Things were starting to stir in my head. Memories. For months now, my thoughts had been slipping away from me. I found it hard to focus on any one thing, even fishing—and that really was serious. The more time passed, the more important Lole’s absence came to seem. It dominated my life. I was living in the void she had left behind. The worst part of it was going home. Being alone in the house. For the first time in my life.
I should have changed the music. Gotten rid of these grim thoughts with something Cuban. Guillermo Portabales. Francisco Repilado. Or better still, the Buena Vista Social Club. I should have. My life was full of should haves. Great, I thought, tooting my horn at the driver in front of me. He was calmly getting his family out of the car, along with everything they needed for a picnic on the beach. The icebox, the chairs, the folding table. All they needed was a TV set, I thought. My mood wasn’t improving.
Coming level with the Café du Port, at the Pointe-Rouge—it had taken forty minutes to get that far—I felt like a drink. One or two. Maybe even three. But then I thought of Fonfon and Honorine waiting for me on the terrace. I wasn’t really alone. They were both there. With their love for me. Their patience. This morning, after the call from Hélène Pessayre, I’d left without saying hello.
“Who is it you want to kill?” Honorine had asked me last night.
“Forget it, Honorine. There are thousands of people I’d like to kill.”
“Sure, but there seems to be one you’ve really set your heart on.”
“Honestly, forget it. It’s the heat. I’m on edge. Go back to sleep.”
“Make yourself a camomile tea. It’ll relax you. Fonfon had one.”
I’d lowered my head. I didn’t want to see the questions in her eyes. Or how afraid she was that I was getting involved in something I shouldn’t. I still had a vivid memory of the way she’d looked at me four years ago when I’d told her that Ugo was dead. I didn’t want to see that look again. Not for anything in the world. Especially not now.
Honorine knew I didn’t have blood on my hands. She knew I’d never been able to bring myself to kill a man in cold blood. I’d let the cops handle Batisti. Narni had crashed his car at the bottom of a ravine on the Gineste pass. There was only Saadna. I’d let him burn, and hadn’t felt any remorse. But I couldn’t have killed even that loathsome piece of shit, just like that. She knew that. I’d told her all about it.
I wasn’t the same man now. And Honorine knew that, too. There was too much repressed rage in me, too many scores I hadn’t settled. And too much despair. I wasn’t bitter, but I was weary. Tired. Tired of people, tired of the world. I couldn’t get Sonia’s unjust, stupid, cruel death out of my head. Her death made all other deaths unbearable. Including all the anonymous ones I read about every day in the newspapers. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Ever since Bosnia. Rwanda. Now Algeria and its daily massacres. A hundred men, women and children slaughtered every night, their throats cut. Disgust.
Enough to make you throw up.
Sonia.
I didn’t know what her killer looked like. I imagined a skull. Like on the skull and crossbones, which I saw being hoisted some nights in my head. Floating free, still unpunished. I wanted to have done with it. At least once. Once and for all.
Sonia.
Shit! I’d promised myself I’d go see her father and her son. That was what I should be doing this evening, not drinking. Seeing him and little Enzo. And telling them I thought I would have loved Sonia.
I put on the left indicator light, pulled out, and edged my car into the opposite lane. Immediately, people started hooting their horns. But I didn’t give a damn. Nobody really gave a damn. They hooted for the hell of it. They screamed too, also for the hell of it.
“Where are you going, shithead?”
“To see your sister!”
After reversing twice, I managed to join the line, but I immediately turned left because I didn’t want to get into any more jams. I zigzagged through a maze of side streets until I came out onto Avenue des Goumiers. The traffic was lighter here. I was on my way to La Capelette, a neighborhood that had been a magnet for Italian families, mainly from the North, ever since the twenties.
Sonia’s father, Attilio, lived on Rue Antoine Del Bello, on the corner of Rue Fifi Turin. Two streets named for Italian resistance fighters who’d died for France. For freedom. For an idea of mankind that had nothing to do with the strutting of a Hitler or a Mussolini. Del Bello, who’d grown up in State custody in Italy, wasn’t even French when he died in the maquis.
