Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  She took one step.

  She felt an animal desire to press her body against Natale’s, as if he alone had the mixture of strength and serenity that could soothe everything.

  Aurélia left Harrison Ford behind and took two steps.

  Franck entrusted his daughter’s dry clothes to the first ambulance man he came to, and took three steps.

  Cesareu Garcia took a step back, like a wrestling referee leaving the ring to the fighters.

  ‘Natale!’ Aurélia cried.

  He didn’t move.

  ‘Clo!’ Franck cried out behind her. ‘Clo!’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Clo. Valou wants to see you.’

  She hesitated.

  ‘She has something important to give you.’

  The driver of the ambulance had spat out the stub of his cigarette. A stretcher-bearer came forward. The police Zodiac was moving in ever-increasing circles, taking the search further out to sea.

  Clotilde’s heart felt veiled.

  What else could she do? Abandon her daughter?

  She turned around.

  Valou and Palma were sitting side by side, the same golden blanket over their thighs, the same white towel wrapped around their hair, the same bent position. They looked startlingly similar.

  ‘Yes, Valou?’

  ‘Maman, I … I’ve got something for you.’

  Valentine got to her feet, staggering slightly, then took out a plastic bag that had been wedged between her legs under the blanket. She hesitated for a moment, then leaned towards her grandmother.

  ‘No … you should give it to her.’

  Palma’s voice trembled, she was struggling to articulate even a few syllables.

  ‘Please … call … me … Mamy …’

  She found the strength to smile, to hold on her knees that mysterious plastic bag, without letting go of her granddaughter’s hands.

  Clotilde walked over to them.

  Their six hands mingled, holding the parcel together, making the plastic crinkle. Palma forced herself to speak again.

  ‘It’s … for … you …’

  Palma and Valou opened their hands. They were crying, both of them.

  Clotilde unwrapped her present gently, not understanding at first what could have provoked such strong emotions. At first she glimpsed something blue, faded blue through the plastic; then she felt a shape, rectangular, a book, no, not a book, more like a notebook, judging by its thickness.

  The plastic bag flew off towards La Revellata and it didn’t occur to anyone to catch it.

  Holiday diary. Summer ’89.

  The writing, on the cover of her teenage diary, was still legible.

  She opened it extremely carefully, like an explorer unfolding sheets of papyrus found in a Pharaoh’s tomb.

  Monday, 7 August 1989, the first day of the holidays

  Sky summer-blue.

  Hi, I’m Clotilde.

  I’m introducing myself just to be polite, even if you can’t be polite back because I don’t know who you are, whoever it is reading this.

  That will be in a few years’ time, if I manage to hang on. Everything I write is Top Secret. Totally embargoed. Whoever you are, you’ve been warned! Besides, O my reader, in spite of all my precautions, I don’t know who you might be?

  My lover, the one I have chosen for the rest of my life, the one to whom – quivering on the morning after my first time – I will entrust the diary of my teenage years?

  Some idiot who has just found it, because being the total disaster I am, that was bound to happen?

  Tears welled up in Clotilde’s eyes. The letters, the words, the lines were intact. The pages were sometimes warped at the edge, yellow in the corners, making her private diary look more like a witch’s old book of spells. For a moment Clotilde felt as if she were meeting herself, herself seventeen years ago, like two heroines in a book with two parallel stories who finally come across one another in the final chapter.

  Valou looked at her proudly.

  ‘I saved it, Maman. I saved it!’

  They were crying, all three of them.

  One arm gripped her waist, another rested just above her chest.

  Franck.

  She turned around, brushed against her husband’s body and rested her head against him; Franck might have taken it as a gesture of tenderness, but she was merely looking over his shoulder.

  Aurélia was huddled against Natale in his windcheater, sheltered.

  Clotilde slowly pressed the notebook against her heart.

