Guylain stood under the scalding shower for nearly ten minutes. He was sick of the sludge he wallowed in all day long. He needed to cleanse himself of this muck, wash away his crime between these four yellow-stained walls. He stepped out into the street with the feeling that he had come back from hell. Once on the train taking him back to the fold, he brought out the rescued pages and laid them gently on the blotting paper that would free them of the moisture swelling their fibres. So that the next day, on this same train, the live skins would finally give up the ghost as he released them from their words.
8
Guylain did not read during the return commute. He had neither the energy nor the desire. Nor did he sit on the orange jump seat. After laying the live skins on their blotting paper and putting the folder in his bag, he closed his eyes and allowed himself gradually to come back to life as the carriage rocked his tired body. Twenty peaceful minutes during which life flowed back into him while the ballast streaming past under the train absorbed the day’s ill humour.
On exiting the station, Guylain walked up the avenue for nearly a kilometre then disappeared into the maze of pedestrian streets in the city centre. He lived on the third floor of an ancient apartment building at number 48, Allée des Charmilles. His cramped attic studio flat was spartan with its kitchenette from another era, Lilliputian bathroom and worn lino. When it rained, like today, the skylight let in water if there was a wind. In summer, the terracotta tiles greedily drank in the sun’s rays and transformed the thirty-six square metres into a furnace. And yet, each evening, Guylain arrived home with the same sense of relief, far from all the world’s Brunners and Kowalskis. Before even removing his jacket, Guylain went over and gave a pinch of food to Rouget de Lisle, the goldfish who shared his life, whose bowl stood on the bedside table.
‘Sorry I’m a bit late but the 18.48 should have been called the 19.02. I’m knackered. You don’t know how lucky you are, my friend. Sometimes I’d give anything to change places with you.’
He had caught himself talking to his fish more and more often. Guylain liked to think that Rouget de Lisle listened to him, suspended in the middle of his sphere, gills flapping, eager to hear about his day. Having a goldfish for a confidant meant expecting nothing from him other than to listen in passive silence, although Guylain sometimes thought he discerned in the stream of bubbles coming from the fish’s mouth the beginnings of a reply to his questions. Rouget de Lisle greeted him with a lap of honour then gulped down the food flakes floating on the surface of the water. All the lights on the telephone were winking. As he expected, Giuseppe’s voice erupted from the speaker as he listened to his answerphone messages:
‘Listen, kiddo!’ The old fellow’s elated tone at once swept away any shame that overcame Guylain at deceiving his old friend, as he was doing at present. After a long silence, beneath which he could hear the breathing of a Guiseppe almost fainting with emotion, the gravelly voice resumed:
‘Albert’s just called. We’ve got one! Call me as soon as you get in.’ The command brooked no evasion. Giuseppe picked up before the end of the first ring. Guylain smiled. The old boy was waiting for his call. He pictured him bundled up in the light-green blanket he always had wrapped around him, the telephone resting on what remained of his legs, his hand clenching the receiver.
‘How many is it now, Giuseppe?’
‘Sette cento cinquantanove!’
His mother tongue rose to the surface when he was overcome with anger or an immense joy, as he was now. Seven hundred and fifty-nine – that took them up to where? wondered Guylain. Above the ankles? Mid-calf?
‘No, I meant how long since the last one?’ fibbed Guylain, who remembered perfectly well the date circled in red on the wall calendar hanging next to the fridge.
‘Three months and seventeen days. It was the twenty-second of November last year. That time it had been one of his contacts who works at the waste recycling centre in Livry-Gargan who’d found it. It was sitting on top of the pile in the waste-paper skip. It was the colour that had attracted his attention. He said it was a good thing I’d taken a photo to give to all the lads. That’s how he recognized it: from the colour. There aren’t any other books like it, he said. It’s exactly the same as the colour of the old missals when he was a choirboy. Jesus, just think! What’s more, it’s in excellent condition, he says, apart from a faint grease stain on the top right-hand corner of the back cover.’