Attilio De Luca opened the door. I recognized him. Hassan was right. De Luca and I had met in his bar and had a few aperitifs together. He’d lost his job in 1992, after fifteen years as a timekeeper at Intramar. He’d been working on the waterfront for thirty-five years. He had told me a little about his life. How proud he’d been to be a longshoreman. The strikes he’d taken part in. Until the year the oldest of the longshoremen were shown the door. The employers were modernizing the workforce. Not only the oldest had to go, but the troublemakers too. De Luca was on the red list. The workers who were considered “inflexible.” And because of his age, he was among the first to be thrown out on the streets.
De Luca had been born on Rue Antoine Del Bello. A street where everyone’s name ended in i or a before people called Alvarez, Gutierrez or Domenech started arriving.
“When I was born, out of a thousand people on that street, there were nine hundred and ninety-four Italians, two Spaniards and an Armenian.”
His childhood memories were strangely similar to mine, and made me feel happy thinking about them.
“In summer, there’d be chairs set out all along the sidewalk. Everyone had their little story to tell.”
Dammit, I thought, why didn’t he ever tell me about his daughter? Why didn’t he ever bring her to Hassan’s? Why did I see Sonia only once and then lose her forever? The terrible thing was that with Sonia, there were no regrets—the way there were with Lole—there was only remorse. The worst kind of remorse. Thinking I’d unwittingly brought about her death.
“Oh,” De Luca said. “Montale.”
He’d aged a hundred years.
“I heard about Sonia.”
He looked up at me, and I saw how red his eyes were. They were also full of questions. Obviously, he didn’t understand what I was doing here. You might feel close to someone over a pastis at Hassan’s, but that didn’t make you part of the family.
At the mention of Sonia’s name, Enzo appeared. He only came up to his grandfather’s waist. He clung to him and looked up at me. He had his mother’s gray-blue eyes.
“I . . .”
“Come in, come in . . . Enzo, go back to bed! It’s nearly ten o’clock . . . Kids never want to sleep,” he said to me in a flat voice.
The room was quite large, but cluttered with furniture. Every surface was covered in trinkets, and family photos in frames. Just as his wife had left it, ten years ago, when she’d walked out on De Luca. Just as he hoped she’d find it when she returned. “She’ll be back one day,” he’d told me, full of hope.
“Sit down. Would you like a drink?”
“I’ll have a pastis. In a large glass. I’m thirsty.”
“Fucking heat,” he said.
There wasn’t much of an age difference between us. Maybe seven or eight years. I could almost have had a child Sonia’s age. A girl. A boy. The thought of it made me uncomfortable.
He came back with two glasses, some ice cubes, and a big jug of water. Then he got the bottle out of a sideboard.
“Was it you she was supposed to be meeting last night?” he asked as he poured my drink.
“Yes.”
“When I saw you at the door, I understood.”
Seven or eight years’ difference. The same generation, or almost. The generation that grew up after the war. That made sacrifices, that scrimped
and saved. Pasta for lunch and dinner. And bread. Open bread, with tomato and olive oil. Bread and broccoli. Bread and eggplant. The generation that had plenty of dreams—dreams that, for our fathers, had worn the genial smile of Joseph Stalin. De Luca had joined the Communist Youth Movement at the age of fifteen.
“I swallowed it all,” he’d told me. “Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the positive achievements of socialism.”
He handed me the glass, without looking at me. I could guess what was going through his head. What he was feeling. His daughter in my arms. His daughter beneath me, as we made love. I didn’t know if he’d really have liked it, the two of us together.
“Nothing happened, you know. We were supposed to meet, and . . .”
“Forget it, Montale. All that, now . . .”
He took a swig of his pastis, and finally looked at me. “Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t understand.”
