Short Stories in French

by Richard Coward

  Des revers avaient dû sévir pendant leur perte de vue puisqu’il n’y avait plus aucun de ces gros meubles achetés en demi-deuil, lustrés par l’argent de l’assurance. Ce n’était qu’un matelas de mousse poussé contre le mur de droite, un réchaud, des tréteaux avec des plans dessus; déjà les miettes et les moutons se poursuivaient sur le sol inachevé. Mais Fabre se tenait bien vêtu, ne craignait pas l’eau froide. Il avait fait les vitres par lesquelles on distinguait le fond du canal, privé de son liquide pour cause de vidange trisannuelle: trop peu d’armes du crime se trouvaient là, les seuls squelettes étant des armatures de chaises en fer, des carcasses de cyclomoteurs. Sinon cela consistait en jantes et pneus disjoints, pots d’échappement, guidons; la proportion de bouteilles vides semblait normale, en revanche une multitude de chariots d’hypermarchés rivaux déconcertait. Constellé d’escargots stercoraires, tout cela se vautrait dans la vase que de gros tuyaux pompaient mollement sous leurs anneaux gluants, lâchant d’éventuels bruits de siphon.

  Fabre s’était présenté le premier au bureau de location, avant même l’intervention des peintres, donnant un regard mort à l’appartement témoin. On ne le dissuada pas franchement d’emménager tout de suite, au quatrième étage côté Wagner, dans un studio situé sous les yeux de Sylvie qui étaient deux lampes sourdes derrière le mur de droite. Selon ses calculs il dormait contre le sourire, suspendu à ses lèvres comme dans un hamac; à son fils il démontra cela sur plans. La voix de Fabre exposait une mission supérieure, relevant d’une cause auprès de quoi les nerfs du fils pouvaient faire l’autruche. Paul partit quand même après vingt minutes.

  Il rassembla des affaires et revint samedi soir. Le père avait fait quelques courses: un autre bloc de mousse, quelques outils, beaucoup de yaourt et de pommes chips, beaucoup de nourriture légère. Nul ne raconta rien de ces dernières années, rien ne s’évoqua sous l’ampoule nue; on discourut juste de la nécessité, puis de la couleur d’un abat-jour. Fabre était un peu plus disert que Paul, avant de s’endormir il se plaignit doucement, comme pour lui-même, du système de chauffage par le sol. Regarde un peu le soleil qu’on a, dit-il aussi le lendemain matin.

  Le soleil en effet balaierait tout le studio, comme un projecteur de poursuite dans un music-hall frontalier. C’était dimanche, dehors les rumeurs étouffées protestaient à peine, parvenant presque à ce qu’on les regrettât. Ainsi que tous les jours chômés, les heures des repas tendraient à glisser les unes sur les autres, on s’entendit pour quatorze heures – ensuite on s’y met. Un soleil comme celui-ci, développa le père de Paul, donne véritablement envie de foutre le camp. Ils s’exprimèrent également peu sur la difficulté de leur tâche qui requerrait, c’est vrai, de la patience et du muscle, puis des scrupules d’égyptologue en dernier lieu. Fabre avait détaillé toutes les étapes du processus dans une annexe agrafée aux plans. Ils mangèrent donc vers quatorze heures mais sans grand appétit, leurs mâchoires broyaient la durée, la mastication n’était qu’horlogère. D’un tel compte à rebours on peut, avant terme, convoquer à son gré le zéro. Alors autant s’y mettre, autant gratter tout de suite, pas besoin de se changer, on a revêtu dès le matin ces larges tenues blanches pailletées de vieille peinture, on gratte et des stratus de plâtre se suspendent au soleil, piquetant les fronts, les cafés oubliés. On gratte, on gratte et puis très vite on respire mal, on sue, il commence à faire terriblement chaud.

  The Occupation of the Ground

  Since everything had burnt – mother, furniture, photographs of mother – there was immediately a lot of work to do for Fabre and his son, Paul: all that ash, and that mourning, moving house, racing round the supermarkets to replace everything. Too quickly Fabre found something less vast, two rooms with interchangeable uses set beneath a brick chimney whose shadow told the time, and which had the advantage of being fairly close to the quai de Valmy.

