by Mary Byrne
I hunted my memory for what he had already said, but couldn’t find any major thing I’d missed. The incident with the gendarme had just been a rite of passage, it seemed.
I made suitable noises. I wanted him to spit it out. My attitude seemed to encourage him.
His mother stood by him through all of it, he went on. He lived with her and turned all his money over to her, unlike his brothers. I imagined a whole family of diminutive pent-up violence. I thought of a wife, children, money trouble.
But it wasn’t any of these.
Now he straightened his shoulders, as he declared, ‘Shot a man stone dead. Did five years for it.’
He didn’t wait to see what effect this would have, his confidence in me already assured.
‘We all carry a gun, you know?’—he waited to see if I knew.
I nodded, lying, and hiding my surprise at the occasions for violence that sail blithely past us daily on roads and motorways.
‘Well, we carry big sums in cash, for one thing and another. For the truck, for repairs, for petrol, for accommodation and food, for urgent cargoes, whatever.’
He wasn’t even in his truck when it had happened. One night, in some provincial town or other, a chap in an anorak with the hood up had noticed him in a shop or a bar and followed him home to his meublé. ‘If he knew I was a trucker, he knew I’d have a wad of money. I could hear his footsteps behind me. I was near the door of the hotel when I heard him come at me, fast, from behind. I was ready for him. I drew my gun, turned, and shot him dead.’
He studied my reaction. I was suitably impressed.
‘Self-defense all right, that was no problem. It was what I’d done to the gendarme that complicated my case. Sent me to a shrink. A female. Screwed her as well. She was dying for it. Strictly against the rules, but mum’s the word.’
I tried to imagine a shrink who’d be dying to make love to this small violent man at the risk of losing her job and career. Yet he was strangely convincing. Perhaps she’d fallen for it too. Or perhaps he really was an innocent.
He giggled.
‘Then she stood up for me in court—I was upstanding, honest, all that sort of stuff. Which was true. The boy’s family were all there too—the mother and all, looking for compensation. How were they to manage without him, that kind of thing.’
We hovered in front of a door, which turned out to be the hotel whose back peeked onto our yard. Single men of all colors made their way around us through the Art Nouveau doors to the cheap-chandeliered interior, grunting anonymous greetings at each other and us, a minor hold-up in an organized existence.
The bitter black wind blew up stronger from the wilds beyond the city boundaries, and I knew I’d soon have to head for home. I made a shift at taking my adieus, but he wasn’t finished yet. He was getting to the important bit.
‘Every morning, I have a hearty breakfast and I head for my truck. I go round it, check everything outside. Then I get in, pat the seats, look around, smell it all—’
He studied my face carefully.
‘—and I say “Good Morning” to my truck.’
He started moving towards the hotel entrance.
‘And I drive off, a free man,’ he said, as he swept through the wrought-iron doors.
The cold wind bundled me home. Before lighting the lights I looked outside. The high-rises were not so much moving nearer as floating.
There we were, all glowing and floating, like tall ships on a night sea.
Plugging the Causal Breach
When Bea and I first came to Paris, we were still so wrapped up in each other we didn’t see much of our neighbor, Marie-Louise. She and a Vietnamese couple were the only other people sharing the lift with us. I did notice she was peculiar, with big fuzzy hair that was obviously dyed and glowed purplish against the light. She had a gummy smile, the rare time we saw it, but as my girlfriend Bea said, that was hardly her fault. There were times when we would meet her down on the street and she wouldn’t even see us.
Marie-Louise rarely had visitors, although she had a mother in the suburbs and a sister who was married somewhere in town. Bea (who found out most of this) swears she actually met the mother once, helped carry her bag up the stairs, and found her strangely unfriendly.
‘You fabulate, my dear,’ I told Bea that time. ‘It’s the causal breach. You women are obsessed by it. Spend all your time trying to plug it, searching for reasons and explanations.’
Marie-Louise had a cat. We first got to know her when she asked us to feed the cat one time she went to a clinic to lose weight. I hated the cat, its litter, its smells. I mentioned toxoplasmosis.
