The Emperor, C'est Moi Read online

  the emperor, c’est moi

  the emperor, c’est moi

  HUGO HORIOT

  Translated by Linda Coverdale

  Afterword by Françoise Lefèvre

  Seven Stories Press

  New York / Oakland

  Copyright © L’Iconoclaste, Paris, 2013

  English translation © 2015 by Linda Coverdale

  Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Insitut Français.

  This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

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  Book design by Jon Gilbert

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Horiot, Hugo, 1982-

  [Empereur, c’est moi. English]

  The emperor, c’est moi / Hugo Horiot ; translated by Linda Coverdale ; afterword by Françoise Lefèvre.

  pages cm

  Originally published in French as: L’empereur, c’est moi. Paris : L’Iconoclaste, 2013.

  ISBN 978-1-60980-612-5 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-60980-613-2 (e-book)

  1. Horiot, Hugo, 1982- 2. Autistic children--France--Biography. 3. Asperger’s syndrome in children--Patients--France--Biography. I. Coverdale, Linda, translator. II. Lefèvre, Françoise, 1942- writer of postface. III. Title.

  RJ506.A9H65513 2015

  618.92’8588320092--dc23

  [B]

  2014038290

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my mother, who gave birth to me a second time.

  To my beloved father, with my thanks.

  To my sisters Hermine and Olivia, in affectionate complicity.

  And to my sister Rebecca, who endured the worst rages of the cannibal Little Prince, with my loving gratitude.

  To Jean-Jacques Pauvert, my first reader, for his invaluable support.

  Only do not forget this: the dreamer must be stronger than the dream. Otherwise, danger.

  —Victor Hugo, The Headland of Dreams

  CONTENTS

  I I. BIG BANG

  Numbers and Letters in the Stars

  Wheels and Me

  The Tractor

  Pipes

  Gleaming Green Tiles

  Faster than Light or Kindergarten for Jerks

  The Red Telephone

  Mama’s Belly

  Welcome, Without Any Fuss or Fanfare

  Hermine

  Imprisoned: Forgotten

  My Tree on My Planet of Sand

  The War of the Kindergartens

  Kick in the Head

  The Apple

  The Dictator and the Diplomat

  The Shit in Me and Me in It

  Turtledove My Love

  Conditioner

  II II. ASHES AND RUINS

  How I Died at the Age of Six

  The Emperor, C’est Moi

  Trajectory

  When I Daydream

  From Dragons to Humans to Vampires

  Hugo Versus Julien

  The Little Girl, the Tyranny of Impulse, and Me

  Caution: Public Menace!

  III III. THE BLACK YEARS

  From Resistance to Collaboration

  Reverse Discrimination

  The Pig Trough

  Razor Blades in My Mouth

  Odile

  Politics and I

  IV IV. THE THEATER AND TRANGRESSION

  The Giant of the Cinema

  Smooth Outside, Empty Inside or The Loser Who Was Taken for a Big Shot

  This Is Where We Met

  Even Trollops Mend Their Skirts or Lucretia’s Lesson

  The How of the Why

  EPILOGUE

  To All Those Who

  Cannibal Yourself or What I Was Lucky to Have Been Spared

  In Praise of the Norm

  When the Storm Has Passed

  AFTERWORD BY FRANÇOISE LEFÈVRE

  My Child of the Abyss

  I

  BIG BANG

  Numbers and Letters in the Stars1

  My name is Julien. Julien Hugo Sylvestre Horiot, but I’m called Julien. I am four. I am very well behaved. Too well behaved. When something doesn’t please me, I get angry. Too angry. I scream. I scream, but without words.

  I do not speak.

  I often make repetitive gestures. What I’m particularly fond of is wheels. Probably because the Earth turns around itself, the Moon goes around the Earth, which goes around the Sun. That, that’s something my father told me. But the Sun, what’s it go around? That he didn’t tell me. Maybe because I didn’t ask him? Anyway, I never ask anyone anything. I know how all the letters line up. I even know how people make words from them, it’s my mother who taught me that. Together we drew the alphabet and the numbers up on my bedroom wall. I also know how to count. Very far and very fast. I can count in my head all day long if I want. Without stopping. But I do not speak, not even to my mother. The only one I take the trouble to speak to is my worst enemy: Julien. Only when I’m alone with him, tête-à-tête. I hate him. I am going to kill him.

  I know perfectly well that I am going to die.

  It will all go on without me.

  And I will not be born again.

  Not like that.

  So: I am four and that’s where I’m at.

  Note:

  1Des chiffres et des lettres (“numbers and letters”): A French television program that tests the ability of two contestants to understand and work with words and numbers. It debuted in 1965 and is still going strong, one of the longest-running game shows on TV.

  Wheels and Me

  They turn around and around, toy car wheels. And the tractor’s plow wheel too. And merry-go-rounds. And the Earth, Sun, stars.

