Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  I open my eyes. Or rather it’s Natale who opens them for me.

  There he is, in his swimming shorts, as handsome as a pirate, unattainable, with his tanned skin, the bandana on his shaved head and his bare feet leaving footprints in the sand. Christ, this guy who’s asking me to do him a favour knows how to talk to dolphins! He’s come straight out of a novel, or a film, he’s taken my hand and now he’s pulled me into it.

  ‘Of course I will. Why would Papé say no?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t give a damn about cetaceans, tourists or me. But if his dolphin-loving granddaughter were to beg him …’

  I know I should start bargaining, negotiating, setting out my conditions, but I can’t do it, so I simply clap my hands.

  ‘Whatever you like! Where do you imagine you’ll put this museum of yours?’

  Natale becomes unstoppable and starts using words I don’t understand – environmental standards ISO something, composite materials, recycling systems – he’s even started talking about budgets, it’s all very technical, and I switch off until he slips in a word that makes me jump into the middle of his costs totalling thousands of francs. Maman.

  I think I use the familiar ‘tu’ for the first time.

  ‘So you’ve talked to Maman about it?’

  ‘Of course. Your mother is an architect specialising in eco-buildings. She has a real sense of the practicalities. According to her, you can achieve energy self-sufficiency with just a few solar panels here and there.’

  He points his finger towards the flatter rocks.

  ‘Have you brought her here?’

  He does a brilliant imitation of a grouper, or whatever you call that fish with the big round eyes.

  ‘Yes. Your mother is very skilled, brilliant even. If my project goes ahead, I’m sure she’d be the best person to design it.’

  I cut him off.

  ‘If she’s so fantastic, why don’t you ask Maman to talk to Papé?’

  He sits down beside me like Robinson Crusoe. I love that cool way he has of hunching himself up. I see a mixture of strength and childishness, a man who is sure of himself and still a little boy in each of his gestures.

  There’s only one person like him on this planet and I’ve found him. Except that I was born ten years too late.

  ‘Let’s just say that your mother, well … as a daughter-in-law she isn’t exactly loved. How can I put it? The fact that she isn’t Corsican is already a handicap. A surmountable one, I grant you. But to make things worse, she’s the one who dragged your father over to the mainland, and not to Aix or Marseille, but to the far north, way above Paris. In the eyes of the Idrissis who stayed here, she stole your dad.’

  ‘I live north of Paris too.’

  ‘Yes, but you have Corsican blood. You’re an Idrissi, a direct descendant. You might inherit all this one day, the eighty hectares. Perhaps that will be enough to persuade your Papé …’

  *

  To tell you the truth, if you haven’t worked it out already, I was truly falling in love. Experiencing that feeling of wanting to give everything to a man, to sacrifice everything, all your values, all your honour, all those promises you’ve made yourself – sworn them, spat them out – to be a free woman. My understanding of this was all over the place, and yet like some female Darwinian reflex, I hardened; as if the women who had survived over the millennia were the most cautious, and all the impulsive, naïve and spontaneous ones had been liquidated. As if, at the end of the evolutionary chain, caution had become almost second nature, a means of survival.

  ‘Why would I help you, Natale? You adore my mother. I’m sure you’ve done the whole dolphin thing with her, you’ve gone sailing with her, let her dive far from the shore, brought her back to this beach. Why would I help you when you prefer her and you don’t give a damn about me?’

  Natale gave me a look that I registered, without knowing how to decode it; but I already knew that that was the way I would like men to look at me for the rest of my life. An astonished look, a look of intrigue, both uneasy and fascinated. The look of a poker-player wondering what his opponent has in his hand, one who keeps on betting just to see …

  At last he replied.

  ‘Clotilde, cards on the table, you’re fifteen. OK, you’re more mature than other girls your age, you’re original, you’re rebellious, imaginative, you’re just the kind of girl I admire; but you’re fifteen. So my suggestion is that I take you on as an associate. Are you OK with that? With us becoming collaborators? Sharing the same dream, nothing but that. Saving the dolphins, saving the planet, saving the universe; I can tell you, there aren’t many girls I’ve made that suggestion to.’

