The Wound Read online

  “One of France’s most talented writers, Laurent Mauvignier always kept a low profile on the literary scene—until his stunning novel about the Algerian War became a runaway bestseller.”

  —France Today

  “[Mauvignier is] one of the major French writers today.”

  —Lire Magazine

  “The Wound gives us a France that few American readers will recognize, a land and a people marked by a history in which memory and violence can seem indistinguishable. . . . David and Nicole Ball’s translation is as elegant as a flick-knife—a superb version of this viscerally important novel.”

  —Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

  The Wound

  Winner of the French Voices Award

  www.frenchbooknews.com

  The Wound

  Laurent Mauvignier

  Translated by David Ball and Nicole Ball

  Foreword by Nick Flynn

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

  Translation and foreword © 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  Originally published in French as Des Hommes © 2009 Les Editions de Minuit.

  French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch.

  This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image adapted from Wikimedia Commons/Casbah-La Bataille D’Alger, 1957.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mauvignier, Laurent.

  [Hommes. English]

  The wound / Laurent Mauvignier; translated by David Ball and Nicole Ball; foreword by Nick Flynn.

  pages cm.—(French voices)

  “Originally published in French as Des Hommes? 2009 Les Editions de Minuit”—Title page verso.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8032-3987-6 (paperback: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-7653-6 (epub)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-7654-3 (mobi)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-7655-0 (pdf)

  I. Ball, David, translator. II. Ball, Nicole, translator. III. Title.

  PQ2673.A836D4713 2015

  843'.914—dc23

  2014039726

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  And your wound, where is your wound?

  I wonder where that wound is nestled, where it is hidden, the secret wound where every man runs to take shelter if his pride is violated, when it is wounded. That wound—which has become his inner self—is what he will inflate and fill. Every man knows how to find it and inhabit it so completely that he becomes the wound itself, a kind of secret, aching heart.

  Jean Genet, The Tightrope Walker

  Contents

  Foreword

  By Nick Flynn

  Afternoon

  Evening

  Night

  Morning

  Glossary

  Foreword

  Nick Flynn

  Afternoon. Evening. Night. Morning.

  The Wound is a quiet novel with a war in the middle of it. We begin in a small French village on one semi-eventful day, a day when something that has been lurking below the surface of every other day—a tension from all that has been left unspoken—rises up for a moment in the form of a few wounding words and a thoughtless (sinister? premeditated?) act. Once that dark thread is plucked it leads us back to all we have tried to forget, all we have tried to leave behind. I say “we” because this is a novel that very quickly pulls us into its orbit. The narrator walks us through this incident and its aftermath and then rewinds the frames to when the protagonist, Bernard, was a young man in a war. Bernard came home from that war and he has become an outcast—unable to turn away from what had happened, or perhaps the pressure of turning away has distorted him. The narrator lived through that war as well, along with his cousin Bernard; he carries some photographs of those days, photographs which keep changing in meaning the more he looks at them. The Wound ends up being about time and the masks we all wear and how blood runs in both directions at once, both away and toward whatever wounds we try to ignore. The tension builds slowly, surely—it takes its time, yet each word, each gesture, is utterly gripping. Within a few pages you know you are in the realm of something magnificent.

  Afternoon. Evening. Night. Morning—this is how Laurent Mauvignier divides the book, these are the names he gives each section. The story unfolds in one day, until we land in Night, which travels, as nights do, through time and space, bringing us closer to the unknown, the mysterious, the out-of-sight, the dreamworld.

  In Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay’s study of war and its aftermath, the author proposes that the Greeks wrote their plays, in part, to try to understand the soldiers coming home after their endless wars; what soldiers bring back inside them, and what they don’t—or can’t—talk about. Why Ajax slaughters all the cattle in that tent, say. The Wound begins in the same silence, after the incident that is, in retrospect, both predictable and unfathomable. A small cruelty that leads back in time to a larger one, the one no one wants to talk about.

  The books that come closest to The Wound’s energies are J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Like those masterpieces, The Wound has the feel and texture of inevitability, as if every word had been floating along the surface of some hidden river below the earth’s crust all this time. Until this moment no one had yet found the crack, no one had simply bent down, reached through it, touched the water. The Wound is contained in a day, and what happens on that day—perhaps on any day, if we could only touch it—reveals the entirety of the universe. Something happens, and through it we try to understand all that has happened.