  67

  27 August 2016, midday

  Lisabetta, amused, studied the crowd in the yard of Arcanu Farm. The sun at its zenith beat down on the gathering dressed in their Sunday best, each one seeking a corner of shade to protect themselves, and not finding it. They were all trapped. Cassanu would have loved it.

  He had always hated the kind of gloomy scene some Corsicans still went wild for, the black-clad women singing lamenti and voceri, all those ritual gestures to evoke death, closing the curtains of the house of the deceased, putting sheets over the mirrors. Cassanu wanted none of that on the day of his funeral, and Lisabetta had promised him.

  She had kept her word.

  Still, they hadn’t been able to prevent the crowd from coming.

  Numerous, curious, silent. Lisabetta watched them perspiring litres of sweat, puddles forming under their feet, she imagined, rivulets that would flow all the way to the Mediterranean.

  There wasn’t an inch of shade in the courtyard of Arcanu Farm.

  And so the crowd waited, crushed by the leaden weight of the sun.

  All prisoners in this courtyard, more like an oven. As if Corsica were taking its revenge.

  Slowly, very slowly, the crowd came forward.

  The coffin set off first, carried by Orsu, Miguel, Simeone and Tonio, the most closely related cousins. One by one, like grains of sand in an hourglass, the members of the gathering followed, emerging from the farm in a dense procession and turning down the path that led to the coastal road, all the way to the Marcone cemetery. The endless black caterpillar crawled slowly along. The path was too narrow for the mourners to walk more than two abreast, or to space themselves out and breathe. It wasn’t until they reached the coastal path that a gentle breeze made the walk more bearable – the last kilometre of the three from the farm to the mausoleum. The procession stretched out along the entire distance, and by the time the coffin reached the Marcone cemetery, the last of the visitors still hadn’t left Arcanu Farm.

  Among the crowd of anonymous faces, it might have been amusing to pick out a Prefect, four councillors, seven members of the Corsican Assembly, a president of the Upper Corsican Hunting Federation, a director of the Regional Natural Park … Yes, Cassanu’s Corsica was having its revenge. The higher the rank of the dignitaries, the more they were dressed up in tight shirts, buttoned-up waistcoats, and polished shoes, and so the more they suffered in the intense heat, envying the children in their shorts, the girls in their mini-skirts, the local guys wearing T-shirts to the cemetery as if this were a game of boules.

  Like one last wink from Cassanu against the established order.

  Most of the crowd were still at Arcanu.

  The oak tree had been stripped bare.

  Lisabetta had thought about it for years; every day, for hours, from her kitchen window, when she observed the huge holm oak in the middle of the courtyard, she imagined that the ceremony couldn’t be otherwise. She had asked Cassanu to write it into his will.

  No flowers, no wreaths.

  For everyone, for her, the Arcanu oak, the Revellata oak, that was Cassanu. And so, as Lisabetta had promised herself, every friend, every guest, every visitor who came to pay their final respects to her husband had been offered a branch from the holm oak to set down on his grave. There were more than a thousand stacked up around the trunk, which no longer offered the shade everyone dreamed of.

  All of the branches of the three-hundred-year-ol
d tree had been cut off.

  The oak was bare, as if it were the depths of winter. A skeleton. A huge corpse stripped of its flesh.

  That was what Lisabetta wanted. She didn’t care about how it affected these people, this great crowd. In the end, this tree alone would be dressed in mourning.

  For a summer.

  And then, in a few months, it would blossom again. And Arcanu could come back to life. For hundreds of years, since Cassanu and that oak were one and the same. It wasn’t blood that flowed in his veins, but sap. The sap of the Idrissis, since the dawn of time.

  Lisabetta was impressed by the ballet of branches as they were carried along by thousands of black ants. The last members of the procession were now leaving the courtyard. She would bring up the rear, she had decided. Before setting off, she glanced one last time at her flower bed, on which no one had dared to trample, her little garden, the flowers that she watered every morning.

  She thought that when she died, on her grave she would settle for an orchid.

