Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  I’m sure this fisherman would be quite capable of that.

  I’ve been staring at him for almost an hour from behind my Lolita glasses.

  Shall I describe him to you? Have I talked to you about The Big Blue? Can you picture Jean-Marc Barr, the dolphin man with every shade of blue imprinted on his eyes, starry chasms, like two marbles containing the entire universe? Well, his spitting image is right in front of me. A fisherman who’s just as magnetic: baby-round head shaved with an electric razor three days ago, from skull to chin, the same poetry in his eyes. He’s the same, I’m telling you! Just as dreamy, except that he clearly doesn’t spend his days free-diving under water; he’s more likely to spend them above the waves. He works with his hands, he toils away, unknotting his wretched nets with great concentration whilst being fried by the sun.

  I wait.

  How old? Ten years older than me, max?

  I wait like a little flirt, I wait until the sun has grilled him medium rare, I imagine his tanned arms pulling his wet T-shirt over his head, his damp muscles twisting the fabric, his hands …

  ‘Come on over.’

  He’s spoken to me. Damn it. Caught red-handed!

  ‘Come here,’ he says again. ‘I need some advice. Come and take a look.’

  What would you have done in my place?

  Don’t try to be clever, my future reader. The same as me, obviously! So I set down my newspaper and my Walkman, I pushed my sunglasses back on to my forehead and stepped towards his boat.

  ‘I need your advice. Look, what do you think?’

  And even if you don’t believe me, I don’t care, the dolphin-man really was a dolphin man, as if I’d read something in his face and he’d picked up on that. Like some kind of telepathy, the same way cetaceans can communicate with each other, by sonar, brain to brain. OK, so it was less than five metres from my bench to his boat, but we were just starting out. My dolphin-man and I can train ourselves, we’ll get better, and in the end we’ll be able to communicate from one ocean to another.

  ‘So, are you looking?’

  He shows me a little blue poster painted on plywood, showing three dark outlines on a sparkling sea.

  Sea Safari – swim with dolphins

  Every day until the end of August.

  L’Aryon

  Port of Stareso

  04 95 15 65 42

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s good.’

  To tell you the truth, his poster is a complete rip-off of The Big Blue, he hasn’t exactly over-exerted himself. Besson could sue, I think.

  Then I add:

  ‘Except that it’s nonsense.’

  I like to provoke. The dolphin-man pauses and stares at the death’s-head sphinx on my T-shirt. He pulls the face of a wandering poet who’s walked into a glass door.

  ‘Is that what you thought when you read it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  He brings his two hands to his face, clamping it like a vice as if to flatten it, except that it stays as perfect as ever, the curves of an appetising round fruit. I love it when his face splits into a smile.

  ‘Shit. That’s why I asked you. It’s little mermaids like you that I’m trying to attract.’ (Two lychees twinkle above his watermelon smile.) ‘Mermaids who dream of swimming with dolphins. In the open sea.’

  I stare in disbelief at my mermaid-fisherman. The hook’s pretty big!

  ‘Are you joking?’

  He nods and bursts out laughing. I’d guessed a moment in advance, thanks to our telepathy.

  ‘It’s not rubbish at all, though. There are thousands of dolphins in the Mediterranean. And hundreds off the coast of Corsica. The boat-trip guys in Porto, Cargèse and Girolata promise to take you out along the coast of the Scandola nature reserve, but given the number of bathtubs floating around out there, you don’t have even a one-in-a-hundred chance of seeing so much as a fin. Dolphins prefer fishing boats, they like to bite through your nets and steal the fish.’

  ‘Have you ever seen them?’

  He nods as if it were obvious.

  ‘Like all the fishermen in the Mediterranean. But as a general rule dolphins and fishermen aren’t exactly the best of friends.’

  I roll my eyes the way Maman does when she’s haggling in the market.

  ‘But you are. And now you’re going to tell me you’ve even managed to train them.’

