“Moustache?” Dédé said. “You mean Moustache the Basque?”
“Yes, that’s the one,” Monique replied, with a grimace.
Dédé knew Moustache the Basque. He had met him in Montpellier, where he’d been bumming for a few months with Félix, a taciturn young guy who carried a football everywhere he went. Dédé had gone with the two of them to the Corbières for the grape harvest, and they’d worked together for several weeks.
“A strange guy, that Moustache. Not a bad guy, but not straight. A bigmouth too.” Dédé laughed. “Worse than me. So obviously, he and I didn’t get along too well.”
Since the Belgian’s death, Monique continued, no one had seen Moustache. But the cops had a lead. A good one. A social security card found among his things at the squat in Aubervilliers. The card was in Jo’s name.
“When the cops came for Jo, they wanted him to sign a paper. ‘Don’t play the fool,’ they told him. ‘Face the facts. We have evidence it was you.’ But Jo had nothing to admit. Apart from having a moustache.”
“But fuck it,” Dédé said, “how did his social security card end up in Moustache’s pocket?”
“Well,” Monique said, “one day, six months ago, Moustache turned up here with Félix in tow. A bit like the two of you, this morning. They didn’t have any money. We lent them a little, and gave them clean clothes. Jo was working as a bricklayer at the time. He left early and came back late. Félix had found a job on a farm, a little way inland, with board and lodging included. But Moustache did nothing all day long. That started to piss Jo off. One day, he told Moustache he’d had enough and wanted him out. They had a really big argument.”
What happened next was predictable. Moustache had taken off early in the morning after going through Jo’s pockets.
“Shit!” Dédé cried. He turned to Rico. “Can you imagine that?”
Rico was gradually dozing off. It was warm in the little apartment. He had the impression the warmth was easing the pain in his back.
“Hey, you asleep?”
Rico shook his head.
“Want another beer?” Monique asked.
“If it’s no bother,” Dédé replied.
“How old is he?” Rico asked, pointing to the baby.
“Sixteen months. And she’s a girl. Her name’s Maeva.”
“Can I hold her?”
The words had just slipped out. But the desire to take the child in his arms had been sudden and strong. Another life was coming back to the surface. A life he had lived. A life he had lost.
Surprised at first, Monique smiled at Rico. “Yes, all right, if you want to.”
Rico rediscovered gestures he hadn’t made since Julien was born. It’s like swimming, he thought, you never forget how. He gently rocked Maeva, and her eyes started to close. Why, he wondered, shouldn’t what’s true one day also be true another day?
When they had moved to their new house in Rothéneuf, Julien had just turned two. Sophie and he were as happy as newlyweds. One morning, as he was leaving for Lorient to canvas some new customers, Rico had found a note from Sophie in his wallet. I feel good here. The house is beautiful. I love knowing you’re here, walking in the garden, looking at the sea, listening to the waves. Julien is going to be happy here, isn’t he? And so are we, my love. Thank you for giving me all this happiness. I’m a lucky woman. (And you’re lucky too, right?) I love you.
Rico had never been able to make up his mind to throw away this note. He kept it, folded in four, with his identity card, and although he knew it by heart, he reread it sometimes. Just to convince himself that moments like that had really existed. That was the only reason. Because, as of today, he had given up trying to understand. And because, as Titi used to say, not all questions have answers. “They call it the mystery of life. That’s all.”
“And have you heard from Jo?” Dédé asked, when Monique returned with the beers.
“Well, he has his ups and downs. The guards laugh at him when he says he’s innocent. In prison, they say, everyone swears they’re innocent, especially the guilty. And as Jo did a few stupid things when he was young . . .”
“Fucking bastards!”
“Do you have a lawyer?” Rico asked.
Maeva had fallen asleep, but he was still rocking her gently, all the while drinking his beer.
