by Mary Byrne
Monsieur Pierre himself lives on the top floor of one of these old buildings, in a tiny room painted entirely in white (except for a brown patch on the ceiling due to a leaking roof). He keeps his room impeccably tidy. Its sparse furniture bears no relation to the kind he likes to sell, except for a valuable carved desk in dark wood that he found at a street market and which he suspects might have been stolen. Sometimes in the evenings he just sits and admires it, which is what he is doing this evening when his concierge, Fernande, knocks on the door. She has news, other than the state of the building and the impossibility of its inhabitants paying for restoration.
‘Two guys,’ she says, breathlessly. ‘Location scouts, they called themselves. For a film.’
Monsieur Pierre indicates the kettle and raises an eyebrow. Fernande nods. Mr Pierre puts water on for tea. He likes having someone to share tea with, although he knows Fernande prefers coffee. It means he can take out his best pot and tea set.
‘It’ll help me sleep. I fueled up on coffee all day,’ she says. ‘Listen, they could save the building, these people. The film is to star Matt Damon, they said.’
Mr Pierre recognizes the name from bus-stop posters as he walks to and from work.
‘Some kind of a thriller, with car chases.’
Mr Pierre still can’t understand how the film will save the building.
‘Try and keep up,’ Fernande says impatiently. ‘They want to use the yard and the porch entrances for a car chase. Shooting, they call it. A Mini Cooper or something like that—a Swatch wouldn’t go quick enough. We’re on their shortlist. They were very enthusiastic. One was French, he was the translator.’
Monsieur Pierre thought a Swatch was a Swiss watch. He imagines chaos in the yard beneath his windows, overturned dustbins, petrol fumes. He has already seen what filming can do to streets in the quarter, blocking cars and pedestrians. Busy types in black bearing walkie-talkies have frequently forced him to take another route to work. He thinks this shouldn’t be allowed, and says so.
‘But that’s the whole point,’ says Fernande. ‘They pay for the service! We kept at them till they gave me a figure. It’d be enough to re-do the roof—imagine!’
She goes into detail about the roof and the scouts and Matt Damon until the teapot is empty. Monsieur Pierre ushers her out, reminding her that he will be away for the long weekend.
‘I’ll keep your mail, so,’ she shouts as she goes down the stairs. ‘Have a great time! Maybe I’ll have more news by the time you get back!’
Monsieur Pierre sighs and closes his door, thinking that the whole building is now aware of his movements, something he dislikes intensely. It occurs to him that his years of peace and habitual routine are coming to an end, and that he may have to make a move soon.
From his everyday preoccupations Monsieur Pierre takes regular and spectacular breaks. He never discusses details of where he goes and colleagues have long since learnt not to ask. Every chance he gets, Monsieur Pierre goes on hunting trips to Morocco with a small group of acquaintances. Sometimes they go for a long weekend. Most of their trips focus on fishing, boar-hunting and falconry. This coming weekend, with a holiday and a pont—a bridge to a public holiday—is to be a grand festival of all three.
The group includes three brothers, two cousins, and Monsieur Pierre. The only thing he has in common with them is that they all live in Belleville, a quarter teeming with immigrants, many from North Africa. They met by accident on an early trip and have hunted together ever since. Monsieur Pierre is nonetheless aware of a difference between him and them: they are pieds noirs, cultural colonials of European origin, born in Morocco and dragged away from it by parents frightened by the Algerian war and Moroccan independence. For them each trip to North Africa is returning to paradise. Without these trips they would stop breathing. They have recently begun bringing their sons, so that they too will keep up the tradition: home is là-bas: ‘down there.’ France is some kind of temporary abode. That, and their mastery of Moroccan dialect, makes them closer to the locals, more familiar with the music and customs, all of which serves to keep Monsieur Pierre apart—which, up to now, is where he has preferred to be.
