It doesn’t matter where or how violence is served… It happens to women across every social class and the consequences are always caustic.
“I’ll kill you,” Ted said, even though (or perhaps because) he was a lawyer.
To which I reacted with dismissal or maybe just disbelief at the time. No one had ever verbalized that wish to me in my whole life. I’d not grown up in places where people waved arms or menaced one another, even though things were certainly never that rosy, even if there was surely tension and covert manipulation, even though people in the United States can carry concealed weapons…. But I’d never received a death threat.
Trying to laugh off his idiotic declaration, I remember thinking how crazy it would be to kill someone for so little, and we sipped a crisp Venetian white wine. We were sitting at The Mori Venice Bar in Paris. I thought it was a Sunday lunch, but now I see they’re not open that day, so who knows when and why would that detail change anything anyway? It was still a menace de mort*, as they say in French.
It was probably nothing, I’ve tried to reason since. He was just being brash and speaking off the top of his head out of emotion. But Ted never did that. He’s a lawyer. He’s always weighed every, single thing he’s said and never-ever put any of it in writing.
I’ve been thinking of those four words ever since though. I mean, how could I really ever get them out of my head?
I — The first person singular subject , by which Ted was referring to himself.
Will — An auxiliary which modifies the verb into its future sense.
Kill — An action verb signifying the depravation of another being’s life, snuffing them out, eliminating any life force within them…
And you — the object, by which Ted was indicating me, Eva, his wife.
It’s impossible to un-hear those words once they’ve been uttered. It’s impossible to un-know something so violent when it’s been directed at you. It’s impossible to ever forget them, to brush them aside or to pretend they didn’t matter, were never pronounced or even thought… in the head of, not just anyone, but the very man I was married to.
I’ve been wondering, as they’ve been on my mind for so long now, if those words, coming out of someone else’s mouth, would be any different? I imagine the pharmacist or the boulanger*, a bus driver or the post man addressing them to me. I honestly find their impact chilling, no matter who uses them. But they were directed at me by the man with whom I was living at the time.
My own husband strung them together like beads into a short sentence. A proclamation. An affirmation. A fulmination. An omen. Or just a bluff. And he gave them to me alone as we were seated in the subdued, distinctly designed dining room chez Mori, with its discrete, elegant service, savoring the refined dishes of the stared chef while speaking of our future.
I find their violence egregious, monstrous, heinous… now looking back at that day.
It was February of 2015. There was a bit of disaccord between us, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I’d purchased that new black jacket the day before without asking Ted’s approval or whether it was just renovation-tension, as we were in the middle of transforming our newly acquired future home.
I didn’t realize at that time that Ted had been plotting to leave me for months already. I didn’t recognize that the fatigue on his face and in his eyes stemmed from the extraordinary effort he was making to juggle his crazy nocturnal spying sprees with his normal, daily, work schedule; trying to keep it all together so he could gather as much information on me as possible in order to construct a story, a house of cards, accusing me of conspiring to abscond from our couple myself.
Ted was not only my husband then, he was my legal council too. And he’d built our whole life around rules only he himself knew well. Ted understood just how to structure our investments so that he alone would profit from them later. He’d engineered our estate, he’d made himself property manager, such that he’d be in charge. He kept me poor and powerless on paper so that he’d have the upper hand, so that he’d keep all our capital for himself, no matter what would occur, so as the patriarch, he’d get all the credit… since he was the one who was solvent, the courts would surely say.
It was only in divorce therefore, expecting to obtain shared custody of our effects, that I realized the first phase of what he’d meant by murder. Ted would kill me financially first. Whether or not he would ever see the color of our money during his own life time, he would go to any length at all to make sure that I would never get a whiff of it myself while alive.
“If you stay, you’ll have everything,” he’d say, “but if you ever leave me, you’ll have nothing at all!” If I didn’t preform to his desires, if I didn’t play the game by his rules, if I didn’t behave like Ted wished, doing the things Ted wanted when he demanded them… then he’d make me pay, that’s all.
Hence, that tight, concise, four-word phrase he threw at me in the restaurant.
It was not at all innocent. Ted used those exact four words to hurt me, to gouge me, to destabilize and frighten me. He used them to illustrate how I’d never get out of our relationship alive, that he wouldn’t allow me to just walk away, that he’d have me crawling, cowering, graveling, begging for mercy… before he’d let me go free. He wanted me to know that he’d bleed me to death and then stomp all over me… financially at least, if he didn’t do it for real.
Ted didn’t pronounce them en l’aire*. Those words are weighty. They mean what they say. They’re meant to control.
I guess I hadn’t understood who Ted was all along nor could I have fathomed how far he’d be willing to go to get his own way. I had no idea all those years we were married that crushing me was the real game he relished and that he’d never stop playing until he’d won.
Male violence against women is never a question of passion. It always sexual and sexist and stems from a desire to dominate.
6 women are (literally) killed every hour by men. That’s 140 women per day globally, which totals 50,000 women a year.
30,000 are killed by their current or previous intimate partners… and 20,000 by male family members… all by the hands of men these women knew well and should have been able to trust.(weforum.org)
Men’s violence against women is one of the leading causes of premature death for women all over the world. (https://www.femicidecensus.org/)
Translations from French to English
menace de mort* — death threat
boulanger* — baker
en l’aire* — empty rhetoric, hot air, idle talk
