Shortly before that, she had left the marital home. Her “I need to live life, shit, I’m too young to be locked away” had seemed to him a little facile. She felt trapped with a baby she took no joy in looking after. “You’d have to be a half-wit to feel fulfilled with a life like this, don’t you think?” So be it. Sélim believed that motherhood was something that all wives took to. But his was an exception. You can’t force someone to stay. It had broken his heart, but neither he nor his daughter was reason enough to keep this young mother at home. She was shriveling with boredom, she had other dreams. It had been difficult to accept. When she’d accidentally fallen pregnant early in their relationship, she had been thrilled, she said she felt fulfilled, that she dreamed of family life. At the time, he was the happiest man alive. During the first year, she too had seemed happy. Then she had started to complain about being on her own all the time. A slight depression. She wanted to find a job. She spent all her time stopping by the neighbors’ for coffee. By the time Aïcha could walk, her mother had no desire to spend time babysitting her. Things were breaking down. Sélim did not know what to do. Then there had been the handsome guy from the eighth floor. That was when the problems really became problems. He may have been a pathetic loser, but he was built like a Greek god. She left.
Left alone with his daughter, he refused to let himself be discouraged. In fact, the blow Satana dealt when she abandoned them was so brutal that, at first, he did not feel its full impact. Like a man stumbling from an accident who doesn’t realize he has split his skull open until blinded by the blood, at first he had determinedly thrown himself into the daily routine.
At the time, he smoked a pipe. One day when he had gone into the tobacconist to buy a pouch of Drum, he had scanned the magazine rack while waiting to be served. He had not recognized her at first. The makeup utterly transformed her. But when he looked a second time, there was no doubt. From the cover of some pornographic rag, the mother of his child was smiling at him lasciviously. He had gone to the nearest video rental shop. She stared back at him from an astonishing number of video covers. Pornography was being produced at the speed of light. In a few short months, she had made dozens of films. He had prowled the streets of Paris like a madman. Heading for a role in a harrowing human-interest story, to hell with happiness with everything he held dear in the world to hell with his daughter his job his friends. He was going to strangle that slut. He was going to buy a can of gasoline, burn her alive, then strangle her, or maybe not in that order, but one thing was certain, he was planning to kill her several times over. The resentment he had been choking back ever since she had left now burst forth in wild spurts, poisoned his blood and distorted his features: he would track her down and she would pay. But he did not even know where she was living.
She had reappeared some months later, having never tried to respond to the threats and the forlorn messages he had left on her voicemail, she caught him completely off guard. “I’m so glad that you know!” She told him that she had found it very painful having to hide her “new life” from him. “If you only knew how happy I am!” What was he supposed to say to that? She was out of her mind. She loved her new friends, the first-class flights to the United States, the easy money, the Hot d’Or awards at Cannes. She finally seemed to be living life, and the lifestyle had gone to her head. Thirteen years after her death, he still resented her.
He had promised himself that he would talk to Aïcha. But there was no hurry. Shit … now that her mother was dead, they had a right to forget what had happened. It had been difficult enough when it happened without going over and over it, to say nothing of tainting his little girl’s life with a memory she had no use for. When the internet had come along, with its tidal wave of porn from all over the world, he had felt relieved. Video rental shops closed down. The infamous videocassettes vanished and their sleazy contents with them. No one thought to archive such material. Maybe Aïcha never needed to find out. He wanted to talk to her but, honestly, there was no rush.
When she had turned to Islam, it all came back to him and he had thought it might be karma. That, without realizing, she was compensating. One madness atoning for another. He had to find a way to start the conversation. But he had no time, he had to find time. Not one of the Sundays they always spent arguing. The right moment never came.