  In the evening, after dinner, Fabre used to talk to Paul about his mother, Paul’s mother, sometimes as soon as it was dinner-time. As they no longer had any picture of Sylvie Fabre, he would tire himself out in wanting to describe her ever more precisely: in the middle of the kitchen were born holograms that were deflated by the slightest inattention to detail. ‘It won’t come,’ sighed Fabre, laying a hand on his head, over his eyes, and despondency sent him to sleep. It often fell to Paul to unfold the sofa-bed, thereby transforming the room into a bedroom.

  On Sundays and certain Thursdays they set off on the quai de Valmy towards the rue Marseille, the rue Dieu, to go and see Sylvie Fabre. She looked down at them from on high, holding out to them the bottle of Piver, Forvil perfume, and smiled at them in fifteen metres of blue dress. The grille of a basement window made a hole in her hip. There was no other picture of her.

  The artist, Flers, had painted her image on the side of a block of flats, just before you reached the street corner. The block of flats was thinner, more solid and better maintained than the old buildings that stuck creakily against it, terrified by the plan for the occupation of the ground. Without an awning, its doorway, which drowned in mouldings, bore the name (Wagner) of the architect-sculptor, engraved in a cartouche in the top right-hand corner. And the wall, on which the artist Flers had laboured with all his team to paint a full-length portrait of Sylvie Fabre, overlooked a small rudimentary green area, a sort of unadorned square whose only function was to form the corner of the street.

  Chosen by Flers, urged by Fabre, Sylvie had agreed to pose. She had not liked it. It was three years before the birth of Paul, for whom this wall was merely a slice of life before his time. ‘Just look at your mother,’ said Fabre, all worked up, for this sight drove him to tears or to sexual arousal, depending on his mood. But he could also look for an argument and become frankly hostile towards the effigy, against which his reproaches rebounded in echo – Paul endeavouring to calm his father down as soon as a crowd threatened to gather.

  Later, when he was so separated from his father that they did not even speak to each other any more, Paul visited his mother with more varied frequency, two or three times a month, not counting the unplanned occasions when he was just passing that way. He had almost called his father from a booth set firmly in Sylvie Fabre’s field of vision when they began to demolish the rather old nasty edifice that adjoined the Wagner block of flats. The latter stood alone, rising like a lighthouse on the edge of the canal. The restoration of the façade created on the blue dress, through the effect of contrast, a sheen as well as unsuspected nuances of shade. It was a beautiful dress with a plunging neckline: she truly was a mother. They replaced the old edifice with a dynamic building, fully tiled in white, clad with curved little balconies, the other side of the Wagner fortunately being protected by the inviolability of the green area, which formed an additional lawn at Sylvie’s feet.

  By accident or design, the area was allowed to fall into neglect. Green plants became more and more rare, replaced by brown residues littering the mud from which jutted out scrap iron with menacing edges, stretched out towards visitors to the area like the very claws of tetanus. Visitors were readily offended by such practices. Upset, the visitors boycotted this area, which had been erased from the chlorophyllous world, no longer sent their offspring there, no longer took their pets to defecate. Finding it blocked off with a fence one morning, they gave their support to this quarantine with not a tear in their eyes, without wondering who had taken the initiative; their hearts are empty of emotion, their consciences are private.

  The fence would fall into disrepair sooner or later: a perfect place for posters and contradictory writings, it had soon been broken through the wear and tear of time, becoming part of the comings and goings of life. Completely unruffled, dogs came to pee against the boards that were already swollen with glue and ink, and which quickly rotted: they had fallen apart, and what one could just see between them caused heads to turn away. Her perfume wafting above the decay, Sylvie Fabre none the less struggled against having her body erased, holding out against erosion by the wind w
ith all the strength of her two dimensions. Occasionally and worryingly, Paul saw the freestone chase away the blue, rise naked, breaking a stitch of the maternal clothing; although all of this remained a very slow process.