“Oh, yes . . . A young guy, court-appointed. I certainly can’t afford a lawyer on my welfare payments . . . But he seems O.K. He’s been getting all the paperwork together. Wage slips, clocking-in records. To show that you can’t bump off a guy in Aubervilliers at midnight and get taken on for work in Chalon at five in the morning . . .”
“And?”
“Nothing so far!” Monique said angrily. “That kind of evidence should be enough, but it isn’t! He’s been in the can for four months now. And the worst thing is, the fucking magistrate still hasn’t questioned him. He hasn’t even been brought face to face with the other two, Rita and Ignacio. Even though the lawyer says everything rests on their testimony.”
Rico suddenly had a violent coughing fit. Maeva woke up and started crying. Without a word, he handed her back to Monique. He couldn’t speak. He felt an overwhelming desire to spit.
“Bronchitis,” he murmured, after spitting into an old Kleenex.
Bronchitis was the name he gave to whatever this illness was that was eating away at his lungs.
8.
JUST LIFE, LOVE GOING BAD FOR NO REASON
The lack of alcohol woke Rico.
He had fallen asleep on the couch, exhausted by several coughing fits. Bent double over the toilet pan, he had spat several times, then vomited. Thick, yellowish phlegm. He had come back to the living room, pale, gasping for breath, his eyes tearing up with pain.
“You O.K.?” Monique asked, worried.
“Have you got any Dolipran?”
“Just aspirin.”
Rico grimaced. He didn’t know what the difference was, but aspirin never brought him any relief. At the hospital, they’d given him Surbronc, to ease his cough, and Pulmicourt, an inhalant to help him breathe. They had worked. But you needed a prescription for them. Every time he asked for them, the druggists told him to go to hospital. And he didn’t want to go to hospital anymore. If he set foot there, he was sure the doctors would never let him go.
“It’s not serious,” Rico said, collapsing on the couch. “Don’t worry.”
“All the same,” Dédé said.
“No sweat.”
He finished his glass of beer, then settled down as comfortably as he could on the couch. Gradually, the voices of Dédé and Monique faded away. Monique had resumed her story, clearly pleased to be telling tell her and Jo’s misfortunes to someone.
“The guards call him Lifer,” Monique was saying. “Take a shower, Lifer! Go for your walk, Lifer! Go to the canteen, Lifer! Just to push him over the edge! Jo told the lawyer about Moustache . . . I don’t mean he squealed. That wouldn’t be like Jo. You know how he is . . . But he stood up for his freedom . . . And what about us, what about the kid? It’s only fair, right? . . .”
The apartment was silent. Dédé, Monique and Maeva had gone. Rico extricated himself from the couch and ran to the kitchen. In search of something to drink. There were no more beers in the fridge. Or in the closet. He was starting to feel feverish. This was the thing he always dreaded, finding himself without anything to drink when he had the craving.
He finally found a bottle of Castelvin, three quarters full, under the sink. He opened it and sniffed it. It smelled sour. He lifted the neck of the plastic bottle to his lips to see if it was still drinkable or not. It was. He took a good swig of it. The liquid slipped down him like dirty water into a sewer. It was disgusting, but it was 11 proof all the same. Pleased now, he took another swig.
He’d started drinking after Sophie left. To console himself at first, to forget. Then to destroy himself. That was how he talked about it now, anyway, but at the time he didn’t see things like that. He didn’t a
nalyze them. Drinking had become necessary to him. Vital. From one or two whiskies at aperitif time, he had moved on to half a bottle in the evening. One glass after another. He couldn’t go to bed anymore without a strong dose of alcohol. He would stagger to the bedroom, undress and collapse on the bed. Often, he would wake up at night. About three in the morning. Then he would start over again, after having one or two glasses of water.
The fact was, he had started drinking too much that very first evening he had been on his own. Alcohol, he found, helped him to think better. To understand. He needed to understand how he and Sophie had gotten to that point. It was an obsession. But of course, there was nothing to understand. It was just life. Something two people have that goes bad one day. Like a missed appointment. Just life. Love going bad for no reason. Happiness turning to tragedy.