‘One always hates other people’s cats, Frank,’ Bea said.
Marie-Louise was clearly obsessed about filling the causal breach, that void between an event and its explanation, something that fascinated me too, although I didn’t say so to Bea.
Marie-Louise had a selection of odd occurrences she brought up from time to time, as if requesting or hoping for an explanation. One story was the day she and her husband were travelling along somewhere in Europe in what she called ‘Our Bug’ (a VW beetle), on a normal bright partly-cloudy day. The countryside was hilly but the road—an old coach road—instead of going round the hills went up and down each one as it came. This was fun. You could see she was reliving the experience each time she told it.
The climax was that they topped a hill and suddenly there was a line across the road where snow began and beyond it a winter world of white, with several trucks backed up at a service station surrounded by drifts. Her husband, who was driving, got such a fright he almost skidded, and had to slow down gradually before he was able to turn and go back.
Go back? Why? Where were they headed?
She couldn’t remember, and always closed up at this point.
Bea said it was a freak snowstorm, and nothing more.
Marie-Louise worked at the Post Office next door, along with what I considered to be a selection of other social cases, all swollen from a lack of exercise and the drugs they needed to regulate their serotonin. That was how I explained them to myself, although Bea just laughed. ‘You’re the one with the problem,’ she’d say whenever I complained about their queuing system or the fact that they refused to sell me international reply coupons. ‘We don’t do them anymore,’ they’d say firmly without even checking, and I’d have to lope off to another branch.
Marie-Louise and her husband had traveled the world: Russia, the east-bloc countries in their darkest days, southern Europe, the great outdoor spaces of the American West. She knew all the most beautiful spots, the have-to-see places in every country, although she often preferred to fix on something peculiar. Her favorite story was of the laughing clubs they’d visited in India. ‘They’d start with the vowels,’ she’d say; then she’d shout: ‘He! Ha! Ho! Hi! Hu!’ Sometimes it seemed to be the only thing they’d done or seen in India.
Those days we didn’t know exactly where the husband was, although Marie-Louise never mentioned being divorced, or referred to herself as a divorcee. Eventually it emerged that his name was Vlasta and that he had come from Eastern Europe and gotten rich, a long time ago. ‘Ah, Vlasta!’ she would say with a despairing wave of her arm. In winter she gave Saturday theatre classes to small groups of people like herself, in an under-sized sitting room lined with cheap reproductions of old masterpieces. She pretended her family had known many of the most famous modern painters and reckoned that, as a young girl, she’d shown her bum to more than one of them. ‘Small girls do that, you know,’ she said. She had gone on to become their model.
At twelve years of age, she had ceremoniously binned her very ancient and much-thumbed copy of Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by Tenniel, with its talking sheep and sinister cats. I thought this chain of events worthy of psychoanalysis, but Bea said she was just chatting. Bea sometimes made a cake and invited Ma
rie-Louise to share it. I would come home and find two sets of big teeth grinning over tea and cake, sharing gossip about the building and its occupants.
Marie-Louise called our concierge The Queen of Hearts. ‘Queen of Hearts giving orders again?’ she’d enquire when some directive appeared in our letterboxes. Residents must realize… Residents should note… The Queen of Hearts was a tiny dark Portuguese Catholic, trying to be a tall blonde one. She had a small white poodle and a huge Rottweiler (these I referred to as her Manichean aspects). She took lunch with her parents every Sunday in a public-housing block to the west of Paris which had replaced the shanty town where they lived on their arrival in 1960s France, fleeing Salazar and all that. She was convinced that some saint or other had recently saved her kid from certain death in a scooter accident. She also reckoned we were in constant danger of our lives from local hooligans—hence the Rottweiler—and had organized teams of solemn young men in what looked like Ninja-turtle outfits to patrol the yard and gardens. When the details appeared on the annual charges billed at the beginning of the year, I almost had a fit.
‘Time for you to get interested in your fellow man, Frank,’ Bea advised me. ‘This one has been coming at us for a while.’
