“Look, Pierrot. That’s Daddy’s car, that one.”
He didn’t answer, but I could see his eyes open wide. I think he understood. I could feel warmth rising in my chest.
I picked him up and put him on the hood. Now, from where he was standing, he had the roof light right under his nose. He smiled, and I swear I saw the four letters reflected in his shining pupils.
TAXI.
The beginning of a new life.
* * *
—
After that, we spent more time together. I could make my own schedule. During the day I often took him with me in the car. Seeing a kid in the front seat of a cab would amuse the customers. I don’t know if I had the right to bring him along, but it doesn’t matter. I never had the slightest problem. Later, he started going to school, and things became simpler financially.
As he grew older, I was able to leave him alone at night more and more. That was when I started my nocturnal work routine. I’d give our neighbor my keys, and she’d look in to make sure the kid was asleep. Working at night allowed me to see him during the day.
These days, when I get tired of sitting alone in my taxi, I try to remember those.
5
I ended up heading for the center of town. I figured I’d take my chances—waiting wears me out too much. I couldn’t spend any more nights inside a stationary car. The kind of absurdity that can make you crazy. If you drive around, at least you get to see the city go by, and that’s already something.
I worked three hours and knocked off. It was a bad evening; I didn’t have the heart to persist. I hadn’t accumulated more than one hour’s worth of fares, not even enough to cover my expenses. To salve my conscience, I swore I’d spend the following week at the airport. I turned a corner and thought I saw a raised arm. Tiredness was stinging my eyes, so I couldn’t be sure. I stepped on the gas to chase away all doubt.
Back at the apartment, Pierre was asleep on the sofa. The TV lit up his white face; there was a plate of pasta shells on the coffee table. I smiled as I took in the scene. Pasta, that was one of his big theories: “The best way to avoid a hangover.”
I cleared the little table and shook him. With an effort, he opened his eyes. “You’re back already?”
“Yeah. I got sick of it.”
He smiled. As a matter of fact, he likes it when I knock off early. For almost two years, he’s been insisting that I should quit. “Night shifts are dangerous,” “You work too much,” that sort of thing. But I like working this way. Time is suspended at night; there’s less noise, less traffic. And then there’s the nighttime surcharge added to every fare, by no means a negligible amount.
I was surprised to find him sleeping there. When I asked him what time he came home, he shrugged. “I don’t know, I was tired.”
He added something about a stomachache.
“From alcohol, right?” I said, teasing him.
He smiled and swore he hadn’t had a single drink, and then he went to his room.
It was twenty minutes after three. I didn’t have the slightest chance of falling asleep. I got a beer out of the fridge and sat in front of the television.
* * *
—
The next day, I drove to the university to pick up Pierre when he got out of class. When I pulled up, he was having a discussion with some friends. I sounded my horn. He shook hands all around and walked over to the car. After putting his bag in the back, he got into the passenger’s seat. “It’s all good,” he said. I stepped on the accelerator, and the car surged onto the street.
I drove fast. I’ve always liked that. I was in a hurry; we’d been talking about this weekend for some time. Three days together, just the two of us, with the sea all around. Time passes fast, and such moments are rare. I know it has to do with age. Children grow up and drift apart from their parents; it’s in the order of things.
After some traffic slowdowns on the suburban roads, I turned onto the expressway. We started rolling along at a good clip. Pierre smiled at me, and I asked him how he was doing. He told me he was tired. “But delighted to be here!”
He talked about his day, and then he slid over to the topic of the novel he’d been trying to write for months. “I’m getting close to the end.”
He talked to me about revisions, about some last details that needed changing. He was almost finished.
Then what, I asked him. He kept quiet for a while, his eyes fixed on the road. Then, with a wink, he said, “I’m going to send it to a publishing house and win a lot of prizes.”
I laughed, and so did he. “You’ll see, you’ll see,” he said.
I pointed out that he wanted to become a biologist, but he just shrugged and said, “One doesn’t rule out the other.”
I agreed, because what he said was no doubt true. I didn’t remember ever hearing of any writer-biologist, but I knew nothing about that sort of thing. I remembered that Pierre also used to talk about making a career in the theater. All the same, it’s really something to be twenty years old…
We talked some more, and then rain started to wet the road. Some sunbeams were striving to break through, but the cloud cover slowly overtook the horizon. I switched on the windshield wipers.
“I thought the forecast said good weather.”
Pierre turned toward me, laughing. “We’re going to get wet in any case, right?”
6
I’ve always liked diving. I can’t remember when it started. My father used to take me out in the early evening, after school. Our house faced the sea, so it was easy. The first times we went out, I was too young, I stayed on the surface with a mask on my face. I’d watch him turning below me, and the sight would give me incredible dizzy spells. I still have the same impression today. To dive is to fall, but it’s a fascinating fall. An intoxicating loss of balance.
Pierre got hooked right away. At first, I was glad of that. My father, me, and then my son. Something was being passed down, a part of the family saga. Later he joined a specialized club. He’d made a lot of progress.
