Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  I don’t care. As usual I sit apart from the others, a bit further along the beach, on the edge of the shade cast by the pine trees, my knees and buttocks tucked under my big T-shirt. From my position I can see the whole of the beach, I can make out all the different shades of blue in the water, which becomes ridiculously transparent when you dive into it; the incredible flashes of turquoise among the deep blue of the clumps of posidonia. Not to mention the whole ecosystem of human beings to observe.

  If I look towards the Revellata headland, I can still see the ruins of the Roc e Mare marina that was blown up three days ago. Still no news of the investigation into the explosion. I even tried grilling Aurélia, the policeman’s daughter, but to no avail! Besides, she still annoys me, wandering about the beach looking so superior, fully dressed just like me. I hate the fact that people might think we look like each other. That I have anything in common with this girl who stalks the sand as if she were on duty, as if the whole beach belonged to her, as if there were a time limit on the towels and she was in charge, checking the little kids filled in the holes made by their sandcastles before they left the beach, spying on everyone with her falcon eyes. Before reporting everything to her father.

  I’m not like her, please tell me I’m not! I’m the opposite of Aurélia, you agree, don’t you?

  I don’t judge people.

  I don’t condemn.

  I just analyse, I learn. I document the pleasures that are still forbidden to me.

  I store them up, in theory at least. For later on. When I’m grown up.

  Opposite me, Maria-Chjara has turned over her caramel-coloured skin on her orange towel and is blindly stretching a hand out towards Hermann, as if she didn’t know who was lying next to her on the beach, and didn’t care. In her hand there is a tube of sun-cream. Not one word, not a look. Only a gesture, an explicit gesture of undoing the zip on the back of her bathing costume and pressing her big breasts against the towel, hiding her nipples in the cloth. Just like Maman, who’s a little way off with her friends from the campsite. Parents on one side, teenagers on the other; that’s the law of the beach.

  Mama Palma always brings her big bag, her bottle of water, her big book that she never leaves without; she must have got to page twelve, I checked, and the bookmark hasn’t moved in a week.

  Papa isn’t here. He hates the beach. He’s probably hanging out at Arcanu, with his father, his cousins, his friends, all the Corsicans together … In previous years, Papa did make an effort to put his feet in the sand – he would kick a ball about with Nico, build a castle with me (OK, that was a long time ago), dive into the water and sleep for an hour holding Maman’s hand.

  But not this summer! Maman and Papa are still sulking over the concert on Saint Rose’s day; it’s as if he’s cross with Maman, or Maman hasn’t got over it yet. If I ever have a lover one day, I hope I don’t end up like them.

  I turn my head. The beach is a theatre, a ten-thousand-square-metre stage with hundreds of actors, of all ages and every colour.

  My eyes come to rest on a young couple. One towel for the two of them.

  I want to be like them!

  The couple look like dozens of others. So happiness isn’t that hard to achieve. You just have to be twenty years old, which happens to everyone. You just have to look beautiful with your clothes off, which almost everyone is when they’re twenty, particularly when they have a sun tan. A boy and a girl, gazing into each other’s eyes and holding hands, and caressing each other, and admiring each other’s bums when they get up to go for a swim, and smiling at each other, and even laughing, paying attention to each other. They must be vaguely aware that you shouldn’t spoil those moments because they’re the best in your life and you won’t get them back. So you savour them, you fall in love, you love each other, it’s as simple as that.

  My eye wanders back up the beach the way you wander back in time.

  I find what I’m looking for. A couple in their thirties.

  He’s not bad looking, athletic, on all fours, almost buried in the huge sand-pit that he’s digging with his creamed and hatted children, aged about two and four. He looks as if he’s loving it, even more than the children. She is reading distractedly, and every now and again she looks up and observes them. Happily. She adjusts the hat of the fair-haired little boy, holds out a cool bottle with a nipple on it, swats away a fly.

  She’s on guard.

