History of Violence Read online

  * * *

  MAYBE I COULD HAVE MADE HIM GO AWAY in one of his moments of calm; he would come close to me and—in all my trembling and stammering—I never noticed how many other things he’d slipped into the pockets of his coat. Over the next month, and even the next day, I found that various things of mine were no longer there, that they’d vanished. I didn’t notice that Christmas Eve, in any case they were things that didn’t matter, but he really had emptied my apartment, so to speak, and he did it with incredible discretion, since I was sure my eyes had been on him the whole time; I so badly wanted to make the most of his last seconds in my apartment, to admire him while he was in the shower (or rather, I thought my eyes were on him, that’s how I remember it even now, though clearly that’s not possible or he couldn’t have taken all those things). The pockets of his coat must have been overflowing with my things, a bottle of cologne given to me for Christmas, a watch left behind by a friend, a medallion of the Virgin Mary from when I was baptized, which had just been sitting there in the bathroom ever since I moved in and which of course I never wore but somehow took with me from apartment to apartment, without knowing why I hadn’t yet thrown it away.

  Then a strange idea occurred to me, the strangest I had that entire night. This is the only scene that I’ve completely hidden from everyone I’ve talked to—I hid it from the police, from Didier and Geoffroy, from the nurses, from the doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu, from the strangers I confided in, from that writer, from Clara this week. I’ve never talked about it, not for reasons having to do with memory or the need to forget certain things, but simply out of shame. I actually remember it much better than the rest of the night; these are the images that remain most vivid and robust, as if what we call shame is no more than memory in its most vibrant and durable form, a superior version of memory, a memory inscribed in the deepest flesh, as if Didier is right and the things we remember most clearly are always those that bring us shame.

  There I was in front of Reda. I said to him, “I tell you what, would you mind helping me look around the apartment for my phone, it seems to have fallen down somewhere. If you don’t mind. We could make it a kind of game.” Here is what I suggested: “Whoever finds the phone, the other one has to give him fifty euros; we’ll make it into a contest, just for fun. If you find it, I give you fifty euros. If I find it, you give me fifty euros. Simple.” I swear that’s what I said, I can’t remember whether I was shaking when I proposed this game, or whether my voice trembled. I was sure the phone was in one of his pockets, I was even more sure that I’d found the iPad in his coat, and I was certain that he’d pretend to find it if he could have the money. He’d stolen my phone in order to resell it and make a little money; this logic struck me as self-evident, as perfectly simple. The whole time I was thinking about the photos on my phone and how I needed to get them back—or at least, as Clara would have it, I believed that what I wanted was those photos and that phone.

  He helped me search. He walked around the apartment, he lifted up the sheets, the blankets. He looked under the bed, under the desk and the chairs, he felt around under the pillows, he stuck his hand inside the pillowcases. He got down on all fours, he put his head down, he looked under the bed.

  He wasn’t really looking, and you could tell he wasn’t looking—that was obvious—but he did the least he could to maintain the illusion that he was going along with our game. He opened the cupboards, he picked up a book, he picked up another book, he took a book off one pile and placed it on another. I did what he did. I mimicked him, I pretended to look, I even inspected the inside of the refrigerator, where sometimes I leave books or other things by mistake. I pored over the tiny bathroom, and the whole time I kept sneaking looks at Reda. I could hear the sound of his breathing the entire time.

  I never made a run for it. I never went for the door, even now that calm was reestablished. I never tried to open the door with a quick decisive tug. I never thought, Get out. I hadn’t yet seen the gun in his pocket—so escape was thinkable, even if it wouldn’t have been exactly easy. What strikes me most of all, now that I try to remember, is the unreality of the scene, the unreality of our poses, of our movements. I knew there was nothing to find, and he knew he had the phone, and yet we searched the apartment from one end to the other; it was six or seven a.m., Christmas Eve was over, and here was Reda looking through the drawers, and then he’d stop, he’d think of somewhere he ought to check, or ought to pretend to check; my face was swelling, it was puffing up with exhaustion. Now and then, as we combed the sixteen square meters of the apartment, I would say, “Any luck?” and he’d say, “No”; then I would try again: “Any sign of it?” He answered calmly, the way a person might answer any normal question. I was barefoot, I was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Reda had got dressed after he took his shower. I didn’t dare put on pants to cover myself up. I wasn’t cold yet. We walked around and around the studio.

