Along the way, his belly had grown a lot from eating sweets, but he slept more soundly and woke up feeling better. In this way he was discovering a whole new body economy, with its profits and losses. He didn’t feel so out of sorts when he got up in the morning, for example, but neither did he experience that delicious rush of the first drinks, when you put fuel in the boiler, where burning alcohol stands in for having a second youth.
But that wasn’t the fundamental problem of a life without liquor. It was time. Boredom. Slowness, and people.
Patrick was awaking from a twenty-year sleep, during which he had been dreaming friendships, interests, political opinions, a whole social life, a sense of himself and his authority, certainties about a lot of stuff, even hatreds. But in fact he’d just been drunk three-quarters of the time. Sober, he was bereft. He had to rediscover everything, all of life. It was hard to endure seeing the sharpness of lines and that heaviness of human substance, the mud of people that drags you down, fills your mouth, torpedoes relationships. That was the principal difficulty, surviving the truth of other people.
At first, Patrick hunkered down in his little apartment, a place outside of town that he’d rented in a hurry after his separation. He told himself he would find something better once the divorce was final. A year and a half later, he was still living there. For days on end he’d wandered around like a beast of burden, heavy and vague, full of strength without an object. From time to time he would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and grab his gut with both hands. He disgusted himself and complained about everything—about the cost of living, about Anthony, who was screwing up right and left, about his bitch of a wife, and a thousand other things. And especially, he ruminated over that huge waste, his youth spent in the gutter.
Eventually he bought himself a bicycle. His first step toward something better. It was a nuisance, because he didn’t have a garage and had to store the bike in a one-bedroom apartment already full to bursting. But at least he went riding. He rode along the canal and met other cyclists. He sat on the bank and watched the water flow by. That boredom was his delight. And he’d managed to find another job, thank god. It was then that the piggy bank idea occurred to him. Each day he would put in the twenty or thirty francs that he used to spend on drinking. Now, ten months later, he had accumulated more than five thousand francs. Quite a sum.
“So, have you decided what you’re gonna do with all that dough?”
“Ah,” said Patrick, his arm raised dramatically.
As if the other men didn’t know.
With the back of his hand, Georges swept the five thousand francs off the counter and into the jam jar. He set it on the counter under the three men’s noses, a tower heavy with coins.
“Aren’t we gonna drink to this?” said the barber again, whose glass was empty.
“Sure, go ahead,” said Patrick expansively. “Pour him another shot.”
“Ah, that’s more like it.”
Patrick looked over at Namur and asked him if he was thirsty. Namur remained silent. He hadn’t finished reading. On his lap, the little Cavalier King Charles spaniel was following along line by line, waiting for his master to turn the page.
“Pour him a kir.”
Georges filled the barber’s glass, and Patrick brought Namur his kir. He himself settled for a cup of very strong coffee.
L’Escale didn’t have a lot of customers in the summer. It was a high school hangout, with a foosball table, two pinball machines, and infinite tolerance for minors who lingered for three hours over a cup of coffee and a glass of water. The café was right next to Fourier, the best school in town. At noon, it made croque-monsieurs and sandwiches. A peanut dispenser and a coin telephone stood on the bar. The place was old and brown, with the patina of age. It had stools, a colorful tile floor, a big mirror, a few plants, fake marble and Formica, and brass railings. Absolutely no music; Georges’s wife had tinnitus. And the whole place was clean as a whistle.
Every August, the owners closed for a month to go home to Coinbra, to a sunstruck little village where they spent their time digesting staggering lunches and equally ample dinners cooked by their aunt Bruna. They came back rejuvenated, ten pounds heavier, and almost black.
At the moment, L’Escale was practically empty. Through the windows, you saw occasional traffic, the welfare office across the way, and what remained of the Palace, a movie theater closed for security reasons. The poster of the last film shown there was slowly peeling off: a Sylvester Stallone flick about a trucker who was an arm-wrestling champion.
Namur’s voice broke the silence. Everyone listened up; they were used to this.
“Leo: You are full of energy today, and will take things in hand. Love: You are open to being amazed. Work: Your ambition may hide the essential from you.”
Every morning, when Namur reached the last page of the local rag, he read the horoscopes, starting with Leo, his dog’s sign. The barber waited for Aries before raising the question he’d been dying to ask.
“So where do you want to send your wife with this money?”
“She’s not my wife anymore,” said Patrick.
“True enough.”
Actually, he’d been wondering the same thing.
“I’ll see with the girl at the travel agency,” he said.
“With five thousand francs, you should be able to go to Sicily.”
“We’ll see.”
Patrick had just looked at the clock hanging on the wall between Benfica pennants. He stood up. It was time.
“Well, gentlemen…”
“So long,” said the owner and the barber.
“See you next time.”
“Work well.”
Wishing everybody a good day, Patrick picked up his jar of coins and left the café. His piggy bank was pretty heavy, maybe ten or twelve pounds, though still not as heavy as his guilt. As he walked out, he was happy to notice that Namur had drained his kir without any fuss.