I swallowed. His grief was clearly etched on his face, and hovered around his eyes. I was sure we’d have been friends, even if I’d started something with Sonia. I’d have invited him over for dinner with Fonfon and Honorine.
“I think she and I could have had something solid. With the boy.”
“Have you ever been married?”
“No, never.”
“You must have known a few women in your time.”
“It’s not what you think, De Luca.”
“I don’t think anything. In any case . . .” He emptied his glass. “Another one?”
“A small one.”
“She was never happy. The only men she met were jerks. Can you explain it to me, Montale? Beautiful, intelligent, and never met anything but jerks. I won’t even tell you about the last one, the father of . . .” He made a gesture with his head toward the room where Enzo was sleeping. “A good thing he walked out, or I’d have killed him sooner or later.”
“There’s no explanation.”
“No. I think we spend our lives losing our way and by the time we find it, it’s too late.”
He looked at me again. There were the beginnings of tears in his eyes, but there was also a glimmer of friendship.
“My life exactly,” I said.
My heart started pounding, then contracted. Somewhere, Lole must be squeezing it. She’d been a hundred per cent right about me, I didn’t understand a thing. Loving another person surely meant showing yourself naked to that person. Naked in your strength, and in your weakness. Was that what scared me about love? The nakedness of it? The truth of it? Truth itself?
I’d have told Sonia everything. Even that contraction in my heart whose name was Lole. Yes, as I’d just told De Luca, Sonia and I could have had something solid. Something different. Joy and laughter. Happiness. But different. It had to be different. When the woman you’ve dreamed about, waited for, desired for years, then met and loved, leaves you, you can’t imagine you’ll meet her again like that, on some other street corner of your life. Everyone knows there’s no lost property office for love.
Sonia would have understood. She hadn’t taken long to make my heart speak, or just to make me speak. And perhaps there would have been a future for us. A future true to our desires.
“Yes,” De Luca said, again emptying his glass.
I stood up.
“Is that all you came here for—to tell me it was you?”
“Yes,” I lied. “To tell you that.”
Painfully, he got to his feet.
“Does the boy know?”
“Not yet. I don’t know how . . . And I don’t know how I’m going to manage with him . . . I mean, one night, one day. One week, during the vacation . . . But bringing him up? I wrote to my wife . . .”
“Can I go say good night to him?”
De Luca nodded. But then he put his hand on my arm. All the sadness in him was about to explode. His chest rose. He’d put up a barrier of pride around him, and now the tears were bursting through.
“Why?” He started crying. “Why did they kill her? Why her?”
“I don’t know,” I said, in a very low voice.
I drew him to me, and held him in my arms. He was sobbing loudly. I said again as low as possible, “I don’t know.”
His tears of love for Sonia—big, hot, sticky tears—ran down my neck. They stank of death. The same stench I’d smelled the other night, going into Hassan’s. Exactly the same smell. In my mind’s eye, I tried to put a face to Sonia’s killer.
Then I saw Enzo, standing there in front of us, holding a little teddy bear under his arm.
“Why’s Grandpa crying?”
I freed myself from De Luca, squatted in front of Enzo, and put my arms around his shoulders.
“Your mommy won’t be coming back,” I said. “She . . . she had an accident. Do you understand, Enzo? She’s dead.”
And I started crying too. Crying for us, who would have to survive all this. The world’s ever-present corruption.
10.
IN WHICH BEING LIGHT CAN RECONCILE
SADNESS WITH THE FLIGHT OF A SEAGULL
Fonfon, Honorine and I had played rummy until midnight. Playing cards with those two was more than a pleasure. It was a way to get closer. To share feelings we found hard to express in words. As we played, we exchanged looks, smiles. And although it was a simple game, you had to keep track of the cards the others had played. It was a good opportunity to keep my mind off things for a few hours.
Fonfon had brought along a bottle of Bunan. An old stemmed marc from La Cadière, near Bandol.
