Vernon Subutex 2

by Virginie Despentes

  AS HE DOES EVERY DAY AT ABOUT SIX O’CLOCK, Charles leaves the bookie’s on the rue des Pyrénées and walks up the avenue Simon-Bolivar to the grocer’s near the gates of the park. The boy behind the counter isn’t one for smiling. He barely tears his eyes from the television on which he is watching the cricket as he gives him his change.

  The old man slowly trudges into the parc des Buttes-Chaumont. He is in no hurry. Outside the little Punch and Judy theater, parents are waiting in silence. Inside, their brats are screaming “He’s behind you!” Charles’s bench of choice is on the left, not far from the public toilets. With the flat of his hand, he wipes down the green wooden slats, invariably daubed with mud where some asshole propped his sneakers on the bench to do elevated push-ups. He pops the cap on his first beer using a cigarette lighter. Opposite, two cats are circling, sizing each other up, unsure whether to launch into a scrap.

  Charles has always liked this park. Having spent the afternoon sheltering from the pale afternoon light in the dark recesses of a bar, he always comes here for his aperitif. The only problem with the Buttes-Chaumont is the gradient; one of these days, he’ll drop dead climbing the hill.

  Laurent comes to join him. He knows his schedule. He always has a beer for him. He endlessly trots out the same five or six stories, punctuated by a booming laugh. The tenth time they heard him bragging about the same fistfight, anyone would feel like telling him to change the record, but Charles does not ask much of his drinking buddies. You can’t be a boozer and be choosy about the company you keep. Laurent is part of his day. Obviously, he would rather it was fat Olga who joined him for his aperitif. He’s always had a soft spot for crazy women. He would happily put up with a whole heap of shit, if on a summer’s evening Olga would whisper sweet nothings in his ear. The first time he saw her, she was wearing apple-green clogs, he had mercilessly mocked her, calling her Bozo the Clown, and she had given him a slap around the face. Charles had to give as good as he got. Olga would have liked to return blow for blow, but she can’t help it, she’s soft-hearted. When she punches, it’s like a kiss. The old man was touched, seeing her hold her own with such conviction, he feels nothing but affection for her. She still bears a grudge because of that first encounter. He likes his women mad and ugly. He’s always pretended the contrary. He nods and agrees when friends talk about women who are no trouble as though they are gems to be treasured, he has often pretended that he dreams of a pretty little thing who wouldn’t bust his balls or throw things but that’s just part of the bullshit men like him tell each other: back when he could have landed himself a nice woman, he stayed with Véro, and every time he’s cheated on her it’s been with women who are no oil paintings. It takes all sorts to make a world. Nice women bore him rigid.

  The paths in the park are quagmires. It rained for hours. It’s all anyone seems to talk about in the bar these days, the terrible spring they’ve had. It’ll be a while before people come back for a Sunday stroll. The only people around are the joggers, who seem to have been hiding out in the bushes ready to jump out, panting like they’re being tortured. Some of them, it’s so obvious that what they’re putting themselves through is dangerous to their health. Laurent stares down at his shoes in disgust:

  “I don’t suppose you take a size forty?”

  “I wear a forty-four. Why are you asking me that?”

  “You always have nice shoes. I’m looking for a pair at the moment … I don’t like these.”

  “Those are work boots you’ve got on. They’re really uncomfortable.”

  “I dragged myself all the way down to the Secours populaire to get shoes … they didn’t have anything. The economy is fucked, people are hanging on to their stuff.”

  “Tough shit.”

  “I’ll head up to rue Ramponeau tomorrow, maybe they’ll have something in my size, these are chafing my heels, I’ll end up with blisters.”

  * * *

  On the next bench, a heavyset black man in a silver tracksuit is hectoring some puny little white guy in shorts. In a booming voice, the trainer roars: “Don’t stop, don’t stop, pick it up, come on, pick up the pace!” and the scrawny wimp is bobbing up and down, staring into space, dog-tired and looking like he might have a heart attack. Laurent wastes little time on them, he is fascinated by a big lump of a girl staggering up the path in blue overalls like a drunken cosmonaut. Charles passes Laurent another bottle and says:

  “If it was down to me, I wouldn’t allow any sports freaks in the park. They ruin the atmosphere.”