  ~

  Lisabetta slowly walked past the crowd, which was no longer moving; the first arrivals were already crammed into the pocket-sized cemetery, and the rest of the procession was unable to progress; as she came upon them, the crowd parted or moved aside, like spectators at a very fine, but incredibly slow Corsican rally. It was almost as if the crowd was inches away from waving the oak-branches while chanting Halleluia, although thankfully no one dared.

  It took the widow almost an hour to reach the end of the queue.

  The crypt was open, with a view over Revellata Bay. And yet, however beautiful the scenery, Lisabetta didn’t like crypts, particularly the monumental ones belonging to the important families. In spite of their splendour, with their Greek columns and Ottoman domes, they were little more than huge cupboards in which the generations are stacked in drawers. One day she would share with Cassanu, for all eternity, the fifth drawer up on the right. Tidied away neatly with their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents in the storeys below. With their son waiting for them another floor up.

  She slowly advanced towards the crypt. Of course, she would be the first to throw an oak branch on the coffin, but she had decided to share that honour. She struggled over the last few metres, or at least that was what the impatient crowd thought. Lisabetta turned her head to the right and Speranza understood without a word; she stepped forward and took Lisabetta’s arm. She too would be the first to approach the mausoleum.

  Salomé, her daughter, rested there.

  Lisabetta’s head now turned to the left, and with a look that brooked no opposition she invited Palma to join them, taking her other arm.

  Paul, her husband, rested there.

  The three women, supporting one another, approached the coffin.

  Lisabetta had taken it upon herself. She’d had the idea the previous day, and reflected on it during the night. To reconcile Palma and Speranza if only for the duration of a ceremony. To make peace. In Corsica, women have that gift.

  Together, with a single movement, they threw their three branches. The green leaves settled gently on the varnished planks, as if, by magic, the oak coffin had come to life, blossomed, and turned green; and if it were left there, on the ground, without the marble cupboard being closed, then by next spring the planks would have turned into a tree-trunk, roots would sprout, acorns would grow, and ospreys would nest there. Behind them, Clotilde and Orsu now came forward hand in hand. Brother and sister reunited by the fate that perhaps regretted having left them as orphans. They held just a single branch between them, supported by the only hand that Orsu could use, the right one, as if they were a pair of lovers joining their fingers around a single flower.

  After them, everyone followed.

  A mountain of cut branches piled up; the bare old oak had offered every shade of green, from moss to jade, from lichen to opal, as if, indifferent to the black of the mourners’ clothes and the white of the crypt, it wished only to challenge the blues of the Mediterranean and the reds of La Revellata’s rocks.

  Among the anonymous crowd and the officials whose faces and ranks she often didn’t know, Lisabetta recognised certain faces that were dear to her, or whose stories she had learned, stories that were linked to her own.

  Anika stood by the grave for a long time, inconsolable. In that same cemetery, accompanied by a crowd a tenth of the size, she had buried her husband. Lisabetta had discussed the situation with her at length, advising her to stay as the head of the Euproctes campsite. She would see, she would see …

  Maria-Chjara Giordano was beautiful and dignified, dressed all in black, from her sunglasses to her shoes, from the lace covering her sober cleavage to the two bodyguards on either side of her.

  Franck threw his branch modestly, quickly, discreetly, then stood aside, leaving Valentine there on her own. She stood motionless, for an eternity, her eyes blank, not crying, as if she were trying to see right through the planks of the coffin. To see her past. Her father had to tug slightly on her sleeve before she would move away.

  At last Aurélia arrived, on the arm of Cesareu Garcia. The sergeant was the only guest who hadn’t been made to wait at Arcanu, walk along the path, climb to the mausoleum, but even so the retired policeman’s dark shirt was covered with dry, white patches of sweat.

  Aurélia walked back on her father’s arm, smiled at Lisabetta, then stared out to sea.

  Everyone was there.

  Only Natale had refused to come.