  Me, I set wheels turning. As soon as I can, all day long. As the world turns, so do I. I mark the beat of passing time. I do know that if I went around faster, time would not speed up. So I maintain a constant speed. Cruising speed. The one that best suits my arm, my body. Probably the speed that matches my pulse. Thus my heart beats to the rhythm of the turning Earth. The Universe spins around as well, thus making infinity, which is probably a question of circles and spheres turning inside one another and so creating the movement of life made of births, deaths, and rebirths.

  I know perfectly well that I am going to die.

  It will all go on without me.

  And I will not be born again.

  Today, we are going out. My mother has dressed me in my satiny white shirt and my blue velvet corduroy pants. I feel good. On the village square, there is a merry-go-round . . . that is going around. I have never seen such a big wheel. Except the Earth, but the Earth is so vast that no one feels it turning. That is my great frustration. I would so love to feel its movement. Would I be able to do that someday? Will the Earth agree to share i
ts secret with me? I am four and I still don’t know what lies at the center of the Earth.

  No one knows, exactly. This situation is intolerable. It drives me crazy. Patience.

  I love you, Earth.

  Will you love me back?

  I believe so.

  I hope so.

  It will be yes or nothing!

  Here I am ready for departure on this big wheel. All set: I’m on the merry-go-round. It gets under way. And now I’m moving too. At last! I’m going around! I observe the central column covered with a mosaic of mirrors dancing with reflections of light and movement. I look outward; the rest of the world streams by. Finally! I am moving with the Earth! My gaze turns back to the center and remains fixed on the mechanism of the central axis. Certain wheels are turning in the opposite direction of the merry-go-round to carry it along in its rotation. At that moment, I wonder if the core of the Earth . . . But now my mother takes my hand and slips it onto the mane of the wooden horse.

  Take your hand away!

  I’m busy thinking about important things! More important than the wooden horse! He’s very handsome, this wooden horse, but I already have one at home! Like this one! I couldn’t care less about the wooden horse! He’s not what’s making the big wheel go around!

  I whip my hand back onto the iron bar that is moving as well, but up and down. A steady movement that beats out the pulse of the world. There. I am on the beat. So I was saying . . . Oh yes! What if the core of the Earth were also turning in the opposite direction? I look outward again. I am like the Moon or one of those many asteroids and satellites that go around the Earth. I start making an engine noise with my mouth that does not speak. The same engine noise the tractor makes. Got it. I am the machine, I am the merry-go-round. The Earth is turning inside me and I in it. At last! Something is happening!

  We are one.

  Now I am dragged away from the merry-go-round. It’s the amusement-park man, the great mechanic of that world. I am torn apart. Back to my stroller. Back to square one. The merry-go-round goes on without me. I keep that sensation deep inside me. Sensation of gravity, sensation of centrifugal force. I have touched infinity; I have touched eternity.

  One day I will go there again.

  The Tractor

  At home, there is a tractor. Orange. My father often takes me along on it. It vibrates, it makes noise, a noise so steady and continuous that one winds up not hearing it. The vibrations are also steady, a bit like the purring of a cat. I am perched on my father’s lap; he is perched on the tractor seat. Together, we are the tractor. We are turning over the soil with the rotavator, we are tracing furrows with the harrow, and from time to time we cut the tall meadow grasses with the rotary flail mower. Sometimes I get down from the tractor, I find a branch. Above all it must divide up into several claws at the end or it won’t work.

  Along I go, dragging my little harrow behind me while making the tractor noise with my mouth that doesn’t speak. I am a tractor; smaller, but still, a tractor. I trace furrows, nicely parallel to the ones my father makes. Back and forth, several times, across the entire vegetable garden. They are very small furrows, but I know that I am helping him. I do not speak, but I am with him.

  Pipes

  I love pipes. Their subtle sounds. Distant resonances. Underneath the bathroom washbasin, there are some pipes. I could also crouch down beneath the sink in the kitchen but it’s too busy there, too many lights, too many smells. Silence, calm, immobility are indispensable for listening to pipes. Draining noises: the plumbing belches, gargles, and dozes. And yet the faucet of the basin just above my head is closed. My mother is right next to me, so I know the sounds aren’t coming from the kitchen, either, but from farther away. What I detect by pressing my ear to a pipe could come from the other side of the world. I don’t want to miss a thing. Pipes always go a long, long way. I know that, too, because I see where they begin, but never where they end up. Or is it their extremities that stick out, while their roots are invisible? I’m more inclined to that solution, because the water spurts out of the pipe and not the other way round. The source must be a great distance behind the wall and beneath our feet, buried in the Earth.

  Pipes do not go up into the sky. I have noticed that as well. They all descend into the Earth. All the pipes of the Earth are connected to one another and form the great network. I am certain that if you dig down, the pipes link up to form bigger pipes that join to form even bigger pipes and so on. Maybe they’ll even get together in one single pipe, enormous, gigantic, several miles long? And this huge pipe . . . goes where? Surely to the center of the Earth: inside it, as deep as possible inside. I know that rivulets form streams that form rivers that flow into the sea that then runs into the ocean. The ocean covers more than three quarters of the Earth, the way there’s water in the human body. When I look at my arm, I see veins, which come together to form other, thicker veins. It’s my father who told me all that. He’s a doctor, so I know that he has already looked inside of people. He also told me that inside of us there are guts. Especially in the belly. In the middle.

