I had a happy childhood.
Sunday afternoon, my mother bolts into our room while my brother and I are playing in our separate corners. "Children, do I love you?" Her voice is intense, her nostrils beyond belief. My brother answers straight on, but all I can muster with the confidence of my seven years is to hem and haw. I get what's going on but at the same time dread what's to follow. I end up murmuring, "Maybe you love us a little too much." My mother looks at me in horror. For a moment she's at a loss, then moves to the window, shoves it open, and tries to throw herself from the sixth floor. Having heard the noise, my father catches her on the balcony after she has already stuck a leg into space. My mother yells, puts up a fight. Her screams echo through the courtyard. My father pulls her roughly backward and drags her inside like a sack. During the struggle, my mother's head hits the wall and goes clunk. For a long time afterward, there's a small bloodstain on the wall. One day I draw some circles around it with a black felt-tip pen and use it as a dart target; when I hit the bulls-eye, I imagine for a brief instant finding again a way to speak without fear.
When my mother met my father, she was sixteen and he was eighteen. It was in 1956, during a surprise party at the house in Bois-Columbes into which my father's family had moved after the war in '39. My father brought the party to life by playing drums in a little jazz band made up of fellow law students. My mother helped him do the dishes; a year later they were married and they had my brother, whom they named Olivier, for no particular reason I'm aware of. My father barely had time to see his son; he had to do his compulsory military service. It wasn't the best moment to be drafted: instead of the obligatory eighteen months, what wasn't yet called the Algerian War forced him to wear a uniform for nearly three years. He was quartered at Tizi Ouzou, the capital of Algeria's Great Kabylia region, where, according to him, not much happened.
Getting separated from her husband so soon upset my mother. She quickly made up her mind: to abandon her baby at her in-laws' and go join her lover in Algeria. Such boldness wasn't common to most seventeen-year-old girls of the time. Down there, they loved each other. And they were more — or should I say three times more? — than happy to do so, because an intern at the hospital in Tizi Ouzou fell under my mother's not unsubstantial charms; soon he'd join them in their romps; and in the midst of such threesomes, I was conceived.
Excerpted from Report On Myself by Gregoire Bouillier. Copyright @ 2008 by Editions Allia, Translation copyright: Bruce Benderson. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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