On Thursday the friends fly out early with Royal Air Maroc, land near the desert, have a tasty lunch and take off for a lazy afternoon accompanying a snake-hunter on his rounds. Fascinated by his skill, they watched him tire, fool, and mesmerize serpents under the hot sun. Each time the snake-hunter reaches the crucial moment and slides shut the lid of his long wooden box, the friends watch carefully. Even when he releases the snake and starts again, to show them, they never quite manage to catch the detail of how he finally whips the snake into the box.
Monsieur Pierre finds himself becoming irritated and cannot work out why. A part of his mind, the non-hunter part, wonders again and again why the snake doesn’t just cut and run at one of those moments while it is still free.
‘How does he do it?’ the friends marvel.
‘Can’t tell—he moves too fast,’ another says.
‘The snake helps out, he takes cover in the box,’ Mr Pierre says quietly.
The snake-hunter nods. The snake takes rapid refuge in the very place that will become its prison until it is sold on to a snake charmer and turns up on Jemaa-el-Fna, the main square in Marrakesh, dancing to flute music, mastered for life.
Next day they fish for hours from the rocks at the edge of the broad Atlantic, cool even on a hot day in gumboots and capes against the salt spray, braving the elements with every wave that hits. Around them, Moroccans go to sea and lose their lives for fish. Behind them, other Moroccans help carry boats up to the safety of caves they have carved out of the higher cliffs. Beautiful women, enveloped in pale pastel colors, each with a child on her back, collect mussels they will boil and sell in the market in blue and white striped bowls, with a big safety pin for picking out the flesh.
Everyone but the foreigners avoids the dangerous area where the rocks meet the water, for these rocks are really the top of high cliffs concealed beneath treacherous waters.
‘One slip means death!’ the friends warn each other. They know how to be careful, and although always vulnerable to what nature can do to them, they know Nature is master.
Later they barbecue and share with locals the dozens of sea-bream they have caught. The others eat, laugh, and talk while Monsieur Pierre, as usual, finds himself hunkered before the barbecue, silent. He does most of the cooking, and eats last.
Next day they go boar-hunting. Monsieur Pierre’s companions treat the locals as a race apart, refer to them as ‘they,’ give them instructions in Arabic and speak about them, in their presence, in French.
‘They’re in their Sunday best,’ one says.
Although they are poor, it is clear that the local men have dressed up for the occasion: Monsieur Pierre’s companions have stipulated that everyone must wear natural, non-vivid colors. Monsieur Pierre studies the poor men who arrive in oddments of sport and casual wear that probably took quite an effort to obtain.
The beaters, guided by one of the locals from the top of a dead tree, spread out against the hill, driving the forbidden meat towards the infidel hunters. The man in the tree yells instructions. The beaters yelp replies to each other and to the friends waiting with the guns.
Monsieur Pierre feels as if he has moved through a glass wall to find himself mysteriously on the side of the victim, but to no obvious purpose and with no sale in view.
That evening they have car problems. By nightfall they find themselves and their four-wheel drive in the filthy garage of a very elderly Portuguese in a small town on the edge of the desert.
‘Great to have someone to talk to,’ the old man says, through stumps of teeth and gums. ‘Been here all my life. Quarter used to be full of Europeans like me. Small businesses.’
Monsieur Pierre’s companions are silent, perhaps conscious that here—
but for their parents’ decision in the 1960s—had lain their own fate.
The old man barks harsh commands in Arabic to his latest assistant, a young man from the new apartment blocks, who struggles with the unfamiliar vehicle, sweating heavily under their combined gaze.
‘Big trouble holding onto them,’ the old man shakes his head. ‘Look at the way he works. They just don’t have the reflexes.’
The others nod. Monsieur Pierre doesn’t react.
It is late when the repairs are complete.
‘Sorry,’ the old Portuguese man says, asking for what, in Euros, is small change: ‘prices on the rise.’
As they turn the car and drive away, Monsieur Pierre watches the old man close his black garage and make his stiff way back to a house which is small and poor just like all the others in a street and quarter that is now full of Moroccans and not foreigners.
