by Michel Bussi
‘Have you got the camera?’
Well spotted, Maman. The bag over Papa’s shoulder is open. No trace of the Kodak around his neck. My father stammers and stupidly looks down the hill towards the steps at the bottom.
‘Shit.’
I love my Papa, but he’s been asking for it since this morning. Maman shrugs as he runs back down the hill, with one eye on the tourists below to see if anyone is bending down to pick up a black object. Maman doesn’t wait for him. She steps under the stone arch and turns to me by the door to the citadel.
‘You wanted to go to Tao, Clo. So go!’
She walks on.
Tao it is, then.
At that moment, my puzzled reader, I should furnish you with two short lines of explanatory context: Tao is a restaurant-bar-night-club at the very top of Calvi’s citadel. It’s incredibly famous! Incredibly hip! Incredibly busy! So I’m ahead of you … For what stupid reason did I want to go and have a grenadine or a menthe à l’eau in Tao?
Answer A: because the richest and cutest of the young arseholes on holiday in Corsica gather there?
Answer B: because it was there that the greatest balladeer in the world, Jacques Higelin, wrote the most beautiful song in the world, ‘La Ballade de chez Tao’?
I’ll let you guess.
Onwards to Tao!
So, we’re sitting at a circular table on our red mock-leather seats when Papa comes back, breathless.
‘Have you got it?’ Maman asks.
She’s ordered a piña colada.
‘No, not a trace of it.’
At that moment, normally, Maman would identify the make of the camera, the month and the year when it was given to him, and its emotional value – Maman has a bar code where her brain should be.
Except that Nico speaks first.
‘Are you sure, Papa, that it isn’t in your rucksack?’
Then Papa searches through his rucksack, pushes our glasses aside and empties the haphazard contents on to the table: keys, pens, a book, a road map, cigarettes, a plastic bag, until right at the bottom he finds … the camera!
‘Was it in your bag all the time?’
Maman can’t get over it. No danger of her apologising either.
‘I must say, it’s such a mess in there.’
Papa takes the blow. Maman sorts through the objects scattered on the table, the keys and the rest, until she’s surprised by the presence of a plastic bag, wedged between some sun cream and a pair of sunglasses.
A Benoa bag.
She opens it, delicately unfolds the package and discovers, to her disbelief, a short dress with a V neck and a bare back; there are dozens of red roses printed on the black fabric. It’s the very same dress that she’d stopped to look at! Papa had even slipped a matching ruby-coloured bracelet and a necklace into the package.
‘Is this for me?’
Of course it’s for you, Maman! And Papa’s played an excellent trick on you, pretending to have forgotten his Kodak so he could run back and get it.
In the toilets Maman slips on the dress, and comes back out, the fine black straps disappearing against her bronzed shoulders; her breasts, her hips, her thighs swelling the light fabric (crêpe georgette, apparently – how can such a stuffy name become so exciting when it’s worn by a sexy woman?). The barmen at Tao have all turned to look at Maman, even though they must have seen plenty of gorgeous women walking about in mini-mini dresses.
Before sitting down and crossing her bare legs under the table, Maman whispers, ‘Thank you.’ Not even a kiss on the cheek. Not even ‘You’re a darling.’ Not even ‘You had me there.’
God damn it!
She’s a confident one, is Mama Palma.
Total mastery of the situation.
If a guy had pulled that on me, I would have cracked straight away and thrown myself at him, even if he’d done the most horrible things beforehand. But she doesn’t, she just lets her eyes roam towards the concert posters stuck below the bar, and linger on the one showing the seven singers of the A Filetta group, with their black shirts and their hands on their ears.
Total mastery! Making yourself be desired.
Giving hope. Revealing a little, the bottom of a thigh, the top of a breast, but keeping everything reined in. Remaining cool-headed. Freezing your feelings. Never giving yourself entirely. Never opening up completely. Forcing the other party to bet, and constantly raising the stakes.
Life as a couple – a game of poker.
Oh, my future reader, I will never be any good at playing it! I’ll be trounced by the first handsome guy who comes along. I don’t have that confidence the other girls have, that certainty that I’ll be the one pulling the strings, working the controls, dangling the guys like puppets.
