He felt a sudden lump in his throat. He wanted to cry. Titi! he screamed inside his head. Titi. He remembered the corpse being carried away. Titi, him, the others, they were nothing. Nothing. That was the only fucking truth in this life. He started walking faster.
2.
MEMORIES JUST MAKE YOU CRY
That night, Rico decided to leave Paris. If he was going to die, he might as well die in the sun. That’s what he’d told himself.
All these things that had been going around and around in his head ever since he had seen the firefighters taking Titi’s body away boiled down to one inescapable fact: he’d end up like Titi. It was an illusion to think he could still pull through, could still lead some kind of life on the street.
Compared with some, of course, he wasn’t too bad off. He had a good crash pad. A few bar owners treated him well, a few street traders at the Aligre market. And when he opened the door to customers at the post office on Rue des Boulets, people took pity on him and gave him money. But it wouldn’t last forever. One of these days, he’d go under. Because one of these days, he wouldn’t have any strength left to do anything. In fact, he hadn’t had much strength left since this afternoon. It was force of habit that had kept him going, not will power.
He lay on his back and lit a cigarette. He felt a gnawing in his stomach. It must be five o’clock. Hunger was the most accurate alarm clock there was. He remembered something Titi had told him. “You know, Rico, when I was a kid, I thought hunger was like a toothache, only worse. After a while, I mean. Since being on the street, I’ve come to realize that hunger’s no big deal. It’s easier to handle than a toothache!” Rico smiled. Titi had long since lost his teeth, one after the other!
He grabbed the bottle of vodka from behind him and took a long swig. He’d haggled over that bottle at an all-night Arab grocery on Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and had finally gotten it for seventy-five francs. It was Smirnoff. He’d had this craving for spirits when he left the Salvation Army. The dish of salt pork and lentils he’d eaten had assuaged his hunger, but not his grief. Nor his sense of dread. Titi’s death had broken down all the barriers he’d patiently put up between his present life and his past life.
Rico grimaced. As always happened when he drank on an empty stomach, the liquid felt sticky in his throat. He coughed, got his breath back, and took another gulp. He closed his eyes and waited to feel the warmth of the vodka in his body, then took a drag on his cigarette, and tried again to think things through. Turning things over and over in his head was all he’d done all night.
Rico’s crash pad was on the corner of Rue de la Roquette and Rue Keller. In a building under construction. Like so many working-class areas, the neighborhood was being gentrified, and they were tearing down old buildings left, right and center, to build luxury apartment blocks. Renovation, they called it in city hall.
Always on the lookout, Rico had ventured onto the construction site late one afternoon six months before. Six stories were already finished, but work seemed to have stopped. In the basement, he discovered the parking garage. Partitioned into individual spaces. He settled down in one of them for the night, on a tarp—if you folded it properly, it made for an excellent mattress. For the first time in ages, he slept the sleep of the blessed.
At six o’clock, a security guard found him. A tall black guy, all muscle under an impeccable blue uniform. There was a badge sewed on the left pocket, with the words Paris Security.
“What are you doing here?”
“Sleeping.”
“No trespassing, man. Can’t you read?”
“No trespassing, but it doesn’t say anything about no sleeping,” Rico joked, collecting his few things together.
“Where are you going?”
“Getting out of here, right?”
The security guard offered him a cigarette and lit it for him.
“Dunhill! Shit, it’s been a long time.”
“There’s no rush, man. You can stay.”
They stared at each other as they puffed happily at their cigarettes.
“It won’t bother me, O.K.?”
The security guard, a Madagascan named Hyacinthe, told him that the construction company had gone bankrupt. A buyer had been found for the company, but it would be a while before the work started again.
Rico settled in. He went to the Gare de Lyon and fetched all his things from the two lockers where he’d left them: his backpack, a sleeping bag, some clothes, a small camp stove, a few candles, a china cup and a few other knick-knacks he’d picked up over the years. When he woke up, he would put everything away under the tarp he used at night for a mattress.
Every morning, Hyacinthe bought Rico a coffee and a croissant at Bébert’s, a bistro a bit farther along the street that remained resolutely unfashionable in this hot new Parisian neighborhood.
“I was a security guard at this superstore out in the suburbs,” Hyacinthe said. “One afternoon, I spot a guy like you . . .” He sipped at his coffee. “Don’t get upset, O.K., Rico? I’m just saying, it was my job to keep my eyes open.”
“I know.”
“The guy was pushing a trolley with a six-pack of beers and a loaf of bread in it. I see him stop at the delicatessen counter. He asks for a slice of ham and a little pâté, then carries on along the aisles . . .”
“And starts eating!”
“You said it, man!”
“I’ve done that sometimes.”
“When I saw him again, he was in the electrical section, glued to the TV sets. Bread and pâté, bread and ham . . . I left him alone. Then, as cool as a cucumber, he went to the checkout and paid for his six-pack and . . . that evening they fired me. The guy in charge of the delicatessen counter had informed on me.”
“The jerk!”
“Places like that are full of jerks. The same guys who can’t stand blacks and Arabs . . .”
“What are you doing as a security guard?”
