Marseille Noir Read online

  You’re still laughing?

  “Sorry. It’s what you said awhile ago. Can you hoist me up to the hospital, Caroline?”

  Yes, that’s true, it’s silly. Still, I avoided saying, You’ll hoist me up to Caroline Hospital, Caroline? For years we made those stupid plays on words. And now I’m being careful not to fall into that trap.

  “Because you’d still like to keep being dramatic. You want this moment to be solemn. You really have no sense of humor.”

  Let’s say that in the situation we’re in, I have a hard time feeling . . . detached.

  “Not that I didn’t help you do it. You know why you’re pissed? Because you see me calm and peaceful. You would rather see me as a Sicilian mourner so you could tell yourself you were indispensable to me, irreplaceable.”

  And isn’t that true? You killed me so I couldn’t leave you.

  “I think it was more to avenge the insult. To soothe the pain of disillusion. And I’m no longer so sure I feel like accompanying you.”

  Oh no. That’s not fair. You’re betraying me!

  “That’s exactly why I don’t feel like it anymore. For fifteen years I thought you were a good guy. Two weeks ago I discovered you were a liar—scornful, calculating, and unfaithful. Tonight, I discover you’re monstrously egotistical. I’m beginning to think I deserve better. I’m able to love gently, tenderly, deeply. I know how to build and not doubt. The love I can give isn’t a tag on a wall, it’s a tattoo that doesn’t wash off even if the skin suffers for it. I have a magnificent ass and a brain that works. I can be maternal and bitchy, a saint and a whore. I can read and come at the same time. I think many men would be happy to find me on their path.”

  A pearl before swine?

  “That’s it. You just summed us up. You’re the one who thought I was interchangeable. Into the scrap heap when there are problems. You found I wasn’t hot or smooth enough, a little clogged up in the burners. So instead of making me shine again with a soft cloth and blowing on the fuse to create sparks, the whole shebang to revive lust—oh, it wouldn’t have taken much . . . words that lubricate the eyes and the rest . . . looks that make us flow out of our clothes and into open arms . . . Well, no: you preferred to throw me into the garbage can and buy something all nice and new, something straight from the factory that starts right up . . . You couldn’t understand why I wasn’t greeting you in the evenings already on my knees with an open mouth and an avid cunt? You had lost the instructions. Perhaps others will find them.”

  You’re being crude.

  “It’s not my fault. It’s the island. You don’t bother with amenities here, you’re just above the rock and your flesh is prey to thorns and gusts of wind. Your layers of propriety are ripped away. Only the pulp remains. Look, you can see the city from here, illuminated and hysterical, you can sense the disorder and swarming of all those two-footed ants loving each other, hitting each other, boring each other, seducing each other, forgetting each other, devouring each other, falling asleep, counting their money, putting on makeup, multiplying, repenting, smearing themselves with civilization each at his own level, in any way they can. But us—we’re here, standing in the darkness on the pebbles, swallowing the wind and dust, naked as rats, lured by the depths. We are less than human, we are in quarantine. Don’t make me get out my history books too, you know it and you feel it, we’re quarantined here, in a place to die, a lazaretto. We’re in holy terror of having been contaminated, in the awful wait for the first signs of death throes. Here we have the memory of heads or tails, of croaking right here or being able to get to the other side of this arm of the sea and go on . . . So yes, I’m crude. I’m getting rid of my skin, I’m watching it fall off in shreds like the plague victims did and I’m stripping myself naked as a rock. And I’m waiting too. I’m waiting to see if the illness is crawling inside me. Or if I’m saved.”

  Caroline, I’m lonely . . .

  “I’ve known that feeling—when I realized that the man living with me was no more than a body, because his heart was elsewhere.”

  It’s because you’re so hard. Because you’re pushing me around. I have the feeling I don’t exist anymore.

  “My still loving you was convenient for you. Now you don’t know anymore, and before you, there’s a precipice. I know. I experienced that kind of pain and amputation.”