I’m not like Mama Palma, or Maria-Chjara. I’m going to have to talk to you about her again, because something else has happened.
Anyway, I loved Papa even more after that trick he pulled with the Benoa dress.
But I admired Maman … You won’t tell anyone, will you? Promise?
I’d be too ashamed if she read that.
So I’ll give you my prognosis, right now, for Saint Rose’s day, for the evening of 23 August.
Corsican polyphony or a romantic meal at Casa di Stella?
I’m betting everything on Mama Palma!
*
* *
He looked up and stared at the stars.
Of course. Of course, everything would have been so different if Palma Idrissi had won.
16
15 August 2016, 3 p.m.
Calvi hadn’t changed, that was the first thing Clotilde thought. The same granite citadel overlooking the bay, the same villages clinging to the coast, the same train from the beach to L’Ile Rousse.
Calvi just had more tourists than she remembered. There was a striking contrast between the Euproctes campsite, lost in the maquis, Arcanu Farm in the midst of the mountains, and the crowd rammed in along the shore, the families driving round and round in overheated car parks before deciding to go and park somewhere further away and return on foot; that tide of humanity coursing down the little streets like lava, flowing from the citadel and spreading out along the quays, the terraces, the beaches. As if receiving millions of visitors to the island had done nothing to change its innate peace, the tranquillity of the areas that had been preserved intact; as if the summer invasion wouldn’t trouble Cassanu or the other people who loved the wild Corsica, because the more tourists there were, the more they crammed themselves into the same spots.
Normally Clotilde didn’t like crowds, but that afternoon she found them reassuring. Numbers meant anonymity. Noise imposed on silence.
Since last night she had done a lot of talking. About herself. About her family. With Franck, first of all, on the road back to the Euproctes campsite. Clotilde had hated the faint hint of victory in his smile. Admit it, Clo, you might have stood there under that oak tree with Valou for ages, leaving me on my own with your grandfather, but no one came. Your mysterious correspondent stood you up.
Yes, Franck, of course, do go on … No flying saucer landed in the yard, no ghost rose up from the ground, there was nothing, nothing but me and my daughter looking out at the empty mountain.
Clotilde hadn’t even dared to broach the subject of the new coincidence that obsessed her, and for which she could find no logical explanation.
Pacha.
The name of Orsu’s dog.
The name of her own dog. Her childhood dog.
A name which – if she pursued her line of reasoning without someone getting in the way and saying, ‘But it’s impossible, my dear’ – had been given to this dog ten years ago by someone who had known Pacha. Who had loved him. Had mourned his death. And since it wasn’t her, there could only be one possible explanation.
Only her mother could have named this dog Pacha.
Less than ten years ago. Almost twenty years after the accident, twenty years after she died.
It’s
impossible, my dear!
Franck had parked the car by the lowered barrier of the campsite and kissed Clotilde on the cheek, holding her in his arms for a moment. There was nothing affectionate in the gesture, she had thought – just a respectful hug between two players after a game of tennis. Was their life as a couple reduced to a competition? One set to Franck.
If Clotilde had hated his condescension, that politeness that a boss uses with an inadequate underling, she had been even less enamoured of Cervone Spinello’s smile that morning at reception. When she had approached him, he was putting up a poster advertising an eighties night on Oscelluccia beach.
‘Can I get you a coffee, Clotilde?’
No, thanks.
‘Your daughter is gorgeous, Clo.’
Bastard!
‘She reminds me of your mother, she has class, her …’
One more word and …
Clotilde had calmed herself down. Thanks to her job as a lawyer she had gradually learned to control her impulses, to confront the worst moments of the worst trials, when a client’s lack of honesty stretched the limits of the defensible, and yet they still had to be defended. Clotilde had spoken to Cervone with a view to obtaining some precise information. She had no complaints on that score; the manager of the campsite had given her the information she requested, with professional precision. She’d wanted to know more about Orsu.
