He wakes with a start because he felt something move near him or heard a groaning sound breathe into his ear and he lies immobile in the blackness, muscles stiff, heart racing, and he stares into this impenetrable darkness and notices that he is still alive, because he’s in pain. He is on his back, the blankets pulled up to his chin by his two fists, afraid that they will fall off him or be torn away by someone. There is always a long terrified moment before he remembers where he is: a bedroom heated by the gas stove that he can hear now, humming in the background. A new bed with clean sheets, where he is alone. Around him, the city still sleeps. The city where he was born, grew up, lived, loved. The city that holds all his memories of before. Scraps of torn newspaper blown by the wind. The ruins of a party swept away by a tornado. Paper chains ripped to shreds, Chinese lanterns extinguished. And in the middle of all this chaos he wanders, sometimes thinking he can hear wafts of music, an accordion waltz, a confusion of happy voices.
The rhythmic jingling of the alarm clock. The distant rumble of a truck, on the cours de l’Yser. The muted trickling of gutters. As he does every morning, he finds these blind man’s landmarks and, as every morning, he will later have the feeling that he is opening his eyes for the first time in a long time. He dares reach out next to him with his hand and finds only fresh sheets, so he rolls onto his side then stretches out on his belly and sighs with relief.
Sleep takes him again, scattered with visions. Dreamed recollections. The nightmare ofmemory. He moves inside these moments from the past, sometimes moaning and weeping.
Each morning, his unexpected dawn is ripped by the ringing of his alarm, at the other end of the room. He waits for it to stop before rising effortlessly.
He washes himself at the sink in a corner of the kitchen, inhaling the mixed scents of coffee and soap. He rubs his skin until it’s red. He holds the flannel underwater then wrings it out then rubs again to rinse himself off then dries himself with a towel. He cannot see his whole body in the little mirror hung in front of him but he knows his body bears no traces except for the scar below his collarbone and that hole in his shoulder blade. No pain. His body is tall and lean and hard. Muscles, tendons, bones. His body is still young, at nearly fifty. He knows it, he feels it. He won’t get old until that has been accomplished. He will keep this strength and vitality intact the way you keep a weapon in secret, oiling it regularly, checking its mechanism. And exercising with it too.
His face is all marks, traces, scars. Paths dug in the too-soft ground, trenches never filled after a lost war. An ancient, ageless cartography. Cuneiform writing that you think you can understand without knowing how to read it.
Coffee, barely sweetened. Buttered bread that he dips in his drink and chews, sometimes closing his eyes. He lets the burning liquid pour down the back of his throat, feels its heat spreading through his insides.
Each morning at this wooden table, its uneven legs wedged with cardboard, sitting on his creaking chair, he delights in this moment, both hands cradling the bowl and those little gulps that bring tears to his eyes. And, almost splitting in two, he sees the man he has become savoring what others rush through, what he himself, for a long time, took for granted, until one day he had to lift up the body of a comrade who had died in the night to pick up the scrap of bread he’d fallen asleep on.
Each morning in his mouth the taste and the scent of a silent reconquering.
In the hallway, already filled with the smells of bleach and soap—Madame Mendez must have put her washtubs on the fire—he hears the sound of her radio, the indistinct chatter of a presenter then music and, fading into the distance behind him, the voice of Edith Piaf. The street is narrow, dirty, sticky with damp. The stinging odor of burned charcoal. He steps over the gutter where whitish, lukewarm water runs, steaming slightly in the cold air. Once he’s on the main road, he quickens his pace, matching his footsteps to his calm breathing. He moves through the crowds at the Marché des Capucins, slaloming between the trolleys loaded with crates and boxes and the vans parked willy-nilly on the square and customers carrying large baskets or dawdling in front of stalls. The smells of meat, vegetables, fish, diesel. The shrill cries of the barrow boys and fishmongers, echoing in the covered market, the laughter of butchers coming out of a bar, aprons stained with blood and forearms bare, accompany him like so many auditory landmarks on this itinerary that he has been following for several months now. Next he walks down narrow streets below dark façades, then he enters the roar of cours Victor-Hugo, jammed with traffic, stinking of diesel oil, shouldering his way through the mass of pedestrians, all rushing like him, sometimes muttering a vain excuse.