He often said his fondness for biology came from his diving. He talked about specializing in the study of the ocean floor. I understood; it’s awfully beautiful down there. But hard to describe properly. You have to experience it, you have to slip down into the dark waters. Seriously, it blows your mind. Often enough, you don’t feel like coming back up. You have to be wary of euphoria.
When I was a teenager, my pals and I went diving every day. We dove as deep as possible to impress the girls. We flirted with disaster. When I think back on it, we were assholes. But we didn’t give a damn—underwater was where we felt best. There were always things to discover. The local oldsters called us “mullets” because we’d turn up in the port sometimes. They would holler at us to get out of there; the water was disgusting, they’d say. I don’t know. None of us ever got sick, and there were lots of pretty sights down in the roadstead too. I’ve always thought boats are more beautiful when seen from underneath. Well, that was then, and there’s no chance I’ll go diving in the harbor anymore. When you see the shit floating around in there these days…Things were different back then. I think.
I missed all that a lot after I left. The sea, to start with—it was hard for me to be so far from it. And then the silence. I mean, when I went down, the bottom wasn’t the only thing I was looking for. Immensity is also on the inside. I’ve always loved the moment when your heart slows down and calm spreads into your very muscles. That was how I would stifle the frenzy of the rest. Life, my anxieties—all that external noise. Out of the water, I’ve never really been at ease.
One day I explained this to François, and he talked to me about l’ivresse des profondeurs, “depth drunkenness,” the rapture of the deep. I hated that word, “drunkenness.” It wasn’t that. Sure, I like to get smashed sometimes, but when you drink, your speed increases. Your body’s working at a
hundred kilometers an hour. Besides, that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? Fire in your eyes, and in your guts too, if you want to come on to a woman. Underwater, it’s the opposite. If you dive down there, it’s for the calm. Maybe you’ll go crazy, but it’s never like drunkenness. It’s ecstasy.
Good, but all the same, it takes training. I remember one day, I must have been fourteen. I was hanging around the port when a motor scooter came up and stopped in front of me.
“Are you Yanis? Is it true you can dive down ten meters?”
“I can go deeper than that.”
“Ten meters’ll be enough. Get on.”
We went through three villages and ended up on the big pier. There was a group of guys who all looked to be around twenty years old. One of them came over to us. He was deathly pale.
“You can dive deep?”
“On a good day, down to twenty meters or so.”
“And you could find a coin underwater?”
That stopped me cold for a few seconds.
“Yes or no?” the guy asked, getting worked up.
“Take it easy, Félix.”
One of the other young men put a hand on his shoulder. The one called Félix moved away, grumbling. The other guy explained what was up: it wasn’t really about a coin.
Félix had gotten married the week before.
“A hell of a party,” his friend recalled with a smile.
The next day, Félix had a handsome wedding ring on his finger. The ring had belonged to his grandfather. “Kind of a symbolic thing, see?”
A few days later—the previous evening, actually—Félix and his pals had gone out. A way of proving that nothing had changed.
They’d taken a boat out to the Island, dropped anchor in a cove, and spent the night drinking until sunup.
“A classic evening.”
The problem was that Félix had lost his wedding ring in the water, no one knew exactly how. Stupidly, just like that.
I didn’t have time to ask for details. They seemed to decide that I was capable of finding the thing. I boarded the Zodiac with them and we charged out to the Island. Félix pushed the motor to its maximum speed, and the boat banged against the waves. The sea was gorgeous, not too rough, just a great swell with a rippling surface. I stared at the horizon and saw a white triangle standing out against all the blue.
The cove was sheltered from the wind. I thought that was a good thing, and I concentrated. It was hard to clear my head with all those guys yammering around me. The only one who kept quiet was Félix. He looked at me pleadingly, and I smiled at the thought that he might be scared of his wife.
They applauded me after I reached the bottom on my very first dive. The depth wasn’t even ten meters, eight at the most. I told myself that as divers, these boys must really be pretty bad. On the sea floor, some little clumps of algae were growing among the grains of sand.
I swam along the bottom but didn’t see anything. Gold on sand, not much hope. I went up for air three or four times, and I could tell the guys were getting more and more upset. So I started pushing myself to stay down longer. I pressed my head against the sea floor, and a sense of fullness slowly pervaded me. I became all-powerful, untouchable, in control of even the least of my muscles. That particular osmosis is something indescribable. The fuller I became, the more I felt a desire to go farther. I could leave them all behind, I thought, them and their wedding ring and their insignificant anger.
And that was when I saw it. A stroke of luck, because I’d stopped looking for it. It was shining in the light. I picked it up, and the emotion I felt ruined everything. Adrenaline wrecked my equilibrium; my heart started beating again and reclaimed its rightful portion of air. My tense muscles made a fin stroke, and my body rose up. All the same, I paused before breaking through the surface. Held one arm above the water, the ring tight in my fingers. Thought I’d impress them a little.
