Édouard Louis in 2020 during one of the performances of his dramatic adaptation of his book 'Who killed my father?'.Jean-Louis Fernamdez
I remember how quickly meeting Elena separated me from everyone who had been a part of my life before I left for Amiens.
Not only you [the author addresses his father].
When I came home on weekends, I no longer recognized myself in the reality that surrounded me;
A few hours with Elena were enough for her to break down everything she had learned between my birth and my fourteen years.
Suddenly I couldn't stand the things that I had liked before going to high school, the things that I shared with my mother and you despite what separated us, the hours spent in front of the television every afternoon, seven or eight hours before going to bed, or the days playing a console game, or the jokes about women you made at aperitif time when those you called your “friends” came to drink pastis with you,
those jokes that seemed vulgar and violent to Elena, or the afternoons in the town square when there was a fair and the sale of second-hand items, which I used to love;
the few things that still united us became impossible.
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I resented you for not being able to tell you what I had felt when I entered Elena's house for the first time, the world that offered itself to me, the continent that I discovered through her.
I would have liked to talk about it with someone, I think, to be able to express the violence of what was happening inside me, not a destructive violence, no, on the contrary, a beautiful violence, that of uprooting, that of the possibility of a form of freedom.
I can't find the words, I don't know how to say it, I knew there were other lives before I met Elena, of course, rich and poor, privileged and excluded, people around us who had advantages that you didn't, like the town pharmacist or the mayor, that they had money and good houses, but you have to enter those worlds to realize to what extent the difference is real, to what extent it is in everything, not only in money, but in the ways of thinking, of walking , to breathe, everywhere.
I would have liked to be able to describe to someone that abyss and my fascination, the fact that I understood our world through Elena's and Elena's through ours (but maybe I also say "I would have liked to tell you all this" just because it's too much). late, and because, protected by radical and chronological impossibility,
I can attribute to myself all the intentions, the most beautiful and the most poetic;
maybe, deep down, I liked keeping those discoveries to myself and I liked that new silence between you and me).
At home I had become a stranger.
You and my mother noticed that change in my way of being.
She imitated what she saw in Amiens, she no longer said that she wanted to eat but that she wanted to have dinner, she no longer wanted to watch television in the evening.
I couldn't stand the set phrases anymore, “what is needed is for the death penalty to return” or “after all, the right and the left are the same”, I got irritated when you said them, I growled “what nonsense”.
It hurt me not to have parents like Elena's, who questioned all principles in their conversations, and I'm ashamed of having thought that because I know it's false, but to myself I reproached you for lack of intelligence and complexity, at the same time. contrary to Elena's parents.
It is as if at Elena's house I discovered emotions that I had never felt during my childhood,
not because of my age or because I was too young before, but because I didn't even know they existed: melancholy, artistic exaltation, lethargy, and maybe it's partly true, maybe some emotions are bourgeois inventions (it was before I realized that the bourgeoisie is also usually incapable of certain emotions, such as anger or compassion, but I didn't see it then).
She would give my mother advice on how to raise my brother and sister, younger than me: She doesn't have to watch so much television, why don't you make her listen to classical music, and she would get angry.
I used new words, unimportant words but that seemed distinguished to me, annoying, extraordinary, bucolic, I no longer said eight in the evening but twenty hours, words from another world, and my mother would make fun of me: "He talks like the doctors”.
I sent messages to Elena saying that I hated my mother, that I hated you.
I complained that my family didn't understand what I was becoming, that you couldn't understand it because no one in the family had studied or experienced what I lived, but it wasn't true, my complaints were false, deep down that incomprehension and that distance flattered me.
One night, after dinner, I said to my mother: I'm going to make myself tea, do you want some?
I didn't say make myself a tea but make myself tea, like Elena.
I said it to reveal the new person I thought I was.
My mother looked at me and laughed: Be careful with this one, now he's playing the gentleman, he's from the nobility, he's making tea.
She pretended to laugh, but I noticed the hurt in her voice, in her face.
You didn't say anything.
You watched television, in silence, as always, and I don't know what you thought of my transformation.
I knew that there were rich and poor, but not that the difference is real.
It is in everything: in money and in the way of thinking, of breathing
After the first visit to Elena's house, I went there more and more regularly.
His mother invited me to have dinner with them on weekends, to sleep in the guest room, and I did everything in my power to go to town as little as possible, to distance myself even more radically from my mother and from you.
He wanted to listen to Elena all the time, to be in her house, to listen with her to the Glenn Gould or Keith Jarrett records that she liked, or the Brahms ones, for whom her mother admired.
For me, everything else had become a waste of time.
Even on weeknights she avoided boarding school, which is where she should have been;
Nadya told me that her house was also mine and that I could spend as much time there as I wanted.
During dinner, Elena's little sister played piano sonatas for us.
At Elena's house, above all, I had to turn around everything I had learned with you;
her world was ours reversed.
You had taught me that you had to watch television sitting at the table, that dinnertime was the time to watch TV as a family, first the news and then a movie or a series.
If my mother tried to say something or if I wanted to tell an anecdote from my school day, you would get angry, you would tell us to shut up.
You said that watching TV at night was good manners.
At home there were four or five televisions, you would go look for them at the dump and repair them, one television in each bedroom and one in the dining room.
We saw her in the morning before going to school, at night before going to bed, in the afternoon on weekends.
At Elena's house there was no television, neither in the dining room nor in the bedrooms, but, in addition,
In his house, dinner was a ceremony during which you had to talk, and it would have been rude to do the opposite.
How is it possible that her way of life and ours were so opposite in such a symmetrical, so cartoonish way?
Édouard Louis
(Hallencourt, Somme, France, 1992) is a writer and professor at the Lausanne School of Performing Arts.
This excerpt is a preview of
Cambiar: metodo
, from Salamandra editorial, which is published on March 23.
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