A Long Way Off

by Pascal Garnier

  ‘He was young, the pizza guy.’

  ‘Served him right. His pizzas were disgusting.’

  Avenue Foch was nothing more than a giant building site, a no man’s land strewn with rubble and bent metal girders in which a detached millstone house stood miraculously unscathed, a strange vestige of a distant past. A greening copper doorplate testified to the occupant’s noble profession: P. Blanchard, Doctor of Medicine. So Marc hoped. He rang the bell. Cranes wheeled and screeched in the sulphurous yellow sky as enormous machines belched, combing the earth with their steel teeth. Holes, heaps, heaps of holes. Marc had to shout into the intercom to make himself heard. Even with the door closed behind them, the din of the building site shook the walls of the house from the cellar up to the attic. A wash of grey light trickled through the frosted glass window at the top of the narrow, steep staircase. A croaky voice invited them to come up.

  Even if you hooked a finger under his chin and lifted it, Dr Blanchard could not have been taller than 5'2". He was old enough to be ageless and, despite being swamped in countless layers of dubious woollens, looked impossibly thin. His left eye squinted up at you aslant, while the right eye, veiled with an opaque spot, ignored you entirely.

  ‘ … in … down.’

  Marc and Anne sat down on two worn velvet armchairs covered in cat hair. A strong smell of urine, though overlain with ether, confirmed the constant presence of a feline. The doctor’s good eye immediately fell on Anne.

  ‘How many weeks?’

  Anne turned to her father, eyebrows arched in query. Marc cut in.

  ‘Excuse me, doctor, but we’re here for me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  From then on, the doctor accorded Anne no more attention than the profound disdain of his dead eye.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Practically nothing. I pricked my finger on a rusty nail and—’

  ‘Show me.’

  Somewhat reluctantly, Marc gave up his hand to the dry claw of the doctor, who whistled like a punctured balloon as he leaned over it.

  ‘Not a pretty sight! When did it happen?’

  ‘The day before yesterday.’

  ‘A rusty nail, you said?’

  ‘Yes. On an African talisman.’

  ‘Ah, I see! … Just as I thought … I know Africa, you see! Just take a look at the souvenir I got from there.’

  Craning his tortoise-like neck over his desk, he offered Marc the unappetising sight of his cloudy eye.

  ‘Pus spurted right into it while I was operating on a bubo as putrid as your finger. I’ll bet your rotten old talisman came from Benin, or maybe Togo, am I right?’

  ‘From Togo, I think.’

  ‘Well, there you go! It’s some kind of voodoo black-magic business. How do you expect medicine to help? It’s not looking good for you, Monsieur, not good at all. Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ve had it with these people!’

  The window behind him had just swung open with a thud, to the sound of falling scree. The doctor flung himself against the railing.

  ‘Bastards! Bunch of arseholes! You won’t get me, by God, you won’t! I’m indestructible, do you hear me? I’ll destroy you, I don’t care how many of you there are. Twenty years in Africa and I lived to tell the tale! Blanchard’s still standing, you pieces of shit!’

  Shaking with rage, he closed the window and returned to his seat opposite Marc and Anne, looking them up and down as if he had only just set eyes on them.

  ‘Right, where were we? Either we cut it off, or else there’s nothing I can do. Up to you. I’ll do the amputation for 100 euros. That’s a good price.’

  Marc looked expectantly at his finger as if it might make the decision for him.

  ‘What if I keep my finger?’

  ‘Then you’ll begin to rot a little more each day. First your hand, then your forearm, up to your shoulder, all the way to your heart. It might take a fortnight, a month or a year. Depends on your constitution. But you’ll rot either way.’

  ‘I … I’ll think about it.’

  ‘As you wish. That’ll be twenty-five euros.’

  Outside, it looked as if it had been snowing. The car was covered in a fine sprinkling of white dust. Nearby a chair on a patch of flooring was precariously balanced against a half-collapsed wall covered in peeling wallpaper.

