Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  A veil lifted in Clotilde’s mind.

  The man talking to her, barking at her, was a complete stranger. This was the man who had come on to her at that fancy-dress party, dressed, as if by chance, as Dracula. He was the one who had wanted to marry her. He was the one who had wanted to stay. All she had done was accept his presence, for all those years.

  Accept, smile, say nothing.

  ‘I do care, Franck, but I’m out of my depth. Do you understand? So where I’m at right now is that I could just tell you everything: yes, I think my mother is alive. And yet I know it’s impossible. I didn’t dare talk to you about it. I know who killed my parents, who messed up the steering of the Fuego, who …’

  ‘I don’t care, Clotilde!’

  Franck had raised his voice.

  ‘I don’t care about that accident, I don’t care about your parents who died twenty-seven years ago, I don’t care about the brother I’ve never met. I don’t care about any of it! All that matters, the only thing that is driving me insane, is that you kissed someone who wasn’t me, someone who felt you up, and who you wanted to meet up with and fuck this very night. I can’t accept that, Clo. I can’t. You’ve spoiled everything by coming back here, Clo. You spoil everything!’

  During the whole of their long descent they didn’t say another word.

  ~

  Franck sat hunched over his coffee, his face drawn. Valou sat with a bowl of chocolate milk covered with a mountain of cornflakes, two fried eggs, and an orange juice, as fresh as a rose.

  Behind them, Clotilde was going into action. Franck took a sip of his coffee before speaking.

  ‘You want some good news, Valou? That boat, the 470 that I’ve hired for the day? We can keep it for longer, two days, three days, maybe even a week. I did some bargaining, and it’s all arranged.’

  Valou broke the two yolks on her plate.

  ‘So the three of us are going to spend a week on a sailing boat?’

  ‘The two of us, Valou. Maman isn’t coming with us. We’ll make a few stops. Ajaccio, Porticcio, Propriano … Not to mention the inlets that can only be reached from the sea.’

  Valou mopped up the fried egg with some fresh bread, without asking anything further, then took out her mobile phone like a managing director who needed to cancel her meetings for the next few days.

  Behind them, Clotilde came and went, filling Valou’s bag with warm clothes, medicine, toothbrushes, sun cream, her favourite biscuits, Franck’s favourite biscuits, enough for the two of them. Might she be able to help repair the past by playing the part of the perfect wife, thoughtful and attentive?

  How stupid could she be?

  Why see it as a role now, when these were the same tasks she had been carrying out for years?

  Franck got up.

  ‘Leave it,’ Clotilde said. ‘I’ll clear up.’

  8.57 a.m. The campsite minibus was waiting for them. Clotilde and Franck walked towards the car park, weighed down by heavy bags. Valentine came after them, eyes fixed on her mobile phone as if she had downloaded a GPS app that would prevent them getting lost in the campsite.

  Franck was running away.

  He was scampering off, going underground, sailing away on a sloop while the boat was sinking. Was this line of thought, Clotilde wondered, a way of denying that she was the one who had cheated on him? That she was the one who had provoked all this? But still she couldn’t feel guilty. Everything that was happening seemed to have been planned years ago; she was nothing but a toy. She couldn’t help thinking that Franck had spied on her, that he had hidden part of the truth from her; that he was basically the best placed to have organised everything, from the theft of the papers from their safe to the laying of that staged breakfast table. That he was trying to drive her mad. That he had prevented her from seeing her mother the day before. That today he was stealing her daughter. That he was angry with her for having run off for a few hours to see Natale, while here he was, disappearing for several days, and she didn’t even know where he was headed.

  It was Franck who had imposed this break, to give himself time to take stock. To protect Valou, he had claimed. Clotilde hadn’t said no. After all, it was what she wanted too. Some time to investigate.

  Marco the driver was standing in front of the minibus.

  ‘We’ve got to go …’

  Clotilde kissed Valentine, then stood in front of her husband like an idiot.

  ‘Will you call me? Promise you’ll call me?’

  ‘If we have any coverage in the Bermuda triangle,’ Valou said without putting away her phone.

