Rico was still squeezing. He was becoming breathless. It was himself he was strangling. The more he squeezed Sophie’s neck, the more he choked. Then it was as if he could see himself in a mirror. His eyes rolled upwards, his tongue hanging out. Dead, or almost dead. And in a corner of the mirror he could see Julien, crying and demanding his breakfast. But still he squeezed. With all his strength. Until he choked to death.
His mouth opened wide. Desperate for oxygen.
“Hey, Rico! That’s enough!”
Dédé was shaking him.
“Fuck it, Rico!”
Gasping, he extricated himself from his nightmare. For some reason he didn’t understand at that point, he didn’t like the way Dédé was looking at him. Didn’t like what he saw in his eyes. Like a nightmare version of himself.
“Here, have a drink,” Dédé said, opening a can of beer.
They’d bought a twelve-pack at the station before getting on the train.
“Where are we?” Rico asked, taking a swig of the beer.
“How the fuck do I know? Fucking train’s hardly moving.”
Rico lit a cigarette.
“Bad dream, huh?” Dédé said.
Rico nodded. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to dismiss those terrible images from his mind.
“We all have bad dreams,” Dédé went on. “It’s because of the way we live.”
“Yeah.”
Did our bad dreams, lodged deep inside our heads, or our hearts, catch up with us eventually? Rico wondered, without being able to answer, every time he had this nightmare. He didn’t have it often—fortunately, because each time he choked himself more, and there wasn’t always someone around to wake him, like Dédé on the train, or me, later, in Marseilles. All the same—and Rico was categorical about this—however much Sophie had hurt him, he’d never wanted to kill her. Not that evening, not later. Besides, things hadn’t exactly happened the way they did in his nightmare.
Sophie had been distant toward him for months. Their marriage, Rico realized, was in a bad way. They never talked, except when everyday problems, often quite trivial, led to arguments. Most of the time, Rico would end up falling in with Sophie’s point of view, and they would make up as best they could. Usually in bed. In spite of all the years that had passed, Rico desired her as much as ever. He loved her body. A luscious body, which had ripened with time, and which she kept in shape by going for long runs on the beach. When she made love, Sophie was not at all the well-behaved, slightly strait-laced middle-class woman she liked to appear in company. She was a wonderful lover, so greedy for pleasure that Rico was always surprised.
“Ah, those convent girls!” Titi had said once. “Trust me, they’re incredibly hot!”
They were on their bench on Square des Batignolles, both very drunk.
“The more they go to church, the more they love fucking. Teresa’s syndrome, I call it. Ever hear of Teresa of Avila and her ecstasies? A saint and a fucking sex maniac!”
Rico had started to giggle.
“You may well laugh . . . Ever since then, they’ve preferred their little Jesus in the nude! . . . It’s like American women, you know, they’re supposed to be such Puritans . . . Take their panties down, you’ll soon see the other America. Two, three times a night, they want it . . . And the things they do . . .!”
“Stop!”
“Stop!” he’d yelled at Sophie.
They were arguing again. This time because he was adamant about not getting a housekeeper.
“You don’t do anything all day.”
She’d looked at him with contempt. “That’s just like you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, I’ve always known it. That’s all women are for you, cooking, housework . . . and sex.”
It was obvious Sophie was being disingenuous. This quarrel, like all the others, was just a pretext to distance herself from him. To get used to the idea that everything was over. Maybe—although Rico always refused to believe it—Sophie even enjoyed being cruel to him at this time. At least until her affair with Alain. That other love, she wrote to him one day, which has calmed me down.
“Bullshit!” he had replied, raising his voice. “You want everything, Sophie, everything. But I can’t afford everything. Not now. For fuck’s sake, do you know how much in debt we are?”
She had smiled. With that surprising smile of hers, her lips curled, which she sometimes had when she was reaching an orgasm. A carnivorous smile. “I thought you’d landed a new contract.”
Rico had become a sales representative for a number of ready-to-wear manufacturers. It was a job he hadn’t really chosen and didn’t like much, but doggedly continued with.
“It’s not settled yet. And even if I do . . . I don’t know how I’m going to manage with all that work . . .”
“Well, don’t think I’m going to iron your shirts for you. I’ve had enough of all that!”
And Sophie had walked out of the living room, slamming the door. When Rico had gone to bed, calmer now, he hadn’t made any move toward her. He’d had enough of always giving in to her.
“Sophie,” he had murmured.
It was nearly a month since they’d last made love. Nearly a month since that quarrel. He had won the new contract, but it had meant going on the road every week. Nantes, Brest, Caen. The route never changed. His Bermuda triangle.
Sophie’s body had stiffened when he touched her.
“Leave me alone.”
“What’s going on?”
She had lit the bedside lamp and sat up in bed.
“I’m in love with someone else.”
She had drawn up her knees under her chin, then had turned her face to him. Her angelic face, gentle and luminous. Rico couldn’t have said if what he saw in her eyes was sadness or pity.