  He holds up his hand like a summer-camp monitor who’s just scored against some nine-year-olds, and we high-five.

  When I’m dreaming about him leaving his hand in mine.

  Putting his lips to mine.

  Pressing his skin against mine.

  ‘We’re the same, you and me, Clotilde. Fishers of dreams against the rest of the world.’

  He’s brought Maman here.

  Perhaps he’s kissed her.

  Perhaps he’s undressed her, perhaps they’ve made love.

  Perhaps he desires Maman’s body, what man could fail to desire her, but perhaps it’s me he was thinking of when he caressed her, when he murmured in her ear that he loved her, when he entered her.

  Perhaps it was me that he loved, even if his morals forbid it.

  ‘I want a contract, Natale. A contract that commits you to thirty years. I want 30 per cent of the profits from your business, a boat with my name one day, an office all in glass with a view of the sea, a pair of dolphins all to myself, and I want to be able to dress the way I like. If you can grant me all that, then I will go and jump on Papé Cassanu’s knee and discuss your crazy idea.’

  He burst out laughing.

  ‘And will that be all?’

  ‘Yes … Plus a kiss on the cheek.’

  34

  20 August 2016, 8 a.m.

  The sea carried away empty bottles, wet confetti and broken streamers like so many dreams abandoned at the end of the night by exhausted dancers, party-goers on the brink of despair; the waves returning them the following morning, bleached and faded.

  It was still early.

  The Aryon floated among all the detritus. Natale, lost in thought, seemed oblivious, as if he had long since abandoned hope that the sea would spew up the bottle he had thrown into it many years before.

  Clotilde was late. But she stopped for a minute, just before going on down to Oscelluccia beach. A few seconds to go back in time. It was the same sand as twenty-seven years ago, the same pebbles, the same foam, the same spray mixed with the pungent, peppery smell of the flowers nestling in the hollows of the rocks. Nothing had changed if you didn’t look towards the Tropi-Kalliste beach hut or the building site of the Roc e Mare marina. Something keeled over in her heart, rocking it like a boat unsettled by the swell.

  My God, but Natale was handsome.

  He just had to be there, he had to be sitting there scanning the horizon with his lagoon-blue eyes, his eyes that could detonate all the coral reefs in the world, allowing the triggerfish and clownfish to escape so they could add colour and make the oceans laugh.

  Natale was wearing a salmon-coloured sweat-shirt with a hood. A pair of jeans that were slightly too big for him. Leather sandals. Clotilde imagined that he might often pose like this, like a statue; that he had retained from his abandoned dreams the magical power to transform reality, for a few fleeting seconds, into something more beautiful inside his head. That he had learned to settle for that. To turn the fish counter at the Super-U in Lumio into an inviolate marine sanctuary. The Cour Napoléon road in Ajaccio, car pressed against car, into a one-man transatlantic crossing. A hasty clinch in darkness with the woman who falls asleep by his side every evening, into a starry night of love with one of the passers-by he bumped into earlier that day. One of the passengers who had boarded the
Aryon in the old days.

  Handsome. Solid. Fragile.

  ‘Natale?’

  She had slipped on a lilac dress that floated against her thighs. She had slipped off her sandals to walk on the sand that was still cold, almost damp.

  He turned around, his eyes fixed on hers.

  Handsome. Solid. Fragile.

  Dangerous.

  Nothing could be more dangerous than men with lagoon-blue eyes, Clotilde thought to herself. Blowing up the reef also meant letting in all the sea monsters, which might enter the protected space where families paddled in safety.

  They advanced towards one another, without crossing the final metre that separated them.

  ‘You’re playing with fire, asking to meet me here,’ Natale said. ‘I had promised never to set foot on this beach again.’

  ‘There were a lot of other things you promised too.’

  He didn’t reply. His eye slipped to the Aryon, still moored to the rocks.

  ‘You were lucky. I’m free today. I’m not due back at work until tomorrow morning.’

  Clotilde pinched her lips.