Once outside, he hurried toward the Districan offices. He strode along at a good clip, glancing at his watch from time to time, the loot clinking under his arm. When he got to the office, Caro was already there, standing by the gurgling coffee maker, whose smell filled the whole room. She poured him a cup, then took down an assignment sheet from the corkboard.
“Here, this one’s for you.”
Patrick read the document as he blew on his hot coffee. He had set his jar on the table where the office staffers ate their lunch at noon. Caro eyed the jar without daring to touch it.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“Well, yeah. That’s the way it is,” she said pragmatically.
“You are serious.”
They were the same words, but his tone had taken on more gravity. Caro apologized, all sweetness now.
“We’re understaffed, honeybunch. It’s July. What can I tell you?”
“Yeah, it’s summer all year round with you guys.”
“Go on, complaining won’t do you any good.”
Patrick counted thirteen checkpoints and almost thirty machines. Plus, they’d stuck him in the hospital. The place was lousy with vending machines; they had them on every floor and in every corner. It would take him all morning. He glanced at his watch, sighed, looked over the assignment sheet again, then headed for the exit.
As he was leaving, Caro called to him:
“Hey! Your piggy bank!”
What with all that, he’d almost forgotten it. Caro was holding it in both hands. She jingled the coins before handing it over, as if the sound could give her an idea of the total.
“How much do you have in there? Did you win the lottery?”
“Don’t touch that,” said Patrick, who was trying to pick up the assignment sheet, the money, and his coffee all at once.
“Hey, come on,” said Caro. “There’s no point being grumpy.
I’m not the one who makes the assignments.”
“You are, actually.”
“I work with what I’ve got. What can I tell you?”
Patrick felt like telling lots of things. He tried to find the words. It was a waste of time.
“You’d do better to collect your pennies and take me out to dinner,” she said playfully.
Patrick considered her for a second. After all, why not? It was an idea. Caro wasn’t especially pretty, but at forty-plus, she was still in the running. He liked her plain, what-you-see-is-what-you-get look, her tight jeans, her way of being both provocative and proper. She belonged to that category of women with good legs who are shapeless in wintertime, but come fair weather are transfigured by a skirt and high heels. Patrick liked the type, episodically sexy, springtime pride, returning swallows. Caro was also a relentlessly hard worker who thought the boss and the clients were always right, didn’t count her hours, and invariably made excuses for the powers that be. Probably from lack of imagination, she never thought to complain about the way things were. She was raising two daughters alone, Nina, seven, and Sofia, fifteen. She hadn’t gotten a raise in five years.
“So?” she said.
“What?”
“Are you gonna take me out?”
“No.”
“So what’s the money for?”
“A surprise.”
“For me?”
“Dream on.”
“Well, ciao then. You’re already late.”
As he went out the door, she added:
“And don’t forget your cap.”
* * *
—
Every time Patrick opened a vending machine, he had to collect the money from it, wipe it down, and restock it with canned drinks, water bottles, packets of chips, and little Papi Broussard cakes, without forgetting the chocolate bars. The machines all had magnetic badges. He registered his passage at each with a scanner hanging from his belt. When he got home, he just had to plug the device into his phone line, and the precious information shot straight to the database that Districan used to organize its services and prepare invoices. As a bonus, that same information let the company measure the pace of work, identify downtime, optimize routes, rationalize charges, and fire the lazy.
Patrick had found this job thanks to Adecco, and the boss had promptly signed him to an open-ended contract. He cleared a little under seven thousand francs a month and got a meal allowance, five weeks of paid vacation, and supplemental health care coverage. Plus free Mars bars and Cokes.
Aside from the work tempo, the job might have suited Patrick pretty well. He was becoming less and less demanding, in any case. Since his separation, he ate the same thing every day, chicken and rice, and always wore the same clothes. His days had themselves become all identical, including on the weekend. Basically, once he became a bachelor, he had simplified himself. But there was that business with the cap. It was one thing to wear a Districan T-shirt and jacket, but he drew the line at that soft, red, corporate, and supposedly adjustable hat. He categorically refused to wear the thing. A quality control supervisor had caught him bareheaded on the job several times. That’s how the problems began. “Didn’t you read the memo, Monsieur Casati?” Patrick answered that it wouldn’t help him meet his quota, and anyway, no one could see him. The supervisor had been forced to press the point. “There are rules. It’s impossible to follow all of them, of course, we aren’t Nazis. Still, some of them involve the company’s image. And that’s critical.”
