Patrick Attacks Hacine in the Bar Restroom

Patrick Casati’s attack on Hacine Bouali in the men’s room at L’Usine turns a private confrontation into a decisive act of violence. It begins while Anthony is briefly buoyed by the improvement in his parents’ relations, but Patrick’s arrival transforms the encounter: past grievances converge, and a punch leaves consequences that endure long after the men leave the restroom.

Causes and Setting

Before Hacine appears, Anthony has drunk five beers and is in unusually good spirits. His parents, after months of hostility and insults, have become more polite with one another, and Patrick is keeping to his pledge even while at a bar. To Anthony, this fragile change is already a meaningful improvement. His optimism makes the sudden interruption especially stark: the scene begins not in anticipation of conflict, but in a small, tentative sense that family life might be settling.

The men’s room at L’Usine is a cramped, utilitarian space, with a urinal, a poorly closing stall, a small washbasin, and a barred window. Anthony has no other apparent way out when Hacine enters. The confined setting narrows the choices available to both boys and gives Patrick’s later entrance the force of an abrupt intervention. The encounter takes place in a public establishment, but away from its main room; the restroom becomes a private arena in which the accumulated tensions between these families are suddenly acted out.

Patrick’s understanding of the confrontation is already shaped by what Hélène has told him. When he sees Anthony’s disheveled appearance, he recognizes Hacine and mentally connects him to the motorcycle, its theft, and the divorce. That recognition is not presented as a judicial finding about what Hacine did; it is Patrick’s compressed interpretation of a history in which the motorcycle and the breakdown of his marriage have become linked. The force of the scene comes partly from that leap: Patrick responds not only to what is happening in front of him, but to the chain of losses he believes it represents.

The Confrontation

After Hacine enters, Anthony reacts with alarm. The room that had felt ordinary becomes confining, and he feels as though he has returned to the vulnerability of being fourteen. The brief exchange between the boys develops into a physical face-off. They trade feints; Hacine throws a series of middle kicks, but they do not cause serious harm. By the time the two are standing breathless and ill-tempered, both seem close to stopping. The encounter has not yet settled into a sustained fight.

A rattling door interrupts the standoff. Patrick comes in and asks what is happening. He sees his son’s soiled shirt and confused appearance, then turns his attention to Hacine. Anthony understands the change in his father’s expression before he speaks: Patrick has become rigid and still, as if his anger has taken over. Hacine tries to end the confrontation, but Patrick gives a short laugh and throws the first punch. The narrative marks that action as a release of accumulated pain and frustration, not as a measured attempt to separate the boys. Patrick’s blow knocks Hacine down, and Patrick then orders Anthony to stand by the door. The order places Anthony inside his father’s violence, not simply nearby as a witness.

Consequences and Aftermath

The immediate consequences continue beyond the restroom. Later, Hacine is found there badly injured, and his father, Bouali, takes him into his arms. At the hospital, Bouali visits every day. The incident also leads into a trial, after which Bouali returns to Morocco permanently. The sequence binds the attack to a second separation: the violence between Patrick and Hacine is followed by the lasting departure of Hacine’s father from Heillange.

For Hacine, the attack marks a turning point in his conduct. In retrospect, the narrative says that after losing his teeth he no longer made waves. The physical consequences are thus linked to a change in how he moves through the world: he becomes less confrontational, while the memory of the assault persists in the altered relationship with his father. Their later telephone conversations feel to Hacine like contact with a stranger, and he repeatedly promises himself that he will visit but fears what he might find. The blow’s effects therefore extend beyond the immediate injury, into his sense of family inheritance and separation.

The scene also casts Anthony’s father in a sharper light. Just before Hacine arrives, Anthony takes Patrick’s pledge and the parents’ new politeness as signs of a possible thaw. Patrick’s attack breaks into that hope without resolving the conflict that produced it. Anthony is told to guard the door while his father acts, a small instruction that makes him both a witness and an unwilling participant in the scene’s arrangement. The later trial and Hacine’s changed behavior confirm that this was not a brief flare-up without consequences: the restroom confrontation becomes one of the episodes through which old grievances pass into new forms of estrangement.