That night, the hardest thing was not the fact that that she had found out, but the fact that her first response was to talk to someone other than him. Her Islamic tutor. An ignorant half-wit who wears Nikes under his djellaba. She had not come home and sobbed in her father’s arms. She had gone to see someone else. Did this guy teach you to swim did he comb every shop in the city to find the toy you wanted did he give up his evenings to make sure you knew your reading test by heart did he teach you how to do an oral presentation did he spend nights in his bedroom racking his brains trying to understand mathematics so he could talk you through tomorrow’s homework did he stand in the bitter cold watching you go around the merry-go-round ten times on the little elephant you loved did he put you on his shoulders so you didn’t miss the Princess Parade even though his back was in agony did he get up in the middle of the night to bring you a glass of water when you had nightmares did he take you to see the dolphins seven times in a row because you loved them did he iron your clothes and fold them until last year did he worry how he was going to pay your registration fees when they were increased did he stand in line for two hours to make sure you’d get to see Lorie in concert? If you break him in two if you grind his bones with a millstone will you find nothing in the marrow but love for you, a longing for you to be happy, for you not to make too many mistakes? Then why is it that my words are no longer important why do I have to keep my advice to myself why can my arms no longer protect you? When did I show myself unworthy? Why has life done this to us? Why has this country gone mad?
Sélim has already been to check him out, this tutor. He hoped he would encounter a fanatic, a dangerous manipulator. He would have liked to uncover a recidivist pedophile—no one can tell him that Catholics have a monopoly on hypocritical perverts, there is nothing more universal than vice decked out like virtue. In the end, it turns out that he is a short, chubby man with no charisma, serenely mediocre, foolishly old-fashioned. Like an upstanding country curate in the midst of the Inquisition: incapable of grasping the historical issues at stake, well-intentioned, surprised at the power invested in him. What does his daughter see in this man? How can he make sense of the idea that a young woman who is free to do as she pleases should decide to defer to the judgment of the stupidest man in the neighborhood? It must be something in their blood—after all, Satana left him for a bodybuilder.
What exactly has Aïcha learned? As if the bullshit from the imam at the end of the street were not enough, now the Hyena has to get involved. The revelations of a late, great rock star … that’s all he needs. Let’s add the ravings of an arrogant junkie to the general misery … Sélim walks around and around the kitchen, as he angrily beats eggs. He furiously washes lettuce leaves and dries them in the salad spinner with preposterous viciousness. His daughter comes out with all this shit and then locks herself in her room, what did he ever do to deserve that? What do people take him for? A real sucker, some idiot who runs himself ragged without counting the cost so that everyone is happy except himself, the guy who puts up with everyone else’s moods. And why on earth did the Hyena feel the need to fill his daughter’s head with this nonsense without even warning him? Betrayed on all sides. The fool in the story. As usual. A nice guy. Women hate that.
Alex Bleach. Perfect, that’s just perfect! He has been spared nothing. During the summer of Bleach’s first big hit, Sélim was working in a shopping mall. Selling watches. The song was all over the radio. He had bought the album. He knew it by heart. This is something he would not wish on his worst enemy. For the woman you love to be going out with the singer you have been listening to for years … This was not the muscle-bound hunk upstairs he could simply s
neer at. He had to believe that she had fallen in love. Sélim felt he had been made completely irrelevant.
He calls his daughter down to dinner. He is going to talk to her. With dignity. But once again they eat in silence. Sélim with his stomach knotted with rage, Aïcha staring at her plate. The omelet not overcooked, the way she prefers it, not too much dressing on the salad, the way she likes it, no garlic, because it disagrees with her. Tonight he does not turn on the TV. After a while, he can no longer contain himself: “Do you know where I can find her, the Hyena?” and for the first time that evening, Aïcha looks at him. “Why? Are you planning to blame her?” Sélim has never hit his daughter. He is not about to start now. “I want to know what she’s been telling you before I talk to you about it.” The girl thinks for a moment, then shrugs:
“It’s a bit late but they might still be at the parc des Buttes-Chaumont.”
“What do you mean, ‘they’?”
“There’s a whole group of them. Old guys, about your age. They’ve got this friend, Vernon, who lives around there. They go and visit him every day.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went to see them.”
