by Vargas, Fred
‘Not much fun, eh?’ said Louis.
‘One gets used to it. Does that bit go there?’
‘Yes. It fits on to that one. And you’re not offended?’
‘At first, yes, I was. But perhaps you would know, it’s worse than a weakness, it’s a real obsession. When I realised he couldn’t do without it, I decided to settle for living with it. I even tried to understand, but to be honest, I don’t know what he sees in them, they’re all the same really, big lumbering creatures, like cows. But if it keeps him happy. He says I don’t understand the first thing about beauty. Maybe I don’t.’
She shrugged. Louis wanted to get off the subject, this woman made him ill at ease. She seemed to have lost all her warmth through being forced to live beyond the limits of revolt and lassitude. They went on working on the London sky.
‘Getting on,’ he said.
‘Ah, now we’ve got some action.’
‘This piece?’
‘No, it’s Lionel, he’s coming back up. Must be over for tonight.’
Lionel Sevran came into the room, looking pleased with himself and wiping his hands on a towel. Introductions were made; Mathias had been right, this guy looked healthy and just at that moment like a teenager, delighted with some novelty.
His wife stood up, moved the tray aside. Louis had the feeling that she was not so detached now. But there was something in the air nevertheless. She watched as her husband served himself a drink. The presence of Louis in his house did not seem to surprise him, any more than it had his wife an hour earlier.
‘I’ve told you to leave the towels down there,’ she said. ‘I don’t want them in the kitchen.’
‘Sorry, my dear. I’ll try to remember.’
‘Not bringing her up?’
Sevran frowned. ‘Not yet, she isn’t ready. But you’ll like this one, I promise, very cute, nice shape, curves in the right places, sturdy but manageable. I’ve locked her in for the night, that’s safer.’
‘It’s damp down there at the moment,’ his wife said in a low voice.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve given her a nice warm cover.’
He laughed, rubbed his hands, then ran them several times through his hair, like a man waking from sleep, and turned to Louis. Yes, a good head: open, honest-looking face, he looked relaxed as he sat down, one finely shaped hand holding a glass, the opposite of his wife, it seemed hard to believe this business in the cellar. But he did have a rather receding chin and his lips had something a bit thin, determined, economical about them, nothing very sensual at any rate. Yes, he liked the look of the guy, lips excepted, but this cellar business, no, not at all. And the gloomy abandonment of his wife even less.
‘So,’ asked Lional Sevran, ‘you’ve brought me something?’
‘Brought you something? No, it’s about your dog.’
Sevran frowned.
‘Really? You’re not here on business?’
‘Business? No, not at all.’
Both Sevran and his wife looked equally surprised at this. They had obviously thought he was a business contact, a salesman perhaps. That was why he had been so casually allowed in.
‘My dog?’ said Sevran again.
‘You do have a dog? Medium-sized, short-hair, light-coloured . . . I saw it coming in here, and I took the liberty of calling on you.’
‘Yes, that’s the one. What’s happened? He hasn’t been up to his tricks again, has he? Lina, has the dog been up to something? Where is he anyway?’
‘In the kitchen, shut in.’
So, she was called Lina. Very dark, matt skin, brown eyes, could be from the south of France.
‘If he’s done something, I’ll pay up,’ Lionel Sevran, went on. ‘I do keep tabs on him, but this dog is a terrible bolter. Take your eyes off him for a second, leave the door open and he’s off. One day I’ll find him under a car.’
‘With luck,’ said Lina.
‘Oh, please, Lina, don’t be cruel. You see,’ said Sevran, turning to Louis, ‘the dog can’t stand my wife and vice versa, nothing to be done about it. Apart from that, he’s not aggressive, unless he’s badly treated of course.’
When people have a dog, thought Louis, they say some ridiculous things. And if their dog bites someone, it’s always the person’s fault. Whereas with a toad, no problems, that’s the advantage.
‘You should see what he brings in,’ said Lina. ‘He eats anything he finds.’
‘So he runs away a lot?’ asked Louis.
‘Yes, but what’s he done to you?’
‘Nothing. I’m looking for one the same breed. I saw yours and wanted to ask some questions. He’s a pit bull?’
