Staggering between drawer and jacket pocket, he managed to find the play slip. This was nothing short of a miracle, since he had carelessly crumpled it into a ball. Ten minutes earlier, he would have been incapable of walking as far as the toilet without collapsing, now suddenly he was nimble as a goat. His synapses were firing at random. In the moment, he was too shaken even to feel happy. He tried to reason with himself—you old shitbag, stop tying your brain in knots with your drunken nonsense, you made a mistake, you’ll see things more clearly tomorrow, okay, so maybe you’ve got a couple of winning numbers—but the jackpot? Come off it! You haven’t got the brains you were born with. He had not slept a wink that night. He lay on the bed, fully clothed, then got up and dragged himself to the armchair, tried to wake Véro, cracked open a beer, drained it standing by the window, then went back to bed. But it was no use.
In the morning, he was down at the bar by 8:00. He had carefully copied out his numbers, checking twice to make sure there were no mistakes, examined the play slip this way and that, but could see nothing suspicious. He had sat himself at the bar, right at the back, settled in the shadows—it hardly mattered, at this time of the morning there was no one there that he knew and the Chinese couple who had taken the place over when Ahmed, the previous owner, had kicked the bucket—a burst aneurysm while he was sitting watching TV one night—were not likely to engage him in conversation: they had chucked him out more than once when he was drunk, he was not in their good graces. But this was his watering hole, and he still came here every morning.
Charles had opened the newspaper and checked the numbers again. In the morning light, on an empty stomach, it seemed even more monstrous than it had the night before. This brutal disruption in his rhythm inspired more fear than joy. He almost bitched that life never left him in peace. It just went to show we don’t know we’re born: he could have sworn that he hated his life and would have given anything to change every single aspect of it. But now that it had happened, he was clinging to old habits as though someone were threatening to evict him from his home with a kick in the ass. Two million. What do you say to that, you fat fuck? Overnight, it seemed, Charles had lost his happy-go-lucky indifference. For more than sixty years, he had trudged through the day from alcohol-induced coma to early evening aperitif, bellowing at everyone in the bar about how he didn’t give a flying fuck about anything, and not to bother him. The easy life was over.
And yet, he’d already lived several lives. He had watched his mother rake the ground with her teeth to be able to feed them; he had seen his father disappear overnight and never attempt to see his wife or his kids; he had been an apprentice when strikes broke out in Belgium in the sixties; he had been a champion pétanque player and a truck driver, a pen pusher and a ruthless card sharp, a bill poster and a cuckold, a brawler and a plasterer. His greatest passion in life had been the bottle, the bars and the twenty-four-hour corner shops. He was a lucky drunk. The bottle had never disappointed, never let him down. He has offered flowers to silly women and mooned like a lovestruck idiot over pretty girls, he has had dozens of lovers, each more moronic than the last. The sluttiest was an upper-class bitch with a title in front of her name, her family still had a tumbledown château but she liked to slum it in seedy bars. She’d had his kid. He’d told her: I don’t want to be a father, this was back in the eighties, she said she was having it anyway and if you don’t like it, tough, you should have had a vasectomy, asshole. She wasn’t wrong. He had never acknowledged the kid. Never tried to see him. Véro got pregnant too. But when he said I don’t want to be a father, she had gotten rid of it. She had sulked for a bit, held it against him, but she got rid of it. And she did it on her own, didn’t ask him to go with her, didn’t ask him for a single franc. She’s ballsy. She took it like a prole. Nothing binds people like adversity, working-class people learn to stick together. Véro is the old-fashioned model, the sort that come when a teacher marries a farmer, they never betray their man. He could tell it hurt her, not being able to have the kid. And it did something to him too. But you have to be realistic, a couple of pissheads like them, the poor brat could have spent the whole night bawling, it wouldn’t have woken them. And with the face on the two of them, what would the little fucker turn out like? Anyway, she got rid of it. Unlike the bitch with the fancy name. If news of Charles’s good fortune reached the ears of the phony baroness, she’d be banging on his door with a paternity test in seconds. And men don’t get any say in the matter, they’re fathers whether they like it or not. She’d demand a wad of cash and drag him through hell and back to get it. Véro would end up climbing the walls and screaming at him, and she’d have every right.
