Margarine is standing right in front of him, her breath on his face, she sputters the words on his mouth:
—Come on, Mouloud, come fuck, if you got the money. Come on!
—I’m not here for that shit, on my mother’s life, you gotta help me . . . I need some money!
Margarine steps back in disbelief. She watches him, speechless, mouth wide open:
—What d’you want? I gotta be dreaming, you want me . . . me, to give money to you, the dough I make with my ass?
—I just want you to help me, you know, it’s all . . .
Mouloud lowers his head. He’s sincere, his voice is low and plaintive.
—You poor thing, you really are a sick guy, you really need to get some help! You’re a piece of shit, nut job, you’re not even worth my whore money, go on now, get out!
—I need the money to get far away from here . . . with Rosa and the baby she has in her belly. We’re going to go to Bora-Bora . . . It’s really far . . . There’s the beach, the sun, and everything, over there we’re going to be OK, the three of us . . .
His enthusiasm gives Mouloud a bit of light and rekindles hope in his expression; he gathered the courage to reveal himself. He’s feeling hopeful.
— . . . Where do you want to go with Rosa? She’s expecting a baby? Did you rape her or what? She has no business being with a head case like you, I’d already told her, what did you do to her? Already you were the one who dragged her brother into your bullshit plans, and now Rosa?
—Hey, not you, you don’t have the right to talk about Antonio, on my mother’s life, hey, show some respect, goddamn it!
—What, I don’t have the right because I’m a whore? Well, for your information, he didn’t care, Antonio, he loved me just the way I am, didn’t judge me, yeah, came to see me all sweet, so cute, really kind, he wanted us to get out of here, away from all the crazy ass people like you!
—Bitch, you’re lying, goddamn it, on my mother’s life, you’re lying!
—And this, what’s this?
Margarine quickly leans forward to take a belt from under the mattress, on the buckle a Native American. She brandishes it like a trophy in front of Mouloud, dumbfounded.
—Holy shit, Antonio’s buckle. What did you do to him?
—Asshole, it’s your dealer friends who took him out. He wanted to give them their dough and get out and take off with me, but what he sold wasn’t enough for them. He even stole from his parents for that. Antonio didn’t have enough, they beat him up like sick assholes, and then they took him out behind the supermarket and injected him with the stuff . . . We had a date . . . The cops didn’t even move a finger . . . They couldn’t care less about Antonio . . . about me . . . no one gives a shit!
She pauses and then starts to cry.
—Go on, get out, scram!
Hysterical, beside herself, clenched teeth, her face red with hate, she rushes toward Mouloud, who doesn’t move, and pounds her fists with all her might on his chest. Next, she scratches his face and screams, unable to calm down. Mouloud steps back from the attack, gathers himself, and grabs her by the shoulders to calm her down.
—Cut it out, shit!
She spits on him, insults him, pushes him, kicks him, yelling. A black veil of anger blinds Mouloud, and images of his own suffering overwhelm him. His strength multiplies tenfold within seconds, a surge. He grips Margarine’s throat with one quick brutal move. The image of the officer’s boots beating down on him as he lay there on the ground. He’s bathing in his own blood and begging for mercy. Rage intensifies in his hands, a noose, the fingers press even more intensely, and the suffocating words and sounds Margarine releases escape him completely. He needs quiet and serenity to regain his thoughts. He’s vacillating between the present and his past suffering, the basement, the desert, Mouloud is going to the other side. He’s forgotten that he’s immobilized Margarine with an iron fist. He can see the officer brutally picking him up again and ordering him to get down on his knees, then everything becomes blurry . . .
Margarine is no longer resisting; her upper body goes limp and falls alongside her body. Her head hangs to one side. Mouloud has avenged the months of feeling filthy, the humiliation and violence. He comes back to himself with the contact of the warm and viscous liquid running down slowly on his hands. Margarine’s mouth is bleeding. He discovers a face frozen with an expression of horror. He lets go of her as you might dispose of a burning object. Deep nail grooves cut around his arms, the bruises reveal the futile attempts at resistance by the victim. He looks at her, lying on the ground, contorted. Her open thighs form a broken cross, one leg is straight, the other points outward, her left arm is stuck behind her back, a bare milky white breast hangs outside the bra strap. He realizes that she’s not wearing anything underneath her skirt. Margarine lies on the floor of the basement, inanimate.
