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Hate: A Romance

Faber and Faber, Inc.

Willie

William Miller, in the photos he showed me, looks like a subdued little kid, well-behaved and dull.

He was born in Amiens, in 1970, where he always told me he spent a childhood that seemed happy at the time and terribly sad in retrospect. He had an open face and thick eyebrows. He was a slow student — to put it bluntly, he was no genius — and the one time I heard him describe a memory of first grade, it was of always having to pee and being made fun of. He was a bed wetter. Otherwise there was nothing especially martyrlike about him.

His father, an Ashkenazi Jew, was in the garment business. He opened a shop in Amiens near the mairie which failed, so he went to work as a salesman in a department store selling linens.

His mother was a housewife.

William had two brothers, I never knew their names. He was the youngest. He was still little when he started wearing glasses. His parents got divorced when he was ten. William stayed with his mother in their house near Étouvie. His father moved into an apartment. William didn't see him after that, or not much of him anyway. They weren't close. His father, when he had to take him for the weekend, used to leave him with his aunt, in Compiègne, where William liked to pretend he was a king or a knight in the ruins of the castle, sticking close to the parking lot.

One day we were talking about it, in a leather banquette near the bar. He was winding his big silver watch, fiddling with his wig, he was laughing, and I remember him saying, "At the time I thought it was normal, I didn't feel good or bad, if you see what I mean. Now that I've been around a little, I realize it was wretched."

He was smiling. His brothers were tall — the older one, I think, works for the city, the second one had run away, he ended up in reform school, then the army. From the age of eight or nine, all through William's adolescence, he basically had no communication with them, except when one of them asked what was in the fridge. He got fat.

"Looking back, you realize how many silences there were in a house like that, where the love had just broken in two, you know. Like a string ..."

He played tennis. It was his father who signed him up to play sports. He didn't like his body, he'd have rather they left him alone. He wasn't much good, and he spent hours at a time in the toilet. As the years went by he started to have a few friends, all girls. He made friends with some boys, it's true, in grade school, he said, but never anything deep. There was this one boy, Guillaume, who he practiced tennis with on Sundays, but then Guillaume moved east for vocational school. He had red hair, he never talked, he had no sense of balance on a bike. There'd been a couple of birthday parties, at his house. That was pretty much it.

He was crazy about Star Wars, it became a real obsession. He was always dreaming about Chewbacca and the Ewoks and their planet, and the Empire, and the Millennium Falcon and bipods, the ATSTs at the base on Hoth. He told me once, when the prequels finally came out twenty years later, "That was my way of being a boy."

Whenever the doorbell rang, his mother would call out, "Don't open it, you don't know who it is." Maybe this was because of the scandal that erupted, before the divorce, when his father's mistress burst into their house in a rage, her red hair wild.

William often got phone calls from girls, he always loved to act as a confidant — so he said. But if you ask me, I never saw him really listen to anyone: he was always the one who talked. His friends just tried to keep up.

In lycée he kept to himself, and he got mediocre grades. You could see the red pen on his compositions ("messy") and his report cards ("fair"). They put him in the economics and social sciences track, and the next thing he knew he'd got his bac without even having asked for it. He had longish hair back then — not like anyone's in particular, it wasn't as if he had some idol who wore it that way. At least, I doubt it. He just didn't go to the barber. And he wore button-downs. He had that cupid's bow which everyone would fall in love with, later on, and which back then was covered with peach fuzz. To be blunt, it wasn't a very good look — even clean, somehow it looked grubby. He listened to classical music compilations and French variety songs. He started to read poetry because of a teacher; then he discovered rock, but never really explored it. He liked dance music, but not dancing. If you asked about those years, he wouldn't try to explain, just shrug. "What did I like? ..." I don't think he knew where he belonged.

He didn't start hating his father all at once. It happened in stages. He learned to express himself by running his father down, little by little at first, to other people, to strangers he met. He took a little room in student housing. He enrolled in a program studying sales.

At first he fit in, more or less. He was a little too shy, but he knew enough to smile if you tapped him on the shoulder. He was a bad talker — but in a nice way. An interesting way. He had big, hairy hands, which he was embarrassed about. He felt uncomfortable wearing a tie, and yet sometimes he could be sharp, he was lively, and he could clean up nicely when he had to.

"You're like a butterfly coming out of its cocoon, William. Soon you'll spread your wings." That's what his boss told him during his first internship. Will's admiration for this guy was boundless: he was a bon vivant, a dynamic personality, someone who'd mastered life. When he snapped his fingers it had the force of truth.

