Marseille Noir Read online

  He was living a cliché, having an aperitif right after lunch with his friends at Bar de la Marine, drinking pastis with relish while enjoying the life around the port, there was a tree on quai de Rive Neuve, just one, and the sun was always shining in a blue sky and the women walked with a slow and nonchalant gait. Bar de la Marine was famous thanks to Marcel Pagnol’s film trilogy, which took place in an imaginary bar of the same name, so it was fortunate that such a place actually existed and Pagnol was Marseillais even though he was born in Aubagne, everybody knew that and as far as he was concerned he was having drinks in a literary environment and he liked that. The Vieux-Port wasn’t just a port with boats, it was a place where people lived, it was the MuCEM and the Pharo and the rocks of Fort Saint-Jean from which kids would dive and swim, the place aux Huiles, rue Sainte with its restaurants and the suicidal Canebière that threw itself into the sea, that’s what they said in guidebooks and often in novels, it was the café Olympique de Marseille and la Caravelle, a jazz restaurant-bar where the waiters always ignored him, city hall and the parking garage built at the spot where the César museum should have stood, the Eglise Saint-Ferréol les Augustins, the boats and especially the three-master that had sunk and was never brought up because it would have cost too much, they just cut off the masts, marked its outlines and that way they had a liquid public square, a mineral square made in Marseille, and there was the little blue train that went up to Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, there was noise and tourists and sometimes strange gangster-looking guys and in the morning the fish market which was also the name of the theater on quai de Rive Neuve.

  He would end his evenings right near his studio in the most fanciful and extravagant café in the neighborhood, l’Unic, where the bad boys erupted from time to time to kill each other, it was one of the only cafés that stayed open all night and as a regular he had his own barstool and if ever he was absent, which did happen once in a while, Dominique, the boss, would ask where he had been. She truly loved her customers and followed their latest news. She didn’t say latest news because she never went online, she said she kept herself informed because her customers were long-term customers. She never used the expression from way back. Dominique was sensitive to this new era that transformed mankind into a mere economic vector, of value only until his sell by date or the expiration date for consumption.

  A doll wearing glasses hung behind the bar, family snapshots and postcards were pasted to the wall, a little bear lay on the bottles and a disco ball rotated on the ceiling, reflecting the lights. On a shelf, an old photo of Edith Piaf and a pirate mask and several Enki Bilal reproductions. A fat dog slept on the bench seat.

  Marseille was the city where anything was possible and they had been saying for a long time, for ages, that soon business would pick up and the city would become important, it was a city where the cards always had to be redealt, where everything was yet to be done, where nothing ever seemed finished or followed through to the end, a city of its time, rickety and unique because funds to bolster the economy were misappropriated by civil servants and politicians. In Marseille, it was all kept in the family.

  At first he hadn’t noticed it but then, little by little, that was all he could see.

  The crack.

  A rat who lived in his building saw him leaving one day, earlier than usual and saw him come back at night, later than usual, with his face somehow undone and an expression of disappointment in his eyes. The rat didn’t know what the expression meant but he could see he was no longer the same man. Anyway, the rat couldn’t care less about the man and his frustrations.

  * * *

  Something had happened, a veil had been rent and the man no longer appreciated the sun and the blue sky, he observed the women walking and found them heavy and graceless, the pastis had lost its taste, the fish market no longer held any charm, discussions with friends were reduced to their most rudimentary form and besides soccer and a few shrugs, there was no communication. He tried to fight it and talked about literature, philosophy and even poetry in hopes of having an interesting conversation but they just looked at him and said stupid things. He was getting bored.

  Dégun, engatser, cagole, boulègue, emboucaner, parler meilleur, pourrave, maronner, chourraver, zou, testard, emplâtre, rouscailler, c’est qu’une bouche. The famous Marseille slang, just a lot of chatter.

  He saw the chipped, flaking walls, gray from pollution, dirty garbage containers with their lids always open stinking up the whole city, he saw plastic bags hanging on the branches of trees like Christmas decorations, shit from homeless people and dogs on the sidewalks, men pissing against doors and walls, he saw people littering the street instead of putting their trash into garbage cans, he saw metal posts in the middle of the sidewalk to prevent cars from parking on it, forcing people to walk single file to get around them, he saw a city adrift, up to its neck in filth and corruption and liking it, a city where anything was possible, a city drowning in bullshit and he was exasperated and he freaked out.

  He thought of himself as a good and polite man, with a true civic sense. His glass was always half full but that evening, when he climbed the stairs to his place, he smelled the stench of urine, his fingers grazed the wall and the cracked paint peeled off, he felt the cold and the moisture because of a leak in the pipes and he remembered all the letters of complaint and then insults he had sent to the management company, to the real estate agency, to lawyers and city hall and how they had promised to fix things, a budget had been set aside and all they were waiting for were the workers but he was still waiting, nothing was ever done. His friends said he shouldn’t be in such a rush, he had to give time some time, the time to be. His friends lived as slowly as they walked, they waited patiently for death, that’s the way they saw themselves but he saw them otherwise, he saw the waste of life.