  ‘It isn’t hard. They’re intelligent animals that can recognise the sound of a boat, the voice of a human being.’

  ‘And you’ve gained their trust?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t believe you!’

  He smiles at me again. I think he likes the way I stand up to him. I also think he’s telling the truth. I think my fisherman is a little child who’s spent his life dreaming about dolphins, all by himself in his room, and who’s ended up finding them, approaching them, loving them, I think that …

  ‘You’re right, Clotilde. You should never trust people straight away. Nobody.’

  Wow, he knows my first name!

  ‘Your Papé must have taught you that. It takes time to tame someone.’

  ‘My Papé?’

  ‘You’re Cassanu’s granddaughter, aren’t you? The Idrissis are well known around here, as you know. And you don’t exactly go unnoticed, with your disguise.’

  My disguise? Since he didn’t have hair or a beard, I’d happily pull his eyelashes out. If he didn’t have such beautiful eyes.

  My disguise indeed!

  This peasant has clearly never seen Beetlejuice. He’s never set foot in a cinema, he’s never opened a book, nothing matters more to him than his fish, his passion. My God, do men like that really exist?

  I go on the attack.

  ‘What about my disguise?’

  ‘Nothing really. But I’m not sure you can approach dolphins with a skull on your T-shirt.’

  ‘What would you prefer? A day-glo T-shirt? A pink cloud? Gilded angels?’

  ‘Because you’ve got all that under your T-shirt? Are you really hiding all those colours?’

  The bastard! He’s unmasked me with just a few words. Like a little girl who says she hasn’t had a snack, but still has Nutella on her lips.

  I’m preparing my answer when the boat starts rocking.

  ‘She isn’t annoying you?’

  I don’t believe it!

  It’s my mother. Without any embarrassment at all, she’s boarded the boat and forced her way into the conversation.

  And from that moment everything changes.

  He changes first.

  It’s as if there were nobody on the boat but my mother, Mama Palma, with her frightened-fawn eyes resting on a life-raft, getting her heels caught in the net, crushing her dress against a lobster pot, squeaking like a terrified mouse.

  As if he has forgotten me already.

  Or even worse than that.

  As if he only invited me on board in order to lure my mother on to his little boat. I saw the great big hook he dangled in front of me, but I hadn’t understood a thing. I’m not the fish, I’m only the bait!

  A worm!

  A worm to attract my mother.

  ‘Now don’t go telling her fairy-tales about your dolphins,’ Mama Palma simpers, looking down at the Big Blue poster. Her rebellious air conceals a marshmallow heart.

  A marshmallow! That’s all my mother has to stick on her own hook.

  I hate her!

  ‘I’m not joking, Madame Idrissi,’ the dreamy fisherman replies. ‘As strange as it might seem, dolphins are my real business. A pair and their calves have settled off the coast of La Revellata. They trust me. I really can take your daughter to see them if she’d like.’

  My mother has sat down. Bare legs, squeezed tight together. I can see that she’s trying to cross swords with the laser eyes of this star-gazer.

  ‘You’d have to ask her.’

  She crosses her legs.

  I fold my arms, sulkily. Idiot. Jerk.

  There�
��s a moment of silence.

  ‘Another time, perhaps!’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘Shall we go, darling?’

  And we go.

  He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to.

  He holds his hand out to my mother to help her back on to the jetty. He rests his other hand on Maman’s waist, and she leans against the bare, tanned shoulder of her brave knight. To finish the dance, Maman leaps across the gap between the boat and the jetty, her skirt flying, her legs doing the splits. Like an improvised move that they had secretly practised.

  ‘If Clotilde changes her mind, can I get in touch with you?’

  ‘Of course, Madame Idrissi.’

  ‘Palma. Call me Palma. Spoken hereabouts, Madame Idrissi sounds like the queen mother.’

  ‘A princess, I’d have said.’

  The princess clucks like a turkey. But you have to admit, she has a smart come-back.

