I’m Abdou.
I’ve been scuffling in Marseilles for two months now. I’m Algerian. From Algiers. I’m thirteen. Well, that’s what I tell people. I may be fourteen, or fifteen. As I don’t have any papers, I can’t be sure. But I don’t give a damn about my age. It doesn’t make any difference to my life. That’s what I told Rico, the day we met.
It was a cold, gray January afternoon. We were sitting on a bench on Place de Lenche, in the Panier, the old quarter near the harbor. Rico was out of breath from walking all the way.
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right. You’re as old as you feel.”
“As old as your peter,” I said.
We both laughed.
I liked to make Rico laugh.
I’ll never forget the way we met.
I was coming up Rue Caisserie. A street that takes you all the way around the hill of the Panier.
Rico was glued to a billboard. A poster for a brand of women’s underwear called Aubade. The poster showed this fantastic woman’s ass, two nice plump mounds, thrust right out under the noses of passers-by. It really stopped you in your tracks, I can tell you! Especially as the girl’s tiny panties, a few little wisps of lace, were stuck right inside the crack of her buttocks, making the two mounds even more mouth-watering. At the bottom of the poster were the words: Lesson No 27. Create an area of turbulence.
I’d come to a standstill behind Rico. As hypnotized as he was. Even now, when I close my eyes and imagine how it would be if a girl really did show her ass to me like that, I quickly go from a “state of agitation and disorder”—that’s the definition of turbulence, I was in a bookstore once and I looked it up in a dictionary—to a complete earthquake! To this day, I don’t know what the previous lessons were, but Aubade’s No. 27 always makes me want to jerk off.
Rico must have sensed me behind him. He turned, looked at me in surprise, then pointed to the poster. “That’s my wife’s ass. Sophie.”
“Interesting,” I replied.
“Yeah . . . Especially if you can stick your cock in there. I forgot it was so . . .” With his hand, he drew the wonderful curve of the lower back and buttocks in the air. “Wow!” His hand fell again, as if exhausted. “It gave me a shock!”
“No kidding, that’s really your wife’s ass?”
“Yes, it is! Well . . . I mean it’s . . . It’s like Sophie Marceau’s breasts . . .”
I couldn’t see the connection.
“You don’t understand . . . Look . . .” He practically pressed my nose to the poster. “You see the texture of the skin? It’s the same. Identical. Her twin, that’s what this is. Her twin.” He took a few steps back. “Sexy ass, don’t you think?”
“Sure is!” I laughed. “Hey, you were some lucky guy.”
“Yeah . . .” he said, wearily. Without taking his eyes off the poster, he lit a cigarette, a Fortuna. “Yeah,” he said again, turning to me. “Since then, her ass has fallen into other hands. Enemy hands.”
I laughed. “The world is full of backstabbers.”
Rico laughed too, then he started coughing fit to burst. “You’re right, the backstabbers take everything and leave you with nothing. The poor are the worst. They’d even steal the crumbs from your pockets . . .” He shrugged. “Are you from around here? I think I’ve seen you before.”
I liked it when he said that.
Since I’d started bumming around Marseilles, I’d often run into Rico in this neighborhood near the Vieux-Port, and had gotten used to his weird appearance. Wrapped up in his black parka, with his navy blue woollen hat pulled down tight over his head, he’d walk along with his back bent, looking into the distance, dragging a grocery cart behind him. One of those little carts with a canvas bag on them, the kind you see women use when they go shopping. I never saw Rico without his cart. Always full of newspapers, knick-knacks, old books that people gave him or that he picked up here and there on the street.
Until Rico died, the Vieux-Port was my favourite place for a walk. The perfect remedy for feeling stifled—the ghoumma, we call it in Algeria, like when your folks won’t let you go out.
I’d walk as far as the Fort Saint-Jean, then along the sea wall, until I reached the entrance to the channel. Where the sea begins. With the horizon in the distance. And Algeria on the other side, the other shore. I’d settle comfortably in the rocks, light a joint, and spend hours daydreaming.
Marseilles—that part of town, anyway—always reminded me of Algiers. Not that I felt homesick. My home doesn’t exist anymore. I’ll never set foot there again. I want to forget Algiers. But I needed to hang on to a few memories. That’s all I have left, a few memories.
I wasn’t the only one reliving their memories here. Lots of guys hung around the Fort Saint-Jean, alone or in groups. Quite a few Algerians like me. But also Africans, Turks, Comorians, Yugoslavs . . . A guy who tried to sell me dope told me he thought Marseilles looked like Dubrovnik. “It looks like any place you want it to look like,” I replied. How we all end up here is another story. But I’ve never beaten myself up about that.
Sitting quietly among the rocks, I’d close my eyes and see myself with my pal Zineb, at the Eden or the Deux-Chameaux, bathing all summer. And it really made me feel good to think about him. Especially like that, diving into the lukewarm water of the harbour. Shouting and laughing. Whistling at the girls . . . It was a comfort, you know? It calmed me down when I felt like setting fire to this whole fucking shitty planet. If I’d had good enough matches, I’d have done it long ago.
“You haven’t answered my question,” Rico said. “Do you live around here?”
Ya Khi blad yak hi! Fucking country! I woke up from my daydreams. Rico was looking at me. It was weird, the way he looked at me. As if he didn’t notice the burns on the left side of my face, the eye almost down to the chin. It was the first time that had happened. With everyone else, even the kindest of them, I knew they couldn’t take their eyes off those lousy marks when they talked to me. They all found them repulsive.
“I’m just passing though,” I replied.