Guylain congratulated himself once again for having chosen the second-hand bookseller as an ally in carrying out his campaign of deceit, even though he feared that one day Albert, the legendary bouquiniste of Quai de la Tournelle, famous for his mischievous humour, would arouse the old boy’s suspicions by saying too much. Make a grease stain on the back of the book – Guylain made a mental note. ‘Tomorrow, Giuseppe. I’ll go and pick it up tomorrow, I promise. I’m too worn out tonight, and anyway, it’s a bit late to catch the last train back. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I’ll have plenty of time.’
‘All right, kiddo, tomorrow. In any case, Albert’s holding on to it. He’s expecting you.’
Guylain nibbled gingerly at a plate of rice. Lying, over and over again. He fell asleep watching Rouget de Lisle digest his food. On the TV, a reporter was talking about a revolution in a far-off country and about a population being wiped out.
9
Gross negligence – that was the upshot of the investigation carried out by TERN less than three weeks after the accident. No more and no less than those final brief words. Guylain knew the phrase by heart from having turned it over and over in his mind: ‘The unfortunate accident suffered by Giuseppe Carminetti, chief operator for twenty-eight years at the TERN treatment and recycling company, was the result of gross negligence on the part of the said operator, whose blood alcohol level was shown to be more than two grammes per litre of blood at the time of the accident of which he was the victim.’ Alcohol, that’s what had done for Giuseppe, Guylain was convinced. The army of lawyers and experts hired by TERN had simply pointed the finger without looking any further for the true causes of that whole shambolic incident. Those vultures only just stopped short of billing him for the tattered boiler suit and the forty-five minutes lost production time while the Zerstor was halted. Forty-five brief minutes, not a minute more; just the time it took for the firemen to free Giuseppe, who was howling with pain and writhing at the bottom of the tank like a man condemned, surrounded by books that were drinking his blood, his entire mind sucked into the two wells of suffering that had taken the place of his legs. He had just replaced one of the lateral nozzles and was about to climb out of the funnel when the Thing had devoured his lower limbs, right up to his mid-thighs. The ambulance doors were barely shut before Kowalski himself started the machine up again while Guylain puked his guts out, clutching the toilet bowl with both hands. That bastard had set the machine in motion with Giuseppe’s screams still echoing through the works. Guylain had not forgiven Fatso for this. Starting up again with the sole aim of finishing what had been begun, in other words reducing the contents of a thirty-eight-tonne tipper to a paste. Into the guts of the Zerstor it all went, where it was mixed with the formless pulp that was all that remained of chief operator Carminetti’s pins. The show must go on and God rest his legs!
Alcohol did not explain everything. Guylain had believed Giuseppe when he’d sworn that he’d carried out the safety procedures, that, of course, that day he’d knocked back his habitual little tipple, as he did every God-given day, but that he would never have gone down into the tank without taking the usual safety precautions. Guylain knew Giuseppe and his general mistrust of the Thing. ‘Beware of it, kiddo! It’s vicious and could very well do to us one day what it does to the rats!’ he was always saying. He too had noticed. They had never really discussed the rat problem. Not easy to raise things that defied reason. Each knew that the other knew, that was all. Just once, Giuseppe had had a word with Kowalski about it. That had been a long time before the disaster. After coming
across an umpteenth victim one morning, Giuseppe had gone to see Fatso to tell him of his concerns, but nothing had happened as a result. The boss must have taken the piss out of him as he always did and sent him packing with his customary charm, presumed Guylain. Giuseppe had come out of the office as white as a sheet, looking solemn. Guylain hadn’t said anything. He still regretted it. Perhaps if he had backed Giuseppe up, the company would have investigated the matter properly and tried to find an explanation for the presence of mutilated rats in the vat stuck to the Zerstor 500’s arse first thing in the morning, whereas it had been empty the previous evening. Guylain had conducted his own investigation, following every possible lead, eliminating them one by one until there was only one plausible explanation, the most difficult to accept, the most improbable and yet the only one that held water. In other words, the Thing was possibly more than just a machine, sometimes starting up of its own accord in the middle of the night when one of those wretched rodents came scurrying around in its craw.
