by Michel Bussi
6
13 August 2016, 9 a.m.
Clotilde had gone to get a baguette, three croissants and a litre of milk that she was holding in a bag in one hand, with a litre of orange juice in the other. On the way back, she took a detour.
On purpose.
Valou was still asleep. Franck had gone for a run to the Sémaphore de Cavallo.
In the summer of ’89, Clotilde remembered, she had been sent off on the breakfast run every morning. She would drag her feet as she went in search of fresh bread at the reception desk; she would zigzag along the avenues of the Euproctes campsite, hoping to bump into someone, but none of the teenagers were awake at that time of day, so she had invented a complicated circuit through the maze of the campsite before coming back. Today, conversely, Clotilde had taken the shortest route possible to get to bungalow C29. The one where she had spent the first fifteen summers of her life.
She recognised only volumes. The size of the bungalow. The area of the site. The trees had grown, big olive trees whose trunks twisted up to form a canopy above the chalet which had extended its reach at ground level: a new electric awning, a terrace, a barbecue, an outdoor seating area. It had all been modernised through the good work of the new director of Euproctes, Cervone Spinello who, with sharp business sense, had taken over the running of his father Basile’s campsite. Every innovation – a tennis court, a water slide, a site marked out for the future swimming pool – confirmed Clotilde’s suspicion that barely anything remained of the natural campsite of her childhood, that shady terrain that provided nothing but a bed to sleep in, water for washing with and trees to hide among.
Studying the C29 site in greater detail, Clotilde reflected that she hadn’t seen it since the accident. In the days that followed the tragedy, Basile Spinello had brought her possessions to Calvi, to the hospital ward. A large bag containing her clothes, her mini-cassettes, her books. All of her personal items, except the one closest to her heart: her notebook. That notebook in which she had recorded her state of mind during that summer month. The notebook she had left behind on a bench at Arcanu Farm.
She had thought about it often during that time, on the plane that took her straight from Balagne Emergency Medical Centre to Paris, then in Conflans, the home of Jozsef and Sara, her mother’s parents, who had looked after her until she was eighteen. Over the years she had eventually forgotten the notebook. Clotilde reflected with amusement that it was probably still waiting for her somewhere, thirty years later, tidied away in a wardrobe drawer, slipped behind a piece of furniture, stuck on a shelf under a pile of yellowing books.
Clotilde walked towards bungalow C29, pushing aside the branches of a smaller olive tree that was planted in front of the terrace. She remembered that there was already such a tree, the same size, outside her window in 1989. Perhaps Cervone had ripped out the old trees to plant new ones?
‘Can I help you?’
A man had come out of the bungalow, a New York Giants baseball cap wedged over his greying temples, a cup of coffee in his hand. Smiling. Surprised.
Clotilde liked the simple conviviality of campsites. No barriers, no hedges, no palisades. Not a private home, more of a communal one.
‘Oh, don’t worry …’
A little way off, two little boys were playing football.
‘Did you lose your ball under the bungalow?’ the Giant asked.
From his smile, Clotilde guessed that he would have loved to see her getting down on all fours in front of the terrace, wiggling her bottom in her tight leggings as she crawled under the bungalow. On reflection, Clotilde also hated that about campsites – the absence of barriers. The blurring of lines. Ordinary lust.
‘No. Just memories. I used to come to this bungalow on holiday.’
‘Really? That must have been quite a while ago. We’ve been booking this same chalet for eight years now.’
‘It was twenty-seven years ago.’
The Giant’s shocked expression implied a mute compliment.
You don’t look it.
A woman appeared behind him. A mug of tea gripped between two fingers, curly hair held back by a wooden clip, a colourful sarong draped around her crumpled skin. She was smiling too.
She went and stood beside her husband and spoke to Clotilde.
‘Twenty-seven? So this bungalow, C29, used to be yours? I’m sorry, but an idea has just come to me. You wouldn’t happen to be Clotilde Idrissi?’
