History of Violence Read online

  We got near my house and Reda kept paying me compliments, some of which were strange and over-the-top, and the wind was still blowing, it went right through my clothes, my hair was sticking straight up. I tried to smooth it down, but as soon as I put my hand back into my coat pocket—or even when I started to do so, as soon as my hand found the opening of the pocket or brushed the lining with my fingertips, up flew my hair.

  That’s when I realized I’d changed my mind. I was sure.

  “He realized he’d go home with him. All of a sudden it just wasn’t even a question. He was talking to Reda about his Arab background (she’s mistaken, he wasn’t Arab), and that’s when he realized that whatever part of him had been resisting wasn’t there. It was dead. Anyway, that’s how it felt—which makes it sound like they’d been walking for three whole days, but they were just right by his house, they’d gone, what, a few blocks together (less, actually, since I’d walked fifty meters alone between the time I returned the bike and the time Reda came up to me).

  “So now it’s a matter of time. Reda’s getting impatient, he’s had enough. He puts his finger on Édouard’s mouth to make him stop talking (and I felt the warmth of his finger on my lips, I felt it and I could even smell it), he said they couldn’t just wander around all night, doing nothing, and frankly—look, you know what I think of the guy, but he had a point, frankly that’s just how it is, you’ve got to make up your mind. He says they have to do something, they can’t spend all night there on the street like a couple of bums. Édouard looks at him. He’s not answering. He just quietly looks down. He doesn’t know what to say, so now the guy insists, he says, What’s up, are we going someplace or not?

  “But I’m making him sound pissed off—and he wasn’t. He wasn’t at all pissed off the way he said it. Impatient, maybe, but I don’t know how to put it—he wasn’t angry impatient, he was impatient like someone who can’t wait to get what he wants, and who knows it’s going to happen, and wants it to happen. You see what I mean. He was happy impatient.

  “He works up his nerve and then he just comes out and says it, mid-sentence. Do you want to have sex with me? Just like that. In those very words, I swear. Well! Obviously that’s exactly what Édouard had been wanting to hear. Might as well ask a dog if he wants a bone. For a while now, it’s what he’d been waiting for. He’d been wanting Reda to go faster, to pick up the pace. That’s the only reason he’d been resisting—not to shut him down, but so he’d come out with it.

  “But it was too violent. The way he asked the question was so blunt, it was like Édouard’s body reacted all on its own, like if you take a little hammer and tap your knee. Not him, but his body. Like his body couldn’t catch up to his head—but I don’t really know how to say this either, because in his head he’d already made up his mind. He was sure. It was all sorted out in his head, everything was settled. He knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was to get Reda back to his place. To get Reda into bed. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say there wouldn’t be any more reading that night. Books, what books?

  “His head was saying yes, but his body told him no. To the point that he was actually surprised to hear himself say no—I’m only telling you what he told me, how he heard his body arguing against him, how his head wanted to go upstairs but his body lied to Reda, like by instinct, and his head insulted his body (and I hated my body) but it didn’t do any good, his body kept on lying and he said (or rather, it was my body talking), You have no idea what a bad scene it would be if I took you home, not with my family there, oh my god if my family found me with a guy I can’t even think, it’d be the end. I swear, you’d never get out in one piece. My brother would kill me, too, he’s always saying how he won’t put up with that under his roof. To him it’s the worst. It would mean total war. They’d kick me out and they’d hurt you, they’d really mess you up.

