{"product_id":"the-american-isbn-9781400095858","title":"The American","description":"On June 6, 1944, Frederick Giesbert, assigned to the American army’s 29th division, landed on bloody Omaha Beach, Normandy, an experience from which he never recovered. Three years later, Frederick had returned to his hometown of Chicago, married to a French girl. But when the seemingly happy couple moved to Normandy to make a home with their baby, something in Frederick snapped, and he turned cruel and violent.  His son, Franz-Oliver, spent his childhood doing everything he could to defy his father. \u003ci\u003eThe American\u003c\/i\u003e is a son’s fiercely honest and emotionally gripping story of a search for paternal understanding and forgiveness. | “[An] astonishingly frank memoir of self-discovery and self-loathing.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Says as much about the events in Normandy in 1944 as do many of the far weightier texts that it can honorably sit beside.” \u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What Giesbert does well in his work . . .  is to instill his prose with the haunting that forever chases the abused child, long after that child becomes an adult.” –\u003ci\u003eRocky Mountain News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This dark story, in the tradition of Maupassant, is a miracle: gaiety, imagination, the drive to understand, and also tenderness. . . . It has perhaps never been better show how war continues long after its end and is spread from father to son.” –\u003ci\u003eLe Nouvel Observateur\u003c\/i\u003e | Franz-Olivier Giesbert is a prominent French intellectual, though he was born in Wilmington, Delaware and spent the first three years of his life in America. He is a novelist, biographer, television host and newspaper editor. He has worked at \u003ci\u003eLe Nouvelle Observateur\u003c\/i\u003e as its Washington correspondent and served as Editor-in-Chief of \u003ci\u003eLe Figaro\u003c\/i\u003e. | I’ve spent my life trying to get myself forgiven. As far back as I can  remember, it seems as though I’ve never been up   to it, on any level. It’s a feeling that gives me a knot in   my stomach, often, when I have the misfortune of find-  ing myself alone with myself. In bed, for example, when I can’t sleep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I have to avoid myself. That’s vital. I’ve tried, for several decades now,  with a certain success. Once in a while I linger in front of a mirror to  check out my blank insomniac face or to find a pimple or a new age spot,  but I’ve always stayed away from introspection. I don’t think I could  survive psychoanalysis.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This is therefore not an analysis sublimated by writing, as certain novels  have tended to be. It is my story, a story I have been careful never to  tell myself, for fear I wouldn’t be able to stand it. But I would like  today to unroll its thread, now that I have arrived at the sunset of my  life, and pay my respects, before I join them, to those who made me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To my father, most of all. To my father whom I was so ashamed of and with  whom I think I never talked. Except maybe to ask him to pass the salt or  something at dinner, and even that, I’m not sure of. In the last years of  his life, each time he hung around me waiting to start a conversation, I  changed rooms. I kept putting off the reconciliation that couldn’t fail to  be produced if death hadn’t stolen him from my disaffection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I had an excuse. My father robbed me of my childhood. It’s because of him  that I have always seen the world through adult eyes. Even at the age of  five or six, I was already without illusions. As well as I can recollect,  I never believed in Santa Claus. It’s hard to believe in Santa Claus in a  house where the wife is beaten to a pulp several times a week.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I can’t say when my father began beating my mother, but I knew why. Even  when he didn’t find a pretext, he had a reason. He resented the whole  world, and my mother most of all, for ruining his life. Papa was an  artist, a real one, it seems, and he blamed Mother for preventing him from  being the great artist he could feel welling up inside him, by ceaselessly  making him children. He didn’t like children. They condemned him to  bourgeois mediocrity, which he spat upon every single day. Because of his  children he had to renounce his palette and easel in order to spend hours  boiling up “commercial art,” an expression that, in his mouth, was always  an insult and designated prospectuses, catalogs, or posters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mother gave him five children. In a voice too tired not to show its  fatigue, he called us “mouths to feed,” so it was impossible to be unaware  of the weight we represented on his shoulders, which were nevertheless  broad and powerful. He simply beat us cold. He beat us, too, especially  me, because I stood up to him more than I could make good on, with the air  of a village cock, in order to avenge Mother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Snapshots of that time show me standing a bit apart from the family, head  lowered, seemingly closed off. I   wasn’t unhappy, though. My head was already filled with a Good Lord of  grass, love, dreams, and beasts, not to speak of the Lord and the Holy  Virgin who, from Heaven, watched over me, I believed, like milk on the  stove. It was just that I was ravaged by hatred. Hate for my father, whom  I imagined myself killing sooner or later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Papa slept with a knife under his pillow. It was a habit he acquired in  the army, after the Normandy landing, when his nights were filled with  Germans crawling