  At the end of The Wound is a glossary; turn to it now. Find the words and places that may or may not help in reading the book (wadi, harkis, bicot). Many of the words are from the Arabic, others are places of battle or massacre (Verdun, Oradour-sur-Glane). Scattered throughout the book are references to a handful of images that get returned to over and over—photographs, masks, stones . . . each one takes on talismanic significance by the end. In the end it is, perhaps, simply about wrestling with what it means to tell a story as the narrator describes it:

  Maybe none of that matters, that whole story doesn’t matter, maybe you don’t know what a real story is if you haven’t lifted the ones underneath, the only ones that count, they’re like ghosts, our ghosts, that accumulate and are like the stones of a strange house where you lock yourself in all alone, each one of us in his own house, and with what windows, how many windows? And at that moment, I thought we should move as little as possible during our lifetime so as not to generate the past, as we do, every day, the past that creates stones, and the stones, walls. And now we’re here watching ourselves grow old, not understanding why Bernard is out there in that shack, with his dogs so old now, and his memory so old, and his hatred so old too that all the words we could say can’t do very much.

  The narrator is in a car, an echo of someone else trapped in a car in one great novels of the twentieth century—the eponymous Mrs. Bridge, trapped in her car, watching the snow fall. And here we are in the twenty-first century, holding a book that looks back into the twentieth, to a central event in the history of France, which leads to Algeria and its war for independence and sets the stage for our future “modern” warfare of neighborhood street battles, an enemy who looks just like the people the occupiers are trying to protect (or subjugate—it depends upon your vantage point), and the introduction of torture as a means to cow a population. The pattern was set in Algeria and it has been repeated in Vietnam, in El Salvador, Iraq, the Congo, the list goes on and on, with predictably disastrous results. The Wound brings us closer into the mind of those for whom the war never really ends, and how they—we—carry these wounds with us into our homes. All of this takes place during Night, as if it were all a dream—or a long nightmare—we had yet to escape, because until now we hadn’t found the words.

  The Wound

  Afternoon

  It was past a quarter to one and he was surprised everyone wasn’t staring at him, surprised no one showed astonishment because he, too, had made an effort, he was wearing a matching jacket and pants, a white shirt, and one of those imitation leather ties like they used to make twenty years ago and you can still find in discount stores.

  Today, people will say he didn’t smell too bad. They won’t make sarcastic comments about him coming for a free meal and for once he won’t have to pretend he dropped by at the spur of the moment. They’ll call him Woodsmoke as they have for years, and some will remember he has a real name under the filth and the smell of wine and the neglect of his sixty-three-year-old body.

  They’ll remember that behind Woodsmoke there used to be Bernard. They’ll hear his sister call him by his first name: Bernard. They’ll remember that he hasn’t always been a sponger who lives off others. They’ll watch him on the sly so as not to put him on his guard. They’ll still see him with the same yellow-gray hair from tobacco smoke and charcoal fire, the same bushy, dirty mustache. And those blackheads on his pockmarked, bulbous nose, round as an apple. And the blue eyes, with the skin pink and swollen under the lids. The broad, solid body. And th
is time, if you paid attention, you would see the traces of a comb on his swept-back hair; you would see he made an effort at cleanliness. And you could even tell yourself he wasn’t drunk and didn’t look too nasty.

  People had seen him park his moped in front of Patou’s like he did every day, and then go in there for a bit before crossing the street to come in here, into the community center, to be with his sister Solange, who was celebrating her sixtieth birthday and her retirement with all of us—cousins, brothers, friends.

  And it’s not exactly then, but afterward, of course, when it was all over and we had left that Saturday behind, and the empty hall with its smell of cold tobacco and wine, its ripped, soiled paper tablecloths—and outside, the snow on the concrete slab in front of the entrance had finished covering up the footprints of all those guests who had gone home to wonder over the events of the day—it was only then that I, too, would see every scene again, astonished to find each of them so clear in my memory, so present.

  I will remember that when people started giving their gifts I had looked at him, Woodsmoke, standing slightly apart from everybody, fiddling with something in the pocket of his jacket. Actually, that jacket—I’d never seen him with that jacket, but I knew it. I mean, I’d never seen it on him, a suede jacket with a woolen lining on the collar. It looked old, and I had the time to think it had belonged to one of their brothers, his and Solange’s brothers, who must have given him some old things in exchange for a little help, a cord of wood to move into the garage, or even for nothing, just to give his brother some clothes he didn’t want anymore.

  I said that to myself as I was looking at him because he still had his right hand in his pocket and that hand seemed to be holding or manipulating something, a pack of cigarettes, maybe, but no, of course not, I’d seen him take out his pack of cigarettes and put it into his back pocket.

  People had begun to talk louder and laugh, too—a laugh that billowed from one mouth to another as corks of mousseux popped and glasses clinked together. Dozens and dozens of Solange’s friends had filed by, acquaintances, faces as familiar as the ones in the photos she kept behind glass in her living room cabinet.

  Come on, Solange, you have to drink.

  And Solange drank.

  Come on, Solange.

  And Solange had smiled, talked, laughed in her turn, and then we had almost forgotten she was there as she went from one group to another, for groups had formed according to affinities and relationships, some slipping from one group to another and others, on the contrary, avoiding them altogether.