  “And frankly? I’m thinking, Thanks a lot. Couldn’t he have found some other lie? Couldn’t he have found a lie that didn’t turn us into a bunch of bigots? There’s a whole lot of lies out there to choose from. I’m just saying, he could have come up with something else. We’ve always respected him for what he was, always, and when he told us he was different—that very day he told us, I remember like it was yesterday—what did we tell him? We told him it didn’t change a thing, we’d love him just the same (she’s lying), no matter what, and for us he’d still be the same person. We told him all that mattered was his happiness, all we cared about was he was happy (she’s lying), we told him we’re family and that’s what counts. My mother told him, All I want is for my children to be happy and to live good happy lives, that’s all I ask, I don’t care about money, money doesn’t matter, all I ask is happiness for my children. Just happiness. And that was that. Of course we asked him not to make a big deal of it in the village when he came back, not that he did come back very often, but the once in a blue moon when he did, because then we’d be the ones who had to deal with it when he left. We were the ones who’d have to pay. And how would that have gone down? You know how the people here are, you know them as well as I do, they’re country people, we’d never have heard the end of it, not for the next five generations—you know it’s true. You think they’d let us live down a thing like that? Come off it. Think of all the remarks we’d get, and what a life that would be, with some kind of nasty remark every day, and the constant little digs. That’s not even counting what they’d say behind our backs, but that, too—and him with his little brother and sister still in school, they’d have been picked on, their lives would have been ruined. Because the people around here, they’re country people. You breathe in nothing but cow shit and pollen all your life, studies show, you’re going to end up retarded. But what can I do about it? I didn’t make them that way. So we asked him not to mince around too much and not to go around in girly clothes, is that so much to ask? The only person we made him promise not to tell was his grandfather, and not because his grandfather wouldn’t have understood, but because it might have killed him—and it’s not like he did anything wrong, is it? You can see what I mean. He’s from another generation, you can’t judge different generations by one single standard, he had a hard life, first working on the farm, then fighting in Algeria, then working at the factory, and on and on and on. He just wouldn’t get it. He wouldn’t be capable of understanding, and honestly why should we throw this at him now, on top of all the other shit old people have to deal with?

  “But we accepted him as he was (not true). And that’s what makes me wonder. That’s why the whole thing always leaves me a little uneasy. Sometimes I think Édouard told us he was different not so we could be closer to him or know him better—because deep down, you tell me if I’m wrong, that’s why you tell somebody a secret: to bring them close—but actually for the opposite reason. In his heart he didn’t want us to accept him. He hoped it would make us push him away, because we’d be hurt and angry that he’d been keeping this secret of his, and we’d reject him, and then afterward he could go and tell everybody, in that stuck-up way he has, You see? It’s their fault I’m too cowardly to have a relationship with my family. That way he could avoid all the responsibility and still tell everyone, with a clear conscience, They’re the ones who threw me out, I didn’t abandon them, it’s all their fault. You know how these things work. What I think, when I have time to think about it—and I’ve never said anything to my mother, I’ve kept it to myself, because why hurt her?—is that once he saw we accepted him, secrets and all, it made him hate us. He hated us because it ruined his plans, because he couldn’t go tell everyone how everything was our fault, and sometimes I think he never forgave us for accepting him how he is. That’s if you ask me. But now, what was I saying? Oh right, Édouard. So he apologizes for not asking the guy up. He says, I’m sorry, I can’t take you home—he hears himself apologizing or, how he puts it, he hears his body apologizing, not his head—sometimes he doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but whatever, you get the idea. He hears
himself apologize and then Reda, what does he do? He takes his hand, again, a second time, in the middle of what he’s saying. He grabs Édouard’s hand and he presses it against his dick, so Édouard can feel it through his sweatpants. He was wearing sweatpants. That took Édouard completely by surprise. I don’t mean the sweatpants, of course. I mean what he did with his hand, and then the guy says: Just let me buy you a drink down here, at the café, or we’ll get a cup of coffee, for five minutes, just give me a chance, give me a chance, give me a chance, and he says, My treat. Please? This whole time Édouard wasn’t saying anything, and so he takes his hand again and pulls it against his crotch and says all this stuff like, You’re so beautiful, you’re the most beautiful blond I’ve ever seen. You have the bluest eyes. And so Édouard sighs. He invites the guy upstairs.”

  * * *

  NOW THAT I’D LIED and then suddenly changed my story and admitted that I didn’t live with my parents, Reda wanted to know why, when I was barely twenty years old, I didn’t live at home and most of all why I hadn’t gone home for Christmas. Was it because of my studies? I explained that becoming a graduate student was actually a result of my having escaped from my family. The escape came first. The idea of graduate school had only occurred to me later, when I realized that was pretty much the only way I could get away from my past, not just geographically, but symbolically, socially—that is, completely. I could have gone to work in a factory like my brother, three hundred kilometers from my parents, and never seen them again; that would have been a partial escape. My uncles, my brothers would still have lived inside me: I’d have had their vocabulary, their expressions, I’d have eaten the same things, worn the same clothes, I’d have had the same interests, I’d live more or less the way they did. Studying was the only real escape route I could find. Reda asked me: “But still, you go see them all the time, right? They come visit you? You must see them—they raised you, after all.” I took this as a sign of his generosity.

