Hate: A Romance: A Novel

215 Pages·2010·0.81 MB·English

by  Tristan Garcia

HATE: A ROMANCE
Tristan Garcia

Translated from the French
by Marion Duvert and Lorin Stein
To my four parents, whom I love equally
To Agnès
Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Disclaimer
THE FOUR OF US
1: WILLIE
2: DOUMÉ
3: LEIBO
4: ME
JOY AND DISEASE
5
6
7
ENCOUNTERS
8
9
10
11
TAKING SIDES
12
13
14
15
THE GLORY OF MEN
16
17
18
19
20
21
HATE IS BEAUTIFUL
22
23
24
25
26
27
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
28
29
30
31
TRUE LOVE
32
33
34
35
36
37
JUSTICE
38
39
40
HAPPINESS
41
AT PEACE WITH THE PAST
42
43
44
SEPARATIONS
45
46
47
LIFE
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
THE BEST IN MEN
58
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
The characters in this novel have never existed other than in the pages of this
book.
If, however, the reader feels that in certain ways they resemble real persons
whom he or she knows, or knows of, that is simply because other persons or
characters would behave no differently under similar conditions.
THE FOUR OF US
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 AT-STs 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