A Sun for the Dying

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  Until Rico died, the Vieux-Port was my favourite place for a walk. The perfect remedy for feeling stifled—the ghoumma, we call it in Algeria, like when your folks won’t let you go out.

  I’d walk as far as the Fort Saint-Jean, then along the sea wall, until I reached the entrance to the channel. Where the sea begins. With the horizon in the distance. And Algeria on the other side, the other shore. I’d settle comfortably in the rocks, light a joint, and spend hours daydreaming.

  Marseilles—that part of town, anyway—always reminded me of Algiers. Not that I felt homesick. My home doesn’t exist anymore. I’ll never set foot there again. I want to forget Algiers. But I needed to hang on to a few memories. That’s all I have left, a few memories.

  I wasn’t the only one reliving their memories here. Lots of guys hung around the Fort Saint-Jean, alone or in groups. Quite a few Algerians like me. But also Africans, Turks, Comorians, Yugoslavs . . . A guy who tried to sell me dope told me he thought Marseilles looked like Dubrovnik. “It looks like any place you want it to look like,” I replied. How we all end up here is another story. But I’ve never beaten myself up about that.

  Sitting quietly among the rocks, I’d close my eyes and see myself with my pal Zineb, at the Eden or the Deux-Chameaux, bathing all summer. And it really made me feel good to think about him. Especially like that, diving into the lukewarm water of the harbour. Shouting and laughing. Whistling at the girls . . . It was a comfort, you know? It calmed me down when I felt like setting fire to this whole fucking shitty planet. If I’d had good enough matches, I’d have done it long ago.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Rico said. “Do you live around here?”

  Ya Khi blad yak hi! Fucking country! I woke up from my daydreams. Rico was looking at me. It was weird, the way he looked at me. As if he didn’t notice the burns on the left side of my face, the eye almost down to the chin. It was the first time that had happened. With everyone else, even the kindest of them, I knew they couldn’t take their eyes off those lousy marks when they talked to me. They all found them repulsive.

  “I’m just passing though,” I replied.

  “You come and go, right? Like me.”

  “Right.”

  “And where were you going?”

  “Down to the sea.”

  He smiled at me. “The sea? That’s on my way.”

  He grabbed hold of his cart and started walking slowly. I followed him. I didn’t really care where I went.

  The head of a teddy bear protruded from the cart. One eye hung loose and rocked gently as the wheels turned. It was a nice effect. As if the bear was winking.

  “Where did you get that bear?”

  “Someone just gave it to me. It’s a collector’s item.”

  “I never had one.”

  Rico stopped. He looked at me again, right in the eyes this time. “I can’t give it to you, you do realize that?”

  “Hey, I didn’t ask you for it!”

  “That’s all right, then.”

  He started walking again, and we carried on like that until we got to Place de Lenche. There he suggested we take a breather and sit down on a bench. He was too out of breath to continue.

  “I always take a breather here. I like this square. It’s nice here, don’t you think?”

  He wedged the cart between his legs, and closed his eyes. His breathing was halting and wheezy. It was really painful to hear him breathing like that. I sat there without moving, without saying anything. The bear stuck its tongue out at me, a little tongue of red cloth. “Hi, Zineb!” I said.

  Rico had been in Marseilles for nearly a year. Physically, I think, he’d changed. He was as thin as a rake. The lower part of his face was covered with a salt and pepper beard, which he’d let grow so that he didn’t have to shave anymore. Wisps of greasy hair peeped out from under his hat. And when he smiled, in that gentle way he had, you could see his teeth were black and decaying.

  Obviously I didn’t know it just then, but Rico looked like Titi. The way Titi had been at the end, the way he later described him to me. And the way I imagined him in my head. A bum. Rico just didn’t care about anything anymore. Even his black parka, which he was so proud of, was threadbare and covered in stains. It had aged, just as he had. Just as quickly as he had. And he never took it off. Whatever the weather. I think he even slept in it.