  I don’t know if she avoided going up to him, knowing she couldn’t get out of that invitation, because I know how much she dreaded it even more than she dreaded the presence of the Owl and her husband, and the presence of Jean-Jacques, Micheline, and Evelyne and a few others, too. But his presence. His. Woodsmoke. Bernard. It wasn’t the first time I’d had the feeling she was uncomfortable because of the guilt she felt when she would hide out in her kitchen so as not to open the door to him; when he’d go down to La Bassée, and after a prolonged stop at Patou’s would show up in front of her gate yelling he loved his sister, he wanted to see his sister, she had to talk to him, she had to, she had to, he would say, howling so loud he became threatening sometimes because nobody would come and all the new houses around would only echo back silence and emptiness. Silence and houses hollow as caves in which his voice seemed to get lost, dwindle, and fade away until he finally gave up, grumbling all the way down the road to his moped. Which would take him back home or else back to Patou’s, where he’d probably end up drowning his disappointment in another drink, the last one, for the road, until he’d let Patou convince him that Solange had to work, people have to work, you know, a single woman with kids.

  And he would end up saying yeah, sure, I understand, my sister who’s all alone, my sister and her kids. He would lower his eyes and blush at all the unfairness, at that whole mess, he’d say to the customers, whoever was willing to hear, or rather to the ones who had nothing better to do than hear him—rather than listen to him—despite Jean-Marc’s voice lecturing him nicely, or Patou’s,

  Yes, Woodsmoke, we know, yes, Woodsmoke, your sister, yes, that’s right, Woodsmoke.

  And on his way out he’d always end up spitting near the door, always in the same spot, always staggering, near collapse but never collapsing, standing solid even in that way he had of being pathetic, weak, and dying all the way into his heart.

  But there was his impatience. His way of smiling. A kind of hostility in his presence, or distrust, already, like always, or even, yes, a kind of condescension.

  That’s what I’ve always told myself.

  Even when I saw him like that, scrubbed rather than clean, when all his cleanliness suggested the strain, the work, the determination he had put into making himself presentable.

  And that afternoon I watched him for a long time. I don’t know why, but my eyes kept coming back to him. He wasn’t aware of me. I would watch him as he exchanged a few words with Jean-Marcel, with Francis, watch him smile at the children he didn’t recognize.

  And then suddenly he made up his mind.

  I saw him straighten up, tense up and look around frankly, not surreptitiously as he had up to now, but with his neck stretched and his eyes wide open. I had the time to see him take something out of his pocket, but something too little for me to see, or understand. A black shape I hardly saw before it was swallowed up by the palm of his hand. His fingers closed immediately. Fist clenched, wide, thick and rough.

  And then he walked forward. And then he called Solange. And then, as he kept walking toward her, he called Solange louder and louder. Until people stopped to look at him for a moment, surprised at his burst of energy, at this movement, suddenly, at his smile and energy; I would have said it was actually the faith of a visionary (but I have my reasons for thinking that, seeing it like that), but that wasn’t it, it was the joy of a man who was a little strange and out of it, who probably didn’t like being there, who certainly wouldn’t have come if Solange hadn’t specifically invited him. I mean, he wouldn’t have come if one of his brothers or another sister had invited him—not one of them. He spoke to them from time to time and even accepted a few rare invitations sometimes, but only to thank them for a handout—old clothes—or out of the need to eat, out of hunger, because hunger drove him out of his house.

  They got out of his way to let him go by. It took awhile for the surprise to swell, for all the movements, the looks and the comments to stop. It took some time for all the movements to slow down and stabilize. It took something more than a gesture or a laugh, it took a scream.

  Not a scream of horror, nor terror. No. A voice breaking from stupefaction, a surge of energy and something shattering against him. It was only slightly above the voices and the attention that was vaguely floating in his general direction, toward his voice and movements, and his gesture toward Solange, but it wasn’t insistent enough for them to be quiet, for everybody to listen.

  Yet someone sees, always.

  And here it’s Marie-Jeanne who was the first to see, because she was near Solange and at the moment he came over to the table Solange was sort of leaning on—her hand resting on the edge of the tray, flat on the paper tablecloth—Marie-Jeanne was trying to taste another one of those marvelous petits fours shaped like a little tart with anchovies or cream of tuna when she must have moved, turned around, whatever, and seen him in front of her, suddenly, right there now, his outstretched hand holding that little box (not black, as I had thought at first, but a very deep blue encircled by gold edging) for her, to give her this present she was not expecting and saw coming out of his big callused hand—that man who was so improbably here, in front of her, so fearsome that she would have cried out anyway, even if he had nothing in his hand, even if he hadn’t held out his hand or his fist, or that little deep blue box.

  So yes, you have to hear that particular cottony silence, and the snow that had started to fall again, perhaps, the silence of snowy days, as if something of that silence had entered the hall. You could also have said it was an awkward moment, but the moment was so short, so fleeting. Because Marie-Jeanne got ahold of herself right away, straightened up, stuffed down a petit four and then laughed,