by Fred Vargas
“I don’t want to depress you, old forebear,” said Joss as he shook his head, “but there aren’t any criers any more. Nobody even knows what the word means these days. ‘Cobbler’, well, just maybe, but ‘crier’, that’s not even in the dictionary. I don’t know if you’ve kept up since you died, but down here things have moved on a bit. Who needs to have the news shouted down his lughole in the church square? Everyone’s got the newspapers, radio and TV. You can log on at Loctudy and see who’s having a piss in Pondicherry. That’s the way it is.”
“You really think I’m an old idiot?”
“I’m telling you the way it is, that’s all. My turn now.”
“You’re losing it, my poor Joss. Pull yourself together. You’ve not understood much of what I’ve been telling you.”
Joss stared vacantly at the stately silhouette of his great-great-grandfather as he slid off his bar stool with considerable style. Ar Bannour had been a big man by the standards of his day. It’s true Joss was quite like the brute.
“The Crier,” the forebear declared firmly as he brought the flat of his hand down on to the bar to underscore the point, “is Life itself. Don’t tell me that nobody knows what it means any more or that it’s disappeared from the dictionary, or else the Le Guerns really have gone to wrack and ruin and no longer deserve to cry it out loud. Life!”
“What a pathetic old fool!” Joss mumbled as watched the old man depart. “What a load of balls.”
He put his glass back down on the bar and bawled out after him: “In any case, I did not call you down!”
“That’ll do, now,” said the barman as he took Joss by the arm. “Go easy, friend, you’re disturbing the customers as it is.”
“Bugger your bloody customers!” Joss yelled as he held tight on to the bar.
He later recalled that two guys much smaller than he was ejected him from the Mizzen and sent him rolling along the road for almost a hundred yards. He woke up nine hours later in a doorway at least ten metro stations away. Around noon he dragged himself back to his room, using both hands to hold up his splitting head, and went back to sleep until six the next evening. When he finally opened his sore eyes he stared at the filthy ceiling of his flat and said out loud, unrepentantly, “What a load of balls!”
So seven years had now passed since Joss had taken up the outmoded calling of Town Crier. It had been a slow start. It took time to find the right tone of voice, to learn to project it, to find the best site, devise the headings, acquire a clientele, and set the rates. But he’d done it and there he was, Ar Bannour. He’d taken his urn to various spots within a radius of half a mile of Gare Montparnasse (he didn’t like to stray too far from the main line to Brittany – just in case, as he said) and about two years ago he’d settled for a pitch on the square where Boulevard Edgar-Quinet crosses Rue Delambre. That location allowed him to tap the local residents who shopped at the market stalls as well as office workers and the well-camouflaged regulars of the local red-light streets; and he could also fish among the crowds pouring out of Gare Montparnasse on their way to work. Dense knots of people crowded round him to hear him bark the news. Maybe not as many as mobbed his great-great-grandfather Le Guern in his day, but against that you had to reckon that Joss gave three performances a day, seven days a week, on the same spot.
What he got a really large number of, though, were messages – on average, about three score were dropped in the urn each day. There were always more in the morning than the evening, as night-time seemed more conducive to people slipping things in without being seen. The routine was that messages had to be sealed in envelopes weighted down with a five-franc coin. Five francs wasn’t an exorbitant amount for hearing your own thought, your own announcement or quest cast into the Paris air. In the early days Joss had tried rock-bottom pricing, but people didn’t like to see their sentences valued as low as one franc. It cheapened what they had given. So the five-franc rate suited the crier and his customers equally well, and Joss grossed about nine thousand francs a month for his seven-day job.
Old Ar Bannour was right, there was never any shortage of material. Joss had to give the old man his due when he saw him again one drunken night at the Mizzen. “They’re packed full of things to say, people are, just like I told you,” the old man said, delighted to see his descendant getting the business back on its feet. “Packed as tight as horsehair in a mattress. Packed to the edges with things to say and things not to say. You’re doing them a good turn, and you clean up at the same time. You’re their outlet pipe. But watch it, lad, it’s not always a piece of cake. Flushing through pipework brings out the shit as well as the water. So keep an eye out for trouble. There’s loads of muck in men’s heads.”