  Gradually, Rico’s breathing became more regular, almost normal. He opened his eyes, took out his cigarettes, and offered me one.

  “So where do you crash?”

  “At the Ozéa. It’s a hotel on Rue Barbaroux, not far from the Canebière. There are four of us per room, sometimes five.”

  “And how did you end up there?”

  “Through a center called the Young Strays. It isn’t a shelter. There are no dormitories, no canteen. They call it a walk-in center. A place you go to when you don’t know where else to go. When you’re homeless and penniless. When you don’t have anything. That’s why they call it the Young Strays. That’s what I am.”

  “Don’t you have parents?”

  “No father, no mother, no brother . . . Nothing. Just my hands in my pockets.” I laughed.

  “You’re quite a comic, you are.”

  “I don’t have much choice.”

  I’d found out about the Young Strays through the Timone hospital, where I’d stayed for a month, being treated for second degree burns. Not only on my face, but all over my body. I’d traveled from Algiers to Marseilles in the machine room of a freighter called the Nordland. Hiding just over the pipes. When I came out, the guys in the crew were taken aback. Not because I was there, but because of the state I was in. “I’m thirsty,” I said. That was all I could say before I passed out. When I came to, I was in the ER.

  The doctors told me I’d been crazy to do a thing like that. They were right, but I’d gotten out of that fucking country, and I was still alive.

  I told Rico the story. “One night, these twenty guys in fatigues and combat boots, with hoods over their heads, came to the project where I lived. In Bal-elzouar. They went into one block after another and pulled people out of their apartments. But not just anybody . . . They had lists. They ordered them down onto the street. Whole families. And then, pow, pow, pow . . . they shot them. My parents were on the list. My brother too.”

  Rico had his eyes closed. For a moment, I thought he’d fallen asleep, but when I stopped speaking, he opened his eyes. I can’t describe the look in them. It was like the look of a blind man.

  “And where were you?” he asked.

  “By chance, I’d stayed over at my friend Zineb’s place. We’d gone bathing in the harbor. I always slept at his place when we went bathing. Because it was too far for me to get home from there. It’s out near the airport, and . . . Anyway, I liked sleeping at his place. My only regret is that I left Zineb behind. In all that shit . . .”

  Rico put his arm right down inside the cart, took out a bottle of cheap wine, and downed more than a quarter of it, just like that, without drawing breath.

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s always the same story.”

  “What’s the same story?”

  “You see, the thing is . . . You’re living a quiet life with your wife and kid. Just enough money not to be in the shit. And then one day your wife dumps you. You find yourself alone. You think it’s the end of the world . . .”

  His eyes glazed over. He was somewhere far away. For a while, he was silent.

  “What was I saying?”

  “You were talking about your wife . . . The end of the world.”

  “Oh, yes. In fact, the end of the world had already started. Long before the hassles came along.”

  It was a lot of hot air, and I didn’t understand any of it. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s when the sky falls on your head that you discover the horror. The horror that exists in the world. Because suddenly you’re thrown into another life, and you meet people you never even knew existed, whose
pain you never knew existed . . .”

  “Like me?”

  “Like you. Others too, abandoned at the side of the road.” He took another big swig of wine, then went on, “You know, it’s like World War I. Did they teach you about World War I in school?”

  “Are you kidding? My grandfather was in that war. As an infantryman. They even gave him a medal.”

  “Well, there was the front. The trenches. Men were dropping like flies. It was a slaughterhouse, that fucking war. And all the time, on both sides, life went on . . . It’s just the same today. Except that the slaughterhouses are getting bigger. They’re taking over the world. One day, you see, we’ll all be dead.”

  He put the top back on the bottle and slipped it back inside the cart. He looked at me, with that look I liked. Then he nodded.

  “So, shall we go down to the sea?”

  20.

