The Age of Reinvention (10 page)

The night her contractions begin, he is hugging her in front of the TV. It is nearly midnight. She tells him it's time. Unfortunately, the medical students are on duty—no way to contact them—so Samir and his mother put on coats and rush out to the street, where they walk, keeping close to the walls like gangsters. It's dark and his mother is breathing more and more heavily, practically panting. They head to the Métro and then suddenly, halfway down the steps, she collapses. Samir thinks about that dog again—he is afraid she is going to die, afraid he will be left alone, placed in a home—and rage rises suddenly inside him like bile. “Help!” he yells, and people do. Five minutes later, the ambulance arrives. His mother is put on a stretcher. The contractions become more violent: she had forgotten how terrible the pain was—as if she were fighting to the death against a huge, heavy object inside her. A few minutes after that, sirens drowning out her screams, she gives birth in the ambulance, between two firefighters.
³
She weeps with shame. They tell her: it's a boy. She hadn't known; she hadn't wanted to know; she had hoped it would be a boy. The firefighters ask if there is someone they should call—“like the father”—but she shakes her head and says she will do it herself, a little later,
when I feel better, when I have enough strength
, adding inwardly:
to bear his coldness
.

Her boss, François Brunet: a tall, thin, straight-backed man; blond hair and diaphanous skin; always dressed in a black suit and a white shirt with pearl cuff links; and a navy blue (or sometimes burgundy) tie, the only eccentricity he allows himself. Refined, rather foppish manners. With his excellent knowledge of art, music, and literature, he is intellectually commanding, but he is also politically committed, testifying to his highly developed moral conscience. You look at him and you trust him. You meet him and you give him your credit card number. You find yourself alone with him, in a dark alley, and you feel completely safe. You do not detect the predator inside him. You do not perceive the violence, the erotic charge hidden by his straitlaced appearance. He lives with his wife—a tall redhead from the Bordeaux aristocracy—and their three children in a handsome apartment in Place Vauban, surrounded by books and classical music CDs (Bach is his favorite), by cats and contemporary art (his great passion). He addresses everyone as
vous
, even his parents. He has a horror of familiarity, but he doesn't mind being verbally abused during sex.

The day, in the late 1970s, when Nawel turns up for her job interview with this man, he notices her immediately, sitting among the four other applicants. She has the purebred beauty typical of Orientals and he is excited by the voluptuous figure that she hides beneath an overlarge polyester dress she sewed herself. In reply to all of his questions, she replies,
Yes, sir
, or
Very good, sir
. He gives her a permanent contract, secretly hoping she will be his. The very moment she entered his apartment, he thought about having her. His wife, upon seeing Nawel and the other applicants, said: “I would rather hire a Romanian or a Pole: they're cleaner and more discreet than Arabs. But do as you want.” And she is the one he
wants
. He questions her, feigns an interest in her, her feelings and opinions, and one night, he asks her to join him in his office. Nawel wants to refuse. She is frightened. But she goes in anyway.

The obscenity of desire. The pornography of origins. What gives him the right to invite her in his office, after her working day is over, and then to lead her into the private salon he has had installed there, this private salon where he meets with journalists, with colleagues, and with women? What gives him the right to talk to her as if they were already intimate, to pace around her like a wild beast sniffing its prey?
I like you, Nawel
, he keeps saying.
I like you a lot
. What gives him the right to kneel before her, to slip his hands under her little black dress and pull down her panties while asking her
not to tell anyone about this
? He tells her to relax and she lies still. He tells her do this to me, do that to me, and she does. But the situation is more ambiguous than it appears. She does these things because she wants to. With him, she feels free. For the first time in her life, she surrenders to the desire of a man who really looks at her. She loves it. She submits. Such docility: it is astounding to a man like him, used to working with strong, politicized women, feminists who never let down their guard and repel all of his attacks. He sees himself, a man of power, kneeling at the feet of this Arab cleaning lady, and he feels humiliated. And he loves that. He is the prisoner of his urges. This dusky maiden drives him mad with desire. She makes him lose his head, his dignity, his sense of calm, and he knows it: there is something orgasmic in this loss of control, this letting-go, for a man like him, raised on the precepts of a strict Catholicism, brainwashed with a bourgeois morality that allows nothing and condemns everything. So she is his flower of the East. What a cliché! Aversion as a sexual stimulant. But it is stronger than him: it crushes him, takes him over, and he can think of nothing else. For five minutes of pleasure with his cleaning lady, he is ready to do anything, even if it means losing his job.
Oh, it's really not such a big deal
, he tells himself:
Just a little servant-screwing, happens all the time
. He hates her for having turned him into this limp and wimpish creature, this underling. That little brunette has overturned the balance of his well-ordered existence, and now he's in a panic.

