A Sun for the Dying

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  “That’s O.K. by me.”

  We looked at each other again.

  “I’ll call him Zineb. Do you mind?”

  “Is that your friend who stayed down there?”

  I nodded.

  “Hello, Zineb,” Rico said.

  22.

  HOURS AND HOURS SPENT LOOKING AT THE SEA

  While all this was happening, I didn’t spend much time at the Young Strays, as you can imagine. I’d go there in the morning and again in the evening, to sign the register. Just to make sure I had my board and lodging!

  They’d accepted it at the center. As the judge had said, I’m not easy to control.

  A refusenik, that’s what I am.

  I refuse to accept what happened to me. I’ll never accept it. I don’t want to.

  The important thing, Driss had told me, is that I keep in contact. He was worried about me. About Karim too. And all the kids who ended up at the center.

  “Don’t go kidding yourself, Abdou,” he had said to me when I arrived from the hospital. “There’s no future here, as far as a job and papers go.”

  I’d liked him for saying that. At least, the situation was clear. The future wasn’t here, or at home. Or anywhere else.

  And at any moment, you can screw up. Become a dealer. Attack an old lady. Hold up a drugstore. You just have to get the idea in your head, and not be able to find a reason not to do it.

  I realized that one afternoon when I saw the latest Nikes, in Go Sport. Just looking at them gave me cramps in my stomach. Like when you’re hungry. Why can’t I afford them? Why can others afford them and not me? What did I ever do to the Prophet? All these questions come into your mind. And only one answer. That life’s unfair. And that’s how it begins.

  Driss and I talked about this quite a lot. In Arabic. I only mention that, because at the center they prefer us to talk French. On the wall when you come in there’s a sign that says: He who speaks the language of the people averts disaster. But it does me good to speak my own language, at least to say those things that keep going through my head. I can express them better. And understand myself better too.

  “And besides, there’s Rico,” I’d said to Driss. “I can’t just abandon him. You look after me, I look after him . . . He’s going to die.”

  “Listen, we can help him.”

  That was what they’d told Rico at the shelter on Rue Forbin. They could help him. Take care of him.

  “Help me do what?” he’d asked.

  “To get you away from all this. Find you a job. We’ve done it for others. You don’t want to be like this for the rest of your days, do you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Rico, this isn’t a life. You know that.”

  “What is a life? That?” He had pointed to a guy in a suit who was rushing past them with a cellphone pressed to his ear. “I’ve already had that life. I know where it leads. Exactly where I am today. So stop bugging me, Jeannot.”

  And he’d burned his bridges. He’d had nothing more to do with any of the centers and shelters. At the beginning, while he was searching for a crash pad, he’d even slept in containers down in the harbor.

  Rico would never be in the statistics for rehabilitation. Others would. Fortunately for them. Or unfortunately, I’m not sure anymore. But for every one who escaped that life, how many were going under at that very same moment? Driss and I had talked about that too. He hadn’t been able to give me an answer. Or tell me how many people there were on the street in Marseilles, like Rico. A thousand? Two thousand? Or how many young illegals there were like me. There were a hundred eighty on the register at the Young Strays alone . . .

  “Him and me, we’re the lucky ones,” I’d said to Driss.

  He had blown his top at that. “Shit, Abdou! There’s a medical service specially for people like him. I mean, you’re not stupid. They can look after him. You say he’s your friend . . .”

  I felt as if I was hearing Rico trying to persuade Titi to go to hospital. I didn’t want Rico to avoid me, refuse to speak to me, as Titi had done with him. I accepted him the way he was. I was trying to understand him. I wanted to be with him to the end. And I felt bad about it. Shit, you can understand that, can’t you?

  “Stop, Driss! That’s not what Rico wants.”

  He’d gotten really annoyed. “No one can want to die.”

  I’d looked at him. My big brother in Marseilles. We weren’t always on the same wavelength. It’s as if we were on different sides, not enemies exactly, but . . . strangers, even though we spoke the same language. Why?

  “I often do,” I’d said. “In the morning, when I open my eyes.”

