Mathis came home from school drunk yesterday.
I saw the gleam in his eyes, the slight lack of coordination in his movements. I asked him to come and breathe on me so that I could smell his breath.
There wasn’t a shadow of doubt.
He hadn’t been drinking beer or cider. No, he’d been drinking hard liquor.
I’m the daughter of an alcoholic. That’s how I began the session with Dr. Felsenberg the next day. That was my lead-in. Even before I sat down. So that things were quite clear. My father drank every day from the moment he got home from work until late into the night. He’d repeat the same phrases until he was intoxicated, sitting in front of a bottle of table wine, preferably red. He would rail against the whole world: drivers, TV presenters, singers, neighbors, politicians, pharmacists, department heads, employees, attendants, delegates, to name but a few. He was never aggressive to us or our mother. That’s how I saw him throughout my childhood and adolescence, sitting in front of a screen that he was barely watching, endlessly repeating the perpetual monologue that we no longer listened to. You could say he was part of the furniture. I think I always felt an indulgent affection for him, though it was tinged with shame. I never invited school friends home. He was a burnt-out man, whose sensibility was so awkward and ill-adapted to his environment that all he could do was drown it in alcohol. I never heard my mother complain. She took charge of everything: not just things related to domestic life, but also forms, official things, medical stuff, school, taxes. People called her a saint. I didn’t understand why, because she didn’t believe in any god. But she put up with this man who had long preferred alcohol to any other form of consolation. When he lost his job, I thought he’d sink like a stone. But the routine stayed the same; the only difference was that he started earlier. He remained on the surface, making no waves, with just his head above water. He rarely moved. Just enough to survive. He would sit in the same place and stick to the same rhythm (between three and five glasses an hour) and check the lights were out before going up to bed. He was allowing himself to die without making a fuss. My mother never commented or made the slightest protest. My older brother worked night security at an electronics warehouse for a few years. After he broke up with his girlfriend, he spent his days in his room listening to records. I looked at the color of his skin and wondered how long he could live without seeing daylight.
One evening the television news had shown a report about an oil slick caused by a tanker accident. We were at the table. I looked at those birds caught in the sticky oil and I immediately thought of us, all of us. Those pictures represented us better than any family photo. They were us. They were our black, oily bodies, deprived of movement, numb and poisoned.
The next day all four of us set off in the car to a cousin’s wedding. My brother was driving. It hadn’t stopped raining all morning. The rain made a metallic sound as it bounced off the windshield. The sky was low and seemed to be waiting to close on us like a jaw when we reached the horizon. Long streams of raindrops quivered on the side windows, held there by the wind. The noise of the windshield wipers was audible inside the car, a wet sloshing sound, relentless, a hypnotizing refrain that encouraged drowsiness. My father was sitting beside my brother in the front. He was looking ahead of him, without really looking at anything. Beside me, my mother was holding her bag on her knees, as though an unexpected signal might at any moment require her to get out of the car. I could also see that she was keeping an eye on the speedometer. Because Thierry was driving fast, very fast. Even though you couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. I’d already asked him once to slow down. He pretended not to hear. A few minutes later, when we were going even faster, I asked him more sharply. My brother muttered something to suggest he had the situation under control and then started tailgating the car in front to force it to let us pass. My father was staring at a point in front of him, with that look of having given up that I had known forever. My mother was hunched over her bag. But I could see the spray thrown back by the cars we were passing one after another, then their taillights began to dance before my eyes, and then all the lights started to blur together.
Dead silence had filled the car.
Then I thought of the expression breakneck speed. The deadly atmosphere that suddenly overwhelmed me was not confined to the car, it was how we had been living for years. I began to scream.
“Stop! Stop now! I want to get out of the car!”
Stunned, my brother slowed down.
“I want to get out of this car! Stop! Let me out! I want to get out! I want to get out!”
I was shrieking like a crazy person.
Thierry pulled over on the next shoulder a few hundred yards farther. He stopped abruptly and I kept repeating the same phrase: “I want to get out, I want to get out, do you understand? I want to get out.” But actually what I was shouting was, “I want to live,” as they knew full well.
I got out of the car. Without saying anything, my father opened his door, walked around the front and opened Thierry’s door. My brother quickly moved over to give him the driver’s seat. My father nodded to me to get back in the car and I shook my head. My whole body was shaking.
He hesitated for a second, then started the engine.
When I think back to that moment, to the final glance he shot me before he rejoined the traffic, I know my father understood that day that I was going to leave them. That I was going to launch myself into different worlds, different ways of being, and that one day we would probably no longer speak the same language.
I watched our car drive away. I was at the side of a major highway. In the distance I could see the outline of a town or a village. I began walking. After a few minutes a woman stopped and offered me a lift.
I come from a family where people say “my cousin coulda” and “my sister shoulda.” And we say “Auntie Nadine” or “Unky Jacques.” “Look what I done.” “We’re goin’ ta town.” We eat our supper every night at the same time in front of the TV news. Just to make things quite clear.
When I met William, I discovered a universe with customs and taboos I knew nothing about. He would gently correct me when I made mistakes. Later he congratulated me on my progress. I read dozens of books and learned quickly. He was proud of me. When Sonia was born, or rather when she started saying her first words, he told me that it was out of the question that she should call my mother “Nana” or my brother “Unky Thierry.” Rules were laid down. We’ve raised our children to speak his language. They say “Grandmother” and “Grandfather.” They go to Paris, not “ta town.” They have dinner in the evening, never supper.
This is what I said, as chaotically as this and in a continuous stream (to be honest, like someone who hadn’t opened their mouth for several years), to explain to Dr. Felsenberg the strength of my reaction when I discovered Mathis had been drinking.
Of course, I immediately thought that it came from me, that it was my fault. He’s not yet thirteen and he’s drinking alcohol. Isn’t that proof that something is dormant in him, just waiting to burst out, roaring? Something that of course comes from me, from “my side”? Because I was quite certain that if I spoke to William about it he’d ask, “Who does he get that from?”
But I had no desire to talk to William about it.
It was well worth expending so much time and energy blending into the background and eliminating everything in me that offended the ears of my husband and his family, trying to pass on elegant turns of phrase and genteel manners to my children.
It was well worth learning to say “Mathis could have” and “Sonia should have,” just to end up here.