I want to succeed. I am a stock market at the university and, to make ends meet, I am a host agent at CROUS. It is me that students request when they need keys, access to the laundromat, or vacuum cleaner to clean their room. I am very academic and sociable, I do everything well, and barely amazed this boy who often comes to ask me for things in my university residence office. He must like to clean up.
Until then, I have had love failures that I have not understood well or analyzed. I am black, of Gabonese and Malian origin, in mastery. I went out with a white thesis that I admired a lot. His breakup argument: in his family, they are blond with blue eyes, and the mixture is not possible.
Jérôme, the student of the residence, ends up inviting me to dinner. The evening is idyllic, he tells me everything I want to hear. I caught her in his eye, I attract him a lot, he wants to go further with me, really far, to the point of telling me that I am the right person and get involved. Me, I like, I am rather in love with his “cleaning merry -go -round” of the residence, and his offensive speech. From the first dinner, I think it’s good, let’s go, we’re going to make our lives together. Naively, I tell myself that if you both believe it, it will work, right? We make love on pieces of r’n’b.
All the lights seem to me green, with the exception of his family: he is French and Sardinian, Italian, island, and grew up in an environment where the man is king and the woman is at home . And then there is the question of my skin color anyway. His father does not like people of color, and even less the Arabs. At the Agriculture Fair, where we walk in his company, he wants to eat an Italian ice cream. Except that he is served, according to him, by Maghrebis. So he doesn’t want it anymore. He also does not like the Muslim religion, when I spent a lot of summer from my childhood in Bamako, falling asleep rocked by the muezzin. “Muslims are good, but at home,” ends up saying Jérôme – who follows the footsteps of his father.
Jérôme has another problem: he is jealous. I realize it quickly, he gets angry with my friends at the residence, against this boy who told me hello while held by the shoulder. One day, I surprise him watching my photo albums and gets angry in front of the photos where we see my ex. “You have to throw it all,” he asks me. He cannot bear to see images of me with other men. Jérôme does only what my father already did with me: rummaging through my things and asking me for accounts.
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