As a teenager Marie-Louise had been propositioned, very correctly, by a painter friend of her parents. Politely, in his car, after school. When she refused, equally politely, he drove off and she never saw him again. The thing was she had fancied him terribly and had cried when his wife died and he married a second time. ‘Wanting things to stay forever in one place,’ she said, ‘that’s kids for you.’
On Sunday afternoons in winter she sometimes went to what she called a ‘Thé dansant’ in old-fashioned Paris ballrooms where tea and cakes were served and polite men asked her to dance dances you really had to know: ‘You can’t improvise a tango,’ she’d say. She had some kind of regular dancing partner at these dancing teas, whom she called her ‘Bon ami’ and whose name we never learned.
‘’Cos he doesn’t exist,’ I said.
‘You should cut down on philosophy and read more fiction,’ said Bea, ‘they say it helps us empathize.’
Someone pinched my shoulder-bag one day in the metro when I was lost in a book. Bea wasn’t home when I got there, so I knocked on Marie-Louise’s door. I’d even contemplated asking our Vietnamese neighbor rather than getting involved with Marie-Louise. But I knew the Vietnamese woman would have her own story about a woman’s life in Vietnam, how she only ever went out on her own to go to Mass (our neighbors are Vietnamese Catholics) and how even their watches and wedding rings were taken from them when they left Vietnam. She’d told all this to Bea, who concluded they were terrified of anyone with administrative power over them. Rather than question any authority, they paid all bills without question, including the one for the Ninja turtles.
So I knocked and explained why I needed somewhere to wait till Bea arrived. Marie-Louise ushered me into the sitting room with the reproductions. I was halfway across the dark room when I realized there was someone else there.
‘Vlasta, Frank,’ she said simply.
‘Get a glass for Frank,’ Vlasta told Marie-Louise, as if he came every day, lived there, or even owned the place.
For a while he interviewed me like a prospective husband for a daughter, then settled into the story of his own life. He seemed to have a wife, although I couldn’t be sure, and he certainly had two teenage sons who seemed to cause him endless hassle. I presumed he’d made them with someone other than Marie-Louise.
‘Bought them a 7-11 store,’ he said, ‘and they’re about to run it into the ground as well—they’re too lazy even to sit at the till and take in the money.’
He launched into wider subjects. ‘The Americans organized the Twin Towers themselves. Did you see the way they came down?’ —it wasn’t a question— ‘The plane only hit the corner of the building. Had to have explosives planted all over it.’ And the Americans didn’t care, he said, because the towers were full of foreigners.
Glued to my chair in horror and fascination, all that seemed to be working was my tongue: I tried to move him on to other things, like the newly reduced Greater Serbia. ‘Yugoslavia was ruled by non-Serbs, but the Serbs got the blame,’ he told me. The trouble now was the Albanians. ‘Import two of them Sheptar,’ he said (I thought I saw Marie-Louise wince), ‘and in no time you have hundreds.’
According to him Yugoslavia was made to fall apart eventually. ‘Stalin was a priest before he came to power. He got rid of the soutane and attacked religion. Tito wasn’t a Serb either, no one knows where he came from.’
‘Wasn’t the man who killed the Archduke Ferdinand a Serb?’ I ventured, glancing at my watch.
‘Sure, but he lived in Bosnia,’ he replied. So he wasn’t really a Serb either.
‘If you meet a Sheptar’—Marie-Louise definitely winced— ‘on a country path, he marches towards you and you have to step off the path. Then he steps off the path too, to confront you again. Some people are always spoiling for a fight, like the man who comes up to a peaceful coffee drinker in a café and says, “Why did you fuck my wife?” Coffee drinker says, “I didn’t go near your wife, what do I want to go fucking your wife for?” And the belligerent one changes tack: “What’s wrong with my wife that you wouldn’t want to fuck her?”’