  EVIL IS LIKE HELL, YOU CAN’T IMAGINE IT

  The first thing Rico had done when he arrived in Marseilles was to climb to the top of Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine. To the little building where Léa used to live. The housefronts in the neighborhood, as in other parts of the center, had been repainted ocher and pink. He barely recognized the place.

  That made him hesitate. Then he remembered the corridor, and the narrow staircase leading to her apartment. There, nothing had changed. The same light brown paint, but dirtier, of course.

  “This is it,” he said, when he took me there.

  He’d wanted me to see where Léa’s place was. We went back there several times. It was a kind of pilgrimage. It always took a hell of a long time to get there. Because it’s all uphill. Rico would stop every hundred yards to catch his breath. He would always look at the names on the letter boxes. Just the way he’d done that first day in Marseilles.

  Of course, he wasn’t under any illusion that day. Twenty years had gone by. Maybe more. All the same, his heart was pounding as he read the names on the letter boxes. No Léa Carabédian. He’d read the names again, more slowly. To make absolutely sure.

  Feeling lost, thinking of nothing, he had walked as far as the square in front of the Abbaye Saint-Victor. Leaning on the parapet that overlooks the former careening basin and the entrance to the Vieux-Port, he had looked out at the city and smoked one cigarette after another.

  Marseilles, he told me—and I think it had surprised him—had seemed familiar to him. As if he had lived here for years. More familiar than Saint-Brieuc, where he was born, and had grown up. More familiar than Rennes, where he had lived.

  “Happiness tames everything, you know.”

  Rico said that one evening, when we were on our way back from Léa’s.

  “You want to repeat that?”

  “Drop it, Abdou. Drop it.”

  Rico was like that a lot in those last weeks. We’d be talking about something or other, and then suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word, his mind would wander. He’d be silent for a while, lost in thought. When he came out of it, he’d say some crazy phrase or other.

  It annoyed me a little. I’d have liked to understand. I’d have liked him to explain.

  “I’m not dumb, you know!” I’d yelled at him one day.

  The fact is, Rico found it harder and harder to put the pieces together in his head. There was a big gap between what he was thinking and what he managed to express.

  I’d noticed that when it came to Léa.

  When he talked about her, he often got confused. The way he described her face, it was just how I’d pictured Mirjana. In his memory, their features had gotten all mixed up. The color of their eyes, their hair.

  Rico had a serious problem with time. The notion of time. He couldn’t imagine Léa the way she was now. A woman of forty. To him, she was still the same age as when they had met. Still young.

  I tried to tell him that once, but it was no good.

  I was waiting for him on the bench, on Place de Lenche. When I saw him come out from Rue Caisserie, I guessed that something had happened. He was walking quickly, pushing his cart any old how. He collapsed onto the bench, gasping for breath. I’d never seen him so excited.

  “You’re not going to believe this . . .” he began, and coughed.

  “Wait, I said. “Catch your breath first.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah . . .”

  I thought he was going to choke. I was always scared he would choke.

  “I’m sure it was her. Léa . . .”

  “Calm down, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Calm down? Shit, Abdou! I saw her! On a bus . . . She was getting on a bus. A No. 83. From the stop by the harbor, you know the one I mean? She even recognized me . . . I think so anyway. But it was too late. The bus was already leaving and—”

  “What did she look like?”

  “What do you mean, what did she look like?” He looked at me as if I was a moron.

  “What about her face?”

  “What do you mean, her face?”

  Definitely a complete moron.

  “You see, Rico . . .” I turned it over and over in my mind, and finally came out with it. “Let me explain something, Rico. Whatever we do, we change with time. Don’t you understand that? We change. We get older. I’m sure if you pass me in the street in twenty years time, you won’t recognize me.”

  Rico gave a shrill, rather crazy little laugh, which I didn’t like. “Oh, yeah . . . In twenty years time . . .” He started coughing and retching, like when he was going to vomit. “In twenty years’ time,” he resumed, “I’ll be dead. So don’t talk crap, Abdou, about me not recognizing you . . . I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about Léa. Léa, who I just saw . . .”

