Clémence had this obsession with her vagina, for example. Her labia spread out like butterfly wings, and this alarmed her, as if it were a sickness or deformity.
Steph had already had to reassure her on several occasions. Each time Clémence was about to sleep with a new guy, her obsession returned. Unable to stand it any longer, at some point Steph asked to see for herself.
“What do you mean? Your pussy’s very nice.”
“But there, it looks like steak.”
“You’re sick. It’s super cute.”
“Yeah, but yours is perfect.”
“True,” said Steph.
Finally, they raked Simon Rotier over the coals together. He was stupid, micropenile, pretentious, arrogant, disgusting, impotent, and unfuckable.
“Yeah, but he’s cute.”
“Majorly cute.”
“But he treated us like dingbats in the meantime.”
“Yeah,” Clémence admitted.
Steph handed her the 7 Up bottle. The soda was warm, but Clémence drank some anyway, to make her happy.
“Are you angry at me?” she asked.
Steph wasn’t quite sure anymore.
“He’s an asshole, that’s all.”
“You gonna dump him?”
“That’s the worst part of it. I can’t even do that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t even know if he’s really my boyfriend. We never did anything to make it official.”
“Like what? What do you mean?”
“I mean his parents, they think we’re just friends.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. He never really introduced me that way. I’d come to his place, it was the same thing. I could have been a guy.”
“What about you? Did you introduce him to your folks?”
“Not really, now that I think of it. In fact, he treated me like dirt right from the start. We never went anywhere, just the two of us. He fucked me when he felt like it. And especially, he saw too many other girls while we were going out. When we got together, it was almost always just the two of us, never his friends or mine. He never skipped a party to come see me, never once took me out to a restaurant. Basically, he never gave a shit.”
“What about you?”
“Hey, you already know the whole story.”
That was true; Clémence did know it. And had known it from the time when every other conversation revolved around Steph’s great love, her hopes, her suspicions, all that stuff. Once, in her senior year, Steph had hit rock bottom. She stopped eating for a couple of weeks and had to be sent to a shrink. The guy gave her minimal treatment: got her to talk about her father, then prescribed Prozac.
Clémence really couldn’t stand Simon, that pretentious little jerk. It was all about him, all the time, and his relationship with the world was that of a taker, pure and simple. His little head, all that money, his phony rock ’n’ roll, totally rotten side. But he was hot, which was a drag.
The first time he came on to Clémence was at a party at the Rochand son’s place. The kid’s dad was a notaire, and his mom an agrégée, a certified master teacher. They lived in a big, really gorgeous downtown apartment, a floor-through full of mirrors, with parquet floors, trendy modern paintings, furniture that was a mix of classic reproductions and designer pieces. Every year in February they went skiing in Chamonix. But this year they’d left their eldest son at home for once, because of some business involving his need for math and physics tutoring. The poor kid was hopeless in science, yet his parents absolutely insisted that he do a science major, even though he would eventually study law like his father. Whatever the case, this denial of winter sports led to a series of parties at the Rochands’ place. They were actually pretty low-key, because in those days everybody preferred smoking hash to drinking vodka. That was when Simon tried his luck with Clémence. He trapped her against a counter in the kitchen, even though Steph was in the next room. She had caught his smell, felt his hips against hers.
“Just where do you think you are?”
“What?”
“Cut it out! Steph is six feet away from us. Seriously, what’s your problem?”
Simon very simply didn’t give a damn. He was so sure of himself, so disdainful. Clémence thought of hauling off and slapping him. Instead of that, she didn’t resist when he kissed her. A kiss so incredible, she immediately wet her panties. Crazy, all those things that you initially think are unacceptable and disgusting but then something happens inside you, under your skin and in your guts, and you find yourself feeling like the ocean, all depths and wavelets. She and Simon ran to lock themselves in the bathroom at the end of the hall and started making out hot and heavy, their jeans open, their hands roaming, and their mouths locked together, endlessly sucking. Clémence had heard so much about this guy Simon from her girlfriend that she’d started feeling a kind of envy, a mirrored desire. She had to have him. That was how things started. Over the next weeks she swung between sweet madness and total remorse. She couldn’t stop hating and wanting him, usually at the same time.
* * *
—
“So what do we do now?”
Steph didn’t know. She felt as if they had just found each other again. She smiled at her friend. It wouldn’t have taken much for them to embrace.
“Are you going to see him again?”
“Nah,” said Clémence. “He’s dead to me.”
Steph wanted to believe her, anyway. She walked over to the viewpoint map that identified the valley’s landmarks. It bore several inscriptions in waterproof marker: “Kurt Cobain forever,” “No future,” “Motherfucker.”
“Do you remember the kid from that summer?” asked Steph. “The one with the cousin.”
Clémence didn’t know quite who she meant.
“Sure you do. The two of them showed up at the beach in a canoe. You went out with the older one, for chrissakes. You know, the house with that crazy mother of his.”