around to kill Yankees, knives between their teeth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I imitated him. For a long time, I slept with a pocket knife under my  pillow, so as to be able to disembowel my father if he ever made trouble  for me at night. Although I thought a lot about this project, I don’t  think I would have been able to kill him in cold blood, looking him  straight in the eyes. I was too afraid of him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Papa had a propensity for great anger and great violence. Not with  everyone, however. In town, he wouldn’t have hurt a fly. I am even sure he  let people step on his toes in the bars of Elbeuf, where he often hung out  after work. He was the way immigrants often are. He didn’t want to go back  to his country. He was afraid of being noticed, having his work permit  confiscated, and being sent back to the United States of America, his  mother country, which he hated as much as I venerated it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At home, on the other hand, anything would set him off, particularly when  he came back drunk. He wasn’t a happy drunk; that was the least anyone  could say of him. The disappearance of a screwdriver could take on seismic  proportions; the walls trembled until he found it where   he had left it the day before. Same thing if he discovered that some  tool—a trowel or a scythe—had been left out in the rain to rust: a family  specialty. At the dinner table, he blew up over nothing, an ambiguous  imitation or a furtive smile, and blows rained down like shells at the  battle of Gravelotte. We often had to evacuate the wounded, after the meal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That’s why I had a horror of dinners at home. Nights too, since Papa often  waited until the lights were out to slug Mother. Sometimes he bellowed out  expletives while he hit her. Other times, he just yelled. There were the  sounds of a struggle, furniture moving, doors slamming, but I rarely heard  my mother complain while she was being pelted by his fists. Sometimes,  muffled screams came out of her, which still pierce my ears, fifty years  later. But most of the time, in order not to wake the children, she kept  her cries to herself, in the pit of her stomach, where they fed a cancer  that was biding its time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On those nights I stayed in bed, my heart beating, my blood frozen,  trembling like a leaf. I was dying. I think one always dies a little when  one hears one’s mother beaten. I spent a part of my childhood dying, but  only part. In the other part, of course, I grew stronger.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I’m not sure how old I was, maybe four or five, maybe more, but I remember  that it was raining hard and my brothers were not yet born. It was a  summer night, in Italy, on the side of Venice where my father liked to  spend vacations. We found ourselves, Papa, Mother, my two sisters, and I,  in the family car, a Renault that was built like a big bicycle. My mother  was reading the road map with a flashlight in her hand, in order to  indicate our route to my father, who was in a bad mood because of the bad  weather.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Where are you taking us?” bellowed my father suddenly. “We just passed by  here!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I don’t think so.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You’re making us go around in circles. Don’t you recognize this  intersection?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He stopped the car on the shoulder and grabbed the map and the flashlight  from my mother. He concentrated a long time while sighing noisily, because  he only did things halfway, before muttering, “You’re wrong again. You  don’t even know how to read a map.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You’re the one who doesn’t know how to follow my instructions.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For that act of insolence, Mother got a first blow that knocked her  against the car window. Papa didn’t know how to control his strength. He  always hit harder than he intended to. His slaps were like punches.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother, despite the schoolgirl masochism that was eating her up and  that I’ll come back to, sometimes had a good comeback. She muttered  calmly, which made her case worse, “If you think that is how you’ll find  your way, old man—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She received a new blow, even stronger than the first, to judge by the  sound she made: a dull sound, like the sound red meat makes when the  butcher throws it on his worktable before cutting it up. Nevertheless, she  didn’t consider the discussion over.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You beast!” she cried.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Third blow, same dull sound. But this time Mother gathered herself up.  There were limits to her masochism. She threw herself against Papa’s  chest, screaming and drumming against him like an angry child. I always  felt very afraid when my mother resisted like that. She wasn’t up to it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    If I remember correctly—and I think I do, at least when it comes to this  event—that night my mother did not, as she often had in the past, reproach  my father for beating her in front of the children. In fact I’m sure the  thought never entered her head. That was when we were beginning to get  used to Papa’s rages.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    His muscles reacted first. Especially the hand muscles, to be precise. The  head followed. One could never look for my father as cause of an action.  