Clotilde didn’t reply. Crazy thoughts jostled in her head. They hadn’t put up a memorial plaque in the bungalow: Here lived Paul and Palma Idrissi. But hadn’t the story of her parents’ accident been passed down from generation to generation of campers over the decades?
The cursed bungalow.
The woman blew on her cup and slipped a hand under the Giant’s T-shirt.
A subliminal but explicit message.
This one’s mine.
The universal language of gestures and bodies that live in the open air for the duration of the summer. You expose, you look, you meet, you brush past … but you don’t touch, even if it’s all there within easy reach.
She took a sip of her tea then continued, delighted to be the bearer of a mysterious message.
‘I have some post for you, Clotilde. It’s been waiting for you for a while!’
Clotilde nearly collapsed on the spot for the second time in less than a minute. She grabbed the topmost branch of the baby olive tree.
‘For … twenty-seven years?’ she stammered.
The Giant’s wife burst out laughing.
‘Heavens no! We only got it yesterday. Fred, will you get it for me? It’s on the fridge.’
The Giant went inside and then came back out holding an envelope. His wife pressed herself against him as she read out the address.
Clotilde Idrissi
Bungalow C29, Euproctes campsite
20260 La Revellata
Clotilde’s heart raced for the third time, even faster than before. She almost tore off the olive branch.
‘We’ll need to see some ID,’ the Giant said, laughing. ‘We were going to take it to reception, but since you’re here …’
Clotilde’s damp fingers closed around the letter.
‘Thank you.’
She swayed along the sandy path. Her ballet flats left twisting curves as she walked, like a skater sliding over a frozen lake. Her eyes were fixed on her surname, her first name, the address on the envelope. She recognised the writing, but it was impossible. She knew it was impossible.
Without planning or even thinking about it, Clotilde went on through the campsite. She needed to be on her own to open this letter and she knew of only one place that would be secret enough for that. Secret and sacred. The Cave of the Sea-Calves. A hole in the cliff that could only be reached by the sea, or directly from the campsite via a small earthen track; a cave where, as a teenager, she had taken refuge a thousand times to read, dream, write and weep. She loved to write when she was young, she was even quite gifted, that was what her teachers and her friends had said. But then the words fled abruptly. Her talent hadn’t survived the accident.
She descended to her hiding place without any difficulty. The sand-and-gravel path had been replaced by a flight of concrete steps. The walls of the grotto had been defaced with lovers’ graffiti and obscene messages, and the place now smelt of beer and urine. It didn’t matter. The view of the Mediterranean, from inside the cave, remained the same: vertiginous, making the occupier feel like a seabird ready to plunge on any prey that ventured to the surface of the water with a simple flick of the wing.
Clotilde set down her shopping, went a little way inside the grotto, then sat down on the cool, almost damp rocks and slowly tore open the envelope. Trembling, the way you might open a love letter, even though, as far as she could remember, she had never received such a thing. She had been born a few years too late. Her suitors had flirted with her by text, by email. Digital declarations had been new and wildly exciting in those days
but there was nothing left of them today, not a line, not a single note slipped into a book.
Clotilde’s thumb and index finger extracted a small white sheet folded in four. She unfolded it. It was a handwritten letter, a careful hand, like the writing of an elderly schoolmistress.
My Clo,
I don’t know if you’re as stubborn now as you were when you were little, but there’s something I’d like to ask of you.
Tomorrow, when you visit Arcanu Farm to see Cassanu and Lisabetta, please go and stand for a few minutes beneath the holm oak, before night falls, so that I can see you.
I will recognise you, I hope.
I would like your daughter to be there too.
I ask nothing else of you. Nothing at all.
Or perhaps just that you raise your eyes to the sky and look at Betelgeuse. If you only knew, my Clo, how many nights I have looked at it and thought of you.
My whole life is a dark room.
Kisses,
P.
