11:45 A.M.
During the thirty years that he has sipped a Ti’ Punch on the terrace each day, Christos has seen Saint-Gilles metamorphose. True, he never saw for himself the old fishing village and the railway where trains arrived from Saint-Denis bringing husbands to their wives and children, obsessively white beneath their parasols. But he did live through the changes of the 1990s, when the island still believed it might one day be like its big sister, Mauritius. He followed the construction of the modern marina at the center of the island’s tourist capital. It wasn’t a bad idea . . . The Saint-Gilles gully had not been connected to the sea for a long time, except during storms; it died just as it reached the beach, like an exhausted runner collapsing a few meters from the finishing line. The developers opened the town to the ocean, methodically subdividing the marina into separate sections for boats, fishing and diving, and brightening up the whole place with a wild array of colors: the fresh paint of the fishing boats; the yellow plastic of restaurant chairs; the rich wood of the jetties of clubs such as the Corail Plongée; the pastel shades of the boats for toddlers in Captain Marmaille’s miniature port; the pink roof of Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix; the grey of the foot-bridges over the stagnant gully; the white of houses eating up the arid hillside; and all of this set amidst palm trees that the developers shrewdly decided not to cut down.
There was some black among the colors, too.
With house prices going up, the Creoles were forced to take refuge in Les Hauts, in the Carosse district, but they still descend on the port en masse to fish for pes’cavales from the docks or from their rowing boats.
A success, then! Except that the developers had undoubtedly dreamed of a pedestrianized area buzzing with people, not almost empty bar terraces.
Well, at least Christos can’t be accused of not making an effort on that score.
He, Jean-Jacques and René are the only customers at the Bar de la Marine. They have a perfect view of the yachts and of the twenty Creole fishermen’s arses parked on their rainbow-colored ice boxes.
Not that Jean-Jacques cares: his eyes are riveted to the Journal de l’île de la Réunion.
“So tell us, Messiah, you still haven’t found the nénère?”20
Christos takes a sip of his drink. The Marine’s rum is not as good as Gabin’s at the Athena, but the view is incomparable.
“It’s top secret, O.K., guys?”
“Top secret, my arse,” replies René. “For once, something is actually happening on this side of the gully.”
Christos pushes back his chair to escape the parasol’s shade.
“In that case, you’d better get me drunk . . .”
While Jean-Jacques pours his Dodo beer into his glass, he eyes the bottle of Charrette rum on the table, the bowl and the ice cubes, the pistachios, the samosas. Why not? With customers being so rare here, the bars have to take good care of them.
“All of this island’s misfortunes can be summed up by that bottle,” the Creole declares. “Rum, dulled wits, violence, idleness . . .”
Christos loves it when Jean-Jacques says something profound. Jean-Jacques has one job and one passion: pétanque player and philosopher. Or maybe it’s the other way round.
In the heat of the sun, Christos closes his eyes and opens his ears.
11:48 A.M.
At the far end of the port in Saint-Gilles, among the rocks that make up the sea wall, the waves are methodically tearing off shreds from the corpse’s flesh and then, in the backwash, washing its wounds. A colony of red crabs is also taking part in this cleansing operation. The smallest ones slip inside every orifice and empty the body from within before the carrion insects can get to work. The largest ones nibble the most tender areas of the body’s surface. The mouth, the eyes, the penis, the testicles. New crabs come along, but the old ones don’t complain. There is enough for everyone to have their fill at this feast.
11:49 A.M.
René turns his “974” cap around on his bald head as if it were fastened to his skull with a screw. He stares at the ox cart on the label of the rum bottle.
“Well, I don’t want to die in ignorance, Jean-Jacques. So you’d better enlighten me on the connection between this island’s misfortunes and that bottle.”
Christos keeps his eyes closed, but doesn’t miss a single syllable of the conversation. It is the time of day when Jean-Jacques becomes a poet.
“The connection is the exploitation of mankind, my poor René. Alcohol and the enslavement of the laboring masses. Slaves, freedmen, poor whites, all lovers of the cane-sugar mistress, millions of liters of molasses rum, while the prestigious rhum agricole sails off towards the mainland. Unlimited alcohol for the damned of the earth—vodka for the Poles in the mines, tafia for the Creoles in the fields, the alcohol of the poor, burning their revolutionary neurones . . .”
