Article 353

by Tanguy Viel

  I didn’t tell Erwan anything. I didn’t tell him anything for a long time. That’s strange, now that I think of it. But then again, why would I go putting stories like that in the head of an eleven-year-old kid?

  Is silence like darkness? I wonder about that now. Is it a too favorable climate for mushrooms and bad thoughts? Today, of course, I’d gladly say that plants and flowers blossom in the light of day, that you have to talk, see, you have to talk and shine light everywhere, in all children’s lives, you can’t let night or anxiety win. I now know how you transmit so many bad things to a son, I told the judge, if underneath the things you’re saying there’s so much charged air going from one of you to the other, in that porosity of things circulating in a kitchen at night when you’re having dinner across from each other, and it may be in the fabric woven over the course of days, all those meals when he would tell me what he did in school and what kind of job he wanted later on, all those evenings when I wasn’t really listening to him, it works like an underground water table seeking an outlet, believe me. And you’re sitting there like an absentminded rock, there’s no point in even trying to lie, no point in saying, “Yes, of course I’m listening to you,” because like every child, he knows perfectly well when you’re not listening, forever repeating some loop in his mind, like a sheet of glass in front of your eyes that cuts you off from the world, and then the more your thinking seems to wall you in, you may not realize it, but the more you’re abandoning your child right then and there.

  So you signed, said the judge. What then?

  Then? Then nothing. Then zip, nothing at all, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Otherwise I’d be in a chaise longue with a blanket over my knees, gazing out at the ocean. I wouldn’t be sitting across from you, trailing a string of pots and pans that jangle every time I make a move.

  I heaved a deep sigh and moved my chair closer; it squeaked on the old parquet floor.

  The thing I’ll never know, I told the judge, the thing I’m dying to know, is just how much Lazenec knew. When did he realize that everything would come to a stop before so much as a concrete foundation was poured outside my window, that excavators would just do some digging, and after that, instead of stone blocks and windows being raised while we watched, instead of a six-story building with a terrace on the roof and an indoor pool, instead of all that there was a rectangular hole in the ground, an empty rectangle outlining a theoretical future, but only theoretical.

  The judge flipped through his case files, pulled a bunch of photos from the folders, and laid them out in front of me. They showed the progress of construction on the estate, if you could still call it an estate—what used to be an estate. Looking at them, the photographs were like evidence of the massacre, of building stones abandoned, the plowed-up five acres facing the sea, with just a few stakes and corner posts to mark out a construction site, and then a hole, a rectangle of emptiness like a new quarry being mined for valuable ore and nothing else, nothing, except for the soggy advertising posters hung on the chain-link fence still promising a bright future, with the irony far beyond them, the lawn turned to mud around the ruins of the château—ruins, of course, because when it came to destroying things, that was something Lazenec knew how to do.

  Some of the photos showed a cement mixer or two badly framed against the sky, or people in the distance apparently having a conversation. Lazenec was in some of them, smiling away, as he did for so many years, the way he would smile and clap everyone on the back, and, like a Marseillais, hug and kiss people at random. On the job site he wore a suit and tie with a hard hat, but look, nobody needed a hard hat because there wasn’t anything there.

  Since then, instead of bags of mortar and rows of cinder blocks being laid, I told the judge, the only things that came together were the weeks and months and years, fitted into a compact and increasingly opaque block, only this one was horizontal. I watched this heavy time pass, being stacked up like a building erected under our very eyes, but it was the kind of building that wasn’t likely to be demolished once it was up.

  Time itself appeared like a ghost in the photographs, the city balconies in the distance an arena where spectators might have waited for the outcome of a battle between Lazenec and his own shadow. That shadow still hovered over the ruins, if you can call ruins the remains of something that hadn’t happened. And my little house at the entrance to the estate, the five hundred square feet of stone I shared with Erwan, stood trembling in the middle of the disaster, surrounded by bulldozer scars, with red and ocher dust coming in the windows and getting into everything, our bedrooms, under our sheets, and on the toys gradually being moved up to the attic.

  I didn’t need to tell Erwan much, you understand. As time went on, he got it. As time went on, he could feel my worry growing, he saw my expression change over the months and seemed to sympathize when I looked out at the non-progress of the non-construction site, interrupted only by Lazenec’s regular visits, tramping like a wild boar though a field of flowers, leading his useless guys and make-believe businesses around like walk-ons being paid to play the same scene every day. And of course he kept giving us big friendly waves when he saw Erwan or me at our kitchen window like plastic figurines with fixed smiles.