* * *
He strides through the parc des Buttes-Chaumont, casting black looks at everything and everyone. He glowers at passersby, rolling his eyes wildly. He knows that this melodramatic behavior is simply a means to avoid having to talk to Aïcha, who is silently following a few steps behind. Sélim has a terrible feeling that she is not terrified at the prospect of him making a scene, but sad to see him making a spectacle of himself. He throws his arms in the air like a madman. “I’m so pissed off with you, you know? I’m really fucking pissed off. Why couldn’t you have talked to me about this when you found out? You realize this goes back to Barcelona? You’ve been lying to me ever since you went to Barcelona. What am I? Am I the enemy now? You don’t think maybe you should have talked to your father?” Aïcha does not even humor him by being insolent which would only make him angrier, instead she is gentle and apologetic, “It was so hard to talk to you about something like that, Papa,” she pronounces the a’s in “Papa” like o’s, barely parting her lips. It is heart-wrenching. His little girl. Everything that is happening to her. And here he is like an idiot, forcing her to follow him through the park so he can bawl out the idiots who have been playing her the deranged ramblings of her mother’s former lover. His poor little girl, deal with all this stuff on her own. And he didn’t even notice what was eating her up. So much waste. So much useless love that did not reach the beloved that could not find words to express itself.
In the middle of the path through the park, he stops. He feels overwhelmed. He has failed to do his job as a grown-up. He did not help her come to terms with what she has just found out, for the simple reason that he himself has never known what to do with the turmoil that was Satana. So he gets angry, he becomes defensive, like an idiot. He slumps onto a bench. Aïcha stands, waiting, her hands in her pockets.
Sélim cannot bear the way other people are looking at her. Some passersby turn to stare at her. He wants to chase them away—it’s just a bloody hijab, you’ll get over it, fuck off, just fuck off, the lot of you. Though, as her father, he has every right to ask her why she is wearing this thing on her head, other people should realize that it is none of their business. After all, it’s her hair, she’s entitled to do what she likes with it. He says:
“Aïcha, I don’t know who we’re looking for, but they’re not here. Forgive me. I wasn’t expecting you to bring this up. I reacted badly. Let’s go home. I’ll explain everything…”
“No, Papa. I want you to listen to what the singer has to say. I need to know what you think.”
And she waits for him to get up and follow her. He wishes he knew how to say, “Darling, I don’t have the strength to meet up with people who are going to talk to me about your mother. She broke my heart. I can’t bring myself to think about it all again. You are the most precious thing in the world to me, I wish I could give you the gift of a different mother. Her story is sadder than you can possibly imagine. I wish you never had to know about all this, because I wish none of it had ever happened.” But he walks on in silence. In a feeble voice, he asks:
“What did he say, this Alex Bleach, that’s got you so worked up?”
“You’ll hear for yourself. Maybe you’ll say you don’t believe it.”
“Why did she ask you to watch these tapes and not me?”
“It would have been too embarrassing for us to watch it together.”
The man Aïcha refers to as Vernon turns as he hears Sélim approach. He is wearing boots that are too big for his long, spindly legs. His skin is gray, his eyes are feverish. He has a particular way of holding the gaze of the person he is talking to with disarming equanimity. He walks over to Sélim without a word. He smells of stale tobacco, damp earth, and something indefinable that is sweet and sugary. Pleasant. He takes the father in his arms and hugs him. Sélim is surprised, but all his anxiety and hostility drains away. He came to insult this man, but he has already forgotten that. Vernon’s hug envelops him and he becomes a bastion, a shield, a bandage. Sélim surrenders, aware of the absurdity of the situation, but unable to escape from this comforting embrace.
“IS IT HASH OR WEED?”
Vernon asks the question as a matter of form as Lydia passes him the joint since he is just as happy to smoke either. Then he moves a few paces away from the group and settles in his favorite spot, the hollow created by the roots of the oldest chestnut tree in the park. Tall as a four-story house, the tree has grown lopsided, its huge branches are parallel to the ground. Its leaves, yellowed by some disease, fan out like an orange wall that contrasts sharply with the green of the park in summer.
