Marseille Noir

by Cédric Fabre

  A man with a black eye was stationed in front of the half-open door of a container, guarding the entrance. You could hear children crying inside. I saw black marks on his knuckles, crusts of dried blood. He must have fought for the container. Shoes, stoles, caps, dolls, and gutted handbags were strewn around the waterfront.

  “You could at least answer me. What’s your name?”

  The wheat-sucker. I’d almost forgotten her. I was walking mechanically toward place de la Joliette. She took my hand.

  “I’m going with you. You’ll have a hard time finding Phocéa. She’s in hiding.”

  “Thanks for your help. Just call me the olive-pitter and we’ll be even.”

  She laughed and squeezed my arm until I stopped walking. She drew her face near mine and put her hands on my shoulders. I felt her warm breath in my ear and on the nape of my neck.

  “I know where Phocéa’s going to be this evening,” she whispered. “In the silo d’Arenc for the big multicultural party. Can I take you there? You’re not a fucking racist, are you?”

  “Just a bit, like everyone else: if we could choose, we’d all rather be Thai and invent the massage rather than English and invent the muffin, right? But it never came up: I’m from la Treille.”

  Marseille was supposedly made up of 111 villages that in reality never quite managed to get together and form a city; the village of la Treille was the gateway to Provence. Hills and scrubland. All through my childhood, I’d trapped rabbits and shot farm pheasants that the hunters had missed. A real Pagnol childhood. Except that “the glory of my father,” to use Pagnol’s title, could be summed up by the fact that he disappeared one day, dumping us, my mother and me, with a note of apology. His garage had failed and he chose to run away rather than commit suicide, he wrote. In short, adventure and the open sea: I could read between the lines. He had always preferred the beat poets and psychedelic rock to Provençal writers and Occitan folk musicians. I learned later that he had shipped out on a freighter and I never saw him again. After that, I discovered the punk scene, which led me to the university, probably due to misunderstanding the words of The Clash’s “Career Opportunities.”

  But even immersed in the world of art galleries and the rock and theater scenes, I had still remained a kid from the land at heart: I hated the sea, I never ventured into the neighborhoods around the port, never went to the beach, and I still didn’t know how to swim. For me, the port was the last frontier. Beyond, toward the horizon, lay a wild and hostile world.

  “The port used to be the heart of the city back in the day,” said the sucker, as if she had been reading my thoughts. “The nucleus of the atom of the planet Mars, to quote the famous rap song. A multimodal terminal for all the human odysseys of the Mediterranean.”

  A bit farther, you could see the huge construction site, the cluster of cranes and machines—a perfect square that already had a name: Les Terrasses du Port. It was a future mall, part of a plan aimed at “giving the sea back to the people of Marseille.” Who took it away from them? I turned my head toward the open sea, toward that dark mass on which the dazzling white foam stood out; it seemed to jump up and bite before the swell swallowed it up again. The sea was anything but a symbol of freedom, it had always been nothing but a grave filled with wrecks and the only islands you could make out from here were the Château d’If, where the Count of Monte Cristo had been imprisoned, and the Frioul archipelago, which had been used to quarantine ships for centuries.

  For the last few days, I had been sensing a sort of pressure under my feet. The port was giving me the feeling of a tragic ending. Too many trials and tribulations that wouldn’t find their end here, I imagined. People came from the other end of the Mediterranean and crashed here. The piers looked like ramparts, everything was fenced off, it was a closed space that had stolen longshoremen’s lives day after day, grinding down the guys they called “waterfront dogs.” It was a sick tangle of rails and footbridges that went nowhere, a kind of spiral, a siphon that would bring everything back to the sea and empty itself into it.

  The sun was stuck behind the horizon, leaving shreds of orange-tinted clouds in the sky, torn by the wind. The night seemed to have surged out of the bowels of the city, out of the depths of Le Panier, to spread over the port and swallow up, one by one, the metallic reflections on the gates and the belly of the ships. The cranes had just been lit up, dressed now in their blue and green lights, suggesting that the postindustrial age could also be a promise of celebration.