“You come and go, right? Like me.”
“Right.”
“And where were you going?”
“Down to the sea.”
He smiled at me. “The sea? That’s on my way.”
He grabbed hold of his cart and started walking slowly. I followed him. I didn’t really care where I went.
The head of a teddy bear protruded from the cart. One eye hung loose and rocked gently as the wheels turned. It was a nice effect. As if the bear was winking.
“Where did you get that bear?”
“Someone just gave it to me. It’s a collector’s item.”
“I never had one.”
Rico stopped. He looked at me again, right in the eyes this time. “I can’t give it to you, you do realize that?”
“Hey, I didn’t ask you for it!”
“That’s all right, then.”
He started walking again, and we carried on like that until we got to Place de Lenche. There he suggested we take a breather and sit down on a bench. He was too out of breath to continue.
“I always take a breather here. I like this square. It’s nice here, don’t you think?”
He wedged the cart between his legs, and closed his eyes. His breathing was halting and wheezy. It was really painful to hear him breathing like that. I sat there without moving, without saying anything. The bear stuck its tongue out at me, a little tongue of red cloth. “Hi, Zineb!” I said.
Rico had been in Marseilles for nearly a year. Physically, I think, he’d changed. He was as thin as a rake. The lower part of his face was covered with a salt and pepper beard, which he’d let grow so that he didn’t have to shave anymore. Wisps of greasy hair peeped out from under his hat. And when he smiled, in that gentle way he had, you could see his teeth were black and decaying.
Obviously I didn’t know it just then, but Rico looked like Titi. The way Titi had been at the end, the way he later described him to me. And the way I imagined him in my head. A bum. Rico just didn’t care about anything anymore. Even his black parka, which he was so proud of, was threadbare and covered in stains. It had aged, just as he had. Just as quickly as he had. And he never took it off. Whatever the weather. I think he even slept in it.
Gradually, Rico’s breathing became more regular, almost normal. He opened his eyes, took out his cigarettes, and offered me one.
“So where do you crash?”
“At the Ozéa. It’s a hotel on Rue Barbaroux, not far from the Canebière. There are four of us per room, sometimes five.”
“And how did you end up there?”
“Through a center called the Young Strays. It isn’t a shelter. There are no dormitories, no canteen. They call it a walk-in center. A place you go to when you don’t know where else to go. When you’re homeless and penniless. When you don’t have anything. That’s why they call it the Young Strays. That’s what I am.”
“Don’t you have parents?”
“No father, no mother, no brother . . . Nothing. Just my hands in my pockets.” I laughed.
“You’re quite a comic, you are.”
“I don’t have much choice.”
I’d found out about the Young Strays through the Timone hospital, where I’d stayed for a month, being treated for second degree burns. Not only on my face, but all over my body. I’d traveled from Algiers to Marseilles in the machine room of a freighter called the Nordland. Hiding just over the pipes. When I came out, the guys in the crew were taken aback. Not because I was there, but because of the state I was in. “I’m thirsty,” I said. That was all I could say before I passed out. When I came to, I was in the ER.
The doctors told me I’d been crazy to do a thing like that. They were right, but I’d gotten out of that fucking country, and I was still alive.
I told Rico the story. “One night, these twenty guys in fatigues and combat boots, with hoods over their heads, came to the project where I lived. In Bal-elzouar. They went into one block after another and pulled people out of their apartments. But not just anybody . . . They had lists. They ordered them down onto the street. Whole families. And then, pow, pow, pow . . . they shot them. My parents were on the list. My brother too.”
Rico had his eyes closed. For a moment, I thought he’d fallen asleep, but when I stopped speaking, he opened his eyes. I can’t describe the look in them. It was like the look of a blind man.
“And where were you?” he asked.
“By chance, I’d stayed over at my friend Zineb’s place. We’d gone bathing in the harbor. I always slept at his place when we went bathing. Because it was too far for me to get home from there. It’s out near the airport, and . . . Anyway, I liked sleeping at his place. My only regret is that I left Zineb behind. In all that shit . . .”
Rico put his arm right down inside the cart, took out a bottle of cheap wine, and downed more than a quarter of it, just like that, without drawing breath.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s always the same story.”
“What’s the same story?”
“You see, the thing is . . . You’re living a quiet life with your wife and kid. Just enough money not to be in the shit. And then one day your wife dumps you. You find yourself alone. You think it’s the end of the world . . .”
His eyes glazed over. He was somewhere far away. For a while, he was silent.
“What was I saying?”
“You were talking about your wife . . . The end of the world.”
“Oh, yes. In fact, the end of the world had already started. Long before the hassles came along.”
It was a lot of hot air, and I didn’t understand any of it. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s when the sky falls on your head that you discover the horror. The horror that exists in the world. Because suddenly you’re thrown into another life, and you meet people you never even knew existed, whose pain you never knew existed . . .”
“Like me?”
“Like you. Others too, abandoned at the side of the road.” He took another big swig of wine, then went on, “You know, it’s like World War I. Did they teach you about World War I in school?”
“Are you kidding? My grandfather was in that war. As an infantryman. They even gave him a medal.”
“Well, there was the front. The trenches. Men were dropping like flies. It was a slaughterhouse, that fucking war. And all the time, on both sides, life went on . . . It’s just the same today. Except that the slaughterhouses are getting bigger. They’re taking over the world. One day, you see, we’ll all be dead.”
He put the top back on the bottle and slipped it back inside the cart. He looked at me, with that look I liked. Then he nodded.
“So, shall we go down to the sea?”