  It will soon be day. The island will start to fill up with people again. What will you look like when you walk past tourists and groups of schoolchildren with your stinking little suitcase?

  “No one will come. On stormy days the shuttles don’t leave the port. So we’re condemned to stay for a few more hours or maybe two days here with the birds. You have nothing to worry about. Our fate will be settled by then. We’re not going to hang around here forever.”

  Up to now I could still read into you a little, thanks to a strange omniscience, certainly due to my new state. But that’s beginning to slip away from me too. Like you.

  “Putrefaction holds many mysteries . . .”

  You chose the steepest paths. You could have taken me down to the Morgeret inlet and sunk me cleanly. But you chose to climb farther up, to the very top of the cliff, to walk along the walls of the fort. I don’t understand you anymore.

  “You haven’t understood me for a long time.”

  You want to throw me from the top of the cliff? It’s not nice. That makes no sense.

  “I haven’t decided anything yet.”

  Birds make their nests up high. They’re aggressive right now. Not only will they see you as an intruder, you’ll tempt them with the choice dish you’re dragging after you. I think we’re really in deep shit.

  “I’ll watch them. It will surely do me good to see how you can fight to protect your home and stop strangers from destroying what you’ve patiently built up. Something I didn’t succeed in doing.”

  Are you talking about her?

  “Yes. I’m talking about that creature out of nowhere who took everything away from me. It’s all the more cruel, you know? To be robbed of everything by a phantom. You don’t need a typhoon for citadels to collapse: a simple breeze is all it takes. At one time, I thought I had gotten over it. There was so much mingling of flesh once again . . . But that was without taking last night into account . . . when you came to see me in the kitchen without hearing how hard my chest was thumping inside . . . coming to me with your confessions while I was cutting up the chicken . . . You just chose the moment when I was separating the flesh from the bones and the head from the joints with the Japanese knife that has that special blade—child’s play!—wearing that dress with all the cleavage, lost in the great hurricane of my thoughts, he loves me, he loves me, that appetite he has for me can only be mad love, and there you are, you come in and watch me with a worried look, you seem to be beating around the bush and then, suddenly, after a little cough, you dump that horror on me . . . Caroline, I have to talk to you. I’m in love with another woman . . . But what came over you? Why did you have to choose precisely that moment!”

  She’d just told me she threw her boyfriend out. I wanted to rise to the situation. To accelerate the process and dive headfirst into our promises. It was as if I was anesthetized. You could have been holding a strainer, a skimmer, a whip, or a pepper mill and I couldn’t have told the difference.

  “At that moment, there was a kind of explosion. Is that what hatred is? That blast, the whole inside of you shattering? I simply turned around. The hand that held the knife found its way without my help . . . It went in with the sound of soft suction, a special blade, yes, the precision of a scalpel . . . You rolled your eyes, wide with amazement, before you collapsed with your hands squeezing your abdomen and I just stood there, equally stupefied, and it all came back to me. I saw us again as we were during those two weeks when I knew, my days of struggle, my days of the dance of the seven veils, of purrs, of rapture, of tingling skin, and I suddenly realized that in that whole period, at no time did you hold your hand out to me, initiate a ca
ress, or ask for an embrace. I had done all I could . . . I had given myself blindly, I had opened myself unconditionally like a fruit that cannot do otherwise than gush out of its skin, and you—all you had done was take, taste, and quench your thirst, but without desire, without love, without anything more than a rush of blood. On the floor, you were opening and closing your mouth like a fish that doesn’t understand anything, and I looked at you, leaning over you, I watched you sinking into the great nowhere too, enjoying the way I was avenging my failure, my humiliation, and my disillusion. I loved watching you die, my dear. Oh yes, I loved so much telling myself that you would never live with her and I would remain your wife to the very end . . . And then came the time when you passed over to the other side.”

  Don’t remember. No, no. Don’t.