Orsu was an orphan, apparently. Born to a single mother who had died of exhaustion, loneliness and shame, then brought up by his grandmother, Speranza, the black-clad old witch they had bumped into yesterday on the road and then again at the farm. Speranza had always worked at Arcanu Farm, she took care of the cooking and the housework, feeding the animals and collecting chestnuts. She was almost part of the Idrissi family and Orsu had grown up there, tied to her apron-strings.
Delving as deeply as she could into her childhood memories, Clotilde had managed to remember, on the days spent at the farm with Nicolas, a shadow bringing them dishes, sweeping the floor, picking up their toys. She also remembered a baby, a few months old, who almost always lay motionless in the shade of the oak, surrounded by battered soft toys and dirty, discoloured plastic animals. A silent baby, scrawny and strange.
Orsu?
Had that feeble little thing managed to turn into this giant, this ogre, this bear?
After the boy had turned sixteen, Cervone had hired Orsu to work at the campsite, because no one else wanted him, and certainly not the school. Out of the goodness of his heart. Out of his friendship with Cassanu. Out of pity, yes, if you like, Clo, out of pity, that’s exactly it, if you want to call a spade a spade.
Pity.
The bastard!
Clotilde didn’t have the strength to vary the insults spat out by her brain. It was saturated with astonishingly precise memories that burst into her mind with each new bend in the road, each encounter, each conversation, colliding with everything she had experienced since the previous day, as if some unmentionable truth were lurking behind everything, a truth that she hadn’t been able to grasp back in 1989, when she was fifteen years old.
Twenty-seven years later, she strode impatiently down Rue Clemenceau. The swarming crowd on Calvi’s main shopping street calmed her, and she tried to lose herself in the window of the Lunatik shoe shop, lingered over the necklaces in Mariotti, the dresses in Benoa. Other images swam back to the surface, a vague impression of having experienced this same scene before. Then the veil was torn down and she could see the film clearly: the street in Calvi, her mother lingering in front of the shops just as she was doing today, her father giving her the black dress with the red roses and the ruby jewellery that she’d gone crazy about.
The pieces she’d been wearing on the day of the accident.
Only today did Clotilde understand the full extent of her father’s gesture, giving his wife the outfit in which she would die, her finery for the afterlife, the most alluring attire for their last loving gaze. Wasn’t that the greatest proof of love? Choosing together the outfit for one’s death, the way you would choose the clothes for your wedding.
Clotilde spent so long outside Benoa that Valou caught up with her. Clotilde didn’t often go shopping, even less so with her daughter. But through the miracle of the holidays, she now found herself with her daughter, gazing at the same charcoal dress, like accomplices excluding the man of the family from their game. Franck was waiting ten metres further on, leaning against the wall of the Saint Marie churchyard. This was so unlike them – Papa playing football with the boy, Maman going shopping with the girl. At least that was one advantage of having an only child, Clotilde thought; making that pernicious gender parity impossible.
The stream of tourists continued to struggle up the slope towards the citadel, in search of shade (in spite of the crowds, no one had yet thought of putting in some kind of lift). Once past the drawbridge, Clotilde hesitated for a moment. She thought about suggesting to Franck and Valentine that they could all go and have a drink at Tao, but immediately dismissed the idea as ridiculous: this pilgrimage along the footsteps of her youth had its limits, and Valou had probably never even heard a song by Jacques Higelin. Instead, Clotilde preferred to lose herself in the labyrinth of the streets in the citadel. She also lost Franck.
He joined them nineteen minutes and seven texts later, on the terrace of A Candella, a little square shaded by olive trees with a panoramic view over the harbour. When Clotilde saw Franck appearing along the ramparts, in front of the Tour de Sel, his hand behind his back clumsily concealing his Benoa bag, she forgot for a moment the sequence of mysteries dancing the devil’s salsa all around her. Franck had turned back to go to the clothes shop. Running back down two hundred metres. Just as her father had done.
As a girl, she remembered not being able to resolve her conflicting emotions: pride at her father’s attentiveness, admiration for her mother’s elegant charm, and jealousy like a large hat, casting its shadow over everything. Back then she had dreamed, she now realised, of playing the same game. Of being the consenting victim to a husband’s playfulness. She hadn’t done badly, in the end. Franck could still surprise her, sometimes.