  “You’d deprive us of all the pretty little things running around half naked? I mean, take the girl coming toward us right now—it would be a terrible shame if she didn’t get to show off her wares…”

  The problem with guys like Laurent—and they are legion—is that you can always predict their reactions. The slim, blond-haired student jogging down the path is of no possible interest. The sort of girl who smells of soap even when she’s running. Not that Charles has a moral scale he applies to the libidos of others. But guys these days are all the same, it’s like they take night classes to be as much like each other as possible. If you split Laurent’s brain in two to look at the inner workings, you’d find exactly the same bullshit dreams as you would in the wheezing middle-manager doing abdominal crunches at the next bench: fat-free, zero-sugar girls, a bit of bling by Rolex and a big house by the sea. Dumb fuck dreams.

  There is an order of magnitude between his generation and Laurent’s. His generation didn’t idolize the bourgeoisie. Whatever they claim, the working classes today all wish they’d been born on the right side of the tracks. In Lessines, the town where he grew up, the day was governed by the rhythm of the sirens at the local quarries. They despised the middle-class people from the other side of town. You didn’t drink with your boss. It was a law. In the bars, people talked of nothing but politics, class hatred nurtured a veritable proletarian aristocracy. People knew how to despise their boss. That’s all gone now, and with it the satisfaction of a job well done. There is no working-class consciousness anymore. The only thing that matters to them today is being just like their boss. Give a guy like Laurent power, and he wouldn’t want to force the rich to redistribute their wealth, he’d want to join their clubs. There has been a standardization of desire: they’re all free-market reactionaries. They’d make good cannon fodder.

  Farther down the path, standing next to a bank of flowers, four park keepers are smoking with a man in a gray suit. A smiling, broad-shouldered Asian guy, a regular in the park who always wears a Stetson, is walking backward up a steep lawn. He always does this when he comes here, he never talks to anyone. A short-legged, long-haired gray dog runs around him in circles. Charles turns to his drinking buddy:

  “Any idea why the Chinese do that?”

  “Run up hills backward? Not a clue. Different cultures, isn’t it?”

  “That’s true, it’s not something we’d normally do.”

  Since spring, Laurent has been living on the abandoned railway track that runs through the park at the bottom of the hill. Not many of them sleep there, and the park keepers turn a blind eye as long as no one walks on the grass at night.

  A woman hesitates near the bench where they are sitting as though she has lost her way. She is wearing a long red coat buttoned up the front, the sort of coat a little girl might wear; it accentuates her wizened face. She must be a schoolteacher. If she had more contact with adults, she wouldn’t be wearing a coat like that. Laurent raises a hand and waves when he spots her. She seems surprised at first, then recognizes him and comes over:

  “Hello. How are things?”

  “Cool. Care for a swig?” he says, proffering his cheap wine.

  Instinctively, she takes a step back, as though he might force the bottle into her mouth.

  “No, no, no thanks. I’m looking for a bar called Rosa Bonheur, do you know which way it is?”

  “Always looking for something or other, you…”

  Laurent is playing
the lady-killer. Charles is embarrassed for him. For fuck’s sake, what are you thinking, expecting a clean, well-dressed woman to drink out of your bottle and listen to your shtick?

  “If you’re looking for Rosa Bonheur, it’s simple, take that street there, go straight on, about five hundred yards. Did you ever find that guy, Subutex?”

  “No. You never saw him again?”

  “Nope … but I can take your details and if I hear anything, I’ll let you know…”

  Laurent reels off his patter in the tone of a receptionist. He puffs out his chest, opens the zipper of his thick khaki gabardine, takes out a battered orange notepad, and, flashing a toothless grin, asks the lady to lend him a pen. He’s a pitiful sight when he tries to seem urbane. The lady in the red coat gives a slightly irritated pout and mechanically tugs at a hair between her eyes. Laurent carries on blathering as usual—when he finds himself a new audience, he doesn’t give up easily.