* * *
Back in Paris, Fernande springs on Monsieur Pierre as he enters the hall.
‘The film people want us to supply water and electricity,’ she announces officiously. ‘Won’t that be easy, out here in the yard? The building council is having a meeting to count up the cost and the gains. They have a lawyer examining the contract. Big fancy thing with an address in California.’
It seems she has set the whole quarter alight with film jargon. The word on the street is that Matt Damon will save the decrepit roof. The excitement and the news stir only a feeling of insecurity in Monsieur Pierre. The brown patch on his ceiling seems to be growing.
During the following week, fellow-workers are surprised to notice Monsieur Pierre make fewer sales. A stunning white sofa that was ordered through him with a down payment hasn’t been collected or paid for by the deadline. He has to go through the ignominy of phoning the would-be purchasers and being told they’ve changed their mind—they don’t want it. Even the paperwork involved in keeping their deposit grates on his nerves.
When he arrives in from work on Saturday evening he is tired. He feels that he needs time to think. He wonders if all places, in time, turn out to be traps.
Fernande comes rushing up the stairs, almost in tears.
‘They voted against us! The council was too greedy! They chose another quarter for the film—oh, it’ll be made in Paris all right. How are we ever going to save the roof now?’
Monsieur Pierre forces tea on her but doesn’t drink much of it himself. When she is gone he finds himself wondering how much he would get for his desk if he were to sell it.
When Sunday comes around he joins his hunter friends in an old house with a garden at the top of Belleville, for what they laughingly call ‘Lunch on the grass.’
When he has carefully prepared the barbecue, Monsieur Pierre wanders down steps into a hut in the garden and watches one of the hunters teach his son to make his own bullets.
‘Regarde, mon fils,’ the man says. Watch, my son.
There is a little measure for just the right weight of pellets, and a machine that compacts the powder then seals the capsule in the shape of a star.
Monsieur Pierre examines the objects thoughtfully. He feels a vicious stab of jealousy towards this man, with a distinct history behind him and a son to carry on after him.
Both father and son look at Monsieur Pierre. ‘He’s a good hunter too,’ the father tells his son.
For the first time, it strikes Monsieur Pierre that his friends never refer to him by name. He is a good hunter, but he isn’t one of them. Images of the furniture shop and the snake in the box flash before him. Mastery is a layered cake, he thinks. And he wonders if it is too late now to shift levels.
He returns to set the barbecue alight. The women bring out salads and bread. A child takes a photo of them all and a digital camera is passed around. Monsieur Pierre sees, as in a hallucination, his own pale face staring out from the family tableau of tanned likenesses, smiling like an idiot child.
* * *
Two years later the whole quarter flocks to see the new Matt Damon film. There are car chases and Parisian buildings, but nothing looks at all like their quarter, and none of the buildings are remotely run-down. Fernande says films like that are not her thing anyway, although she wonders if location scouts may not one day see her yard for the jewel that it is.
Lightning Strikes Twice
It is almost Halloween, behind the chalk cliffs of the Alabaster coast, much-loved of the Impressionists. On evenings like this I stand at my window and wait for my young researcher to turn up. I say ‘my,’ but of course Langlois visits others too. Indeed she seems to do little else all day long. She calls it work. She’ll wheel up in a neat little brand-new car and park tidily in a corner of the yard, as if we were expecting a crowd.
If she still hasn’t arrived when the light goes, I turn on the telly for company. At that time of evening there’s just rubbish and games, but I like its eerie light. I put the volume up full too. There are no neighbors to complain, most of those roundabout have already died or left, although others are arriving. There are two Polish families. The castle farm’s mostly automated now, with machines the width of the road and tractors like Airbuses that cost almost as much.
