To linger in the Panier is to feel the old heart of Marseilles throbbing. A heart that speaks the languages of the world, the languages of exile. It is surely no chance that Pierre Puget, the architect, too little known as a painter, built the most beautiful building in this city: the Charité (the old Charité, as the Marseillais call it). Out of love for the neighborhood where he was born. That may well be why the Panier resists renovation, why it refuses to become the Montmartre of Marseilles that it was earmarked as. The neighborhood has been beautified, of course. And everyone is pleased about that. But unconsciously, those who live in it want to prolong its old history. “It’s always been like this,” they will tell you in any café.
The Treize Coins, for example. And they will add, in case you haven’t understood, “Aren’t we fine just like this, my friend?” It is on the other hill, the hill of the Plaine, in the streets close to Cours Julien, which have also been renovated and restored, that what was dreamed of for the Panier has actually happened. Not that this is Montmartre either. It’s just Marseilles in a different register. The boutiques of Marseillais fashion designers rub shoulders with bars and restaurants, art galleries and antique shops stand next to jazz clubs, blues clubs, ragga clubs. But the nearby Place Notre-Dame-du-Mont has not changed its habits. A working-class square that seems to ignore the hustle and bustle that overcomes Cours Julien every afternoon. Here, too, we look out over Marseilles. A glance at Rue Estelle, which descends steeply only to come back up in a gentle slope on the other side. And even Cours Julien has to be reached by climbing Rue d’Aubagne. After crossing Rue Longue-des-Capucins. The street of the Eastern market. People say you don’t smell the smells of Provence here. And it’s true. Here, it smells like an Oriental port. The smells of the eternal Marseilles. You have to breathe them in, at least once. To become dizzy with the spices and the beauty of the women who come here to do their shopping. To take the time to argue with the vendors, who all come from the other side of the Mediterranean. This street, like Rue d’Aubagne, at the end on the left, before you get to the old Halle Delacroix, is a voyage along the Mediterranean, from Istanbul to Tangier. It is there that we feel—really feel—that the two shores have been responding to each other for centuries. It is when we have admitted that Marseilles is as Eastern as Beirut is Latin that the apparent urban disorder of this city will disappear for the confused traveler. That he—you—will start to feel the sheer happiness of being here for one day, one week or one month. Or forever, perhaps. And that’s when you will discover the sea. And the bay. Vast and beautiful. Probably the most beautiful in the world, after the Bay of Naples. You will then understand why Cézanne wore his eyes out painting L’Estaque. Why Rimbaud came to die here, at the end of his travels, having tired of poetry and men. Why, today just like yesterday, the true journey can only begin here. Marseilles remains a gateway to the East. By following the sea, you will discover neighborhoods and villages with romantic names: Les Catalans, Le Vallon-des-Auffes, Malmousque, the bridge of the Fausse Monnaie, Le Prophète . . . Marseilles unreels her nooks and crannies all the way to the Impasse des Muets, in the little harbour of Callelongue. Your eyes can’t get over it. Once past La Madrague de Montredon, the arid white rock makes you doubt you could still be in Marseilles, in the eighth arrondissement of the second-largest city in France. Then, inevitably, because you are lost, you come to a halt in front of the orientation map that faces the Riou Islands. The land of the Big Blue. The noise of the city, her exuberance, comes to an end here. In this landscape that resembles the Aeolian islands. The silence that falls over you, barely disturbed by the phut-phut of the fishing boats returning from the open sea, is tangible. Salt and iodine. Then, as you have, of course, forgotten to wear walking shoes, you sit down calmly on a rock, behind an angler. Time is abolished. In other words, it is all yours. You may catch the angler talking to the fish. You may catch yourself saying out loud your dreams of being elsewhere. Ulysses will become a reality. And you will be proud to have discovered it. Returning to the city center, after eating a pizza in the harbor of Les Goudes, you will have discovered the truth about Marseilles. A truth expressed in terms of sun and sea. She is perceived by the heart through a particular carnal flavor that is all her bitterness and her grandeur. From Algiers, you will then hear the voice of Albert Camus whisper in your ear: “The love we share with a city is often a secret love.”
FABIO MONTALE
FABIO MONTALE’S CHRISTMAS DINNER
I’d promised myself I’d do it on Christmas Day. Visit Joëlle in prison. Take her a gift. Talk to her. Above all, talk to her. Five years ago, when I was still a cop, she’d killed her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, Akim. Stabbed him three times. With no motive. Except her fear. She killed him after making love with him. I never managed to get a single sentence from Joëlle. A single word. In her diary, she had written: “What did I do to be scared?!” And later: “It isn’t the ordinary kind of fear that sometimes catches you unawares, or even the fear of ridicule that makes you clasp tight to your love, it’s a deep fear, a fear without end.” Between herself and her fear she had created a gulf: death. Murder. The murder of the man she loved most in the world.
