I climbed the stairs two at a time. I no longer know what I was thinking about in that stairwell, I imagine I was counting the steps so as not to think of anything else.
I arrived at the door, caught my breath and rang the bell. The man approached from the other side, I could hear him, I could make out his footsteps on the wooden floor.
* * *
I’d met him on the Internet just two hours earlier. He was the one who’d contacted me. He’d told me he liked boys like me, young, slender, blond, blue-eyed—the Aryan type, he’d insisted. He’d asked me to dress like a student and that’s what I’d done—at least his idea of a student—with an oversized hoodie I’d borrowed from Geoffroy and sky-blue trainers, my favorites, I’d done what he wanted because I was hoping he’d reward my efforts and pay me more than he’d promised.
* * *
I waited.
* * *
Finally, he opened the door and at the sight of him I had to tense my face to keep from grimacing—he didn’t look like the photos he’d sent, his body was flabby, heavy, I don’t know how to put it, as if he was sagging or rather oozing to the floor.
Just coming to the door had been a strain for him, I could see his fatigue, his shortness of breath, the dozens of tiny drops of sweat shining on his forehead. I tried to look at him as little as possible, I wanted to avoid seeing the details of his face. In less than an hour you’ll be out of here with the money, I thought. His odor reached me, a synthetic smell of vanilla and sour milk. I focused on that sentence—In less than an hour, the money—when suddenly I heard voices behind him in the flat. They belonged to men, several of them, maybe three or four. I asked who they were, he smiled and said: It’s nothing. Pretend they’re not here, they’re used to it, I often bring in whores, you’re not the first. You ignore them and we’ll go to my room.
* * *
I thought: I don’t want other people seeing my face—the shame began to rise inside me, from the tips of my fingers to the nape of my neck, like a warm, paralyzing fluid, I recognized its burn. I threatened to go home. I thought it would hurt or irritate him but he didn’t try to stop me. Calmly he offered to give me fifty euros for the trip if I wanted to turn and go, and I hated him for not getting angry. I needed more than fifty euros. Okay, I said, we’ll go straight to your room, they won’t see me, I’ll pull up my hood.
He promised me his friends wouldn’t try to see my face, they don’t give a shit; he was already turning around, I could see his fat white neck. Think of the money, think of the money.
* * *
* * *
I crossed the living room with him. He walked in front of me. I lowered my head, the hood hiding my face. In the bedroom he sat on the edge of his bed, the weight of his heavy body on the mattress produced a high-pitched creaking sound.
The mattress screamed in my place.
I stood there, facing his body, I didn’t dare move, he looked at me Fuck you’re a turn-on with your little Nazi face. I didn’t say anything, I knew my silence would please him, that was what he wanted and what he was paying me for, my toughness, my coldness. I was playing a role. He asked me to undress, he said: As slowly as possible, and I did.
Now I was naked in front of him, waiting. He just said: I want you to fuck me like a slut. He straightened up, pulled his trousers down to his knees, without taking them off completely, turned and got on all fours on the bed—his ass in front of me too white and too red, flaccid, limp, covered with little brown hairs. Go on, fuck me, fuck me like I’m your little slut, he repeated. I rubbed my cock against his body but nothing happened, my cock remained inert, I failed, I wasn’t able to think of anything else, to imagine myself in another situation, the reality of his body won out, as if it was so brutal, so total, that it made any attempt at imagination impossible. Can’t do it? he asked and to buy time I said Shut the fuck up. I felt his body shudder under my fingers, he loved it.
* * *
I tried again, rubbed against him, on him, desperately, forcing myself to imagine another body in place of his body, another body under my body, or rather on my body, because I knew that was what usually turned me on. I concentrated, but the contact with his dry, cold skin brought me back to the truth and his presence. He started to sigh to show his impatience. I told you shut the fuck up and don’t move, I repeated, but I knew it wouldn’t work as well the second time. He wanted something else. I rubbed myself even harder against him but I knew I’d already lost, I’d lost from the start, today I look back and I think I knew that the moment I entered his room.
* * *
I thought of the money I needed, the shame the next day if I had to tell the dentist I couldn’t pay him, the look in his eyes and the words he must have known by heart, Can I pay you next time, I’m sorry, I don’t have my wallet, I forgot it, he’d have known I was lying and I’d have known he knew, and I thought of the shame this infinite game of mirrors would cause—it was as simple, as banal as that, that was why I was in this man’s house, naked against him.