  * * *

  “SO THEY WENT UP TO ÉDOUARD’S. They ran up the stairs. Not for any reason, just one of them took off running and the other followed. Like kids. They were laughing and cheating, trying to hold each other back by grabbing each other’s clothes (our laughter echoed in the stairwell). He told me they were laughing and panting and sweaty and when he got to the door—it’s five floors up—he wanted to open the door but he couldn’t find his keys. For a change. And then? He panicked. He was afraid he’d ruined everything; suddenly their whole conversation, even the fact they’d met, had all been a waste of time because he’d locked himself out of the apartment. I told him, I don’t see why it would have been such a waste of time, you could have seen each other the next day, and he answered back—I could tell he didn’t like my interrupting—all right, maybe not a literal waste of time. At any rate, I found the keys.”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T FIND THE KEYS BY MYSELF. Reda actually slipped his hands into my pockets and rummaged through them one by one. He let me feel the heat of his hands through the fabric of each pocket, and my cock grew harder and harder, feeling his fingers so close. His fingers were warm and moist. He found the keys himself. That detail is just one of many things I never shared with my sister or the police, only with Didier and Geoffroy. For example, even though this moment was woven deeply into the fabric of the night, and into my feelings—in the most general sense of the word—toward Reda, I never told the police how I turned out the lights, and how the inky blue light from outside sifted through the cracks in the blinds, and how I saw that blue light shining down in thin stripes over Reda, over his chest, his back, his face. I didn’t tell them that Reda offered to give me a massage before he ran away, long before, before the rape, before the scarf, before the anger, and that I said yes and stretched out on my stomach. He told me to relax, to breathe as deeply as I could, to hold the oxygen in my lungs then let it out slowly, in long, deep exhalations; and he whispered, “Think of something beautiful,” and I answered, “You,” and he laughed and he told me, “All right, think of a beautiful place,” and I answered, “You.” If I’d told that to anyone but Didier or Geoffroy I would have felt ridiculous.

  With the police I simply told them we went inside the apartment. I left it at that. Across from me, the two officers were so static they might have been part of the décor, just like the chairs, or the yellowed antidrug posters on the walls. I already grasped the importance of their listening. This week, while I’ve been talking to Clara—or whenever I’ve talked to Didier and Geoffroy, ever since the day after I filed the report—I’ve noted all the inappropriate and racist remarks the police made, I’ve noted their complete inability to understand my behavior, I’ve noted their obsessions, I’ve explained everything that separated them from me, everything that made me hate them; at the same time, they helped me in a crucial, decisive way, they represented a place where it was possible for me to say what I had to say, and where this was sayable. From the moment I walked in, they made me feel clearly authorized to speak, and from then on my words would bear the trace of this possibility, which existed in my mouth thanks to them.

  The one sitting at his desk stopped me when I described how we went in. “At this point he had shown no signs of aggression?” I answered: “None. On the contrary, he was funny. Solicitous. Strangely solicitous, now that I think about it, considering we’d just met.” And the policeman: “You gave him a drink? Would you say he had been drinking before you met?”

  He mentioned having had something to drink, but he wasn’t drunk. He was in full control of his movements. He didn’t smell of alcohol. He slipped off his shoes, staring the whole time at the piles of books on my floor. I looked at him. We had turned the light back on (was it so we could get undressed?). He tilted his head so he could read the titles on the spines, he read them aloud under his breath, he turned toward me. Did I have anything to drink? I had nothing in the house. But then I remembered—I did have a bottle of vodka in the freezer, a Polish friend had given it to me when he came to Paris, and since I don’t care for vodka, the bottle hadn’t been touched, it was full. I poured some into a tall glass, he took a sip or two. That was all he drank; I came up to him and we kissed. His breath smelled strongly of alcohol, even after just one sip. I sat down and opened my fly, my head back, eyes closed. He put down the glass and knelt in front of me.

  * * *

  THE POLICE WANTED TO KNOW if I felt his gun when we kissed; if so, I didn’t notice. In any case, he took off his clothes very quickly, and if I had felt something in the inner pocket of his coat, I wouldn’t have thought it was a gun. We made love a first time. We did it again four, five times, and in between times he slept next to me, he took little naps of a few minutes each, during which he clung to my arms, to my hair, he’d run his hand through my hair and grab hold of it as if he were afraid I’d run away. He put his legs between mine, and he covered my cock with his hand, or he’d hold it, he’d squeeze it in his hand. We’d wake up, sometimes we’d talk. Then we’d start again.