He no longer answered for anything. For a trifle, he could have killed my  mother without intending to, just by punching her wrong. That was why it  was my duty as the eldest to kill him before he committed the irreparable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I didn’t yet have the bulk to stand up to him, but I bided my time, to be  sure to accomplish my design. With a knife, with an ax, with a mallet; I  hadn’t yet chosen the instrument. However it happened, I at least knew  that my father would suffer a thousand deaths, and maybe more.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That’s what I said to myself, that night, on the backseat of the Renault,  while I pouted and Papa riddled Mother with punches. He hit her while  breathing heavily, and heaved a logger’s groan each time he struck a blow.  He applied himself to the task, for he didn’t take anything lightly,  especially vacations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mother was crying, all wrapped up in her own body, protecting her head  with her arms. She was crying without ostentation under the volley of  blows, waiting for it to be over. Years later, on reading Ecclesiastes, I  understood my mother’s philosophy. For her, there was a time for  everything: a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to love and a time  to hate. For nothing under the sun can last, neither happiness nor  unhappiness. I knew then that she had been much stronger than he was.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It goes without saying that we were crying too, my sisters and I. My  father, who ordinarily couldn’t stand the sound of children crying, let us  wail our eyes out when he beat Mother. At the time, I thought he was too  busy correcting Mother to have time to tell us to shut up. Now, after  considering it some more, I think it was his way of telling us we were  right.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Papa had extinguished the flashlight, no doubt so as not to use up the  battery, during this session with Mother. I could see nothing in the  darkness, but I remember that at a given moment my father took my mother’s  nose and gave it a twist, unless he crushed it, but if so, the damage  would have been visible the next day, and it wasn’t.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You beast!” cried my mother again, using her favorite insult. “You’ve  broken my nose!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “That’ll teach you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You can just manage on your own now.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That was the one thing that should never be said. But against all  expectations, Papa decided to stop his attack. He acted like someone who  hadn’t heard anything and continued on his way without saying a word.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was still raining when we reached our destination, a second-class  campground like all those where we spent our vacations, in the midst of  the smell of soap and dirty water. Papa thought it prudent not to put up  the tent on its stakes, so all five of us slept, all tangled up, in the  family car, in the silence that comes after a storm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The following day, Papa uncorked some Lambrusco   and some Asti Spumante. He was ashamed. My father was always submerged in  shame, afterward. He could look at no one and spent hours without  unclenching his teeth. That suited us perfectly. No one spoke to him,  either. As for me, I had a good reason to keep quiet. I was too busy  replaying the film of the fight and planning my revenge. It was the  following night, I think, that I wet the bed for the last time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The air was very heavy in our house along the Seine, in  Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf. Over everything there reigned a certain violence  that crushed you, at least when my father was there. That was surely the  reason I developed the bad habit of breathing economically, in little  gasps, like a person with asthma.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To this day it sometimes happens that I forget to breathe. My turn goes  by. Thus I live between two apneas, more or less. If it were not for the  bright lights on the sides of my eyes and the sensation of  suffocating—which, from time to time, recall me to order—I think I would  have died of asphyxiation long ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Often, Mother sent us to her parents’ house, just over a mile away from  ours, to unwind a bit. They lived in an enormous apartment over the Allain  Press, named after my grandfather, an austere boss, his thin hair slicked  back, his eyeglasses stern, his mustache square, who was constantly  working and, in order to apologize for that, showered his descendants with  gifts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Most of the time, generosity is just disguised indifference, a way to buy  tranquillity. That could not have been true of Papi, as we called him. He  had real goodness in his look and smile, and a kind of sweet and attentive  irony escaped him, for he sought above all to give the impression, even  within the family, that he was uncompromisingly stiff and rigid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I adored Papi. There was something pathetic about his desire for his  twenty grandchildren, with their mothers, to spend at least part of their  summer vacations together in a big house that he rented for them in  Normandy or Brittany. Or about the interminable dinner parties he  organized, made up of family friends and distant cousins. He might have  seemed to be seeking a kind of posterity for himself. But he was too proud  to have room to be vain, too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He doubtless foresaw that someday a great seismic event, his death or  something else, would devastate everything he had patiently built up over  the years: the press, the family, the dynasty. He was too imbued with the  ancients he was always reading—Plato or Plutarch—to nourish the illusion  that one could leave any trace of oneself on this earth. He didn’t believe  in God any more than in the future. His children discovered this rather  starkly when they opened his will and read that he was a Christian but not  a believer, he wanted to be buried in secret at sun-  set, and he wanted to go directly from the house to the cemetery.