  ‘I’m not. My husband has gone for a run, half an hour or an hour at the most, to Notre Dame de la Serra. I need to be back at the site when he returns. It’s … it’s complicated … I told him I lost an earring here. A big silver hoop. It’s not just an excuse, by the way, I really did lose it the other night, during the concert.

  All the tiny wrinkles on Natale’s face began to move in harmony, as if, for all those years, they had been rehearsing a dance designed solely to make his smile irresistible.

  ‘Can I help you look?’

  He took her hand. The gesture felt entirely natural. They walked slowly, their eyes lowered.

  ‘You remember?’ Clotilde asked.

  ‘Of course. Do you think I often took girls to my sanctuary?’

  Oh yes, my handsome mermaid-fisherman, you shouldn’t have deprived yourself, in those days!

  She stared at the sea.

  ‘Are there still dolphins?’

  Natale’s eyes didn’t move from the sand. He didn’t reply. Clotilde went on. Afterwards, she would shut up, she promised herself. She would let him explain. She would just listen, as she had before.

  ‘Galdor and Tatië should still be alive,’ she said. ‘Orophin and Idril too, they say that dolphins can live to be over fifty. And that they have the memory of an elephant! Even better than the pachyderms, in fact. The longest amorous memory of all the mammals. I read somewhere that they’re capable of recognising a partner just by the sound of their voice, twenty years after they were separated. Do you know a single man who would be capable of that?’

  Eyes in the sand. Still.

  Why had she mentioned that stupid earring?

  She studied the closed Tropi-Kalliste beach bar in front of them, the overflowing dustbins, the chained grey caravan. According to the posters, Maria-Chjara would continue her tour in the west of the island, Sartène the previous night, Propriano tonight, but she was coming back to Calvi in two days’ time.

  Clotilde gripped Natale’s hand even tighter, as if to warn him about what she was going to say.

  ‘What is this madness? This squalid nightclub, these filthy sheds? Your pontoon, your nature reserve, your museum should have been built here. Explain it to me, Natale. Explain to me why Cervone Spinello won. Why he won out over your project.’

  Disembowelled plastic bags were flapping through the air, beer-cans rolled about, it would take hours for a clean-up unit to tidy all this, and then it would all start again the day after tomorrow. How could her grandfather Cassanu have accepted this sacrilege, how could he have allowed this dump of a beach bar to thrive, rather than Natale Angeli’s dolphin sanctuary?

  ‘It’s an old story, Clotilde. It’s all in the past. Please.’

  OK, don’t push him.

  ‘You brought my mother here too.’

  You’re crazy! Clotilde regretted her words instantly. You call that not pushing him?

  This time Natale did react. His feet burrowed into the sand, as if he really did hope to recover the earring.

  ‘Yes … And you were ready to get your claws out, your pointed teeth and your spines, a little hedgehog rigid with jealousy over your mother.’

  ‘I had reason to feel like that, didn’t I?’

  ‘No!’

  They stopped walking, turned on their heels and found themselves facing the Aryon.

  ‘I was fifteen, Natale, but I wasn’t a complete idiot. When you looked at my mother, your eyes … how can I put it … your eyes seemed to undress her! And she looked at you with the same desire. I never saw her look like that at any man … not even Papa.’

  Gently Natale’s thumb stroked the palm of her hand. Like the way the wing-beats of a butterfly can supposedly trigger a tsunami on the other side of the world, those tiny rubs on her skin provoked sensations deep in her belly.

  ‘Right, Clotilde,’ Natale said, suddenly raising his voice. ‘Let’s take off those masks. They’re about as battered and old as our faces are wrinkled. Back in the summer of ’89 I was twenty-five and your mother was forty. We were attracted to one another, I grant you. Physically attracted, I should say. But your mother was faithful, and nothing happened between us, believe me, even if she was tempted.’

  ‘Like good little angels,’ Clotilde said sarcastically.

  Natale went on as if he hadn’t heard her.

  ‘If your mother was tempted to deceive your father, it’s not because she fell in love with me, let alone because she’d stopped loving your Papa.’ He smiled sadly. ‘It was quite the opposite, in fact.’