  Marc was sitting on a tree stump soaking his finger in a cup of disinfectant solution bought from a pharmacy in a small town just outside Cahors. It was so warm they had decided to have a picnic by the river. It was a delightful spot. Polystyrene debris floated by on the current, Anne was spreading truffle foie gras onto thick slices of bread and, in the distance, a chainsaw could be heard topping acres of forest. After the Dr Blanchard incident, Marc had resolved if not to recover, at least put an end to his suffering. He had achieved this by taking three paracetamol and numbing the finger in this liquid, which smelled reassuringly of a Swiss toilet.

  ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, not bad.’

  ‘You know, if I lived here, I’d buy a fishing rod. I’d get up early and come and sit here quietly, dipping my line in the water …’

  ‘And the chainsaw-carrying lunatic would jump out of a bush and cut your throat just to get the watch off your wrist.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘Because peaceful little spots don’t exist, especially not in the countryside.’

  ‘You see the bad in everything.’

  ‘For good reason. More pâté?’

  ‘It’s foie gras, Anne. Foie gras, not pâté. Hey, listen … the chainsaw’s stopped.’

  ‘Then the madman’s clocked us.’

  Marc shrugged, but deep down he had to admit there was something disconcerting about this sudden silence, broken only by the birds whose chirruping could again be heard. Anne snorted with her mouth full.

  ‘I was joking. Hey, don’t you think it might be time for a new car?’

  ‘Why? This one works perfectly well.’

  ‘That’s not the problem. Surely it’s crossed your mind Chloé hasn’t just been twiddling her thumbs since you upped and left. She’ll have reported you missing. We’ll hit a roadblock and bam, it’s game over. Plus it’s an ugly old banger, I never could stand it. It smells.’

  Marc thought about this for a moment. Anne was not wrong. Knowing Chloé as he did, there was no doubt in his mind that she would have taken steps to find him. Yet he had nothing to feel guilty about. He hadn’t broken the law; it was a private matter. But the idea of having to explain himself to the authorities and, worse, to his spouse, even just on the phone, was too much to contemplate. Getting a new car wasn’t such a bad idea. It was Chloé who had chosen this one: ‘You can always trust a German car’; if it had been up to him, he’d have gone for a British or Italian make. Something with a bit more class.

  ‘Well, why not?’

  A few hours later, after protracted negotiations with a dealer, they left the outskirts of Cahors at the wheel of a barely used camper van as handsome as a refrigerator truck.

  They stopped for their first night in the camper van outside the little village of Laugnac, twenty or so kilometres from Agen. Anne was as excited as when she was a little girl opening her presents on Christmas morning.

  ‘Bit of a step up from your old-man wagon, you have to admit.’

  ‘It’s nice, yes.’

  ‘We’re at home wherever we go! Tired? You can go to sleep. Hungry? Have something to eat. Fridge, hob – it’s got everything! What else could you ask for? Look how happy Boudu is!’

  Curled up in the corner of the bed, the cat’s fluffy tail beat to the gentle rhythm of his purrs.

  ‘No more grovelling waiters, no shitty Van Gogh prints on the walls, no thank you, hello, goodbye, we don’t owe anything to anyone. More soup?’

  ‘No, thanks. It was lovely.’

  ‘Go and give your finger a soak outside then while I make the bed. We’ll be snug as bugs in a rug!’


  The pharmacist had advised him to repeat the procedure three times a day for three days. If, as he feared, his finger showed no sign of improvement, then he could go to see a specialist. Perching on the edge of the step with the cup wedged between his knees, Marc watched the flickering, graceful curve of an aeroplane crossing a field of scattered stars. How could he be rotting to death under a sky like that? That crazy Dr Blanchard had put the wind up him, but he was nuts, a decrepit old thing turned mad by malaria or some other fever. The pharmacist, buttoned up in his neatly ironed white coat, had merely diagnosed a harmless inflammation, not even whitlow. And he was clearly right. What was more, it was barely a year since his last tetanus injection (having scraped himself helping Chloé change the knob on one of her nightstands), which would guard him against complications. Voodoo? Yeah, right. Savage superstition. A nail is a nail, Togolese or otherwise. As for the stupid talisman, he would throw it in the nearest tip tomorrow and that would be the end of it. He now felt perfectly serene and confident, in complete symbiosis with the vast night sky surrounding him, the resounding clang of the village bell striking ten times and the distant barking of a dog pulling on its lead. He stood up and went to empty the contents of the cup onto a tuft of dandelions, which immediately withered like an old lettuce heart forgotten in the bottom of the fridge. His camper van really was a thing of beauty. It was Anne who had encouraged him to choose it. He would never have dared go for something like this by himself, yet it was exactly what he needed. A set of wheels like this could take him to the end of the world. It gave him a feeling of invincibility that made the prospect of adventure undaunting. Nothing seemed beyond reach now, the proof being that Agen was now only twenty-two kilometres away. Not that he gave a toss about Agen now. He had far more exotic destinations in his sights, and he wouldn’t be holding back!