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Up till then, Papi had always acted like a model parishioner, a great  consumer of hosts. That was how I learned that one knows very little about  other people before   their deaths, even one’s own grandfather. Once they have mounted the stage  boards of life, they continue, up until the last speech, to play a  character in whom they have ceased to believe. Not wanting to rock the  boat, Papi let those who were familiar with his will be his judges and  either carry out or not carry out his wishes. They, of course, covered  what he said with a handkerchief.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I have spoken of Papi’s goodness. But however sociable he was, he couldn’t  stand to have anyone put his authority in question. Not the typographical  union leaders, whom he fired without hesitating. Not my father, who worked  for his press in the “department of design,” as we called it. I don’t  think Papi took advantage of his position to humiliate his son-in-law, but  Papa had contestation in his blood, fueled by his passion for American  writers like Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Papa was not a Marxist. He felt a merciless hatred, in fact, for  Communists and their fellow travelers, whom he accused of sowing death  wherever they went. I heard him say once that he would fear for his life  if they ever came   to power in France thanks to an invasion by the Soviet Union—a hypothesis,  by the way, that he imagined seriously. But at the same time, he loathed  bosses most of all, and all those who, like my grandfather, believed they  had come—it was one of his favorite expressions—directly out of “Jupiter’s  thigh.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My grandfather certainly had no idea how much Papa hated him, because, as  was his wont, Papa said bad things about him only behind his back—that is,  in front of us, at home. Papa accused him of everything—greed, stinginess,  tyranny, meanness—and, which didn’t make things any easier, he was also  jealous of him. He couldn’t abide their conspiratorial tones and low  voices when Papi and Mother exchanged books, magazines, smiles, or secrets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That is no doubt the reason he got along so well with   my maternal grandmother. They both shared, I think, the same hatred of  Papi. The same passion for music, too. Winner of first place at the Paris  conservatory, Mamie made me cry when she played, with ineffable skill,  Bach or Dupré, her great friend, on the organs of the churches of Elbeuf.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But she did everything to kill the artist in her. Except when she was in  front of an organ, once or twice a month, not much remained of the  musician Papi thought he’d married, inflamed as he was from the moment he  laid eyes on her, the great Romantic, seeing the sad-eyed girl with the  prominent eyeballs whose blind father was a piano tuner. He asked her to  respond to his marriage proposal in music: If the answer was yes, she was  to play a Bach fugue at Sunday mass. She played the fugue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As the years passed, Mamie drowned in masochism, that family curse. Once  funny, lively, and cultivated, her heart in her hand, a pelican’s heart,  she was subject to   sudden absurd outbursts, over a laundry mark or insipid friends. She  repeated the same expressions all day long; for example, about her  grandchildren: “It’s scary how cute he is.” She confined the perimeter of  her conversation to the babies, the clothes, the vacuum cleaners, and the  cleaning products, while keeping, nevertheless, down to her last drop of  life, each time she took her place at a keyboard, the same magic at the  tips of her fingers. Papi took a mistress in Paris and loved her  passionately. He fled regularly to Italy, where he always spent vacations  with her, around Lake Como. He sent us postcards saying “love and kisses.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mamie often confronted him with scenes of jealousy.   I even saw her slap my grandfather around one Sunday night when he tiptoed  in without having turned on the light, with two enormous suitcases by his  side. She had been waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I finally understood that when Papa beat Mother, he was also hitting Papi.  When we came back from one of our stays with our maternal grandparents, he  would correct us for no reason, just for the principle of the thing. No  doubt he could see in our eyes that their world fascinated us. I loved  everything about their house. The ecstasies of their huge tubs, whereas at  home we had to shiver under a shower. The orgies of apple cubes our  grandfather provided for us. The huge bookcase in his bedroom, which  contained his complete set of Pléiade volumes. The incessant stream of  teasing words, uttered in a low voice, his eye benevolent. The nightly  depredations I made in the condensed milk he kept for his morning coffee.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One evening when my sisters and I were just coming back from a visit to my  grandparents, my father lined us up in front of him, like soldiers being  reviewed by their captain, and bellowed out in a martial voice, “So,  spoiled children, did you live the high life?