  One object is all that is needed to set off a chain reaction, and there is always one which seals that which precedes it, colours what is to follow – thus the permission to build follows the initial plan. Immediately, everything happens very quickly, someone probably having sold his soul with the area, there is the hole. There was the hole, carpeted with that fresh earth which is beneath towns, no more infertile than any other; calmly, men with yellow helmets dug it methodically, using machines, two yellow bulldozers then a yellow crane. The broken boards of the fence burnt without a flame in a hollow, sending spirals of black glue into the air. Stretched on rusty stakes, red and white tape marked out the stage. With the foundations deeply dug, all the raw materials delivered, they erected the superstructure, and new boards, brand new ones, were littered just about everywhere, covered in lumps of cement. The storeys drank up Sylvie like an advancing tide. Paul once spotted Fabre on the building site when the block of flats was about to reach his mother’s stomach. On another occasion it was about chest height, and the widower was talking to a foreman as he unfolded his scale plans. Paul stood at a distance, beyond earshot of that irritating voice.

  In place of the green area there would be a block of flats that would be almost identical to the successor to the old edifice, with bow-windows instead of balconies. Later, both would show solidarity, bodyguards to the Wagner, which had been preserved, casting the crossover of their protective shadows on to its old zinc roof. But when it reached the shoulders, the building site became unbearable to a son, and Paul stopped visiting when the entire dress had been walled up. Weeks went by before he returned to the quai de Valmy, and then it was by accident. The building was not entirely completed, finishing touches still needed to be made, and there were still bags of cement torn open; though they had been sealed with putty only recently, the windows were still painted over with whitening so that they would not be confused with nothingness. It was Sylvie’s sepulchre, not an effigy of her; one approached it with a different step, with a less supple tread.

  Through the entrance, in the middle of a paved courtyard, a terrace of loose earth presaged the return of the greenery that had been betrayed. As Paul contemplated it all, a woman who was coming along the pavement stopped behind him, looked up to the sky and shouted Fabre. Paul, whose surname it is all the same, turned to face the woman, who was shouting Fabre, Fabre again, I’ve got some milk. The irritating voice fell from the sky, from a window high up in the middle of the sky: you’re pretending, Jacqueline. The woman went away, and we do not know who she was. Come up, Paul.

  Very many misfortunes must have befallen him since they had stopped seeing each other for there were no longer any of those large pieces of furniture bought in semi-mourning, made so appealing by the insurance money. There was only a foam mattress pushed up to the wall on the right-hand side, a stove, a trestle table with plans on top; crumbs and bits of fluff were already vying for space on the unfinished floor. But Fabre was well dressed, unafraid of cold water. He had cleaned the windows, through which could be seen the bottom of the canal, deprived of its liquid content because of its triennial draining: too few weapons from the crime were in there, the only skeletons being frames of iron chairs, bodies of mopeds. Otherwise, there were wheels and tyres lying apart from each other, exhaust pipes, handlebars; the number of empty bottles seemed par for the course, though it was disturbing to see so many trolleys from rival supermarkets. Studded with skua snails, it all wallowed in the mud gently pumped up by huge pipes under their sticky rings, emitting siphon-like noises.

  Fabre had been the first to go to the letting agency, even before the painters had arrived, casting a mournful look over the show flat. It was quite impossible to dissuade him from moving in immediately, to the fourth floor, on the Wagner side of the building, into a studio flat situated beneath Sylvie’s eyes, which were two dull lamps behind the right-hand wall. According to his calculations, he slept against her smile, hanging from her lips as though in a hammock; he showed his son this on his plans. Fabre’s voice outlined a superior mission, born from an idea in comparison with which his son’s nerves might as well bury their head in the sand. Even so, Paul left after twenty minutes.

  He packed a few things together and came back on Saturday evening. The father had done some shopping: another block of foam, a few tools, a lot of yoghurt and potato crisps, a lot of light food. Neither said anything about those recent years, nothing was evoked beneath the bare bulb; they simply talked about what was needed, then about the colour of a lampshade. Fabre was a little more loquacious than Paul, before going to sleep he grumbled softly, as though to himself, about the underfloor heating system. Just look at the sun today, he also said the next morning.