In fact, he didn’t plan on telling Véro either. At least not yet. He’d do some thinking before opening that particular Pandora’s box. He had trudged up the rue des Pyrénées and gone into a post office to consult a telephone directory. He wanted to track down the number of Française des Jeux, but the woman at the counter, a sly, fat black woman, had laughed in his face. There were no telephones and no directories in post offices anymore. He saddled a high horse: “You’re telling me I can’t make a phone call at the PTT? Now I’ve heard everything!” and she smiled and took him down a peg or two: “Come off it, you’re a bit young to still be calling it the PTT.” Not as dumb as she looked, it turned out. Mollified, he had sighed and walked out without making a scene. He had headed up to the place Gambetta, but the brasserie that he remembered having a pay phone in the basement had been completely refurbished. They can’t help themselves. You have something that works just fine, it’s solid, sensibly designed, everyone’s happy, but then someone has to come along and knock it down and replace them with some newfangled gizmo no one understands. The latest thing, apparently, is bars where drunkards feel unwelcome. Your key target group, and you chuck them out. And then they complain that businesses are closing all over the place. But a bar can’t survive on three tourists chomping on a croque monsieur. You need regulars propping up the bar if you’re going to make it, guys who would sell their house for a drink. If you’re selling booze, you need alcoholics, not lightweights sipping strawberry kir.
So Charles had bought a telephone card. Shit, if this turned out to be all in his head, if he hadn’t won anything, he’d have blown ten euros on a phone card he would never use again. Charles is wary of telephones. His hearing is not good these days, he doesn’t understand what people are saying. It’s a pain, he ends up yelling random stuff into the receiver. He had set off in search of a public phone booth, a quiet spot where no one was likely to recognize him, push open the door, and yell: What the devil are you doing? Come on, let’s go and sink a few quick ones.
He did not know how to phrase the question he wanted to ask. “I have a winning slip in my possession,” or “I’m calling to get a little information about the jackpot.” Like all working-class men, he found it difficult to have to deal with organizations. He didn’t want to sound like he was a moron, and the more effort he made to speak properly, the more blatant it would be.
The girl on the other end of the line had heard it all before. She put him at ease. He obviously wasn’t the only pleb to contact Française des Jeux. And probably not the worst. She quickly understood what he was getting at—a winning ticket was something she often dealt with, please hold the line, he had listened to Ravel’s Boléro, then some other henchperson had listened to him reel off his confused story, asked him to repeat the numbers on his ticket, and said, why don’t you come here now and we’ll check it out together, and Charles had panicked, it was a reflex he had when dealing with organizations—No, I can’t come right now, I’ve got a lot of things going on—and the guy on the other end said patiently, Monday, come on Monday, here’s the address, don’t worry, you can remain anonymous, completely anonymous, no, don’t worry, there’s no one hanging around outside the building waiting for jackpot winners, all sorts of people come and go in this place, it would be impossible to tell you from a winner coming to make
a complaint, or an employee—obviously, within the organization a number of people will know your identity, but we have very strict confidentiality clauses, as you can imagine, you’re not the only person to be in this situation, no, even if you’re too old to be an employee, there won’t be photographers trying to take your picture at the door, if I can offer a little advice, don’t try to disguise yourself, sometimes with the best intentions we end up making things worse, so no glasses, no wigs … Clearly, he was not the first person to win the jackpot.