I remember that when I handed Joëlle over to her judges, I told myself: human behavior is not logical, and crime is human. Then I stopped thinking about it. I avoided thinking, reflecting. In my head, I’d closed all the books that try to give meaning to our actions. And I kept myself away from all sensible reflections. I went fishing, I strolled through the calanques, I spent time cooking for a few friends, and devoted myself to drinking some good bottles of Provence wine.
“Hey, are you listening to me?” Fonfon said. He had just uncorked a bottle of white wine. From Puy Sainte-Reparade. I’d brought back twenty liters.
“Yeah.”
“So Honorine and I decided to have our Christmas dinner together. She’s alone, and so am I. Magali and the kids aren’t coming. They’re off doing winter sports.”
A guy came to see us one day, at the Police Academy. A sociologist. Director of the National Center for Scientific Research. He had written a book: Customs and Moods of the French According to the Seasons. This guy, Besnard I think he was called, told us that suicide and murder neither go together nor in inverse proportion. People kill others and kill themselves a lot in July, that was his theory. But, he said, December is when suicide is at its rarest. He also told us that you don’t find a corresponding rise in physical aggression in the onslaught of September, or a greater number of sex crimes in the depression of December. In both cases, according to him, the spring, until May, was a particularly quiet season for private violence. The explosion did not come until June. This guy had an explanation for all the questions a young cop might ask himself. It was great. A gun in one hand, a sociology book in the other. But Besnard had spoiled everything with his conclusion. “The seasonal variations in interpersonal violence,” he declared, “do not seem to have a simple or spontaneous explanation, whether based on climatic conditions or the frequency of opportunity.” Having analyzed everything, he had come back to his point of departure. Theory is no answer to anything. It just allows us to theorize. About murder. Rape. Delinquency. Even about road accidents. Instead of an approach based on the seasons, you could just as easily have an approach based on sex. Or on race. Everyone was trying to understand the world. By putting it into order. One day, everything had to find its order. And it was there that everything got complicated. No theory is correct until it has been verified. Just like scientific discoveries. The atomic bomb only became true after Hiroshima. Experimentation. The field of experimentation. Other modern applications had followed. The final solution envisaged by a chosen race. The gulag as the joy of the people. Sabra and Chatila as a preparation for peace. Bosnia. Rwanda . . . You always came back to the same starting point. To what had no meaning. To that moment without reason when a seventeen-year-old girl kills her boyfriend. “An unusual personality,” the judge had said. Since
then, Joëlle had withdrawn into silence. Forever. It was said she had gone mad. Because you need a word to describe the incomprehensible. Joëlle. One day. A long way from statistics. From the monthly variation in homicides. And the seasons. That was what you came back to. To fear. Life itself.
“I hate the snow,” I replied.
“What are you talking about?”
“All right, I’ll stay with you. What did you think, I was going to midnight mass?”
He smiled. “Honorine said she’d make us sea urchins, with a few oysters and clams as an appetizer. And the traditional thirteen desserts to finish. The works!”
I took Fonfon by the shoulders and drew him toward me. With tears in my eyes. I started blubbering. I’d planned to visit Joëlle. But Joëlle hadn’t waited for me. She’d killed herself the day before, at dawn. In her cell.
“It’s all right,” I said to Fonfon, straightening up. I let my gaze wander over the sea. Toward the horizon. I still haven’t found any better way to forget the corruption of the world. Joëlle raised her eyes toward me. She had wonderful dark eyes. Could I have been a good father to her? Or a good lover? Could I have explained her fear to her? I nodded. As if to say yes. Yes, Joëlle. The farther you go into things, the more the difference between happiness and unhappiness becomes blurred. Yes, I could have explained that to you.
I knocked back my drink and stood up. I felt like going and losing myself in Marseilles. In her smells. In the eyes of her women. My city. I knew that I always had an appointment there with the fleeting happiness of exiles. The only kind that suited me. A real consolation.
JEAN-CLAUDE IZZO ON FABIO MONTALE
I wrote the first book (Total Chaos) without knowing that I would write another. At the same time, I knew that I wouldn’t write fifty. By the time I started Solea, I was already planning to put an end to Fabio Montale. ( . . . ) Obviously, there’s a little bit of me in him. Personal things, values: the love of food and good wine, for example. On the other hand, I’ve always hated fishing . . . And I was never a cop. All the characters are invented. But they are based on friends . . . The only real one is Hassan, the owner of the Bar des Maraîchers. And the young people are my son and his circle of friends.