One year after the accident, and following recurrent problems with power cuts, a complete overhaul of the Zerstor’s controls revealed a problem with the circuit-breaker lever. A faulty switch was no longer doing its job properly and allowed the current to flow at whim, even when the lever was in the OFF position. After that, all the safety mechanisms were reinforced, most of them even doubled, to ensure that such a tragedy would never occur again. Furthermore, management had agreed that perhaps Carminetti, former chief operator of the Zerstor 500, had been the victim of an unfortunate incident leading to the sudden resumption of operations while he inopportunely happened to be in the tank. Consequently, Giuseppe, who had already come to terms with the idea of having to survive on minimum benefits, had ended up being compensated to the tune of 176,000 euros for the loss sustained. ‘88,000 euros per leg!’ Giuseppe had announced tearfully over the phone. It wasn’t so much the money but rather the fact that they had finally accepted the word of a wino that had made Giuseppe truly happy that day, Guylain thought. He had always wondered on what basis the experts calculated the value of a death, a trauma or a limb, as in Giuseppe’s case. Why 88,000 and not 87,000 or 89,000? Did they take the length of the leg into account? Its estimated weight? The use the victim made of it? Giuseppe and he were no fools. They were well aware that this outcome in no way resolved the matter of the rats. That it took a bit more than a faulty switch to explain how the diesel engine managed to start up in the middle of the night. Guylain had not mentioned it to Giuseppe again, but he still regularly found rats, or rather what remained of them. They were like big dark red flowers, sometimes with a tiny black eye sparkling like a droplet of ink in their centre, strewn over the bottom of the vats.
It had taken Giuseppe nearly three months to come round to the fact that his legs were not going to grow back. Three months to accept those hideous pink stumps once and for all, two swollen lumps of flesh reminiscent of the gnarled branches of an ancient lime tree. According to the doctors, this was good going, excellent even, compared to others who never came to terms with their loss. Watching him whizz around the rehabilitation centre in his brand-new wheelchair, Guylain himself believed that the old man had managed to accept the loss of his legs. ‘A Butterfly 750, kiddo! Amazing, not even twelve kilos! And the colour, look at the colour. Mauve. I chose it just for the colour. What do you think?’ Guylain had not been able to suppress a smile. Listening to him, it almost made him want to go and have his legs gobbled up by the first Zerstor he came across, just for the pleasure of having a nice new wheelchair too. And then Giuseppe had begun to say worrying things, talking of ‘getting them back’. ‘When I’ve got them back, things’ll be better. Just you wait, kiddo’, he’d say each time Guylain visited, his eyes bright with hope. At first Guylain told himself that perhaps the Thing had devoured a bit more than Giuseppe’s legs and partially destroyed his mind in the process. It wasn’t the alcohol talking – the old boy had become a teetotaller overnight. Now that he was away from the plant, he no longer drank. Guylain had asked him exactly what ‘them’ were and what he meant by ‘when I’ve got them back’, even though of course he had his own ideas on the subject. Giuseppe would then clam up, promising to tell him everything when he was ready. For as long as he lived, Guylain would remember his friend’s radiant face when he’d opened the door to him a few weeks later, clutching the precious book. Giuseppe had solemnly held out the book to him before making the introductions in a voice faltering with emotion: ‘Gardens and Kitchen Gardens of Bygone Days, by Jean-Eude Freyssinet, ISBN 3-365427-8254, printed by Ducasse Dalambert of Pantin on the twenty-fourth of May 2002 with a print run of 1,300 copies on recycled paper, 90 gsm, ream AF87452, a ream made with batches numbered 67,455 and 67,456, produced by the TERN treatment and recycling company on 16 April 2002.’
Utterly baffled, Guylain grabbed the book and examined it. The slurry-coloured cover did not look inviting. He leafed through it sceptically. It was all about gardening techniques. Sowing, hoeing, weeding and other vegetable-growing subtleties for weekend gardeners. ‘You’ve discovered you’ve got green fingers and you’ve taken it into your head to grow indoor vegetables?’
Guylain’s dismay made Giuseppe wriggle with delight in his wheelchair. Only then did the words read out by the old boy sink in. The sixteenth of April, the very day that his legs had been gobbled up by the Zerstor! Flesh and bone crushed, pounded, boiled and dispersed into millions of cells that had ended up inextricably mingled with the grey magma shat into the vats by the Thing on that cursed day in April 2002. The start of a long journey, to end up in this inconsequential book and in the 1,299 others made with this unique paper pulp. Guylain stood there dumbfounded. The old fellow had found his legs.