  ‘Quite the opposite? I don’t understand, Natale.’

  ‘Your mother approached me, your mother flirted with me, she came on to me, she walked around in public with me so that people could see us, so that people would start talking … but it was your father that she loved. Do you understand that now?’

  ‘I still don’t. I’m sorry …’

  ‘Your mother wanted to make your father jealous. It’s as simple as that, Clotilde. She wasn’t interested in my sanctuary, the dolphins and my hands that smelled of fish. She just wanted to get a reaction out of your father.’

  Clotilde let go of Natale’s hand. The wind brushed at her face, caressed her legs, more gently than any man.

  ‘Things were also a bit complicated, Clotilde, between your father and your mother.’

  She didn’t want to hear any more. Not here. Not now.

  ‘It’s the oldest story in the world, Clotilde. Dangerous Liaisons, you remember, the book you were reading on your bench, in the Port de Stareso, opposite the Aryon? Your mother was playing with me, she used me because she loved someone else … and like a total fool I didn’t realise what was happening, I fell for it completely. Palma was very charming, she had class, she was interested in my project, she was an architect, she had concrete ideas. I almost believed that we would be able to make it happen together. I felt that there was some kind of bond forming between us. When in fact …’

  It was my turn to scour the beach. No buried jewel, only cigarette butts, beer bottles and perhaps some condoms if you dug the sand a little deeper.

  ‘When in fact,’ Natale went on, ‘that bond was really between you and me … not with Palma, with you. I think that mattered too.’

  Clotilde reached out for Natale’s hand, grabbed it in mid-air and pulled him towards her so that he spun round until he was facing her. After all, if the carnival was over, if they were throwing their masks into the sea …

  ‘Fantasising about the mother while letting the daughter fantasise about you was a slightly twisted plan, don’t you think?’

  ‘No, Clotilde. Of course not. You were a stunning fifteen-year-old, even if you looked barely thirteen. But there was no ambiguity there. Absolutely none. It’s just that I’d guessed.’

  ‘Guessed what?’

  His foot rummaged in the sand, embarrassed. Adorably embarrassed. />
  ‘I’d guessed what you would become, over time. A girl steeped in imagination, a lively and intelligent girl, effervescent, a wonderful girl who would devour life. A girl who, even when she was older, would look at it through the same glasses as I did.’

  A faraway voice echoed in Clotilde’s head. ‘We’re the same, you and me, Clotilde. Fishers of dreams against the rest of the world.’

  ‘But I was ten years too old, Clotilde, that’s no small thing, ten years … for us, it meant two curves that were already crossing, yours rising towards the peak of your seductive charm, and my own that was already beginning to tumble.’

  ‘Stop!’

  He bent over suddenly, as if to escape her arms.

  ‘Stop it, Natale. Stop blackening everything. Stop destroying yourself. You know very well that …’

  He stood back up without letting her finish. Between his thumb and his index finger he was holding a silver ring.

  ‘Is it yours?’

  Incredible!

  Magic. Pure magic.

  ‘Thank you.’

  You should never fight against magic, Clotilde thought. It brings bad luck. Her thoughts suddenly fell into place, like the enchanted wrinkles on Natale’s face.

  It was so obvious. Kiss him.

  Just one kiss. To honour a twenty-seven-year-old contract.

  Just one kiss to put to rest a twenty-seven-year-old ghost.

  Just one kiss, then that’s it.

  So as not to die in ignorance, not to regret it for all those years to come, when her own body would begin to decline.

  Just to feel on her mouth the taste …

  Gently, Clotilde placed her lips on Natale’s.

  For a moment, just a moment.

  Then their lips parted, as if it had been agreed, as if it was agreeable.

  For a moment, just a moment.

  Before their fingers intermingled around the silver circle, before Clotilde’s hand gripped the back of Natale’s neck, and Natale’s hand the small of her back, before their mouths melted into one and their tongues brought back lost time, and their bodies pressed against each other as if they had always been designed to fit each other.