  “Vernon got into a right mess because he was hanging out with the wrong tart … You see it a lot in newbies: too easygoing. If I’d seen him with Olga, I would have warned him to watch out. Everyone gets fooled. She seems nice enough at first, but if you hang out with her you end up facedown in the shit … It’s no life for women, living on the streets. And anyway, it’s easier for them to avoid it. If Olga had squeezed out two or three brats when she still could, she’d be entitled to loads of benefits, and let me tell you something, if you’re a single mother, they’ll find you fucking social housing. Guys like us, single men with no kids, we can drop dead … oh, but families, they’re sacred! Not her though, oh no, too much effort to crank out a kid … a useless bitch, that’s Olga. She has to do everything like a man … except when it comes to brawls, oh, she’s more than happy to throw the first punch, but the one who takes the punches is the guy who’s with her…”

  “If you do see Vernon, tell him we’re looking for him, yeah? Tell him Émilie, Xavier, Patrice, Pamela, Lydia … we’re all looking for him. Tell him we’re worried … and that we have stuff to tell him, important stuff…”

  “So, you gonna give me your number? And what did you say your name was?”

  * * *

  The woman in the red coat does not know how to say no. Her name is Émilie; reluctantly she mumbles her mobile phone number, then rushes off. She is a little wide in the hips, she moves unsteadily. “Where the fuck d’you know her from?” Charles says.

  “There’re a whole bunch of them,” Laurent crows. “All looking for Vernon Subutex, but I’ve no idea where the bastard’s gone…”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “A loser. New guy. The sort you know can’t hack it. Too weak. Too delicate. I dunno where he’s gone, but it was obvious that the guy would never cut it, living on the street. At least ex-junkies have some experience with it, not him though … too la-di-da. He got in one brawl after another until some friend of his got beaten senseless and left for dead on the street. And then the guy up and disappears. His friends have been trying to track him down ever since…”

  “She didn’t seem angry.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think they’re looking to give him a beating … they’re just a bunch of headbangers who’ve been hanging around the park looking for Subutex the last three days.”

  “So what does he look like, this guy?”

  “French, skinny, nice eyes, long hair, comes on like some faggotty rock star … He’s not much to look at, actually, but he’s a straight-up guy.”

  The description sounds a lot like the guy up on the butte Bergeyre. Charles is wary. The guy was so sick, the old man thought he would croak right there on the bench. If he’s in hiding, he’s probably got good reason. We all have our secrets, and we all have our own way of dealing with them.

  “So you’ve no idea why she’s looking for him, this woman?”

  “Why are you so interested?”

  “It’s not exactly common, a lady like that looking for a homeless guy…”

  “Never trust women. They’re always hiding something … it’s probably something to do with death.”

  “Death?”

  “Women are always going on about how all they care about is kids … having kids, looking after kids, all that shit … and we’d like to believe them. But think about it. The only thing women are obsessed with is dead people. That’s their thing. They never forget. They want to avenge them, want to bury them, want to make sure they rest in peace, want people to honor their memory … women don’t believe in death. They just can’t bring themselves to. That’s the real difference between us and them.”

  “I don’t know where you came up with that bullshit theory, but I suppose at least it’s original.”

  “Think about it when you’re sleeping off the booze tonight. You’ll see. It makes sense.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why she’s looking for this guy.”