Old Ar Bannour was right about that too. In his urn Joss found things he could say, and things he had better not. “Things better left unsaid” was how the bookworm who ran a kind of lodging house next door to Rolaride put it. When he picked up his envelopes, Joss always began by sorting them into two piles, the “can dos” and the “better nots”. The “can dos” were the sort of things usually dealt with naturally by human speech organs, in normal trickles or in howling waves, a process which prevents the build-up of words from reaching sufficient pressure to cause an explosion. Because people were not like mattresses, in the sense that they packed more and more words in every day, and that made evacuation an absolutely vital issue. A trivial portion of the “can do” material came to the urn under the headings of “For Sale,” “Wanted,” “Lonely Hearts,” “Miscellaneous” and “Technical”. Joss put a quota on that last category and also charged a one-franc premium because “Technicals” were such buggers to read aloud.
What struck the crier most was the unforeseen quantity of “better nots”. They piled up because there was no other drain for getting this kind of verbal matter out. “Better nots” were either way beyond acceptable bounds of violence or outspokenness, or else weren’t within striking distance of the level of interest that would justify their existence. Whether they were over the top or short of the mark, these “better nots” were thus condemned to a shadowy, silent and shameful life in the darker recesses of the mattress. All the same, as Joss had learned from his seven years on the job, those messages didn’t just wither away. They built up into piles over the years, they clambered on top of each other, getting ever more sour at their mole-like existence as they angrily watched the infuriating comings and goings of authorised and thus more mobile messages. The thin six-inch slit in the crier’s urn offered a breach to which these prisoners flew like a plague of grasshoppers. Not a morning passed without him finding a crop of “better nots” at the bottom of his letter box – harangues, insults, expressions of despair, calumnies, denunciations, threats, ravings and rantings. Some of the “better nots” were so feeble, so desperately mindless, that they were hard to read right through; some so convoluted that their meaning was all but lost; some so creepy as to make you drop the sheet of paper to the ground; and some so vindictive and so destructive that the crier got rid of them.
For Joss did not leave his news unfiltered.
Though he was a dutiful man aware of his responsibility to save the mind’s least wanted waste products from total oblivion, in pursuance of his ancestor’s work of salvation, Joss assumed the right to exclude anything he could not utter with his own tongue. Unread messages could be taken back together with the five-franc fee, since the Le Guerns, as the forebear had emphasised, may be rough customers but they never stole a penny. So at every newscast Joss laid out the day’s rejects on the orange box he used as a stand. There always were rejects. He never read messages promising to reduce women to pulp, or to send blacks or wogs or Chinks or queers to hell. Joss guessed intuitively that he could easily have been born female or black or queer, so he exercised censorship not out of moral principle but from an instinct for self-preservation.
Once a year, during the low tide of the mid-August holidays, Joss would put the urn in dry dock: he would sand it down,
repaint it bright blue above the Plimsoll line and ultramarine below it, with Nor’Easter II in copperplate black lettering on the bow, Timetables on the port side, and Rates, Conditions and Terms After the Fact to starboard. He’d heard “after the fact” many times during his arrest and trial, and had hung on to the formula as a souvenir. Joss felt that “after the fact” gave a touch of class to his newscasting, even if the lodging-house scholar seemed to think there was something wrong with the word. He didn’t quite know what to make of the scholar, actually. He was called Hervé Decambrais, was certainly an aristocrat – he had a very grand manner – but he was so broke that he had to sublet the four bedrooms on his first floor, sell off the table linen and take fees for giving perfectly useless counselling sessions. He camped in two ground-floor rooms mostly occupied by piles of books. Even if Hervé Decambrais had ingested millions of words from his books, Joss wasn’t worried about his choking on them because the toff talked his head off all the time. He took words in and spewed them out all day long, sometimes with complicated parts which Joss did not always understand. Damascus didn’t get all of it either, which was reassuring in a way; but then, Damascus wasn’t a rocket scientist either.
