Marseille Noir (Akashic Noir)

by Cédric Fabre

  “I’m rolling you over the stones. I don’t know if I have the right to venture out here, beyond the boat, but I always felt like it, and today I couldn’t care less about what’s not allowed.”

  That takes the cake. You just killed a man. Now you’re developing a keen sense of transgression.

  “I’ve always been so very good . . . This is a liberation proportionate to my former restraint. I’ve always wanted to explore that big, disintegrating structure, right there against the cliff. What a waste . . . It would have been beautiful cleared up, reconfigured, lived in. It could have been a place for you and me. To raise kids. They would have built a cabin in the white boat. They would have measured themselves against the limestone, the low grass, the naked stone, against their fear of birds, which are not cute little jumping balls here but predators with beaks like drills. They would have learned not to trust their whiteness, their apparent gentleness, their claws as yellow as candy; it would have been a good school for learning to face life.”

  You’re fantasizing. You never could have lived here. You’re not made for islands. You would have wilted.

  “For sure. But tonight I need to dream. And I want to keep on dreaming about the two of us and our past splendor, like the past splendor of that building.”

  Everything is surrounded by fences and No Entry signs . . . I never knew if it was because of the danger or a vestige of the military installations that practically covered the whole island.

  “Forbidding people to do something never made anyone back off in this town. There’s a hole in the fence. Hardly big enough for us to slip through.”

  I’m sure that house is a squat. It may not be prudent . . .

  “Chicken! Do you know any squat as silent as this? No, there’s nobody here. Just memories of illegal parties, of course . . . Murals, graffiti, rotten boards, stumps of doors and furniture . . . Some shit, maybe human. Greasy old papers. Empty cans. No worse than our street.”

  Thanks for thinking of giving me a little freedom. I’m feeling a bit cramped in my box. This breeze grazing my face feels good . . . So this is where you intend to leave me?

  “No, of course not. I just want to look at you again before the hours pass and spoil what’s left of your flesh.”

  But it’s dark here.

  “No big deal. I can taste you with my fingertips. I feel like imprisoning your skin in mine, so I can take the memory of a caress to where I’m going.”

  But you don’t know where you’re going.

  “I won’t go very far. We’re on an island. It limits your options.”

  What do I look like?

  “Still handsome. Hardly blue. It’s just the smell that’s starting to get unpleasant. Like here. It stinks. Dead rabbits and bird droppings. Decomposed vegetation and rotting wood.”

  Protect me from the flies.

  “That’s what I’m doing. I’m spreading my coat over your body, like the sheets on our bed. There, that’s a lovely image. It brings back happy days. The moments when we fell asleep. When I curled up against you, when you said I was keeping you warm. The awakenings. Our faces all rumpled, not presentable yet. It made us laugh to see ourselves so ugly, before a trip to the bathroom made us radiant for one another again.”

  You’re hurting yourself.

  “That bothers you? You didn’t have any scruples about hurting me.”

  What do you know about my scruples?

  “You managed to look me straight in the eye every single day and act as casual as ever, throughout your affair with that woman. Not one eyelash expressing the slightest embarrassment. What esteem for me . . . I no longer existed. I was simply a nuisance, an obstacle between the two of you.”

  Caroline, I’m cold.

  “You won’t die from it, François. You’re already cooled down.”

  I forgot. Everything . . . I just remember I was alive, and suddenly I had become nothing but my head in a suitcase. I don’t even know how you killed me. Oh yes . . . I have a last memory . . . I know I was about to tell you something important. You were in the kitchen, very sexy, maybe a little too sexy. Very sexy and very sad. We’d spent the last two weeks making love day and night. No. You had spent the last two weeks making love to me, vamping me, making me lose all sense.

  “So you had sense?”

  I think I was kind of shaky when I left.

  “Remember . . . I killed you just before you told me about her.”

  So that’s it? And yet you knew. You had found out everything, I have no idea how.