  “It’s better that way. You would have witnessed my collapse and it was not a pretty sight. The last image that you have of me is that of a pinup girl, although a slightly hollow-cheeked pinup girl, cutting up a chicken and perched on stilettos like nails anchoring her to the floor. But what happened afterward, that night huddled against you, trying to absorb your last warmth through the pores of my skin, kissing your face, murmuring words of farewell—you didn’t witness that and it’s much better that way. You would have been contemptuous of that scene, the image of your wife in tears next to your inert body . . . Much too soppy—the epilogue that’s usually served up with funeral music in the background, just before the fadeout. Count yourself lucky.”

  Felt . . . nothing. Like the . . . darkness. Until . . . crossing.

  “You seem to have a hard time talking. It’s not my story that’s upsetting you, I suppose.”

  My mind . . . blurred.

  “At last a bit of rigor mortis! Soon you’ll be reduced to silence, and that’s good news. You’ll be absent for real: I will be a widow at last. Not bad, that widow. Especially if she’s merry and free. I feel so free! It must be because we’re on a promontory and from the other side of the depths growling down below, the city continues to deploy its lights, vulgar but so alive, like a promise of continuity. I look at that constellation of small lamps and I think that there are so many men out there on the other side. So many men who will want to love me, to tell me the words that push girls’ little buttons and give them back their desire to live. François, my man, if I can still call you that, I think it’s the ideal moment to ask you for a divorce. That won’t shock you too much, will it? It’s what you were getting ready to do anyway.”

  Leave?

  “Don’t tempt me!”

  . . . itch.

  “Shh! It’s so easy to insult someone. Keep your dignity. After all, you’re the one who got us into this situation and I’m taking it rather well, right?”

  Love.

  “No, no. The end is unknitting your brain, that’s all. Those are illusions brought on by the open air, by that geological purity that’s blinding us; it’s that apotheosis of rock and water, touched now by the first gleams of dawn, which passed over us like the blade of a knife and peeled the bark off us. It may be nothing more than panic and urgency. Remember panic and urgency? Easy to confuse them with love. You weren’t able to tell the difference.”

  Ost. Don’t know. What’s . . . ?

  “Well, François, you’re getting soft up there.”

  Where are?

  “Everything’s slipping away from you, isn’t it? I know. It’s tragic to see life leaving us.”

  Oline.

  “Yes, honeybun.”

  Oline. Not leave. Alone.

  “Look at the last home I found for you! At the foot of those crosses that seem to stand there like an ancient premonition of our story. Those big metallic crosses pretending to look like a graveyard by the sea when in reality it’s much more prosaic, just aborted plans for bunkers. That’s life for you: you plan big things and it all comes to zilch. You want to build citadels, they end up as perches for seagulls. Speaking of which . . . you won’t be alone. The birds are coming closer.”

  Shut.

  “So sorry to disappoint you. I’m going to leave the suitcase open. As soon as I go away, as soon as I stop making a barrier with my body, you’ll be the target of a cloud of giant wings, sugared beaks, and insatiable appetites. For the last few hours, they’ve been staring at you the way one looks at a chocolate éclair in the window of a pastry shop. Your aroma is the promise of a feast. You were good to love, good to kill, good to eat. You’re just right, my beloved carrion.”

  Line. You.

  “Me? Well, I’m going back down, my love. Look: I’m unzipping your plastic cover. The big white sails of birds are navigating closer and closer, and it won’t be long before they are transformed into a rain of shears. I’m going to take the path back to the port and wait for the first shuttle as I listen to the mews of ecstasy of those flying ogres behind me. Their gullets will be your last home. And I’m going back home, where I’ll take a long bath to get rid of your smell, and I’ll make myself beautiful again. Then I’ll go out and I’ll meet someone. I don’t think I’ll miss you very much. I’m not contaminated; my life is ahead of me, out there, on the other side. I will leave, my love. I’ll go away with the first man who isn’t hurt by words. With the first one, François. The first man who says, I love you.

  ON BORROWED TIME

  by EMMANUEL LOI

  L’Estaque

  It was no accident and it couldn’t have been a hallucination. An all-too-peaceful period. Miguel knew it: even after everything he’d tried for the ten years he’d been hanging around L’Estaque, he’d still wind up in deep shit.