Mouloud takes off, disappears into the night, trapped in the hood. A thick fog blurs his path, a desperate meltdown, no aim in sight.
SALVATORE MOVES SLOWLY toward the obsession that has been haunting him for a long time, determined to pay the price to have, if only once, the body in full blossom of this young woman he’s been watching, with her ample thighs, her generous chest, and provocative strut. With some change and a bank bill, he can give himself the extravagance of a moment of human warmth. He goes by the closed supermarket, a night watchman in a dark blue uniform is on duty. On the other side of the little square, two men are smoking in silence. Salvatore goes around the huge pot of flowers in its pride of place on the roundabout, then he disappears into an alley, his cigarette going back and forth, at regular intervals, toward his mouth. He continues into the poorly lit alley with privet hedging. He raises his head and for a second takes note of the balconies encumbered with all sorts of diverse objects, stripped bicycles, engine parts, car tires, abandoned strollers. This tableau makes the neighborhood look like a whole other continent.
The taste of the flattened filter, hot at the tip, is getting bitter on the tongue. He crushes it as you would something that torments you. Salvatore imagines the little pieces of hidden skin, firm, pink. He has almost forgotten the velvety contact of Angelina’s soft lips on his skin. When they were young and in love, she used to laugh a lot and her mouth was always stuck to his. He’s going toward a presence, in hopes of tasting the desire his body is longing for. His simplest desires are orphans to him.
Imagine a blond comforter, moist, perfumes, savors, a family man caught between need and shame. Is she alone in the basement of the uninhabited building? He walks alongside the back of the building in complete darkness, the electric lamps and streetlights have been stolen and never replaced. The fifty-year-old pauses before the entrance decorated in multicolored graffiti, he lowers his head and exhales at length. Salvatore descends, after having verified that no one has seen him, then closes the door behind him, being very careful, and places a flat stone at the base of the door, between the wood and the ground, so that it can’t be opened from the outside. A dim light in the back of the corridor guides his steps. He enters the room and finds Margarine’s body motionless.
ONE SUSPECT REMAINS to be brought in. Mouloud Zayed was not at home when the police went by there. Witnesses confirm having seen him the night before, in the early evening, entering the basement of a building in the complex. Lieutenant da Silva and Captain Traoré are preparing to go over to project 6000 to verify the information they received:
—I’ve got a bad feeling about this, you know, Moussa, I don’t like to go digging around in basements!
A half hour later, both officers get into their unmarked police car and head over to the location, followed by a small van from the national police force. Now stationed in the parking lot of building F, the duo head toward the basement. At the same time, police officers ward off curious and idle onlookers approaching before securing the perimeter with a red police cordon. Laurence and Moussa enter the basement, armed with powerful flashlights. They advance carefully for about te
n yards, then turn left and stop dead in their tracks, shocked by what they discover.
At their feet, the lifeless body of a young woman is lying on the ground. The silence is sad and heavy. You can hardly hear the hissing sound of the wind howling through the staircase, a cold caress, as the door remains open. The girl seems stuck to the concrete, enveloped in an invisible shroud of dust, urine smells, and excrement. Margarine’s body is stiff, stretched out in an obscene position, her crotch is wide open, gaping. Her blue eyes staring wide-eyed tell the surprise and full horror of the tragedy, her face, a terrifying mask. Death seems to have taken her to the height of suffering, limbs splayed, traces of the violence around her neck, her clothing ripped open, revealing her pale breasts, the blows from the previous night had left purplish marks in several places.
