Marseille Noir Read online

  So much for Alice. I won’t give up looking for her but I have decisions to make: should I dig up my dope, start dealing again, or find myself a job as a waiter in a café by the port?

  It’s summer again, the season that suits my birthplace best, the season that shows it in its real light, its noble rot, and its smells, stronger than ever; the red dust left on cars by the southern wind, the glassy sea with just enough waves to lap the port with suction-like sounds that show its lassitude, the shrill screams of the girls, the loud boasts of the guys, a whole world I feel excluded from.

  I start waiting tables at a restaurant on quai de Rive Neuve while hoping for something better to turn up. Waiting for . . . nothing much. For Alice to come back, for her to feel good without needing dope, for her eyes to look the way they did before, for us to be ten again with a whole palace just for the two of us, a whole kingdom to explore, with its stone bulls, its grottoes and cascades, its bandstand and phantom zoo.

  And then one day, at the terrace of the restaurant where I work, I recognize Maël, my former customer. My heart leaps. “Maël?”

  “Hey, Farès! How are you?”

  “Okay, and you?”

  He still has his pleasant face and his good manners, polite and all. And if I know him, he must be keeping up his jolly student life and shoving lots of coke into his nose every weekend.

  “Like a drink?”

  “No, I can’t, actually, I work here. But I’ll get you one. What do you want?”

  “A Stella. Thanks. But sit down with me for a minute—look, there’s no one out here.”

  “Okay, but I have to make it quick.”

  The heat is stifling. It won’t go down for another two or three hours and Maël seems delighted to see his glass arrive all misted up. After exchanging a few slightly strained banalities, for we clearly have nothing to say to each other, I risk it: “Hey, Maël, you wouldn’t have news of Alice by any chance?”

  “Alice? Which Alice?”

  “Alice T. I saw her at your place once.”

  “What, you knew Alice?”

  “Yeah. We’re childhood friends.”

  Maël, nice little Maël, suddenly looks distraught over his Stella. “Yo, dude, you mean you don’t know?”

  With me, Maël always thinks he has to talk like a guy from the projects. It irritates me right now but I don’t let on, as I feel my anxiety rising.

  “Well, no.”

  “She died, man.”

  “How?”

  “OD.”

  “What? But she’d stopped!”

  “Yeah, that’s what everyone said. She’d been super-clean for three months at least. We partied together in April and she was in great shape—the Alice from before, see what I’m sayin’?”

  The Alice from before, are you kidding me? The Alice from before had disappeared a long time ago, but I forgive Maël for his lack of insight and his wesh mec—yo, dude—and other annoying expressions, trying to make people forget where he comes from.

  “So what happened?”

  “Like I said, she OD’d. Except it might not have been an accident. You really don’t know, bro?”

  He’s going to get a fist in his face if he keeps calling me “bro” or “dude,” but I’ve got to know: “No, I really don’t. Actually, I wasn’t in Marseille. I just got back.”

  “They found her at the Palais Longchamp. She lived in the Cinq-Avenues, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Really weird. The newspapers talked about it, but if you weren’t in Marseille . . .”

  “No, I wasn’t. Come on, spit it out!”

  “Well, apparently she took all her stuff—the dope, the rig—and let herself be locked inside the park, or she somehow got in.”

  Alice knew the passage through place Henry Dunant, I’d showed it to her. We had climbed the fence to spend part of the evening in the grass, drinking and smoking. That was before I let her try the smack that killed her.

  “Anyway, she did that at night, like around two months ago. You know where she chose to shoot up?”

  Yes, I know, or I think I know, but I let him relish the macabre details. Wesh mec—yeah, right.

  “She went into the fountain, you know, the big thing at the entrance to the park, over the cascade—there are bulls or something there, see. Actually, I never noticed them before. I never go that way, it’s a bad neighborhood, dead, but okay, anyway, she climbed up on one of the bulls and she shot her shit into her veins, a crazy dose apparently, no way she could’ve survived, that’s why they think it’s suicide. Some kids found her the next day, can you imagine the shock? You’re a kid, you’re playing, and bang, you bump into a corpse with a rig still in her arm!”