Waves splashed against the entrance to the cave, as if God had created it at exactly the right height for it to be showered with sea spray without being flooded. In Clotilde’s hand, the paper shook like a sail blown by the wind.
But there was no wind. Just a calm morning, already warm, the sun gently beginning to probe the deepest recesses of the cave.
Kisses.
It was her mother’s handwriting.
P.
It was her mother’s signature.
Who but her mother could call her ‘My Clo’? Who but her mother could remember those details? The Goth-punk outfit that she hadn’t worn since the accident.
Who else would have remembered Beetlejuice. Betelgeuse, to give it its proper name. Clotilde had hung the poster in her bedroom at the time. It was Maman who had given it to her for her fourteenth birthday, having ordered it directly from Quebec.
Clotilde stepped forward and studied the path leading down to the sea, then above her the clifftop track that led towards the beaches at Alga and Oscelluccia. At the end of the path, a teenage girl was wandering alone, clutching her mobile phone, perhaps searching for the network, or trying to read a message secretively, without her parents peering over her shoulder.
Clotilde looked down at the letter once more.
Who else but her mother would have remembered that phrase that had obsessed Lydia Deetz? That cult phrase from her cult film, that phrase that Clotilde had thrown in her mother’s face, during the intimacy and violence of an argument, one evening when they were alone together?
Their secret. Between mother and daughter.
Her mother had wanted to drag her into town the following day to buy more presentable clothes – presentable meaning comfortable, colourful, feminine. Clotilde, before slamming the bedroom door in her mother’s face, had hurled at her those desperate words borrowed from Lydia Deetz. The answer like a summary of her teenage life.
My whole life is a dark room. One big. Dark. Room.
7
Friday, 11 August 1989, fifth day of the holidays
Alfalfa-blue sky
My father, on the other hand, I like.
I’m not sure a lot of people like my father, but I do, three times over.
My friends sometimes tell me he scares them. They think he’s handsome, that much is certain, with his black eyes, his raven hair, his short beard on his square chin. But maybe it’s exactly that, his confidence, that creates some distance.
You know what I mean?
My father is one of those people who are sure of themselves, who give their opinion with a single definitive word, give their friendship with two and take it back with three, the kind who can mow you down with a look and show no mercy. The scary teacher, the boss that you fear, respecting him and hating him at the same time. My father’s a bit like that with everyone. Except me!
I’m his darling little daughter. All his tricks might work with other people – his conductor’s baton making them play to his rhythm – but it doesn’t work with me.
Take his job, for example. He says he works in the environment, in agronomy, ecology, that he’s helping preserve the green lungs of the planet. In fact what he really does is sell turf! fifteen per cent of the market goes through him, apparently that represents thousands of jobs in France, and in a dozen other countries, so people keep their mouths shut when he talks about it, when he says it was only twelve per cent of the market when he first started at Fast Green, and that he expects to get to seventeen per cent before the year 2000. Others look impressed when my father says that every minute, an area the size of a football pitch is re-turfed in France, and that whatever you say, at the end of a day, that’s the equivalent of the Forest of Fontainebleau. They even look startled when he says he doesn’t care about Kentucky Bluegrass or fescues, those stalwarts of the lawns of big suburban houses, given that he’s in charge of the whole of the golf-course market in the Ile-de-France, and that he only ever sells agrostis stonifera, the blade of grass that tops them all.
It just makes me laugh.
A father who sells turf!
The shame of it. I’ve told him plenty of times – he could have found something better to fill the dreams of his darling daughter! So I jump onto his lap and tell him I know all his tall tales about turf are only so much nonsense, and that he’s really a spy, or a gentleman burglar, or a secret agent.
My name is Grass.
Ray Grass.
Right now, as usual, Papa isn’t here. No one is here apart from me.
I’m alone, at Bungalow C29, writing under the olive tree. Nicolas is off with the other teenagers from the campsite, Maman has taken the Fuego to go shopping in Calvi, Papa is at Arcanu Farm, with his parents, his cousins, his local friends.
