by Michel Bussi
*
We reached the heart of his sanctuary. I felt nothing but a bit more wind on my cheeks, perhaps a little more rocking. Behind us, the Revellata lighthouse looked like a toothpick stuck in an île flottante. Natale turned off the engine of the Aryon and started praying, or as good as.
It was a prayer I knew.
And you float there, in the silence. And you stay there,
And you decide that you’ll die for them
Only then do they start coming out.
They come, and they greet you, and they judge the love you have for them.
I continued the quote. Natale looked impressed.
If it’s sincere
If it’s pure
They’ll be with you …
I let him finish.
And take you away forever.2
It was crazy, really, I don’t know if you can imagine it, reciting the words from The Big Blue in the middle of nowhere with the sea all around.
Natale had lit a cigarette. Without offering me one. Like one more sign that, in his eyes, I was just a kid.
‘We won’t wait for long,’ he said between two puffs. ‘You know the story of the Little Prince? When he tames the fox? Do you remember the most important thing?’
‘Hmm.’
‘To come at the same time every day, so that the fox’s heart is ready to greet him. You’ll see, my princess, dolphins are like foxes – they get their hearts ready too, and they always come at the same time each day. Hang on …’
And gently, he points his finger to his left.
I can’t see anything. It’s just charm. He’s trying to charm me again when he takes my hand and guides it in the right direction.
‘There … Don’t move …’
And then there they are, my God … I’ve seen them!
Yes, as I’ve told you, just as I can see this pen and this page right now, I’ve SEEEEEN them!
Four dolphins, two large ones and two smaller ones. I didn’t just see their fins, I saw them swimming and leaping, diving, coming back up, diving again.
And I wept.
I swear, I burst into tears like an idiot, while Natale talked to them, throwing them fish. I rubbed my eyes, trying to hide the tears, and noticed the charcoal smears from my wet mascara on my fingertips.
‘Are you hungry, my Orophin? Leave some for your sweetheart! For your little ones! Go on, Idril, catch it. Galdor and Tatië, move over a little.’
I swear to you, the four dolphins were less than three metres away, making those little noises they make. We weren’t in Marineland or some dumb theme park, we were in their home, just the two of us, and they were there, demanding another bucket of frozen fish.
‘Do you want to join them?’
I looked at him with my wet-charcoal eyes, dumber than ever.
‘Can I?’
‘Of course, if you can swim.’
Can I swim?!
I slipped out of the black jeans I was boiling in, the T-shirt with the big teeth, and Natale couldn’t help smiling at the sight of me in a bikini. Not a lascivious smile, more that of a father discovering that his little daughter still has her princess costume on under her pyjamas.
I didn’t give him time to study the indigo tones of my costume, the sapphire sequins and the little flowers decorated with pearls.
I dived straight in.
I even touched them. Especially the babies, Galdor and Tatië.
You don’t believe me? I don’t care, I was there! I put my hand on their fins, my palm on their sleek skin, trying to feel its slight flakiness, I looked under the water when, with a flick of the tail, they slipped ten metres below the surface, I saw them come up again with two waves of their bodies, I brushed against them when they jumped and splashed. It isn’t even a dream, my future reader, it’s beyond that … It’s beyond anything you can experience.
I have swum with dolphins!
‘Come on,’ Natale said to me, starting the engine again. ‘There’s something I’ve got to show you.’
* * *
The sun had just set behind the bungalows of Alley C.
He closed the notebook and looked at the photograph of the summer of ’61 hung above the bar. It was time to finish it. To silence the past once and for all; to put all trace of it on the bonfire, burn it and scatter its ashes.
As if it had never existed.
2 Dialogue from the film, The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson, © 1988, Gaumont.
32
19 August 2016, 8 p.m.
‘Your beer, Herr Schreiber.’
Marco, the young waiter at the bar in the Euproctes, had checked that the bottle was cold before serving Jakob his Bitburger. The boss ordered eight packs every summer, for the sole use of the oldest customer on the campsite, a kind of imperial privilege dating back to the days of Bismarck.
‘Danke.’
The German hadn’t even looked up from his computer. Schreiber was exactly the kind of customer Marco couldn’t stand. The customer who thinks he’s interesting. Who smiles at you with a slight look of contempt, who explains all the whys and wherefores of every single thing, going on about how things were better before, the waiters in the old days, the espressos in the old days, the motorbikes in the old days, the Mediterranean in the old days … There was only one thing he couldn’t reproach Jakob Schreiber for: at over seventy, he still had the energy and curiosity of a young man, demonstrating for you the superiority of carbon pétanque balls over stainless steel, the superiority of analogue over digital photography, of craft beer over industrially produced.
His days at the campsite were organised as rigorously as a Mannschaft 4-4-2. A game of pétanque in the morning, between ten and twenty photographs in the afternoon, and thirty-three centilitres of beer in the evening. An unchanging way of life.
And to think that he still had a good twenty years to bore them senseless …
He wouldn’t be the kind to join in with the poker game in the next room.