  Had he really slept? With Boudu weighing on his head like a hot-water bottle, Anne occupying three quarters of the bed and the pair of them snoring loudly, he felt as if he had navigated the night on stepping stones, jumping from one absurd dream to another. At the first light of dawn he had emerged, dazed, from the igloo on wheels, hoping for some miracle to bring him back down to earth – earth which was spongy beneath his feet, sticky with dew as if a feverish sweat clung to it. The bell chimed eight times, setting off a commotion that rocked the van as if a mud-flinging contest were going on inside. Anne’s face, still puffy with sleep, appeared in the doorway.

  ‘You’re up already? If it wasn’t for the fucking bell, I’d still be asleep. Coffee?’

  ‘I’m going into the village. Need to stretch my legs. Want me to get you anything?’

  ‘Cigarettes.’

  It was a bright, chilly morning. Each little house had a small garden laid out in front of it like a grandmother’s apron filled with flowers and fruits. Energetic octogenarians in blue cotton slacks and rubber clogs were already out digging and pruning their little plots, nodding in response to the jovial greeting Marc called out on his way past. It made you want to be old, to have reached the end of everything, to dig your hole and lie in it happily, telling yourself, ‘It may be little, but it’s home.’ ‘The right hole’ was exactly what he found at the café-tobacconist-grocer-breadstore Au Bon Trou, chez Maurice and Tinette, which he entered, causing a bell to ring and Maurice (it couldn’t be Tinette with that Gallic moustache) and three natives at the bar to shoot stares at him. It was as warm and yellow as egg yolk inside. Marc took a seat at a table and rubbed his hands together.

  ‘A large coffee, please, and some bread and jam if you’ve got it.’

  To entertain himself, he started to read a rag picked up from a neighbouring table. Despite the abundant facial hair, the glimpse Marc caught of a support stocking informed him just in time that the person bringing the coffee and bread was Tinette and not Maurice, saving him from committing a terrible faux pas.

  ‘Thank you, Madame.’

  Judging by the events that filled the news-in-brief pages, this was a sleepy sort of area: car accidents (mostly involving young drivers who had got their licences only months before), the theft of a widow’s bathroom sink, a row over cockerels and church bells. Nothing of any importance. News from paradise, you might say.

  The bread was as bad as could be found in any supermarket, but at least the coffee was hot. From time to time, the bell tinkled as other customers entered, tall, fat, small, thin, young and old, buying cigarettes, a magazine or bread, exchanging banal comments with Tinette about the weather or such-and-such’s health. Life in paradise. This was precisely how Marc saw it: insignificance taken to perfection. No one paid attention to him, as if he were invisible. As he melted into the warm, bovine atmosphere, he undressed his fellow customers with his eyes, peeling off their outer skins one by one, stripping them from head to foot, revealing them as God made them with their crooked, hairy legs and varicose veins, impressive rolls of pale flesh amassed around their guts, wormy blue veins wiggling up their arms, calves covered in shrivelled flesh, or taut enough to snap, flab, bones, fat, spots, vaccination scars, war wounds, moles, warts, hollow chests appearing empty of breath, others bursting with suppressed cries, hard nipples and nipples drooping sadly from empty, crumpled saddlebags, fanned, semi-webbed toes, and toes squashed together in narrow high heels, stranglers’ hands with knobbly fingers, hard as tools, fingers of church saints, as long and pale as candles. A full-on striptease: incredible!

