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  “I’m wearing gloves and a coat that’s not mine. I didn’t even sit on the seat next to you. No prints, no DNA. You committed suicide. I’ve been thinking of this moment for years. I’ve already lived through it ten thousand times. You’ve already died ten thousand times. Even if they question me, they won’t have a thing.” I held out his car keys. “Put them in your pocket!’

  He obeyed. If I’d told him to eat his shoes, he would have eaten them.

  “Now jump, or I’ll blow your head off! It’s your last chance.”

  He huddled up on himself. I turned the rifle toward the canal and pulled the trigger. The report pummeled the night. It banged against the hills, rolled through the valleys, hit the rocks of the Barre de l’Étoile.

  With the terrible wind that was now blowing and the blackness of the countryside, I was in no danger. No shutter creaked open on the other side of the fields, behind the rows of cypress trees.

  Suddenly, he uncoiled like a spring and threw himself into the canal.

  I leaned over the dark water. He was thrashing around, breathing noisily, groaning, suffocating, beating the water like mad to reach the other side of the canal. Fifty yards.

  I had given him a chance. I turned on my heels and ran off toward the village. I heard him fighting awhile longer in the icy water and then there was nothing but my partner in crime, the wind, on this little piece of land where we’d been happy so long ago.

  * * *

  The next morning I went back to work. The sky was extremely pure. The wind had fallen during the night. I hung the coat back up on its peg in the garage. Mademoiselle Niozelles heard me and invited me to come up and have a cup of coffee in her kitchen.

  I told her: “I’ll be done this evening. If you want to go to the mill with me, we’ll have the exact weight of the crop. You can stock oil all over and there’ll still be some left.”

  She agreed. She was holding a little red steaming mug in the hollow of her hands. She must have just come out of the shower; her wet hair was sticking to her forehead. I’d never seen her so fresh, so pretty.

  * * *

  Around six that evening, I loaded the last crates into the van and we went off to the mill.

  Since the beginning of November I’d picked 1,378 kilos. They told us the oil would be ready toward the end of January.

  I asked Mademoiselle Niozelles if she would go out to eat with me to celebrate this beautiful crop. It was Saturday night. She said yes.

  “What do you feel like eating?”

  “Foie gras, Sauternes.”

  She was so simple and natural it threw me off balance. I said, “You know what I call you in my mind?”

  “No.”

  “Belle Lurette.”

  “Well, in my mind I call you Geronimo. Every morning, I’m happy when I hear Geronimo’s motorcycle.”

  She took my arm and we left. I didn’t dare look at her. On my right cheek I had all the sweetness of her smile.

  The stars are never as beautiful as the night when a widow turns toward life again.

  PART II

  Wanderings

  I’LL GO AWAY WITH THE FIRST MAN WHO SAYS I LOVE YOU

  by MARIE NEUSER

  Le Frioul

  The small boat slowly leaves the safety of the port, chomping at the bit. No sooner has it brushed against the last dike than it will abandon its elephantine pace and bounce over the swell with childish glee, thumbing its nose at the haughty sailboats, and, with the wind at its back, speed toward the white island.

  On the deck, the benches are empty. Cold and spray have discouraged anyone from sitting on them. Anyone. Not quite the word: in reality, you can count the passengers on the fingers of one hand. The time for the detour by Château d’If has passed: the site has closed its doors, winter schedule, last shuttle for the archipelago. Instead of the day’s tourists, the boat, putting on a Breton air, is only taking the residents of the island. Behind the portholes, several people dazed by their day’s work on the continent are returning toward their solitude, pitched to and fro by the waves.

  You are among them.

  You. And I, in your suitcase.