He enters rue Bouquière, the sidewalks already clogged with parked vans being unloaded by lads in grey shirts. Bundles of clothes, lengths of cotton, wool, terylene, in solid colors or prints or tartans or polka dots or floral patterns: for soft furnishings, dressmaking. Wholesale and retail-wholesale. A shop every ten meters, each with its own specialities, its own customers.
The one where he works is a long corridor, three meters wide, the ceiling four meters high, the walls covered with shelves full of rolls of cloth, offcuts, clothes in packets of twenty: trousers, suits, jackets, waistcoats, shirts, and overalls. Look all you want, but you won’t find any bright colors. Everything here is grey, charcoal, brown, navy blue. Beige at a push, but it stands out a mile. Pinstripes are as whimsical as it gets. Houndstooth is an extravagance.
The boss, Monsieur Bessière, is standing behind a counter, examining a tweed offcut. He barely even glances up as he greets him with a sigh.
“Hello, André. No lack of work today. And plenty of headaches as usual.”
He says more or less the same thing every day. Drowning in work. Looking exhausted as soon as he starts the day, tired-eyed and pasty-faced beneath his greying brush cut, his forehead glistening in the dreary neon light. With his impeccable white coat, he looks like a doctor or pharmacist on the verge of a nervous breakdown, no longer able to bear informing people that there is nothing more he can do for them and that they must prepare to die with a great deal of suffering. Next, in the same cavernous voice, he complains that business is bad, that people don’t dress properly anymore. That is how he justifies the pathetic wages he pays. If he could afford to pay more, he would do so with all his heart, that goes without saying. But the competition is pitiless. The major stores. Look at America. The peril is at our gates, and soon it will swoop down on small businesses and tear them to pieces. He mopes around behind his cash register, a pencil tucked behind his ear. Some days you’d think he was about to slide the key under the door and go downstairs to hang himself in the cellar.
It’s a shame. He should remind him about his house in Caudéran more often, with its big garden, and the three or four apartments in town that he owns, even if he does have occasional difficulties with tenants. That would do him the power of good, poor Monsieur Bessière.
“Hello, André. Your work is ready for you. Thank you for being early.”
He says that sometimes. When he’s in a good mood.
André. The man always feels a twinge when he hears people call him that. The spare name came to him spontaneously last year in Paris when the man who was forging his papers asked him for it, just after he’d taken his picture. Family name, first name. The forger had a stock of blank identity cards, picked up during the Liberation from the prefecture offices, taking advantage of the chaotic battles being fought on the streets and the desperate demand for certificates of resistance from coppers. He was a former Resistance fighter. Georges. He knew him only by his first name. Georges told him all this under the red lamp of his little darkroom while he soaked the photographic paper in the developing tank. His voice went hoarse as he described the vileness of French cops. After rounding up the Jews and hunting down the Resistance fighters on behalf of Marshal Pétain and the Gestapo, they suddenly felt all republican and hurried through the corridors of the prefecture building in shirtsleeves, a red, white, and blue armband around a bicep, to offer their services to the very people they’d spent the last four years hunting and fighting. It was like a huge herd of calves stampeding in all directions, terrified by the arrival of cowboys and desperate to save their asses from being branded with hot iron. The most they ever did against the Germans was to fire their .30 pistols through the windows, without even aiming, as the tanks sped past on the other side of the Seine. “One month earlier, those bastards would only have set foot inside the building on rue Lauriston to smash our heads with truncheons. But . . . what can you do? History is stronger than men, so they say. And we wanted to believe it, back then.”
André Vaillant. He liked the sound of that straight away. He tried to forget his real name, the label attached to his previous life, which every day he tried to tear off: Jean Delbos. And so André Vaillant, born 18 March 1911 in Courbevoie, came into existence. Afterwards, he and Georges went to grab something to eat and drink at a greasy spoon on rue de Charonne, and the forger told him about the fighting around Madrid, the fall of Barcelona, the desperate flight of his brigade, his comrades in tears. The death of a dream. It was war, down there in Spain. Heavy artillery, planes, tanks. He saw it all. Hideous death. Friends blown to pieces. Defeat, foreshadowed by terrible massacres. But he doesn’t remember being afraid. Rather, a desire to get stuck in, to go and hunt down fascists everywhere he could find them, to flush them out of hiding and confront them head on, to fight the last battle at every moment.
Then came the clandestine struggle. The secret meetings. The preparation of ambushes. The stakeouts. The enemy everywhere. On a street corner, behind a window, in a dark corridor, crouched behind double doors. You search for him and he finds you. After that, blackness. Falling.
