A Woman's Battles and Transformations, page 1
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author and the Translator
Copyright Page
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I
Everything started with a photo. I didn’t know that this image existed or that I possessed it—who gave it to me, and when?
* * *
The photo was taken by her the year she turned twenty. I imagine that she must have held the camera backward to capture her face in the lens. It was a time when cell phones didn’t exist, when taking a picture of oneself wasn’t a straightforward thing to do.
She is tilting her head to one side and smiling slightly, her blond hair brushed and falling in immaculate bangs around her green eyes.
It was as if she was trying to be seductive.
I can’t find the words to explain, but everything about the snapshot—her pose, her gaze, the movement of her hair—evokes freedom, the infinite possibilities ahead of her, and perhaps, also, happiness.
I think I’d forgotten that she had been free before my birth—even joyful?
It must have occurred to me sometimes, when I was still living with her, that she had once been young and full of dreams, but when I found the photo I hadn’t thought about this for a long time—her freedom and contentment had become an abstract notion, something I vaguely knew. Nothing, or almost nothing, of what I knew of her in my childhood, through the closeness I had with her body for fifteen years, could have helped me remember all that.
* * *
Looking at this image, I felt language disappear from me. To see her free, hurtling fulsomely toward the future, made me think back to the life she shared with my father, the humiliation she endured from him, the poverty, the twenty years of her life deformed and almost destroyed by misery and masculine violence, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, a time when others experience life, freedom, travel, learning about oneself.
Seeing the photo reminded me that those twenty years of devastation were not anything natural but were the result of external forces—society, masculinity, my father—and that things could have been otherwise.
The vision of her happiness made me feel the injustice of her destruction.
I cried when I saw this image because I was, despite myself—or perhaps, rather, along with her and sometimes against her—one of the agents of this destruction.
* * *
The day of the argument with my little brother—it was summer. I came home after an afternoon spent hanging out on the steps of the village mairie, and a fight broke out with my youngest brother, right in front of you. Amid the shouting and the insults, my brother said, using the most hurtful tone he could muster, Everybody in the village makes fun of you behind your back. Everyone says you’re a faggot.
It wasn’t so much what he said that hurt me, or the fact that I knew it was true, but that he’d said it in your presence.
I went to my room and grabbed the bottle of colored sand that stood on my chest of drawers, then returned to my little brother and shattered it on the floor in front of him. It was a trinket he’d created at school. The teacher had suggested that the kids soak grains of sand in dye and fill Coke bottles with them to make colorful ornaments; she’d asked my brother if he’d wanted to make something and he’d chosen to make one for me. It was for me that he’d taken on this burden, for me that he’d spent an entire day making this pretty thing.
When I smashed the bottle at his feet he screamed sharply and began to cry, burying his face in the sofa cushion. You came up to me, slapped me, and told me that you’d never seen such a cruel child. I already regretted what I’d done, but I hadn’t been able to stop myself. I was mad at my little brother for having revealed to you something of me, of my life, of my suffering.
I didn’t want you to know who I was.
* * *
Throughout the first years of my life, I was terrified that you would really know me. In middle school, whenever meetings were arranged between parents and teachers, unlike other children who had good grades, I made sure that you didn’t find out about them. I hid the invitations, I burned them. When an end-of-the-year variety show with sketches, songs, and dance routines was put on in the village hall, the other kids brought their parents and families along. I did everything I could to ensure your absence. I told you that the dances and songs would be boring; I made up stories about technical problems; I didn’t give you the real dates for the show. I lied to you. Later I would discover an image, so often repeated in movies and TV shows, of a child on stage, waiting for his parents to appear in the hall to admire the performance that he has worked on tirelessly during that year, just for them. I never recognized myself in that child—neither in his waiting for his parents nor in his disappointment in their absence. It was as though all my childhood had been lived basically in reverse.
* * *
I didn’t want you to know that at school, the other kids refused to be friends with me because it was frowned upon to be close to someone thought to be a faggot. I didn’t want you to know that several times a week, two boys waited for me in the hallway of the school library to slap me and spit on my face, to punish me for being who I was. Is it true you’re a fag?