  The rat didn’t know what had happened, he couldn’t discern what made sense and what didn’t because he was a rat and he didn’t follow the man wherever he went, nor did he think like him, he remained holed up under the garbage cans, under the dumpsters, that was his kingdom and from this roomy kingdom he saw the man go by, looking lost. The rat too was fat, he moved slowly, sure of himself, he ate a lot and had never known hunger, he was a rat made in Marseille.

  A few days earlier, standing on a corner in the Vieux-Port where he had once again observed the lid they called a roof or a shade-giver or a gigantic upside-down mirror so people could see themselves and take a selfie, which was the irrefutable proof that Marseille was more or less experiencing modernity, the man forgot to verify if the cars had actually stopped at the light before he stepped off the curb. They had warned him when he arrived in Marseille that people were rebellious to the core and you couldn’t cross even when the light was red without checking to make sure that cars had actually stopped, the issue wasn’t really a lack of civic spirit but a sort of prideful disobedience, a matter of principle. They had said nous, les Marseillais and he had been proud. He had always seen himself as a rebel, so he liked this way of defining Marseille and when a car didn’t stop at the light, he had just enough time to tell himself it was a city made for him, a perfect match, when he was thrown into the air, fell heavily onto the asphalt and banged his head as the car sped away. He was alive, he had been very lucky, too bad for him. When a paramedic shook him, his first reflex was to ask what happened and when the paramedic had stopped telling him about his adventures, his next reflex was to ask where the driver of the car that had practically killed him was. The police had closed off the area and were redirecting traffic while a crowd gathered. One of the policemen explained that there was no way for them to get their hands on the driver, he should try to forget the accident, he was okay and that was the main thing, being okay and he had to understand that the police were overwhelmed, so why press charges, no point wasting energy and anyway, with a good pastis, he would feel better. Shaken up by his accident, he agreed, of course.

  Later, when he was having a drink with his friends,
they told him that the car almost certainly belonged to a cop, they had recognized him. Hey, that’s the way it is and they laughed stupidly.

  He saw and became aware that their laughter was stupid and he lost his sense of humor.

  Far from being rebellious, Marseille now appeared to him like a city where people got bogged down and grew dumber by the day. He tried to fight those wicked thoughts and prove to himself that the city didn’t have that kind of influence on him, that it was all in his head and to avoid people, he went out for a walk early in the morning, probably too early since it was the time when the garbagemen having already cleaned the city gave themselves what they thought was a well-deserved cigarette break, leaving behind them a jumble of refuse and open garbage cans, the asphalt was slippery and dirty because they watered it down but never cleaned it and the detritus melted into a stinking paste. He would walk by them every morning and to show that he too was participating in cleaning the city, he would pick up trash from the ground, put it in the containers and close the lids and when the garbagemen did not react, he would ask them why they watered the asphalt like a garden when it was not a garden, why they didn’t put the lids back on, why they didn’t pick up the stuff, why they didn’t clean and they made fun of him and turned their backs on him. He told them that this was no way to act, everybody suffered from the filth but the garbagemen responded with indifference and shrugs, they didn’t care at all, they had work waiting for them at their cousin’s place, their brother’s, or a buddy of theirs. Done and gone, that’s what you called the special treatment accorded to the garbagemen by city hall or perhaps the regional council, nobody really knew who was in charge of what in Marseille, things were often vague. The man went to see the driver of the little tourist train and explained that he should avoid the streets behind the Vieux-Port and their mountains of garbage so as not to frighten the tourists because, subsequently, the city would get even poorer and be swallowed up in the economic fault line but the driver merely shook his head.

  In Haiti too they had a problem with the accumulating garbage which was understandable, they had nobody to clean it up, no garbage truck or men to pick it up and make it mysteriously disappear, no place to hide the trash, all they had was poetic words to name filth, they called it fatras and that wasn’t so bad because in Marseille they didn’t even have the poetic words, they had disappeared into a dumpster. He said to himself that it did not make him feel any better to know that it was worse in Haiti and that he had no desire to resemble this city but the dirt was getting under his skin and he washed his hands again and again.

  He read Don DeLillo who had written magnificent pages on the accumulation of waste, of garbage, of everything man no longer wanted or needed, magnificent, disturbing pages but nobody ever talked about those pages, it was just literature.

  He dragged himself along the streets, swearing and arguing with everybody and cursing the day he had moved here. Filth was everywhere despite all the signs saying Do not leave garbage here. Violators will be prosecuted and despite the cleanliness police who rode slowly around on their bikes, enjoying a bit of sun. He had nightmares, dreamed of dirt and filth and people who wallowed in it, enjoyed it and he spent hours and hours cleaning his apartment, the building, the street but there was always more of it and he could no longer put things in perspective. He kept washing his hands, over and over.