  The minibus disappeared off down the road. Franck had arranged with Cervone Spinello for them to be driven to Calvi harbour, where they would pick up the 470, leaving the Passat for Clotilde. The only words he had addressed to his wife that morning concerned the car – the papers in the glove compartment, the oil level, the tyre pressure, the key to the petrol tank; she had only half-listened, apparently already familiar with the workings of an engine. Franck was playing a part too, that of the husband whose pride had been wounded but who was making it a point of honour to remain attentive.

  His male alter ego.

  As stupid as she was. And perhaps more cynical. As he made his recommendations, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from showing her how to work the reclining seats.

  Other single-seaters, other motor-homes, other cars, other families were passing along the road to Calvi. Clotilde felt a huge weight in her stomach. But it wasn’t the first time they’d left her. Franck took Valou to basketball every Saturday. For a few hours, not a few days. A few hours Clotilde could take advantage of in order to escape; lying down with a novel, not a lover.

  Clotilde had already lost sight of the minibus, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t help thinking about her father, who had also gone off on a sailing trip, just a few days before the accident at Petra Coda. At least that was what she had been told. He hadn’t come back until Saint Rose’s day, the twenty-third of August.

  The day after tomorrow.

  A hand brushed her arm and she turned round. Cervone Spinello was standing behind her.

  ‘You shouldn’t complain, Clotilde. Your husband is going off with your daughter. Most guys would leave you holding the baby.’

  ‘Drop it, Cervone.’

  Spinello didn’t take it to heart. And he didn’t take his fingers off her arm either. Clotilde bit her lips. No way was she going to burst into tears in front of this bastard! No way was he going to be the one who handed her a handkerchief. Looking for a way out of the conversation, she remembered that she hadn’t seen Orsu at the campsite that morning. Where had he gone after their midnight walk to the shepherd’s cabin? Of course, she could have asked Cervone, but she had no desire to take the campsite manager into her confidence. Instead she headed towards a different question.

  ‘Still no news of Jakob Schreiber?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Cervone replied. ‘If I haven’t seen any sign of him by this evening I’ll call the police.’

  Clotilde wondered why he hadn’t done that already. Cervone seemed to be good friends with Captain Cadenat. She was about to ask him, when Spinello cut in ahead of her.

  ‘I have a message for you, Clotilde. From Mamy Lisabetta. She phoned reception. She sounded as if she was in a complete panic. Your Papé Cassanu wants to see you, as soon as possible.’

  ‘At Arcanu?’

  ‘No.’

  He left her in suspense for a few seconds before continuing.

  ‘Up there.’

  He stared at the clouds that clung to the mountain, over towards Capu di a Veta. Clotilde followed the line of the crest as well, until her eyes came to rest on a tiny black cross outlined against the sky.

  Memories came flooding back, pure and light, only to be spoiled by a single phrase from Cervone.

  ‘Unless he’s had himself set down there by helicopter, the old lunatic will die at the foot of that cross.’

  43

  Tuesday,
22 August 1989, sixteenth day of the holidays

  Earth-seen-from-the-stars-blue sky

  Hey there, are you awake, my confidant?

  Is everything fine? Can I tell you my dreams and nightmares from this morning? From very early this morning? If I tell you what time it is you’ll go nuts.

  You remember my mission, my contract, Natale’s kiss on the cheek on condition that I persuade my grandfather Cassanu? I didn’t back out, I arranged a meeting, a business meeting and Papé accepted. At Arcanu, that didn’t surprise me, but at five in the morning!

  When my parents never usually see me out of bed before midday.

  Five in the morning? Well, Papé, I went there, not knowing what to expect.

  I must tell you, my discreet and patient reader, that I have experienced some extraordinary feelings during this holiday, as if everything were oscillating each day between the worst, these pages I’ve blackened with spiders’ webs woven from the lies of grown-ups, and the best, like swimming with dolphins, and what I’m experiencing today, feeling free and light, so free and light that I could catch the clouds and pull the tails of the golden eagles.

  Shall I tell you everything?