  “Stop talking crap, Abdou!”

  I’d stopped, of course. I’d done my usual patented about-turn. Like: Don’t worry, Driss, the only thing I care about is smoking dope. I really have a ball. Where there’s grass, there’s hope . . . Then I went and gave Christine a kiss and set off to look for Rico.

  My day was just beginning.

  The best moment of the day was when Rico and I went down to the sea. Whatever the weather, unless it was pouring with rain. First we dropped by his crash pad. He’d empty his cart, sift through everything and put it away, then take a strip of Dolipran with a little wine or beer, and we’d set off, going as far as the end of the sea wall by the Fort Saint-Jean. Cutting across the wharves, where they’d knocked down the old warehouses.

  We liked it there. At the entrance to the channel. Facing the Sainte-Marie lighthouse, on the other, bigger sea wall.

  “When the weather’s good, I’ll take you to the other side. Up the lighthouse. You see the staircase there, on the left? You can climb up, and when you get to the top, you can sit down with your back against the stone and look out at the sea and the islands. It’s fantastic. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Léa had taken him there. At her school, she’d managed to get a Port Authority permit to take photos. What she’d really ­wanted to do was watch the sun go down over the harbor with Rico.

  They had made love up there, on the platform of the lighthouse.

  Often, when he looked at the sea, fragments of memory would come back to him, and time would fall back into place in his head.

  Rico was staring at the lighthouse. “Léa . . .”

  She had unbuttoned his fly, then had lifted her dress and come and sat down astride him. Her body pressed to his. Burning hot. They had stayed like that, clasped in an embrace, looking into each other’s eyes, for an eternity.

  Her lips had brushed his, leaving a salt taste on them, then moved over his cheek to his neck, his ear, titillating the lobe, then returned to his face. To his half-open mouth, which was waiting for her kiss. Her tongue.

  “Don’t move,” she had murmured.

  Rico had been in an agony of excitement.

  “Don’t move.”

  Her legs had held his waist, like clinging seaweed, and she had started to move imperceptibly, her hands clutching his shoulders. Her tanned skin bathed in the setting sun and wet with salty sea spray.

  “Joining our destinies,” Rico murmured, still staring at the lighthouse.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I think she said that. Something about joining our destinies to the sea. I can’t remember.”

  As often happened when he was making an effort to remember, Rico was tiring himself out. He put his hands together in front of him, as if to pray.

  “She loved the sea. This sea. She taught me to love it. By linking our desires to it, I think. She used to say . . . that it was . . . that it was like a dream, that’s it. That this sea is like a dream you must look at with your eyes open, a dream you wouldn’t wake from. Do you understand that?”

  I nodded.

  I didn’t really understand, but I sensed what it meant, and that was O.K. by me.

  “You can always be wrong,” Rico said laconically, lighting a cigarette.

  “Do you mind explaining that? I don’t follow y
ou.”

  “Doesn’t matter . . .” He puffed ferociously at his cigarette, then took the book from his pocket. The Odyssey. That book, he had told me, reminded him of Léa. For some time now I’d been reading it to him. Rico couldn’t concentrate anymore on the words and sentences. I didn’t mind, and anyway it was a good story.

  “Here, read.”

  At first, Rico had lost his temper a lot because I asked a lot of questions, every time I came across a name I didn’t know.

  “What’s a nymph?” I’d asked.

  “For fuck’s sake, Abdou, don’t stop on every word! What does it matter what a nymph is? Her name is Calypso, right? And she’s a nymph, right? . . . What matters is the story, dammit! The music of the story. If we have to know and understand everything, we’ll soon get pissed off . . . O.K.? Now start again from the beginning.”

  “Now only he still desired to return to his wife, for an august nymph held him captive deep in her caverns, Calypso, that divine being who longed to have him as her husband.”

  We could spend hours like that, not talking. Sitting side by side. Until the dampness of evening woke us from our torpor. Rico would smoke one cigarette after another, absently, and I would watch him. He seemed to be letting go, moving into something I found incomprehensible. Sometimes, a smile would appear on his lips, a smile that made me shudder.