As he emptied his urn on to the table in Rolaride and then began to sort the messages into “can dos” and “better nots,” Joss lighted upon a particularly wide envelope in thick, off-white paper. For the first time it occurred to him that maybe the bookworm was the source of these fancy envelopes he’d been getting for the last three weeks, weighted with no less than twenty francs apiece. They contained the most disagreeable messages he’d had to read in all his seven years as crier. As he opened this missive Joss could hear his forebear leaning over his shoulder and whispering, “Keep an eye out for trouble, Joss my lad, there’s lots of muck in people’s heads.”
“Shut up,” Joss said out loud.
He unfolded the sheet of bond and softly read out the following message:
When manie woormes breede of putrefaction of the earth: toade stooles and rotten herbes abound: The fruites and beastes of the earth are unsavoury: The wine becomes muddie: manie birds and beastes flye from that place
Joss turned the page over for the rest of the sentence, but the verso was blank. He shook his head. He’d drained off plenty of weird language, but this really took the biscuit.
“A nutcase,” he mumbled. “This one may be loaded, but he’s a nutcase.”
He put the sheet aside and got on with opening the rest of the day’s haul.
III
HERVÉ DECAMBRAIS EMERGED from his front door a few minutes before the start of the eight-thirty news, leaned back on the door post, and waited for the crier to turn up. His relationship with the ex-sailor was fraught with unspoken hostility. Decambrais couldn’t work out why or remember exactly since when, but he was inclined to make it all the fault of that weather-beaten, rock-hewn Breton, who was quite possibly a violent man too. With his soapbox, his eccentric urn and his newscasts spewing a ton of trivia on to the public highway three times a day, Joss had been a disturbance to Hervé’s cunningly ordered life these past two years. At the start he hadn’t worried about it very much, since it seemed obvious that the fellow wouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks. But the newscasting business had done surprisingly well; the fisherman had netted a real audience, and had a full house, so to speak, day after day. That was what made the whole thing a real pest.
Decambrais wouldn’t have missed the newscasts for anything, but nothing would have made him own up to being a fan. So when he took up his position every morning to listen to the news he kept a book in his hand, slowly turning the pages, his eyes down, though he never read a word. Joss Le Guern sometimes shot a glance at him in a pause between two headings. Decambrais really didn’t like being looked at by those narrow blue eyes. It felt as if the crier was checking up on him being there, as if he imagined he’d hooked him and worn him down like some lousy fish. Because all the Breton had really done was to apply his brutal fishing skills to the city: he’d cast his net along the boulevard among the shoals of pedestrians and had trawled them in just like they were cod. It occurred to Decambrais that Joss probably couldn’t tell men from mullet any more, seeing the way he treated both kinds of catch, that is to say, making his money by pulling out their guts.
But Decambrais was hooked, and he had enough insight into human nature to know it. The only thing that made him slightly different from any other outdoor newscast addict was the book in his hand. But wouldn’t he be less of a rat if he were simply to put it away and to assume his new identity, three times a day, as a fish on a line? For he had to confess he had been caught. Despite his education he’d failed to swim against the tide of the street.
Joss Le Guern was a bit late that morning, which was very unusual. From the corner of his lidded eye Decambrais saw him arrive in a great hurry to rehang Nor’Easter II, as the ex-sailor had pretentiously dubbed his gaudy blue-painted box, on the trunk of the plane tree in the square. Decambrais wondered if Joss was really all there. Maybe he’d given pet names to all his personal possessions – chairs, table, and so forth. He watched Joss flip his heavy stand upright with his brawny hands and set it up on the square as easily as he would have put a parrot on a perch, then spring on to it with a single leap as if he was hopping on board. He took the messages out from inside his pea-jacket. There were about thirty people waiting for him to start reading. One of them was the ever-faithful Lizbeth, standing as she always did with her hands on her hips.