And so came terror, though you would never admit it to your friends. Terror that pins you in the middle of the street unable to take a single step or prevents you sleeping for a whole week, woken by a door banging shut in the street. Terror that tears to shreds your paper sleep, with nightmares where you hear them climbing the stairs and smashing down the door, where you see yourself tied to a chair being beaten and tortured, not knowing if you’ll be lucky enough to die before you give them the three names you know because you can’t take it anymore, because no-one can withstand those weapons, those refinements of brutality, the pleasure they take in it and pursue unwaveringly, perhaps hoping that you won’t talk so it lasts longer and they can get their kicks . . . That, that was the true terror, the terror that reigned during the years of the Resistance.
André listened to him talking quietly, his voice husky with emotion, controlling the urges of his hands, which wanted to move around, perhaps to make sure they didn’t say more than he wanted to, to make sure they didn’t betray him. Like an armless Italian. His shoulders twitched but his fists remained balled to prevent the hands flying around. He had known a Jew in Turin who talked like that, with his shoulders, arms severed by exhaustion.
He liked Georges, this Resistance fighter still tormented by fear, who talked and talked in order to keep it quiet.
Yes, he said, that terror at the idea of falling into their hands because he knew what would happen if he did, that vertigo he felt before he entered a building or crossed the street for a meeting, the silence that always settled within you in that instant, so heavy and massive that it seemed to spread all around and to point you out in the eyes of everyone as the person responsible for that sudden deafness of the air, he had felt that so many times and still dreamed of it now. “Some nights I wake up on the Gestapo’s chair, even though I never sat on it. I’m there in the place of friends whom we never saw again afterwards or whose screams were described to us or the state they were in when they were sent back to their cell, shit, sometimes I’m there and I’m scared that I’ll talk, can you believe it? And I wake up and I don’t know who I am anymore and sometimes I bawl my eyes out like a little kid! It was my one obsessive fear, of course, but nearly fifteen years have passed since then and it still haunts me! How is that possible?”
André did not reply, he just nodded and kept looking at Georges, wide-eyed.
“Why am I telling you all this? My wife is the only one who knows. And two or three comrades who are like brothers to me.”
The former Resistance fighter looked at him more closely, pushed back in his seat and smiled.
“You’re not saying anything, but I bet you must have seen some things too. I can tell from your face.”
Prisoner. It came to him suddenly, like that, unthinkingly, an improvised destiny. He had been taken after the evacuation of Dunkirk and had found himself in a Stalag near Bremen. Three escape attempts, all failures. After the war he had worked in a cotton mill near Douai, but he’d been sacked after a strike, and so after that he’d done some, let’s say, more serious stuff, a bit of sabotage, a bit of . . . he hesitated, yeah, you know, a bit of armed robbery, so anyway, he needed a change of scenery and a new name.
Armed robbery. Brigandage. André found the word curious and beautiful. Like an old weapon that could be used again.
He wasn’t sure Georges had believed him. He nodded but his eyes seemed full of surprise and perhaps admiration for this storytelling talent. But he liked the fable, in any case, and that was probably all that mattered. “Brigandage?” he repeated, as if also savoring the word. “I do that too,” he added with a smile. “We’re on the same side.”
So, yes, André. He thinks about the Resistance robber and feels a bit bad about the lie he had to tell him. He thinks about what he is leaving behind him, these successive lives, two, three of them. He read somewhere that American Indians believe they have the equivalent in lives of the three horses12 they possess, and he knows that two have already died under him or have unseated him before running away—where, he doesn’t know, perhaps to eternal prairies where those animals go, calm and happy. The third is walking beside him now. He holds its bridle and whispers to it. He has not yet mounted it; he’s waiting until they know each other better. Soon. And then will come the time for the final attack. He needs to preserve his strength. To gather as much of it as possible despite, sometimes, his tiredness.
He sits at his work table, at the very back of the room, separated from the rest of the shop by a high wooden set of shelves sagging under rolls of cloth and packets of shirts. A little nook that sometimes smells vaguely of saltpetre. There is a calendar hung on the wall, where he notes down deadlines, jobs he has to do. A color photograph of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, which he cut out of a magazine.