“Oh, yeah. So what?”
“I saw the younger one.”
“The one with the screwed-up eye?”
Steph nodded. The landscape before her offered only ruins, stale ideas, boring, predictable weekends, and too-familiar faces.
“I’m never coming back to this shitty town,” she said.
“What does that have to do with the guy?”
“Nothing. I just saw him at the sailing club the other evening.”
“What was he doing there? The family doesn’t have a pot to piss in.”
“He was working. He sort of got into a fight with Romain.”
“Yeah, those guys are real lowlifes.”
“Well, he sure had changed, anyway.”
“Hey, come on! You aren’t doing one of those losers, are you?”
“ ’Course not. I’m just saying he’s changed a lot.”
Clémence stood up in turn. She swung her arms around in the air to get the stiffness out of her shoulders and to wake up a little. Though evening was gathering, the temperature still seemed to be rising.
“His cousin was cute, anyway.”
“Mainly he was a jerk.”
“Come on! He was super handsome.”
“Yeah, but that house, and his mother…That was a red flag.”
“Yeah, so? What about the other one?” asked Clémence.
“I dunno. He has potential.”
“In any case, we’ll be gone in two months, and they’ll never hear of us again.”
“That’s for sure,” said Steph.
She looked at her watch. It would soon be six o’clock. Anthony had said to meet him behind the old power plant at nine. Maybe she would go. After all, what was stopping her?
10
By the time Hacine reached L’Usine to pick up his father, people had already be
en drinking for a couple of hours. He parked at a good distance and walked the rest of the way. He very quickly understood what was happening. From fifty yards away he could see disheveled men staggering in the street, talking. The tables set up for the occasion were now littered with empty cans and plates, with brown circles that looked like constellations on the white paper tablecloths, and plastic tumblers rolling in the gutters. Women’s laughter rang out. Inside, voices joined in the opening bars of “Les lacs de Connamara” pam papam, papppam! and then trailed off, replaced by a busy, cheerful hubbub.
Before making his way inside, Hacine thought he’d better take a look first. The place was jammed and lively, reeking of beer, tobacco, and bodies heated by alcohol and promiscuity. He entered as if into a sauna, looking for a face, and was promptly caught in the whirl and deafened by the noise. It was odd to see these red-faced women in their Sunday best, and men in shirtsleeves with loosened ties sprawled on chairs, telling each other funny stories or talking about politics, about Bernard Tapie and Balladur. Overexcited children were racing between the tables, and from time to time a mother would nab one and give the kid a good shake. This was no place to be running around like that. But the game very quickly resumed. People had long since quit drinking coffee, and pitchers of cold beer glowed on the tables. The waitresses, as shiny as seals, endlessly cruised the room, topping up glasses and emptying William Lawson ashtrays the size of dessert plates. Behind the bar, Cathy stood anchored to her beer taps. They had already had to change the barrel. She was earning six months’ receipts in a day. Speakers were playing Polnareff’s “Holidays” on the Nostalgie station in the background. In another place, a man was resting six feet under. Here, his nephew had stood up several times to propose a toast in his memory but was now asleep in a corner, his head resting on his bare arms. Underfoot, Hacine could feel the resistance of the floor sticky with beer.
“Hacine!”
His father wound up spotting him first, and waved from a table on the left in the back, near the door to the pool room behind the bar. Hacine joined him. The Arabs had all gathered together, of course. They hadn’t drunk as much as other people but were in a very good mood just the same. Hacine recognized several of them, neighbors. He said hello.
“Is this your son?” asked one, a bald man with a lined face and a gleaming, caramel-colored pate.
“Yes. Sit down for a moment.”
“I’d rather we took off now,” Hacine answered.
“Sit down, I am telling you. Come on.”
Hacine gave in, and ordered a Coke. He felt ill at ease among these men, who’d all been born over there and were full of naïve ideas. They had worked like animals, yet wound up stuck off in their little corner: welcome, but not all that welcome.
Hacine never discussed this with his friends, but it was a thorn in their side just the same. The boys had all grown up fearing their fathers, men who didn’t fool around. Yet they couldn’t really take seriously what their fathers said. The men mostly misunderstood the real rules of French society. They spoke the language badly. They laid down precepts that were out of date. So their sons were caught between the respect they owed their fathers and a certain understandable contempt.
Besides, what had these fathers, who had tried to escape poverty, really done? They all owned color TVs and cars, they had roofs over their heads, and their children went to school. But in spite of those things, satisfactions, and accomplishments, no one could say they had succeeded. No material comfort seemed able to erase their initial poverty. Was it due to professional vexations, being given grunt work, being marginalized, or just the word “immigrant,” which summed them up wherever they went? Or was it the fate of being stateless, which they couldn’t admit to themselves? These fathers, hung suspended between two languages and two shores, were badly paid, disrespected, uprooted, and had no heritage to pass on. From this their children, and especially their sons, developed an abiding feeling of disappointment. So to do well in school, succeed, have a career, and play the game became almost impossible for them. In a country that treated their families like a minor footnote to society, the least honest effort looked like an act of collaboration.