The only thing that truly calms him is hunting. Three years before he met her, he joined a shooting club in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. There, earplugs muffling the noises of the world, his mind concentrated solely on the target, he is able to relax. Around that time, he began traveling in Africa, hunting wild beasts. He loves the color of blood, the smell of it. He has spent his career battling against the death penalty, but he accepts the ambiguity. He loves the contrast between the purity of nature—wide-open sky, rich landscape painted in blues and greens—and the deathly vision of sacrificial corpses, ripped apart, entrails cooling, fur stained red. He enjoys the spectacle of death—a death he caused—and, most of all, he enjoys making love after hunting, feeling the touch of a warm body, just like the warm body of the dying animal on the sun-scorched earth. The body that says nothing. That lets him do what he wants. Once he even fucked a woman with his hands still stained by blood. The remembered afterglow of that mad, primitive act still fills him with pleasure even now. When he travels in Africa, alone or with a friend, he generally has no trouble getting a woman to come to his hotel room; he has his networks there, of simple folks who respect his position, his discretion.

But when he is with Nawel, obsession grips him once again. The more he sees her, the more he wants her. And she's in love with him—you can see it a mile off. Soon he becomes convinced that he must break it off with her, but he doesn't know exactly
how
to do it. When she told him that she was pregnant, he asked her to have an abortion—nicely to begin with, because he didn't want to rush her—and then more firmly, in the hope of intimidating her. He undertook to pay all her expenses and even to compensate her—those were his words—for the injury she suffered. But she could not keep it: one must be responsible, one must act like an adult. She refused. For her, being responsible, acting like an adult, meant keeping the child, whose father she loved. For years, she had believed herself sterile, and now “God” had “given” her a child. Realizing that he was not going to be able to change her mind, Brunet helped her find another job—in a dry cleaner's on Rue Montorgueil—because it was impossible to keep her on under his roof and risk the possibility of his wife asking questions, becoming suspicious. Nawel agreed. She signed the “resignation letter” he wrote for her. She imagined him installing her in a beautiful apartment where they would begin their life together again . . . instead of which she found herself scrubbing at oil stains, coffee stains, bloodstains, semen stains, grease stains, stains that can be removed and stains that remain, all those dirty things, those stinking things, those revealed intimacies. This was the very opposite of her dream. This was reality. She worked ten hours a day in a dry cleaner's: taking delivery of the laundry/noting each item/identifying each stain/sorting the colors/sorting the materials/brushing the fabric/preparing for stain removal/scraping off dirt/filling the machines with perchloroethylene/loading and unloading the machine/checking the fabric/rubbing and rubbing/steam-ironing with an inflatable mannequin/rechecking the fabric/putting it in a slipcover—that was her day. Every time she closed up the shop, she had to fight against the desire to shove her head inside the dry-cleaning machine and inhale the toxic vapors of trichloroethylene. The only thing that held her back was the child growing in her womb. She hardly ever saw Brunet anymore. Until the day the child was born.

After several hours spent staring at her child, after counting his fingers, checking that he had all his limbs, she called Brunet from the hospital. “Your son has been born,” she told him in a voice no louder than a murmur, a voice that expressed fragility, fatigue, struggle, and solitude. He did not reply at first—he let the silence float up between them—then announced calmly that he would be around to see them before lunch. At two p.m. he entered the room, holding a stuffed animal—a blue dog of breathtaking softness, purchased in the most expensive toy store on Boulevard Malesherbes. He showed her no tenderness at all, but he took the child gently in his arms, his hand under the baby's neck, as if this were something he had done thousands of times before. And then he got a shock. Because the baby was a tiny version of himself, a perfect replica: white skin, eyes that would soon turn pale, that little tuft of strawberry-blond hair. He had imagined the child would be swarthy like its mother, with shining black eyes (
an Arab face
, he had thought), but seeing that it was white, and blond, like him, he suddenly relaxed. He could love his son now. “What are you going to call him?” he asked. She looked at him somewhat fearfully, then replied: “François.” “Ah,” he said, and that was all. He didn't protest. He knew he would not raise this child who bore his name, that he should remove himself from its life, not rename it as he wished. That she could name him whatever she wanted, do whatever she liked . . . He would not acknowledge the child. The next morning, he came one last time to tell Nawel that he would pay her hospital bills and give her two years' salary to “help with the costs of bringing up the baby,” as he put it. She could have asked for three or four years' salary and the payment of her rent on the attic room, and he would have agreed: he didn't want a scandal. But she didn't ask for anything. He looked into her eyes for several breaths. There was emotion on his face. He still loved her, he knew. But he told her coldly that he did not wish to see them again—neither her nor the child. He had too much to lose: his peaceful marriage, his children, his political career, everything he had acquired through years of sacrifice.