  And then he started shouting again.

  INTERLUDE

  It was in a novel by William Faulkner, Sanctuary, that I first found a case like mine, in which a person was unable to flee.

  On page 65, Faulkner writes:

  Temple backed from the room. In the hall she whirled and ran. She ran right off the porch, into the weeds, and sped on. She ran to the road and down it for fifty yards in the darkness, then without a break she whirled and ran back to the house and sprang onto the porch and crouched against the door just as someone came up the hall.

  When I read it, I made this note:

  “Today is Tuesday, November 11, 2014. I’ve just found and read this book by William Faulkner while writing the last pages of History of Violence. I’m stunned by my encounter with Temple Drake, by the parallels between us, by thoughts of hers that are exactly identical to my own. Here in the first part of the book, Faulkner is telling the story of a woman, Temple Drake, who after a car accident is taken with her male companion to a ruined house, not far away, inhabited by a small community of men and one woman. One of the men in this community has found her and her companion and has brought them to this frankly troubling house, lost in the woods and underbrush.”

  From the beginning, the characters she meets in this house—small-time bootleggers—are presented as violent, unpredictable drunks.

  They threaten one another, they fight, they curse, they drink, they threaten Temple, and the possibility of rape—which will take place—hangs over her.

  Temple thinks of escaping now and then, although escape will be complicated without a car. She asks the woman who lives in the house to help her. The woman answers that Temple has to get away before it’s too late. She insists that Temple go, even though at times she seems to want to keep her there. Several times Temple could do it, she could conceivably get away. Her male companion does manage to leave, in the end, and his example points up the inertia of Temple Drake.

  * * *

  IN THE SCENE that I have just transcribed, Temple makes a run for it, and we breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that finally Faulkner will give us the escape scene we’ve been waiting for, for too long, but no sooner does she escape than she turns around “without a break,” as if in the grip of the situation, as if the first act of violence in this situation was to preclude the idea of an outside, to lock her inside the limits of the situation itself. In chronological terms, the first problem—for her, and for me, too—is not to have been forced into such-and-such behavior in this interaction, but to have been held within the frame of the interaction, within the scene imposed by the situation, that is, in the murky terrain of the bootleggers’ house. It is as if the violence of that enclosure, the geographical violence, came first and the other forms of violence merely followed in its wake, as if they were no more than consequences, side effects, as if geography were a history that unfolded without us, outside of us.

  And then Faulkner writes:

  Temple backed from the room. In the hall she whirled and ran. She ran right off the porch, into the weeds, and sped on.
She ran to the road and down it for fifty yards in the darkness, then without a break she whirled and ran back to the house and sprang onto the porch and crouched against the door just as someone came up the hall.

  * * *

  THAT CHRISTMAS EVE, I managed to defend myself from Reda, but only at the last moment, after a long time, and just as it was for Temple, the will to escape, which I ought to have felt the moment Reda lost his temper, was the very last reaction I had.

  9.

  And then all I felt was exhaustion. Clara told her husband that my fear and my pain were suddenly crowded out by the exhaustion that consumed me. Even as I mastered my terror, all I could hear was my exhaustion whispering, It’s time for him to go, it’s time for this to end, it doesn’t matter how you do it, but it’s time for this to end. I was trying to think.

  All of a sudden I was freezing. I’d been so tense this whole time, ever since Reda’s transformation, that I hadn’t noticed the temperature, but now that I was exhausted I felt how cold it was, my teeth chattered harder and harder, I got goose bumps. My exhaustion was gradually replaced—or rather, reinforced, since the exhaustion remained—by a heightened sensitivity to the atmosphere around me and to my outer body, so that suddenly his scarf was still tightening around my throat, as if it had been around my neck all along, as if he’d never taken it off; it had been ten or fifteen minutes since I’d had anything around my neck, but suddenly I felt the contact of the wool against my throat, coarse and heavy; the sensation, which had gone away, was back. At this point I’d have done anything to make him go away. But now he was the one who didn’t want to go. What I remember, too, is that in these moments time doesn’t flow the way it normally does. Elements and situations unfolded in a thick fog, as if Reda and I were drunk, as if the world itself were drunk, as if the oxygen and everything in the room were drunk; time flowed differently, more laboriously, more sluggishly, more heavily, the words that came out of our mouths were heavy, tangible, they could have fallen to the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces; our words were distant, as if spoken by other people; our bodies moved in a sort of sticky sludge of inertia, like sand or wool.

  While I explained all this to the two police officers, they’d curled up on themselves, backs hunched, hands balled up, they were growing old before my eyes; time once again grew disjointed and each minute took the toll of a normal year.

  * * *

  REDA NO LONGER WANTED TO LEAVE. And in the midst of his obsessive and unending refrain about his mother, about the family I’d disrespected, he took a revolver from the inside pocket of his coat. I hadn’t seen it before. I don’t know whether it was a real gun or a toy, I had no way of knowing, although the male officer came back to this again and again. “But was it an actual gun? It could have been a toy, you know, that’s something we see a lot, a guy uses a fake gun to scare you and push you around, but in this case…,” and I assured him I didn’t know; I rebelled against the idea that it was fake, since naturally I saw this as a way of telling me that my fear had been less than legitimate. And the policeman would ask me again: “But you’re sure it was a handgun, you saw it, you remember what color it was? Can you describe it? It’s not so easy to get hold of a gun,” and I thought: Of course it is. What planet are you living on? He came back to this with every other question, he asked me so often that in the end I started to wonder, I wasn’t sure what I’d actually seen, whether Reda really had had a gun; even though I remembered it, the repetition was eating away at the reality.

  The scarf was lying next to the bed. He bent down to pick it up. Without taking his eyes off me. I thought, He’s going to strangle me again.

  He picked up the scarf and he looked at it as if in panic, as if in shock, he looked at the scarf between his fingers as if it might tell him something, as if it might break into speech and whisper what he ought to do. He told me, “Turn around,” but with so much hesitation I didn’t do it, I couldn’t take it as an order; I almost thought he hoped I wouldn’t obey. But he said it again: “Turn around,” and I thought, He wants me to turn my back to him so he can strangle me, he doesn’t want to see my face when he kills me. He said it again: “Turn around.” I shook my head no, I didn’t want to. I stood there and Reda grabbed my right arm. Then he reaches for my left arm, he wants to tie me up with the scarf. I struggle, I won’t let him do it, I cry out, but quietly, I was quiet because I didn’t want to provoke him, I didn’t cry out so much as moan and plead. I resist, he fails to do whatever he’s trying to do, he keeps saying over and over, louder and louder, “I’m going to take care of your ass I’m going to take care of your ass I’m going to take care of your ass.” I was speaking to no one and he was speaking to no one, it seemed as if he’d never get tired but instead would keep on yelling, cursing, meting out and raining down violence for decades, centuries, never letting up; so now I feel all my own energy drain away, with each heartbeat I feel myself losing strength, it’s running out, it’s leaking from my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth; I want to contain it inside me, I can’t fight all night, it has to stop; a moment will come when the exhaustion is too much and I’ll be paralyzed forever. And I thought: He’s not a murderer. You don’t just run into murderers on the street. Murderers aren’t skinny Kabyles. They’re menacing and you don’t just happen to meet them by chance. He’s not built like a murderer … What about him could mark him as a murderer? A hand, a foot, an arm, a face?