  ‘Princesses hardly ever turn into queens,’ she says. ‘But in French at least, dauphins might turn into kings … isn’t that right, Monsieur … Monsieur?’

  ‘Angeli. Natale Angeli.’

  On the way home I ruminate on my certainty.

  It’s like a revelation.

  Yes, my mother is capable of cheating on my father.

  Cheating on him with that man.

  Natale. Natale Angeli. A fisher-king of mermaids, princesses and dolphins.

  While I … I’m having a lot of trouble writing these last few words.

  But I couldn’t care less!

  No one is going to read them. I know, my future reader, that you don’t exist.

  While I’m the one he loves. I’m the one who loves him.

  I knew it at first glance.

  Don’t make fun of me, I beg you. Don’t make fun of me, it’s serious, serious enough to make me weep all the tears in the world over this notebook.

  I love Natale.

  I love, for the first time.

  And no other man will ever be able to change that.

  * * *

  He closed the warped pages of the notebook and sat there for a moment.

  Echoes of techno music rose up from Oscelluccia beach.

  He stepped into the path to hear it more clearly.

  22

  17 August 2016, 2.30 a.m.

  Franck looked at his watch.

  What on earth were they up to?

  The breeze from the sea carried the sounds of electronic music but all he could hear was the dull, percussive notes of the bass, repetitive, obsessive, as if a drum-skin had been stretched out by the sea and every wave were striking it. An endless rhythm.

  Boom boom boom boom …

  In the campsite, however, everyone else was asleep. Franck had to admit that with the doors and windows closed, the noise was almost inaudible inside the bungalows, the mobile homes and the Finnish chalets. Too bad for those actually camping! The disco was perhaps another way of getting rid of them and replacing the sites with fixed dwellings that multiplied the profitability of each plot ten times over.

  What were they up to? Surely Clotilde wouldn’t want to be dancing all night to this techno soup?

  Franck continued waiting for another half hour, wandering around the campsite, coming across only a few shadows, other insomniacs, dog-walkers, pensioners who were allergic to David Guetta, concerned parents.

  The torch of Clo’s mobile phone lit up the end of the path at 3.04 precisely. Franck could have sworn as much to a policeman; he was checking the time on his mobile almost constantly. He recognised her as soon as she passed beneath the light at the entrance to their pitch.

  ‘Where’s Valou?’ Franck immediately reproached himself for not asking any other question, even for form’s sake: how was your evening? how was that Italian girl? how was the seaside disco?

  But Clo was on her own.

  She looked exhausted. Her eyes were drawn, her gait weary. As if she were ready to collapse without saying a word, without explaining anything. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’m shattered. Franck didn’t like this attitude, this carelessness, bordering on contempt. He hated feeling as if he were being left out and yet still had to justify himself.

  ‘Where’s Valou?’ he said again.

  Clotilde slumped on to a chair. He was annoying her, he could tell.

  His wife’s words came out slowly, dragging their feet.

  ‘She stayed on. With friends. Some girls from the campsite. They’ll come back up together.’

  ‘Are you fucking serious?’

  His words came out just like that, unplanned, at a sprint. And there was a whole team just behind them.

  ‘She’s fifteen, damn it! Are you oblivious to that, or what?’

  A team of executioners.

  He machine-gunned her with his eyes.

  ‘I’ll go. I’ll go and find her.’

  Clotilde didn’t react and Franck plunged off into the darkness.

  ~

  When Franck came back, Clotilde was asleep.

  At least she was lying under the blankets, wearing her Charlie and the Chocolate Factory T-shirt.

  Eyes closed.

  She had left the window open, and Franck didn’t dare close it. He undressed quickly, in the semi-darkness, and pressed his body against his wife’s.

  ‘It’s fine, Valou has gone to bed.’

  Lips pressed tight together.

  Franck rested his head on Clo’s shoulder, slipped a hand underneath her and gripped her left breast.

  Heart closed.