He was still in her hospital room when Samir arrived, accompanied by the two students, arms filled with presents. Brunet nodded to them, said goodbye to Nawel, and left. In fact, he would go to see them a few more times, in the attic room, but his visits would end after he met a young right-wing activist with whom he fell instantly in love.
⁴
Two years later, he would ask Nawel to leave the attic room. He did not admit the truth to her: that he wanted a place to meet his mistress, who was also married. He told Nawel that he had to sell it, but that he would continue to pay her child support. Nawel refused—she had nowhere to go, she had no money—and it was him, “once again,” who found her a two-bedroom apartment in Sevran belonging to a friend of his. It was all settled in a matter of weeks. François Brunet hired a firm to renovate the attic room and, two months later, not a trace remained to show that Nawel and her children had ever been there.

Samir had never been close to this brother, who did not look like him and whom he had always regarded with a measure of mistrust. He himself was the child of an arranged marriage, maybe even a forced marriage, while the other son was a love child—a child of corrupt desire, transgressive passion. The other son was Western while he remained Eastern—he knew this, it was undeniable, and it drove him mad with rage, with jealousy. So, no, he couldn't stand her writing “your brother.” Blood kin? Bullshit. He had chosen his family. His kin was made up of friendships, intellectual and sexual affinities, not the fantasy of a perfect genealogy.

He does call her in the end, though.
She's my mother
, he thinks. And he feels a little ashamed: he has just celebrated his birthday and it never even crossed his mind to invite her. It's impossible: she knows nothing of his life in New York. He decided very early on—even before he was trapped by the lie of his Judaism; yes, even before he started studying law, maybe even while he was still living in the sixteenth arrondissement—that his mother would be an obstacle to his success. The shame of his origins: he did all he could to elude them. He never invited anyone to their apartment and told his mother in no uncertain terms that she must never pick him up from school.

Dialing her number, he feels guilty again. She picks up on the first ring and he imagines her waiting next to the phone for her exiled son's call. “Ah, Samir, my son—at last!” Hearing her voice, her Arab accent, wrenches his heart. “What's wrong, Maman?” he asks. His voice is despondent. You can sense his vexation, his irritation: he would prefer not to talk to her anymore, to sever the cord definitively, but he has never been able to. It is stronger than him. He loves his mother; he feels admiration for her courage, esteem for her resilience; and he feels pain. A life of lies—and for what? “It's your brother . . . I'm worried that he's going off the rails . . .” Hearing this, Samir orders her to be quiet: he knows the line might be tapped. As a lawyer, he deals with sensitive cases; he is careful. Then he changes his mind, reassures his mother: “Don't worry, it'll be okay. I'll try to talk to him.” Instantly she is calm. She imagines herself with her two sons—a good place to be—and her tone suddenly becomes lyrical: “I am waiting for you, my son. I want to see you. You are so far away and I miss you so much. So . . . still no girlfriend?” “No, Maman, I don't have a girlfriend. I'm busy with work.” “It will happen Insha'Allah. Oh, I almost forgot—happy birthday!” “Thank you, Maman. Goodbye.” He hangs up and rushes back to his apartment. He hands the car keys to the valet and, in the lobby, suddenly feels sick. He remembers the evening, his wife, Elisa Hanks's sweaty body. He remembers his brother, whom he hasn't seen for two years, with whom he never speaks, and he feels bile rising up inside him. His body shakes violently and he vomits on the carpet, observed by the night watchman, who asks him if he's okay. No, he's not okay: he's suffocating, bent double, one hand on his belly, breathing hard, in, out, in, out, the stench of the soiled carpet. Then he stands up, takes a deep breath of fresh air, says he'll be fine, and walks quickly toward the elevator—without even glancing back at the employee—thinking how lucky he is that he doesn't have to clean up that shit.