She had told him one day, in early ’40: “When the war is over, we’ll go to Venice. We’ll leave the kid with my mother and we’ll go just the two of us. What do you think? I’ve seen pictures, it looks really pretty. And apparently you have to see it before you die.” He must have evaded her question, as he always did in situations like that. Lied about his real intentions and his plans. He has lied a lot throughout his life. Bluffed, as in a game of poker. Like when she asked him where he’d been when he came back late at night or early in the morning, stinking of tobacco and wine, and he lied, again, and she listened to his muddled explanations with a weary sigh. She would never see Venice. They would never have to leave her son with anyone. And now he has no-one to whom he can tell the truth.
He lights the lamp and sighs as he sees the cashbooks, the invoices, the delivery notes, the credit notes handwritten by the boss. He gets started. For four hours, he knows he will be able to make his brain work unrestrainedly on calculations and writing and that he will leave the shop with his mind free and light because it will have thought of nothing but figures and numbers, will have been occupied by mental exercises that he forces himself to do, as he used to, over there, for whole days and nights, to stop his grey cells freezing up and his body being trapped in ice.
The door opens behind him and the sound of the flush and the stench of shit follow in the wake of Raymond, the assistant, who taps him on the shoulder with a “Monsieur André”. Raymond is a short, stocky man with thick eyebrows and a lantern jaw, neckless and ageless, with long arms capable of lifting huge loads under which he sometimes seems about to disappear. He is old Bessière’s creature. His own personal monster. Maybe he tampered with him in his basement, patching him up with bits of other poor devils, like mad Dr. Frankenstein. Bessière treats him with a lukewarm mixture of contempt and compassion. He punishes him whenever he’s in a bad mood, yells at him if turnover is low and makes deductions from his wages that André does not enter into the accounts or the payslips. Raymond goes off to stand behind his counter, always in exactly the same place, eyes staring vaguely from his square, surly, inexpressive face. He hangs the blue ribbon of his tape measure around his neck, and he checks in a drawer that his chalk sticks are there and takes out two pairs of scissors that he tries out vigorously, making the clear hissing sound of steel rubbing steel.
The telephone rings, an early customer opens the door. The day begins.
André forgets himself in numbers, gets drunk on additions, empties his mind into columns of figures. Sometimes he looks up at the photograph of Venice and stares for a few seconds at a woman in a red dress walking past the basilica.
About quarter past one, he shakes hands with Raymond, waves to the old man who replies with a sigh and goes outside and spits in the gutter, his working day over. Every day that he comes here, he scrupulously follows this shopkeeper’s routine, never deviating from it. The way you might climb a rock-face, following a marked path, without neglecting any pitons, without allowing your mind to drift. No sudden jolts, no slackening. Because below you, the ravine is bottomless.
After that, he has time. On cours Victor-Hugo he is almost blinded by the sun as it shoots a few rays of light between the clouds. The air is milder. It’s supposed to rain all week, as it often does here in winter. So he looks up at the patches of pale blue sky, he lets himself be dazzled by the violent bursts of sunlight that fall on the wet street.
He enters the café Montaigne and sits on a bench, in a corner, not far from the counter. From there, he can see who enters or who arrives on the sidewalk, through the big windows. Pupils from the nearby secondary school are sitting a little way off, leaning against the windows and laughing, winding each other up, ties loosened, shirt collars unbuttoned. He hears them talking about Algeria, Guy Mollet, Soustelle, calling for Mendès . . . There are five of them. They drink coffee, leaning forward to talk over breadcrumbs, the remains of their sandwiches. Then they lower their voices, one of them whispers, and in turn they stare at his dark eyes. Their faces grow more serious as their eyes meet his.
André decides to look away so as not to be taken for a snitch. At the other end of the café, four old men are playing cards. They laugh loudly, their chips clicking softly when they throw them on the green baize. Right by the door, there is that very old lady dressed all in black, tiny, a little dog with a long face and bulging eyes sitting on her lap, a glass of beer on the table in front of her. He sees them every time he comes in here. Same seat, same position. The old lady and the dog look out through the window, their eyes seeming to follow the same passers-by, as if they were waiting for someone who was already very late. André wonders who. Someone who is not coming. Or who never came back. But who is not dead, oh no, because she was never informed of anything officially. She did not see his name on any list. She doesn’t know. Perhaps prefers not to know. And it’s true that you sometimes read in the papers about unexpected reunions. So why not?