I didn’t want you to know that at the age of nine or ten I already knew the taste of melancholy and despair, that I was prematurely aged by these feelings, that every morning I woke up with the same questions in my head: Why was I the person I was? Why was I born with the mannerisms of a girl—mannerisms that the others identified, and rightly so, as proof of my abnormality? Why was I born with this desire for other boys instead of for girls, unlike my father and brothers? Why wasn’t I someone else? Once, several years after all this, when I told you during an argument that I’d hated my childhood, you looked at me as though I was crazy and said: But you were always smiling!
How could I criticize your reaction that day when it was, in a way, a symbol of my victory, of the fact that I had succeeded, throughout my entire childhood, in keeping you ignorant of what my life was—and, ultimately, in preventing you from becoming my mother?
* * *
The first pages of this story could have been called: A Son’s Struggle Not to Become a Son.
* * *
The year she wanted to take a vacation—she came into the kitchen and told us she had made up her mind. We would be going on holiday. She recalled her childhood stays in the mountains, when doctors had sent her to the Massif Central to treat her severe asthma. I was with my father, watching TV next to him. She announced: We’re going to the mountains. My father laughed. He kept watching his show and said, What the hell is that all about?
She had met with a social worker the previous day and learned that there were programs run by the state for families like ours who couldn’t afford to go on vacation. She began to hope.
She started by shuttling back and forth to the little building that housed the social services office, on the edge of the fields near the metal factory. She came back with stacks of paper under her arms, all sorts of forms and documents freshly photocopied, still warm from the printer, and she was charged with an energy that I had never before seen in her, both in her body and on her face.
She placed the documents on the table and spread them out to show my father, but he never looked up from the television. He replied that it didn’t interest him, so she just stayed there, immobile. She turned to me, but I didn’t listen to her either. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was unconsciously imitating my father, or maybe I was just bored by her description of the application process.
My father continued to make fun of her, but she didn’t give up. I saw her heading toward the village grocery store, often several times a day, to use the photocopier next to the checkout.
She asked my father for the administrative documents that he had sorted out and filed away the previous year, but he replied that he couldn’t remember where he’d put them. He said it with a faint, cruel smile on his face.
So she waited. She waited for him to go to the café before rummaging through the chest of drawers. She didn’t just open them, she pulled the trays out completely and placed them on the floor, sitting next to them and taking out the piles of paper one after the other; she made phone calls, left messages, called back when she didn’t get a reply, crossed the street again, filled in yet more forms; until the day she told us that it was done, she had won. Her words smothered the noise of the TV: We’re going on vacation next summer. She smiled. (Your face suddenly became so luminous.) My father said that he wouldn’t go with us, that he was better off staying at home, chez lui, but nothing he said mattered to her at this stage: she looked down on him now, thanks to her victory over him.
In her
* * *
I’ve been told that literature should never attempt to explain, only to capture reality, but I’m writing to explain and understand her life.
I’ve been told that literature should never repeat itself, but I want to write only the same story again and again, returning to it until it reveals fragments of its truth, digging hole after hole in it until all that is hidden begins to seep out.
I’ve been told that literature should never resemble a display of feelings, but I write only to allow emotions to spring forth, those sentiments that the body cannot express.
I’ve been told that literature should never resemble a political manifesto but already I’m sharpening each of my sentences the way I’d sharpen the blade of a knife.
Because I know now that what is called literature has been constructed against lives and bodies like my mother’s. Because I know, from here on, that to write about her, and to write about her life, is to write against literature.
She was born in the suburbs of a large agglomeration in the north of France. Her mother didn’t work, and her adoptive father worked in a factory. She was proud of not having been born in the countryside, unlike my father. “That’s why I speak better than he does.”
* * *
I’m trying to remember: her father died when she was ten, from an accident that she talked about often. She kept a letter from him of barely twenty lines that he wrote in his hospital bed, when he knew he was going to die. Once or twice a year, she would take out the letter, which she’d carefully folded and stored in a yellowed envelope, and reread it, sitting on the edge of her bed. I would watch her through the gap in the door and try to understand what she was feeling.
* * *
I have nothing else to say about her childhood, nothing other than this evocation of a working-class universe and the loss of her father.