That said, Hacine also had plenty of former classmates who were getting technical diplomas, majoring in sociology and mechanical engineering, earning business certificates, even studying medicine. In the final analysis, it was hard to sort out the impacts of circumstances, personal laziness, and general oppression. He himself tended to favor explanations that let him off the hook and justified the liberties he took with the law.
Hacine finished his Coke. It was nearly seven o’clock. All this was dragging on. He didn’t like this place, didn’t like these people, didn’t like the atmosphere. Besides, he had to see Eliott a little later to explain how things would go down from now on. He was at the start of a delicate period. He had to prime the pump. He thought he could probably get at least four thousand francs for the kilo he’d brought back. With that, he would launch the business. When you bought directly from the grower, right at the farm, you could buy a kilo for twelve hundred francs. He knew good middlemen, but he wasn’t kidding himself: He would have to pay five to six thousand francs. With a twenty-thousand-franc investment, he was sure to get three or four kilos, which he could retail for twenty thousand francs each. Then the business would be up and running. Hacine would drive the first trips himself, but planned to turn that lousy job over to other people as soon as possible. He wasn’t one of those knuckleheads who kept racing across Europe for the excitement, pedal to the metal, even after they’d become millionaires. He would concentrate on tasks with significant value added: negotiating prices, stocking raw material, organizing logistics, and managing teams in the field. He had gone over his calculations a hundred times. The graphs followed a lovely exponential curve. The more money came in, the more he would move to the background. The mediocre prestige of being a big shot no longer interested him. On the other hand, he still had that gnawing hunger to be rich. It was no longer a matter of success or comfort. He needed the money to avenge himself, to wipe away the spittle.
Hacine figured he could eventually get a big slice of the pie between Reims and Brussels, Verdun and Luxembourg. There was competition, but he wasn’t worried. As he had with little Kader, he would do whatever it took. All that was left was to whip the local labor force into line. For starters, he had a little money and no scruples. But the first months would be critical. Like old-time merchants in Bordeaux, Bristol, and Amsterdam who bet everything on a first ship, he knew that a single storm could doom all his hopes. That risk so stressed him that he ground his teeth while he slept. He would wake up with a sore jaw, wondering what had happened. He and Eliott drew up lists: babysitters, lookouts, sellers, managers. The people he had to convince, the people he had to mess up. Make a couple of examples. It would work. His stomach hurt, and he’d had diarrhea for days. He felt emotionally dead, or nearly so.
He leaned over and spoke into his father’s ear:
“We ought to go.”
“Yes, yes. Just a minute.”
The old man was enjoying himself. Hacine had time to go take a piss. When he stood up, he saw Hélène.
* * *
—
At first, it didn’t quite register. She was a middle-aged woman with thick hair falling to her shoulders. She reminded him of someone, but who? They looked at each other for a second. Hacine racked his brains. In Heillange, you were always running into the same people. Then the boy sitting next to her stood up. He was very young but quite husky, with a drooping left eyelid. Hacine jumped out of his chair.
“Where are you going like that?” asked his father.
“I’ll be right back.”
* * *
—
For her part, Hélène immediately recognized the tall, brown young man, as spindly as an insect, who had just stood up. He held her gaze for a moment and gave a polite no
d. His dark eyes were disturbingly unreadable. His face was absolutely blank. Hélène had drunk quite a few beers and her head was spinning a little. Patrick was talking to his neighbor. Around her, she saw only red faces and open mouths, all that racket and smoke, the women fanning themselves with the yellow pamphlet handed out in church. Anthony had gotten to his feet and she had to move her chair to let him by.
“I’ll be right back,” he said in turn.
Anthony headed for the men’s room nearby. The young brown man crossed the room and followed him in. The door to the toilet closed behind them. My god, thought Hélène, suddenly frozen.
“Patrick.”
She grabbed him by the arm, but he couldn’t hear her. Especially since he was talking about soccer. For the last several minutes she’d been hearing a chorus of foreign names: Baggio, Bebetto. Dunga, Aldaïr.
“Patrick!” she repeated.
Now she was pleading with him.
* * *
—
The men’s room at L’Usine looked like a hallway. Anthony went to stand at the only urinal and relieved himself, tracing loops and curlicues on the porcelain. He had drunk five beers, and pissed on and on. Behind him was a stall with a door that didn’t close well, and next to him a tiny washbasin with a bar of soap on a metal rod. To dry your hands, you did the best you could, which usually meant wiping them on your pants. Daylight entered through a barred window. That was it. Anthony began to whistle lightheartedly. He was a little loaded and feeling especially glad that things between his parents were going so well. After months of hatred and insults, their politeness was already a wonderful improvement. And his father was sticking to his pledge, even in a bar. Anthony felt an unusual burst of optimism. Then the door opened.
And Their Children After Them Page 27