10
Contrary to his promise to Giuseppe, Guylain did not go into Paris that Saturday to see the famous Albert. He had never intended to. He didn’t set foot outside his apartment. All he did was pop into the pet shop two blocks away to buy a packet of dried seaweed as a treat for Rouget de Lisle. In the early afternoon, Guylain took out of the cupboard the heavy suitcase he stored there. He remembered the glorious days when Gardens and Kitchen Gardens of Bygone Days had come flooding in from all four corners of France. After raiding all the online booksellers with his credit card and contacting all the bookshops up and down the country to strip them of the sought-after book, Giuseppe had had the brainwave of paying a visit to the second-hand booksellers on the banks of the Seine. One fine day, the old boy and his wheelchair had turned up on their patch and pirouetted from one stall to the next telling them his story and explaining how he, Giuseppe Carminetti, former chief operator of the TERN treatment and recycling company, ex-alcoholic and ex-biped, was going to do his utmost to recover the books that contained what was left of his pins. He had given each of them his card, with the quirky book title written on the back. They had been moved by his quest. Each bookstall owner had immediately roped in his own network to hunt down the Holy Grail. Not a weekend went by without Guylain paying a visit to the booksellers on the riverbank to act as courier and bring the fruits of the harvest to Giuseppe. He had enjoyed those strolls, contemplating the bateaux-mouches packed with tourists gliding lazily through the Seine’s silvery waters. It was good to be aware that there was another world outside TERN, a world where books were allowed to end their lives snugly arranged inside the green booths lining the parapets, growing old to the pulse of the great river watched over by the towers of Notre Dame.
The 500 mark had been reached less than a year and a half after the beginning of this mad venture, and the 700 one three years later. And then the inevitable happened. The source eventually dried up and the counter stayed stuck at 746. Giuseppe then sank into a profound state of gloom. All these months, the quest had been his main reason for living. It gave him the strength to cope with the columns of ants that attacked his phantom limbs night after night and helped him to put up with the pitying looks people showered on him when he roamed the streets in his Butterfly. Alm
ost overnight, Giuseppe had given up. For nearly a year, Guylain had battled to keep up the old boy’s morale, visiting him once or twice a week. After rolling up the blinds to let the light in and opening the windows to get some fresh air into the stale-smelling apartment, he would sit down opposite him and gently take his friend’s hands, two warm dying birds that meekly allowed themselves to be caught. Then, chatting about this and that, he would steer Giuseppe into the bathroom. He bathed and rubbed down his friend’s battered body, shaved the straggling bristles on his cheeks and chin and combed his thick locks. Next, Guylain washed the dirty dishes mouldering in the sink and picked up the clothes scattered over the floor throughout the apartment. He never left without explaining to Giuseppe that he had to hang in there, that all was not lost, that time acted on books like ice on buried stones and that sooner or later they would surface. But all his efforts to coax the old boy out of his sluggish state were to no avail. Only new finds could rekindle the fire in Giuseppe’s eyes.
How the idea of contacting Jean-Eude Freyssinet had come to him, Guylain couldn’t say. On the other hand, it was strange that it hadn’t occurred to anyone else, not even to Giuseppe, to contact the author of Gardens and Kitchen Gardens of Bygone Days directly. He’d had no trouble tracking down the illustrious writer’s telephone number and Madame Freyssinet had answered on the fifth ring. She informed him in a quavering voice that her Jean-Eude had passed on a few years ago, halfway through writing his second book, an essay on Cucurbitaceae and other dicotyledons of central Europe. Without beating about the bush, Guylain had explained to the widow that within the unsold slurry-coloured copies that she had kept in memory of her departed there was something more than her husband’s spiritual legacy. She immediately suggested that she only needed to keep a few copies and offered to let him have the rest of her collection, which represented around a hundred pristine copies of Gardens and Kitchen Gardens of Bygone Days. Giving them to Giuseppe all at once would have been a grave mistake, Guylain knew. It was the search that mattered. The Freyssinet collection had to be distilled sparingly, at a rate of three or four a year, never more. Just enough to bring a glimmer to the old boy’s eyes and keep the hunter on the alert.
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