  I get up, knocking my chair over, I ditch Maël, the restaurant, and my new job, and I run away, I run like mad, I run up the Canebière, through le Chapitre, I take boulevard Longchamp still running, and so what if my heart is pounding, if my sides are aching and I’m gasping for breath? I get to the main entrance to the park, pass the statues of the lions devouring their prey, the fountains, the double ceremonial staircase, the chariot of the Durance triumphantly pulled by the stone bulls. And presto, like in the old days with Alice, I climb over the railing and get on my steed. The stone is still warm from the sun and I press my cheek against the colossal neck. From there I see what Alice must have seen before she died, the row of fountains, the flowering lawns, the trees on boulevard Longchamp, and that statue we loved and always saluted, a triton melancholically blowing into his conch for all eternity.

  I cry, I talk to Alice, I draw her out of her incomprehensible sadness, I cradle her with tender words that would have restored her confidence in herself. Except that I’m too late, I get there after the game’s over, I get there after she’s met her fate, the point of no return predicted by the Arcana number sixteen that she reached before I did.

  On boulevard Longchamp the light is dancing in the tree leaves and the trolleys are clanging their joyful bells. I pull the Tower card out of my wallet, tear it up into little pieces, and scatter them in the wind. They go fluttering over the steps of the monumental staircase, at the exact spot where Alice gave it to me one day. It was already the end, but we didn’t know it.

  PART III

  Dirty & Rebellious

  KATRINA

  by FRANÇOIS BEAUNE

  La Belle de Mai

  “It’s crazy what happened to us on the 49 the other day,” Alain tells me. “If I could’ve filmed the whole thing, YouTube would’ve flipped.

  “You see, that bus, the 49, the one for pygmies dressed in plastic, you can’t even sit in there, it goes through La Belle de Mai and down La Joliette. You get tossed all over the place. The driver works thirty-six faces of the city for you. With all the bumps and dead rats. You start sitting up front and you end up in the back with your head in the engine.

  “What I’m saying, there’s an asshole of the month every month. And if you’re looking for him, nine times out of ten he’s on the 49, trust me. That day I scored a bull’s-eye, fate’s always against you here, Allah really did his job.

  “Bus 49, the whole cast of crabs moves sideways in there. A fucking aquarium. Sometimes even, as if we didn’t have enough dickheads, tourists get on, like the other day, this couple from Mars: Is this the way to the MuCEM? they ask the driver. What the hell you take the 49 for to get to the MuCEM? I feel like telling them. You can’t walk the Vieux-Port like everybody else? Besides, in Bavaria, all you got is MuCEMs, why you coming here to see what you got in your own country? Mr. Driver, we bought two tickets one way, make sure you tell us when to get off. Shit, if you miss the MuCEM you’re not a tourist. The MuCEM, you know, that black thing there with its footbridge like a huge pipe, the coal shed, how can you miss it, you don’t watch the documentary channel, that’s for sure. Bavarians.

  “Now that it’s going through the docks, and past the whores who congregate on place de Lenche, it attracts an impressive bunch of losers—Krauts,
Chinese. Not to mention the culture-vultures who stop at la Friche, with funny hair and Paris accents, a whole bunch of nuts all year round, not too cultured, believe you me; and also rich kids with problems, not totally hatched, going slumming with their skateboards and baseball caps. Boxer shorts. Jeans hanging down below their asses. They all join the competition to see who can bug us the most in our great neighborhood of La Belle de Mai. They send us their crappy offspring and then are surprised when their offspring sink the mayor’s three-master (you know, the one he anchored in the Vieux-Port right in front of city hall that they once used as a restaurant).

  * * *

  “So anyway, the other day on the bus, there we are, like schmucks on the day they draw the lottery numbers, stuck at the Réformés Canebière stop for the last half hour, a nice gang of assholes who like to get fucked over, and frankly they’re right not to hold back, they know we love it. We’re sweating like monkeys in winter, smiling into the rearview mirror. It’s fascinating to watch.

