis ; translated by Lorin Stein.

  Other titles: Qui a tué mon pere. English

  Description: New York : New Directions, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046580 | ISBN 9780811228503 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Louis, Édouard—Family. | Authors, French—20th century—Biography. | Authors, French—21st century—Biography. | Fathers of authors—France—Biography. | Louis family.

  Classification: LCC PQ2712.O895 Z4613 2019 | DDC 843/.92 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046580

  eISBN: 9780811228510

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  for Xavier Dolan

  Acknowledgments

  This book in its current form would have been impossible without the writings of Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, Tash Aw, and Peter Handke, especially Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Aw’s The Face. It would also have been impossible without the films of Terrence Malick: I don’t know how often I rewatched To the Wonder and The Tree of Life while the book was being revised (several dozen times at least). Nor would this text have come into being without Litteraturhuset in Oslo, Yale University, the New School, and MIT, where I presented early versions of certain chapters, not to mention the periodicals Morgenbladet in Norway, Dagens Nyheter in Sweden, FAS in Germany, and Freeman’s in the United States, where those versions were published. I must also thank Stanislas Nordey, who was present at the origin of this text, who supported it with his solar energy, and who was its first reader. And, of course, this book could never have existed without Didier or Geoffroy.

  Who Killed My Father

  x

  If this were a text for the theater, here is how it would begin: A father and son stand a few feet apart in a vast empty space. That space could be a wheat field, an abandoned factory, the laminated floor of a school gym. Maybe it’s snowing. Maybe the snow slowly buries them, until they disappear. The father and son almost never look at each other. The son is the only one to speak. At first he reads aloud, from a sheet of paper or a screen. He addresses his father, but his father doesn’t seem to hear, we don’t know why not. Although they stand close together, neither can reach the other. Sometimes they touch, they come into physical contact, but even in these moments they are apart. The son speaks, and only the son, and this does violence to them both: the father is never allowed to tell his own story, while the son longs for a response that he will never receive.

  I.

  When asked what the word racism means to her, the American scholar Ruth Gilmore has said that racism is the exposure of certain populations to premature death.

  The same definition holds with regard to male privilege, to hatred of homosexuality or trans people, to domination by class — to social and political oppression of all kinds. If we look at politics as the government of some living people by other living people, as well as the existence of individuals within communities not of their choosing, then politics is what separates some populations, whose lives are supported, nurtured, protected, from other populations, who are exposed to death, to persecution, to murder.

  Last month I came to see you in the small northern town where you’ve been living. It’s a gray, ugly town. The sea is just a few miles away, but you never go. I hadn’t seen you for months — it had been a long time. At first when you opened the door, I didn’t recognize you.

  I looked at you. In your face I read the signs of the years I’d been away.

  Later, the woman you live with explained that by now you can hardly walk. She also told me that when you sleep you need a breathing machine or else your heart will stop. It can’t beat without assistance, without the help of a machine. It doesn’t want to. When you got up to go to the bathroom, just walking the thirty feet there and back left you winded. I saw for myself, you had to sit and catch your breath. You apologized. These apologies are a new thing with you, I have to get used to them. You told me that you suffer from an acute form of diabetes and from high cholesterol, that you could have a heart attack at any moment. As you were telling me all this, you ran out of breath. Your chest emptied of air as though it had sprung a leak. Even talking required too intense, too great an effort. I saw you struggling with your body, but I pretended not to. The week before, you’d had an operation for what the doctors call a ventral hernia — I’d never heard of it. Your body has grown too heavy for itself. Your belly stretches toward the floor. It is overstretched, so badly overstretched that it has ruptured your abdominal lining. Your belly has been torn apart by its own weight, its own mass.

  You can’t drive anymore. You’re not allowed to drink. You can’t take a shower or go to work, except at great risk. You’re barely fifty years old. You belong to the category of humans whom politics has doomed to an early death.

  I spent my childhood longing for your absence. I would return from school late in the afternoon, around five o’clock. I knew that if I reached our house and your car wasn’t parked out front, it meant that you were at the café or at your brother’s and that you’d come home late, maybe after dark. If I didn’t see your car out front I knew we’d eat without you. Sooner or later my mother would shrug and give us our dinner, and I wouldn’t see you till morning. Every day, when I reached our street, I thought of your car and prayed: let it not be there, let it not be there, let it not be there.

  It’s only by accident that I’ve come to know you. Or through other people. Not long ago I asked my mother how you met, and why she fell in love with you. The cologne, she said. He wore cologne and you know in those days it wasn’t like now. Men didn’t wear cologne. But your father did. He was different. He smelled so good.

