by Michel Bussi
I’m a bit like them.
A kind of sea urchin.
I just want to throw words down like that, higgledy-piggledy. Don’t even have the energy to make phrases any more. I’ll leave that to others, the people who have something to say, Le Monde journalists talking about a curtain being torn at the other end of the world; the ones from Corse-Matin who are forever going on about the businessman from Nice, Drago Bianchi, whose body has now been found, at least a body in what was left of his clothes. He was supposed to have gone under a ferry in Ajaccio harbour.
‘Is something wrong, Clotilde?’
The first thing I see is the end of a fishing rod, then, at the end of that, I find Basile Spinello. The owner of the campsite. Papé’s friend.
I’d be happy enough to talk to him. And tell you about it afterwards. Happy enough.
‘What’s wrong, Clotilde?’
‘Mmm.’
‘It’s not like you to be so melancholy, Clotilde. At least you don’t normally let it show.’
He must have said a magic word. I don’t know why, but I start telling him my life story.
‘I’m in love.’
‘It’s your age, my dear.’
‘That’s exactly it. I’m not in love with some idiot my own age.’
‘Are you thinking of anyone in particular when you mention an idiot your own age?’
‘What?’
‘My son? Cervone?’
‘No, not him!’
Basile bursts out laughing. I like his big mammoth laugh; it almost brings down the stalactites in my grotto.
‘You know, my dear,’ he says with a wink, ‘the Corsicans have only one shortcoming: they love their families. It’s sacrosanct.’
He stops there, but I can see what he doesn’t dare say.
The Corsicans love their families, it’s sacrosanct. But when you’ve got a twit for a son, you’ve got a twit for a son!
Basile changes the subject.
‘So who are you in love with?’
It comes out almost against my will.
‘Natale Angeli.’
‘Aha!!!’
‘Do you know him?’
‘Yes. You could do worse. Natale’s not too lazy, not too stupid, not too ugly. He comes from a good family too. His father, Pancrace, was in charge of the clinic in Calvi for a long time, before he got divorced and went off to open another one on the Riviera. They say that Antoni Idrissi, your great-grandfather, gave him a thousand square metres on the Punta Rossa, in exchange for a coronary bypass that added five years to his life. Natale was angry with his father when his parents divorced, but here family is family, and before leaving for Italy, Pancrace left Punta Rossa to his son. People around here think of Natale as a gentle, enlightened type with his villa built below the lighthouse and all that stuff he does with dolphins. They see him as a charming idealist. But if you want my opinion, I think Natale is hiding his game – he looks like a dreamer so he doesn’t scare anyone. His plan to create a dolphin sanctuary, with boat trips to see the creatures close up, might work. Natale is sincere, people sense that, and they’re willing to pay through the nose for it. Sincerity. Authenticity. Yes, my love, your Natale is a bit of a gold-digger who’s hit pay-dirt, and he’ll go on whistling as if nothing’s happening, so that everyone doesn’t catch on. But Natale is also an old bachelor, much too old for you, my Clo.’
Basile says it in a considerate, incredibly gentle way.
‘I know … I know. But a guy like that is exactly what I want.’
‘You’ll find him. If you’re patient. If you know how to wait. Without revising your ambitions too much.’
‘He’s suggested we go and see the dolphins tomorrow morning, off La Revellata.’
‘Well say yes, then. Dive in! He might even need you.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘Have a good think. You’re not stupid. Why would he need you? And your mother too, I’d have thought.’
Is Basile already aware that Natale and my mother are flirting? Am I that stupid? Is it all right under my nose, does everyone know and I can’t see a thing?
‘Think about it, Clotilde. Natale has a grand project. A dolphin sanctuary, with a sort of aquarium, and a museum, so that people can study, conserve, and look after them. An eco-building to fit in with the seaside environment. Have a think, what does your mother do for a living?’
‘She’s an architect.’
‘And who does the land for his sanctuary belong to?’
‘My grandfather.’
‘Exactly, to my friend Cassanu. I know him very well, the old lunatic. Natale Angeli’s project could work, but Cassanu is suspicious, and he’s cautious. He won’t be an easy man to convince, he doesn’t like change.’
So if I’m following him correctly, Natale is using me and Maman to soften up Papé?
Or perhaps Basile is talking nonsense.
‘Papé is right to be suspicious, don’t you agree with me, Basile? Even though I only come here once a year, I’m crazy about this part of the world, the Euproctes, Oscelluccia beach, the Revellata Peninsula. I’d like everything to stay the way it is, I don’t want anyone to be allowed to touch it during the eleven months of the year that I’m not here. Like in Sleeping Beauty, a magic wand to make everyone go to sleep when I leave in September, and I don’t wake them up again until July.’
‘But everything changes, Clotilde. You will too, you’ll see. You’ll change. More quickly than the landscape.’
‘It doesn’t have to happen. You haven’t changed, for example.’
Basile was amused.