  “Why are you smiling?” I asked.

  That was two days before all this.

  “I’m smiling about my dream, if you must know. Shit, can’t you just keep quiet for a minute?”

  I felt the cold that was in him settle in me.

  He wasn’t dreaming about Léa. He wasn’t dreaming about Mirjana. I knew that. He was dreaming about the faceless woman with the soft, caressing voice. The one who came to him more and more frequently at night, took his hand and asked, “Why aren’t you smiling? Why won’t you give me a smile?”

  I wanted to get up and run through the streets of Marseilles, to look for Léa. Shit, there must be a Léa somewhere! A Léa who could say to him, “It’s me, Rico. I’ve waited so long, if only you knew . . .” A Léa who would give flesh to his memories, to the hopes of his youth. And would finally get the thoughts in his head into some kind of order. Once and for all!

  I could see it, dammit! I could just see it.

  The world would get back on course.

  Back in the right direction.

  The direction of life.

  Bullshit!

  I wanted Rico to take me in his arms. And say to me, “I love you, son.” The way my father used to, when I went to bed. Just to help me believe, before I went to sleep, that there’d be a tomorrow, that there’d be celebrations, and barbecues, and Tom and Jerry on TV, and soccer matches, and endless swims in the harbor, and girls to look at . . .

  “I’m freezing here,” I said, standing up.

  “I’m coming,” Rico replied.

  I had the impression he wasn’t there anymore. That he’d already gone.

  I walked with my hands in my pockets. An old Algerian was fishing. I had noticed him as we were coming. He’d been there at least two hours, and I hadn’t seen him catch a single thing.

  “Are they biting?” I asked in French.

  “Meïtta,” he replied in Arabic.

  It’s dead here.

  Another angler had told Zineb and me the same thing, last summer, in the harbor of Algiers.

  Meïtta.

  Léa, I think, had said to Rico, “Looking at the sea, you know, I understand how much life I have in me. There’s nothing on land. The land is ugly. Nothing changes there. It’s as if everything is dead. Even the people . . .”

  But it might have been Mirjana who had said that.

  Or Rico who had muttered it one evening.

  Or maybe I’d thought it myself.

  Because I did think it.

  23.

  A LITTLE CAR RIDE ON RUE SAINTE-FRANÇOISE

  I was sitting on the old mattress, waiting for Rico. I’d been waiting for hours.

  “What do you think, Zineb?” I asked the teddy bear.

  He didn’t think anything, so we just kept on waiting.

  I hadn’t seen Rico all day. I’d been up and down his usual route twice, without success. The Bourse Center, the church of Saint-Ferréol, Quai du Port, Rue Caisserie, Place de Lenche, Quai du Fort Saint-Jean. Checking his crash pad each time.

  I was in a foul mood from not knowing where he was. Something must have happened to make him change his ­routine.

  Something major.

  The second time I checked his crash pad, his cart was there. But the things he’d collected hadn’t been sorted. Beside the cart, a large, worn canvas sailor’s bag.

  He’d met someone.

  I rolled a huge joint, and smoked it slowly. I’d gotten it from Karim. It was Colombian. “The best, you’ll see.”

  I love that moment when I take the first drag, and the smoke hits the back of my throat. Closing my eyes and holding my breath, I feel it take me over. I release it slowly, just as my temples start to throb. It’s so good.

  It would have been nicer still if I’d had some cute chick with me. The girl in the Aubade poster, for example. Salima, she’d be called. No, not Salima! Are you crazy or what, Abdou? Have you ever seen an Arab woman showing her ass like that? No. Marina, then. Not bad, sounds Italian. Or Carmen. No, not Carmen . . .

  I looked at Zineb, and blew a little smoke at his head. Smell that, Zineb? That’s good grass. Real fucking good.

  Vanessa. That’s it. Vanessa. With tits like Sophie Marceau.

  “Give me a drag,” she’d say, tugging at her little lace panties.