  “No. But I’m happy to shoot the breeze with a lady. I’m an obliging sort of guy. And I like women like her, timid, straitlaced, makes me want to give it to her, wham bam, thank you, ma’am…”

  * * *

  Charles leaves him to his lecherous ramblings. He is still surprised that the woman in the red coat deigned to talk to them. Charles looks like a tramp. People are reluctant to talk to him. But when he feels like talking to someone, he knows how to go about it. It’s like pigeons and crows; you have to regularly feed them little crumbs of attention. His approach is the same as the little old lady he used to run into around the neighborhood until last summer. She lived on the rue Belleville, and when she came out of her house at six o’clock, the pigeons recognized her. They would flock to her in huge numbers, in the air and on the ground, and follow her. She would scatter fistfuls of seeds and bread crumbs around the base of the trees along the avenue. Feeding pigeons is banned. To anyone who didn’t know what she was up to, the flights of birds synchronously swooping along the avenue Simon-Bolivar were very unsettling. One day, her kids put her in a home. Charles heard the news in the bar opposite the park gates. The old woman owned her apartment. The kids probably sensed the wind changing, the housing crisis coming, they wanted to sell up before the market crashed. Off to the slaughterhouse. She was a frisky old dame, had never touched a drink, the one pleasure of her dotage was feeding the pigeons when she went out for a walk … she wasn’t doing anyone any harm. It makes Charles laugh, people who have kids thinking it’s an insurance policy for their old age. He’s long enough in the tooth to recognize that they’re just feeding greedy baby vultures. No one likes old people, not even their own children.

  There’s someone just like her who comes to the park. An old guy who walks with a stoop, he shows up every day, listening to something on his headphones. He has long hair and wears a threadbare black jacket. With him, it’s crows. As soon as he shows up, they spot him and gather in a circle around him. Crows seem to be much more organized than pigeons. They’re as big as chickens, their feathers are a beautiful glossy black, and they’re unnervingly intelligent to people who assume that animals are dumb. The crows in the park know who they’re dealing with. They don’t need this old guy to feed them—they rip open garbage bags with their beaks and help themselves. But, seemingly, they like to socialize. They don’t just appear when he shows up with the birdseed, they wait for him. And if the guy has to change location because the park keepers are watching, they’re not flustered at all: they follow him and tell each other in crow that the meeting point has changed. The old man stopped coming in early spring, Charles never found out why. He was probably hospitalized. He’s far too young to have been put in a home; however desperate they are to get their hands on the cash, it’s difficult to get rid of a parent who’s healthy, especially if he’s still got all his marbles—you just have to grin and bear it. Charles asked Véro to do a search on the internet to find out what birds eat. And he showed up, every day, at the same spot, and fed the fucking things. He figured someone had to take over. And he realized why some people do it—the crows ar
e as much company as his drinking buddies. They have beady little eyes and they’re funny. Every morning, Charles goes to the pet food section of Bricorama. It stinks to high heaven, and there are flies swarming over the split sachets of dog food—he has to wade through all this, with his back aching and his bum knees, he’s none too steady on his feet, he’s circling the drain, that’s old age for you, it’s normal. But he clings on. It was only with age he developed this mania for being kind.

  Charles won the lottery. No shit. This dried-up old boil. What a joke. He often puts money on the horses, rarely on the Lotto. But like all the suckers down at the bookie’s, he sometimes filled in a slip, tempted by some rollover jackpot. What was most surprising was not that he won, but that he was in front of a television on the night of the drawing, was too lazy to get up and change the channel, and there were no batteries in the remote. It was only as a result of the sequence of coincidences that he bothered to watch the drawing—he never imagined he would be among the winners. Then again, that’s the whole point of the lottery: it could be anyone. Even him. He always plays the same numbers, his mother’s birth date. Easy to remember. The balls started to roll down the tubes—he has never understood people who play regularly, there is nothing more boring than a Lotto draw. And, one after another, his numbers started to come up with the terrifying precision of fate seeking you out, you and no one else. It woke him from his doze. His chest tightened as his heart hammered faster. It is not a pleasant feeling, intense joy. In an instant he was stone cold sober. Véro was lying next to him on the sofa, sleeping like a stone, mouth gaping, lips stained with wine. If she had woken up at that moment, he would have given her a wallop—anything rather than admit that he had thought he’d won. Because, obviously, at first, being unaccustomed to life serving up pleasant surprises, he assumed that he was off his rocker, that any minute now he would spot the catch.