  “It happened in such an unexpected way . . . one of those chance events that humiliate you more than they get you down, because the first feeling that hits you in the gut is the sudden realization of your own stupidity . . . Asking yourself . . . how could I have been dumb enough not to see it? An accident that makes you feel like bursting with laughter like a scary clown with paint smudged all over your face—”

  No digressions. Tell me how you found out.

  “Shh! Be quiet! I just heard something . . . Little steps rattling the broken bricks and stones just behind that old wall . . .”

  Rats. This island is a paradise for rats, seagulls, and rabbits. Here, the rats are kings. Here, they outwit the laws dictated by the capital . . . Here, they remember that their ancestors imported the Black Death. Boat people with poisoned fleas . . . And thousands of humans who died in abominable conditions because of a few precautions that were bypassed out of greed . . .

  “You’re insensitive enough to rehash your history books, here and now?”

  Oh, because on top of it all I’m supposed to be sensitive? I should spare you? Plane off the rough spots? When I’m the one who’s reduced to . . . this?

  “This what, François? To an avatar of a dead human being, yes. To an imperfect dead man. I had no idea corpses could be so chatty, it wasn’t part of the plan. Your death should have meant your silence. But you’re still the way you always have been . . . Useless. Cerebral.”

  That’s because I’m still full of gray matter. My brain is intact. If you had pulverized it, if you’d shot me in the head—

  “I hear a noise . . . it’s coming closer . . . Be quiet.”

  But you’re the one who’s talking all the time! Me, I’m just a heap of flesh, already soft and oozing into the lining of a suitcase on wheels. My voice is inside your head.

  “They’re coming closer!”

  It’s the smell of my corpse that’s attracting them. Don’t yell like that, for God’s sake!

  “A loud rustling of wings behind me . . . Those aren’t rats . . . they’re birds . . . There are lots of them . . . They’re snatching up the last gleams of day, they’re so white, so immaculate that they seem to be shining from inside, like children’s phosphorescent toys . . . They look like an army of little ghosts moving toward us.”

  I think you should shut my lid. They’re coming to devour me.

  “I think I’d get the better of them.”

  Well, you’re not thinking straight. You’ll be no match for their beaks.

  “They’re so white . . . You can’t be so cruel when you’re so pure.”

  Bullshit. That’s what you thought of love, and look where that got us.

  “Right. I’m packing you up again. Onward.”

  Where to?

  “You’ll see. A spot that’s more protected. The wind is beginning to rage. I want to go where we’ll be more sheltered. From the wind and the creatures that want to tear you away from me. Today, I’m the one who’s making the decisions. And it’s out of the question that anyone else, man or beast, gets to decide what to do with you.”

  It’s lighter outside. You were right: the full moon puts us in a very theatrical spotlight. We deserve at least that. What a tragedy, don’t you think? Your dear Hamlet chatted with a skull too. You’re very Shakespearean tonight.

  “That’s exactly what I was telling myself yesterday. You, on the other hand, floated around in an Éric Rohmer film, eaten away by a very noble dile
mma—shall I kiss Jeanine or Monique?—while I was torturing myself with Elizabethan sorrows. It all comes down to this, you see. Wrong set.”

  You’re having trouble moving uphill again. You’d be almost funny, blown around like this by the wind. Your hair like Medusa’s snakes, your coat like a sail swollen by the storm, and that wind breaking in front of you rising like a wall.

  “It burns my face. Don’t be fooled, all right? These tears are due to the icy wind whipping at me, they aren’t tears of sadness or remorse.”

  Look, you can’t go forward anymore. It’s comical. It reminds me of a scene in The Gold Rush, when the cabin’s leaning over and Charlie’s skidding back and forth, sucked backward by gravity. I’m glad I can come up with something funny, considering the situation.

  “Happy man.”

  How did you find out? Caroline . . . you started to tell me, but we were interrupted.