He’s maintaining his Corsitude.
Papa’s Corsitude, on the other hand, is no laughing matter.
Paul Idrissi.
Lost in Normandy, in the hunchbacked Vexin.
No one laughs about that – except me!
Because to tell you the truth, Papa’s Corsitude, from September to June, consists only of a yellow rectangle stuck in the back window of his car. The Cabalistic unifying symbol of Corsicans lost on the mainland. With the Freemasons it’s a triangle. The Jews are made to wear a star.
For the Corsicans exiled in the North, it’s a rectangle.
The Corsica Ferries sticker.
Just to explain, Papa’s Corsitude begins when his yellow sticker starts peeling off, which means that the days are getting longer and the holidays are on their way. My Papa is a bit like those kids who start believing in Father Christmas once December comes, or old people who start believing in God when they are told how many months they have left to live. You know what I mean?
Oh! Wait a minute, reader, just raise your eyes a second, there’s a great procession going on in front of me. There’s Nicolas and Maria-Chjara, heading towards Alga beach with Cervone and Aurélia hot on their heels, and then the whole tribe, Candy, Tess, Steph, Hermann, Magnus, Filip, Ludo, Lars, Estefan … I’ll introduce you to them, don’t worry. All in good time.
I could go and join them, but no, I’ll stay here with you. That’s nice of me, don’t you think, choosing to write to you like someone doing homework on holiday, instead of chasing after the gang of big kids? Big kids who ignore me, snub me, leave me behind, abandon me, humiliate me, forget me … I could fill three pages this way, a whole thesaurus, but I’ll spare you the tirade and get back to my chapter about Papa.
His acute Corsitude, his longing for the maquis that afflicts him in June the way other people catch hay fever; I’ll describe it to you in three stages, which will turn into as many family rows.
The first stage occurs on the motorway just after Paris, when Papa takes out of God knows where some cassettes of Corsican music to put on in the Fuego. The second is once we’re on the island, our first meal, local charcuterie, cheese and fruit from the village, stocking up on produce from the little shops, buying coppa, lonzu and
brocciu, pretending that everything else, everything we put in our shopping trolley for the rest of the year, is just rubbish. The third is the interminable family visits, the grandparents, the cousins, the neighbours, the conversations in a foreign language, and Papa struggling because I can see that these days he speaks better English with the boss of Fast Green than he does Corsican with his friends, but he sticks at it, my Daddy does. It’s touching even if, like Nicolas, you don’t understand a word, or only bits and pieces. They talk about politics, about the world that is turning around quicker and quicker, and shrinking as if it’s losing bits along the way, and their island which doesn’t move at all, in the eye of the hurricane, and which looks on in astonishment at the commotion made by humanity. Papa tries his best to follow, like a devotee of a religion who thinks that learning the prayers and reciting them once a year will be enough to get him into paradise. But I watch him all the time, my Ryegrass Papa, and I can tell you that he is no more Corsican than I am, no more Catholic than a Catholic who only hails Mary when he’s being christened, married or buried.
Papa is a Corsican in shorts.
He wouldn’t be happy with someone who said that to him. Not even me. Even if I’m the only one would dare.
But I won’t do it.
It would only annoy him. And I don’t want to do that.
I like my Papa more than Maman. Perhaps because he likes me too. Perhaps because he’s never had anything bad to say about my Goth Lydia get-up. Perhaps because he likes my black clothes, perhaps because they remind him of the clothes Corsican women wear.
The comparison stops there.
Black for old Corsican women is the uniform of submission. For me, it’s the symbol of rebellion. I wonder which kind of black-clad women my father prefers? Both, Captain? Submission in public and rebellion in private. A way of owning a treasure that you keep to yourself. A bird that you can put in a cage.
Like all men, I think.
Wanting a mother, a housewife, a cook, but hating you because that’s what you’ve become.