  “The bus isn’t moving, no A/C, more like the opposite. As if the city government had sprung for a microwave to defrost all the rotten meat of us pushovers of the 3rd arrondissement, with our greenhorn faces, a mixed dish of reheated frozen foods—the Picard chain but not from Picardy, all kinds of colors, polite assholes waiting nicely for the driver to deign to finish pissing. Seated standing, everybody. We scratch the time, we pick our snotballs. So we can make sense of our suffering, not die of suffocation. One day you begin to get used to it, accept your fate, and you end up choosing torture over death.

  “I mean, it’s a swimming pool here now. Sweat drips out of your hair and arms, right down into the smartphones—they now have the toilet bowl app, thanks to the satellites and all. Little kids slide their fingers along their screens. They’ve had this game for a while now. The short fat guy sitting next to me in Adidas sweatpants with his iPhone screen covered with watermelons and bananas that he bursts with his index finger—I tell myself it’s getting worse and worse. That shitty little asshole’s making a real shakshouka out of it. He smells like soap, so okay. Without saying a word he smashes up the whole Noailles market. You can bet he’s not gonna go to one of those fancy schools up north. His father probably sells fruit and vegetables and when this kid has a break he screws watermelons to get rid of his Oedipus complex. I did an internship in psych recently, I know what I’m talking about. What can you do with this kind of kid when he grows up? You’ll explain to him he shouldn’t kill fruit?

  “Me, I’m no spring chicken, I’m going on fifty-seven. Fifty-seven, that’s an important number and I’m not gonna lie to you. For over twenty-five years I been working at the city hall for the 2nd and 3rd sectors. You hear me? The numbers. They mean something.

  “Honestly, I work hard and I’m all for young people. I was fifteen when we came back to Marseille. I remember I had to readjust, find my place again—and it wasn’t easy. My father couldn’t live north of Valence in Givors anymore. My mother couldn’t stand being so far from her mother, it was too painful for her.

  “Now I know everybody here. But the problem nowadays is, we don’t have kids anymore, just lunatics. I’ve been the moderator of the junior forum on the city hall website for a year now, and I see all kinds of crazy shit and every time I count their neurons, I can’t believe they have so few of them, it’s a Guinness record every time. Like the amount of sperm thrown away in our Marseille village of Les Goudes these last few years. You read the article, right? You realize the massacre? The Danes are the ones who counted them, they’re serious up there and I trust them. Billions of tadpoles go into the wringer every night because of the pesticides, insecticides, and all the other fucking cides. So you can blame the same phenomenon on those kids’ neurons. Today, aside from smashing fruit, there’s zero motivation, they don’t give a shit about all you’re doing for them. The girls are a little better but really, they’re no Rosa Luxemburg either.

  * * *

  “Since we’re waiting to start, I look to my right through the burning window—a woman sitting under the bus shelter, a stroller, and a three-month old kid, crying. I feel sorry for her right away. Beautiful evasive blue eyes—Kabyle I’d say—but faded, lost, like they went through too many washes. The chador falling over a plastic sweater, you could almost see the bottles of Evian in it; same thing with the standard-model I’m-ashamed-of-my-body-and-I-want-to-hide-it djellaba dress—and anyway I’m finished, screwed, dead married. But you can imagine how hot it is under that thing? The girl’s dressed for cross-country skiing—the poor version.

  “She does look poor, the poor girl. Even the stroller’s a piece of crap. The baby’s howling like a Mediterranean ferry siren. I look in her eyes, she has fear inside her. How can I describe it, it’s an all-purpose kind of fear. For the baby, fear he’ll catch cold, deep-in-her-eyes fear of being in the city, fear something will happen, the husband will get mad, fear the little one will die because of a bad decision, not knowing how to manage, fear of making the slightest gesture, fear of being guilty when you never did anything bad.

  “A guy sits down next to her on the bench. She looks elsewhere because she’s on a public bus. Even if he weren’t there she would probably just stare into space. Out of precaution, see. While waiting to dissolve, disappear into the aquarium of the wall-to-wall carpet, the baby wipes, the TV, and the smell of lamb’s-neck stew the world has built for her. Waiting to go back to her stifling place. To be saved by Allah, who will close all the locks on the door behind her, from the highest to the lowest, and even the locks of her head to be on the safe side, that way it’s all over.