  The wheat-sucker quickened her step. “Come on, let’s move it.”

  I let go of her hand. I had never been relaxed with women, especially women like her, with their pungent perfume of freedom, even if the wheat-sucker was mostly trailing a sour smell of iodine, moldy seaweed, and rust.

  All around us I could make out silhouettes trotting toward the north. They were coming out from all over—from sheds, from behind the low walls and containers, from the roofs of buildings, and from footbridges. They dropped from there, supple as cats, and landed on heaps of sand before starting to run. Dozens of shadows converging in silence, like us, toward the silo.

  “We are all shadows,” whispered the wheat-sucker. “The docks have never been well lit. A problem merchants used to gripe about whenever they weren’t complaining about the scarcity of weighers on the waterfront. A weird profession, those weighers had: the guys had to know how to read and do arithmetic, but mostly prove they were honest. But us, we’re light. We don’t weigh anything—we’re not worth anything and we’re not a weight on anyone’s shoulders.”

  I nodded dully. I was out of breath and my lungs were on fire.

  “You’re not into sports, clearly. The longshoremen carried fifty-kilo bags, so at the end of the day they’d lifted close to forty tons . . .”

  “I don’t know a thing about the life of the longshoremen. When they tell me about working at an ungodly pace I only think of Jimi Hendrix solos.”

  She shrugged and quickened her step still more.

  The shadows were going through the wire fences and jumping over obstacles. Nothing stopped their progress. We scaled concrete barriers, hoisted ourselves onto the hoods of cars waiting in line for the ferry to Algeria: soon, it would open its hull like an ulcerous mouth under the astonished eyes of the drivers smoking cigs at the wheel. We then followed railroad tracks and I almost tripped over the rails embedded in the asphalt.

  “Why’s everybody running? Couldn’t we walk there at a normal pace?”

  “We’ll get there late and it might be packed. Most of the people running around you have no place to sleep and the silo’s a warm place to spend the night. A storm’s coming.”

  The silo d’Arenc was the emblem of the port. When you came into Marseille by car across the bridges and over the docks, it hit you right in the face. Over sixty feet high, the silo stood out in stark contrast to this dizzying horizontal landscape. It marked the entrance to the city, just before you dove into the tunnel and emerged a few hundred yards later onto the Vieux-Port—the yachtsman’s paradise. The old silo had finally been rehabilitated and was now a theater. It became clear that its rich history as a major trading and shipping port was over when the ruins of its industrial past were converted into cultural venues: a tobacco factory had become a multicultural multimedia center in La Belle de Mai and old warehouses were now harboring music stages at Dock des Suds. Museums had sprung from the earth, from the Archives to the MuCEM, the Frac and the J1; now they defined the neighborhood of the port. Recently, people had started talking of Marseille as a “world city” and you couldn’t help wondering—so out of it did the place seem—if it would one day be included in that other concept the north had created to reassure and flatter the south: the “global village.” All I could see here was No Future. In fact, during the last French tour by the Ramones, in 1977, Marseille was the only city where they hadn’t been able to play. The power supply couldn’t handle the sound system and the amplifiers.

  The sucker slo
wed down at the foot of the silo, where the crowd was forming an orderly line at the entrance. They were wearing clothes from all four corners of the earth. There were the inevitable Rastas, of course, in Peruvian toques; a group of guys wearing Scottish kilts, and flip-flops; a whole bunch of people sporting Olympique de Marseille T-shirts, but also teenagers wearing animal prints. I followed the sucker inside and had barely made it into the hall with its huge ceiling when I began feeling as oppressed by the dancing as I was by the shouting and the chaotic beams of the projectors. Upstairs, on the two balconies that stretched over the whole length of the hall on each side, some people were screaming to attract attention to themselves. The bass was pulsating throughout my body. On stage, the group’s guitarist was playing harsh riffs while the singer screamed out aggressive slogans in English: “No people! No fun! No football! No feelings! No me! No dock! No sea! No food! No city!”