  He was the one who pursued me, she went on. I’d just split up with my first husband, I’d finally got him out of my life, and I was happier that way, without a man. Women always are. But your father kept at it. He was always showing up with chocolate or flowers. So in the end I gave in. I just gave in.

  2002 That day my mother caught me dancing, all by myself, in my room. I’d been trying to move as quietly as possible. I’d tried not to make any noise, not to breathe too hard. The music wasn’t turned up, either, but she heard something through the wall and came in to see what was going on. I was startled and out of breath, my heart in my throat, my lungs in my throat. I turned to face her and waited — my heart in my throat, my lungs in my throat. I expected her to scold me, or mock me, but she said, with a smile, that when I danced was when I looked the most like you. Dad used to dance? I asked. Hearing that your body had done something so free, so beautiful, and so at odds with your obsession with masculinity, it dawned on me that you might once have been a different person. My mother no
dded. Your father was always dancing! Everywhere he went. And when he danced, everybody watched. I was so proud to have a man like that! I ran through the house and into the courtyard where you were chopping wood for winter. I wanted to know whether it was true. I wanted proof. I told you what she’d just told me and you looked away. You can’t go believing all the crap your mother tells you, you said in a halting voice. But you were blushing. You were lying, I could tell.

  *

  One evening I was home alone because you and the others were out having dinner with friends and I hadn’t wanted to go. I remember the wood stove spreading its scent of ash through the house and its warm orange glow. In an old family album, worm-eaten and mildewed, I found some photos of you dressed as a woman, as a cheerleader. All my life I’d seen you sneer at any sign of femininity in a man. I’d heard you say a man should never act like a girl, ever. You must have been thirty in those pictures, I must already have been born. I pored over those images all night long — your body, your body in a skirt, the wig on your head, the lipstick on your mouth, the fake breasts under your tee shirt. You must have stuffed cotton wadding in a bra. The most surprising thing to me was that you looked happy. You were smiling. I stole one of the photos and several times a week I would take it out of the drawer where I’d hidden it and try to decipher it. I never mentioned it to you.

  One day I wrote in a notebook, thinking of you: To write the story of his life would mean writing the story of my absence.

  Another time, I surprised you while you were watching an opera telecast on TV. You’d never done that before, not in front of me. When the soprano sang her lament I saw that your eyes were glistening.

  What is most incomprehensible is that even those who cannot always bring themselves to respect the norms and rules imposed by the world still insist that they be respected, like you when you said a man should never cry.

  Did it make you suffer, that paradox? Were you ashamed of crying, you who were always saying a man should never cry?

  I wanted to say I cry, too. Plenty. All the time.

  2001 Another winter evening. You’d invited people over to eat with us — a large group of friends. This wasn’t something you often did, and I had the idea of putting on a show for you and the other grown-ups. I invited all the children at the table — there were three boys besides me — to come to my room so we could prepare and rehearse. I had decided that we would put on a little performance imitating a pop group called Aqua (long since forgotten). I worked on the choreography for more than an hour, the steps, the gestures. I told everyone what to do. I would be the lead singer—her name was Lene. The other boys would be the backup singers and musicians, strumming invisible guitars. I led the way into the dining room. The others followed. I gave the signal and we started the show, but as soon as we did, you turned away. I couldn’t understand it. All the grown-ups were watching except for you. I sang louder. I danced harder to make you notice me, but you weren’t watching. I said, Look, Dad, look. I was putting up a fight, but you weren’t looking.

  When you drove I used to demand, Do Formula 1! And you’d hit the gas, you’d go a hundred miles an hour on those little country roads. It scared my mother. She’d scream, she’d call you a lunatic — and you would catch my eye in the rearview mirror and smile.

  You were born into a family of six or seven children. Your father worked in a factory. Your mother didn’t work. Poverty was all they knew. I have almost nothing more to say about your early childhood.

  Your father left when you were five years old. This is a story I often tell. One morning he went off to work at the factory and that night he didn’t come home. Your mother, my grandmother, told me that she waited for him. That’s all she’d ever done anyway. That’s how she’d spent the first part of her life, waiting for him. I’d made him something to eat, we waited for him as usual, but he never came back. Your father drank a lot, and certain nights, because of the drinking, he used to hit your mother. He would snatch up plates, small objects, sometimes even chairs, and throw them right at her. Then he’d come at her with his fists. I don’t know whether your mother cried out or endured the pain in silence. As for you, you watched without being able to do anything, powerless, trapped in the body of a child.

  That, too, is something I’ve already told — but shouldn’t I repeat myself when talking about your life, since nobody wants to hear stories about lives like yours? Should I not repeat myself until they listen to us? To make them listen to us? Should I not cry out?

  I am not afraid of repeating myself because what I am writing, what I am saying, does not answer to the standards of literature, but to those of necessity and desperation, to standards of fire.