  Indeed, the sun would sweep the flat, like a roving spotlight in a frontier music-hall. It was Sunday, outside muffled murmurs could scarcely be heard, almost to the point where they were missed. As on every public holiday, meal-times would tend to blend into each other, they agreed upon 2.00 p.m. – then they got down to it. A sun like this, suggested Paul’s father, really gives you the desire to get the hell out of here. They also said little to each other about the difficulty of their task, which would require, it is true, patience and muscle, then the scrupulous care of an Egyptologist in the final stages. Fabre had written in detail every stage of the process on a piece of paper stapled to the plans. So, they ate at about 2.00 p.m. but without much appetite, their jaws ground their way through it, their chewing was merely clockwork. With a countdown such as this, one can, should one so wish, reach zero ahead of time. So, they might as well set about it, they might as well start scraping immediately; no need to get changed, first thing in the morning they had put on those sloppy white overalls spattered with old paint; they scrape and layers of plaster are hanging in the sunlight, leaving dots on their foreheads, in the coffee they have forgotten to drink. They scrape, they scrape and then very soon they have difficulty breathing, they sweat and it starts to be very hot.

  Sylvie Massicotte

  THE THIRD-RATE FILM

  Le Navet

  On plonge dans la pénombre sans dire bonjour. On choisit un fauteuil comme dans une salle d’attente enveloppée de musak. Seulement, ça ne gargouille pas dans mon ventre comme chez le dentiste.

  Depuis une semaine, je dis «on», pour tromper la solitude peut-être. J’ai regardé les affiches et j’ai murmuré: «Pourquoi on n’entre pas?» Oui, j’ai vraiment murmuré, cela a fait de la buée … pour moi-même.

  A la guichetière on a dit le minimum parce qu’on n’avait pas envie de s’attarder. Cela arrangeait ceux qui faisaient la queue, derrière. On a su résister au parfum du maïs éclaté parce que ça fait trop de bruit et qu’on ne supporte pas. En s’approchant lentement de la salle, on a demandé:

  «Est-ce qu’on peut entrer?»

  Le garçon a répondu par une question mais on était occupée à regarder un bouton blanc, bien mûr, sur son menton encore imberbe. On n’a pas dit ce qu’on était venue voir, alors il s’est approché pour examiner le billet, puis il a fait signe d’attendre.

  On a guetté les grandes portes derrière lesquelles résonnait une musique émouvante. On a attendu d’apercevoir un premier visage, chiffonné, agressé à la fois par la foule et les néons. On s’est souvenue de l’enfance, de s’être levée pour faire pipi au milieu d’une soirée où les invités parlaient fort dans trop de lumière.

  On a regardé défiler les gens qui sortaient et on s’est demandé pourquoi on voulait entrer. Mais dès que le portier a cessé de tripoter son bouton et qu’il a fait signe d’avancer, on est partie la première. On a hésité à mettre le billet dans une poche du manteau. On l’a finalement gardé dans la main pour pouvoir l’enrouler autour d’un doigt. On a dit pardon. Mais on ne dit pas bonjour quand on entre dans la
pénombre.

  On se demande pourquoi cet homme déjà assis dans la salle. On a dit pardon pour passer devant lui, dans la rangée étroite, mais on n’ose pas s’installer dans le fauteuil voisin. On laisse l’espace d’une frontière.

  L’homme lit un journal et avec la musak, oui, l’impression d’une salle d’attente. Mais ça ne gargouille pas dans son ventre. Il n’y a que le froissement du journal et celui du billet entre mes doigts. Une certaine gêne.

  «On dirait qu’il n’y aura pas grand monde, dit-il en tournant une page de son journal.

  – On dirait que non.»

  L’homme s’est adressé à moi sans me regarder mais il semble à l’aise, parle d’une façon dégagée comme à une femme qu’on ne voit plus au milieu de son salon feutré. Sans se détacher du journal, il demande:

  «Et vous?»

  Cette fois, il scrute mon regard dans la demi-obscurité.

  «Je … dirais que non.»

  Devant nous s’installent une jeune fille et son copain aux cheveux ébouriffés. L’homme jette un œil au-dessus du journal et ne tarde pas à réagir à cet obstacle dans son champ de vision. Calmement, il plie le journal, ramasse son manteau et quelques objets qu’il avait dispersés autour de lui. Il se soulève avec la force de ses bras pour ensuite se laisser tomber dans le fauteuil voisin, voisin du mien. Plus de frontière.

  «Pardonnez-moi, dit-il. Je préfère les chauves!»

  Il m’aurait dit «Je préfère les blondes» et j’aurais été rassurée. On regarde l’accoudoir qu’il faudra partager.

  «Je vous en prie», fait-il d’un geste galant.

  Rétrécie au fond de mon fauteuil, je ne bronche pas.