‘Ye-es,’ admitted Sevran, as if it were a reprehensible habit.
‘It’s for this old friend. She wants a pit bull as a guard dog, her idea. But I’m a bit suspicious of them, I don’t want her to get savaged in her bed. So what is he like?’
Lionel Sevran launched into a lecture on the dog’s attributes, about which Louis couldn’t care less. What interested him was to have learned that the dog ran around a lot and picked up stuff everywhere. Sevran was discoursing on nature and nurture, and ended with the firm conclusion that with proper training a pit bull could turn into a little lamb. Unless you upset it of course, but that’s the way with all dogs, not just pit bulls.
‘Still, the other day, he attacked Pierre,’ said Lina, ‘and Pierre said he hadn’t done anything to upset him.’
‘Of course he had. Pierre must have annoyed him.’
‘Did he bite him badly? Where?’
‘On the leg, but it wasn’t too serious.’
‘Does he often bite?’
‘Of course not. He just bares his teeth, that’s all. Very rare for him to attack anyone. Unless you upset him, of course. Apart from Pierre, he hadn’t bitten anyone for a year. But it’s true that when he gets away he can do a lot of damage. He knocks over dustbins, he bites bicycle tyres, he can rip up a mattress. Yes, he’s good at all that. But that’s not a matter of the breed.’
‘You see, I told you,’ said Lina. ‘He’s cost us a fortune in compensation. And when he’s not ripping something up, he goes to the beach. He rolls in whatever he finds, preferably rotting seaweed, dead birds, dead fish, and stinks to high heaven when he gets home.’
‘Look, darling, all dogs do that, and you don’t have to bath him. Hold on, I’ll fetch him.’
‘Does he go far?’ Louis asked.
‘Not very. Lionel always finds him, on the beach or in the village, or at the rubbish dump.’ She leaned towards Louis to whisper: ‘He scares me so much that I ask Lionel to take him with him, when he goes to Paris. For your friend, find her a different kind of dog is my advice. A pit bull isn’t a nice dog, it’s a creature from hell.’
Lionel Sevran came in with the dog, holding it firmly by the collar. Louis saw Lina shrink on her chair and pull her feet up on to the crossbar. What with the cellar and the dog, it didn’t look as if this woman led a very relaxing life.
‘Come on, Ringo, come on, boy. This gentleman wants a look at you.’
He talked to the dog as stupidly as Louis did to his toad. Louis was glad he’d left Bufo in the car, this mutt would have swallowed him at a gulp. You felt he had too many teeth, that his fangs had swollen his jaws, as they protruded from his misshapen mouth.
Sevran pushed the pit bull towards Louis, who didn’t feel too happy about it. The strong-jawed beast was growling softly. They went on chatting about this and that, the dog’s age, sex, reproductive habits, appetite, all perfectly tedious subjects. Louis asked them for the address of the local hotel, declined an invitation to dinner, and left them with thanks.
He felt out of sorts and dissatisfied on leaving. Taken by themselves, both husband and wife seemed normal, but together something was wrong. As for the runaway dog that ate any old rubbish, for the moment, that fitted. But tonight Louis had had enough of dogs. He found the village’s only hotel, a large new one, which must be of a size to absorb t
he summer tourists. As far as he could see, Port-Nicolas had no sands, but several shingle beaches interspersed with mud and jagged rocks.
He checked into the hotel, dined quickly and went to his room. On the bedside table were several brochures and folders, useful addresses. The tourist brochure was not large and he forced himself to read it all: local seafoods, the town hall, antique dealers, diving equipment, a seawater health spa, cultural activities, pictures of the church, pictures of the new street lighting. Louis yawned. He had spent his childhood in a village in central France, and while local history did not bore him, brochures did. His eyes halted at a photo of the staff at the health spa. He stood up, examined the picture under the lamp. The woman in the middle, the owner’s wife. Shit.
He lay on the bed, hands behind his head. He smiled. Oh well, if that was who she’d married, if she’d left him for that, it wasn’t worth it. OK, he was no oil painting himself. But that man, with his low brow, his black hair in a crew cut, his ugly mug staring out from the centre of a group photo, frankly no, bad exchange. Yes, but what would be worse, to find her in the bed of someone with film-star looks or with a money-grubbing ape? Worth discussing.