  I’ve already said: When your father died, you celebrated the news. You had never forgotten what he’d done to your mother. Your sister had tried to make peace between you several times. She had come and asked you to forget the past. She herself had forgiven him. But whenever she came to visit, you’d concentrate on whatever TV show you were watching and act as if you didn’t know she was there. The day you learned that your father was dead, the whole family happened to be in the kitchen. It was the same day or the same week as your fortieth birthday. Once again we were watching TV, and you said loud enough for everyone to hear, This calls for a toast. Looking back, I think you said it too loud, there was something off about your tone, something artificial, as if it were a line you’d been working on for months. You took the car to go buy a bottle of pastis at the village grocery. You partied all night, you laughed, you sang.

  It’s strange: because your father was violent toward you, you were always saying — obsessively — that you would never be violent with us, that you’d never hit a child of your own. I will never raise a hand against one of my kids, so long as I live. Violence doesn’t just lead to violence. It was a phrase I repeated for years, that violence causes violence, but I was mistaken. Violence had saved us from violence.

  Your father wasn’t the only one to have a problem with alcohol. Alcohol was part of your life from before you were born. We used to hear one story after another: the car accidents, a fatal fall on a patch of ice after a hard-drinking dinner, conjugal violence fueled by wine and pastis. Drinking brought oblivion. The world was responsible, but how could you blame the world, the world that imposed a life that the people around us had no choice but to try to forget — with drinking, by drinking.

  It was forget or die, or forget and die.

  Forget or die, or forget and die of the rage to forget.

  The night I put on a show for you with the other children, I was determined, I didn’t want to stop. I wanted you to look at me. Embarrassment began to spread through the room, and still I went on begging, Look, Dad, look.

  1998 It’s Christmas. I reconstruct the image as best I can, but reality has the quality of dreams: the harder I try to grasp it, the more it slips away. The whole family is sitting around the table. I am eating far too much: you brought home too much food for our Christmas dinner. You were always afraid of being different because of lack of money. You’d say: I don’t see why we should be any different from anyone else. And for that reason you wanted our table to have everything you imagined other people having and eating for Christmas — foie gras, oysters, bûches de Noël — so that, paradoxically, the poorer we were, the more money we spent for fear of not being like other people.

  I’m talking to my mother and brothers and sisters, but not to you. You won’t talk. You say you hate the holidays. When December comes, you say you wish the holidays were already over and done with and well behind us, and I think you pretend to hate happiness in order to make yourself believe that, if your life seems an unhappy one, at least you’re the one who chose it. As if you wanted to pretend you had some control over your own unhappiness. As if you wanted to give the impression that, if your life was too hard, you wanted it that way, out of disgust with pleasure, out of a loathing for joy.

  I think you refuse to
acknowledge defeat.

  At Christmas, every year, you would hide the presents in the trunk of the car. You’d wait until I’d gone off to bed, then you’d bring them in and put them under the tree for me to find when I woke up the next day.

  But that night — it was almost midnight, we weren’t asleep — I heard, we all heard, an explosion outside. It was as if the kitchen had exploded, that’s how intense it was, how immense — I don’t know how to describe it — as if an airplane had come crashing down on our doorstep or in the backyard. I can’t find an image to express it. You went outside to see what was going on. I followed you, and I saw: your car was there, but compressed, reduced to a shapeless lump of metal. All around it were scattered little shards of plastic, with scraps of shredded wrapping paper floating in the air. And then, finally, a few feet past the vanished car, there was an enormous tractor trailer, a car-hauler, with a slight scrape on its bumper. The man driving it — the man responsible for all this — had paused to contemplate the tragedy. From where I stood, I could see the condensation rising from his mouth, the plumes of smoke blurring his face. He looked like a ghost. When he saw us, he threw his truck into reverse and vanished into the night. You chased him, which made no sense. You could never have caught up with a truck. It was hopeless, completely hopeless, but you ran shouting, I’m going to kill you, you motherfucking son of a bitch. I watched you run after him. Your body disappeared into the darkness, dissolved in the shadows, then reappeared, defeated and out of breath.

  I was too young to remember, but I remember, the look on your face as you gazed down at the remains of the car. Seeing the look on your face made me cry, and I asked what you’d do now about getting to the factory. I lay down on the sofa and cried all Christmas Eve. Why did I cry? I should have been crying because my presents had disappeared. (I’d figured it out. I knew you hid them in the car.) At the age of seven, I shouldn’t have been crying over the car. I ought to have been thinking about my presents — that would have been the logical thing. Had you already taught me that we were the sort of people whom nobody would come to help? Had you already conveyed to me your sense of our place in the world?