The family of our former Lord and Master has a goodly selection of these Airbuses, although all the comte ever really cared for was his horses. ‘Bloodstock’s the thing, Marie-Jeanne!’ he used to say to me when I still worked up at the chateau. When he still spoke to me. Before they retired me from the castle farm to this little house. It’s on the side of the road, but I don’t complain because I like to see the odd passer-by. I counted two cars and three tractors today, and our new British residents, out for what they call their ‘constitutional.’
The Poles, as factotums and farmhands, are better lodged than we ever were: the comte even restored two traditional stone houses for them, landscaped, the whole bit, overlooking a lake that provided power for the old forges. Original tiling, gutters, very pure and traditional altogether. No doubt he got subsidized to do so, for money always attracts money, as my brother liked to point out. The lake and forges kept the comte’s ancestry rich and the rest of us in work. In the old days it was the only respectable job a noble could do apart from soldiering. The Poles’ll not lack for fish this winter, although no one’ll be any the wiser. They have three kids here, keeping our school from what was an inevitable shutdown, and several more at home doing military service and whatnot.
Bussed them in, did the comte, local unemployed notwithstanding (‘Can’t work, won’t work,’ he said). They are paid the minimum, and they’re happy to do the work of ten. ‘It’s lots more than they’d get at home, and everyone’s happy,’ the comte said to me from his wheelchair the last day I spoke to him.
By the time Langlois comes, I’m deafened by the telly and tetanized by the evening light. So she knocks and yells and finally has to step into the firelight like a Christian and declare herself. I check on the cakes and biscuits she brings—we often have a sugar lump dipped in the home-made Calva I found all over the cellar after my brother was killed. Called a ‘duck’ locally, this amuses Langlois no end.
She’s mad for all my news.
Langlois is researching coincidence. She heard about me from her parents who used to raise pigs outside the village. They told her about the time I was struck by lightning. Then there was the foot falling down the comte’s chimney into my pumpkin soup. That and a few more things and she had a path beaten to my door.
‘Tell me about the lightning!’ she cried that first day. ‘Where were you when it hit you?’
That was easy to work back to, and anyway the ambulance men told me they found me in the middle of the field with the milk bucket in one hand and the milking stool still attached to my backside. I didn’t believe them until the hospital staff concurred. Concur is a good word, often used by little blonde Langlois. She’s very proper—her favorite coincidences concern St Thérèse of Lisieux
, further south from here—so I have to make sure to avoid patois or crude words, else she looks consternated.
Fact is I was unconscious for three whole days. Severe burns down the entire side of my body. Fascinated that Rolande too was struck by lightning on her scooter, Langlois and I spent several evenings on the fact that me and Rolande feel alive with electricity when a storm is due, allowing us to predict the weather, but also making us nervous and irritable.
Later, when Langlois got wind of the burglar that died in the comte’s chimney, I was guaranteed company for the whole winter. We’ve had researchers here before—it was about witchcraft the last time—and we know they like to spin it out. So I eked it out gently like the home-made Calva.
Where was I? These last days of a very late Indian summer are distracting with their warm southern winds. It’s already shriveled up my Virginia creeper, red after an initial cold patch. Anyway, the earth is parched after the summer. Wells are down to mud level, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen them harvest maize without strewing muck all over the roads.
So: the foot.
Langlois wasn’t the first to visit me about the foot. When it first happened, I was still working at the chateau and the journalists, the telly, were all over the place—and me. A telly van with a special antenna parked down the road until the comte got his pals at the gendarmerie to shift them. ‘Tell them what happened, Marie-Jeanne,’ he said, ‘no more, no less. Let us get them out of our hair once and for all, shall we?’ You can see he’d be well able to chat to the Queen of England, who came over and stayed once. They had horseflesh in common. There’s a photo of her still in the library, and a copy of the thank you letter she sent afterwards. (The new guide up at the chateau gets great mileage out of this, although you can tell tourists don’t like her tight mouth, tight speech, tight clothes, and the big wallet she hugs tightly under her arm until she unlocks the last door to let them out, drawing their attention to a bilingual notice suggesting tips.)