Stephano, the barman, who is listening to all this from behind his counter, feels duty-bound to intervene.
“Hey, Jean-Jacques, the man selling tafia says ‘screw you.’”
“Me too,” agrees René, lifting his glass.
René is a fisherman. Or was, rather. A deep-sea fisherman, for twenty years, in Saint-Pierre, until the price of the fish he sold wasn’t enough to cover the cost of diesel for his trawler. René then moved to Saint-Gilles, planning to make a living from tourism. His idea was to take tourists out to see swordfish, dolphins, sharks, humpback whales, sailing far out, as far as Kerguelen if he had to. Satisfaction, or your money back: that was the concept. You only paid if you saw some sea monsters. But no one saw anything, or at least that’s what the tourists said when they came back from his trips. René was often too drunk to dispute the matter. In the end, he’d even added mermaids to his programme.
“Tafia or Charrette, who cares?” says René, draining his rum in a single gulp. “I drink to the health of the island’s cultural heritage . . .”
Jean-Jacques sips his beer slowly. “Cultural heritage, my arse.”
11:54 A.M.
The red crabs are now attacking the corpse in a more orderly fashion. Like a column of ants, they are becoming organized. The bluish putrefied flesh, which has turned the texture of papier-mâché, is being shredded by the strongest ones. The weakest make do with transporting it. The tastiest internal parts are evacuated first—bowels, viscera, brain—like furniture being carried out by efficient movers, leaving only a light, hollow carcass.
Suddenly the crabs all freeze.
The corpse has moved.
The most fearful have already run away and hidden under the massive rocks of the sea wall. Others, tiny, pour from the mouth, as if the dead person has spewed them out.
The body becomes stable again. The crabs warily watch the object that has collided with the corpse.
Round. Smooth. Cold.
11:56 A.M.
Jean-Jacques waves the Journal de l’île de La Réunion about as if it were a Bible, almost tipping over his plastic chair.
“Close your eyes and enjoy your drinks, my lads. Alcoholism, illiteracy, violence . . . It’s all there, in black and white. Réunion is top of the league for all these things.”
Christos opens his eyes, downs the contents of his glass, then finally intervenes in the conversation.
“Slavery’s been abolished for a while now, René. If the people on this island drink, you can’t keep blaming the Gros Blancs . . .”
Jean-Jacques twists around, then takes a pil plat’21 from his pocket.
“And what about this? Why do you think mistress cane sugar invented it? Twenty centiliters of white rum in the shops for the same price as five at a bar . . .”
“Now you’re speaking my language!” Stephano yells from behind his counter. “Solitary bwar22 is the scourge of our nation . . . Kantines23 going out of business, it’s a crime against humanity!”
René nervously pours himself another glass of rum.
“I’m with you on that too, Jean-Jacques. The island’s cultural heritage is Charrette, forty-nine per cent, and in a bottle, not this cough syrup in a hip flask with the alcohol limited to forty per cent by the government.”
Christos leans forward on his plastic chair. He loves their hypocrisy. He watches the sails of the boats moored nearby billowing gently in the calm breeze. The sun beats down. Paradise, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Until he came here, he had no idea that such a place could exist on this earth. As long as you can survive a tropical storm once every three years. Two days spent huddled under the duvet. It’s not so bad.
Jean-Jacques has not given up. He sticks the flat bottle of rum under René’s nose.
“Taste it, you moron . . . It’s forty-nine per cent. All you need is a Bag-in-Box, three liters of Charrette in a soft plastic container with a built-in tap, and you can fill your own pil plat.’ The latest of mistress cane sugar’s inventions in order to keep the masses in a permanent daze.”
He gets to his feet and starts imitating a drunken puppeteer.
“Listen to me, my friends. Global capitalism has the people of this island dangling like puppets by two threads, one in each pocket. The pil plat’ and the mobile phone.”
René stupidly pats the pockets of his jeans.