Later, the old lady will stand up and her dog will jump to the floor, with a shake of its cylindrical body, and it will chew its leather leash and they will leave, disappearing slowly towards the cours Pasteur. Tomorrow. Surely tomorrow . . .
He has just been served a sandwich and a glass of red when the door opens and a man greets him with a movement of his chin and approaches, removing his hat. They shake hands. The man waves at the waiter then sits down with a sigh, unbuttoning his coat and then his waistcoat. He is quite tall, with a bladelike face and dark eyes. Hair greying at the temples. He looks around casually then changes his seat so he’s positioned perpendicular to André, and immediately shoots a glance at the street. Inspecteur Mazeau.
“Shit, I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it. We had a double homicide in Mériadeck. A whore who slit the throats of her pimp and a john. There was blood everywhere, she did a good job. One of them was almost decapitated . . . Problem is, she can’t explain to us what weapon she used. We haven’t found anything. No knife, no razor, no cleaver, nothing. Just that bitch, pissed out of her head, with two corpses, in a room that looked like an abattoir. It was the hotel manager who found her like that, about ten o’clock, as she hadn’t checked out. We don’t think he’s hiding anything, he’s a vice squad informer. He runs his hotel and we close our eyes to the drugs he deals occasionally in return for him being a good snitch. Although with that kind of weirdo, you never know when they’re going to betray you. The girl could hardly have shanked them with her nail file, so we’re wondering. Apart from standing there shivering in her blood-soaked nightdress, she’s incapable of doing or saying anything. We don’t think she could have acted alone, but we don’t know anything for sure, and hardened prossies like that don’t talk to cops.”
He exhales. He looks like he’s just been running, or at least walking fast.
André stares at his forehead, which is glistening slightly. A few drops of sweat at his temples. The waiter arrives, and the man orders a ham sandwich and a beer.
“I’m starving, after all that crap. I haven’t had time to eat anything since breakfast.”
The old lady leaves with her dog. She shuffles slowly away. The teenagers burst out laughing. They are sprawled on their table, shaking with hilarity, or thrown back in their chairs, guffawing. The belote players lay down their cards grandly. André sees all these scraps of lives like little islands in an ocean of chaos.
“You’re not very chatty today.”
The waiter returns with the cop’s order. He attacks his sandwich, chewing noisily, swallowing with difficulty, washes it all down with a mouthful of beer and exhales, shaking his head.
“Ah, that’s better!”
“So?”
Mazeau shoves in another mouthful while watching him with narrowed eyes. Maybe he’s smiling, or maybe his face is just deformed by the contents of his big gob.
“So, I have news,” he says, mouth still full.
André nibbles a bit of bread from his sandwich. His throat is tight. He can no longer see or hear anything around him. He waits for the other man, preoccupied with eating, to come to the point. Cops are like that. They like to show who’s in control of the situation by playing on the nerves of the people they deal with. Enjoying their power.
“One of Darlac’s relatives. Some sort of distant cousin. Emile Couchot. Married in ’47 to Odette Bancel. They have a wine bar on place Nansouty. That Odette, she’s like the sister of his wife Annette. She used to whore for the Krauts too. Danced at Tichadel, just like Darlac’s wife. They lived together during the Occupation. Apparently they put on a lesbo show for a hand-picked audience, including the Krauts, who liked that sort of sophisticated stuff, as we know. In ’44, when they sensed the wind changing, the two sisters gave up their Nazi orgies and tried to find a way to cover their asses. So they went over to the people who seemed to be in the safest position at the time, cos their analysis of the situation was not exactly exhaustive, namely cops and gangsters. Annette shacked up with Darlac, and the other one, Odette, put her hand down the pants of Couchot, who was making a small fortune with his cousin Darlac selling objects stolen from deported Jews and taking commissions on the sales of confiscated goods. He wasn’t the only one and he wasn’t as greedy as the lawyers in Bordeaux, who were really filling their pockets, but he got enough to buy his bar and a lakeside cottage for him and his missus. He looks like he’s gone straight, but it wouldn’t surprise us if he was still doing a bit of business on the side. Anyway, Darlac goes to see him occasionally. And Darlac is not the kind of man who goes to see people just to pass the time of day. And as for family, he couldn’t give a crap . . .”
André says nothing. He is digesting the information that Mazeau has given him, mentally sketching a family tree around Darlac. There is something not quite right here.
“How old is Darlac’s daughter? Fifteen, sixteen?”