But in front of his computer, that evening, Jakob was getting bored. At his age, the unexpected was not recommended. 67 per cent of files copied, said the grey bar that was slowly turning green. Files flashed across his computer screen at great speed, the way they do on those new police dramas where as many different images slide past during the opening titles as there are in a whole episode of Derrick. The download still wasn’t going fast enough for Jakob’s liking. He had calculated that he would have to download about eight hundred photographs from the cloud, all the pictures from the summer of ’89, stored at 300 dpi. His old laptop was struggling, either that or the wi-fi connection in the Euproctes bar left something to be desired.
Download complete in 11 minutes, it said on the screen, but it looked like one of those dishonest signs telling you the estimated wait in a queue, or an unmoving traffic jam. The second hand of Jakob’s watch, on the other hand, kept circling the face.
9.12 p.m.
The next question on Who Wants to Make a Million?, the last of the day, would be asked in less than half an hour.
73 per cent of files copied.
He waited there, irritated, staring at the five posters that decorated the walls of the bar, five photographs that he had given to Cervone Spinello, and formerly to his father Basile, without claiming any privilege in return other than to be served beer, pretzels and Knackwurst imported directly from the Rhine.
The summers of 1961, ’71, ’81, ’91 and 2001.
Jakob gazed at his photographs with pride, those five pictures which gave a synoptic vision of the passing of time, from the first Canadian tents to pop-up igloos, from sleeping bags on the beach to self-inflating mattresses, from wood fires to self-lighting barbecues. Just when he was least expecting it, the download suddenly speeded up, going from 76 per cent to 100 per cent before he had time to finish his Bitburger.
Scheisse!
He downed the beer in one, grabbed a handful of pretzels and tucked his computer under his arm, and with his other hand gr
abbed his case of boules, because he refused ever to be separated from his Prestige Carbone 125 Demi-dure which, according to the German, were worth their weight in gold. Malicious gossips claimed that Herr Schreiber slept with his pétanque balls under his mattress, like the princess and the pea.
Night was falling. Crickets hidden in the olive trees announced the end of the day like a thousand muezzins perched in as many trees. Amidst their din, in the gloom, Jakob Schreiber paid no attention to the sound of footsteps behind him. He walked quickly and with great determination.
With his feet comfortably protected by his socks, and his socks solidly strapped into his leather sandals, they could have found their own way to the bungalow. They had already done that before in fact, on the day when Jakob had emptied the entire eight packs of Bitburger with tourists of every nationality, on 8 July 1990 – the evening when Germany won the World Cup. Hermann and Anke had still been with him in those days. He had spent the rest of the summer drinking Pietra on draught, and had sworn that he would never allow himself to be as generous again. Two years ago he had been alone in his mobile home when he had witnessed his country gaining another victory. This time he hadn’t even opened a bottle to celebrate Mario Götze’s goal in extra time.
Hermann and Anke weren’t there any more.
As soon as Jakob opened the door of his mobile home, he set down his pétanque balls and turned on his transistor radio. He had time to prepare himself, the radio was still broadcasting advertisements, the twelfth question wouldn’t be asked for another nine minutes. He sat down at the sitting-room table and turned on his laptop. He clicked distractedly on the file Summer ’89, thinking about questions 9, 10 and 11, which he had answered with an ease that even he had found disconcerting. In the seven years he had been listening to this programme, he had never got past the tenth … Might little Clotilde Idrissi have brought him some luck? With the tenth question, he had won a twenty-four-volume Brockhaus encyclopaedia, of which he now had three copies, or seventy-two sizeable volumes to store at his house, and he had seriously considered bringing one of the sets here, to his cramped second home.
The twelfth question corresponded to the third level, the level reached by less than one player in a million according to the statistics provided by the website. You didn’t get any money, but you did get a VIP entrance pass to the Pinakothek, the monumental assembly of museums in Munich, with a visit to corridors normally forbidden to the public, access to restoration studios. Above all, before you left, a bust of you would be created by a sculptor which was then exhibited in a special room. So far only seventeen Germans, their heads crammed with facts, had entered into posterity like that.
Jakob was just one question away from becoming the eighteenth.
Distractedly, he flicked through the photographs of the summer of ’89. His memory of the faces remained amazingly precise. He easily recognised little Clotilde, Nicolas Idrissi, Maria-Chjara Giordano, Aurélia Garcia, Cervone Spinello; slightly less the ones who had spent only that summer here, but some names came back to him – Estefan, Magnus, Filip. He sped through photographs of landscapes, adults and scenes of everyday life, concentrating solely on the teenagers.
He was worried about why his pictures had been stolen, because they had been stolen, there was no doubt about that. There was clearly some connection to Clotilde Idrissi coming back to the island, even if he couldn’t tell what it was. One thing at a time, he told himself, just now he had to concentrate on the competition. He would examine the photographs properly after that.
Concentrating harder than ever.
Concentrating too hard to hear the crunch of gravel outside his mobile home.
The radio presenter announced that he would be asking the famous twelfth question in less than a minute. Jakob’s right hand gripped his mobile phone, his left hand trembling slightly. To calm the tremors, he clenched the mouse and clicked on the slide-show to keep it going.