Vernon takes long, slow tokes on the spliff, he holds the smoke in his lungs and looks at the others from afar. He likes being stoned, it allows him to experience the most improbable sensations without having to worry too much. As, for example, when he lays his hand against the bark of the tree, feeling the soft pulse of the regenerating sap, the low electromagnetic frequencies, being aware of the rhythms of plant life. He would rather think it is because he has been smoking weed, but the truth is he never really came down after the trip he had before he watched Alex Bleach’s tapes.
Over the course of that strange evening, Émilie, Lydia, and Patrice in turn had offered to put a roof over his head. They were probably worried that he would accept, given the bizarre state he was in, but they were also motivated by sincere regret—they did not want to go home knowing that he would be sleeping on the streets. To his own surprise, and without a flicker of hesitation, Vernon declined all the offers. It was difficult to justify. He had said: “Don’t worry, I don’t want to be a burden, honestly, it doesn’t bother me sleeping outdoors.” They look at him as though he were insane. Normal. He would have done the same in their shoes. The real truth was that, physically, he could no longer bear to be enclosed by walls and ceilings, he found it difficult to breathe, every object was hostile, and he was plagued by a noxious vibration. The worst thing was having people around him. He could feel their misery, their pain, their fear of not being good enough, of being unmasked, being punished, wasting their lives: he felt it was like pollen, it insinuated its way into every orifice and made it impossible to breathe. Which meant that no, he really, truly had absolutely no desire to move in with any of them. These days he needed space. Solitude.
That night, he had dozed off amid the words of others, even in his sleep he could make out their conversation. Alex’s declarations had been like a spotlight trained on a dark corner. Some of them believed him unreservedly. Daniel saw it as proof that women who had to bear the burden of male sexuality were second-class citizens whom one could kill with complete impunity. Pamela had started out by being more reserved, according to her, Alex was madly in love with Satana, and eaten up by guilt that he couldn’t save her, he had invented this story to stop himself going insane, but sh
e could not bring herself to believe that it was true. Patrice was not surprised, to him, this was just another example of the fact that the rich are entitled to do whatever they like, and the right to kill the poor was just one more tool in their arsenal. As for the Hyena, all this proved that there was something going on in this little group, something that she could not define, but which, when she spent time with them, was almost tangible: a pleasure at being together that was completely mysterious. They did not like each other, they had little in common, they had no interest in hanging out together, but as soon as they got together, there was a congruity—she explained this to Lydia, who was having trouble understanding. To Lydia, the evidence was staring them in the face: Alex had been murdered too. They had to avenge him. Xavier declared that the whole thing was bullshit. “Alex is dead because he was into drugs, Satana is dead because she was into drugs, junkies die like dogs because they’ve given up caring about anything except where their next fucking hit is coming from. When they’re not looking for excuses, they’re looking for someone to blame. Alex was an addict. He was always denouncing people who had betrayed him or abandoned him. But the one person who betrayed him, who abandoned him, was himself.” Patrice nursed his can of beer and laughed. “In that case we’re all addicts. Because what you’re describing is not addicts, it’s the human race.” Émilie was unsure. She didn’t give a shit whether someone had helped Vodka Satana take an overdose, but she had found the early part of the tape unsettling. She thought about her youth, wondering whether it had really been as magic as Bleach described it. Aïcha had not stayed with them. She had been too shocked by what she had heard. She had said, “There’s so much going on in my head right now it’s deafening,” and rushed away. Pamela and Daniel had shared a long, wordless glance, then reached for each other’s hands and interlaced their fingers. They were trying to imagine what it would be like for Satana’s daughter when she woke up tomorrow morning and had to bear the weight of the story she had heard. It was enough to drive anyone mad. As for Vernon, he needed to be alone.
Vernon Subutex 2 Page 14