  You don’t look at anyone. And as if to thank you for so much discretion, no one really looks at you either. A man, yes, a man glanced at you stealthily, because you’re a pretty woman. No. The man corrects himself. He tells himself pretty’s not the word, you’re not pretty. Pretty is a word that implies freshness, luminosity, youth, something innocent or carefree. Instead, you look like a flower about to close for the night. Your features are drawn, your eyes are puddles of oil and their outlines are blurred in the harsh neon lighting. And yet I know how beautiful you are, I do. How beautiful you were before the catastrophe. The man realized it too; he tells himself that if you hadn’t looked so sad, so out of it, he would gladly have been flirting with you. But he tells himself that you’ve reached the end. You don’t flirt or even just chat with someone who’s reached the end. You don’t want to be contaminated by the end.

  “Be quiet. Get out of my head and leave me alone. Enjoy your last trip in silence.”

  You did everything right, my love. The boat, the crossing, the island . . . Like in Venice, to the Island of the Dead. You did a good job with the symbols to celebrate our farewell.

  “Be quiet. Leave me alone.”

  I don’t know if I should feel sorry for you. You’re so silly on this boat with your rolling suitcase. Another person noticed you, precisely because of the suitcase. Nobody crosses over to the island with a suitcase. People generally land there with beach things during the summer months. And even in the Indian summers, which can sometimes go on forever. Or in hiking shoes and a backpack to tromp over the stony ground. But never a suitcase. You didn’t want anyone to notice you? You screwed up, baby. You made this crossing on the last shuttle, the one that’s almost empty, with your lovely eyes like faded violets and your little suitcase. They’ll remember you.

  “I had . . . how can I put it . . . something else in my head.”

  Try not to talk out loud to me, my sweet. People are looking at you. The person who just noticed you because of the suitcase is wondering where you can possibly be going. There’s no hotel on the island, maybe just a single furnished room.

  “I could be someone going to her yacht anchored in the marina. To spend a few nights on it?”

  That’s exactly what the woman watching you just told herself. To spend a few nights or go sailing . . . Risky. The weather reports said there’ll be a mistral blowing at a hundred miles per hour in the next few days. Very few yachts go out to sea in conditions like that, in fact none at all, because everybody knows the Mediterranean can turn itself into a coffin without warning. And I’m sorry, but seeing you so frail, so tired and alone, sitting next to your rolling suitcase, nobody thinks you bear the slightest resemblance to an adventuress on the raging seas. No, darling. You make people uncomfortable. You’re a weird stranger entering a village where everybody knows everybody, where everybody spies on each other and picks each other apart, at an hour when only residents return.

  “Please, get out of my head! I came here because I’m looking for silence, darkness, and solitude. Our last night is worth at least that, don’t you think? No other place in the city offered me that privilege—a night of silence and darkness, next to you.”

  And then what? What do you intend to do with me?

  “With what remains of you?”

  With what remains of me.

  “I’ll improvise. I’ll offer you to the sea. You wanted some kind of symbol, you’ve got it.”

  How about you?

  “Maybe I’ll follow you. Yes, it would certainly be better like that. You said so yourself. I’ve reached the end.”

  Hey, look. With the twilight creeping toward Château d’If, it looks more than ever like a sand castle. We’re brushing past it. We’re ignoring it. We keep bouncing over the whitecaps until the boat slows down and the sailors moor it to the dock. One of the men even he
lps you slide your suitcase down the gangplank. He must have found me heavy. Do you think he suspects something? No. Nobody could possibly imagine this.

  “Of course. Just yesterday, I couldn’t have imagined it either.”

  We’re going by the final hikers getting ready to board for the last crossing of the day, the one that goes back to the Vieux-Port. In a few minutes, Le Frioul will be totally cut off from the city for the next twelve hours. Don’t worry, you’ll find the solitude you long for. Look: no one’s paying the slightest attention to the woman with the suitcase, not even noticing the little hypnotic music of the wheels over the concrete of the dike. Careful . . . careful . . . there! It’s done. Everybody turned left toward the houses and restaurants. Except you. They all forgot about you, and you kept going right. Toward the desert.

  “Not toward the desert, no. Toward the places we loved. The beach, the inlets a little farther on. We used to plunge our bodies into that water slightly colder than elsewhere and, under your rather pitying look, I would pick up those pink stones, like pyramid-shaped candies, and then polish them and pile them up in candy boxes.”