It’s hard for me to analyze my success. I don’t think I’m the kind of writer that everyone agrees about. There are some people who’ll never read me . . . I don’t make any concessions, either in form or content. I think my readers see themselves in the character of Fabio Montale and in the subjects of my novels, including relationship problems, and friendship, for example. Everyone sees Montale as the friend they have been looking for. ( . . . ) I’m often told my work is dark and pessimistic, but the nicest compliment I regularly receive is to be told that when people close Solea they have one hell of a desire to live! I find that touching, because it’s the feeling I myself have when I read Jim Harrison. ( . . . )
Yes, like Montale, I am a pessimist. The future is desperate. But I’m not the one who is desperate, it’s the world . . . I say we can resist, transform, improve, but basically, we’re stuck. We can’t change anything fundamentally. On the other hand, in the space that we have, we can be happy.
I’ve stopped believing politicians who tell me that things will be better tomorrow, or that the revolution will change everything. ( . . . ) Everything I write about the involvement of the Mafia in the Provence and Cote d’Azur region is true. My past as a journalist must have something to do with it . . . ( . . . )
Writing crime novels is not another form of activism. It’s just a way of conveying my doubts, my anxieties, my joys, my pleasures. It’s a way of sharing. Apart from my opposition to the National Front, I’m not trying to say: we must do this or we must do that. I just tell stories. If it spurs some people to join a group, so much the better. Montale doesn’t belong to any party. He has values. He doubts. He’s a lone wolf. But he does believe in a certain number of things.
As a citizen, as an activist, I no longer have much hope. But I still have a lot of hope in man. ( . . . ) Killing Montale in Solea is an alarm signal. If he represents hope, that means that, if you want other Montales, you have to do something about it . . .
FABIO MONTALE’S FAVORITE PLACES
Hassan’s Bar des Maraîchers, on the Plaine.
Bar de la Marine, Quai de Rive-Neuve, in the Vieux-Port.
La Samaritaine, in the Vieux-Port.
Chez Ange, on Place des Treize Coins.
Bar des Treize Coins, on Rue Saint-François.
Chex Félix, on Rue Caisserie (Le Chaudron Provençal).
Chez Paul, on Rue Saint-Saëns.
ChezMario, on Place Thiars.
FABIO MONTALE’S MUSIC
In Total Chaos:
Ray Charles, What’d I Say and I Got a Woman (Newport concert).
Miles Davis, Rouge.
Thelonious Monk
Calvin Russel: Rockin’ the Republicans and Baby I Love You
IAM.
Paco de Lucia, Django Reinhardt, Billie Holiday, Rubén Blades.
Lightnin’ Hopkins, Last Night Blues.
Bob Marley, Stir It Up.
Paolo Conte.
Michel Petrucciani, Estate.
Astor Piazzolla & Gerry Mulligan, Buenos Aires, Twenty Years After.
Buddy Guy with Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Damn Right, He’s Got the Blues.
Dizzy Gillespie, Manteca.
Léo Ferré (at Hassan’s Bar des Maraîchers).
In Chourmo:
Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline and Girl from the North Country.
John Coltrane, Out of This World.
Miles Davis.
Bob Marley, So Much Trouble in the World.
Ray Barretto, Benediction.
Lili Boniche.
Los Chunguitos.
Art Pepper, More for Less.
Sonny Rollins, Without a Song.
Lightnin’ Hopkins, Your Own Fault, Baby, to Treat Me the Way You Do.
Edmundo Rivero, Garufa.
Carlos Gardel, Volver.
ZZ Top, Thunderbird, Long Distance Boogie and Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings.
In Solea:
Miles Davis, Solea.
Mongo Santamaria, Mambo Terrifico.
Pinetop Perkins, Blue After Hours.
Lightnin’ Hopkins, Darling Do You Remember Me?
Abdullah Ibrahim, Zikr (in Echoes from Africa).
Fonky Family, Le Troisième Oeil.
Nat King Cole & Anita O’Day, The Lonesome Road.
Gianmaria Testa, Extra-Muros.
Rubén González, Amor Verdadero, Alto Songo, Los Sitio’Asere and Pio Mentiroso.
FABIO MONTALE’S BOOKS
Within the Tides and Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.
Grand Suitcase Hotel by Christian Dotremont.
Exile by Saint-John Perse.
The Marseilles poets Emile Sicard, Toursky, Gérald Neveu, Gabriel Audisio, and Montale’s favorite, Louis Brauquier.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jean-Claude Izzo was born in Marseilles in 1945. Best known for the Marseilles trilogy (Total Chaos, Chourmo, Solea), Izzo is also the author of The Lost Sailors, and A Sun for the Dying. Izzo is widely credited with being the founder of the modern Mediterranean noir movement. He died in 2000 at the age of fifty-five.
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