  So, at five in the morning, long before dawn, Papé was waiting for me in the yard at Arcanu, by the foot of the oak tree, walking stick in hand, binoculars around his neck, which he then placed around mine.

  ‘Look.’

  He made me look along the line of the crest, towards the south, in the direction of Asco, above Notre Dame de la Serra, and higher again.

  A cross. Or what remained of it.

  ‘We’re going to sit and talk beneath that cross, Clotilde. Are you ready?’

  And he looked with amusement at my Guns ’n’ Roses sweatshirt and my trainers.

  I pretended to sprint off.

  ‘Shall I wait for you up there?’

  It didn’t take me long to slow down.

  Seven hundred and three metres! And you might say that we were starting at sea level.

  A four-hour climb, gentle at first, then steeper and steeper and, right at the end, a sheer slope for the last two hundred metres, with me ending up on all fours like a mountain goat. Papé barely said a word the whole way up. Just a pause for a snack, some goat’s cheese and coppa, half-way up, just as the sun rose behind Cap Corse. It looked like a set from one of Tolkien’s books. A big iron ring rising above a long limestone finger.

  While I’m writing to you, I’ve calmed down. My heart has returned to a normal rhythm, my thighs are starting to obey me again, my feet aren’t trembling any more and my head isn’t spinning.

  So, I’m finally sitting beneath the cross. Papé explained to me once we got there that it’s called the Austrian Cross because it was some mountain-climbers from Vienna who opened up the path to the peak about fifty years ago. The cross dates back to 1969, and it’s been allowed to get into a terrible state over the last twenty years. I feel like a gust of wind might blow it away.

  The Austrian Cross – it makes Papé laugh. He told me that the local Corsicans hadn’t waited for the Viennese to climb up Capu di a Veta, that he’d reached the summit for the first time when he was less than eight years old, with Pancrace, my great-grandfather.

  I understand why.

  It isn’t easy to explain in words, but when you’re at the top, on that little dome of stones where the two of us sat together, you have a sense that you rule the whole world. The wind thunders in your ears, inviting you to keep turning your head and enjoy the incredible three hundred and sixty-degree view. Like a giant. Or children, perhaps, children who have built a plasticine island.

  It’s a feeling of floating. A feeling of being alone in the world with my Papé, who didn’t seem to be out of breath, who waited for me every twenty metres during the climb. The feeling of being able to tell him anything.

  Now, you who know me so well, you will be expecting that I held nothing back.

  ‘There’s one thing that amazes me, Papé. I have this sense that everyone here is afraid of you. But I think you’re nice.’

  Operation Beluga. I must not forget. It was as if I was hoping to soften him up.

  ‘Nasty. Nice. Those words don’t mean anything, my girl. You can cause disasters with niceness, you can mess up your life with niceness, you can even kill with niceness.’

  Kill with niceness?

  OK, Papé, I’ll write it down in my notebook. I’ll take another look when I’m in my final year, studying philosophy.

  I turned my head to admire the landscape, like the Geode at the Cité des Sciences (THE school trip of the year!).

  ‘Papé, how far does the land that belongs to you reach?’

  ‘The land that belongs to us, Clotilde. Nothing ever really belongs to only one person. What would they do with it? Just imagine, the richest man in the history of the world – who would that be? The one who had got rid of all the others? Living alone on the planet, with all the wealth that had ever been produced? He would be the richest man who had ever walked the earth, but the poorest as well, because no one on earth would own less than he did. To talk about wealth, there needs to be at least two of you, like the settlers in westerns, a couple who set up home in the desert in the middle of nowhere, who build themselves a shelter to live in, to have a child there. Wealth grows with a family, with other children, grandchildren, so that the land, the house, the memories, can be passed on. And so, in an absolute sense, wealth should belong to the tribe, to all those people who have helped each other. It belongs to an island, to a country, to the whole country, if humanity were capable of the same solidarity that unites a couple, a family or a tribe.’ And here Papé looks me straight in the eye. ‘But it isn’t so. It will never be so, we have to defend what belongs to us. We have to be the guardians of the balance between the selfishness of the individual and the madness of the world. So to answer your question, my dear girl, this is what belongs to us.’