  Having got on to the topic of fingers, he inevitably remembered his own, which he contemplated with a look of bafflement as he rested his elbow on the table. He was not in pain, but the index finger was still just as swollen and had turned a strange orange colour which he put down to the product in which he was marinating it three times a day.

  ‘Was there something else you wanted?’

  Marc jumped. His finger, held in the air like a schoolboy asking permission to speak, had caught Tinette’s attention.

  ‘No … umm, what do I owe you?’

  The return leg always feels shorter than the way out. It’s because you know where you’re going. Marc already had his bearings – there was the little house with blue shutters, the farming co-op, the collapsed wall … He felt at home here. Only, his home appeared to have vanished. In the spot where the camper van had been parked, there were now only tyre tracks veering from the grass onto the tarmac of the road towards Agen.

  Even though he was alone, Marc said aloud the last word we all resort to at times of extreme disarray: ‘Shit!’

  His immediate response was to sit down. But there was nothing, not a rock or a tree stump, still less a bench or handy Voltaire chair to settle into. So instead, with arms hanging by his sides, he walked several times round the perimeter of the patch of yellowed grass where barely an hour ago his camper van had stood. The interesting thing about the last word is that it isn’t the last word at all, but can be multiplied at leisure to fill the void of an unsolvable enigma. Which he did, in a range of tones of voice, like an actor rehearsing lines. Then, trying to regain control of the situation, he began constructing a series of hypotheses to find a semblance of sense where apparently there was none. Anne had been attacked … by a prowler … gypsies … She had been kidnapped, raped … Knowing his daughter, this seemed unlikely. She had been killed, then, strangled, stabbed and thrown into a ditch, a ditch so thick with brambles it was impenetrable. And Boudu? What had they done with him? Was he still in the camper van or huddled against the mutilated body of his mistress?

  Having armed himself with a stick, Marc was beginning to beat back brambles, muttering ‘Boudu? … Boudu?’ when the familiar sound of a diesel engine caught his attention. Anne drew into the exact spot the van had occupied an hour earlier. She was not alone – a young man resembling a baby ostrich, his long neck emerging from a loose polo neck jumper, was sitting beside her.

  ‘Anne!’

  ‘What on earth are you doing with that stick? Looking for snails?’

  ‘Anne, where were you?’

&
nbsp; ‘I went for a drive. I wanted to give it a spin. It’s great.’

  ‘But you don’t have a licence. You—’

  ‘Who gives a toss? I know how to drive. Oh, this is Zoltan. He’s Hungarian.’

  Anne gestured to the slender Magyar who unfolded his six-foot frame and marched purposefully towards Marc, a carnival smile hanging from his sticking-out ears.

  ‘I Zoltan, Hungaria.’

  Marc shook the cold, bony outstretched hand, wondering how they were going to deal with this.

  ‘Anne, where’s he going?’

  ‘No idea. He hardly speaks a word of French. He was hitching, I picked him up. He seems nice, doesn’t he?’

  It was true, he didn’t seem aggressive. He carried his village-idiot grin with as much conviction as his huge red rucksack, gazing enthusiastically at everything around him – the trees, the sky, the camper van, Anne, Marc and the village bell tower.

  It had nothing to do with his finger, although it did now have the turgescent appearance of a freshly dug carrot. No, this time it was his legs. They had simply refused to obey him when he tried to stand up from the step and dust the crumbs of his sandwich off his lap. No pain, pins and needles or cramp. His legs had simply gone on strike, without prior warning. The rest of his body – the torso, arms, neck, head – continued to work perfectly. Marc had been reduced to a torso as Anne, munching a slice of ham, looked on in bafflement, as did Zoltan, who could not tell if Marc’s vain attempts to stand up were part of some weird after-dinner ritual. Anne swallowed the ribbon of fat and rind she always saved until last.

  ‘What the hell are you doing jiggling around like that?’

  ‘It’s my legs.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘It’s ridiculous. I can’t get them to move.’

  ‘Oh. Wait a bit, maybe you’ll get the feeling back.’