Pale, Laurence is overcome by nervous spasms, her legs buckle beneath her weight, nausea intensifies, she places one hand on her mouth, the other is looking for support against the wall to keep her balance. The seconds feel interminable, her eyes are riveted to the unbearable sight, she loses control of her bearing. The lieutenant rushes to the exit, a chaotic rush, the sudden urge to take in a breath of fresh air. She bumps into the cement walls and ignores her superior’s injunction:
—Lieutenant, what’s the matter with you? Shit, get it together, goddamn it!
She’s choking, she needs to clear her head a minute, quickly get rid of the knot of bile coming up in her throat. Doubled over, Laurence stumbles in the staircase and, once outside, vomits, choking several times and coughing. While wiping her mouth and nose after blowing it, she responds to the agent approaching to inquire:
—Thanks, it’s over . . . It’ll be OK, thanks . . . It’s going to be all right!
A few minutes to get her thoughts together, she avoids crossing the inquisitive gazes of the onlookers and colleagues who are worried. One of them asks:
—Lieutenant, what’s inside?
—A girl has been killed . . . A kid, twenty years old at the most!
Alone before Margarine’s body, Moussa Traoré squats down and closes his eyes. The girl seems so young, almost still a child; she must have been gorgeous. The nakedness of her intimate parts bothers him tremendously, but he remains blocked, motionless, he doesn’t cover her.
Laurence da Silva straightens out her clothes and goes back in to her superior. He breathes deeply, still shocked by the violence of the tragedy and preoccupied by the horrific turn of events. They’re both silent before the young lady lying in the dust, with the mystery of the dried blood on the cement. The pain that can be read in the eyes of a girl, so young, triggers a profound malaise, the feeling of a life completely wasted.
Mouloud Zayed, he remains at large.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF the murder of Margarine shakes up the whole project, news of more violence, but this time, the vilest! The police confirm that strangulation was the cause of death of Marguerite Pinson. Her cranium had been damaged after several blows against the wall and the ground. She had not had sexual intercourse before her death. At the counter of the bar, the hypotheses run the gamut, the girl had apparently been killed by a dangerous psychopath or some serial killer:
—Given that she’d been a whore, she must have finally fallen on a real sicko!
The rumors recount the facts of an incredible atrocity. Margarine had been tortured all night long by a sadist with a criminal record. She had undergone unimaginable sexual abuse with various objects of different sizes. Everyone used their imaginations and their fantasies, the commotion drowned out the sounds of drink orders and the coffee machines at work.
In front of the supermarket, a neighbor tells Angelina that the little blond girl, her daughter’s friend, the one who sleeps with all the men, was savagely murdered, they tore off her huge breasts and ate her genitals, like in the movies, definitely a real head case. You’ve got to absolutely barricade your girls in the house, this kind of person will do just about anything.
Angelina hurries to get home. Anna is probably alone in the house. On the way, the mother curses the rotten neighborhood with all its horrors that are killing the kids. She’s now running while mumbling prayers to the Virgin Mary, asking her to protect, at the very least, her girls from the killer.
Once she’s back in the apartment, relieved, she finds Salvatore at the kitchen window. He hasn’t shaved, hasn’t eaten, his jaw is clenched. Her husband seems overwhelmed by an immense fatigue. She recalls how he tossed and turned in the bed, he hardly slept and kept waking up in sudden fits, sweating, haunted by nightmares.
Images of Margarine, naked with her gaping sexual organ from which blackened blood gushed, terrorized Salvatore for a good part of the night. He saw himself running in the deserted streets, finding himself face to face with the figure of the deceased at each intersection. She kept turning around him, increasing in size before imprisoning him between her thighs. At that point, the family man ripped the sheets off his chest and got up before screaming. Angelina had preferred to sleep on the sofa in the living room.