Mazeau smiles, a sly look in his eyes.
“What do you conclude from that?”
“That she was born in ’42 or ’43. Before her mother met Darlac. That means she’s not his daughter. That he accepted her afterwards. That maybe she’s the result of her mother bedding a Jerry. And that you must know the truth, you cops.”
Mazeau shrugs. He glances over André’s shoulder.
“In any case, how would it help you to know that?”
“So I can understand. Know what kind of man he is, how he reacts, so I can know what I should do to really hurt him.”
André looks in the cop’s eyes, and Mazeau nods knowingly, with a fixed grin. He looks as if he has understood these words.
“Of course,” he ventures.
André bites into his sandwich without taking his eyes off the cop, who lowers his, looks away, sips his beer. They don’t say anything more, and the hum of the café around them prevents the silence becoming heavy. Then André leans towards him and points a finger at his chest.
“And what’s in it for you? Why are you telling me all this? Who are you with? Who are you betraying?”
Mazeau looks saddened and shakes his head. He gazes at André like a beaten dog.
“I don’t understand why you’re so mistrustful. Shit, you’re always like this. It’s like you don’t believe anything anyone tells you anymore. If I give you information, it’s cos we’ve known each other a long time, cos I know who you are, where you’re from. And also cos you had the cojones to kill Penot. And cos I didn’t think you’d do it. So I’m giving you Couchot. Another one of Darlac’s relatives. All these shits slipped through the net after the Liberation, and it doesn’t bother me at all if a guy like you bumps a few off. Anyway, I owe you that much.”
“You don’t owe me anything. Just cos we were friends doesn’t . . .”
“Were?”
“Yeah, well, I mean . . . I don’t really know where I stand anymore, or where we stand. I . . .”
“Forget it. We all fucked up. We all lost our honor in that shit heap. But you know perfectly well that if I could have . . .”
The policeman finishes his beer, staring down at the table.
André looks out through the bay windows. His face shows nothing. He lets the other man swallow his remorse with his beer: it will pass very quickly, with the first belch. Inspecteur principal Eugène Mazeau was always a penitent bastard. Gnawed at by doubt and by the old moral lessons learned by heart in church schools, but capable of ridding himself of questions of conscience the way you might chase away an overly curious wasp, and then instantly ready for new subterfuges and betrayals. Whether through chance or some dogged scruple, he became part of a group of republican cops in ’43 who put together a Resistance network within the Bordeaux police force. Like a coin that has spun on its side for a long time, he finally fell—and landed right side up. Since then, he has been living in the shade of the patriotic laurels on the head of Commissaire Divisionnaire Laborde, the man who runs the city, the man who sees everything, even the slender profits eked from activities condemned by the law and conventional morality but to which the great Gaullist fraternity decorously closes its eyes.
Mazeau had not acted either—he had done nothing, said nothing. But it wasn’t up to him. Too young, at the time. And besides, Darlac had promised. Darlac knew what was being prepared. He had sworn in front of Olga, in front of the kid, one evening, that he would warn them as soon as he knew when the round-up was supposed to take place. He had held the kid in his lap. He’d kissed his hair. André remembers all this as if it had happened yesterday. The way he smiled at her, eyes shining with the thought that the three of them would escape the quiet massacre being carried out in Poland that everyone was beginning to whisper about as a little hell capable of spreading across the whole of Europe.
Mazeau sits up, as if emerging from a dream or a stupor. He tries to get the waiter’s attention.
“You want a coffee?”
A coffee. André nods. The cop should leave now. He can feel that impalpable mantle of silence and solitude descending on him. No more talking. No more listening. He just wants to go there now and prowl around that address, around that Couchot and his wine bar. See what might be possible. But Mazeau has started speaking again.
“Darlac is convinced that this is all some settling of scores between clans. He thinks this has-been, half-dead gangster—Bertrand Maurac, aka Crabos—is coming down on that shit Destang, who’s an old acquaintance of Darlac, and that he sent one of his men to mess up Penot. He reckons that Crabos decided to eliminate Destang and his gang before he snuffs it so he can pay them all back for what happened during the Occupation. Penot was an auxiliary in the S.A.P.13—he sneaked in during the Liberation. Anyway . . . you know all that. So, to calm everyone down, Darlac and his henchmen took the Crabos to the station the other day and sent him down to Spain, where he’ll meet up with a few of his friends who are managing his money. No-one wants a war here. Laborde—you know, the commissaire divisionnaire?—he promised the mayor he’d keep the peace. It’s like the pact they made when they took the city after the war. This isn’t Marseille. Everyone knows each other here, but we don’t knock about together. We never needed gangsters to control the city. Those sons of bitches, the ones here in Bordeaux, they’re not very bright, but they’re not really dangerous either. As soon as they start swaggering around, all you have to do is bare your teeth at ’em and they fall into line straight away.”