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We didn’t answer anything, in order not to excite him. But he grew heated  all by himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You believe that’s real life, the life of châteaus among the filthy rich  who fart above their asses! Well, you’re poking your fingers in your eyes.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My father had an American accent so thick you could cut it with a knife.  Like Eddie Constantine, a popular actor in the fifties. But for a  foreigner, he had a huge vocabulary, speaking fluent slang, with a sort of  voluptuous triviality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Your grandfather,” he continued, “doesn’t take himself for a turd, that  guy, with his air of having shat all architecture. But he has an asshole  like everyone else, the poor idiot.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I don’t know what my crime could have been, a shrug or an unfortunate  word. But Papa’s fist shot out at me. I tried to avoid it, but he knocked  me into the hutch right behind me. A key in one of its doors broke the  arch over my eyes where the brows are. I still have a scar there to prove  it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I remember the expression on Papa’s face afterward. He looked very  bothered, while Mother tried to stanch the blood that flowed everywhere. I  don’t think I told on him to the doctor who put in my stitches, but for a  long time I displayed my eyebrow wound proudly, like a battle scar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I certainly hadn’t stolen my punishment; instead of killing Papa, I  wounded him often. As he resisted physically, I learned that making fun of  him could hurt him more than injuries or blows. My only weapons were the  insults I threw in his face, sometimes right in the middle of a meal, just  before running away as fast as I could. When he ran after me, he always  caught me. But I generally waited to provoke him until the end of the  meal, when the wine had gone to his head. He would get up with a terrible  scraping of his chair and then sit down again, cursing at me and lashing  out against what he called “my stuck-up airs.” Rightly so; I spent my  childhood scorning him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      4\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thanks to my father, I learned to live outdoors in any weather, among the  beasts, trees, and vegetation. Unable to stand his presence in the house,  I often spent entire days in nature, mingling with the great shudder that  comes and goes over the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Orival Landing, where we lived in Saint-Aubin-lès-Elbeuf, ran along a  curve of the Seine. When the weather was nice, it seemed to drown beneath  a flood of trees, shrubs, and brambles that were trying to pull themselves  up to the sky before they fell back to earth, exhausted, the foliage  shining with rain, with dew, or with the slime of snails. Everything there  smelled like mud and love, even the people.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Much later, I often encountered that odor at the foot of beds or in damp  forests: the smell of the joy of life. Even when it was pouring or the  tree branches were covered with frost, I felt that joy underground, a joy  of the banks of the Seine, which required, to burst out, only a sunny day,  and which, when the day came, would swell the buds, overturn the rocks,  and flow toward my feet. That joy enchanted my childhood. I was everything  at once: the birds that chirped, the ants that poured out of their hills,  the rabbits that danced beneath the brambles, the seeds that creaked with  happiness, the wind that ran its fingers through the willows’ hair. I was  also the Seine, which let itself flow lazily, half asleep, eight months  out of twelve.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I never had to look for God. He was everywhere, in that joy. It seemed to  me that I was accompanied and protected. Sometimes, in the midst of the  day, because of the wind, the sky, or a smile, I would get carried away by  a feeling of ravishment. It was God that called me, I knew it. He never  spoke to me, even when I spoke to Him. But I always felt his presence. So  the day my mother took me to catechism class for the first time, I was  already very devout.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The course was given by the parish priest, a chubby, rosy-cheeked fellow  who oozed goodness from every pore: Abbé Mius. He didn’t have any trouble  making me into a Catholic. God was for me so obvious, he almost poked you  in the eye. I’m sure that, in my mother’s womb, I was already a believer.  She transmitted to me a kind of fetal faith, a primal and animal  faith—when she spoke about Christ she would have the ecstatic look of a  Carmelite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No doubt she liked sex too much ever to have been tempted to take holy  vows. But except for the vow of chastity, I could easily imagine my mother  taking the   veil and spending her life, a psalter in hand, praying to God. She who  never stopped mortifying herself had a hard time accepting the fact, I  think, that Christ was a man. I hardly exaggerate when I say that she  would eagerly have embraced damnation if only someone would pierce her  hands with nails. For lack of anything better, she put them there herself,  gradually, with the ecstatic expression of those who adore it when their  flesh burns. It did her good to do herself harm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As an anticlerical in Nietzsche’s manner, my father constantly made fun of  my mother’s ostentatious piety. It’s true that she liked to show off her  stigmata. Sometimes they had the blue color of the shadows under her eyes,  after long days dealing with naps, dirty linen, and crying children.  