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I was skinny, so they must have figured that my self-defense capabilities were feeble or nonexistent. At that age my parents frequently nicknamed me Bony and my father was constantly repeating the same witticisms You're so skinny a breeze could blow you away. In the village, being overweight was viewed favorably. My father and two brothers were obese, as were several women in the family, and people often commented No point in dying of hunger, being fat's not the worst thing that can happen to you.
* * *
(The following year, tired of all the ribbing from my family about my size, I decided to put on weight. I got money from my aunt and used it to buy bags of potato chips after school—my parents wouldn't have given me the money—and stuffed myself with them. Me, the person who had refused to eat my mother's cooking when it was too greasy, precisely because I didn't want to become like my father and my brothers—which would leave her exasperated: It's not like it's gonna clog up your asshole—suddenly I would gobble up anything around me, like those clouds of insects that can unexpectedly swoop down and consume whole fields. I put on nearly fifty pounds in a single year.)
* * *
At first they just pushed me with the tips of their fingers, not too roughly, still laughing, with the gob of spit still on my face, then harder and harder until my head was banging against the wall of the hallway. I didn't say a word. One of them grabbed my arm while the other started kicking me, his smile fading, taking his job more and more seriously, a more and more concentrated expression on his face, an expression of anger and hate. I remember: the kicks to my stomach, the pain of my head hitting the brick wall. That's one part of scenes like this that people don't think of: the physical pain, the body suffering all at once, bruised and wounded. What people think of—faced with a scene such as this one, I mean: looking at it from the outside—is the humiliation, the inability to understand, the fear, but they don't think of the physical pain.
* * *
The kicks to my stomach knocked the wind out of me and I couldn't catch my breath. I opened my mouth as wide as I could to let in some oxygen. I expanded my chest, but the air wouldn't go in, as if without warning my lungs had filled up with some dense kind of sap, with lead. They felt heavy all of a sudden. My body was shaking, as if it had a mind of its own, as if I had no control over it. The way an aging body that is freeing itself from the mind, or is being abandoned by it, refuses to obey it. A body becoming a burden.
* * *
They laughed when my face began to turn purple from lack of oxygen (a natural response from working-class people, the simplicity of those who possess little and enjoy laughing, who know how to have a good time). My eyes filled with tears reflexively, my vision became blurred as usually happens when you are choking on saliva or a piece of food. They didn't understand that it was because I was suffocating that I had tears in my eyes; they thought I was crying. It annoyed them.
* * *
I could smell their breath as they got closer, an odor of sour milk, dead animals. Like me, they probably never brushed their teeth. Mothers in the village weren't too concerned about their children's dental hygiene. Dentists were expensive and as usual a lack of money came to seem like a matter of choice. Mothers would say There's way more important things in life. That family negligence, class-based negligence, means that I still suffer from acute pain, sleepless nights, and years later, when I arrived in Paris and at the École Normale, I would hear my classmates ask me But why didn't your parents send you to an orthodontist. I would lie. I'd say my parents, intellectuals, slightly too bohemian in their outlook, had spent so much time worrying about my literary education that they sometimes neglected my health.
Excerpted from The End of Eddy by Eddy Bellegueule. Copyright © 2017 by Eddy Bellegueule. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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