Back at home, he had regretted postponing the meeting until Monday. He was scared even to go and take a shit in case a window might blow open, knock over a radio that might open the drawer of the nightstand, a gust of wind and pff—no ticket. If you thought this was a flippant joke, you could think again … He had even gone easy on the sauce, in case he did something stupid. That’s how bad it was … And it was not just this fear that fate would play a nasty trick on him, a reaction typical of his class, the glitch that screws everything up, fate devising some improbable ruse to ensure that proles stayed in the shit, where they belonged … There was a deeper fear. What was he going to do with all this cash? Jesus fucking Christ, in three days and three nights without a wink of sleep, he had had enough time to consider the problem from every possible angle: A house? What the fuck did he want with a house? And where would it be, this house? In some godforsaken hole where no one knew him? In the South, with all the idiots and the fascists? With bars full of hunters who can talk about nothing except slaughtering coypu. In the nineteenth arrondissement, where the bars are about as friendly as a Supermax prison? Normandy? What the hell would he do with himself anywhere but here? A house—that was all he needed. Had he ever wanted to buy a house? The idea of being a homeowner bored him rigid. And the thought of having to visit a lawyer and all the damn paperwork … No, no, no. This was not how he intended to spend his old age.
He had gone, as arranged, to Française des Jeux. They expected him to be thinking in terms of investments, shares, long-term funds … As he listened, stoically, to the gobbledygook of the junior manager, he felt as though he were slowly turning into Jean Gabin in a gangster movie, as though at any moment he might declare, “Listen, sonny, are you planning to bust my balls for much longer?” But he said nothing, he waited patiently until they allowed him to leave with his check. Having spent a lifetime sneering at those who made money without lifting a finger, he was not about to start speculating on the stock market now.
At home in his kitchen, he felt more deflated than anything else. So what’re you going to do with all this loot, old man? Buy a new suit? Can’t be bothered. Travel? I’d rather die. He didn’t like suitcases, sunshine, sandy beaches, and certainly not “getting away from it all.” What then? Talk about a problem … he would treat himself to a couple of young things. He was not remotely bothered by the idea of some hot babe rimming his ass just because she was after his money … but how would he find them? The bars where he hung out were not exactly teeming with sexy young things … Jesus, he hadn’t even gotten his hands on the money yet and already all he could see was hassle, trips to the bank, mountains of paperwork, new friends, hypocrisy, complications of all kinds …
For a long time, he sat in a daze, staring at the fridge. Véro had woken up by now and kicked up a hell of a racket because apparently he had forgotten to buy olive oil and it was his turn. She swallowed a dessert spoon of oil every day at four o’clock before her first aperitif, supposedly it lined the stomach and made it easier for her to hold her liquor. Charles had let her rant, he had slipped on his coat without a word and thought, I’m going to find myself a whore. This is what he would spend the money on. But when he got to the massage parlor on the rue de Belleville—the one he’d heard so much about from his drinking buddies—he had peeked his head in the door: plastic chairs and reflexology posters. And turned on his heel.
He had had his fair share of prostitutes, back when they used to hang out behind the gare Saint-Lazare. Sometimes, he would hang around for half an hour before plucking up the courage to ask a girl “How much?” He was shy around women, except when he was drunk. For all that, women tended to like him. He had known the great ladies of the night, the sort you didn’t mess around with. They were no prettier than the working girls today, but they were witty, they could reduce a man to silence, you had to behave yourself. Later, when you had to go cruising for them on the boulevards, it was less practical. He didn’t own a car. He had to walk everywhere. They never had a room. When they moved out to the suburbs beyond the périphérique, he gave up. He wasn’t about to take a train just to get his cock sucked … When the Chinese invaded Belleville, he had gotten laid once, down a dark alley, with a woman in an anorak who was energetic and good-natured, but she didn’t speak a word of French and he didn’t find it as exciting if you couldn’t even pass the time of day. He had thought: There you go, even whores were better in the old days, and he had never bothered to find out about the girls working the boulevard de la Villette. He hadn’t been interested, just as he wasn’t today. He wasn’t about to force himself just because he’d come into some money. He had paid for a round of brandies at Le Zorba, then met up with Véro, as always, at the bookie’s on the rue des Pyrénées. If anyone had told him that one day he’d hit the jackpot only to find himself, as usual, him and Véro, at each other’s throats …
Véro is like an old shoe, he slips it on and he feels comfortable. There is no such thing as chance, twenty years with the same woman, however ugly and annoying, must mean you like something about her. He had still not said anything to her. He had decided to keep it to himself. He was afraid that news of his good luck would spread like wildfire and hordes of women would spring out of nowhere, claiming he was the father of their children, demanding DNA tests and grasping for his money.