  He felt her breath against his palm, the echo of techno through the open window giving him the illusion that he could hear its beat, amplified a million times.

  ‘I’m sorry, Clo. I’m sorry for speaking to you like that. I was just concerned about Valentine. There are drunk guys down there. Weed. The beach, the sea, the rocks.’

  The heart calmed down slowly as the music speeded up.

  Lips parted, at last.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Valou? Nothing. She was surprised to have been allowed to stay up so late, I think.’

  Boom boom boom boom.

  Outside.

  Eyes wide open now.

  Clotilde turned over gently and gazed into his eyes.

  ‘You were just worried, it’s fine. Let’s leave it at that. You’re … you’re an amazing father.’

  Franck’s hands ventured under the T-shirt again, and the more daring of the two touched her other breast.

  ‘And a useless husband?’

  She let him stroke her, gently fill her heart with desire, her mouth with sighs, her belly with pleasure, before the seams burst one by one and she murmured, ‘Shut up, you silly fool!’

  They made love in silence. So as not to be heard. By anyone outside, by Valou, as if they were a pair of teenagers.

  Too quick.

  Clotilde closed up again almost immediately.

  Back turned. Sheet crumpled. Body bent.

  Franck lost his erection.

  Clotilde was slipping away from him.

  Had it all been written since the outset?

  He thought again of their first meeting, almost twenty years before; a fancy-dress party at a mutual friend’s house, both of them recently separated, she dressed as Morticia Addams and he as Dracula. Without that morbid similarity, Clotilde probably wouldn’t even have noticed him. What does a life hinge upon? A mask that you wear or don’t wear? Until the evening before the party he’d been looking for a Peter Pan costume, in which he could have returned home …

  Franck’s cock was now nothing but a soft, damp, ugly thing that he would have liked to tear off. People meet each other through coincidences, he thought. A throw of the dice. If couples survived after chance had brought them together, it’s because things could have worked just as well with another girl if fate had decreed it that way. So no one love story was better than another, a thousand other lives could have been possible, perhaps better, perhaps worse. Basically, Franck thought, staring out of t
he window at the square of starless sky, the only true love stories were the ones in which one party cheated at the outset, played with chance, disguised themself, put on the right costume, wore the right mask, waited for years before taking it off. Long enough for the other person to be used to it, conditioned, trapped.

  ‘And the beautiful Italian girl?’ Franck asked her back gently.

  ‘Beautiful. Still beautiful …’

  He felt like he was going mad. Clo was just worried. Perturbed. They would get over this as a couple. He would have to maintain his bearings. He ran his finger up his wife’s spine.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she went on. ‘But weird. She doesn’t remember Nicolas.’

  His finger zigzagged a little.

  ‘Twenty-seven years later? You think that’s weird? What about you? Do you remember your friends? The people you knew here when you were fifteen?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘No, you’re right.’

  Franck halted the track of his finger just before he reached Clotilde’s neck, disappointed.

  He knew she was lying.

  23

  Saturday, 19 August 1989, thirteenth day of the holidays

  Sky the inky blue of your eyes

  Dear future reader,

  I’m writing you a postcard from Corsica, a short postcard, because to tell you the truth, I’ve got better things to do these days than write to you.

  I’m too busy.

  To do anything but dream.

  So I’m forcing myself, after abandoning you for a few days, I’m giving you some news, a bit like the only time I went to a holiday camp, in the Vercors, and my mother gave me stamped addressed envelopes for the entire family, with instructions to write to all my uncles, aunties, and cousins.

  So then, if it’s compulsory …

  Dear all,

  I’m still in Corsica.

  Everything’s fine, I am enjoying myself, I have lots of friends.

  And I’m in love. Since the day before yesterday.

  With a dolphin fisherman. I think of him all the time.

  He doesn’t know. He will never know. He will never love me.

  Perhaps he will love my mother instead.

  My life is nothing but one big misunderstanding.