Sometimes they would be green like the bruises inflicted by Papa. Often,  in order to be disagreeable, he called her a saint, and I think the word  suited her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Marie-Berthe, called Mabé, saint and martyr. Her greatest happiness would  be to be beheaded, or disemboweled, cut up and scattered. She gathered  herself together as she could. I understood her better when I was about  eleven and found in our library, lost between two huge volumes, doubtless  some paternal Hugo or Balzac, a little volume   by Simone Weil entitled The Weight of Grace. When the weather was good, I  often took the book along with me,   in my wanderings along the Seine, to read a few pages surrounded by the  beauty of the world. My mother had underlined passages in pencil, as Papi  also liked to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thanks to Simone Weil, I understood the virtues of detachment and  renunciation, which I saw at work every day when my mother silently  absorbed my father’s anger or served herself last at table, or when she  didn’t actually give her piece of cake to one of her gluttonous children.  Since then, it seems to me I drink from the same well as Mother every time  I reread Meister Eckhart’s Treatises and Sermons, Saint Teresa of Ávila’s  Life, or Saint John of the Cross’s Spiritual Works.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Except for The Weight of Grace, I never saw any of these books in the  house, but Mother sounded exactly like them in different words and  conformed to each of their precepts. To find oneself by losing oneself. To  renounce everything in order to take possession of oneself. To lower  oneself constantly in order to rise up to God.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mother had the religion of sacrifice and never stopped giving of herself:  to her children, to her high school students, to sick or distressed  neighbors, to everyone. Her self-denial was almost hysterical.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Some years later, a long time after Mother’s death, I had one of the  strongest shocks of my life when I read the autobiography of Saint  Marguerite Marie Alacoque. It was my mother speaking to me, her words and  her obsessions. With my heart aching, I heard her voice from the grave  through the words of the nun arriving at the Monastery of the Visitation,  in Paray-le-Monial, in 1671.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The more my love for him is oppressed,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The more I burn for his unique ability to console;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Let me be nightly and daily distressed,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My love for him cannot be removed from my soul;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The more I suffer for his part,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The more he twines me in his heart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It is in her autobiography that Marguerite Marie recounts that one day,  not being able to stand herself for being disgusted by little things, she  couldn’t stop herself from licking up the vomit of a patient and eating it  while saying to God, “If I had a thousand bodies, a thousand loves, a  thousand lives, I would sacrifice them all in order to submit   to thee.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That was exactly Mother. At home, she was the bowel-movement inspector,  rolling her eyes in ecstasy when she saw, at the bottom of the pot, her  children’s turds. She almost stuck her nose in them. I even heard it said  that, at the Liberation, she was not a prudish nurse. She never had to be  asked to clean up the sick or the dead. She even tolerated quite well the  job of emptying the vat of family excrement. My mother loved shit, because  it enabled her to expiate everything and nothing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      5\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Rereading my pages up to here, I wonder whether I haven’t fallen into the  trap so frequent among writers of memoirs. With a few exceptions, they are  either vain or whiny, accusing themselves by beating on the chests of  others while recounting all the harm that has been done them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I, too, have done evil, notably to my father. As I said before, I  practically never talked to him. I even turned my back on him, especially  when he was down. Long after my mother, the most immediately concerned,  had forgiven him his volleys of long ago, I refused to let him off the  hook or even to commute the sentence I had given him: perpetual silence.  Wrapped up in my idea of vengeance, I always kept my teeth gritted, my  face glowering in front of his face, which toward the end was asking for  grace.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When he was suffering from bouts of lumbago and shouting loud enough to  wake the dead on his sickbed, I didn’t once go up to his room to ask him  what I could do to help. Rather, I chuckled to myself. When he was fired  from the press at age fifty and saw himself definitively reduced to  unemployment, I made no sympathetic gesture toward him, not even a word.  He had become invisible to me—except, of course, when I wanted to provoke  him. I loved to drive him crazy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Did you feed the rabbits?” he growled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48338549604581,"sku":"NP9781400095858","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400095858.jpg?v=1769572645","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-american-isbn-9781400095858","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}