The cop says all this in a quiet voice, arms crossed on the table, leaning towards André. The waiter brings them their coffees so he falls silent, eyes glistening, panting slightly, maybe a bit proud of himself.
André drains his cup in a single mouthful. The coffee is lukewarm, too sweet. Leaving the other man to do the same, he gets to his feet, opens his wallet and drops a banknote on the table.
“What are you doing? Are you leaving?”
“What do you think? I need to walk. I can’t breathe in this place.”
Mazeau looks around, as if looking for a source of heat or a broken fan.
“I’ll call you,” André says. “I do really need to get going.”
As he walks past the cop, he puts a hand on his shoulder in a gesture of consolation, or excuse. He doesn’t really know why he does it, in fact. He leaves the café and the air is cool on his neck so he tightens his scarf and walks quickly towards rue Sainte Catherine, full of parked cars and groups of pedestrians who wind between the smoking hoods in single file. He goes down to the Garonne and the wind brings tears to his eyes. Wiping them away with the back of his hand, he tries to shake off that feeling of suffocation by breathing through his mouth in time with his strides, like an athlete.
Close to rue des Menuts, he suddenly turns on his heel, colliding with an old man locked in a struggle with his dog’s leash, and walks for about fifty meters. There’s a break in traffic and he quickly crosses the road. Once he’s on the other side, he looks back across the street to see if anyone is following him.
He goes home, turning around frequently, sometimes retracing his steps. He is not proud of these spy-film precautions, but after listening to Mazeau and scrutinising his false facial expressions and his lying hand movements, he is tormented by the conviction that he cannot trust this cop, or any other cops, that perhaps he can’t trust anyone at all.
In the afternoon he tries to sleep but can only doze as his heart is racing. Then he picks up a notebook and begins writing. He writes for a long time. His thoughts are unordered, a mass of memories that come to him randomly, like big fish rising up from a dying pond and struggling, mouths agape, on its surface.
He waits for nightfall, which comes suddenly with the rain. For a moment, he listens to the soft sound from the gutters, the erratic ticking of the drips, and he stares out through the window at the vague glimmers spreading over the cobbles on the street. He absorbs this discreet confusion, detecting its nuances, its rhythms and melodies and syncopations. He has never been to a concert, he knows nothing about music, but he remembers that Hungarian, Gregor, the cellist, who at night in the camp would listen to every sound possible, even sounds he never thought he could hear, and would describe them in a whisper. “And that, can you hear it? A kapo walking through a puddle of mud. His footsteps are heavy and slow. He’s drunk. And now someone scratching his balls. You can hear his fingernails rustling in the hair.” Once he had heard a man’s final breath. He spoke a word, a name perhaps, as he died. Afterwards they had listened to the silence that reached them from the place where the dead man lay, at the other end of the shelter, blowing on them like a soundless wind. And then they had discussed, in whispers, what he might have said. “I think I know who I would call out for,” André had said, “if I had the strength. If I didn’t die in my sleep.” Once, an airplane had flown over, high in the sky. Gregor had located the rumbling note of the engines and had held it until the end of his gasping breath, gripping his sleeve, interrupted by a cough and by sobs. He died before he could hear the thunder of artillery fire moving closer and filling their nights while they waited, deaf to all the rest.
He shakes himself and stands up. Dresses, trembling, then leaves.
It’s a cellar bar. There are dozens of others just like it in the city, selling cheap reds in bulk to guys who come with their crates of empty bottles, as well as more expensive, elaborate vintages or wines from little-known chateaux passed around on the sly as if they were smuggling something shameful.
A man sits alone at a table, bellowing about a friend of his who won ten million on the lottery and died behind the wheel of the Mercedes he bought himself after dumping his wife, who would have preferred to spend the money on a trip to America.
“That’s fate, that is, fuck’s sake! There’s nothing you can do about that! The guy would rather have a new motor than his wife or America—what can you do? And it’s the same for me!”