  “A mistake with our computer, François. I clicked on the wrong icon and I came upon your mailbox that you’d left open. Which didn’t affect me one way or the other at first, since I never had the slightest curiosity about your contacts and messages. Never felt the urge to rummage through your private life, because you weren’t supposed to have one . . . one apart from me, I mean. Another life. Everything had seemed so transparent to me for the last fifteen years . . . We were so close, like a real family . . . But my eye caught the first line of your inbox: Me, Sonia (149). And the first sentence of your last message: My love. I can’t wait to . . . My love, I can’t wait to. And Sonia’s not me.”

  So you opened it and read it.

  “Not right away. I remained planted there like a very old tree. I was so old, all of a sudden. No need to open it to realize that the catastrophe had happened. At that moment, I understood everything. Everything. The awareness of my idiocy overwhelmed me. A world had just ended. And that world was the one that kept me standing, the one that pushed me forward in life. And it was crumbling now, because of the wrong reflex of my forefinger on a mouse . . . like on the detonator of a bomb . . . You tell yourself that if you hadn’t made that unfortunate little slip, the day would have continued along like all the other days, but it’s too late . . . a whole life is called into question.

  So I walked out of the study, I walked through the apartment, and, for a long time, I looked at the tangible traces of the two of us—objects, gifts, books, photos . . . the dirty dishes in the sink, your fingerprints on the glasses . . . That whole material pretense of love going down the drain before my eyes . . . I touched everything with my fingers. I went to sniff your clothes. I went to look at the hollow the ghost of your body left in our bed. A moment that seemed interminable, mute, paralyzed with stupidity, before making up my mind to go back to the computer and click on that infinite exchange of messages.”

  In short, you did the most masochistic thing possible.

  “Coming from you, a despicable analysis like that doesn’t surprise me. What would you have liked me to do? Close it all up fast, relegate the rest of my life to a personal access code and keep being cheated on without saying anything, pretending not to know? No, love, the end was on its way. The least I could do was try to understand why. So then, yes, at that moment I read it all. Months of nauseating messages, you and her bellowing out your stinking desire, weaving your schemes, organizing your disgusting double life, your dates, thrusting into each other in elevators, the justifications served up to your spouses when you came home a bit late, planning to break off and giving us ridiculous, revolting nicknames—both me and him. Rubberdick for him, The Nun for me, cooing novel words . . . Oh, my love . . . All the things you told her . . . told that stranger . . . words that even when we were at the height of our passion, you never said to me . . . Never . . .”

  I’m not the type who pours out his feelings. I never was.

  “Pours out, you say? I love you. Saying I love you to your wife is so hard to do? And the worst of it, you see, is this absence of words had never scandalized me. Until I discovered that another woman had been able to inspire you to use them. Or get them out of you with forceps, it hardly matters. And you want to know something? I closed my eyes . . . and I imagined, just for a minute, that you were saying all those wild things to me, all those silly teenage words, all those jokes bordering on pornography, those naughty whispers, those words of wonder, those compliments you say at the end of a party, the enamored or excited babble, those dissertations on her beauties, hidden or half-visible, those comments on the folds of her intimacy and the orifices of her body . . . and those whole pages of I LOVE YOU, yes, yes, in capital letters . . .”

  Love isn’t only in words. I shared fifteen years of my life with you. I was the first one to talk about getting married.

  “No, that’s true, not only in words. With me, you started with the principle that your presence alone, near me, that sleeping next to me, our common address for so many years, replaced words of love. Realizing in a fraction of a second that all those words, all that slightly silly or frankly dirty poetry you were serving her up on a trowel . . . flowery vomit that could have made me laugh, well, I would have loved so much to hear it . . . at least once . . . So I read and reread 149 messages like stabs to the heart, and with every line I could feel my body shrinking, melting, becoming as fleeting as a smoke ring . . .”

  So that’s when you decided to kill me.

  “Not at all. At no time did I decide to kill you. Didn’t even cross my mind. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that’s my tragedy: no premeditation. I made the decision to reconquer you, you idiot. To fight. You have to fight for the things you hold dear, right?”

  I remember now. One day I found you more tender, more catlike, more in love . . .