“It’s the only thing I know. I can hardly read or write, man. Hey, this is a more honest job than being one of those Rambo types who work for the transit authority!”
When construction work started again in the fall, Hyacinthe reassured Rico. There was no need to worry. The parking garage would be the last thing they touched. Rico just had to get his things out of the way before the workers arrived, so as not to get Hyacinthe into trouble. And as they didn’t arrive too early, Rico could still have a lie-in.
For some time now, his thoughts had been out of control. They came in waves, in no particular order, and he found it hard to focus on a single one.
The cigarette had started to burn his fingers, and he clung to the memory of his last fixed abode. Three years ago, when he was living with Malika. Not that he was eaten up with desire for Malika right now. He didn’t feel anything physical for her anymore. Or for Julie. Or even for Sophie, even though he’d been madly in love with her. Women belonged to another world now. As inaccessible as a major blow-out in an expensive restaurant.
“How do they do it?” Titi had asked, eyeing up a pretty brunette pacing up and down the platform, waiting for the metro.
She was wearing a miniskirt under her open coat.
“Do what?”
“Wear skirts up to here without freezing.”
“I guess it warms up their pussies to know they’re getting us all excited,” Rico had joked.
“I guess so . . .”
Not that Rico was excited. Even imagining himself slipping his hands between the girl’s thighs didn’t give him a hard-on. He hadn’t jerked off for ages. His dick stayed limp, whatever images of women he conjured up. Even the image of Sophie offering him her ass so that he could take her doggie-fashion. After a while, the flaccid piece of flesh between his fingers sickened him. He disgusted himself.
“You know something?” Titi had resumed, without taking his eyes off the brunette. “We’d need to eat at least ten rare steaks to be able to fuck a girl like that.”
She walked back past the
m, slowly.
“Any chance of a smoke for me and my buddy?” Titi had asked.
She had shrugged, indifferently.
“We’re not her type, old pal.”
This was what they’d come to. Impotent even for life.
Rico stubbed out his cigarette and took another long swig of vodka. He was starting to feel warm inside. There was nothing else like it to help you think.
He’d never felt any resentment against Malika. Everyone had his own life to live. And there always came a moment when you knew you had to save your own skin. That was what she had done. They’d been living together for two years. On Rue Lepic. In a little two-room seventh-floor apartment overlooking a courtyard. Malika worked as a switchboard operator for some company out in Issy-les-Moulineaux. He’d never discovered what its name was. He’d found a job working for a porn dealer, delivering what he assumed were hard-core videos to ritzy neighborhoods in Paris.
Things were fine between him and Malika. It wasn’t happiness, but it was O.K. He was living a normal life, like the people he passed on the street. Not like before, when he’d lived with Sophie, but normal enough to make you believe that it was possible to start all over again and rebuild your life.
One day, someone stole his moped. His boss refused to provide him with a new one. “You deal with it. No moped, no work. I can’t afford a moped for every idiot that comes along. The next person I hire has to have his own transportation. I’ll make it a condition. Either you find a moped by this time tomorrow, or you’re out . . .”
“Go fuck yourself!”
He dug his heels in. After that, he couldn’t find another job. His relationship with Malika became strained. It was harder and harder for the two of them to live on his welfare payments.
Time passed. A year. The welfare payments ran out, and he spent his time hanging out in bars. One evening, he came home, fairly drunk as usual, to find the apartment empty. Malika had left, taking almost all their things with her. She hadn’t even left him a note. “O.K.,” he’d thought. “It’s not the end of the world.” And he’d gone out again and had a few more drinks, on Place Blanche.
Rico kept the apartment. The rent arrears accumulated. The registered letters. The notifications of eviction. The day before he was due to be thrown out, he left of his own accord, taking only some clothes and a few odds and ends that soon turned out to be useless on the street. He’d long ago sold the few things Malika had left behind. Including what belonged to the landlord. The little fridge and the hotplate in the kitchenette.
It was the end of May. The air was fragrant with spring. Rico slept that night in the open air, on Square Henri IV. The first morning was like a new dawn of happiness. Of freedom. He had turned a page. He was setting off into the unknown. After those wretched years with Malika, he felt liberated.
He was starting a new life, with his rucksack on his back. He felt like a tourist in Paris. He blew sixty francs on a nice big breakfast on Place du Châtelet: fruit juice, coffee, croissants, bread and butter. Leaving the bar, he told himself that life on the street wasn’t going to be as hard as all that. He was in top form, wasn’t he? The city was his.
When Titi had told him about the beatniks, Rico hadn’t said anything, but he’d remembered that first morning. On the road again, you said it, what bullshit! And forever, dammit! Because six months later, it was obvious to Rico that it really was forever. He realized that the things he’d taken with him were of absolutely no use. He’d been so convinced that the situation wouldn’t last, he’d neglected the really important things—good shoes, a penknife, a nail file, a sleeping bag.
And then there were the souvenirs.
“Crap,” Titi had said. “You carry all these letters and photos around with you. All they do is make you cry. It’s bad for morale. If you’re going to burn your bridges, then burn them. You have to choose.”