  You always were a pack rat. I wasn’t pitying you. You amused me. I found you beautiful, and so childish. I would watch you walking up and down the beach, your supple little body, so tanned it looked like you’d slipped into it like a dress.

  “My body?”

  Yes, your body. Which clothes your soul.

  “But as for bodies, you preferred hers. We wouldn’t be in this situation today if you had been content with mine.”

  That’s only a matter of physical bodies. Now, just when you’re beginning to struggle to climb this road, pulling your suitcase behind you, you tell yourself it’s a body that brought you here—mine. Nothing’s harder than getting rid of a body, right?

  “The problem isn’t getting rid of a body, but getting rid of a body one loves. And you know that: I’m not here to get rid of something, but to push us very gently out of life, you and me.”

  Do you really mean to take this road? You know it leaves the populated area behind as it moves along the coast. Reckless, isn’t it? You leave behind you the ugly buildings that were once modern and today are only yellowish, the terraces of the restaurants hibernating with all the sadness of summer resorts in January, the empty tourism center and the building they made for the pilots with its facade like an ocean liner. You seem determined, you don’t have the slightest remorse . . . The streetlamps are still projecting reassuring halos, but soon we’ll be in complete darkness. What have you gotten yourself into? You were always afraid of the dark. When I wasn’t there, you’d sleep with the TV on and the sound off so the glow dancing on the walls could give you the illusion of perpetual daytime.

  “I wasn’t afraid of the dark, I was afraid of loneliness. In your absence, everything became terrifying. But tonight I’m not alone. You are near me. I like having you near. Besides, the sky is clear, bleached by the wind, dotted only by the moon. The night will not be dark, it will just be cold.”

  And you plan to pull me along behind you like that, to where . . . ?

  “I don’t know, François. I didn’t make some grand plan. I want to enjoy not having a goal, having this time free from the hands of clocks. I feel truly free for the very first time in my life, free of all that shit that makes us aware of our human condition. I’m no longer afraid of death or night or what tomorrow will bring. I’m no longer afraid you’ll leave me. I feel in complete harmony with the present. I almost have the feeling that it’s a privilege. Very few people ever get to know this empty, slightly numb serenity and it makes me feel like tasting it, chewing it, absorbing it through each one of my senses. The road is hard, you are heavy, and that’s good. I’m thirsty and soon I’m going to be hungry, but that, too, is good. I know very well that you’re inside my head as I talk to you and—”

  I’m in your suitcase, Caroline. Not in your head.

  “You’re not entirely in my suitcase. In my head, you are complete. It’s better that way. It makes communication easier.”

  Since you’re raising this subject . . . why didn’t you make me disappear completely? You had the time. You would have spared yourself a lot of trouble . . . It all started off so well . . . Cutting me up into little pieces to put me into the blender—a brilliant idea! You always had a practical mind.

  “When you’re in a jam, you jump at the first idea that comes into your head. Modern appliances are surprisingly efficient. French quality, oui, monsieur! Once I started I found it pretty easy to do. In fact rather fun, I must admit. Your legs, which dared to run to her . . . Your arms, which dared to embrace her . . . I was so angry, and that did me good. But your face . . . your face, I just couldn’t. It was too much for me.”

  And yet it’s my face that did it all. My eyes, which veered from you to her. My mouth, which betrayed you. My tongue, which conveyed the lies—

  “Stop it. Spare me the nauseating details. Yes, of course it was your face that offended me, when it was still giving me those casual as-if-nothing-had-happened looks and everyday smiles when you’d just given her a quick fuck. It’s not that I didn’t feel like wiping it out, turning it into a mush of bones and blood, and that’s exactly what I was getting ready to do . . . but then I just didn’t have the heart. Your face, which I still loved so much—”

  What about my torso? My hips? My penis? That, you didn’t eliminate, and yet that’s what started it all.