  Each of her gestures is sexy. You sense that she’s where she’s always wanted to be. She’s achieved what she wanted to achieve. The apogee. The peak.

  She’s keeping watch.

  Because all that she owns – her devoted husband, her well-behaved children, her fine body – she wants to keep.

  As if it could all last forever.

  You’re dreaming, my dear!

  My eyes slip away again, I’m spoilt for choice, and I settle a few metres further along.

  They are forty. Maybe fifty.

  She’s reading, really reading. Concentrating. The last few pages of a giant doorstop. Beside her, he’s getting bored. He’s not bad – tall, greying, something powerful in his expression. But he’s looking elsewhere. On a beach there’s no shortage of pretty things to look at.

  Or I take another couple. The same age, but the other way around. He’s lying on his side, back to the sun, in the shade of a parasol, his slightly paunchy belly sliding under him like a deflated balloon. Beside him, still gorgeous, she’s getting bored. Slender, elegant; wearing make-up, nicely turned out. She looks elsewhere. Her eyes come to rest on some children playing in the distance. Hers must be too old; or not old enough to have given her grandchildren. She’s bored, resigned to waiting like this for the rest of her life.

  It’s a long downhill slope, my darling …

  Time passes. My eyes wander. I search for a long time before I find the rare specimens I’m looking for.

  They’re about seventy, maybe eighty. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but they’re talking to each other, that much is certain. He must be asking if she’s not too hot, she must be asking if he wants his book, his glasses, his cap. And then all of a sudden they get up.

  I don’t like their naked bodies. If my skin was as wrinkled as that, with the bones looking as though they’re piercing it, their heavy flesh sagging at the chin, the neck, the belly, the buttocks, I’d go into hiding.

  My hands twist in my T-shirt.

  I’m fascinated by those two old people, holding hands as they wade into the water, not even pausing before they go in, not even shivering at the waves’ cold bite, pressing their lips against each other for a moment, and then setting off towards the sailing-boats doing an impeccable and coordinated crawl.

  ‘You’re watching old people now?’

  I look up.

  It’s Cervone. Cervone Spinello. Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirt, trainers. I’ve never seen him in a swimming costume before. I’ve got the whole beach to myself all year round, I heard him saying once. In summer I leave it for the tourists.

  How long has he been there? How long has he been looking at me? Me, my mother, the other mothers, the other teens? As if caught off guard, my eyes go back up the beach as if I could rewind everything I’ve seen and get back to the start.

  Three hideous towels.

  Nicolas’s bum is still on the rearing horse of his Ferrari, sunglasses on his eyes, no cream and no hat, as if he couldn’t give a damn what happened to his beautiful muscular skin. Maria-Chjara is still arching under the gelatinous caresses of Hermann, eyes fixed on the bare-chested teenagers playing volleyball a little further off: Estefan with his dreams of becoming a doctor, Magnus and his Oscar-winning ambition, Filip and his reveries about the stars. The young German rubs and rubs the cream over the back of the beautiful Italian girl, he starts the fifth layer, hesitating to venture elsewhere, to slide his fingers over the edge of those gilded curves towards the taut elastic of the swimming costume, towards the beginnings of her breasts at the sides of her unzipped cost
ume.

  Poor little Cyclops …

  It’s time to have a real conversation with you. To tell you who Maria-Chjara really is.

  I think you’re going to like this!

  * * *

  He closed the notebook and let a handful of sand from Alga beach slip through his fingers. After all, it was logical enough to read this diary at the scene of the crime. Because this was where it all began, that day.

  Undeniably, Clotilde had a great talent for describing feelings. For a fifteen-year-old it was nothing less than astonishing. You would have thought the story hadn’t been written by her; or by her, but years later, with hindsight and maturity. Or that her story had been rewritten, like a retouched photograph, even if it contained no flaws, even if the ink, like everything else, has long since dried.

  18

  11 a.m.

  ‘19, Rue de la Confrérie,’ Cesareu Garcia had said on the phone. ‘Behind Calenzana Church. You can’t miss it.’

  Strange. At 19, Rue de la Confrérie there was a building with a dilapidated façade, the yellow plaster coming away, revealing holes left by grey bricks that hadn’t been sealed properly, ancient window frames barely concealed by nailed-up and gaping shutters.

  ‘Don’t knock before coming in,’ the retired policeman had added, ‘I won’t hear you. Just push the door then walk through the house. Don’t pay too much attention to the mess, I’m an old man. I’ll be waiting for you in the back garden. In my swimming pool.’

  A swimming pool …

  Clotilde had imagined a magnificent villa, above the village, with a veranda, a sun terrace, parasol and lounger. Like the one on the posters hung all along the road, announcing an eighties night the following evening at the Tropi-Kalliste discotheque on Oscelluccia beach.

  Clotilde focused once more and pushed open the door, passed through two rooms that were as tiny as they were cluttered, a musty kitchen that smelled of grilled figatelli sausage and a sitting room that was occupied almost entirely by a convertible bed so battered that it looked as if it couldn’t be folded back into a sofa. Torn curtains floated over the door to the garden at the end of the room. Clotilde parted them tentatively, the way you might touch a cobweb spun on a condemned piece of furniture.

  ‘Come on in, Clotilde.’

  Clotilde lowered her eyes towards a voice that seemed to be emerging from a manhole.

  The garden, even smaller than the room she had just left, was reduced to not much more than a stretch of concrete, surrounded on three sides by a fence, and reached by three steps. Cut into the cement was a hole around a metre in diameter, the size of a well. And soaking in that well was Cesareu. All that could be seen of him was his bull-like shoulders, his thick neck and his head in a swimming cap bearing the words Tour de Corse 97.

  His swimming pool?

  More like a hippopotamus stuck in a dried-up swamphole.

  ‘Come on over. Pull up a chair, Clotilde. I’m not coming out of my waterhole before that bloody sun has gone down behind the garden walls.’

  She sat down on a plastic chair.

  ‘I’m like a big whale,’ the policeman continued. ‘A beached whale. As soon as the temperature gets above twenty-five degrees, I need to be in the water. And to move as little as possible, or else I’ll die!’

  Clotilde looked at him in disbelief. Cesareu ran his finger around the concrete rim.

  ‘Made to measure, my love … Dug as a precise match for my waist size. Oh yes, pretty one, Sergeant Garcia has put on some weight since the last time you saw him.’

  She merely smiled. Yes, she remembered. Of course, everyone around here had always called Cesareu Garcia ‘Sergeant’, no one had ever called him by his real rank. Was it Captain? Lieutenant? Deputy?

  ‘I’m glad you came.’

  ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘Nor do I, I suppose.’

  Good start. Cesareu went quiet; he seemed to be gently going to sleep in his bath. Unless it was an old sea-elephant’s trick. Letting her come to him so that he didn’t have to break through the ice.

  If that was what he was waiting for …

  ‘How is your daughter, Cesareu? It would be strange to see her again. In my mind, Aurélia is still seventeen, but she must be over forty now? She’s two years older than me.’

  ‘She’s fine, Clotilde. Fine. She’s married, you know. Has been for years.’

  ‘Married?’

  Who would have agreed to share their life with such a killjoy?

  And for years? Poor man!

  ‘Any children?’

  The beached whale poured water over his red face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You can be sorry if you like. I really don’t mind not being a grandfather.’

  Cesareu rose up a little bit more above the water. Clotilde imagined that he must be sitting on a sort of step-ladder, and had brought his buttocks up a step.

  ‘So, Cesareu? What’s this big secret of yours?’

  For a long time Cesareu looked around the pocket garden, the fence, the open door to the house and the floating curtains, as if his home were being bugged by the intelligence services.

  ‘You know, my lovely, because you are incredibly lovely, Clotilde, I think I’m not the first person to tell you that since you came back to the island. You were lovely then too, by the way, but you didn’t know it. A girl’s charm is like happiness, miracles, talismans, all that nonsense – you just have to believe in it for it to work. Really believe, believe in it stupidly, like those fakirs who can walk on fire without burning themselves.’

  Clotilde didn’t even try to conceal her irritation. She waved her hand around as if swatting an invisible fly, then rose to her feet and walked around the hole, taking a position behind the sergeant’s back.

  ‘Why did you ask me to come here, Cesareu?’

  Wedged in his tub, the former policeman could only hear Clotilde now. He tried to twist himself round, then gave up.

  ‘You remember, Clotilde, I was in charge of the investigation at the time. Just me. There was an incredible amount of pressure, believe me. Three people killed at the height of summer. Even though the Corsicans drive like lunatics, that’s rare. Not to mention the fact that your father wasn’t just anyone. The son of Cassanu Idrissi. At the time, Cassanu owned half of the district, and you know what they say about Corsican districts, they’re bigger than some of the regions on the mainland, they extend from the line of the mountain ridge to the horizon, you can go alpine skiing in winter and water-skiing in the summer.’

  Clotilde interrupted him.

  ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, an accident, of course. An accident, and everyone’s happy.’

  All of a sudden the sergeant got to his feet. His obese body splashed water over the concrete as he climbed up the step-ladder. In the well, the water level fell abruptly, leaving it almost dry. A tiny pair of red trunks disappeared beneath the folds of his belly as if he were wearing a thong backwards, with the pouch over his buttocks and a G-string to cover everything else. Without even drying himself, he went into the house and grumbled as he moved furniture around, ‘Where has Aurélia put that damned file this time?’, and then came back out a few seconds later wearing a dressing-gown around his shoulders and with a cardboard folder in his hand. He picked up a plastic chair and pulled it towards the shade of the fence, holding the dossier out to Clotilde.

  ‘Open it.’

  Clotilde sat down, put the folder on her knees, opened it and found the first page.

  A name. A registration. A date of birth.

  Renault Fuego. Model GTS. 1233 CD 27. First on the road 03/11/1984.

  Photographs of the corpse of a car.

  In colour.

  An eviscerated roof. Charred tyres. Close-ups of broken glass.

  Clotilde almost retched.

  ‘Go on, Clotilde. Go on before I explain.’

  A few more pages.

  Red rocks. T
hree bodies lying on the rocks. Blood. Blood everywhere.

  Another page.

  A name, Paul Idrissi, born 17 October 1945, died 23 August 1989.

  A dozen photographs, details taken from the earlier pictures, enlargements, a swollen face, an arm twisted into a right angle, an asymmetrical torso, a heart crushed in a vice.

  Another page. Nicolas Idrissi, born 8 April 1971, died 23 August …

  Clotilde couldn’t read any further. She swallowed the bile rising in her throat, tried to look back at the file again, then dashed towards the circular swimming pool, knelt down and vomited her guts up.

  Cesareu held out a tissue.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She remained kneeling on the ground.

  ‘I’ll bet you are. They say it’s going to be thirty-seven degrees today. And the person who does the maintenance for my pool is on holiday until the twenty-first of August.’

  Clotilde’s eyes rested on the net used for fishing out leaves that was leaning against the fence. The sergeant held her back by the shoulder.

  ‘Leave it, Clotilde. I’m teasing you. I don’t care. It’s my fault, but I wanted you to go all the way through … All the way to …’

  ‘To the photographs of my mother?’

  Cesareu nodded.

  ‘My mother isn’t dead. Is that it?’

  She had guessed. It was obvious. All the clues were so obvious, convergent. That explicit letter about the dark room, Orsu’s mop, the Labrador called Pacha. So many mysteries that could only be explained by the presence of her mother, here, alive on the island. Cesareu Garcia knew the key to the solution of the impossible problem: how had Palma Idrissi survived the accident?