He was still in the same position, motionless on all fours. I backed up a bit, walked around the bed and came to stand in front of him. His features were drawn, his face was pleading, exhausted from waiting. Suck, I said, and he took my still soft cock in his mouth. I closed my eyes. I don’t know how I managed, but after about twenty minutes standing there in front of him my cock bulged and I came, I pulled out of his mouth to cover his face, and looking down I saw the thick, white liquid on his forehead, his cheeks, his eyelids.
My breath shook.
* * *
I got dressed. I thought: It’s almost over. Almost over. He grabbed a towel from the bedside table that he’d probably put there knowing I’d come, wiped his face and walked over to a small chest of drawers. He took out a wad of notes and came over to me.
He gave me a hundred euros; I didn’t move. He knew exactly what I was expecting and why I didn’t move but he pretended not to understand. He was playing with me, he knew full well that I saw what was going on, that I knew he was playing with me but that I was too afraid to say anything. Finally he said You did half the job so I’m paying you half the money. You should have fucked me, you didn’t. A whore who doesn’t fuck isn’t a whore. You can be glad I’m giving you a hundred. He didn’t say it aggressively but more as an observation, the way you cite a rule or the terms of a contract. I’d learned to recognize how rich someone was at a glance, I could see it, I was never wrong, I knew he was rich and that paying me a hundred euros more wouldn’t have changed a thing for him, that having a hundred euros less in his wallet wouldn’t have made the slightest impact on his life. My heart was pounding in my chest (it wasn’t my heart that was pounding but my whole body). I started to describe my situation to this man in front of me, I didn’t even know his name but I told him everything, the shame, the dentist. That wasn’t his problem, he said, when you do things by halves you get half what you bargained for. You have to know what you want in life. You’re young, you have time to learn.
* * *
It was when he said those words that I decided to back down. His friends in the next room could get worried and come in to see if everything was all right, they couldn’t see my face—They mustn’t see your face, Other people must not see your face.
* * *
I took the money and left, walked through Paris in the night, and went home. Outside, the pavements were shiny from the rain, reflecting the streets like a second city projected onto the ground. I walked. I didn’t think I hated him. I didn’t think anything.
When I entered my flat I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. Even when I was crying I didn’t think anything. I no longer knew my name. I wasn’t crying because of what had just happened, which wasn’t such a big deal, just the sort of unpleasant thing that can happen to you in any situation; rather, what had just happened allowed me to cry for all the times in my life when I hadn’t cried, all the times I’d held back. It’s possible during that night, in that room, I let my eyes cry twenty years of uncried tears.
I walked to the shower. I didn’t take off my clothes. I turned on the warm water and felt it run down over me, from the top of my head to my ankles. I tilted my head back, stretching my throat, and opened my mouth as if I was going to scream, a long, beautiful scream, but I didn’t. The water soaked my clothes, my white T-shirt turned the color of my skin, my soggy trousers grew dark and heavy.
I stayed under that shower for a long time, watching the water running down over me. When I got out morning was breaking. I think it was then that I asked myself if one day I’d be able to write a scene like that, a scene so far removed from the child I’d been and his world, not a tragic or pathetic scene but above all one that was radically foreign to that child, and it was then that I promised myself I’d do it one day, that one day I’d tell everything that had led up to that scene and everything that happened afterward, as a way of going back in time.
Need I tell you again how it all started? I grew up in a world that rejected everything I was, and I experienced that as an injustice because—as I repeated to myself a hundred times a day, to the point of nausea—I didn’t choose what I was.
* * *
I’ve said all this before but I have to put it in order, I promised it to myself, the problem was diagnosed in the first years of my life: when I learned to speak, when I started to express myself, to move in the world, I heard more and more people around me asking Why does Eddy speak like that, why does he talk like a girl when he’s a boy? Why does he walk like a girl? Why does he twist his hands when he speaks? Why does he look at other boys like that? Could it be that he’s a bit queer?
