Prologue
For some years now, Naïma has been feeling a new kind of pain: one that arrives like clockwork with her hangovers. It is not just the splitting headache, the furred tongue, the churning, malfunctioning stomach. These days, when she opens her eyes after a night’s drinking (she has to space them out a little; she could not bear this torment to be weekly, let alone twice-weekly), the first words that come to her are:
I can’t do this.
For a while, she wondered about the precise nature of this unequivocal surrender. “This” might be her inability to deal with the shame she feels about her behavior the previous night (you talk too loudly, you make shit up, you always have to be the center of attention, you act like a slut), or her remorse at having drunk too much, at not knowing when to stop (you’re the one who was shouting, “Hey, come on, guys, we can’t go home yet!”). It might even refer to the physical pain she feels crushing her … And then she realized.
The days she is hungover lay bare the overwhelming challenge of simply being alive, one that she usually succeeds in ignoring through sheer force of will.
I can’t do this.
Any of this. Getting up every morning. Eating three meals a day. Falling in love. Falling out of love. Brushing my teeth. Thinking. Moving. Breathing. Laughing.
* * *
There are times when she can’t hide it, and the words slip out while she’s working at the gallery.
“How are you feeling?”
“I can’t do this.”
Kamel and Élise laugh or shrug. They don’t understand. Naïma watches them move around the exhibition space, their actions barely slowed by last night’s excesses, exempt from this revelation crushing her: everyday life is a high-level discipline from which she has been disqualified.
* * *
Because she can do nothing, it’s vital that hangover days be completely empty. Empty of the good things that would inevitably be ruined, and of the bad things that, meeting no resistance, would destroy everything within.
The only thing she can tolerate on days when she’s hungover are plates of pasta with butter and salt, in comforting quantities: a taste that is bland, almost nonexistent. And box sets.
Critics have been raving lately that we have witnessed an extraordinary transformation. That television dramas have been raised to the level of art. That they are glorious.
Maybe. But Naïma can’t shake the idea that the real reason for the invention of box sets lies in hangover Sundays that need to be filled without leaving the house.
* * *
The day after that is always a miracle. When the courage to live returns. The feeling that she can do something. It’s like being reborn. It’s probably because such days exist that she continues to drink.
There is the day after a bender—despair.
And the day after the day after—bliss.
The alternation between the two creates a fragile dissonance in which Naïma’s life is mired.
* * *
This particular morning, she has been holding out for the morning that follows, like the old tale about Monsieur Seguin’s Goat holding out for sunrise:
Occasionally, Monsieur Seguin’s kid goat looked up at the twinkling stars in the clear sky and said to herself:
“Oh dear, I hope I can last till morning…”
Then, as her vacant eyes are staring into the blackness of her coffee, which reflects the ceiling light, a second thought slips in after the brutal, parasitic, habitual first (“I can’t do this”). It is a deflection more or less perpendicular to the first.
At first, the thought flits by so quickly that Naïma cannot quite perceive it. But later, she begins to make out the words more clearly:
“… know what your daughters get up to in the cities…”
Where does it come from, this fragment that runs back and forth inside her head?
She sets off for work. Through the day, other words cluster around this initial fragment.
“wearing trousers”
“drinking alcohol”
“behaving like whores”
“What do you think they get up to when they say they’re studying?”
And while Naïma is desperately trying to work out what connects her to this scene (was she present when the words were said? is it something she heard on television?), the only image she can bring to the surface of her febrile brain is the furious face of her father, Hamid, brows knitted, lips tightly pursed to stop himself from roaring.
“Your daughters who go around wearing trousers”
“behaving like whores”
“they’ve forgotten where they come from”
Hamid’s face, twisted into a rictus of fury, is superimposed over the prints by a Swedish photographer that hang on the gallery walls all around Naïma, and every time she turns her head, she sees him, floating halfway up the wall, in the antireflective glass that protects the photographs.
* * *
“It was Mohamed who said it, at Fatiha’s wedding,” her sister tells her that night. “Don’t you remember?”
“Was he talking about us?”
“Not you. You were too young; you were probably still at high school. He was talking about me and our cousins. But the funniest thing…”
Myriem starts to laugh, and the sound of her giggling merges with the strange, static crackles of the long-distance call.
“What?”
“The funniest thing is that he was completely shit-faced, and there he was trying to give us a lecture about Islamic morality. You really don’t remember?”
When she patiently, fiercely racks her brain, Naïma unearths fragmentary images: Fatiha’s pink-and-white dress of shiny synthetic material, the large tent in the municipal gardens for the reception, the portrait of President Mitterrand hanging in the registry office (He’s too old for that, she had thought), the lyrics of Michel Delpech’s “Le Loir-et-Cher,” her mother’s flushed face (Clarisse blushes from the eyebrows down, something that has always amused her children), her father’s pained expression, and Mohamed’s remarks—she can picture him now, staggering through the crowd of guests in the middle of the afternoon, wearing a beige suit that made him look old.
* * *
What do you think your daughters get up to in the cities? They claim they’re going there to study. But just look at them: They’re wearing trousers, they’re smoking, drinking, behaving like whores. They’ve forgotten where they come from.
* * *
It’s been years since she saw Mohamed at a family dinner. She never made the connection between her uncle’s absence and this scene now resurfacing in her memory. She simply assumed that he had finally embarked on adult life. For a long time, he had gone on living in his parents’ apartment, an overgrown teenager with his headphones, his Day-Glo tracksuits, and his cynical lack of employment. The death of his father, Ali, gave Mohamed an excellent excuse to hang around for a little longer. His mother and sisters addressed him by the first syllable of his name, drawing it out endlessly, shouting it from room to room, or through the kitchen window if he was loitering on the benches by the playground.
“Mooooooooooh!”
* * *
Naïma remembers that when she was little, Mohamed would sometimes come and spend weekends with them.
“His heart’s been broken,” Clarisse used to tell her daughters with the quasi-clinical compassion of those who have lived a love story so long and so untroubled it seems to have blotted out even the memory of what it means to be brokenhearted.
With his garish clothes and his Converse high-tops, Mo had always seemed faintly ridiculous to Naïma and her sisters as he traipsed through their parents’ huge garden or sat beneath the arbor with his older brother. As she thinks back on him—and with no way of knowing what she’s making up now to compensate for the memories that have faded and what she made up back then out of spite at being excluded from grown-up conversations—Mohamed was miserable for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with a broken heart. She thinks she remembers hearing him talking about a misspent youth, marked by cans of beer in stairwells and small-time dope dealing. She thinks she remembers him saying he should never have dropped out of school—unless that was Hamid or Clarisse speaking with the benefit of hindsight. He also told his brother that living in a cité in the 1980s was completely different from what Hamid had experienced, how it wasn’t fair to blame him for not seeing any way out. She thinks she saw him crying under the dark flowers of the clematis while Hamid and Clarisse murmured reassuring words, but she can’t be certain about any of it. It’s been years since she thought about Mohamed. (Sometimes she silently runs through the list of her uncles and aunts just to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anyone, and sometimes she does forget, and that upsets her.) From what Naïma remembers, Mohamed was always sad. At what point did he decide that his sadness was as vast as a vanished country and a lost religion?
Her Day-Glo uncle’s words go around and around inside her head like the grating music of a merry-go-round set up just under her window.
Copyright © 2017 by Flammarion / Albin Michel