‘No, that’s true! But that’s a shortcoming rather than a quality. The great shortcoming of the Corsicans, perhaps – not being able to change. I’m like your Papé in that regard. Honour, tradition, respect. But everything will move on anyway, despite us. Because we’re not going to live for ever, he and I. After I’m gone, everything will change completely.’ His eye swept across the landscape, all the way to the tents at the campsite, whose flagpole was just visible. ‘And to tell you the truth, I’d rather not be around to see that.’
Except that he was still here.
And he could see it already.
A procession of teenagers was coming down the path that started above the cave and led down to the sea, in a hurry to get there before sunset. Maria-Chjara walked at its head, all dressed in white lace. Hermann followed after in his cyclopean way, with a radio on his shoulder wailing out ‘You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul’ by Modern Talking; the radio continually changed shoulders as Maria slalomed down the path. Behind him, Cervone and Estefan were pulling a small trolley loaded with packs of beer. Nicolas dawdled a little way behind the others. And Aurélia appeared a few metres behind my brother. Then came Tess, Steph, Lars, Filip, Candy, Ludo …
The herd was on the move. Going to Alga beach, I assumed.
* * *
He closed the notebook and rested the palm of his hand on the cold stone of the cave.
Basile had been right to let his cancer of the colon take him away.
Since then, paradise had been conquered by fools.
28
9 August 2016, 3 p.m.
Everything’s fine
Valou
Attached to the text was a photograph of Valentine with a helmet on, strapped into a harness, perched with a group of teenagers above a spectacular waterfall. There was no reason to worry, there were trained instructors in charge of the canyoning activity, and Valentine was a sporty type. Yet Clotilde couldn’t quite rid herself of the feeling of unease. She put it down to the mysteries that seemed to be piling up around her; the strange, sly pressure they exerted. Franck, who had gone off diving in Galéria for the day, was right on one point at least. She mustn’t brood. She needed to move on.
She walked along the pink gravel path that led to mobile home A31, reputedly the best looked-after in the campsite. The owner had even installed solar panels on the roof, a water-butt and a small wind generator perche
d on top of a pole, right next to the German flag.
Jakob Schreiber was the oldest resident of the Euproctes campsite. He had first come here with his wife in the early 1960s, a rucksack each and a motorbike between them. Then he had come back in the ’70s, with an Audi 100 and a Canadian tent for three. Their son Hermann had been less than three months old. Then they came back every year, renting mobile home A31 for the first time in 1977 and buying it in 1981. Those were the best years, the ones during which Jakob personalised his plot, cultivated his garden, set up a veranda. From the 1990s onwards, history began to go backwards. First of all Jakob and Anke spent their holidays on their own again, when Hermann turned nineteen and chose to stay on in their flat in Germany, working for a chemical company over the summer months. Then from 2009, when Anke closed her eyes for the last time, Jakob continued to come back to the Euproctes alone, for more than three months a year.
Just as villages always have a knowledgeable old man who preserves their history, and companies have a document-keeper who looks after the archives, in the campsite there was an old tourist who conserved all the pictures.
Almost sixty summers, since 1961.
Jakob had given the most beautiful pictures to the camp managers; they were hung on the walls of the reception, in the bar, under the pergola; pictures in black and white, photographs of women in bikinis from the old days, people dancing on the beach in flares, Franco-German football matches from 1962 until 2014, smiling children, giant barbecues … Jakob Schreiber was a passionate photographer. Inclining towards manic and obsessive. Over time, he had become an almost mute witness.
Jakob Schreiber invited Clotilde in with a slightly old-fashioned courtesy. Most of the walls of his mobile home were covered in large picture-boards displaying hundreds of photographs in no apparent order. Clotilde’s first impulse was to look around at random for the years that interested her, but she refrained out of politeness.
‘Monsieur Schreiber, there are some photographs I’d like to see. Anything from the summer of 1989.’
‘The year your parents and your brother died in that accident?’
Jakob spoke with a strong German accent. He talked loudly to drown out the radio, a German station that didn’t broadcast music, just the monotonous voice of a presenter.
‘I understand, I understand.’
While they were still talking, he hurriedly took out his mobile phone and started tapping on the keys. He did this for more than thirty seconds, and Clotilde thought about returning his rudeness and getting up to look for the pictures she wanted to see.
‘Sorry, Mademoiselle Idrissi,’ Jakob said just as she was about to do so. ‘I’m only an old man with a little boy’s hobbies. Do you know the programme Who Wants to Win a Million in Their Own Sitting Room?’
Clotilde shook her head.
‘It’s the same as on television, but adapted to the radio. You have to subscribe with your phone and download an app. When the presenter asks questions, you have to reply in less than three seconds, so there’s not enough time for you to look up the answer on the internet. You tap A, B, C or D. If you’ve got it right, you progress. It’s only the last three questions that aren’t multiple choice.’
‘And you really win a million if you get all the questions right?’
‘Yes, apparently. It’s all paid for by advertising. The programme is a huge hit in Germany, there are hundreds of thousands of subscribers. But like the vast majority of Germans, I’ve never got beyond the tenth question.’
