A Sun for the Dying

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  Come was the one-word message on the back of a postcard from her, a few months later.

  It was the end of June. The only job Rico had been able to find, as a traveling salesman for a German raincoat manufacturer, was not due to start until September.

  He set off for Marseilles.

  On the platform of Saint-Charles station, the two of them were shy with each other at first. It’s never an easy thing to put words into actions. Léa’s sparkling black eyes looked deep into his. Rico finally took her in his arms, and their kiss was as passionate as their letters. “My Armenian doll,” he whispered in her ear: the words he used to start his letters.

  They were both awkward that night. Rico’s only sexual experiences had been with prostitutes, in Rennes, then in the army. And it was Léa’s first time. It was over quickly, and probably neither of them enjoyed it very much. But then they lay in each other’s arms for a long time, without talking. There was surprise and joy in Léa’s eyes, Rico thought—incredulity too. He was thrown. Love, he was starting to discover, was about a whole a lot more than just sleeping with someone.

  “It’s nice here with you,” Léa murmured.

  She gently pulled the sheet over them, and fell asleep, or at least pretended she had. He did the same, but in his case he really did fall asleep.

  “What would you like?” she asked him when he opened his eyes the next morning.

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  “Black coffee, then. It’s ready.”

  From the window of Léa’s little two-room apartment on Rue Neuve-Sainte-Catherine, right near the Abbaye Saint-Victor, there was a view out over the Vieux-Port.

  “Down there is the Canebière, can you see? And straight ahead of you, the Fort Saint-Jean. I love it. It’s so beautiful in the sun. Behind it, you can see the bell tower of Les Accoules. We can go there today, if you like.”

  Rico held her tight. So often, in her letters, she had described day breaking over the city. That moment when the air becomes transparent, when, like a miracle, the roofs turn blue and the sea pink. He recognized it all, as if he’d always lived here. You’ll see, she had written to him. In Marseilles, there are hours of the day when it’s good to feel like this: standing here, halfway between the light and the sea. A way of knowing why we’re from here and not from somewhere else, why we live here and nowhere else.

  That was now, Rico had thought.

  The rest of his time there was a whirlwind. The exuberance of Marseilles seized him by the throat. More intensely, it seemed to him, than during his brief stay in the spring. People spoke loudly, they laughed and shouted all the time, they ­hooted their horns.

  On Place des Moulins, in the Panier—the old quarter, near the harbor—Rico discovered that Marseilles was a city of hills. Léa and he had climbed the steps of Montée des Accoules.

  “It’s only when you walk, when you stroll around like this, that you realize quite how hilly this place is.”

  Until then, Rico had thought there was only one real hill, the one topped by the church of Notre Dame de la Garde—known as the Good Mother of the people of Marseilles—which was on all the picture postcards.

  “That’s how Marseilles deceives your sense of perspective,” Léa remarked, showing off her architectural knowledge.

  Rico felt the city taking possession of him. As gently as Léa’s hands had taken possession of his body the previous night. He suddenly wanted to make love to her, right here, in one of these narrow alleys heavy with shadows, history, laughter and cries. These alleys that he loved, with their singsong names: Rue du Refuge, Rue de Lorette, Rue des Pistoles, Rue du Petit-Puis . . .

  When they were on Place de Lenche, a violent storm suddenly broke, and they rushed back to Léa’s apartment. Soaked to the skin and laughing like children. Their first ­siesta in Marseilles. Their bodies were in perfect harmony, and their pleasure was as sweet as it can be when you’re first in love. It was as if Marseilles had carried them away, transported them.

  Rico still had a vivid memory of the almost transparent blue light that came in through the window when the storm was over.

  One day, they caught a bus. Léa wanted to show him the eastern outskirts of the city. The little ports of Les Goudes and Callelongue. The bus took the sea road. Once past the Catalan beach, Vallon des Auffes, Malmousque, the Fausse-Monnaie bridge, the whole harbor of Marseilles came into view. Vast and beautiful. Like a gift. Léa’s gift to their love.