By mutual agreement, Sophie had moved her things out one week when Rico was away travelling in Brittany. Furniture her family had given her. Julien’s brand new bedroom. Plus objects, knick-knacks she was fond of.
“Take whatever you want,” he had said to her, “I don’t give a damn.” One evening, in a hotel room, he had imagined Sophie taking off the wall a painting by Mariano Otero, a Spanish painter who had been living in Rennes for years, and who exhibited regularly in a gallery in Dinard. They had gone there one Sunday.
The painting was called The Kiss. Rico had loved the sensuality of it. And the tenderness. He had given Sophie that painting for their wedding anniversary. The fifth. “I always love that moment, when our lips are half open, and quiver a little. It’s just like the first time . . .” That was what he’d said, after she had unwrapped it.
“I was sure it was this! Oh, I love you!”
Sophie’s warm lips had half opened, with the same emotion. And he had felt her moist, hard tongue against his. And her beautiful white breasts, swelling and eager for his hands, his caresses. And her naked body offered to him on the living room floor. They had made passionate love. Both carried away. All because of a kiss. All because of The Kiss.
“Can I take it?” she had asked, almost indifferently.
He had said yes. It was a gift. He was not the kind of man to take back his gifts. What did it matter, anyway? Without her kisses, this Kiss was meaningless now.
“And what about this?” Sophie had gone on, pointing to an old armchair they had bought in a flea market.
What about this? And this? He had said yes, and yes again. He didn’t give a damn, really.
When he had returned from his rounds, he had found a note from Sophie, a fairly gentle one, waiting for him on the low table in the living room. Don’t go into the bedroom right away, or Julien’s room. You’ll have a shock.
But he had immediately gone through every room. Empty or half empty. His footsteps echoed through the house. Fragments of their recent conversations came into mind. “I don’t know what to tell you . . . With Alain, it’s . . . as if everything’s out in the open . . . Everything’s simple . . . We can say anything to each other. Good things and not so good things . . . Life has stopped being a problem . . . Life is simply life . . .” Opening and closing each of the doors, it had seemed to him as if life wasn’t life anymore. That it had simply left. And silence and death had taken its place.
That evening, he made himself spaghetti with butter, and ate it standing up. Listening to old Charles Aznavour songs.
Love is like a day
It ends, it goes away . . .
Songs to cry to, for when you want to cry. Rico had always liked Aznavour because of that. Because tears were so near the surface.
Love is sun and feasts, love is moon and quarrels
Love is rain and battles . . .
Holding his plate, he walked from one room to another, reopening the doors, switching on all the lights. Every time he went back in the living room, he had a large glass of red wine. Saint-Émilion. A Château-Robin 1997. He and Éric had brought back some bottles from a bachelor jaunt in the Bordeaux region.
Rico finished the bottle then, collapsing into an armchair, started on the whisky. Aznavour was singing “To Die of Love.” On a forty-track compilation. Enough to get him through the evening. Later, totally drunk, he slipped naked between the sheets and jerked off, weeping and thinking of Sophie. He sobbed as he came. And the sobs stayed with him all through the night.
That was how he spent the first week. Drowning himself in alcohol every evening. Jerking off too. His head full of fragments of things Sophie had said. “It hurts me to know I’ve hurt you. It hurts me to see you hurt . . . It’s like a weight inside me. I live with it, but it never goes away . . .” Bullshit! he would scream. Bullshit! “I’d like to see you happy, one day soon. I’d like to see you smile again . . . You deserve love, tenderness, happiness . . .”
Bullshit! Words, words, as Dalida used to sing. Hot air! Words you say and then forget as soon as you’re in someone else’s arms. In someone else’s bed, and his swollen cock enters you and thrusts deep into you . . . Sophie being fucked by Alain. The images were impossible to get rid of, and they made him refill his glass. One last drink and then he’d sleep . . . But every evening, he needed one more drink.
Sophie! he would cry, panting. Sophie, he would weep. And he would keep jerking off. Until his cock, red and sore, burned his fingers.