  Do you know which fable Erwan learned at school that year? I asked the judge. It was “The Fox and the Crow.” And when he recited it to me, each time he got to the sentence “It opened its beak wide, and down fell the cheese,” I swear that something cramped inside me. Like I was perched in a tree and Lazenec was down below, looking at me and laughing and saying, “This lesson’s certainly worth a piece of cheese, right?” So the more time went by, the less I felt like explaining things to Erwan. As time went on, it was as if I risked accidentally dumping all the weight piled on my shoulders onto his back. So by keeping quiet about my bad thoughts, I was protecting him, as if I’d managed to build a watertight barrier between the two of us and the world, with me sinking deeper and deeper in the mud of a stalled construction site, and him simply remaining a child. But it doesn’t work that way, does it? Maybe even childhood doesn’t exist. Maybe the world affects you at every age, and that’s just the way it is. Only when certain hours come, they’re like black marks that shape you.

  Erwan in front of the switched-off television. Erwan in the kitchen watching me think. Erwan outside the bank’s windows. Erwan behind his bedroom door. Erwan on the docks looking at Lazenec’s big boat. I’m saying that each scene became a fixed image in his brain, like a box cutter ripping his skin, or not his skin but slicing the flesh underneath, so it wound up lacerating his inner face. Maybe that’s all memory is, the sharp edges of inner images, not the images themselves, I mean, but the slashing jumble of images inside us, chained up to keep them from getting loose, but the chafing that stretches and holds them becomes like a vulture tearing at your flesh, and without a devil or a god to free you, the agony can last for years.

  I was quiet for a moment. Erwan’s face was floating there in the room between the judge and me. The judge himself seemed to be accompanying me in my thoughts.

  I’d like to ask you something, I said.

  Go ahead.

  If you’d had to sentence Erwan, what would you do?

  He nodded slowly and raised his left eyebrow, then said, I don’t know, he really did screw up.

  That’s for sure, I said, it was a major screw-up.

  And then a little more silence fell, maybe as a way to fill the distance between me and Erwan, a hologram suddenly pacing in his cell, there on the judge’s desk between the books and the files, which had become like the walls of a prison.

  The judge didn’t move. As time went on, I started feeling I was in the office of a psychologist or someone like that, seeing him motionless, not answering, his hands folded under his chin, and because in the hours that had passed I felt he’d been asking me to dig inside myself the way a psychologist would have done, to unearth everything down to t
he dust of bones, provided it shed light, and even more light, and without wondering whether with too much light, people like me might go blind. God knows I knew that feeling of treating my brain like a stone quarry and excavating day after day to get out what I could, hoping it would eventually free me from searching too much, that I would eventually do something other than just watch the boats setting off at dawn and the outbound fishermen waving in a gesture of forgiveness—the fishermen being the guys from the Arsenal who’d been laid off, and the moment the money was in their bank accounts had run to the boat salesman and without hesitating, without arguing, pointed at the one they’d been coveting for years, because they knew how to do that, like a gift or a genetic program inscribed in them, they’d been able to do it, nursing that fixed, patient thought, and when the time was right, circulating it in their nerves and not just in their nerves but right down to their index finger pointing at this or that model, saying: That one, I want that one. But for me, it was as if I lacked that program.

  And now that the château had been razed, now that I could see the sea directly from my kitchen window, each time one or another of them hailed us from his cockpit, their lobster traps ready to be set, I had the impression they were taunting Erwan and me as we stood behind the window and looked at the sea. Sometimes Erwan asked me: Why don’t you buy yourself a boat? Looking totally evasive, I would tell him: Sure, of course I’m going to buy one, I’m going to buy one very soon. And to help convince him, I took him to the port to look at boats that very afternoon, and we visited sales offices, comparing prices. He was twelve, maybe fourteen, his voice starting to change. After so many worn-out promises, I could almost hear him saying: I know you’ll never buy anything, I know you’ve never been able to make a decision, but don’t forget that someday someone will make a decision for you, and when that time comes, they won’t ask your opinion about it.

  I read this in Erwan’s nonchalance, now that he had reversed our roles, I mean in the beginning I was the one who took him along, and then little by little he forced himself to go with me, as if to make me happy, or even worse, so as not to broadcast his pity or his shame everywhere, because I now know that whatever take you might have on a problem, a son doesn’t want to see that, your weakness. A son isn’t programmed to pity you.

  In a way, it would’ve been easier if Lazenec had just skipped out, left the area and changed his name. We would’ve run from law firm to law firm filing hopeless suits against the bankers, the insurers, and the notaires connected with the project, at least it would’ve kept us busy. We would’ve lost, but we would’ve been busy. I’ll say it again: Lazenec’s stroke of genius was to go on living among us, staying all those years, summer and winter, like he was a flower, a sunflower that turns as the hours pass, in a garden contest where he took first prize. And do you know why? Because the longer he stayed, the more we told ourselves that if he’s staying, for sure it means that he’s not dishonest. If he stays, it means he believes in the project. Whereas it was actually just the opposite: He stayed so the rest of us would keep on believing, so he could fan our little inner fire every day, walk around each person’s soul, stoking their boiler with overflowing shovelfuls of some inexhaustible fuel. And it worked. Because the funniest thing isn’t even that a guy was able to hypnotize an entire village, the funniest thing is how much time it took us to come back from that strange country, to have written a check that big, to watch the guy who cashed it spending money like there was no tomorrow, and still tell ourselves that this was a sign that we’d put our money in good hands. And do you know why? Because it meant that he had money, it meant that things were working, and it meant that soon, very soon, it would be our turn to play with fat rolls of bills. Think of what that means, for a guy like me to be saying this, as though I were the kind of person who wanted to play with rolls of bills. Not that I suddenly started liking those nouveau riche manners, but I just got used to them, I wound up thinking it was normal that Lazenec should spend his days in the best restaurants, without telling myself that it was our money in his hands and in his pockets, our money that he was cheerfully burning through or shifting from one account to another like the coins in a shell game.