I don’t clearly remember what went on next. The boys were so happy they wanted to celebrate. The ride back to the pier was even faster than the ride out. Félix sprang for about ten rounds of drinks, and by three in the afternoon, I was already vomiting.
* * *
—
Pierre has propped his head against the window and fallen asleep. Outside, the rain has stopped. I feel good. Many things come back to me in this moment. When he was little, I used to put him behind me, buckled up in the middle of the back seat. He’d stay awake the whole trip; getting him to go to sleep was impossible.
He put me through hell, that kid. The hyperactive type—no naps, no downtime. And look at him today, snoring for the past half hour.
In the end, it’s never completely lost.
7
It took us four hours to reach the seacoast. No matter how much time has passed since I moved away, it’s always been hard for me to live so far from the water. Pierre didn’t grow up like me, city life is the only life he knows. He likes the sea, even adores it. But he doesn’t miss it.
We often spend the first night with Lucille’s parents. They live in a house on the coast. It’s practical, and it allows Pierre to see his grandparents.
Personally, I’ve never had the least doubt. Those people hate my guts—it’s a thing you can feel. So much resentment is hard to get past. I think they hold me responsible. For their daughter, and for unhappiness in general.
They have no qualms about displaying their hatred. Especially the old lady, quite a nasty piece of work. After Lucille went, I really thought they were going to snatch my son away from me. Fortunately, the law is well made. They couldn’t take him. The judge announced his ruling with a weary look on his face, and I was pretty damn happy.
After that, we calmed things down. For Pierre’s sake, mostly. Deep inside, I think he’s very fond of his grandparents. He never objects to visiting them. Generally, we spend one night there and leave the next day, but when he was younger, I’d let him stay with them every now and then. It was hard, I could never hold out for very long. I’d go to pick him up, and it did me good to see their faces when he got into the car.
As soon as we arrive, the dog drags himself over to us. I say “drags,” but even that’s an overstatement. He’s an old spaniel, fifteen years old, in fact, senile and half deaf. A clump of fur that’s been on the verge of croaking for I don’t know how long. He’s suffering; you’d have to be blind not to see it. I’d use my rifle on him, but I’m afraid the old man would shoot me next.
The old lady served us chicken for dinner. She almost never talks. Papi’s the one who makes conversation. Stopping him is not a possibility.
We were attacking the dessert when he started talking about his daughter. He can’t restrain himself. He twists the knife in my wound, every time. I’m well aware that it’s eating him up too, but there’s nothing to be done. On the one day when I begged him to shut up, he’d called me a monster and accused me of staining her memory. I almost jumped on him, but I held myself back. For the kid, and for Lucille too.
I have to say that hearing such things bothers Pierre considerably less than it does me. He never really knew his mother. I’m not saying he didn’t suffer, but that’s different. He can listen, though, and I think he likes it. After the cake, I took my glass and went outside.
I walked down to the beach. To tell the truth, it was more like a cove, a chaos of sand with rocks scattered more or less everywhere. Foam whipped the ensemble without letup. I listened to the crashing waves. I could barely see them. A moonless night had fallen, the horizon was black as pitch. I inhaled the smell of the tide. I realized how much I missed everything about sea spray. I imagined I’d come back to all that water one day, and then I sighed. You tell yourself so many things. The cold caught up with me, and I crossed my arms against my chest.
When I went back, I saw that everyone had left the table. The old woman was just about finished clearing it. I thanked
her and carried the bags upstairs. Pierre was in the bathroom, vomiting.
“Is everything all right?” I called to him.
The toilet flushed. I heard him unbolt the door, and then he appeared, his complexion pallid. I repeated my question. He nodded: “Yes, it’s better now. I don’t know what came over me. Like a sudden urge to puke up everything.”
“You have to see a doctor.”
He started joking around. “You don’t think the probable cause was Mami’s cooking?”
I insisted, and in the end he promised. The color was already coming back into his face, so I felt relieved. He wished me a good night, and I watched him disappear into his room.
* * *
—
We got up at seven o’clock the next morning. Pierre grumbled a little when I woke him. I went downstairs to drink some coffee while waiting for him to get ready. The old folks were up; he was reading the morning paper. I sat down and poured myself a cup. Papi didn’t lift his eyes from the page. I didn’t exist; okay by me.
Pierre joined us to eat his bread and jam, dunking the slices in a bowl of hot chocolate. The old man put down his newspaper and stared at us. He asked why we didn’t do any spearfishing. “I can’t believe you don’t when you can hold your breath for so long.” He added that if he could dive, he wouldn’t have any problem spearing one or two sea bass.
Pierre smiled because it’s the same old tune, every time. It’s beyond his understanding—the grandfather’s, I mean—that you can dive for the sheer pleasure of diving. I even tried fishing once, but the spear gun just got in my way. And besides, I don’t like fish. I’d just as soon leave them in the water.
Schrödinger's Dog Page 2