He would jerk off until he couldn’t come anymore.
Sophie.
Until he couldn’t love anymore.
By the time the weekend had come and gone, he realized that no one had called him. None of his friends. Not even Éric. All of them, especially Éric, were on Sophie and Alain’s side. Rico was the loser of the couple, and other couples don’t like losers.
Much later, one noon when they met to discuss the divorce, Sophie told Rico that everything had started between her and Alain at a lunch party organized by Annie. One Sunday, one of those Sundays when he was in Paris attending yet another course for the sales force, she had invited a few people over. Her sister Isa, Isa’s husband Claude, Sophie, and Alain.
“That really shocked me, you know,” Sophie had said.
She meant it. And he believed her.
“And I said so to Annie, in the kitchen.”
“Don’t make such a fuss,” Annie had replied. “I bet your man”—Annie always called him that, putting as much contempt into the word “man” as the conventions allowed—“has the occasional fling with one of his female colleagues.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“All those conferences, all those courses he goes on . . . You know what men are like . . . Believe me, it’s best to keep them where you can see them.”
They had both laughed. And Annie had said, conspiratorially, “Shall I put you opposite each other, or side by side?”
Annie probably hadn’t imagined that this lunch would turn Sophie’s life upside down. Or that it would destroy their marriage. She had probably assumed that Sophie and Alain would sleep together, might even have an affair. She hated Rico so much, she certainly had no objection to the idea.
When Sophie told him she had met “someone else,” Rico knew immediately she was talking about Alain. Who else could it be? He’d noticed how Alain hovered around her. Whether meeting at someone’s house or during their ski trips. It even amused Rico to catch Alain eyeing Sophie’s ass, or staring at her legs when she crossed or uncrossed them. “Yes, she’s beautiful, my friend,” he would think, “but she’s mine, all mine.”
All his. He believed that. But nothing’s ever fixed. Nothing can ever be taken for granted. He should have known that, after all the songs he’d listened to on the car radio! Maybe if he had been a little less sure of himself, or a little more jealous, he would have realized that Sophie wasn’t indifferent to Alain’s glances, Alain’s desire for her.
There was only one time when Rico had gotten a little worried.
Alain, who prided himself on being a good photographer, had invited all of them to his place to show them the slides of their last skiing t
rip. The kind of ritual occasion Rico found particularly boring and stupid. That day, though, he didn’t doze off as soon as the first images were projected. Even though Sophie wasn’t always in the foreground, she was in almost all the photos.
The last slide came on the screen. Sophie had taken this one. Alain was sitting on his ass in the snow, his legs spread wide. Between his legs, carved in the snow, an erect penis and two nice round testicles. Alain was looking at the camera and smiling, with the tip of his tongue protruding slightly. Everyone had burst out laughing. Sophie more than anyone else.
“Would you like to suck his dick?” he asked her as soon as they got home.
“You’re so vulgar. It was just a joke.”
“Me, vulgar? It’d never have occurred to me to do something like that. Let alone have my photograph taken by a friend’s wife.”
“You’re a killjoy. You see the bad in everything.”
“I see what I see,” Rico said, raising his voice a little, unusually for him. “That he’s showing his dick. That’s what I see. Which makes me wonder if you’d like to suck it.”
“Ah . . . so monsieur is jealous, is he?” she replied, sarcastically. “No one can do anything, with you around. We can’t amuse ourselves, we can’t even laugh. You always have to look for . . . I don’t know what . . . a meaning where there isn’t one. Annie and Isa were there, and yes, we laughed a lot. If you had even a tiny sense of humor, it could have been you making us laugh . . .”
“Now that’s an idea. Next time, I’ll show them my ass!”
Sophie left the room to go to bed, but without slamming the door as she sometimes did. When he joined her in bed, she was leafing through a women’s magazine. A special dieting issue. He glanced over her shoulder.
“Are you interested in this?”
A Sun for the Dying Page 6