I didn’t choose to walk the way I did, to talk the way I did, I didn’t understand why I had those mannerisms—that’s what the people in the village called them, Eddy’s mannerisms, Eddy has mannerisms when he talks—I didn’t understand why those mannerisms had been imposed on me, on my body. I don’t know why I was attracted to other boys’ bodies and not to girls’ bodies as would have been expected of me. I was a prisoner of myself. At night I dreamed of changing, of becoming someone else, and it was perhaps in those early years of my life that the idea of change became so central for me.
You were one of the first to worry. At night, when you were with Mom in your bedroom, I could hear you two talking—there were no doors between the rooms, buying doors would have cost too much money, and you’d hung up curtains you’d found at the junk shop. I could smell the cigarettes you smoked one after the next in your bed, the smoke and above all your voices reached me in the darkness, Why does Eddy talk like that? We didn’t bring him up to be a queer, I don’t get it. Can’t he act a bit normal?
Queer. At five or six I understood that this word would define me and that it would stick with me for the rest of my life.
What you don’t know, because I hid it from you, is that it followed me everywhere, not just at home but also in the streets of the village, at school, everywhere, and that you weren’t the only one who worried.
* * *
(Or did you know that and just not say anything to protect yourself from the truth?)
* * *
What you also don’t know is that the insults made everything else unbearable for me, our poverty, our way of life, the constant racism in the village, as if exclusion forced me to invent my own value system—one in which I had a place.
When Mom told us in the evening that we had no money and nothing to eat, the insults made the hunger even worse. When we no longer had any wood to heat the house, I suffered far worse from the cold than the others because of the insults. When I heard the women at the bakery or in the town square saying There’re too many foreigners in France, nothing but Blacks everywhere you look, I despised them and spontaneously felt on the side of those they wanted to oppress and eradicate.
* * *
I don’t know how it’s possible to have such precise and somehow also adult and anachronistic thoughts as a child, but I remember that I wanted to leave the village and become rich, powerful and famous because I thought the power I’d gain through wealth and fame would be my revenge against you and the world that had rejected me. I’d be able to look at you and everyone else I’d known in the first part of my life, and say Look where I am now. You insulted me but today I’m more powerful than you, you were wrong to despise me and call me weak and now you’re going to pay for your mistakes. You’re going to pay for not loving me.
I wanted to succeed* out of revenge.
* * *
Deep down, what did you know? What didn’t you know, what did you choose to ignore? Did you guess what I was going through? Did you wonder?
* * *
* * *
I never told you that when the students had to form teams in PE at school, most often to play football or handball, I was never chosen, no one wanted me on their team. (I’m not sad telling you this today, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, I just want you to know—to go back in time.)
Such scenes of childhood suffering are among the most banal and predictable that there are, we’ve all seen them a thousand times in books and films, and yet they were among the ones that hurt me the most.
* * *
It was always the same: two pupils were chosen to form opposing teams. The gymnasium smelled of plastic, the shiny floors gave off a violent and sickening odor that mingled with the smell of sweat. The two who’d been chosen to form the teams, almost always two boys, took turns saying a name, and when someone’s name was called they had to line up behind the one who’d called it.
* * *
The group with everyone who hadn’t been chosen got smaller and smaller, the bodies around me disappeared. In the end, when I was the only one left, when my name was the only name that hadn’t been called, one of the two captains shrugged and sighed, “Okay then, Eddy,” and I could feel the others’ disappointment at having me on their team, I could feel all their eyes on me.
It wasn’t not being chosen that hurt, but being seen by the others as the one who hadn’t been chosen. Often when I joined the group that had been forced to take me someone would whisper, “Homo on board we’re toast.” The adult who was supervising our class would pretend not to have heard.
That scene was repeated detail for detail, almost without variation, several dozen times during my childhood.
The same tone of voice, the same disappointment when it came time to say my name.
* * *
Another thing I didn’t tell you is why I refused to go skiing with the rest of my class. Every year the school organized a week’s skiing for students in year 8, practically for nothing, just fifty euros or so, and even that could be covered by social security. Hardly a family in the region could afford a ski trip, for most of the kids it was the only time in their lives they’d go on holiday, the only chance they’d get to leave the damp cold of northern France for a few days.
Copyright © 2021 by Édouard Louis
Copyright © 2024 by John Lambert
Copyright © 2017 by Michael Lucey