“Taste this,” he’d said. “It’ll make a change from that Scotch of yours.”
It was delicious. Quite different from my Lagavulin with its slightly peaty taste. The Bunan was dry, but extremely fruity, smelling of scrubland. By the time I’d won two games of rummy and lost eight, I’d already enjoyed four little glasses of it.
As we were saying good night, Honorine came up to me with a padded envelope.
“I almost forgot. The postman left this for you this morning. As it was marked fragile, he didn’t want to put it in your mail box.”
There was no indication of the sender on the back. The postmark said Saint-Jean-du-Gard. I opened the envelope and took out five computer disks. Two blue, one white, one red, one black. I still love you, Babette had written on a sheet of paper. And underneath: Take good care of this for me.
Babette! The blood started beating in my temples. At the same time, Sonia’s face flashed in front of me. Sonia with her throat cut. I had a clear memory of Sonia’s neck. Tanned, like her skin. Thin. It looked as soft as the shoulder where I’d placed my hand for a brief moment. A neck it would have been nice to kiss, there, just below the ear. Or stroke with your fingertips, and marvel at the softness. How I’d have liked to hate Babette!
But how do you go about hating someone you love? Or someone you once loved? A friend or a lover. Mavros or Lole. I couldn’t do it, any more than I could have done without the friendship of Manu and Ugo. You can stop yourself seeing them, keeping in touch with them, but you can’t hate them, it’s impossible. For me at least.
I reread Babette’s note, and felt the weight of the disks. This was it, I thought, our fates were linked, in the most horrible way possible. Babette was appealing to love, but it was death that was rearing its head. To the death. That’s what we used to say when we were kids. We’d make a little cut in our wrists, and cross our forearms, so that one’s person’s wrist was against the other’s, and our blood mingled. Friends for life. Brothers. We’d always love each other.
Babette. For years, we’d brought each other nothing but our mutual desire. And our mutual solitude. Her words I still love you made me uncomfortable. They didn’t strike a chord with me. Was she sincere? I wondered. Or was it the only way she knew to call for help? I was only too well aware that you could
say things, think they were true in the moment you said them, and then do things, in the hours or days that followed, that belied them. Especially in love. Because love is the most irrational of feelings, and its source—whatever people say—is in the meeting of two bodies, and the pleasure they give each other.
One day, Lole had packed her bag, and said, “I’m going away. I may be gone for a week.”
I looked at her for a long time, my stomach in knots. Usually, she would say things like, “I’m going to see my mother,” or “My sister isn’t well. I’m going to Toulouse for a few days.”
“I need to think, Fabio. I really need it. For myself. You understand, I need to think about myself.”
She was tense, having to say it like that. She’d have liked to find a better moment to tell me, to explain. I understood her tension, even though it hurt me. I’d been planning—but as usual, I hadn’t said anything—to take her on an excursion into the countryside inland from Nice. Over toward Gorbio, Sainte-Agnes, Sospel.
“If that’s what you want to do.”
She was leaving to join her friend. The guitarist she’d met at a concert in Seville, when she was visiting with her mother. She hadn’t told me until she got back.
“I didn’t do anything to . . .” she’d said. “I didn’t think it would happen so fast, Fabio.”
I held her in my arms. Her body felt stiff against mine. I knew then that she’d been thinking a lot about us, and about herself. But of course not the way I’d imagined. Nor the way I’d heard in what she’d said before she left.
“What are those?” Honorine asked.
“Computer disks.”
“Do you know about that kind of thing?”
“A little. I used to have a computer in my office.”
I embraced the two of them and said good night. I was in a hurry to go.
“Even if you leave early,” Fonfon said, “come and see me first.”
“I promise.”
I was already thinking about something else. About the disks and what was in them. The reason for the mess Babette was in. The mess she was dragging me into. Whatever it was had cost Sonia her life. And had delivered a knockout blow to an eight-year-old boy and his poor lost grandfather.
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