  This all might seem crazy to you, and that’s understandable because you look at facts, just the facts, but you can line them up one after another on a timeline, and it still doesn’t explain this. To understand, to really understand deep down, we need a new science or new physics, with a new Einstein who would explain how the soul or thought or, I don’t know, this thing inside that vibrates in the light, this thing that sings its own music, with notes that the ear can’t hear, those deep strange notes like the song of humpback whales. That’s it, Lazenec and I were humpback whales and our waves met under the ocean.

  And it’s not as if I hadn’t taken him aside a thousand times to ask when the project would really get going, and even, more than once, to suggest that it would be better if we just backed off and settled it as friends: We’ll tear up the contract, I’d say, you give me back my money and that’ll be the end of it. But you know what he answered, besides the hundred times when he brushed me off with a pat on the shoulder? He said, “I’m concerned, Kermeur. You aren’t broke, are you?”

  That’s completely nuts, wouldn’t you say? The very guy who caused you to be broke is now handing you a pole longer than his arm, he’s opening the door so you can shout whatever you want right into his ear, and instead of that, you quietly answer, “No, of course not, I’m not broke, but still, you understand…” Whereas of course you’re broke. You saw your banker just the day before about a huge overdraft, you watched your son waiting outside the bank windows kicking an empty can while you were promising the banker that things would be all right, that you had faith in the project and the guy behind it, so that the whole scene of you begging the banker, of you feeling your breath coming a little shorter each day, is playing out while Lazenec’s question is hanging in the air, but instead of that, you again say, No, of course not. And you just add that after all this time you’re starting to get a little worried. But a guy like him takes the phrase “a little” and gauges how much room he still has to maneuver, measures it with his own instruments, and those instruments have strange names. I’m pretty sure they’re called “instinct,” and “intuition,” and “cunning.”

  For a little guy like me to be taken to the cleaners, that’s just the way things are, I told the judge, but for the others, the people in the city or the soccer club, people who invested ten times as much as I did, it’s completely crazy.

  How many units, did you say?

  Thirty. Thirty units. Thirty apartments at an average of five hundred thousand francs each is a pretty good chunk of change, isn’t it?

  At that point something in the judge seemed to gradually stiffen, as if I had an electric transformer and was slowly turning up the power. Now more and more angry, he exclaimed: For God’s sake, what could he have done with all that money?

  What do you think he did with it? I asked. He spent it! He spent it, with the rest of us watching him. Right under the noses of thirty suckers like me who dropped five hundred thousand francs on a scale model. He burned through that money right under my nose, under the mayor’s nose, under Erwan’s nose. It’s not hard to figure out, he burned through that money right in front of us. I’ve drunk some great wines too, but you know what money I used? The money for a Merry Fisher that I never bought, whereas he did. That’s right, Lazenec bought a brand-new Merry Fisher and even went so far as to take us out for cruises around the harbor.

  The judge tried to calm down, several times picking up the pen he’d been playing with for hours, to make a note of something or just to look busy.

  So there were thirty of you, he said. What about the twenty-nine others?

  Oh yeah, the other twenty-nine, that’s right. Well, the twenty-nine others should be here with me facing you. I mean they should have helped me toss Lazenec into the drink. B
ecause I don’t mind telling you, it’s not so easy to heave somebody over a boat railing all by yourself.

  The judge didn’t pick up on that, didn’t ask exactly how I’d done it, how I waited for us to stop the boat, for us to haul up the pot with the lobster and the crabs, how Lazenec leaned over to lower it to the bottom again, sixty feet down. Standing behind him, all I had to do was to grab him by the legs and dump him into the sea like a sack of potatoes. That was all there was to it, that’s how it happened.

  But the judge wasn’t interested in those details. What interested him was something more mental, like a math equation he had to formulate or solve. But I needed to solve the puzzle too, I told him, only I’m not a thinker, so I need to solve it physically. And I’m not an impulsive person, either, if you figure what six years of daily patience represents, six years of believing that instead of getting a bad mushroom, there might be an apartment with bay windows glinting in the sun.

  Okay, said the judge, but about the twenty-nine others: Why didn’t you get together against Lazenec?

  Because, I said. And like an eight-year-old, I ended the sentence as soon it was out, just repeating a little more quietly, “Because.”

  Because what?

  Because I didn’t want people to know.