  He got up three or four times during the night to go to the bathroom and rinse himself off. He would press himself against the sink, standing on tiptoe, slightly arched over the basin. He rubbed his cock with his hands, the muscles rippling in his back. He’d make the water run over his cock and his lower belly, which he rubbed in a brisk circular motion, and on his way back to bed he’d stop in front of the books. He picked up one thick volume and said, “I never read, my parents wished I was good at school, but it wasn’t my thing, I was always clowning around.” It’s one of the sentences around which I tried, later, to imagine Reda’s life, to construct meaning and explanations where there was only silence. I told Didier and Geoffroy that there would have been a day when Reda stood up from his chair. Slowly. This would have been in grade school. He’d been sitting down like everybody else and suddenly up he stood. He moves away from the chair, much too gracefully—if he’d stood up in a hurry, or roughly, or if he’d cried out, it would have actually been less unsettling
to the teacher, much less unsettling; it would have been reassuring compared with this calm and controlled movement, too calm, too controlled, like nothing she was used to, like nothing she had the words to name. She didn’t say a word. All the kids were watching Reda. I imagine a classroom awash in light. I imagine the sunbeams on the polished blond wood of the desks and on the yellow linoleum, which in the heat of the light from outside gives off a plastic smell. They’ve been writing. Everyone was quiet when Reda stood and walked over toward one of the windows. Over to the window he goes, he passes between the open backpacks lying scattered on the floor. He moves along the perimeter of the classroom, and the heads turn one after another to watch him, no one understands, the other students follow him with their eyes; and he moves gently on, still perfectly calm, and heads for the window and opens it just as gently, as if all he wanted was to get some air, and that may be exactly what the others are thinking at first, “He’s going to open the window to get some air.” He opens the sash and swings one leg out the window. It was my cousin Sylvain who did this. It was one of his exploits, people told the story in our family and at my school, the same school he attended ten years before me, where this scene took place. No one had forgotten, over the years the scene had become a constitutive myth of masculinity, a sort of ideal, an origin story of masculinity, a reference point against which boys would have to invent themselves; it was something they dreamed about, a fantasy they had to attain or at least strive for in any situation. It wouldn’t be my cousin, in this version, but Reda. I’m transposing. He opens the window with his fingertips, and not one word breaks the astonished silence. Then his leg, in a sort of slow motion, lifts itself from the floor, bends, straightens, then bends a second time to pass over the windowsill. Then comes the explosion. At the same time that the teacher, who had been sitting there as silent and astonished as everyone else, realizes what’s going on and cries out, Reda cries out too—that’s what my cousin did, according to the story I heard and repeated, in turn, many times—and it’s a shout even louder and deeper than hers and it drowns hers out, it sounds puny, feeble, like nothing next to his, “I’m going to do it, I’m fucking going to jump,” and the teacher panics, “as you can imagine,” I say to Didier and Geoffroy, it’s like a tableau with the teacher on the right—hands clasped before her mouth, as well they might be, eyes wide, the only possible response a body can make at a moment of such complete impotence—and Reda on the left, the two of them almost perfectly symmetrical, Reda with his leg out the window, yelling, “I’m fucking going to jump, I’m going to throw myself out this window,” his face bathed in the yellow light, eyes shining, the thick veins of his face swollen from shouting, especially on his forehead, spit shining on his lips; and the light is too yellow, everything around him is too yellow, including his spit, and he has to keep from laughing at his own performance because he exults in the attention, the fearful and admiring attention of the other kids, who at the same time know he won’t jump, who hope he won’t do it and also hope he will, who want him to jump. There wasn’t any reason for him to do it. And that was the point of the story, I told Didier and Geoffroy, he did it for no reason. He didn’t have anything against the teacher in particular, he just wanted to see her transformed, deformed, transfigured by panic, he wanted to make the other kids laugh, he wanted to show who he was, to embody absolute freedom—Reda or Sylvain, it doesn’t matter which—he wanted to be the image of freedom at its most spectacular. It wasn’t a matter of responding to some kind of conflict. He would create the conflict himself, he would produce it, he would invent it—he would be the one in control of time, so the others would have to respond, he would decide when the conflict must occur, and how much weight to give it, and everyone else would take their lead from him.