‘And now?’
‘I’m on the ninth, you reach the second level on the twelfth. But I’ve got time, the next question won’t come up for another fifteen minutes. It’s all the advertising, as I said. So, the summer of ’89, is that the one?’
Jakob got to his feet. The seventy-year-old still seemed quite alert. He went into another room of his mobile home.
‘Hermann’s room,’ he explained. ‘I turned it into a dark room in the late nineties.’
Dozens of filing boxes, all labelled and numbered, were lined up neatly on the shelves.
Summer ’61.
Summer ’62.
And so on up to 2015. The most recent years were archived in several files.
‘I take a few hundred photographs a year,’ Jakob explained. ‘Particularly since it all went digital. But even before that, I used up dozens of films each summer. So here we go, ’89.’
He climbed on to a stool, took down the box and came back to Clotilde.
‘If your parents didn’t die in an accident, but were murdered, there is every chance that the murderer’s face will appear in one of these shots.’
She thought at first that he was serious, but then the old German smiled at her.
‘And I’ll be the witness they need to get rid of. But I suspect you’re only here out of nostalgia. That happens sometimes, former visitors asking me about old photographs, for a wedding or an anniversary.’
He looked at his mobile phone again – it was almost a tic, because the radio was still broadcasting a series of jingles in German – then he opened the box.
For a second, Clotilde thought that Jakob was going to have a heart attack right there on the spot.
~
Valentine waited until it was her turn before throwing herself into the void. It didn’t look too difficult. First of all you had to abseil down seven metres, hang above the little platform half-way down the waterfall, then take a deep breath, hold your nose and jump. The basin below, the largest of the natural pools in the Zoïcu gorges, was three metres deep, according to the instructors.
Nils and Clara had already gone down. There was only Tahir ahead of her.
Valentine couldn’t have known. Perhaps it was better that way.
Valentine couldn’t have known that the carabiner holding the harness, the one that supported her weight, was about to break. That at the slightest sudden movement her safety harness would fail, and the clasp would give.
Valentine looked at the void with an excitement that left no room for fear. From the platform, Tahir had just leapt into the waterfall. His almost animal cry had changed into an explosion of laughter as soon as he surfaced.
Pure happiness. Valentine buzzed with adrenaline.
She couldn’t have known that the equipment she had been given a few minutes before leaving had been sabotaged.
It was her turn.
Jérôme, the canyoning instructor, put his hand on her wrist and guided her towards the void, passing the rope around her waist.
~
There was nothing in the box.
Summer ’89.
An empty file.
Not a single photograph, not a single negative.
‘I … I don’t understand,’ Jakob stammered.
He put his hand inside the box as if to check that it didn’t have a false bottom. It was almost comical. He climbed back on the stool and pulled out the boxes on either side to check that nothing had fallen out, but didn’t find anything.
He went on opening the nearby boxes, grunting Scheisse and verdammt. For him, finding that box empty was like watching a whole, well-ordered life being turned upside down; as if the contents of the rest of his files were going to fly away in turn, like a game of dominoes, toppling one another. Clotilde was about to tell Jakob to forget it. That it wasn’t his filing system that was at fault, that he hadn’t made a mistake. That a ghost had passed through this place.
As with her wallet in the safe; as with her mother’s letter, as with the breakfast table.
‘I don’t understand,’ Jakob kept saying, over and over again.
A jingle on the radio seemed to pull him out of his obsessive cul-de-sac: Who Wants to Make a Million? was about to start again.
The tenth question.
Jakob suddenly froze. The presenter asked something incomprehensible, in a slightly surreal voice, and then, even faster, listed the four options:
A, Goethe, B, Mann, D, Kafka, D, Musil.
Ein, zwei,
drei …
A ding burst from Jakob’s phone.
‘Ja, Antwort B, only Thomas Mann stayed at Davos sanatorium, there’s no doubt about it!’
He was in a state of euphoria for a few more moments, before the box at his feet brought him back to the sad reality.
‘Maybe I’m losing my marbles, Mademoiselle Idrissi. I spend my days organising these damned files, and the one day someone asks to see one of them …’
‘It doesn’t matter, Monsieur Schreiber. As you said, it’s just nostalgia.’
‘I must be going mad. But as you have seen, Fräulein, I do still have that verdammte memory of mine.’
On the radio, the presenter confirmed, Antwort B, Thomas Mann, followed by another endless tunnel of advertising.
Clotilde got up. She’d hit another dead end. She still needed to question Maria-Chjara and Cassanu. Go back and question Sergeant Cesareu Garcia as well or, even better, have a conversation with Aurélia, his daughter.
Ding.
This time the message came from Clotilde’s phone.
Natale.
She felt herself blushing and, like a young girl caught talking to her lover, she turned off her phone. She would read his message later. Perhaps in the Cave of the Sea-Calves.
‘Let me say it again, it doesn’t matter, Monsieur Schreiber.’
The German scratched what few grey hairs he had left on his head.