Louis picked up the phone and called the bunker.
‘Marthe, old lady, did I wake you up?’
‘No fear. Doing my crossword.’
‘Me too. Pauline has married the big cheese around here, director of a health spa. She must be really hard up! I’ll send you the photo of the couple. It’ll amuse you.’
‘A health what?’
‘A spa. Official name “Thassalotherapy Centre”. What it is, it’s a machine for making money by covering people in seaweed, fish sauce, soup with iodine and other nonsense. Like sea-bathing cures, but a hundred times more expensive.’
‘Ah, not stupid then. What about your dog?’
‘Found it. Horrible dog, mouthful of teeth; its master seems OK, except he has some kind of obsessive sex thing going in his cellar, need to find out about that. The wife’s a bit disturbing. Polite but frozen, or rather drained of vitality. She seems to be repressing something, she represses herself all the time.’
‘While I’ve got you on the line: “Flows through Russia”, two letters.’
‘The Ob, Marthe! For heaven’s sake, it’s the Ob!’ sighed Louis. ‘Get it tattooed on your hand so there’s an end of it.’
‘Thanks, Ludwig, you’re a pal. Have you eaten? Yes, well, love and kisses and don’t hesitate to ask me for contacts. You know I know all about men, don’t you . . .? And also –’
‘Will do, Marthe. Just write down “Ob” and sweet dreams, but keep an eye on the archives.’
Louis hung up and decided on the spur of the moment to go and take a look at Lionel Sevran’s cellar. There was an outside door, he’d noted that when he left, and locks rarely bothered Louis except those blasted multi-locks which required time, tools and tranquillity.
A quarter of an hour later, he was standing at the door. It was after eleven: everything was dark, the world was asleep. The cellar was protected by a lock and a bolt, and it took him some time. He worked silently because of the dog. If there really was a woman under the blanket, she was sleeping soundly. But Louis was beginning to doubt there was a woman. Maybe he understood nothing about women, or about this one in the cellar, or the wife upstairs, and perhaps he had better give up the job of being a man right away? Yes, but what else could he do? The Sevrans seemed to have been speaking quite openly about her. But there was something grotesque about it all, and Louis was always suspicious of the grotesque.
The door yielded. Louis went down a few steps and closed it behind him softly. In the middle of an indescribable chaos stood a large workbench, and on top, under a quilted blanket, a bulky dark shape. He felt it, lifted it up, looked, and nodded. Some misunderstanding, eh? He hated ambiguity, word games, useless and malevolent pastimes, and wondered to what extent Lina Sevran had been deliberately misleading him.
The only thing under the blanket was a huge ancient typewriter, from the early twentieth century, if he judged correctly. And yes, as Lina had said, it was big and lumbering like a cow, and in need of a good clean. Louis ran his torch across Lionel Sevran’s obsession. On the shelves and on the ground, everywhere, there were dozens of ancient typewriters, but also gramophone parts, horns, old telephones, clothes horses, ventilators, heaps of metal objects, screws, levers, pistons, fragments of Bakelite, anything you like. Louis returned to the machine on the table, now unveiled. So this was ‘the new one’ Sevran had ‘picked up’. And he himself had evidently been taken for another collector of machines, since he had been so calmly received. The couple must be used to frequent visits from addicts. Sevran must be well connected to the market network, if people came to visit him in this remote spot of Brittany.
Louis fingered his three-day stubble. Sometimes he shaved, sometimes he didn’t, to cover up his jaw which was rather too prominent. He resisted the temptation to hide behind a real beard, and opted for this half-hearted solution to soften the offensive chin which he didn’t like. So enough, the world was full of horrors and bloodshed, he wasn’t going to worry about his chin all night, there are limits. That Lina Sevran had taken him for one of the scores of collectors she must see all the time, yes, it was quite possible. But it also seemed she had been playing games with him, and had perhaps been amused to see him looking ill at ease. Perversity perhaps? If you’re bored, you might pass the time with jigsaw puzzles, or if it takes you that way, with perversity. As for the husband, well, now there was nothing much to be said about him. Louis returned to his initial favourable opinion, except for the dog. It looked like an exception to the usual rule, many times observed: like master, like dog. In this case, the master and the dog were not at all alike, and that was odd, because they seemed to be attached to each other. He must remember this exception, because it is always reassuring in human existence to see a rule being broken.