  In one of the recesses under the first mezzanine, I could make out windows illuminated by blue, white, and red neon lights. Groups of onlookers had clustered in front of them. Some of them were making monkey calls, with their hands flattened on the window panes. I walked over to them. A sign read, (post-)Colonial (un)Fair. Behind the panes stood men and women in traditional Provençal garb: a woman in a recreated old-style kitchen wearing a white lace bonnet, a black corset, and a flowery dress was cutting vegetables on an oak table in front of a big copper pot sitting on an old stove top. Next to it, in another enclosed space of a few square yards, a hunter in a red shirt and scarf, short pants, and big clumpy shoes stood motionless with one eye shut, aiming at a stuffed rabbit in a scrubland décor that recreated the Provence garrigue; in the background, a child with his hands in the air was acting delighted. It looked like a live Provençal crèche except for the last tableau, where you saw an old man in jeans and a T-shirt mowing the lawn of his modern villa, depicted on a mural.

  I heard a voice behind me and turned around. An old artist with a pipe in his mouth wearing a cap and a sailor’s sweater was making a speech in a thick voice with a northern French accent: “In 1906, Marseille held a phenomenal colonial exhibition where France put on a display of its colonies and their natives. We never should have stopped that tradition, so we have concocted a fine one here for you, with real natives from Aubagne and Aix, from the foot of Mount Sainte-Victoire to the foot of Sainte-Baume. Look at that kitchen, it’s totally period. Provence, for us Marseille people—first-rate citizens in a third-worldized urban mess—it’s the Promised Land, a pioneer utopia, it’s the Jeffersonian American Dream in the valleys of the Arc and the Huveaune rivers.”

  I shuddered. “You should display some Marseille people in your windows. Marseille is our true colony, our own far-off, foreign country, our ultimate dream of exoticism.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Not really. I grew up near the Garlaban—you know, the ‘lonely moorland that stretches from Aubagne to Aix’ as Pagnol said. Mule paths, wild rosemary, and savory, does that ring a bell?”

  “You’re oversensitive.” The sucker pulled me by the arm. “Come on, relax. They’re actors, don’t worry, no peasants have been harmed.”

  “Why’re you following me like this, what do you want from me?”

  “I’m your guide. You’re lost and there’s something you have to do. When you’re done with your mission, you’ll take care of me.”

  “It’s this goddamned port. Nothing seems to make sense. I’ve been seasick for the past three days. Right now, it’s Phocéa I’m interested in.”

  “She’s here. She’s the one who puts on those screenings.” She pointed to the long curtain hanging behind the stage. Three different films were superimposed on it and seemed to melt into each other. A documentary about animals, a Disney movie, and an X-rated film. “Great summary of the history of the world, right?”

  “Phocéa—do you know her?”

  “We just keep the myth going: she’s supposedly a former artivist who put subversive messages into commercials. I’m not even sure she actually has a message to communicate—she’s having fun, that’s all. Nothing’s more exhilarating than belonging to the shadows while you play with the light, don’t you think?”

  “Exhilarating, like you say.”

  Each portion of the walls and ceiling was now covered with fragments of moving images. Several beams of light were going through the big hall; you could see dust and curling smoke dancing in them. I could make out boats—fishing boats—on the roofs of apartment buildings, fish thrashing around in a net on a bed where a couple was making love, as if they, too, had been caught in the mesh; pictures of the Nazi destruction of the “reserved quarter” of Marseille in 1943. Another film was projected on the dancing crowd. Faces were deformed and the floor seemed to move. It looked to me like images of a violent storm at sea.