“Hardly surprising,” says a big man leaning on the bar, a glass of red in hand, “given what your missus looks like! But if I were you, I’d change my car instead. It’s easier!”
“I’d take my wife to Noo-York! She’s never stopped talking about it since she saw Americans during the Liberation. Near Paris, she was. And on the way back—boom!—I’d get another wife and buy myself a Chambord! If you’ve got cash, they don’t give a shit if you’re ugly or your feet stink. All they see is the dough!”
The three other customers laugh and drink to madame’s health, while the man shifts in his chair, the laughter dying in his throat.
André approaches the counter and Couchot moves towards him, still laughing, gesturing with his chin to ask what he wants. André hesitates. He glances at the bottles lined up behind the man, who stares at him.
“I dunno . . . A dessert wine.”
“I’ll do you a glass of Sainte-Croix-du-Mont. I’ve got some of that in the fridge. You’ll see, it’s not bad at all.”
The glass is cold in his hands. Golden sparkles in the hollow made by his palms. He smells the wine and his mouth fills with saliva. Scents he doesn’t recognize, a mingling of sweet aromas. He drinks a mouthful and it makes him feel better. He lifts his head and looks around at the little bistro, at the men laughing and ordering another round. Near the back, on the right-hand wall, he sees a door marked “It’s through here” and he walks towards it, turning back to the landlord, who nods at him.
Dark corridor. He stands still for a moment as his eyes adjust and he sees a line of light under the outside door and his hand gropes for a light switch. A weak yellowish glow, splashed like dirty water over the leprous walls. He walks to the back, where a door opens onto a tiny courtyard. There he sees a narrow little bungalow, solid outer shutters closed against the few rays of light that penetrate the louvred shutters. Inside, a radio is singing. To his left, the toilet door, with a heart-shaped hole cut out of it. The bulb inside illuminates only the hole. Squares of newspaper are hung to the end of a metal wire. A water jug that might be empty: he doesn’t know, doesn’t look.
He goes back into the corridor and walks to the outside door. No bolt or anything. He wonders then if they close the door to the bar.
Back in the main room, the laughter and the ranting have ceased. He walks back to the counter and picks up his glass under the watchful eye of Couchot, who is smoking a Gitane. André gestures to his glass.
“Do you sell this? It’s really good.”
The landlord moves closer, cigarette hanging from his mouth, and looks at him, one eye blinking in the stinging smoke.
“Yeah, I sell it. You live in the quarter?”
“A bit further off. Cours de l’Yser. Been there two months.”
“Are you Spanish?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Cos it’s full of Spaniards over there.”
“No. I came from Toulouse. I was there for my job though: I was born here.”
“Loads of Dagos over there as well. And you don’t have the accent.”
“You don’t seem to like them much?”
“I’ve got family in Toulouse. They know all about the Spanish there. As far as I’m concerned, they’re lazy bastards. Came and invaded us cos of their war. Bloody Commies. And they’re still coming cos they’re starving in Spain, not that I give a shit. I do have some good Spanish customers though. Every Dago I know has a strong drinking arm.”
André finishes his drink. He invents a smile and sticks it to his face.
“What’s better, a strong drinking arm or a strong fighting arm?”
Couchot squints at him.
“That’s not bad. I might use that. And what’s your answer?”
“There’s a good reason why God gave us two arms.”
Couchot does not reply. He opens a trapdoor and goes down to the cellar. André hears the sharp clinking of glass. The landlord climbs back up, holding a bottle.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Four hundred and fifty.”
“Plus the glass.”
“Nah, it’s on the house. Free taster.”
Couchot wraps the bottle in newspaper. André pays with a five-hundred-franc bill and drops the change into his trouser pocket. He takes his leave, and exits at the same time as another man, unsteady on his feet. The man who told that story about the idiot who died in a Mercedes. He starts laughing, out on the sidewalk, alone, leaning against a car. André walks quickly away, almost running, acid at the back of his mouth.
He vomits in the gutter. The wine is now nothing more than bitter puke, burning his throat. Further on, blinded by tears, he throws the bottle into the darkness, relieved to hear it explode on the cobblestones.
12 A homage to the novel Tre Cavalli, by Erri De Luca.
13 Section Atterrissage Parachutage—the parachute regiment of the French Resistance’s “shadow army” in the Second World War.