  She’d stay like that, keeping the pose she had on the poster. All the time. Well, for a while, anyway. Until the whole of Lesson 27 was over. I’d put my dry lips against hers and, just as Mirjana had done to Rico, I’d release the smoke in her throat.

  “Like it, Vanessa?”

  Of course she’d like it.

  My brother used to say it was good for girls to smoke a little dope before fucking. It made their bodies softer, more pliable, like you couldn’t imagine.

  No, I couldn’t imagine. I still can’t. I still haven’t slept with a girl. But after a few drags of that Colombian, Vanessa would of course be as soft and pliable as khobz-al-aid, the feast-day bread my mother used to bake.

  Wow . . . Vanessa . . .

  I stubbed out the butt. I had a hard on like a Moroccan mule. Zineb couldn’t get over it. I grabbed my burning dick. It was all prickly inside, as if it was full of hot sauce. Dersa.

  Fucking Colombian!

  Vanessa.

  I fell asleep.

  I was woken by voices in the gallery. I leaped to my feet. Shit, with all that had happened, I’d forgotten to go to the center and sign the register. Driss was going to bawl me out. The voices came closer.

  Rico came in.

  There was a guy behind him. Rico was holding two big pizza boxes and a plastic bag with bottles clinking inside it. The guy was carrying four more large bags.

  “This is Dédé!” Rico cried, extremely excited. “Dédé, can you imagine? Fucking bozo’s been in Marseilles for four days already!”

  “Hi,” Dédé said.

  “I’m Abdou.”

  “I know.”

  “Put everything down on the mattress,” Rico said.

  There were two twelve-packs of beer, six bottles of wine and a half-bottle of whisky.

  “We’re going to have a party,” Rico announced.

  “It stinks in here,” Dédé said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Where the hell were you?” I asked. “I’ve been looking all over.”

  “We went for a few drinks,” Dédé replied. “I’ve been looking for this jerk for four days! I’ve been everywhere. The night shelter on Rue Forbin, the Madrague-Ville hostel, the drop-in center on Place Marceau. It was like a treasure hunt. Everywhere I went, I found someone who thought he’d seen him . . .”

  “I
n the end we just bumped into each other,” Rico said. “On the Vieux-Port. We came back here, and then we went out again to catch up with everything . . . Shit, a whole year . . . Hey, guess what? They released Jo! That was . . . how long ago did you say?”

  “Six months.”

  “Right, six months. And wait for this. Apart from all the apologies, he’s really hit the jackpot. 2,600 francs in compensation for every day he spent in the can! Just think of that, Abdou. That’s adds up to quite a sum.”

  “If they’d given Jo a life sentence,” Dédé joked, “he’d be a millionaire!”

  “How about Félix?” I asked.

  Dédé shrugged.

  “He’s vanished,” Rico said. “One morning, he was just gone. The only thing he took with him was his ball.”

  “I thought he’d have come down to Marseilles. He was always talking about it. And about you . . .”

  “Apparently, Norbert, his boss, found him sleeping with his wife, Anne . . .”

  “That’s what they say anyway,” Dédé said.

  “And what does Norbert say?”

  “How the hell should I know? Can you see me going to the farm and asking Norbert, ‘So, man, is it true that Félix fucked your wife?’” Dédé laughed as if he’d just told a dirty joke.

  “I don’t believe it,” Rico said. “I can’t imagine Félix doing that.”

  I couldn’t imagine it either.

  From what Rico had told me about Félix, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d do. There must have been some kind of quarrel between Dédé and Félix, I thought. Over Jo. Jo and Monique. Félix couldn’t have approved of what Dédé had been doing.

  “Why are you looking at me like that, boy?”

  “No reason,” I said. “No reason.”

  I didn’t like the look of Dédé. I didn’t think we were going to be friends, him and me. Rico had never told me what he thought of him, but in my opinion, a pal who fucks your girl while you’re in the can is a real scumbag.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about it while I ate my slice of pizza.

  Poor Félix. I’d have liked it if he’d ended up here. “I’d rather not talk about it,” he’d have said. For sure.