  When he first moved into the cabin he’d fixed up and covered with old boards, the neighbors confessed they were surprised that some joker out of nowhere could take root in the territory. He knew how to make himself handy, went out into the hillside, set up rabbit traps, and took on all kinds of odd jobs: repairing a fence, weeding a garden, cutting cords of wood for pizzerias. Never having idle conversations or trying to get close to people. This quiet stranger with a sad smile who didn’t bother anybody. His mystery never lost its halo. Just about nobody ever entered his shack. Unknown, and he wanted to stay that way, practically off the grid.

  * * *

  Today, early in the morning as boats with their muffled motors start to drift in, there’s a change. After ten years of this apparently inert way of life, two men land on L’Estaque and start combing street after street, store after store, asking about the soldier who knows how to do everything.

  During that latency period—all those years undercover and not making waves—time had dug other tunnels. The two trackers with foreign accents couldn’t have predicted that: this jack-of-all-trades was protected by his discretion, in a way. He’d been accepted without anyone giving it a thought and he’d managed to blend into the landscape. Here you don’t squeal, you don’t judge, you don’t give out information to God knows what avenger. Talking about someone, informing on him, is betrayal. The past is the past, and past mistakes shouldn’t influence your judgment. If someone’s in hiding, he must have reasons for it. After four days, the whole village had identified the two thugs. Trackers, cops. Dogs who hunt deer in a pack.

  Miguel’s oldest neighbor, Pierrot, who lives two houses down, opens the gate, walks around the little shack. “Hey, Miguel, there are guys looking for you.” No answer. He knocks on the door.

  “Come in.”

  “Two guys are looking for you. They have funny accents.”

  Pierrot describes the missing little finger on the right hand and the abrupt manners of one of the two undertakers. “The other’s wooly-headed. Looks like a guy from Martinique or Reunion, light-skinned black guy.”

  Miguel keeps whittling his piece of wood without raising his head.

  Through the window, thirty feet away, Pierrot can see a gull trying to take off with a bloody rat dangling from its beak. He picks up the aluminum lid of a beat-up pot. The church bell rings three times.

  “You checked your
traps, Pierrot?”

  “Yeah. Zero. I think there’s too much traffic there or we’re putting them too near the path.”

  “Not the only reason.”

  The neighbor realizes his curiosity won’t be rewarded. The guy’s tough as nails. It’s been a long time since people stopped setting snares for rabbits.

  “If those guys keep at it, what do we do?”

  “Whack ’em.”

  Pierrot sits down and breaks off a piece of stale bread. He doesn’t say the prowlers have ugly mugs. No, time has changed its rhythm, the hourglass has turned over. In the termite gallery, a whole crowd gets busy. They have no leaders, they’re as old as the world. The calm of the quarry intrigues the retired fishing-boat pilot.

  “You should come with me, see who they are.”

  Miguel eats the fish stew and dunks pieces of bread in the aioli, then pulls on a sweater full of holes and tucks a four-pound sledgehammer into his leather carpenter’s kit.

  As they walk, they avoid the terraces where pals might call out or intercept them. They know the labyrinth of dead ends and reach the jetty where Carasco rents out two rooms in his guest house. In the guidebooks, they say Cézanne used to walk here all the way from the Jas-de-Bouffan in Aix to paint and meet up with his mistress.

  The landlady is reluctant to tell them where the bloodhounds went. “I don’t follow my guests around.”

  Pierrot suggests they stay and wait for them. Night has fallen, there’s less activity. The carrier pigeons are bound to come back to their base soon.

  An hour goes by. The neighbor dozes off in an uncomfortable chair, but the thud of a body hitting the rug jerks him awake. The four-pound hammer has left a square imprint in the skull. The body twitches twice.

  “This one won’t see his islands again,” Miguel says bluntly.

  “How about the other guy?”

  “He ran away.”

  They roll the body up in a frayed red rug, drag it out to a porch, and hide it behind a pile of cardboard boxes.