“I’m in love with someone else,” she had repeated gently. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know how to tell myself. It’s all happened so quickly . . . But we . . . we’re finished, you understand? I’m in love with someone else.”
“You don’t love me anymore.”
It wasn’t a question. Just a desperate statement of fact.
Rico had gotten to his feet and without another word, without even looking at her, had walked out of the bedroom. In the living room, he had poured himself a whiskey. To help him think. Images and words had passed through his mind. In slow motion. The gestures she had made. The words she had said. Her hesitations too. Their silences. And sometimes, their tear-filled eyes.
Drinking one whisky after another, he had tried to convince himself that all was not lost, that everything was still possible. Sophie, his Sophie, loved him too, whatever she said. He had sensed it in the way she’d told him things, the way she’d put her hand on his. “You’re such a good man, I know . . .”
He had fallen asleep on the couch, the bottle of whisky empty at his feet, and had woken with a start at about four in the morning. His mind was still turning over, like a machine. “I’m in love with someone else.” Alain. She hadn’t said his name, but he knew it was him. The only bachelor in their group. “You don’t love me anymore.” Her only response had been silence. Her face hidden by her mass of blond hair. Tired, his tongue coated, he’d had to face the truth. He had lost Sophie forever. He had dressed and left the house. He had driven like a madman. All the way to Nantes.
That was what had really happened that night. In the first bar he found open, Rico began his day with a cognac. By the third one, he knew his life had been turned upside down.
Rico was still silent, drinking his beer in small sips. Dédé was sitting opposite him. He wasn’t saying anything either. Occasionally, they’d look at each other, then look away and stare out the window of the compartment, into the blackness of a night in which no one gave a damn about them.
As arranged, they had met at the Gare de Lyon. At the brasserie, below the Train Bleu restaurant. Dédé was sitting at a table, looking weary, a double espresso in front
of him. When Rico had sat down opposite him, he had slid a handful of bills across the table.
“Your share,” he had said.
It had been great to feel the money in his hand. For ten or twelve days, he had thought, he wouldn’t have to beg.
His share.
Neither of them mentioned what had happened a few hours earlier. Rico did not want to think about it. It was against his deepest principles. You didn’t steal. Even when things had been really bad on the street, it had never crossed his mind. But if Dédé suggested doing it again one of these days, he wasn’t at all sure he’d say no. His outlook had changed. When Titi had died, he admitted, he’d gone over the edge.
In the lobby of the station, Rico had been surprised to see so many guys like him hanging around, alone or in groups. At the usual places. Tobacco shops, newspaper vendors, ticket machines . . . Rico had felt distant from them. Different. His nice parka made him look like a normal person, like any of the other travelers coming and going along the platforms.
It’s incredible, he thought, how easy it is to fool people. A new parka, and you could melt into the crowd. Dressed like that, he didn’t jar on anyone. As long as they didn’t look at his feet, of course. Shoes always gave you away. When he was begging at the post office, he could always tell the unemployed from those who had jobs. He just had to glance at their feet.
“When I came to Paris as a student,” Titi had said, “I was almost penniless for the first month. I had a garret on Rue de Luynes, on the corner of Boulevard Raspail. Every morning, I’d put on a tie and the jacket of my only suit and go out to buy bread. The woman in the bakery would make small talk with me, just the way she did with her other customers. Because of my appearance. She never imagined that once I got home I’d eat that loaf of bread on its own without anything else.”
Everyone judges by appearances, whatever they say. If, right now, he went and sat down on the ground in front of the snack bar, Rico had thought, they’d immediately see him for what he was: a down-and-out. That was the way things were. And they’d start looking at him in the same old way. With pity, contempt, condescension, disgust, fear . . . Especially fear. Poverty scares people. The unemployed guys who came into the post office never looked at him, never said hello or goodbye. Most of them knew it was only a matter of time before they ended up on the street. It might happen a year, six months, a week from now. But it would happen, sooner or later.
He had walked across the lobby with the confidence of a man who has a train to catch. A place to go. His wanderings were over. He had nowhere to come back to. Nothing to hope for. Not even a glance from Julien. When the train started, these thoughts soothed him to the depths of his soul.
In spite of the parka, he felt cold all of a sudden. Cold inside. The way Titi had so often felt in those last months. Even in the sun, on their bench on Square des Batignolles.
The train was slowing down.
Rico yawned. “I think we’re there,”
It was 1:55 in the morning. They were the only passengers getting off at Chalon-sur-Saône.
“Fucking one-horse town!” Dédé cursed, realizing that nothing was open in the station, and the bistros in the vicinity were closed too.
Outside, it had been snowing heavily. The first weather reports of the morning would inform the inhabitants that the temperature had dropped during the night to 12°F.
7.
WHAT’S TRUE ONE DAY CAN BE FALSE THE NEXT
Fucking one-horse town,” Dédé kept muttering. He said “one-horse town” in a lingering kind of way, a real Foreign Legion way, as if it justified wiping the place off the map. That was all Chalon-sur-Saône deserved that morning. But Dédé would probably have said the same of any town in France waking up covered in snow, under a cold gray sky.