  Pipe—tripe. They’re alike. And in our bodies everything meets up in the belly, in the middle, like the pipes that plunge into the Earth. Logical. Humans and the Earth all come from the same matter: stardust. That, too, my father told me. Mama told me that before, I was in her belly, in the middle. Furthermore, that’s how it is with all children. I want to go back there, but for that I’d have to find a rather large pipe or else open her belly up, but if I do that, she’ll hurt a lot and it will kill her. So I have no choice. I must go to the center of the Earth.

  In the courtyard, in front of the house, there is a well. Now and then my father goes down into it to open or close some faucets. I can’t go there because the metal cover that closes the well is too heavy. The bars of the iron ladder set into the stones are too far apart for me and if I jump into the well, I’ll drown. Above all: I mustn’t die before reaching my destination. Out of the question. Failure is not an option.

  In the woods surrounding our house, there are underground caves. They have no galleries; these are not natural grottoes. It’s men who made them. Once they were used for cold storage. My father has often told me stories about speleology. That was before, when he used to go down into the Earth. He went very far, very deep. He spoke to me about abysses, galleries, subterranean rivers. He also spoke of buried cathedrals. He discovered one that isn’t named after him but after his companion, who never came up again. He also showed me some rare rocks he brought back from the depths. And yet, in spite of all his journeys into the bowels of the Earth, even he was never able to find the center, the core, the middle.

  My father is away on a trip. He doesn’t have time to take me into the Earth. Besides, he doesn’t go there anymore. And I tell myself that even if he did take me there one day, he would want to protect me from every danger. We would wind up returning to the surface. So I who am so small—what can I do? Wait to be grown up?

  That will take too long. My mind’s made up.

  Mama’s belly it is.

  I don’t want to kill Mama or hurt her by opening up her belly, so I must become infinitely small again. I will therefore stop eating—or rather, I will eat just enough to keep from dying. Only soup, liquids, cottage cheese. No meat, fish, cake, or candy. No chewing. Perhaps I’ll end up with no teeth, like a newborn. That will mean I’m on the right track. Nothing steaming hot on my plate. Steam, that’s excess air. If I swallow the steam, I might swell up . . . like a balloon. And balloons burst. I already breathe in enough air to remain alive. I must nevertheless try to exhale more air than I inhale. To practice apnea when I can. The smallest possible amount of oxygen. The vital minimum. Like cosmonauts or deep-sea divers. But, careful! Above all: I mustn’t die before completing my mission. And my mission is to go back into Mama’s belly. These are the guidelines I have chosen and I will follow them to the end. Until victory, until
success.

  Obviously there must be no talking. If I speak, I will grow up. If I speak, I may reveal clues. If I speak, I may give myself away. No needless risks. I must keep the situation under control. This plan has to remain a secret. Not even Mama must know because I’m not sure she would approve. When the right moment arrives, when I’m ready, then and only then—I will make a surprise move in a flash.

  I will recover my lost kingdom.

  Gleaming Green Tiles

  The door opens all by itself. I’ve always wondered how that works. Later I’ll be told that it’s called the magic eye. It sees you and opens the door . . . as if by magic. There’s a big black doormat that covers the entire floor of the small room we go through, which is an entry vestibule. Then another magic eye sees us and opens a second door, identical to the first. We reach a very large room: the reception area. On our right, there are women behind windows who tap at computers. But we are going to the left. The floor tiles are green and gleaming, with a few white veins in them, but they aren’t marble. I’m certain of that. It’s clean here. Too clean. Mama is with me. She holds my hand or else she carries me. Sometimes I’m in a stroller, that’s what I prefer.

  Elevator, corridors, white floor. It’s the same tiling but white, with little gray streaks. Same floor, different color. Same place, different zone. In this corridor there are plenty of doors. All identical. We stop before one of them, always the same one; sometimes it’s open. We enter a dark office: shades pulled down, filtered light. It is a place for being bored. The floor has changed again. This time, it’s blue carpeting. We have arrived at our destination, so I must test the floor that will support us during the time we spend here. Some people are afraid the sky will fall on their heads; me, I’m scared the floor will crumble beneath our feet and suck us down. Which is only natural: I don’t know what’s underneath. I fling myself onto the floor to feel it with my entire body and press down on it with all my weight. It’s a good technique. I saw a documentary once about an explorer couple who were walking on volcanoes. Up there, the ground is quite treacherous. The husband always went first. Given that he was twice as heavy as his wife, she knew that wherever he went, she could follow him safely. But, careful: above all, exactly in his footsteps, so as to avoid a likely death. The other way round was not an option.