Gradually, he had become accustomed to his circumstances and had decided what he was going to do with the money: nothing. It came as a surprise even to him, but having thought about it, his life seemed to him the best that he could lead. He would carry on, but better. He visited the barber more often, he had always cared about his appearance. Now he could afford peanut butter, brand-name beers, and razors with five blades … The days of hunching over chill cabinets in Dia, checking the price of camembert, were over: he picked whatever he liked. Véro was suspicious. She came up with the idea that he had secretly inherited money—a dead uncle whose house had been sold off. As though he came from the sort of family where uncles were likely to own anything other than their own asshole … but when she noticed that, on the whole, they were eating better, drinking more, she distinctly smelled a rat. And it intrigued the old cow. From time to time, Charles thought he should probably marry her—the problem was, it would not be easy to pop the question without arousing suspicion: Why would he suddenly want to marry this fat lump? From this point, whenever he heard about someone or other unexpectedly kicking the bucket—a heart attack, or run over by a moped—a nagging worry would ruin his whole day. Shit, Véro would be seriously pissed off if he bought the farm without making sure she inherited … This whole thing with the jackpot was a nightmare. It was a constant fucking hassle.
His first real pleasure as an old man with money had been a pair of sneakers from Go Sport. It just sort of happened: his old shoes were uncomfortable and he’d decided, fine, I’ll buy a new pair. In his head, he was imagining an elegant pair of brogues, but he had no idea where he would find such a thing and instead found himself sitting in Go Sport while a young man presented him with various types of sneakers. He had tried on a pair, out of sheer curiosity. Suddenly, a whole world opened up before him: here, finally, was a field in which “progress” was not a meaningless word. Shoe design had reached a scientific perfection and there he was, still lumbered with a pair of old clogs. After that, he bought a new pair of sneakers every month. Though he tried to hide them, Véro had sharp eyes and she launched into a tirade: “Looks like you’ve been frittering away your pocket mone
y—you’re losing your marbles, old man.”
He had never invested the money. It had been an instinctive decision. He was not about to become a crook at his age. The young manager who looked after his post office account practically wet himself when he saw the new balance. He started inviting him to high-profile soccer matches, but Charles had no interest. Stupid fucking sport. No, he had no intention of talking about his money with anyone. This was one of the more pleasant surprises that came with being rich. Until you are in a position to say “no,” it is impossible to say you are incorruptible. He would never have thought it of himself. He had assumed he would be vile, self-seeking, that he would lose his head over the zeros on a check. Not at all. He discovered that it cost him nothing to say “no.” No. Even so, he took a real pleasure in watching the snot-nosed manager at the post office jump up like a jack-in-the-box every time he came in to post a letter. Charles gleefully tore him off a strip: What the hell were you thinking, coming to talk to me while I’m in line? Are you out of your mind? Do you want the whole neighborhood trailing after me begging for money? The poor kid could only blush and stammer his apologies. Charles was the most important customer in this branch, probably in the whole arrondissement. What a display.
One afternoon, after seeing a film on TV, Véro had wedged a cigarette lighter in the crack of her ass and was walking around, careful not to let it fall—apparently it toned your buttocks. Charles teased her as she strutted about, and pointed out that, in the movie, the actress had a pert little ass, whereas she could barely get hers through a doorway—the real miracle would be if the lighter did fall.
“How can you expect to tone that flabby ass? Before you could start toning, you’d need to melt off the fat.”
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