  Then there was that look in his eyes again, as if he was going under. Like the Titanic but speeded up. I was angry at myself for talking a lot of bullshit. They say it’s better to keep quiet sometimes, don’t they? What difference did it make, after all? As long as Rico believed he would see Léa again, he’d carry on living. And what did it matter if this Léa looked like Sophie, or Julie, or Malika, or Mirjana? Memories deceive us, I thought.

  I even thought it out loud.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Shit, man! I can talk crap too if I want to.”

  “Yeah . . .” He had lit himself a cigarette. The first drag made him cough again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About Léa. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  Rico shrugged, and his smile returned. “Guess what, Abdou? She was wearing that little red beret I liked . . . I told you about the beret, remember?”

  I nodded. What was I supposed to say?

  “I’m going to that bus stop tomorrow, and I’m going to wait for her.” He put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me. There were tears in his eyes. “I’m going to surprise her!”

  I let him talk. I knew that by the next morning he’d have forgotten. Not about Léa, but about Bus No. 83 and the stop by the harbor. It would only take a few beers, or a bottle of cheap wine, and a night’s sleep, and everything would melt away in his head.

  I’d come to terms with it. We didn’t make appointments anymore, him and me. Because he always forgot them. Once, we’d arranged to meet outside a cheap clothing store almost at the bottom of Rue de la République. I hung about for two hours before I gave up. The easiest thing to do, I’d discovered, was to wait for him somewhere on his usual route. Either at the end of the sea wall by the Fort Saint-Jean. Or at his crash pad.

  “Oh, there you are there,” he’d say when he saw me, wherever the place, whatever the time. “I’m not too late . . .”

  And he’d start telling these incredible stories, with past and present all mixed up. It hasn’t been easy for me, I can tell you, trying to put everything in the right order.

  Don’t forget, he really took a beating in Avignon. Something must have gone off the rails inside his head, in my opinion. I’m not saying he was crazy, please don’t think that. All I’m saying is that violence and pain traumatize y
ou. When you’ve been beaten up, you’re never the same again. You don’t feel things in the same way. You don’t react like other people.

  I’m like that myself. Sometimes, even the most understanding people—I’m thinking of Michel, who works at the center as part of his military service—sometimes get irritated because they don’t understand our reactions. Especially when they try to help us and we tell them to piss off.

  The people at the center, the judges at juvenile court, all of those guys, however interested they are in what’s happened to us, however moved, however indignant, it’s impossible for them to put themselves in our skin. It’s like with my burns. I just have to rub my face, and I’m not part of the same world anymore. This world. Evil is unreal. It’s like hell. If you haven’t been on the rack, you can’t imagine it.

  Even Driss doesn’t understand. Driss also works at the center. He’s a Moroccan, but he was born in Marseilles.

  One day at the center, he cornered Karim and me. He wanted­ a word with us, he said. He sounded just like my teacher when I’d screwed up.

  “I have a principle,” he said. “I steer clear of anyone who touches dope.”

  That evening, I’d smoked so much dope, my eyes were as big as lottery balls. But it was Karim that Driss was ­particularly angry with. He turned to him and said, “I’m not talking to you anymore, O.K.? Not while you continue with that crap.”

  It’s true that Karim was always smoking dope and taking anything he could find. He just wanted to get as high as possible. To be in another place. He’s not a junkie, in my opinion. It’s just that when he comes back down to earth, the first thing that comes into his mind is those three fucking soldiers beating his mother. To force her to inform on a neighbor. In the end, it was Karim who informed on him. He couldn’t bear to hear his mother screaming anymore. So those bastards went and got the neighbour and shot him in front of Karim. Three bullets. One each. Blood spattered over Karim’s shirt. That’s always in his mind too—his neighbor’s blood spurting over him.