From then on, Patrick’s relationship with the cap became a soap opera. He wore it, felt himself observed, stomped on it, forgot it in his van, and regularly lost it. Behind the wheel, on the job, in the bistro, the office, the garage, he would ask himself the question: Should I be wearing my cap? In the old days, guys didn’t have to put on costumes, except maybe for elevator operators, porters, and maids. But today, we’re all flunkies, more or less. Silicosis and mine explosions are no longer risks of the job. Instead, you now die by degrees, killed by humiliation, tiny demands, petty surveillance at every stage of your day. By asbestos, too. Since the factories shut down, workers were nothing more than confetti. Fodder for the masses and the corporations. It’s the hour of the individual, the temp, the isolate. And all those scraps of employment endlessly orbiting in the great vacuum of work are divided into a swarm of separate plastic and transparent places: bubbles, cubicles, partitions, glass panels.
Inside them, air-conditioning tempers mood swings. Pagers and telephones split up buddies and erode connections. Centuries-old solidarities dissolve in the great bath of competitive forces. New, ill-paid, thankless little jobs are replacing work that was grueling, but shared. Production no longer means anything. People talk about relationships, service quality, communication strategy, client satisfaction. It’s all so small, isolated, nebulous, and faggoty, Patrick thought. He couldn’t understand a world where you didn’t have a pal, where discipline extended from gestures to words, from bodies to souls. You were expected to not only provide punctual availability and monetizable labor. You were expected to believe in the mission, echo its spirit everywhere, use an approved vocabulary handed down from on high, spin your wheels. This had the stupefying effect of making resistance illegal and your interests indefensible. You had to wear a cap.
Blue-collar workers no longer counted for anything in this new world. Their glory days were out of fashion. People laughed at their unions, which talked big but were always ready to strike a deal. Whenever some poor slob demanded a less pathetic existence, he was carefully shown how unreasonable his desire to live was. In wanting to eat and enjoy himself like anybody else, he risked slowing the march of progress. But his selfishness was understandable. He was just ignorant of worldwide trends. If they raised his pay, his job would fly off to the outskirts of Bucharest. The famously hardworking, patriotic Chinese would do the work in his stead. He simply needed to grasp these new constraints, which were explained to him by affable, well-paid pedagogues.
That said, there was no danger of a supervisor showing up in the middle of July, and Patrick worked bareheaded. As he’d expected, it took him all morning to cover the whole hospital. He worked through his lunch hour, because Anthony was coming to dinner and he wanted to go home early. After three o’clock, he even elected to swipe a few electronic badges without restocking. With vending machines, it was obviously tempting to pretend to work while just recording your passage. He worked quickly and accurately, making the same moves at each machine, treating himself to a free Coke from time to time. Since he’d given up liquor, that had become his vice. He drank a couple of quarts a day, which led to bloating and frighteningly guttural belches. In an empty hospital hallway, they took on almost pyrotechnical dimensions. The best was when they hit when he was stopped at a red light. People would turn to him with quizzical looks on their faces. At the wheel of his Districan vehicle, Patrick would give them a little military salute. That was surely good for the company’s image.
* * *
—
Punctual as usual, Anthony arrived at his father’s around seven. They hugged on the threshold. They now had to get along far from Hélène’s eyes, and didn’t know quite how to do it. The kind of dull hostility that had served to connect them had evaporated. What remained in its place was a kind of affectionate embarrassment. They were especially careful to avoid any hot topics.
“So, how’s it going?”
“All right.”
“What’s that?”
Frowning, Anthony’s father was pointing at the cuts and bruises on his son’s face. His lip was split, and one eye sported a rainbow-colored bruise.
“It’s nothing.”
“Were you in a fight?”
“No.
“Let me see.”
Anthony pulled away before his father touched him. It was an instinctive movement. Patrick’s hand dropped. No
point in insisting.
“All right.”
Anthony went to sit in the little living room, facing the parking lot. He had locked his motorbike out front on purpose. He liked keeping an eye on it. His father cooked dinner in the kitchen. Anthony recognized the smell of tomato sauce, heard meat sizzling in the frying pan.
“What are you making?”
“Spaghetti bolognese.”
“Cool.”
His father smiled. Spaghetti was practical, and it was the only thing he cooked when Anthony came over. Make a half-pound package of pasta, and the boy wolfed it down. Patrick was proud of that appetite and what the kid had become. During his entire childhood, Anthony had been small, below average; you could tell by the charts in his health file. Not to mention his screwed-up eye and the way he always clung to his mother’s skirts. Some things did improve with the passage of time after all. Patrick lowered the flame under the pan, added onions and garlic to the meat, then heated everything while stirring it with a wooden spatula. One thing was still bothering him, though. Anthony had gotten beat up and he wanted to know why. Put words to the injury.
He heard an official-sounding voice coming from the TV in the living room. It was a wrap-up of the Tour de France.
“Who has the maillot jaune?”
“Indurain.”
“It’s getting boring. Same old, same old.”
“The man’s a machine.”
“No kidding.”
“He’s gonna win.”
“I know.”
They ate while watching the news. Anthony was bent over his plate. Patrick cut his pasta, which reminded him of old arguments. Hélène used to say that you shouldn’t cut spaghetti; she was a stickler about things like that. Remembering it gave Patrick an odd feeling.
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