  He points along the Revellata Peninsula all the way to the lighthouse, to the Euproctes campsite, to Alga beach. His finger stops at the edge of Calvi in the north, and by the rocks of Petra Coda in the south, and then he explains that hundreds of square metres belong to the Coastal Conservation department, or the scientists in the Port de Stareso. Strangely, he does not mention the area of Punta Rossa left by his father to Natale’s, nor the heights above Oscelluccia beach on which the Roc e Mare marina was blown up.

  My Geode-head turns again.

  A hundred and ninety degrees. A full view of the Monte Cinto range, the highest in Corsica. 2706 metres. Apparently if you add on the hundreds of metres of the marine trench under the Mediterranean, the one from which the favoured food of the dolphins rises, it’s a total of over 3500 metres, as high as the peaks of the Alps!

  I turn towards my grandfather.

  ‘I love you, Papé. When you talk like that, it sounds as if you’ve stepped straight out of a film. You know, those films about godfathers defending their clan.’

  ‘I love you too, Clotilde. You’ll do something with your life, something good. You have ambition, you have convictions. But …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But, you won’t get annoyed, will you? You won’t leave me here and run all the way back down?

  ‘What is it, Papé?’

  ‘You’re not Corsican. You’re not a real Corsican, I mean. Here, the women wearing black don’t have skulls on their dresses. Here, women are discreet, they say nothing, here women rule over the household, but nothing else. I know what I’m saying will make you jump, my little rebel, but what do you expect, I’m used to things being as they are. I’m used to loving women like that. Everything you represent goes over my head, Clotilde, even though I too place freedom above everything else. If I’d been born forty years later, perhaps I’d have married a woman like you.’

  ‘That’s what Papa did!’

  ‘No, my dear. No. Palma isn’t like you.’ He remained silent for a long time. ‘So, come on, what did you want to ask me?�
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  Forty-five degrees. A bird’s-eye view of the Balagne. The panorama of the garden of Corsica runs from Calvi to L’Ile Rousse. With a little imagination you can even make out the desert of Agriates and the port of St-Florent at the foot of Cap Corse. I stare at the sea, as if taking a deep breath before diving, and then explain everything. The dolphins, Orophin, Idril and their babies, Natale who talks to them, the Aryon, a jetty to moor it to, then a bigger jetty to moor a bigger boat off, the off-shore sanctuary and, on the shore, a terrace, a bar … And I stop there. I don’t immediately mention the dolphin house, and certainly not the female architect that Natale has been speaking to.

  Papé listens to me without saying a word.

  Three hundred and twenty degrees. A direct view of La Revellata. From here the peninsula looks like a sleeping crocodile! The grey-green skin, with the Oscelluccia headland and Punta Rossa forming its big feet, and its mouth floating in the water at the end of the peninsula. A thousand white rocks lined up like teeth, and the lighthouse that looks like a pimple on its nose.

  And then at last my Papé speaks. With a little smile curling the corners of his mouth.

  ‘What’s so extraordinary about a dolphin?’

  That’s the last thing I was expecting.

  So I try to explain what I felt on the Aryon, when I dived, when I swam with the cetaceans. He must be able to hear the emotion in my voice, my arms are trembling, I’m welling up just thinking about it. So I seize the moment, because I’m sincere and it’s obvious.

  ‘Please say yes, Papé, say yes. Say yes, just for the happiness of all those people who will be able to dive like I did. Natale just wants to share this treasure.’

  And there we go, I should never have put the words ‘share’ and ‘treasure’ in the same sentence. Papé talks to me again like an old, white-bearded sage, as if he wants to take the secret notebook in which I keep my words and turn it into a book of spells.

  ‘You see, my dear, there are only three possible attitudes you can have towards a treasure, this has always been true, whether that treasure is a woman, a diamond, a piece of land, or a magic spell: you can covet it, own it or protect it. Just as there are only three types of men: the jealous, the selfish and the conservative. No one shares a treasure, Clotilde, no one …’