CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Marcia, 6

DAVID MARCIA is in his bedroom. He is a man of about thirty, with a fattish face. He is lying fully dressed on his bed, having taken off only his shoes. He is wearing a tartan cashmere sweater, black socks, and a petrol-blue pair of gaberdine trousers. On his right wrist he wears a silver chain-like bracelet. He is thumbing through an issue of Pariscop which is marking the relaunch of The Birds at the Ambassadeurs cinema by carrying on its cover a photograph of Alfred Hitchcock, the director, looking through a barely open eye at a crow which is perched on his shoulder and seems to be laughing out loud.

The bedroom is small and summarily furnished: the bed, a bedside table, a wing chair. On the night table there is an English paperback edition of William Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on a Flying Trapeze, a bottle of fruit juice, and a lamp with a pedestal made from a cylinder of rough glass half-filled with multicoloured pebbles whence emerge a few tufts of aloe. Against the rear wall, on a china mantelpiece bearing a large mirror, stands a bronze statuette representing a little girl scything hay. The right-hand wall is covered with cork tiles, intended to soundproof the room from next door, the bedroom of Léon Marcia, whose insomnia constrains him to interminable nocturnal comings and goings. The left-hand wall is hung with embossed paper and decorated with two framed prints: one is a large map of the town and citadel of Namur and its environs, with an indication of the fortifications carried out during the siege of 1746; the other is an illustration of Twenty Years After, depicting the escape of the Duke of Beaufort: the Duke has just taken two daggers, a rope ladder, and a choke-pear (which Grimaud is stuffing into La Ramée’s mouth) from the pie they had been camouflaged in.

David Marcia came back to live with his parents not long ago. He had left home when he turned professional motorcyclist, and had gone to live in Vincennes in a rented villa possessing a large garage where he spent his days messing about with his machines. In those days he was an orderly, conscientious lad entirely consumed by his passion for motorcycle racing. But his accident turned him into a whimsical fellow, a daydreamer who poured into muddle-headed projects all the money he got from his insurance, totalling nearly one hundred million old francs.

First he tried to switch to car racing, and drove in several rallies; but one day, near Saint-Cyr, he killed two children who ran out of a level-crossing keeper’s cottage, and he lost his licence for good.

He then became a record producer: during his stay in hospital he had met a self-taught musician, Marcel Gougenheim, alias Gougou, whose ambition it was to have a big jazz band like there used to be in France in the days of Ray Ventura, Alix Combelle, and Jacques Hélian. David Marcia realised it was in vain to hope to earn a living from a big band: even the really small groups couldn’t manage, and, more and more frequently, the Casino de Paris and the Folies-Bergères would engage just the soloists and provide them with backing on tape; but Marcia thought a record would do well, and he decided to finance the project. Gougou hired forty players or so, and rehearsals started in a suburban theatre. The band had an excellent sound which Gougou’s Woody Herman–style arrangements brought out fantastically well. But Gougou had a terrible defect: he was a chronic perfectionist, and after every run-through of a piece he would always find a detail that wasn’t good enough, something too slow here, a tiny muff there. Rehearsals, scheduled to take three weeks, went on for nine before David Marcia decided to cut his losses.

Then he got interested in a holiday village in Tunisia, in the Kerkennah islands. It was the only one of all these projects which might have come off: the Kerkennah islands were less overrun than Djerba but offered holiday-makers the same kind of facilities, and the village was well equipped: you could do horse-riding as well as sailing, and then waterskiing and underwater fishing, coarse fishing and camel rides, pottery sessions, spinning lessons and basket-weaving classes, body language and autogenous fitness training courses. The village was connected with a travel agency providing it with customers for almost eight months a year, and David Marcia became site manager; for the first few months it all went pretty well, until the day when he hired as drama-course director an actor by the name of Boris Kosciuszko.

Boris Kosciuszko was a man of about fifty, tall and spare, with an angular mien, protruding cheekbones, and smouldering eyes. His theory was that Racine, Corneille, Molière, and Shakespeare were second-rate playwrights who had been fraudulently elevated to the rank of genius by sheep-brained directors devoid of imagination. Real theatre, he decreed, was Wenceslas, by Rotrou, Manlius Capitolinus, by Lafosse, Maisonneuve’s Roxelane et Mustapha, Longchamps’s Lovelorn Seducer; the real playwrights were Colin d’Harleville, Dufresny, Picard, Lautier, Favart, Destouches; he knew dozens and dozens of that ilk, went into imperturbable ecstasies over the hidden beauties of Iphigenia by Guimond de la Touche, Népomucène Lemercier’s Agamemnon, Alfieri’s Orestes, Lefranc de Pompignan’s Dido, and ponderously stressed the clumsy way such similar or related subjects had been handled by the so-called great classic authors. The educated audiences of the Revolution and Empire periods – Stendhal being the leading light amongst them – put Voltaire’s Zaïre on the same level as Shakespeare’s Othello, or Crébillon’s Rhadamniste on a par with Le Cid, and they hadn’t been wrong; up to the middle of the nineteenth century, the two Corneilles were published together, and the works of the elder, Thomas, were appreciated quite as much as those of the younger, Pierre. But the introduction of compulsory non-Catholic schooling and bureaucratic centralism, from the Second Empire and Third Republic on, had smothered these energetic, fulsome writers and imposed the skimpy, feeble order which bore the pompous name of classicism.

Boris Kosciuszko’s enthusiasm was apparently infectious, for a few weeks later David Marcia announced in the press the launching of the Kerkennah Festival, intended, the release specified, to “safeguard and promote the rescued treasures of the theatre”. Four plays were programmed: Jason, by Alexandre Hardy, Inès de Castro, by Lamotte-Houdar, a one-act verse comedy by Boissy, entitled The Chatterbox, all directed by Boris Kosciuszko, and The Laird of Polisy, a tragedy by Malte d’Istillerie in which Talma had made his name, directed by Henri Agustoni, from Switzerland. Various other events were planned, including an international symposium, the subject of which – the myth of the classical unities – constituted a bold manifesto in itself.

David Marcia did not economise on resources, reckoning that the success of the festival would rebound on the reputation of his holiday village. With support from various agencies and institutions, he put up an open-air, eight-hundred-seat auditorium and tripled the number of chalets so as to provide accommodation for all the actors and spectators.

Crowds of actors came – a score were required just to play Jason – and there was similarly a flood of designers, costumiers, lighting men, critics, and professors; on the other hand, there were few paying spectators, and several performances were cancelled or abandoned because of the violent storms which frequently break out in this area in midsummer: at the festival’s end, David Marcia worked out that total receipts were 98 dinars, whereas the whole operation had cost him nearly 30,000.

That was how David Marcia managed to get rid of his small fortune in three years. He then returned to live in Rue Simon-Crubellier. To begin with, it was to be a temporary solution, and he looked around unenthusiastically for a trade and a flat, until his mother, out of a soft heart, gave him one half of her shop, together with any profits he might make from it. The work is not too tiring for him, and the income he makes goes to support his latest craze – games of chance, and in particular roulette, at which, nearly every evening, he loses between three hundred and fifty and one thousand francs.