“And I don’t care!” proclaims Jean-Jacques. “I don’t give a flying fuck! As long as all the island’s welfare cases suck at their hip flasks before taking aim on the pétanque court, I will remain the best player in Réunion.”
As a finale to his sentence, Jean-Jacques lifts his Dodo up to the sky. René bursts out laughing, then picks up his glass of rum and lifts it towards Jean-Jacques’ beer to make a toast.
He tries it in a Provençal accent. “Peuchère,24 you old nutcase, we can still get along.”
Jean-Jacques stares at him sorrowfully.
“Don’t talk to me like a pétanque player from Marseilles. That really . . .”
“Think about it, you dick. I’m talking about reconciling rum and beer.”
Jean-Jacques stares at his Dodo sceptically.
René gives a triumphant laugh.
“Canne-bière,25 peuchère! Canebière!”26
Christos laughs so hard he almost falls off his chair.
Jean-Jacques sighs, close to losing his patience.
“Fucking hell, René,” says Stephano, bringing over another bowl of samosas. “That last joke was a bit lame.”
12:01 P.M.
“There’s a dead body, Kevin. Oh God, there’s a body!”
“Stop messing around, Ronaldo! Just get my ball and come back here. You said you’d try to beat my record of thirty-two keepy-uppies. Stop wasting time.”
“I’m not messing around, Kevin. There’s a dead body, I’m telling you. There, on the rocks, half-eaten by the crabs.”
12:05 P.M.
Jean-Jacques is reading the Journal de l’île de La Réunion again, weary of his companions’ jokes. René has tipped back his head towards the clouds covering the peak of Maïdo.
Christos savors the moment. He never tires of this ambience, it’s like a permanent carnival. The comparison to the festive melting pot on the Canebière is not entirely misleading; there are no crowds here, but there is the scorching heat, and it lasts all year round. Christos had had enough of the cold in France. Bringing in the garden furniture. Bringing in firewood. Bloody hibernating. Those cretins on the mainland sometimes ask him if he doesn’t miss the seasons, if he doesn’t get tired of seeing blue skies every morning, of the leaves that never fall from the trees, of the sun that sets every day at the same time. They claim they can only really appreciate the spring after three months of rain; that going on holiday would not be the same if they weren’t leaving behind grey skies . . .
Idiots.
As if you have to get older to appreciate the passing of time, or go on a diet for a week just to enjoy a good meal. Depriving yourself in order to earn pleasure. That old Judeo-Christian morality. Or Muslim. Or Buddhist.
Christos wonders if maybe he’s some kind of anomaly. Generally, a Zoreille does not stay more than five years on the island, putting aside his fifty-three per cent of supplementary earnings as a government employee, investing his savings in local property to avoid paying tax on it, then, boom, back he goes to France to buy the suburban house of his dreams. Doing it for the kids, they all say. For the good schools.
Well, it’s true, he doesn’t have any kids.
A Creole officer from the Saint-Benoît force once told him that Christos reminded him of the character Lucien Cordier, played by Philippe Noiret in the film Coup de Torchon. At the time, Christos felt insulted by this. Then he thought about it. Appearances can be deceptive . . . The character is a police officer in a small West African town. Bored shitless, he regards life in the tropics with cynicism, and goes on to kill off all the idiots that surround him. He, Christos, is the complete opposite. Here, he is happy as a lark, as a clam, happy as a ripe fruit on a branch high enough not to be eaten. The officer in Saint-Benoît must have made that comment out of jealousy, because over there, on the windy coast, they get up to six meters of rain each year. It’s the world record. But here, in Zoreilleland, not a drop.
Christos can live peacefully until he retires in this little corner of paradise. It belongs to everyone—and, consequently, a little bit to him too—because the island was uninhabited until the seventeenth century. No one can claim the land is theirs because they were here before the others; they are just a bunch of men and women all in the same boat, anchored in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
There’s a definite hierarchy, of course. As on an overcrowded ocean liner. Jealousy too. Mutiny sometimes. But no racism.
All in the same boat, like a labora . . .
It is at this precise moment that he sees, through his sunglasses, the two kids running towards him. They’re waving their hands like lunatics. What’s up with them?