He replaced the cover on the typewriter, as a gesture of kindness to protect it from the damp, not to conceal traces of his entry, since he had in any case removed the screws holding the bolt. He went out into the night, pulling the door shut after him. Tomorrow, Sevran would discover the break-in and react. Tomorrow, he would go and see the local mayor to find out more about the old woman who had been found dead on the beach. Tomorrow, he would also go to the seawater spa to see his little Pauline. He might tell himself she had married the man with the low brow for his money, but he couldn’t be sure. It wouldn’t be the first time he had been dropped for someone he wouldn’t have wanted to touch with a bargepole. But all the same, since Pauline was the third woman he had really loved, it hit him hard in the guts. What had Marthe said? This wasn’t supposed to be a revenge expedition. No, of course not, he wasn’t such a bastard. But it would be difficult. Because he had really suffered when she left. He had downed unimaginable quantities of beer. He had put on weight and wallowed in endless memories. Then it had taken months to recover, first the inside of his head, then the rest of his body, which was too tall but normally solid and in good shape. Yes, it would be difficult.
XII
KEHLWEILER GOT UP too late for breakfast at the hotel. He gave himself a near-complete shave and went out into the fine rain falling on the village. Village wasn’t really the right word. Scattered locality, he would have called it. Port-Nicolas must originally have been a small medieval port, and there were still some narrow alleyways which might have interested someone like Marc Vandoosler, but not Louis. Thinking of Marc, he found his way up to the church with its calvaire, which was unquestionably very fine, a calvary crawling with sculpted monsters and other horrors fit to inspire terror into religious souls. Twenty metres away, a partly demolished granite fountain emitted a thin stream of water.
Under the now heavier rain, Louis leaned over, one leg bent, the other stiff, to trail his hand in the fountain. Thousands of people must have come to dip their hands into this water, telling it their sorrows, praying for help, or for l
ost love, for children, or for vengeance. Centuries on, that makes the water full of meaning. Louis had always liked miraculous springs. He briefly considered plunging his knee into it. True, there was no evidence this fountain could work miracles. But in Brittany, right alongside a calvaire, it must be able to, people aren’t stupid, any fool could tell a miraculous spring when he saw one. It was a beautiful spot and he liked it. Up here, he could look down and see part of the modern settlement. Port-Nicolas had spread itself. Now it looked like a scatter of dispersed villas, built several hundred metres away from each other, with an industrial zone in the distance.
Of the original village centre, all that now remained after the ravages of time were a central square, with a large stone cross, the hotel, the cafe, the town hall and a handful of run-down houses. All the other buildings were ranged throughout the landscape in no particular order: a garage, a few villas, a supermarket, the spa – an unlovely structure – and the rest, thrown down like a game of dominoes and linked by a series of roads and roundabouts.
Louis preferred the miraculous fountain, in which he was still trailing his hand, and the worn granite demons on the calvaire. He sat there in the rain, on a rock protruding from the mown grass. Small figures were moving about down below, one around the villas, and another in front of the town hall. Perhaps it was the mayor, Michel Chevalier, of uncertain allegiance, officially listed under ‘N’ for ‘non-aligned’. Non-aligned politicians had always bothered him. They were often rather weak people, as if they had somehow shrunk in the wash of life and preferred to shelter on some vague central ground, people whose decisions were unpredictable. Louis couldn’t get much purchase on these floating politicians. Perhaps the mayor wondered every day whether his hair was dark or fair, whether he was a man or a woman, perhaps he would hesitate when faced with the simplest questions. But then, after all, Louis himself hesitated when people asked where he was from. Don’t know, it doesn’t matter, son of the Rhine. Men had spent much time trying to grasp the Rhine, they had even cut it in two. Cutting a river in two, what lunacy, only mankind could come up with something so idiotic. But the Rhine is nowhere and belongs to no one, and he was a son of the Rhine, that was what his father had told him, indefinite nationality, the world was full of horrors and bloodshed, he wasn’t going to think about that all day.