  On the curtain you could now see a film showing Zinedine Zidane and Eric Cantona. Without the sound. The two soccer players were speaking alternately, side by side, pointing fingers at the camera. On stage, the group had launched into an instrumental piece. It was a psychedelic version of an Olympique de Marseille anthem. The people stopped dancing, fascinated by the film. My employers had told me: “Soccer. In this city, soccer is the key to everything. Find the film.”

  The two soccer stars seemed to be talking very seriously, almost vehemently. Then they stopped talking and pointed their fingers again, perhaps at the spectators. Their lips still moved, synchronized. They were probably saying the same thing. They raised their fists in the air and froze. Fade-out. Sequences from films of demonstrations followed the clip.

  Zidane and Cantona. Together. The two most popular Marseille players, although Zidane had never been with the Olympique de Marseille and the latter had hung up his uniform in a fit of anger.

  They had disappeared from the media over the past few days. In fact they had disappeared altogether, according to rumors; their families and friends allegedly hadn’t heard from them.

  “Not such a great duet, right?” the sucker said. “Apparently they like it . . .”

  The crowd had launched into a furious pogo dance. The group had come up with their own wild version of Alibert’s old Marseille standard “Un petit cabanon,” complete with chorus and distorted lyrics.

  “Wait for me here.”

  I walked toward the stairs that led to the upper mezzanine where a beam of light seemed to have its source. I climbed the stairs two by two. In the middle of the platform, a few punks who could hardly stand were hanging out around a bar. In one corner, a kind of booth made of hanging black cloths: the projector. As I was moving toward it, one of the punks bumped into me; I was pulled into a corner and suddenly there she was in front of me in a Medusa wig with latex octopus tentacles dancing on her shoulders.

  “Phocéa.”

  “You were looking for me, right?”

  “The film . . . what’s so special about it?”

  “They sent you to get it back, is that it?”

  “You stole it from them?”

  “From the ones who made it, yes. But it doesn’t belong to your employers, who would like to steal it from me. What will be, will be, with or without the film. Two soccer stars speaking subversively enough to unleash total mayhem . . .”

  “What are they saying?”

  “They’re icons and they’re speaking with one voice. They could say anything at all and it would be gospel.”

  “Are there any copies?”

  “No. The film was shot on video and the only existing tape is the one I have. Here, have a drink, you look pale and it’s not just because of the purple lighting.”

  I took the glass she held out to me and emptied it in one gulp. A spritzer. I made a face at the bitter taste.

  “I’m really sorry but I have to get that film back . . .”

  I headed toward the improvised projection booth but she blocked my way. I took hold of her forearm to move her away but she freed herself with a quick, supple movement, grabbed my wrist, and twisted
it until she could read my astonishment in my eyes. Then she broke her hold.

  “Relax. You’ve got nothing to fear here, we’re not downtown.”

  Downtown. The expression brought a smile to my face.

  “Since this morning, I’ve been wondering whether I should give the film to your employers—well, to you actually—or destroy it.”

  Shouts of hate and insults reached us from below. I leaned over the railing. A fight had broken out in front of the windows of their goddamn colonial exhibition. It was bound to happen. The rock group had left. A deejay was wriggling around in front of the turntables. A hammering of industrial sounds. The labor unions, not to mention Isaac Asimov, had warned us that one day robots would replace humans—and now machines had already taken control of music.

  When I turned around, Phocéa had disappeared. I felt like my brain was spinning around on itself. Down below, people were whistling to me. Around me, guys were patting me on the back, as if to congratulate me. On the curtain I saw a black-and-white film in sped-up motion. It was a close-up of a face. It was happening right here, perhaps at this very moment. That face was mine.

  I heard a laugh behind me. Phocéa.

  My legs suddenly gave way; I was held up by the armpits and my eyes blurred over. The last image I saw was the wheat-sucker walking in front of me, pushing aside the crowd to make way for the men who were carrying me. The ocean swell . . . it had caught up with me. Then everything went dark and silent as that fucking sea.