The summer of ’89 flowed in front of him. Alga beach at sunset, the Cave of the Sea-Calves in the early morning, a game of pétanque, the teenagers dancing, the reception area at the campsite, the car park.
Noch 30 Sekunden, the radio announced.
Jakob frowned; something in the photograph intrigued him.
He didn’t hear the door of the bungalow slowly opening.
Noch 15 Sekunden.
Jakob, as if hypnotised, studied the few cars parked there, including, recognisable among all the others, the Idrissi family’s red Fuego. The one that would crash less than twenty-four hours later on the rocks of Petra Coda. 23 August 1989, said the caption on the photograph, but what intrigued the old German wasn’t the car, it was the teenager who was staring at it, with the look of someone who …
Noch 5 Sekunden.
… the look of someone who knew in advance what was going to happen.
Noch eine Sekunde.
Jakob closed his eyes, his thumb raised slightly, now concentrating entirely on the question that the presenter delivered at high speed, like the engine of an MG 08. Three seconds to answer.
Answer A) Mönchengladbach, B) Kaiserslautern, C) Hamburg, D) Cologne.
Ein.
Jakob knew the answer!
Zwei.
He had no doubt, even though he was cautious by nature. As if in a dream, he saw his finger resting on the screen, entering the right answer, the journalists contacting him, his name making the headlines of his local newspaper.
In the big corridor of the Neue Pinakothek, in bronze, his skull on display.
Drei.
It was the second-to-last image his brain ever registered.
Jakob would never reach the third level.
His thumb stopped a few millimetres from the touch screen, just at the moment when the case of Prestige Carbone 125 Demi-dure smashed into his right temple. Jakob collapsed to the ground, taking with him the table, the laptop, the telephone.
In the narrow sitting room of bungalow A31, drenched in blood, his skull shattered.
The German’s eyes, before they closed, drowned by the scarlet spring spurting from his forehead, fixed on one last image on the computer lying on the floor next to him, a few centimetres away from his face.
Still the same photograph, the one of the Fuego in the car park and the teenager staring at the vehicle as if he knew that the steering was going to fail that evening. The teenager that he knew, who he had bumped into that evening, whose hand he had shaken, who had even asked him why he wanted a wi-fi connection at such a late hour.
Cervone Spinello.
~
He waited for several minutes, far too long.
Getting rid of the photographs would be child’s play, he just had to delete them, go outside with the laptop and throw it into the nearest rubbish container, leaving not one trace, no proof. Getting rid of the pétanque balls wouldn’t be complicated either. They would never find the murder weapon.
But how to get rid of the old German’s body?
Take advantage of the darkness? Take advantage of the silence?
It was already too late.
Outside, in Alley A, a noisy group was approaching, probably players from one of the poker tables who had finished their game and were talking about bluffing, beginner’s luck and going all in. Others would follow, as each table emptied.
He’d have to think of something else. Now that it was all over, he needed some peace and quiet.
33
He wiped the blood from his hands, from the pétanque balls, the scarlet stains from the floor of the mobile home, then he walked, walked away and waited until he had found a street-light isolated enough that he could start reading the diary again.
Red, everything was red.
Apart from that notebook, and its deep-blue words.
*
* *
Sunday, 20 August 1989, fourteenth day of the holidays
Delphinidine sky
Delphinidine, my future reader, is the scientific name for the blue pigment in flo
wers. Incredible, isn’t it? It’s the pigment that roses don’t have. That’s why no true rose will ever be blue!
I’m not a rose.
I’m letting myself dry on the rocks of Oscelluccia beach. I haven’t put on my T-shirt. This time Natale can peer at my innocent water-nymph bathing costume for as long as he likes; no skulls, no skeleton, not even a single drop of black, nothing but every shade of blue.
The Aryon is moored alongside us, attached to a ring hammered into the rocks. Oscelluccia beach isn’t really a secret inlet that can only be reached by sea, there’s a little path that leads almost directly from here to the Euproctes campsite – it’s a steep slope, too steep to go down wearing flip-flops and carrying a parasol, but it’s a lot less busy than Alga beach.
For the moment we’re on our own.
Natale Angeli goes on talking, sweet-talking. Except this time I’m actually listening to him.
‘You see, Clotilde, this would be the ideal spot for my sanctuary. At first you’d just have to put up a pontoon, some moorings, maybe a ticket desk and a little bar. I’d model it on the Baie des Tamarins on Mauritius, maybe you’ve heard of it?’
I shake my head and close my eyes. He can say anything he likes …
‘It’s a bay where dozens of dolphins have settled. Outings are organised every morning, it works like a dream, they’ve even had to limit the number of boats. It’s turning into an industry, but that’s not what we’d do here. We’d limit the number of trips. We’d raise the bidding, it would be a privilege, we’d create thousands of disappointed punters and just a few of the lucky elect. And then, if that works, if the money comes in, we could start thinking big. A real building, a sea-water pool, a wellness centre, a small research team …’
Then I sense him turning towards me, approaching, his shadow falling over me, making me feel cold.
‘Would you talk to your grandfather about it? Would you do that for me?’