Christos lifts up his Ray-Bans.
Bloody hell!
The first kid, the smallest one, wearing a Barcelona shirt with Unicef emblazoned on it, looks like he’s seen a ghost. The second, behind him, yells at the top of his voice:
“It’s Rodin! It’s Rodin!”
Jean-Jacques leaps out of his chair.
12:08 P.M.
Christos runs to the end of the sea wall, panting. The kids are five meters ahead of him. Jean-Jacques, behind him, can hardly breathe. René is walking, or rather, staggering after them.
“There it is! There!”
The sea wall seems to go on forever.
It’s Rodin.
Only with thirty years of experience in the Saint-Gilles force is he able to decipher this message. Christos had once read a maxim in an old book of colonial images: “The Creole is naturally contemplative.” Rodin is the personification of that maxim. As long as anyone can remember, Rodin has spent his days staring at the horizon from his black rock, at the end of the sea wall of the port in Saint-Gilles, his back to the island, the port, the bars, the nightclubs, the car park. And that’s all he does. If all Creoles are philosophers, Rodin is Diogenes.
Rodin is there. He must have fallen onto the rocks, five meters below.
If you lean over, you can see his body.
Christos gets his breath back. The second lieutenant is thinking that he will have to go down there, to check. Just in case the Creole is merely injured . . .
It doesn’t seem likely.
The kids stare at him unblinkingly, as if he’s Horatio Caine. They won’t be disappointed.
Christos starts climbing down the slippery rocks of the riprap intended to break the waves and protect the concrete sea wall. He makes slow progress. The stones are covered with seaweed and his polished shoes keep sliding. You’re not dressed for this, Horatio. If only he’d known.
“So, Christos?” asks René anxiously from above.
So what? What does he expect? That Christos will bring Rodin back to life with his bare hands?
Christos yells at the red crabs to scare them off. The less alert ones are crushed underfoot, their shells crackling like dead leaves.
The corpse is lying face down. Feet turned towards the ocean.
Definitely dead. No sign of any wound.
Christos swallows, as the realization hits him. He must turn the body over to understand fully. Rodin has had excellent sea legs since time immemorial; he could stick to the concrete like a mussel. He didn’t fall. He was pushed.
He hears Jean-Jacques weeping, up on the sea wall. Rodin was the perfect example, the very quintessence of Creole wisdom.
Christos decides not to think about it too much and grabs the corpse by the belt around its jeans. The body is surprisingly light and easy to turn. Its crab-eaten face is offered up to the sunlight.
Shit!
Christos just manages to stop himself falling. His hand digs into the soft coral that seems to cement the blocks of stone together.
This is all we need!
There is a knife sticking out of Rodin’s chest.
Christos makes the connection instantly. Even the most obtuse police officer would be able to see it. It’s a good, solid knife. Only the ivory handle is sticking out of the corpse, carved from the horn of an animal that does not exist on this island. Christos takes a closer look. The brand is engraved on it, just in case the cop who found Rodin was not the sharpest blade in the box.
Maisons du Monde.
The type of bourgeois-bohemian brand sold all over the planet, but which you cannot buy on Réunion Island.
Christos tries to think as quickly as possible.
Why kill Rodin?
He looks up towards the sea wall. Jean-Jacques is sobbing onto René’s chest. The bigger of the two kids is holding the smaller one’s hand, and the smaller one is holding the ball.
Why kill Rodin?
Not to rob him, that’s for sure. Rodin had no possessions, not even a roof over his head. Christos turns around, observes the channel of the port. A theory begins to form in his mind, crazy but plausible.
What if Rodin had turned around, for once in his life? A noise behind him, a scream, someone calling for help. Just the briefest glance.
One single second, against an entire lifetime spent contemplating the sea.
What if Rodin was the victim of the most incredible bad fortune, one of those cruel ironies in life that sometimes make us smile?
Turning his head, for one time only . . . but at the worst possible moment.
20 Girlfriend.
21 A flat flask of rum.
22 Drinking.
23 Bars.
24 Never mind.
25 Rum-beer.
26 The historic high street in Marseilles.