  Once upon a time there was a city called Marseille and a man lived there, he was in a bad mood and was drinking beer on the Vieux-Port, he had made a decision and his eyes wandered off over to cours Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves and way beyond. Dominique, the owner, observed him, still grouchy, she said, tapping him on the shoulder. Three generations of men had come to her bar and she was sincerely attached to her customers, they were the apple of her eye, she said, which didn’t stop her from occasionally throwing them out to teach them good manners.

  It’s not the way it used to be, she said as she sat down next to him. People don’t know how to live anymore, they are so cautious, so reasonable. Can you believe it? Yesterday I served organic tomato juice and Diet Coke all day long. Not one bottle of champagne in a whole year. People are so uptight. The one leads to the other. Not like back in the day when they would down tequila while listening to rock and roll.

  He didn’t answer, he just looked at her and wondered if in those days people used to be that dirty and when she met his eyes, she kept quiet for a long time. Then she said. You know, you scare me. Are you okay? You look weird. He didn’t say anything for a very long time and then, heavily, he stood up and said it was time for action, he said that from now on he would take care of everything, she had nothing to worry about and he walked out.

  Sparing no efforts, he worked meticulously to put his plan in place, studied all the possibilities on the Internet, from how to make a homemade bomb to programming a detonator, and bit by bit he bought what was needed and slowly his apartment was transformed into a bomb kitchen. He was in no hurry, he had all the time he needed. He wanted to show the world that Marseille could become a clean city but first you had to get rid of the garbage.

  And then he was ready. Taking advantage of National Heritage Day he entered city hall and walking from floor to floor he placed explosives everywhere he could without anyone noticing anything. He was a discreet man.

  After spending the evening at l’Unic, he went home and wrote in his diary all night and when day broke and the garbagemen had left, he went out and prowled the neighborhood and stuck explosives under the dumpsters on rue Sainte, rue Glandèves, rue Molière, and rue Beauvau. On place Général-de-Gaulle he waved at the owner of the Brasserie de la Bourse, who, thanks to his cousin at city hall who had given him the keys to the city faucets, tapped into the water main every morning to clean his sidewalk. He set explosives there too.

  The rat who often went shopping for food at the garbage heap on cours Jean Ballard near the newsstand saw the man bending down by the containers, one after the other and he, the rat, scuttled away fast. He didn’t understand what was going on, only that something was going on, he could see that the man’s expression had changed again and thought that this did not bode well. The rat had the instinct of a rat. As far as he was concerned, the existence of mankind was not inevitable, men were there one day, then maybe gone the next, it didn’t matter but meanwhile the rat distrusted them. The rat lived in the present and, if possible, out of men’s sight.

  Late in the afternoon, the man strapped an explosive belt around his waist, he made sure his diary was in full view on the table, he took his phone and went for a last beer at Bar de la Marine and when he had finished his beer, he caught the last ferry and when the ferry was in the middle of the harbor, he took out his phone and triggered the explosives, they all went off at the same time, like the clamor that should have arisen during the inauguration of Marseille as the European Capital of Culture, although his own fireworks were more spectacular and blew him up too.

  Some Marseillais were gathered around the Vieux-Port. It stinks worse than usual, said one of them. Yeah, we don’t have any more garbage cans, said another. The guy who did that wasn’t right in the head. Look, even a rat got obliterated. Jeez, said still another.

  * * *

  Once upon a time there was a city named Marseille and it was the dirtiest city in France until the day a man decided to sacrifice his life and since the day he blew up city hall and the dumpsters near the Vieux-Port as a protest against filth and corruption, the city has been cleaned up and kept clean because this is a tale and a tale always has a happy ending.

  GREEN, SLIGHTLY GRAY

  by SERGE SCOTTO

  La Plaine

  In Paris, it would be Montmartre. In Marseille, it’s la Plaine. Where a mound of earth flattens out, attracting artists to it like flypaper. But if many a child of the Muse takes flight from the heights of Montmartre, in the underworld of la Plaine, all they do is get glued down. They should find the energy to leave . . . But la Plaine is a contagious disease you catch
at bars where ill-fated artists make the world over, make the world over and over and over every single day with their mouths, and soon they can’t do anything with their hands but lift their glasses, drowning their talent and good will in beer and pastis. And yet they thought they would lift the world up . . . Magnificent bums who think they’re celebrated because they celebrate themselves and each other, who think they’re powerful at the beginning of each month because they buy their colleagues a round with the little money they collect from the government, who think they’re handsome because they appeal to drunks and druggies of the opposite sex, who think they’re geniuses because they don’t sell anything and think they’re funny because they really are.

  But if Montmartre is a beginning, la Plaine is an ending. We’re near the end of the twentieth century and you still have to go up to Paris to make it? True, often the friends who’ve done that made out better than they did here, but you have to say they also slacked off a lot less . . . Their example isn’t enough to motivate the majority of the troops. These indolent intellectuals have drawn a rebellious slogan from their laziness about succeeding: They want to “succeed here at home” and they’re even capable of singing it to you in Provençal! A legitimate demand. The demand of an activist . . . But it’s pathetic. A denial of reality: there’s nothing to do in Marseille except go around it ten times over or take a high-speed train to Paris.