  They changed buses twice. After Madrague de Montredon, the dry white rock made him wonder if he was still in the city. He couldn’t get over it. It reminded him of the Aeolian islands where his parents had taken him when he was a child.

  “The land of the Big Blue,” Lea said proudly, pointing to the Riou archipelago.

  The noise of the city, its exuberance, ended here. The silence that descended on them, disturbed only by the faint chug-chug of the fishing boats returning from the open sea, was so intense, you could touch it, smell it. It smelled of salt and iodine. Léa and Rico sat down behind an angler, and forgot all about time.

  Léa had fallen silent. And now it was Rico who really ­wanted to say something. To tell her what he had loved about Marseilles. They gazed into each other’s eyes, with a look of total love, the kind of look in which we glimpse the bitterness and greatness of dreams, as Léa was to write, recalling that moment, when Rico announced that it was all over, that he had met someone else. Penelope and Odysseus must have looked at each other that way when they parted.

  But Rico only skimmed through that letter. His heart was in another place. With Sophie.

  When Hyacinthe shook him to wake him up, Léa’s voice was still in his head, asking, “What are you smiling about?”

  “You. Marseille. Me. Us. Us being here.”

  They were on Rue Longue-des-Capucins. “Our own oriental market,” she called it. A place where all the smells of the Maghreb, Africa, Asia merged into a single smell, as heady as happiness. The promise of happiness.

  Rico hadn’t dared to add, “Us always, maybe.” He should have.

  These unchanged memories, the only good memories he still had left, were well worth another journey to Marseilles. “If you’re going to die,” as Rico said to me, “you might as well die faithful to moments like that, don’t you think?”

  4.

  WHAT’S INEXPLICABLE IS THAT YOU CAN HATE, AND STILL LOVE

  Outside, it was snowing. A fine, cold snow that not even children wanted to play in. In the metro, people had even longer faces than usual. Rico got off at Ménilmontant to see his friends and tell them he was leaving.

  “Where were you, for fuck’s sake?” Dédé asked. “We haven’t seen you for two days. We were worried, dammit!”

  At the end of the platform, Jeannot, Fred and Lulu were having a picnic, huddled over two plastic boxes full of what looked like paella. Dédé was smoking, and watching them eat.

  “Looks like a party,” Rico joked.

  “You know that food store?” Jeannot said. “The one on the boulevard, at the corner of Rue Oberkampf? The owner gave us this when Fred and I passed by at noon.”

  “Apparently, they talked about us on TV last night,” Fred said. “They said there are hundreds of us dying of cold and hunger on the streets of Paris . . .”

  “Seems it made the owner’s wife cry when she saw it. So . . . Want some?” Lulu asked, holding out a plastic spoon.

  Rico shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”

  He hadn’t eaten anything since the previous evening. He’d tried, but nothing would go down. Not even a cookie. There was a knot of pain in his stomach. Too much grief. Too much sadness. He could only handle a liquid diet. Beer and cheap wine. A few cups of coffee.

  Dédé laughed. “The thing is, if we all start dying this winter, there’ll be a hell of a mess on the streets! Am I right, guys?”

  The three others laughed too.

  Dédé was always saying things like that. He was a bit of a loudmouth, and his
irony and cynicism sometimes irritated Rico. But he liked him all the same. Titi had liked him too.

  The three of them had always gotten along. That must have been because, even if they didn’t exist anymore in the eyes of society, they weren’t resigned to accepting just anything that came along. Not like Jeannot, Fred and Lulu. You only had to see them wolfing down the food to realize that. That was why Titi had died. Because his dignity wouldn’t let him fall any lower. He would never have touched that leftover paella.

  Rico had often wished he’d met Titi earlier and had him as a friend for longer. He’d never have abandoned him. Not like the others, the people he’d believed in for years, who’d all made themselves scarce when things had started going wrong for him. Vincent, Philippe, Robert, and Éric.