Knowing how to surprise your partner, Clotilde thought, was the number-one key to a lasting relationship. Even though Franck had done it less discreetly than Papa, with less theatre, less imagination, supplying no explanation for his hurried departure, and holding the Benoa bag clumsily behind his back.
Don’t be too picky – the second key to a lasting relationship.
Franck pushed the glasses of grenadine aside and set the bag down on the table.
‘For you, my darling.’
His darling, the one to whom Franck presented the bag, was Valou.
‘I’m sure it will look gorgeous on you, my lovely girl.’
Total eclipse. A storm could have fallen on the citadel, a tsunami could have carried away all the yachts moored in the harbour, a gust of wind could have ripped away all the parasols and flags …
The bastard! The total and utter bastard!
Clotilde was still raging in silence when Valou came back from the toilet, the charcoal dress hastily slipped over her swimming costume. It was sexy, figure-hugging, perfect.
‘Thank you, Papa. I love you.’
Valou kissed her Papa with conviction. Clotilde took the blow. They should have had two children, an only child was a nonsense, a trap for any couple. Yes, two kids, one each.
Having your own daughter steal away your man was rock bottom.
What a shitty life! She felt murderous.
Valou had got up and was standing by the parapet, holding her camera, the teeming Bay of Calvi behind her. A selfie to make her friends envious! A present from my darling little Papa.
It was surreal. What a shitty life shitty life shitty life.
And that fool Franck still smiling as he gazed at their daughter, putting his hand under the table as if stealthily giving his balls a good scratch.
And then, who took out an
other Benoa bag!
‘For you too, my darling.’
The bastard. The adorable bastard!
Of course Franck wasn’t a match for her own father, back then, that trick with the camera, but his double bluff was still pretty good.
Clotilde felt heart-broken. Why did she have to be so vulnerable?
Don’t be picky.
Make yourself voluptuous, moist, sensual.
Kiss your man without restraint.
Don’t be picky …
Silence that little voice that was telling her, over and over again, that everything was happening exactly as it had twenty-seven years ago. The same place, same story, same family scene. That dress her husband had just given her, just as her father had given one to her mother all those years ago … perhaps it would be the one she would die in.
A few hours later, back at the campsite, alone in the shower block without even Orsu mopping up or some teenagers to yell at, Clotilde slipped on the dress and looked at herself in the mirror. It was quite obvious. Even if she had to wear that dress on the last day of her life, she would never make as sexy a corpse as her mother had.
The stretchy fabric sagged where her breasts failed to fill it out, it floated around her undistinguished hips, covering her short thighs all the way to the knee.
She definitely wasn’t a match for her mother.
And Franck wasn’t a match for her father.
They had died too soon to bring her up. Bring her up in the purest sense, up to their level.
Why?
Why had they died?
Perhaps she would find out tomorrow.
Cesareu Garcia, the retired policeman who hadn’t wanted to tell her anything over the phone, wanted to see her the following morning. ‘You’ve been waiting for the truth for twenty-seven years, Clotilde,’ he had said before hanging up. ‘You can wait a few more hours.’
17
Tuesday, 15 August 1989, ninth day of the holidays
Sky beached-jellyfish blue
Hello, hello? Alga beach here, live.
Each to their own towel.
Mine is black and flame-red with rows of pretty little white crosses, and I can tell you that finding a Metallica Master of Puppets beach towel is no mean feat! Nico’s is a bright-red towel with the yellow Ferrari logo, about as tacky as Maria-Chjara’s, which is a bright-orange sunset with the shadow of a palm tree and a naked couple embracing. Hermann’s, placed between Nico and Maria-Chjara’s, is black and white with a giant B and an unpronounceable name running across it. Borussia Mönchengladbach – as glamorous as it gets! But you have to give the cyclops his due, he’s swift and responsive, because he wasn’t the only one who wanted to put his towel down next to the beautiful Italian girl’s. Towels on the beach are like desks in a classroom. You elbow your way through until you’ve found the right one, next to the right person.