  I hoped someone, a neighbor, would hear us and intervene. But nobody came. He was still trying to tie my arms, he still had the scarf in his hands. Since this wasn’t working, he grabbed the gun, which he’d slipped back into the inside pocket of his vinyl coat; he drops the scarf on the floor or else he wraps it around his own neck, I don’t remember, and he pushes me down on the bed, crushing my face against the beige fabric of my sheets; I can smell the more or less realistic peach scent of the detergent. When he was raping me, I didn’t cry out because I was afraid that he would shoot me. I held still. I breathed through the mattress; the oxygen tasted of peach. His pelvis pounded against me with a dull, dry sound. I focused on the taste of peach. I told myself a real peach wouldn’t taste like that, wouldn’t taste the way that smelled. All around us was silence, always the same silence. I had to struggle somewhat. I needed to handle him carefully if I wanted to avoid what seemed to me the worst. What he really wanted was my nonconsent. He was on top of me, but he materialized in everything around me; I gather this is a recurring motif in accounts of rape: everything became an extension of Reda, my pillow was Reda, the pitch darkness was Reda, the sheets were Reda.

  I struggled in order to reassure him, my cries were swallowed up by the thickness of the mattress. I needed to maintain a delicate balance, to struggle without struggling too hard, to get rid of him without doing it too quickly. My cries were partly from pain, but if I’d actually put up a fight it would have provoked him more, and so I planned out every flinch, every groan; I did what I could to muffle any groans of actual pain, letting him hear only the groans I faked, I used the internalized force of the actual groans to produce the fake ones, and I focused on my train of thought: No one has ever seen a peach that smelled like that, this is not the scent of a peach but the idea of the scent of a peach. I struggled harder to give him pleasure, more pleasure, and so to end it sooner. I controlled everything, I measured everything—at least that’s what I wanted, and what I told myself to do.

  The policewoman said if it had been her she’d have shouted as loud as she could.

  * * *

  JUST THEN, his body trembled and convulsed, his cock contracted, I felt it stiffen and grow, it hurt me more; during his orgasm he would be weak, less vigilant, I could get away. And at that moment, the exact moment of his orgasm, I elbowed him in the side. This wasn’t bravery on my part, it was just a gamble.

  He didn’t see it coming. He was surprised, disconcerted, and he tumbled sideways off the bed, like an insect flipped over on its back, helplessly waving its tiny legs; now sudd
enly off-balance, with his pants around his knees, he looked like a lost and hunted beast, with his cock still stiff as a rod, covered in blood, erect and suddenly ridiculous, just a pinkish bit of flesh clumsily attached to the middle of his body.

  I ran to the door. From my bed to the door is less than two meters. I was on the landing, almost naked, blood running down my thighs in long sinuous red lines, when he caught up to me; he’d pulled up his pants but the buttons of his fly were hanging open. He didn’t take me back inside. He could have, easily enough, he only needed to threaten me with the gun. He stood facing me, paralyzed. Again I saw the fear in his eyes, but bigger now, bigger than ever, as if it were a ghost that passed between us, between my eyes and his. He stood facing me on the landing, baffled, as if blinded by his own ineptitude. Maybe he felt regret. He had no idea what he should do, or could do, he looked stunned by his fall and by this brutal turn of events. He was a pathetic creature, feverish and dazed. Not that I felt any pity toward him. It’s not as if I was touched by this sudden weakness of his; it didn’t make me feel sad, but it didn’t make me feel glad or triumphant either. The only question, I told the police when the interview ended, the only question in my mind was: How to do it? And I told Reda: “Get out or I’ll scream.” When I came to this part of the story with the police officers, they didn’t believe me. “That’s it? That’s all it took?” And I said, “Yes, that one little sentence panicked him.” Reda froze. His face went rigid, he said, “Please don’t.” My apartment door was open, he took a few steps toward the doorway, he leaned over, he reached down to pick up his coat, which was near the landing, and I watched him leave, backing his way around me, as if he were nervous and even afraid. I knew he wouldn’t try anything else. It was over.