Lizbeth lived in room 3 at Decambrais’s place, and instead of paying rent she saw to the running of his unofficial hotel. She was a pillar of strength. Decambrais could not possibly have managed without her, and he lived in fear of the day when someone would steal his splendid Lizbeth from him. It had to happen, one way or another. She was tall, she was stout, she was black, and she stuck out a mile. Not someone you could hide away from the peering eyes of the world. Nor was Lizbeth afflicted by timidity – she had a voice that carried, and was inclined to state her mind on anything that crossed her path. The worst of it was that Lizbeth’s smile – fortunately, it was not on display terribly often – made you want to throw yourself into her capacious arms, bury yourself in her expansive bosom and settle in for the rest of life. She was thirty-two, and one day, Decambrais knew, he would lose her. But right now Lizbeth was taking it out on the newscaster.
“What’s been keeping you, Joss?” she asked, arching her back and jutting her chin towards him.
“I know I’m late, Lizbeth,” the crier admitted breathlessly. “It was those coffee grounds.”
Lizbeth had been swept from the black ghetto of Detroit at the age of twelve and flung into a brothel as soon as she hit Paris, where she’d learned the language on the street – to wit, Rue de la Gaîté. Fourteen years of immersion, until she’d been moved on again because she’d grown overweight and could no longer plausibly appear in a peepshow. She’d been sleeping rough on a bench in the square for ten days when Decambrais decided to haul her in one cold and rainy night. One of the four upstairs rooms that he rented out in his old house was vacant. He offered it to her. Lizbeth said yes, and as soon as she got into the hall she took off her clothes and lay on the carpet with her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling and waiting for the bookworm to get on with it.
“That’s not what I meant at all,” Decambrais muttered as he handed her back her clothes.
“Can’t pay no other way,” said Lizbeth as she sat up on her haunches.
“Look, I can’t manage here on my own any more,” Decambrais went on with his eyes riveted to the carpet. “There’s the cleaning to do, the lodgers’ dinner to make, there’s shopping, and all the bills to see to. Give me a hand, and you can have the room for free.”
Lizbeth smiled, and Decambrais nearly swooned into her arms. But he was an old wreck and he reckoned the woman could do with a break from all that. And she certainly had taken a break – she’d been in the house for six years now
, and there’d never been the slightest sign of a lover. Lizbeth was recuperating, and Hervé prayed for her convalescence to last a while longer.
The newscast had begun and the small ads were flowing thick and fast. Decambrais realised he’d not been paying attention, as Joss was already on to ad number 5. That was how it worked: you had to memorise the number of the ad that caught your ear, and go to see the crier afterwards for “further details after the fact”. Decambrais wondered where Joss had picked up that strange charge-sheet formula.
“Five!” barked Joss.
For sale, litter of white and ginger kittens, three male, two female. Six: Could the tam-tam players making jungle noises all night long opposite number 36 please desist. Some people have to get some sleep. Seven: All types of carpentry, especially furniture restoration, perfect finish, will collect and deliver. Eight: The gas and electric company can go jump in a lake. Nine: Pest control is a complete scam. There are just as many cockroaches as before, and they take 600 francs off you for nothing. Ten: Helen, I love you. I’ll be waiting for you tonight at the Chat-qui-danse. Signed: Bernard. Eleven: Another rotten summer, and now it’s September already. Twelve: For attention of the butcher on the square. Yesterday’s meat was old boot leather, that makes three times this week. Thirteen: Come back, Jean-Christophe. Fourteen: cops means perverts means pigs. Fifteen: For sale, garden apples and pears, tasty and juicy.
Decambrais glanced at Lizbeth, who jotted down number 15 on her pad. Since the crier had started his newscasting you could get all sorts of first-rate supplies for a song, with consequent benefits for his lodgers’ table d’hôte. Hervé had slipped a blank sheet between the pages of his book, and waited with pencil in hand. For the last few weeks the crier had been barking very bizarre texts that didn’t seem to raise the fisherman’s eyebrows any more than small ads for cars or kittens. But the morning catch now regularly included these special messages – refined, sometimes crazy, and often sinister snippets. A couple of days ago Decambrais had decided to keep a private note of them. His two-inch pencil was completely hidden by his large hand.