  “Same thing. That stupid love. It was still too strong, you no longer deserved it, but it kept me standing up. Once arms and legs had been blended and thrown into the toilet, I looked at what remained of you, of fifteen years of life together, and I was struck by a sort of astonishment that kept me from going on. I actually felt bad when I realized what I’d just done. Flushing you down the toilet like diarrhea. Is going from mad love to diarrhea really the normal order of things? I couldn’t bring myself to chop up the face I had loved so much, your chest where your heart had throbbed for me, just for me, for so many years, your penis that had thrust for my pleasure alone for so long. No, I couldn’t. That’s when I decided to take us to the island. Think it’s absurd as much as you like. For me, it was the obvious choice.”

  And now you’re stopping. You’re hesitating. Are you going to retreat?

  “No. I’m taking a last look at this spot. It always amazed me. There are places you can never understand and this is one of them.”

  This empty lot?

  “Yes, empty’s the word. Empty, as if nature itself never knew exactly how to fill it. Even the few prickly pear trees sticking up here and there look lost. They didn’t even dare grow too tall, for fear of being decapitated by the storms. Everything looks lost. Even that old boat dumped on the scrub, tilting over as if the earth were heaving. It seems to miss the time when they took it onto the water. It’s been forgotten here since . . . I don’t know. I always saw it here. Year after year, it lets itself be eaten away by the salt, slipping from dirty white to the gray of a rainy sky, stung by moss and seagull shit, and the rough lances of the grass that ended up splitting its belly.”

  A bit like our own story, don’t you think? From luminous whiteness to disemboweling.

  “Please don’t. We never went through rain.”

  Not true. We never went through a storm, but a permanent drizzle kept us wet.

  “Because you let go. Because you could no longer take me on board for wild times and sweet pleasures. You’d just answer my loving words with a smug nod before going back to whatever you were doing. It’s easy to speak about drizzle when you let my light go out for lack of I love you’s. Be quiet. Let me look at this land. I’ve always thought nothing illustrated the word desolation quite so well.”

  Or a big hodgepodge, like this whole city. Remember? You used to say it yourself: Marseille isn’t a city, it’s an agglomerate, a haphazard conglomeration of arbitrary constructions, a swarming space between entrance and exit signs without anything ever having been thought o
ut. You used to rail against its total absence of harmony, its dislocated, disfigured, patched-up face, glued back together any old way, like you’d treat the broken head of a china doll . . .

  “Yes . . . I also used to say that if people thought Marseille was beautiful since from some neighborhoods you could watch the sea, it was because it had failed in its vocation as a city. Saying a city is worth something because the nature around it is pleasant is totally absurd. But do you really think we’re here to discuss urbanism? I would so much like to devote these last hours with you to talk about love.”

  Even though you just killed me?

  “The logical consequence of my love.”

  You’re being cynical.

  “True. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. What I expected from the two of us was a child. It was the desire to see us grow old together, loving even the passage of time on our skin. I was beginning to look tenderly at your brow gradually receding, your belly getting soft.”

  I loved the wrinkles around your eyes. The scars of your perpetual smile.

  “Vile flattery. It didn’t prevent you from finding a younger woman with eyelids as smooth as the belly of a fish. And if I used to smile so much, it’s because you made me happy, because I felt like a queen. A queen doesn’t pout if you forget to say I love you to her. I even managed to keep smiling after I found out.”

  Maybe that’s the mistake you made. If you had screamed and cried, if you’d made a scene by smashing the dishes and slapping me silly, I would surely have left her.

  “I don’t think so. You keep lying even when you’re cut in half. You had organized your new life. You were on your way out. How could I ever imagine you’d be so stupid? Why would you wait till you’re hurt to get us back on an even keel . . . No pun intended.”

  Ouch! You’re shaking me. I’m being jolted around in my polyester coffin. There’s very little asphalt here and you just turned sharply and made the suitcase swing over the potholes.

  “I’m rolling you over the stones. I don’t know if I have the right to venture out here, beyond the boat, but I always felt like it, and today I couldn’t care less about what’s not allowed.”