  “More in love, no. I was never less in love. More giving, that’s the word. Much more prosaic, in short. Sex. Sex as a weapon, not of mass destruction, but of sly reconquest. You wanted sex, I was going to give it to you. And then suddenly I dredged up all the little sexy underwear that had been sleeping in the drawers, the sluttish paraphernalia I’d considered pathetic at my age, astonished that it still fit me fifteen years later and I could find myself beautiful in it. Laces, ribbons, hooks that bite into the skin, trussing up the body so expertly it takes your breath away; dresses that don’t allow you to sit, spike heels that scratch the floor—I threw myself at your neck in all those frills I didn’t think I needed anymore to get my soul to enter yours, because my God, I thought that those flimsy garments, no matter how charming, were useless when you were truly in love. Truly, you see. Going through beautiful landscapes together, hearts unfolding at the noise of a key announcing a return, wanting to kiss every one of our scars, that was more important than anything else for me. More important than the various lickings, dunkings, and suckings whose pleasure, after all, only lasts a moment. Telling myself that every day that went by with our voices mingling more than our organs was a multiple orgasm in itself.”

  You’re digressing. Just tell me how it happened.

  “By chance, love. Okay, I was talking about the lace.”

  Nice moments you gave me then. I wondered why that dormant sensuality had suddenly reemerged. But now I understand. It was a sense of urgency. Panic.

  “You bastard. No. No urgency, no panic. Just howling out my love differently. I wanted to be the ideal woman. Your little dream. To make her fall back into the shadow, into the great nowhere she came from. And you, into my lace, my waste-squeezers, my tight bodices, my half-cup bras, my straps and my garters, you buried yourself. You took. You hugged, squeezed, kneaded, licked, bit, penetrated, you turned me over and flattened me out for weeks: I was skinned, peeled, hollowed out, seeded, singed, buttered, shredded, peppered, and grilled. Beat. With a wild heart, but not yet satisfied. Thinking I could read in that body . . . penitence, and your return . . . no woman was ever fucked like you fucked me . . . those crazy days . . . Leave her right away. I . . . convinced myself that everything had come back to me.”

  I was happy. My
skin was in a state of bliss.

  “Meanwhile, you . . . repaired your . . . confidentiality . . . access to your . . . you were dreaming . . . thought that . . . could convince myself . . . things were not so clear anymore . . .”

  I can’t hear you anymore. Everything is howling around us. The surf sounds like a highway, the wind is rushing into my capsule yelping like a mad beast. I’m bouncing around too much, I’m seasick. Can dead people vomit? It was crazy to take me here on a day when the mistral’s blowing, Caroline. Nothing can stand up on the days when it’s blowing. Even the trees drag along the ground, hoping to protect their limbs.

  “SO THEY . . . HAVE A START ON YOU.”

  You’re losing your breath . . . The gusts are hitting your thorax like uppercuts and making you catch your breath with the groans of an old woman with emphysema . . . I feel carried away . . . You’ll end up dropping me and I’ll fall to the foot of the rocks . . . Don’t let that happen, Caroline. I deserve better than being dumped into a pit like an old fridge.

  “. . . NERVE TO TALK ABOUT . . . DESERVE.”

  Please, leave the road. Take me down to the beach. In the hollow of the cove we’ll be sheltered. You’ll be able to put us up against the rocky wall, where our huddled bodies won’t run the risk of being ripped off the ground like wood chips. I’ll be able to hear you again. You’ll tell me everything. And then maybe you’ll feel like leaving me there. The water will come and take me. I can’t wait. I want to end it all. The very last thing I’ll taste before meeting God knows what, God knows where, will be this sand sprinkled with so many pieces of brick polished by the sea that you’d think it was decorated with little orange eggs. And all around, like the edges of some porcelain basin, the white walls of the limestone cliffs twinkling under the moon. It will be beautiful. It will smell good. In fact, it will be better than the walls of a coffin . . . But you always were headstrong.

  “For the moment, it’s your head that’s still strong. Oh, come on. One can laugh at anything.”

  You feel like laughing?