And so on. My ears were tuned to the bump of the lift, but there was still no sign of Bea. Vlasta couldn’t be stopped, now he had an audience. Marie-Louise busied herself with tea. ‘Marx and Engels had excellent ideas that were meant to be introduced gradually,’ Vlasta continued. ‘But no, Lenin had to go and have his Revolution. Communism is a complete misnomer. It brought to power men who only knew how to herd sheep. Down they came from the mountains and found themselves addressing crowds. They didn’t know the difference between Communism and Capitalism. They were told that Communism meant if a man has two chairs you take one off him and give it to someone who has none. One of these former shepherds, before a crowd and stuck for words, saw a tramp go by at the back of the crowd with a sack on his back. “A capitalist!” he cried. “There goes a capitalist! Take the sack off him and divide its contents among you!”’
Vlasta looked very pleased with himself. Marie-Louise winked at me surreptitiously.
Suddenly Vlasta glanced at a very expensive watch, leaped to his feet and said he couldn’t delay, as if we’d tried to hold onto him.
When he was gone Marie-Louise opened the window and beckoned me over.
‘Come and look,’ she said. ‘He likes me to wave goodbye.’
We waved as Vlasta got into a Mercedes that was several generations old and roared off in a cloud of black fumes. Just then Bea rounded the corner. We waved at her too.
‘I must apologize for Vlasta’s behavior,’ Marie-Louise said. ‘It is part of why we are no longer together. A lot of things about Vlasta were masked by language and culture, from the start.’
She paused.
‘The original and correct word is Shqiptar,’ she said, ‘from the Albanian language. It’s related to the word for speak. The word Vlasta used is extremely pejorative, like “Barbarian” once was for the Greeks, or “Welsh” for the Germans.’
I’d had enough by then and was in no mood for linguistics. I made for the door in haste, but Marie-Louise caught me by the arm:
‘How can you see something in a mirror that isn’t reflected in it directly?’ she wanted to know.
She pointed out a rooftop opposite and then to its reflection in a mirror on her wall that lay at right angles to the window.
First I sighed. I could hear the lift. Then I went to a lot of trouble with paper and diagrams and angles and so on, but it was clear that she didn’t believe me. She was convinced it was some kind of magic.
‘I had a dream,’ she said. ‘I came into a room and saw a small man—tiny, really—dressed in bulky but shiny clothes, lying, obvi
ously dead, on the floor near a chair. My first reflex was to reach out for it’—she definitely said ‘it’— ‘more for tidiness than anything else. Just then a very large speckled bird—as big as the little man, anyhow—took him by the beak and pulled him under the chair out of my reach.’
‘So what’ve you been up to?’ Bea challenged me as I burst into our apartment,
‘Plugging the causal breach,’ I said.
I kept it going for a while before telling her about Vlasta. Bea and I had reached that stage in our relationship where the lives of others filled a space between us that we couldn’t fill ourselves.
That summer was the famous ‘canicule,’ as they called it here (somehow a deadlier word than ‘heatwave’) during which France killed off some fifteen thousand of its old folks.
Early on, Bea and I enjoyed the weather, the city. One weekend we rolled out to watch the Queen of Hearts participate in a parade celebrating Portugal in all its aspects. I was truly astonished at the sheer numbers of them, their costumes, their faithfulness to regions and habits. There were groups from all over Paris with banners related to occupations, ways of life and regions in Portugal. All in costume, there were brides and grooms, kids, people carrying peasant farming tools, playing music, dancing.
I said, ‘What, no tools for digging ditches?’ I told Bea this was over-the-top folklore, a memory of the times before they all had to flee dictatorship and poverty and getting called up to fight wars in Angola and Mozambique.
The Queen of Hearts smiled and waved as she jigged by in a black and white outfit topped with a kind of lace mantilla.
When I said, ‘No sign of the concierge’s tools there,’ Bea dragged me away.
After that we fled south—‘Because they know how to deal with heat down there,’ Bea said—until it became too much there too. Then on to Morocco to friends, until I tired of seeing rich people in rich houses surrounded by the poor padding about them, cleaning, cooking, trying for invisibility.