  Éric. His old school friend, his companion on so many wild nights. The best man at his wedding, who hadn’t even called him when Sophie had left. Rico had wiped Vincent, Philippe and Robert from his memory. For good. But not Éric. There was no way he’d ever forgive him.

  He should have known, though, that Éric would be that way. It had been on the cards for a long time. Éric believed in the good life. In a world where money goes hand in hand with family and happiness. The medical laboratory he had inherited from his father was doing well. He was surrounded by a good team. He did practically nothing and got well paid for it, invested his money wisely and got a good return.

  Rico could still recall an argument they’d had one evening when they were eating out.

  “I’m fed up to the teeth with all that humanitarian bullshit!” Éric had said, angrily. “You know as well as I do, these guys you see on the street are just assholes. Lazy assholes. If they wanted to work—”

  “There’s a recession, Éric. But you don’t want to see that, you don’t want to know anything. Even in my profession, they’re laying people off.”

  “Oh, no!” Éric’s wife Annie had cried. “You’re not going to start talking politics, are you? We get enough of that on TV . . .”

  “You’re right, darling. All the same, if they sent all the blacks and Arabs back home, there’d be room for all the French people who are having a hard time right now.”

  “Éric has a point,” Sophie cut in. “But what I really want to know is, where are we going for the holidays? The West Indies, or to the mountains to ski?”

  When they got back home, Rico quarreled with Sophie. Not because she’d supported éric—he didn’t give a damn what she thought—but because, as she must have known, their financial situation was far from being secure.

  After Julien was born, Sophie had asked for time off from the bank where she worked. A woman’s role, she had de­clared, was to take care of her child, to bring him up. She’d always been a bit of a conservative. But when Julien had started school, Sophie had decided not to go back to her job as a business consultant. She would be a housewife, like Annie.

  Rico had started working even harder, making more and more trips out to the western end of his territory. A lot more money was coming in, of course. But even so, it wasn’t easy to live in the same style as Éric and Annie. Especially as a large part of his income went into repaying the loan on the beautiful house they had bought at Rothéneuf, near Saint-Malo.

  One afternoon, on their bench on Square des Batignolles, Rico had opened up to Titi about all these things. He was feeling down. It was the start of the school year, and he “wasn’t there” for Julien. He always felt bad at this time of year. It was worse than Christmas. Not that he liked Christmas. Midnight mass, the family dinner, the tree, the presents, all that respectable hypocrisy.

  “What’d be the point in your coming?” Sophie had replied when he had called. “We can live without you, fortunately.”

  In the divorce settlement—which came a whole year after Sophie left, because he had stubbornly refused to give her one—Rico had not even obtained visiting rights. He was a violent alcoholic. That was what Sophie’s lawyer had managed to get the judge to swallow as the reason for his client having abandoned the marital home. All his friends’ wives had agreed with that. Especially Annie. True, he had called Annie a hypocritical bitch. But he wasn’t drunk that evening, just angry, and hurt.

  Moved by Rico’s story, Titi had also opened up a little, for the first time. Rico had understood what it was that united them. They had both believed in the same thing. They had both dreamed of love, a proper family, a good position in life. Security and stability too. And everything had collapsed, without their really knowing why.

  “One day, I realized I didn’t want to struggle anymore in order to succeed. Earn money, all that shit . . . You know, Rico, there are lots of good guys like us on the street. All I can say, after years of living this kind of life, is that when I look at the way society is, I don’t have any particular desire to go back to it. Trust me, I’m never going back to their world.”

  Rico had often thought about what Titi had said. However hard he pondered Titi’s words, he couldn’t decide whether or not he wanted to go back to his former life. Until he had gone to Rennes, the previous day.

  After leaving Hyacinthe, Rico had gone to the post office on Rue des Boulets to beg. His heart hadn’t really been in it. But he had to make a little money. He couldn’t get away from that.

  And besides, begging had one advantage. It meant you ­didn’t have to think. Rico had discovered that in order to open the door of the post office, hold out your hand, say hello, goodbye, thank you, thank you very much, goodbye, have a nice day, you needed to have a completely empty head.