* * *
Her mother—my grandmother—was discreet, shy, self-effacing—everything a woman was expected to be. She spoke softly, cooked and cleaned, and slipped away at the end of family meals to wash the dishes while the men continued to talk and help themselves to more wine. She was born in the 1930s and at six or seven was forced to leave her home in the north because of the bombings during the Second World War. In these circumstances she hadn’t been able to learn to read as a child, though she managed to catch up later in life through her own efforts. She lived a modest existence and brought up four children, my mother and her siblings; her husband died young, but she wasn’t unhappy. When I spent several days with her once during a school vacation, she talked to me about my mother: “It pains me to see my daughter suffer so much. I would never have thought I’d see your mother like this.”
* * *
The story of my mother starts with a dream: she was going to be a cook. An extension, most likely, of the reality of life around her: women had always done the cooking and served others. At sixteen she enrolled in the hospitality school in her region, but a year later she had to abandon her training; she was pregnant, about to give birth to my older brother, who would swiftly become alcoholic and violent, always in court or at the police station, either because he’d beaten his wife or set fire to the bus stop or the stands at the village stadium—I’ll come back to that. His father, a plumber whom my mother had met a few months earlier, asked her to keep the child. They married out of convenience and moved in together. He went to work, and at eighteen she was already a “stay-at-home mom,” as she put it. Perhaps, a bit later, she might have been able to pick up where she’d left off and pursue all her youthful dreams anew, but barely two years after the birth of her first child, the doctors told her she was pregnant again, and she brought a second child into the world: my older sister. At twenty, she found herself with two kids, no degree, and a husband she already hated after just a few years with him.
He would come home drunk in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t know where he had spent the evening, and they’d argue. When she spoke to me about this more than twenty years later, she explained: I was stronger than him, I wasn’t going to be pushed around. But it wasn’t much of a life. I was tired—tired of living in a situation where I always had to be on my guard, ready to defend myself all the time.
* * *
She hated him but stayed because of the two children. She told me that she didn’t want them to grow up fatherless, that she didn’t want to be “responsible.” Whenever she told her story she would always add: Leave him? Sure, I wanted to, but where would I go?
And yet after two or three more years with him she could no longer bear it. She’d figured out that he was sleeping with other women, that he was lying to her. He was drinking more and more. Some days—like his son years later, my older brother, these two lives repeating identically—he would wake up at seven or eight in the morning to go to work, already drunk even before he started drinking, the alcohol no longer draining from his body. So she left.
She moved in with her sister, who lived in public housing in a high-rise on the outskirts of a small industrial town, near a jumbled mass of supermarkets and huge garden centers.
She was twenty-three, with two kids, nowhere to live, no work, no driver’s license, no relatives who could help her. The only dream left, the only dream still possible for someone like her, was to rewind, to Go Back in Time. This was barely a few years after she had photographed her self-portrait.
* * *
Why do I feel as though I’m writing a sad story, when my aim was to tell the story of a liberation?
* * *
2000, or maybe 2001—memories of voices in the night; an evening when she had drunk too much. It almost never happened. In the village the roles were clearly defined: the men drank and the women tried to prevent their husbands from drinking. But some evenings she forgot all about the rules. She wanted to enjoy herself, and when my father went to buy his pastis, she would ask him to buy her a bottle of lychee liqueur, a drink called Soho. She would get drunk quickly because she wasn’t used to it, and once she was in the grip of the alcohol, the same scene always unfolded: she would go to the large wooden chest where the DVD player sat and slide a disc into it, the only one she owned, a compilation by the Scorpions.
She, who otherwise never listened to music, would start singing and whistling. It’s the song of my youth, she would smile.
I didn’t understand why, but I hated seeing her happy, I hated the smile on her face, her sudden nostalgia, her solace.
This scene happened, in almost exactly the same way, four or five times during my childhood.
One night, at around one in the morning, I was sleeping in the bedroom next to the living room, where she was partying with my father and the neighbors, and the song started, waking me up. I got up, eyes still half-closed, my mouth dry, and went into the room where my mother and the others were. I saw the calm on her face and screamed: Stop playing this song! But this time she didn’t ignore me as she had all the other times. Her eyes filled with tears of anger, she turned off the music and shouted: For fuck’s sake, none of you will ever let me be happy even just once in my shitty life! Why the hell am I not allowed to be happy?
All the adults fell silent. Even my father didn’t know what to do. I felt a chill run through me but I didn’t apologize. I went back to my room and lay down on the bed.
I’d gotten so used to seeing her unhappy at home that the joy on her face seemed scandalous to me, a deceit, a lie that had to be exposed as soon as possible.