Guilt is torturing Salvatore. He is going around in circles smoking cigarettes nonstop, back and forth, between the window and the table, his bed and the toilet. He no longer leaves the house. He thinks about God and mumbles the few prayers he can remember, his lips barely moving. Convinced he doesn’t deserve salvation, he resigns himself to eternal suffering to pay for the heavy toll of temptation. His face is that of a man hardened by a life of poverty, manual labor, a spinal column broken from long-term unemployment, all weighing heavily on him. The tragic death of the young woman in all that filth in the basement. Huge tears mist his eyes and fall feebly on his cheeks . . . Salvatore sobs in silence, consumed by a longing to cry in his wife’s arms, to have her console him so that everything can go back to what it used to be!
ALERTED TO THE agitation in the entrance to the building, Rosa Maria joined the discussion among the girls gathered in the hallway.
—What, you didn’t hear about it? Margarine was found dead in the basement, some crazy shit, disgusting!
Yet another blow to the head, now her best friend was dead, turmoil, head spinning, adolescent girls’ high-pitched squealing, screaming, and gesticulating in the air. A cascade of blurry images, her smile, a taste of full lips posed on hers, the sensation of escaping into the wheat fields, over there, Margarine and her stretched-out laughing fits, tenderness. The pain overwhelms her, she has difficulty breathing. The light suddenly goes black, she faints into the arms of the girl standing next to her. Her big brother is dead, yesterday her best friend, soon the café au lait baby in her belly. They place her on a step and try to revive her with gentle pats on her temples.
—Hey, come on, Rosa, wake up, you’re scaring us now!
She eventually comes around, cries her eyes out uncontrollably, without saying a word.
—Holy shit, girls, we better take her back inside, she’s about to lose it!
Together, they manage to carry Rosa Maria all curled up, her muscles tense, stiff, pale face, she’s grinding her teeth, her jaw is locked. The shock has imprinted her face with a crazy expression, shortness of breath, speechless. She’s carried and left on the steps to her apartment door. After ringing the doorbell several times, the others take off. Angelina opens the door, her daughter falls right into her arms, they hold each other tightly. Overcome by the intensity of the embrace, Rosa Maria and her mother collapse together on the doormat and cry for a long time.
Standing in front of the window, Salvatore is still smoking, disconnected, his back slouched, his cheeks hollow. His eyes with dark circles are sunken into their sockets. Depleted of thoughts, he no longer sees or hears anything around him.
ROSA MARIA DOESN’T know what to do anymore, torn between leaving with Mouloud for Bora-Bora and the abortion. Sonia stands firmly by her position, intransigent. It’s time for her to go see her savior so that they can get out of here. If she keeps on doubting and hesitating, they’re also going to wind up being devoured by the
projects, this Hydra, killer of women, men, hope, a vampire that feeds itself off the blood of young people. She wants to see Mouloud and convince him to speed up the preparations, so that one day her child can prance along on a sunny beach, even more beautiful than Sicily, at the end of the world. She dreams of diving headfirst into the turquoise blue of the ocean, warm, transparent, shellfish with velvety shells, magnificent colors, a sensation of complete calm coming from the contact with soft tropical algae on her skin.
Mouloud has returned to his parents’ home and locked himself in his room. The scene of the fight has polluted his head and keeps horrifying him, he’s going crazy. His forearms are streaked with long, swollen scratches. Despite several washings, Margarine’s blood, especially on his hands, persists, indelible. If only he could fall into a deep sleep then wake up and realize that all of this was just a bad dream. He hides in a corner of his room, sitting right on the floor, chin on his knees, his eyes glued to the door. He’s imposed absolute darkness on himself as punishment, obsessed by the bright blond hair of his victim, a specter relentlessly hounding him. Mouloud is falling apart. Bora-Bora has completely disappeared from his mind, the beaches have become vast deserted spaces where balls of dust dance, no more bursts of laughter, nothing. His brain is faltering for good. Rosa is no more than a shapeless shadow, Antonio, a distant mirage. Mouloud’s mind is saturated with information and images, all attempts to concentrate are failing. Short-circuited. When he tries to scream, to call out for help, no sound comes out. Sometimes still, words leave his lips without him wanting them to, an uncontrollable flow that surprises and frightens him. He’s struggling.
Concrete Flowers Page 12