He’d thrown everything away. Sophie’s letters, their photos. The only thing he’d kept was a photo of Julien. An ID photo. He could forget everything, but not his son.
Hyacinthe woke him.
“Shit, Rico, what are you doing here, man? Have you seen what time it is? They’re coming in.”
Rico was in a daze.
“Get all that stuff out of the way right now.”
Hyacinthe was angry. For the first time, Rico had broken their agreement.
“Sorry,” he said, getting to his feet.
“Hurry up!”
Rico didn’t put anything away. He just shoved it all under the tarp. Right now, he didn’t give a fuck about anything, even Hyacinthe. At last he knew where to go. A place to die.
“I’m leaving, Hyacinthe. I’m getting out of here.”
“Don’t talk bullshit. I didn’t say anything.”
“It’s not that. In two days at the latest, I’m going, and that’s it. You won’t see me anymore. I’m going south. To Marseilles. Marseilles,” he repeated, with delight.
That’s where I met Rico. In Marseilles. And that’s where I learned everything I know about him and about that shitty life, where everyone is alone and defeated from the start.
3.
IN WHICH WE GLIMPSE THE BITTERNESS
AND GREATNESS OF DREAMS
Marseilles. In Rico’s restless, painful sleep, images of Marseilles had resurfaced. Slowly at first. Then in waves. Streets, squares, bars. The sea, the beaches, the white rock . . .
These memories were like picture postcards sent him by the past. As if the past had finally found his address, and was forwarding mail that hadn’t been distributed for fifteen years. Greetings from Marseilles. Best wishes from Marseilles.
“I love you, Léa.”
“I love you too.”
Léa.
Her image came to the fore early in the morning, when Rico fell asleep again after finishing the bottle of vodka. Nostalgia for a lost happiness. A feeling that, perhaps, his life had taken the wrong turn the day he’d decided to marry Sophie instead of Léa.
When he met her, Léa was just starting an architecture course. He’d not long arrived in Marseilles, after finishing his military service in Djibouti, in the marines. He and his friends in the regiment were waiting in the camp at Sainte-Marthe, north of the city, to be demobilized.
Late one afternoon, strolling aimlessly before meeting up with his buddies for another night on the town, he got lost in a maze of alleys.
Léa was taking a photograph of the front of an old building. She had her back to him. Loose-fitting beige linen pants, a roomy light gray sweater that covered her buttocks, her head a mass of curly black hair.
He went up to her. “Excuse me.”
She turned, and the beauty of her face took his breath away. Deep-set dark eyes. A thin nose. High cheekbones. Well-defined crimson lips.
“Yes?”
“Er . . . I’m sorry,” he said, unsettled. “Could you tell me how to get to the Vieux-Port?”
She looked at him in surprise, a slight smile on her lips. “You’re lost, is that it?”
There was irony in the question. Cheekiness too.
“Yes . . . I’m not from around here.”
She burst out laughing at his honesty. “But it’s impossible to get lost in this city! All the streets lead down to the sea.”
“Well, that may be . . . But . . . well, I just couldn’t find the right one!”
She laughed again, and Rico fell in love with her laugh. “I’m going down there myself. It’s not very far.”
It was an invitation.
He followed her without a word. They walked side by side in silence. She moved quite fast, her head held high, her eyes alert. Léa barely came up to his shoulder and several times he felt like putting his arm around her. But he didn’t. Hitting on women wasn’t his style.
“Are you a photographer?” he asked, daring to break the silence.
“No, but I like it. How about you?”
“Like everyone else. Click, click.”
There was a slight smi
le on Léa’s lips, and Rico sensed her looking at him out of the corner of her eye.
“There you are!” she said, at the bottom of Rue Fort-Notre-Dame.
The Vieux-Port was there in front of them, bathed in the light of the setting sun. A beautiful pale ocher light, typical of spring.
“I like this town.”
“I love it!” Léa cried.
Rico asked if he could buy her an aperitif in the Bar de la Marine, and she said yes. They drank pastis and nibbled chickpeas and spicy black olives and talked a little about themselves. Rico told her proudly about the year he’d spent in Djibouti. The landscapes, the colors, the smells. The desert, Lake Assal, Lake Abbe. The caravans leaving for Ethiopia . . . He still hadn’t gotten over it.
“I love those countries,” Léa said.
I love. I hate. Léa wasn’t one of those neutral people, always sitting on the fence, always taking other people’s opinions into account in order to please them, to win them over. Rico was under her spell, ready to share all Léa’s passions.
She’d already been to Egypt. She dreamed of traveling to Jordan and Yemen. Maybe even farther, to Asia Minor. And Armenia, “my family’s poor country.” She looked at him. “But not alone . . .”
Rico grabbed the opportunity. “Let’s go tomorrow.”
She burst out laughing, and, once again, Rico told himself he could spend the rest of his life listening to her laugh.
They met every evening for an aperitif, until he was finally demobilized. They exchanged addresses, promising to keep in touch. Rico wrote to her as soon as he got back to Rennes, and continued writing every day. Léa’s letters soon started arriving just as regularly, and their correspondence changed. After a while, they stopped pretending to be just friends and started writing open love letters.
A Sun for the Dying Page 2