  “Once you start ‘work,’ you have to focus on an absolute minimum of words and gestures. To get the maximum number of coins dropping into your hand.”

  Titi had told him that, when Rico mentioned that he made barely sixty francs a day.

  “Get this into your head, Rico. Once you hold out your hand to beg, you’re admitting, once and for all, that you’re out of the running, that you’re in this life for good.”

  “I know.”

  Rico had put off that moment as long as he could. He had finally taken the plunge at six o’clock one morning, after spending twenty-four hours without a penny. That had made him realize that he’d hit rock bottom.

  “I feel so ashamed.”

  “We’ve all felt ashamed. But if you don’t get beyond that, you’re dead, Rico.”

  The shame hadn’t gone away. But he had found a way to drown his humiliation. Just to get himself started, he would drink at least a couple of pints of cheap wine, then a couple of cups of coffee to conceal the smell, and concentrate on each person who entered the post office. That way, he managed to make between a hundred and a hundred fifty francs for eight hours’ “work.” That day, he made a hundred fifty-eight francs. A good day to go see Julien, he had thought.

  At the Gare Montparnasse, he had caught the next to last train for Rennes. In case a fucking ticket collector threw him off at Le Mans, he could still try his luck with the last train, which was an express from Le Mans to Rennes. But no ticket collector came by.

  As he always did when he went to Rennes—about once a month—he had slept in the parking lot behind the haulage depot. No one had disturbed him, not the security guards, not the backpackers with their fucking dogs. In the morning, he had a coffee in the station canteen, then went to the restroom, where he washed his face and shaved.

  At eight o’clock, he set off downtown, to Rue d’Antrain and the Collège de l’Adoration, the school where Sophie had enrolled Julien soon after they had separated and she had settled in Rennes. It was the school that éric and Annie’s children attended. And Armel, the daughter of Alain, the man Sophie was living with now.

  He leaned against a wall opposite the entrance to the school and smoked two cigarettes. Sophie’s car arrived. A white Golf GTI. He straightened up. Sophie double-parked—she always did that, whatever the traffic—not far from where he was standing.

  Armel got out of the car, followed by Julien.

  “Hello,
” Rico said.

  Julien stared at him. Every time Rico turned up like this, Julien looked at him in the same way. It was a look he found impossible to interpret. There was no contempt in it, no tenderness, no joy, not even indifference. Nothing.

  “Hurry up, Julien,” Sophie cried.

  She had got out of the car, ignoring Rico. She was holding Armel by the hand. Julien joined her. They crossed the street. Outside the school entrance, Julien and Armel kissed Sophie, then went inside. Julien did not turn around.

  Rico walked up to Sophie. Her blue eyes looked daggers at him.

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  Her blond hair cascaded over the collar of her beige cashmere coat, which was open in spite of the cold. She was wearing a white roll-neck sweater and a tight-fitting chestnut-­colored skirt cut well above the knees, revealing her beautiful legs.

  Rico couldn’t help remembering Titi’s question, the day he was eying up the girl in the miniskirt. “How do they do it?” Now Rico had the answer. They’re happy, that’s how. Happiness keeps you warm.

  He was only a couple of feet from Sophie. She was as beautiful and desirable as ever. If she’d said “Come,” he’d have followed her, forgetting all about how much she’d hurt him. Yes, he would have forgiven her. You could hate someone, and still love them. That was something he had never understood, and never would.

  “I’m going away. You won’t see me again.”

  “I think that’s best for all of us.”

  She got back in her car and drove off.

  Rico stood there in the middle of the road, feeling lost. A young woman came up to him.

  “Here,” she said, slipping a ten-franc coin into his hand, “get yourself something hot to drink.”

  And she ran to her car—a green Mitsubishi station wagon—also double-parked.

  He was so stunned, he didn’t move after the station wagon had gone. He squeezed the ten-franc coin in the palm of his hand. Harder and harder, until it hurt. Then he flung it down in the road.