  ~

  Finally the crowd dispersed. Clotilde, after hugging Lisabetta for a long time, walked over towards a bench that overlooked the Mediterranean. Palma remained seated and silent. In spite of the heat, she had put a fine silk shawl around her shoulders: black with a pattern of wild roses. Valentine sat beside her, tapping on her mobile phone. Had her grandmother known, in her prison, that they’d invented a contraption that all teenage girls were addicted to?

  There were so many things her mother didn’t know. There were so many things she didn’t know about her mother. Now they had all the time in the world to catch up. It wouldn’t be easy. Since regaining her freedom, Palma hadn’t talked much, hadn’t told many stories, most of the time she had remained silent. Listening.

  She was sixty-eight years old, too much light made her tired, as did noise, agitation, questions, everything went too quickly for her, there was too much information to take in. Too many surnames, too many first names.

  She got confused. When she saw Valentine, her granddaughter, she sometimes called her Clotilde, as if time had stopped during her captivity, and her fifteen-year-old daughter had been transformed.

  Transformed into what she had hoped for. A daughter who looked like her.

  Clotilde didn’t care. Today, she was at peace.

  She stood beside the bench where her mother and her daughter were sitting, her eyes turned towards the sea.

  ‘He … he’s gone,’ said Palma.

  Clotilde thought at first that her mother was talking about Cassanu, then she realised that she had been looking out beyond the Revellata lighthouse.

  A boat was heading out to sea, and they both recognised it as the Aryon, Natale’s form bent over the wheel.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Palma repeated.

  For the first time since her release, her mother tried to put a few more words together.

  ‘I’ve thought … of him a lot … I was about forty years old … when I went into … my dark room … I was still … a beautiful woman … I think … I had a mirror … I forced myself to forget Natale … My greatest fear … was that he would see me again … Time is cruel … unfair to women … a man in his fifties … doesn’t love a woman … of seventy …’

  Clotilde didn’t reply.

  What could she say?

  She merely allowed herself to be swallowed up by the view, since she loved it so much, to let her eyes roam from the Austrian cross at the top of Capu di a Veta, to Calvi citadel, then further down to the
Euproctes campsite, to Alga beach, to Oscelluccia, the ruins of the Roc e Mare marina, the Revellata lighthouse.

  ‘Look, Maman,’ said Valentine, who had finally unglued her eyes from her mobile phone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Down there, out at sea, just past the lighthouse.’

  She couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Towards the Aryon. Four black dots.’

  Clotilde and Palma narrowed their eyes but couldn’t see anything.

  ‘It’s them, Maman! Orophin and Idril and Galdor and Tatië. Your dolphins!’

  Clotilde was startled, and wondered for a moment how her daughter knew those names from her childhood, before she understood. Her notebook, of course, the notebook from the summer of ’89 that her daughter had read when she was bound and gagged in the Fuego.

  ‘I’m almost sure of it, Maman! It’s obvious. They’ve recognised the Aryon.’

  Was her daughter, normally so serious, really capable of imagining something like that? Would the dolphins really recognise the noise of the engine of the same boat, twenty-seven years on?

  ‘A dolphin lives for over fifty years,’ Valentine insisted, ‘and they have an incredible memory, you remember, you told me, Maman. You once said they’re capable of recognising a partner more than twenty years later.’

  Clotilde studied the horizon, but she couldn’t see any fins.

  ‘Too late,’ Valou said after a moment, ‘I can’t see them any more.’

  Had her daughter, through the miracle of reading her notebook, learned how to bluff? Valou continued, as if she hadn’t put everything on the table. She lowered her eyes towards the rocks overlooking Oscelluccia beach.

  ‘Now that Cervone is dead, what will become of the Roc e Mare marina?’

  ‘I don’t know, Valou. It’ll probably stay like that for years.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Why is it a shame?’

  Valentine turned towards her grandmother, then back towards the crypt, examining every name engraved on the marble, not only those of her uncle and her grandfather, but those of all her ancestors for the last three hundred years.

  ‘It’s a shame that my name isn’t Idrissi.’