Will never understood what happened, though he worried and worried about it. Something occurred between them, something scandalous and wrong, even if no one ever knew. So William left Amiens, he was barely nineteen, in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down — but as he liked to say, what side did it fall on?

"What did the Wall come down to? Really, I'm asking."

He stumbled off to Paris, Gare du Nord — no job, no nothing. Less than nothing.

He met Doum a year and a half later, in June.

Doumé

Dominique Rossi had always looked handsome in a mature way, responsible and lightly chiseled by time. The trouble was, when he was twenty it didn't suit him. He had to wait to look his age.

The village he came from lies just next to Calenzana, in Corsica, a few kilometers from L'Île-Rousse and Calvi. His father was a doctor, the big doctor in town. He had five older brothers, no sisters. He was the baby.

His mother? Italian. That's where he got his long black eyelashes, and the rest of it. A person could have done worse.

He grew up in a big house at the foot of the mountains. Winters they went skiing in the Alps, summers they spent in Sicily then Tunisia, where they owned beautiful second, third, etc., houses.

The ties between his father, Pascal, and the separatists were never entirely clear. He was an intellectual of sorts and in later years he often, you might say, shepherded the young men who started to organize in the early seventies. He owned a vast library, and in his own way exposed the young Bastiais to the idea that Corsica had always been, historically, under foreign domination. Except when Paoli, that slick ... well, but that was another story and it ended with the French. Pascal Rossi was never partisan in anything. No, he was a dilettante, a blowhard with a great thick beard, who smoked his pipe and reflected on events. He spoke Corsican because he taught himself out of a book. He wanted to be able to talk with the old people. He encouraged the younger generation to reconnect with their language, he showed them all the ways the mainland exploited the island, more and more, without bringing them infrastructure or jobs. Unemployment was already on the rise.

Dominique remembered them sitting there in the upstairs room with the wood paneling: Alain, François, Jean-Claude, and the other Alain. His father never said their last names. He'd say, "Read the papers, you know who they are." They were a few years older. Dominique would sit in the corner, he wasn't allowed to drink with them. Wrapped up in her shawl, his mother kept an eye on him — when it came to things like that, she was as strict as his father was relaxed.

Then came Aléria, the underground resistance, and the founding of the FLNC. They say it was his father who opened the door to Jean-Claude, not long afterward, the night of the shoot-out. He certainly didn't approve of the underground tactics, of armed resistance. He never had. Jean-Claude was one of the fugitives on the wanted poster. That famous poster. When the original Bastiais started fighting among themselves, he'd shot the other Alain on his motorbike, who'd lately gotten into bed with the Communists, over some imbroglio having to do with the purge of Orsini. And for Pascal Rossi, the second Alain had been like a son, a sixth son.

"He was like something out of the Bible," Dominique would sigh.

I never could follow the ins and outs of these stories.

Pascal Rossi had opened the door of his barn, where he'd gone to do the chores. Here was Jean-Claude, who had just murdered Alain, on the lam. He'd turned up here by chance looking for help, having crossed the maquis. He had no idea he was on the property of Pascal Rossi, Alain's "father," his protector. Jean-Claude stood there petrified. If it had been anyone else ...

Pascal Rossi let him in and tended to his wounds. He was perfectly plain: "You were wrong to kill Alain. I ought to turn you in, but I'll give you till tomorrow at noon before I call the cops. Hear me? You can sleep and have something to eat. Tomorrow, though, if I have to help them hunt you down myself, I'll do it. And you know it."

"My father had known him since he was little, is the thing ..."

Jean-Claude was killed a month later. They say Pascal wasn't far away when it happened.

Doumé pursed his lips: "That's how it is with this 'Corsican hospitality,' you know. I never had time for it, all those males playing at manly honor, everyone hugging and kissing, all this business about respect, then they turn around and kill you and it's all part of the Code. The fucking Code. Compared to that, communism is feminine. It's more theoretical, more sensitive."

At seventeen he left for the mainland, for Nice, where he attended lycée and prepared for the École Normale. None of the universities was ever controlled by the separatists, especially not Corte. In the seventies all the militants went to study in Nice. Doum couldn't stand them. They were always talking to him about his father, and his father was always talking to him about them.

Dominique worked alone. He worked hard, he worked conscientiously, and during those years he moved closer and closer to the leftists. That way he wouldn't have to betray the young militants around him, but wouldn't have to switch off his brain and join them, either.

He was suffocating.

"Nice was just more of the island. Beautiful, sure, but I didn't get anything out of it. Except maybe Place Masséna."

