![]() ![]() He always said we shouldn’t talk during meals, we should watch television, it was a question of good manners. My mother was serving supper and my father turned on the television. That same evening I went home after school. She hesitates over which strategy to adopt, she tries something else, she changes the tone, brings back that soft, imploring voice, Your brother needs money to eat at the lycée but your father just refuses to understand that, so be nice to mama don’t tell papa, you know how he can be such a jerk sometimes. ![]() She comes over to me, furious: You’d better not tattle to your father or else, and then she hesitates. My father told my mother Don’t let me catch you again giving money to that troublemaker, so when she sees that I’ve found her out, she gives a start. When I enter the house, without knocking on the door, I can see the huddled forms of my mother and brother in all the smoke, closer together than they were when I left.Īnd I see what’s going on: my mother is taking advantage of the dim light and the fact that the others aren’t there, she’s giving money to my big brother and I know that my father has forbidden my mother to do this, he ordered her never to give him money again, not ever, because he knows that my brother will use it to buy alcohol and drugs and that once he’s drunk he’ll go tag supermarkets and bus stops or set fire to the stands in the village stadium, he’s already done that several times. I leave the house, I slam the door and head off into the cold, surrounded by the redbrick walls of northern France, by the smell of fog and manure and then, somehow or other, I realize that I’ve forgotten something in my room, so I turn around. She nods without taking her eyes off the TV. I let my mother know that I have to go see a friend in the village to help him fix his bike. My mother and brother are laughing in front of the television, throaty, booming laughs, and they’re still smoking. I’m coughing, I had a lot of asthma in those days. They’ve been up for only twenty minutes but have already smoked four or five cigarettes each and the room is stuffy with thick, cloudy smoke. They awakened a little while ago and are smoking while watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. You have to imagine the scene: I’m drinking hot chocolate in the kitchen, sitting next to my mother and my big brother. The story of my revenge begins very early one morning. Because I was the one who’d provoked this fight between my father and my brother, I’d wanted it. She was shrieking, too, Oh shit, don’t, you’ll kill each other, calm down, hollering at the top of her lungs He’ll kill his father, he’s gonna kill his own father, then she’d whisper in my ear Don’t look sweetie, don’t look, Mama’s right here, don’t look. She was throwing glasses at my brother to stop him but missed every time and the glasses kept falling, exploding, shattering on the floor. So then a week later, without any connection to the attacks except that the striking closeness of the events gives me a time frame for the attempted murder, right in the middle of dinner, in front of the rest of the family, my big brother grabs my father by the hair and starts bashing his head against the kitchen wall: he was killing him, and my father was howling, begging-I’d never seen my father beg anyone-with his face disappearing under the redness of the blood, under the accumulation of gaping, bleeding wounds, and my big brother was yelling I’ll fucking waste you, you son of a bitch I’ll fucking waste you while my mother tried to shield me. I was nine and I was crying too, like a kid who cries when he sees his parents cry, without really understanding, crying precisely because of this incomprehension, this void, crying because I was afraid of death and because I was too young to realize that my father’s words were only an expression of his violent and racist impulses, the words of a man I would learn to hate in two or three more years. ![]() ![]() With my father I’d watched the twin towers burst into flames, implode, collapse, my father draining a bottle of whisky in front of the television trying to get control of his grief and he was crying, crying, saying Fuck now the sand niggers and ragheads they’re gonna kill us, this here’s the start of the war, I’m warning you my son get ready because this, I’m telling you now, I’m telling you we’re bound to die, all of us and he was moaning, warning The next bomb they throw will be right in our faces, our French faces and then that’ll be it for all of us for sure. It was a few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and that’s why I remember the exact date it happened. I saw my big brother try to kill my father one September evening in 2001. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |