by Michel Bussi
‘My mother isn’t dead?’ she repeated.
Cesareu looked at her as if she had blasphemed.
‘What on earth are you talking about, Clotilde?’ He seemed genuinely devastated. ‘Don’t go getting an idea like that into your head, you poor thing. There’s no doubt about it. Your mother died in the ravine at Petra Coda, along with your father and your brother. You saw them die in front of your very eyes. I saw their bodies too, it was the worst experience of my life. There were dozens of other witnesses. So no, I didn’t bring you here to tell you that your mother has come back from the dead.’
Clotilde pressed her lips together to stop herself crying.
‘S … so what is it?’
‘Look at the following page. After the photographs.’
Clotilde took the folder again, skipped the page about Nicolas but summoned the strength to look at the one about her mother – six pictures of her shredded body, six enlargements of the photograph of her corpse, which looked as if it had been torn apart – before turning to the next page.
Crumpled metal replaced battered flesh. She found photographs of the Fuego. The whole thing, first of all, then pictures that probed the intimacy of the carcase, the engine, the passenger compartment. Clotilde studied close-ups of a fan belt, a cam shaft, a steering column, the double wishbone suspension, a brake cable. At least that’s what she imagined them to be. She’d only ever had to open a car bonnet once in her life, in the middle of winter, to clean some dirty spark plugs, and that day she had shocked herself by navigating the huge steel puzzle almost instinctively.
She set down the file and turned towards the policeman, her eyes level with his belly. Clotilde had a sense that the sergeant’s body was almost melting in the sun, that he’d told her the truth, and that if he stayed out of his water hole for too long he would indeed turn into a puddle of viscous, gelatinous flesh.
A huge wave of disgust bubbled up in her stomach again. She nearly screamed.
‘What are you getting at then?’
‘That last page, Clotilde, those photographs, they aren’t official. If you check the date you’ll see that they were taken a few weeks after the accident, when the investigation had officially closed. I waited until everything had calmed down before asking one of my mates to examine the remains of the Fuego. Discreetly. Ibrahim has a garage in Calenzana. We’ve known each other since we were children. He keeps his hands clean, even if the judges have never actually sworn to it.’
‘Why wait so long?’
He smiled.
‘I told you, we were under incredible pressure, Clotilde. The son, the grandson, the daughter-in-law of Cassanu Idrissi, I don’t know if you have any idea of what it was like. The case had gone all the way up to Deputy Pasquini and President Rocca Serra. So they just passed the whole business on to some poor guy who was given the task of botching the investigation. Me. Sergeant Garcia. An investigation whose solution had already been determined. AN ACCIDENT.’
Clotilde tried to clear her mind of the images of the Fuego crashing through the barrier, plunging into the void, bouncing three times, killing three times.
It was an accident, of course it was. What was this fat policeman trying to say?
‘Look at the third photograph, Clotilde. That’s the rack-and-pinion steering system. And at either end you’ve got the tie rods and the ball joints.’
All she could see was an iron rod, a piece of conical metal and a big bolt.
‘It was one of these ball joints that went. All of a sudden. Just as your father tried to turn, just before the Petra Coda ravine.’
Her father hadn’t turned.
She saw the Fuego flying off the road like a football. It wasn’t suicide. The steering had failed. Her voice softened.
‘So it really was an accident?’
‘Yes, as I told you, that’s what the official report said, just before the word END. A steering joint failed. The only guilty party is the car. Except that according to my friend Ibrahim …’
Thick droplets pearled on his belly.
‘According to my mate,’ he said again, ‘the failure of the ball joint was not, how can I put this … it didn’t seem normal.’
‘Normal?’
He leaned towards her, his belly resting on his knees like an apron.
‘Let me be more precise, Clotilde. I’ve thought about it hundreds of times since then, I’ve talked to Ibrahim, I’ve examined the photographs and the evidence. And in the end I’ve reached my own conclusion.’
‘Just tell me, for goodness’ sake!’
‘The steering was sabotaged, Clotilde. A bolt on the ball joint was unscrewed, just enough so that the vibrations would knock it out after a few bends, the rod would give all of a sudden and the driver would find himself with a steering wheel turning in the void and an uncontrollable vehicle.’
Clotilde said nothing. She clasped her arms around her knees, in a huddle. Prostrate.
The shadow of the pachyderm fell across Clotilde, stealing the sun. He had got to his feet.
‘I had to tell you, Clotilde.’
She felt cold. She was shivering. She was drawn by the well. As long as it was bottomless. Then she could fall for all eternity.
‘Thank you, Cesareu.’
A long silence passed before she said another word.
‘Who … who else knows about this?’
‘Only one person, the only one who had to know. Your grandfather, Clotilde. I gave a copy of the entire file to Cassanu Idrissi.’
She bit her lips until they bled.
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing, Clotilde. Nothing at all. He didn’t react. It was as if he’d known all along. That was what I thought at the time. That he’d known all along.’
The sergeant didn’t add anything else. He took an infinity to do up his dressing gown, observed the filthy surface of his pool, then slowly made his way over to the net resting against the fence. He turned to Clotilde one last time.
‘Do call in and see Aurélia, she’d be delighted.’
Go and see that bitch? The very idea!
‘She isn’t far away. You’ll remember the way. She lives at Punta Rossa, below the Revellata lighthouse.’
The words became a blur, caught in a whirlwind.
That bitch Aurélia.
Punta Rossa.
Revellata lighthouse.
Cesareu took off his cap and stared intently into Clotilde’s eyes.
‘I thought you’d be surprised, my lovely one. I was too. If they’d told me that twenty-seven years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it either. But yes, that’s where Aurélia lives, it’s where she’s been living all this time. You know what that means, my pretty, I don’t need to put it in writing.’ He gave Clotilde a moment to sort out the tangle of her memories. ‘Aurélia lives with Natale.’
Clotilde swayed above the concrete pool. She had fallen into that bottomless well for the second time in less than a few minutes. And that second time left her even more breathless than the first.
Was more painful.
Oh, so much more painful.
19
Wednesday, 16 August 1989, tenth day of the holidays
Fairy-blue sky
Once upon a time …
Once upon a time there was a little Calabrian princess.
Maria-Chjara Giordano.
This story starts like a fairy tale because Maria-Chjara is a real princess. She was born three years before me, the same year as my brother, in 1971, in the little village of Pianopoli, near Catanzano in Italy.
Her father runs the biggest broccoli business in Calabria, apparently that’s the speciality down there, very green broccoli. He’s already sixty years old, with sixty million lire in the bank when she was born; her father is handsome, a handsome old thing, as they say, which is to say that the only handsome things about him now are his brown eyes and his curly silver hair. Her mother is nineteen years younger than her husband and nineteen centimetres taller in heel
s; she’s a model for Ungaro and has acted in B-movies made at Cinecittà, none of which have ever been shown in France. I’ve been keeping an eye out, believe me.
Better watered than my Papa’s cauliflowers, Maria-Chjara grew quickly.
Quicker than me, anyway. When she turned fifteen, she was already over one metre seventy. She slowed down a bit over the years that followed, ending up at one metre seventy-five, but those extra centimetres that hadn’t made her thighs, her back or her ankles any longer had spread elsewhere, swelling her bosom, curving her hips, plumping out her bottom. A small miracle of harmony, the figure of the heroine from an Italian graphic novel, the ones Papa hides in the library between Tintin and Asterix. A girl created by Manara.
That kind of girl.
Papa Giordano, probably in order to forget the smell of broccoli and enjoy the extra nineteen centimetres or so of his starlet, bought a villa on the slopes of Revellata and comes back here every summer. The little Calabrian princess, his sole heir, grew bored on her own in her stone palace, and every now and again, then more and more often, for longer and longer spells, her dad’s Suzuki 4x4 would drop her off between Alga beach and the Euproctes campsite so that she could enjoy herself with girls her own age. Girls, and boys.
In the summer of 1989, Papa and Mamma Giordano had set off to sail around Sardinia in their yacht, which was moored all year round in Calvi Bay, and Princess Chjara, having just reached the age of majority, had told them that there was no way she was going to spend the next month getting bored to death with them in a floating prison that measured thirty metres by ten.
She would manage on her own. Her father had dropped the keys of the villa in the palm of her hand.
Chjara didn’t barter.
And she did manage very well on her own.
Dancing the lambada better than Kaoma. Singing ‘Una storia importante’ better than Eros Ramazzotti. Delivering lines from Cinema Paradiso better than Agnese Nano, kisses included.
She was all set to be a star.
To shine in the galaxy before all the other stars went out.
To seduce or to perish!
Maria-Chjara. The story of a princess.
I’m still here in the shadows, on my bit of beach, on the edge of the pine trees with the needles digging into my bottom, Dangerous Liaisons lying open on my knees. All of a sudden Maria-Chjara got up from her towel, and Hermann the cyclops was left with his sticky hands in the air, stroking the void.
Not fast enough, Hermann … Ha ha ha!
Maria-Chjara got up just like that, without putting the top of her costume back on. She went and ordered a Coke at the other end of the beach, and the whole beach turned to look at her. I swear, from my slightly elevated observation point the spectacle was very striking, like a field of sunflowers following the course of the sun, but speeded up a thousand times. With poppies, pansies and ears of corn twisting on their stems as well.
I deliberately look down at my book.
I was wrong, in fact.
Valmont isn’t my brother! Valmont is Maria-Chjara.
The libertine seducer, in the eighteenth-century novel, couldn’t be a woman, times were different. But nowadays, of course she could! The girls you respect, the girls you admire, are the ones who take things for granted, who are confident, who do what they want with their bodies and their hearts, who do what they want with guys.
I’m a long way off being like that!
Maria-Chjara is a virgin. That’s the rumour doing the rounds. In tents, on the beach, in the girls’ showers and the boys’ toilets. It’s almost as if she’d shouted it through a loud-hailer, or pinned it up on the campsite notice board.
I’m a virgin … and I don’t plan on staying one.
Maria-Chjara has taken a vow of non-chastity.
She’s practically announced it, like a bowls competition, a ping-pong tournament or bingo night. She’s going to get herself a man. For the first time. Just one! Before the end of the summer.
Ever since then, Maria-Chjara has been strolling about in a thong, her breasts in the air, going to get her scoop of pistachio ice cream, her sandwich, her copy of Jeune et Jolie. Valerie Kaprisky in Year of the Jelly-Fish, if that gives you some idea.
And now here she is, coming back with her Coke.
Three steps forward, slowing down, head thrown back, a sip, forward again, curves to the fore, a twist of the waist, a sway of the hips, casually letting a few drops spill, wiping her sugary skin with the back of her hand.
Walking on.
All the men lying at her feet, the Papas’ spades freezing above their sandcastles, bottles of ice-cold beer pressed against swimming trunks, volleyballs rolling about with no one running after them. Estefan, Magnus, Filip, all thunderstruck!
It’s filthy.
But I can’t help admiring her …
Being jealous of her …
Hating her.
Hating the way men’s eyes stare at her chest, which defies the laws of gravity.
I’m screwed, even though I have a theory about that whole thing. You want to know what it is? Anyway, I’m not asking your opinion, I’m just letting off steam by telling you this. Going out with a girl who has small breasts, a girl you want to spend the rest of your life with, I mean, a girl like me, for example, is a long-term investment. A thirty-year guarantee. A choice you aren’t going to regret after decades as a couple. Big breasts, on the other hand, will inevitably disappoint, they will sag. It’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s a mathematical, physical law! Consequently, even if that little hand grenade Maria-Chjara is ahead of me at the moment, I’ll catch up with her eventually, at my own rhythm, a quiet trot.
You just have to be patient.
Up with small hearts, small bottoms, small breasts!
Shall we talk about it again one day, Chjara?
A long time from now, a very long time, because at the moment you’re the one whose making the auction rise. And the stakes are already high, very high.
The beautiful Italian has returned to her towel after walking around it three times like a suspicious cat. Cervone, who is also hiding among the pines, hasn’t missed a shred of this display, his hand stuck to the resin of the tree-trunk. The cyclops has frozen Egyptian-style, facing his goddess (Bastet, the cat goddess, my ignorant reader!), and even my Nico, my indifferent, handsome brother with his Ray-Bans, has moved his neck almost imperceptibly.
He’s lost, too.
Once upon a time …
Once upon a time there was a little Calabrian princess
With a hot little treasure
You know where.
*
* *
He looked at the poster, and thought about tearing it down.
What would be the point, there were so many others, dozens along the road.
Tonight. 10 p.m. Oscelluccia beach. Tropi-Kalliste Discotheque.
He would be there.
Not to hear Maria-Chjara sing.
To shut her up.
20
16 August 2016, 3 p.m.
The posters had been taped up everywhere, even on the doors of the shower blocks, the barriers at the car park and the local dump. Valentine stopped by the one opposite their pitch. She had wrapped a sarong around her waist, and her flip-flops were clacking against the soles of her feet as if they were stilettos on the parquet floor of a ballroom; the baguette under her arm made her look like a majorette. Clotilde stood beside her daughter, anxious to move on; she was carrying the rest of the shopping, and the melons, grapefruits, oranges and the half-watermelon weighed a ton in the plastic bags she was holding in each hand.
Valentine looked up and read.
Eighties Night
10.00 p.m. Tropi-Kalliste Discotheque
Oscelluccia beach
On the poster, multicoloured foam spilled from a huge plastic swimming pool that had been placed on the beach. A girl in a bikini leapt from it under a shower of gold sequins.
‘Apparently it’s a great tradit
ion at this campsite,’ Valou insisted, staring at the girl. ‘Nobody’s talking about anything else. She used to spend her holidays here, and since then she’s become a star in Italy.’
Amazed, Clotilde took her eyes off Valou’s sparkling expression and concentrated on the poster. The siren’s face was unrecognisable beneath the heavy make-up, her perfect body was like the thousands of others that would appear if you tapped ‘starlet’ or ‘bikini’ into the internet, but her stage name provoked another explosion of childhood memories.
Maria-Chjara.
The plastic handles of the shopping bags cut their way into Clotilde’s fingers.
‘Cervone even told me you knew her, Maman! He said you spent five or six years together and that Uncle Nico knew her well too.’
Uncle Nico. So she’d suddenly remembered she had a family.
Clotilde had heard vague news about Maria-Chjara since August 1989. She had spotted her once, almost twenty years ago, in an Italian film on TF3; a cameo role, a girl riding a bicycle, skirt flying in the air, along the streets of Lucca. She had also seen her name and recognised her face when she had stayed in Venice with Franck, sixteen years ago, before Valou was born. An old four-euro CD in a bargain bin: flashy colours, songs she’d never heard of. So Maria-Chjara’s fame was probably relative, even in Italy.
‘You know, Valou, she was eighteen back then. She might be a bit … old-fashioned these days.’
But Valentine didn’t care. It was the pretext that mattered.
‘Don’t you want to see her again?’
Oscelluccia beach was just down the hill from the Euproctes campsite, and could be reached directly by a steep path bordering the sea. Clotilde studied the poster, the foam, the pool, the bikini with as much enthusiasm as if it were an advertisement for a bullfight.
‘Are you joking?’
‘I could go with you, Maman? I’d just go for the party but then you could see your friend.’