When he got in to one of the grandes écoles, he went up to Paris. Paris was another story. He'd smile just thinking about it. "So I had a square Corsican face, and bad skin, but it wasn't all that bad. And, well, I'd already gone out with a couple of girls."

"My first time was in Paris, in the suburbs, the place belonged to the girl's father. We did it next to the china, on a folding cot, practically underneath the sideboard. Christ, what a memory."

He shrugged. "I don't remember much about it, actually. I do remember washing the dishes afterward. Putting away the silver. Housekeeping, coupledom, you know how it is. A trap — I could see it even then."

I nodded.

"I pretty much dropped out when I became an activist. But I'd already learned a thing or two. I'd mastered rhetoric as a threat. I knew how to use theory as blackmail. I held on to that and it came in handy. It was an asset. Back then, you might say, I used my skills for the class struggle, all the stuff I'd learned in my father's upstairs sitting room, the room with the paneling. My God, just imagine. The Party. Or as we liked to call it, the Organization. For two, three years of my life it meant everything to me. Then I was done. Were we believers? Sure, we believed. But afterward, you know, in the eighties, with Stand and the rest of it, there was no question of belief. No, that's what we really were, we were defending what we were. All we wanted was to exist. That's a big difference, compared to the Organization, where we were fighting for ideas. We believed in those ideas, absolutely. But an idea's just an idea, you see what I'm saying — we weren't fighting for our bodies.

"In terms of ideology, our leader was a guy named Elias. After Overnay, I mean after he got killed, we spent a long time debating whether to take up arms — as if the whole thing wasn't already over and done with. Elias was pro-violence. Daniel, who handled politics and concrete action — insofar as anything was concrete back in those days, when all anybody ever talked about was 'praxis' and no one ever actually did anything remotely practical — at any rate, Daniel was against it. He dissolved the Party, he started another one, which turned into a club, or really more like a kind of nonprofit, two years later. It was more what I guess you'd call traditional. The swing voters backed the Socialists before the victory of '81.

"I voted for Mitterrand myself.

"Three years later Elias, keeper of the flame of liberation, tactician of hand-to-hand combat, grand strategist of the avant-garde convergence — this guy who said we should all spend a lot of time thinking about why the nonthinkers (that is, the workers) were always in the right, who said we ought to be educating them so they could show us the way forward, which supposedly was all part of the dialectic, but mostly just meant getting our asses kicked outside some factory gate, this guy Elias ... but how can I describe him? He was the kind of guy who'd quote Marx at you whenever you tried to talk, who'd quote Lenin when you quoted Marx, Liebknecht when you quoted Lenin, Pannekoek when you quoted Liebknecht, Mandel when you quoted Pannekoek, and Mao when you ended up quoting Mandel — and when you quoted Mao, he gave you some worker from Billancourt ... and if you were a worker from Billancourt, he shut you up with Lenin. You get the picture.

"So anyway, I lived in terror of the guy. I felt almost guilty around him, this man who stood for the proletariat, the downtrodden, and the antifascist movement all in his own person, which at the same time was ironic, since he was the son of a big industrialist, a specialist in African timber ... In any case, two years later he got religion, of all things ..."

Doumé laughed. "Though I suppose he had religion all along.

"Unless you count a couple of 'interventions,' the Party never did a damn thing in Paris. Three years of doing nothing. There was nothing for me to learn, though it helped me for what came later. It helped me for life.

"When the Party fell apart, a couple of flakes, people none of us really knew, took off for the southwest and continued the resistance by kidnapping the head of some chamber of commerce, this big fat guy from Gers who had no idea what was going on, and then afterward, to liberate some funds — they were completely broke — they knocked over a Crédit Agricole in Pau, and they killed a cop without even meaning to. They spent a year and a half going from barn to barn in the Hautes-Pyrénées before they got caught in their hideout. In the end it was a couple of day-trippers who turned them in. They're still doing time. He has cancer, she's basically lost her mind.

"Elias became Orthodox. He started writing commentaries on the Torah. Daniel made a deal with the Socialists, he lobbied the Party to support Mitterrand, and they got three posts in the head office. He ended up as secretary of tourism and land management, then Fabius came along and they resigned. And came back later on.

"And me, well, I was in New York ... And that's how it ended, the Organization, the Party, the left — well, in any case the left as we knew it — and all that kind of thing. Though in reality it had all been over for years, long before we came around. Oh yeah, and Leibo, Leibo went off to write his books, and then he ended up — well, but I don't need to tell you about Leibo.

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Excerpted from Hate: A Romance by Tristan Garcia, Marion Duvert, Lorin Stein. Copyright © 2008 Éditions Gallimard. Excerpted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc..
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