  “As for the guy, he’s a pig, he doesn’t know how to get her to notice him. He should have learned some other words than your cunt and your breasts. But with him it’s very limited, you can see right away he’s not gonna hit on her with a love sonnet by Ronsard.

  “I look at her so much I start thinking like her. She must tell herself stuff like how can I get on the bus with the stroller? Should I sit or stand with the baby? If he cries do I keep him in my arms or do I restroller him once the bus starts moving? Stuff like that. Maybe she’s thinking of Mohammed too. What he’s going to bring her back tonight. Since he buys just about anything at all, stolen stuff that fell off the garbage truck, to get himself forgiven for being a shitty husband. What’s he gonna bring back? One of those plastic games that help babies learn how to walk, I’ll bet. Something to eat up the little living space they have.

  “The pig’s moving his head, with his starving eyes. She’s still in her bubble, but she can feel his presence. She rocks the kid to make him understand he’s going too far, he should be ashamed, but even without looking at him she knows he’s got nothing left to lose anyway. There he goes, he dares talk to her. You should see the animal. He gets her to understand there’s something, madam, that’s falling out of your pocket. With all the thieves around here, she should watch out. She doesn’t answer, takes a pack of chewing gum out of her pocket and puts it in the other pocket.

  “I get a better look at him too, now. Not tall, and like her, dressed in plastic recycled from mineral water bottles, sneakers, the little imitation-leather jacket straight from the boonies, all for 1.99, and his eyes not evasive, no, more like unstable, fixed on the inside and speaking to him of asses and cunts, the ass to forget, the cunt on the horizon, a fuck to quiet his fatigue, stop walking around without knowing where to go in the city. What do you expect them to think about, those jerks? No encyclopedia up there.

  “He looks beat; it’s sex, see, it’s liquor too telling him it’ll do him good, smashed already even though it’s not late. The heat, of course. Feel an ass, follow it, finally a goal, a little peace, an ass with a chador, it’s something from here at least, and if she wants, right away, but how to do it he must be asking himself, with the kid? I don’t want to screw her if he’s crying. It’s impressive to watch those guys: you can almost see them thinking. No, I’d have to catch her in the kitchen. She puts the kid to b
ed and then I put it into her. Here, bitch, and don’t forget your five prayers facing Mecca, I spit on whores like you, or I drill her on the living room table, from behind. She’s not Kate Moss, the sister. Too bad if she just had a baby, that’ll put her ovaries back in place.

  “We waited for so long the driver finally shows up, an Arab for a change, see. I don’t know this one. We must’ve disturbed him in the middle of a video game, he looks irritated, but we don’t blame him, we don’t say anything, we don’t say, okay, you done with your pee? You zipped up your fly all the way? No, we don’t say anything, us jerks from the 3rd, we don’t dare complain. Otherwise they’ll serve us up even worse, a pygmy, a Martian, a Breton, anything they can unload ends up our way.

  “The woman asks the driver to open the back door, to lift up the stroller. The pig offers to help her, she can’t refuse. They find each other standing side by side. Me, I disconnect, I put on my headphones and my music, those two distract me too much.

  “Right opposite me, sitting two rows down, there’re two fat Jewish women, real Sephardic, stuff that fills up the whole seat. Actually, I notice, it’s incredible, we’re almost all obese on this bus. Every time you take the 49 it’s a reality TV show. You never know the theme. Today the show is fat people: how do fat people deal with tsunamis?

  “Me, I’m fat. I’m okay with it because I like good things. Except for the last time, I’ve always voted Communist, see, and I’ve always loved life. They’re superb, those two women, and well-dressed too, big dark red scarves with maybe some green, some auburn, and then creased slacks and little boots. They’re coming back loaded with their shopping from the Centre Bourse mall, all precious, happy, must be Moroccans, hairy like that, with big pulpy mouths, lipstick matching the scarf, the kind of detail that drives you wild. Impressive, the sweat streaming from their impeccable skin. Like a torrent in the middle of the two breasts! It’s an equatorial forest. Niagara—not the rock group, the real one, the Falls.