The first bar to open, the Terminus, was not especially welcoming. The owner looked at them from behind his counter as if they were mangy dogs. No hello, no smile.
“Yes?” he asked, laconically, almost without moving his lips.
“Double espresso with calvados,” Rico said.
“Same for me,” Dédé said. “And a slice of bread and butter.”
“Yes, I’ll have a slice of bread and butter too,” Rico said.
The café owner’s eyes went from Rico to Dédé. Without looking at him, Rico put fifty francs on the counter, and the guy served them like an automaton.
It was true they didn’t look too good. After getting off the train, they had stayed on the platform, sitting on a bench sheltered by a canopy. Rico had looked around for some cartons to protect them from the cold, without finding any. Half-dozing, their backs propped against their rucksacks, they had sat and chain-smoked, waiting for a bar to open.
Now, they were advancing, silently and cautiously, along the slippery surface of Avenue du 8 Mai 1945. Chalon, still drowsy from so much snow, was slowly waking up. The snow on the sidewalks had already been trampled and was full of gray, frozen footprints.
Dédé’s friend, Jo, lived in a neighborhood called La Thalie, out beyond the business area, on the northern outskirts of town. Reluctantly, the owner of the Terminus had told them how to get there.
“We should have listened to him and taken the bus,” Rico moaned.
They had been walking for at least thirty minutes, and Rico was starting to get out of breath. The shooting pains in his lower back had returned. He’d have to get some Dolipran, he told himself, that always helped.
“I didn’t think it was so far,” Dédé said.
“A mile and a half is a mile and a half.”
“Fucking one-horse town! Shit!”
Chalon, as it was revealed to them this morning, was nothing like the way Rico had imagined it. “I think it’s a nice town,” he had said to Dédé on the train.
At a seminar on new sales strategies, Rico had gotten friendly with a guy who worked in the region. Blandin, his name was. Or Blondin, he couldn’t remember which.
“My territory’s the wine route! You can imagine what that’s like. Beaune, Puligny-Montrachet, Mercurey, Givry, Ruly . . . Come spend a weekend,” he had suggested during another seminar. “We’ll do the whole circuit. The house of wine at Chalon is worth the journey in itself. It’s unique in Burgundy.”
Rico had mentioned the idea to Sophie. But Burgundy wasn’t one of her dream destinations. Even when he mentioned the raviolis de grenouilles aux morilles or the dos de brochet aux griottes at the Moulin de Martorey, a country restaurant highly recommended by Blandin. She preferred going to the mountains in winter, for the skiing, and to the sea—but not the Mediterranean—in summer for the sailing. She hated the countryside. It was such a peasant thing, wherever it was. And as far as wine was concerned, all that mattered was to have some in her glass. As long as it tasted O.K., she didn’t care where it came from.
Rico had forgotten all about Chalon-sur-Saône and the wine route. Just as, over the years, he’d forgotten all about a lot of things he’d set his heart on. Getting a spaniel, learning to play the saxophone, walking the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostella, visiting Petra in Jordan . . . All that mattered was Sophie. Her desires. Her happiness.
They came to a housing project. “I think this is it,” Dédé muttered.
They had passed La Thalie, and had lost their way near the Chalon-North interchange. Several times, they’d had to ask for directions. Which wasn’t an easy thing. They were practically the only pedestrians on this road, and most businesses were still closed.
Once they were in the project, they found Jo’s place easily enough. The last block on the edge of the countryide. It was concrete, but, as Rico remarked to Dédé, it still looked a whole lot better than the outskirts of Paris.
Monique opened the door to them, a baby in her arms. Jo wasn’t there. The cops had arrested him four months earlier. On a charge of murder.
“They came for him one morning,” Monique said. “A whole squad of them! It’s because two years ago, he was sentenced to life imprisonment
in . . . What do they call it when you’re not there, in court, I mean?”
“In absentia,” Rico replied.
“Yes, that’s it. In absentia. Sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia, for killing a guy in a squat in Aubervilliers. Jo never set foot in Aubervilliers in his life. He didn’t even know where it was.”
Rico remembered the case. He’d seen an item about it on TV, one evening when he was having a beer at Abdel’s.
The body of Jean Marceau, known as the Belgian—a down-and-out in his sixties, a stand-up guy according to several witnesses—had been found in a squat in Aubervilliers. Twenty-five broken ribs. He’d really taken a beating. Blows, strangulation, internal hemorrhage. The police had arrested a couple of dropouts, Rita and Ignacio, who lived on two gallons of cheap wine a day. “They admitted they’d taken part in the beating. But it was Moustache who killed the Belgian. For his monthly pension. The Belgian had just gotten it, and kept telling everyone about it.”
It was the kind of thing that often happened. When you were on the street, you lost your bearings, there were no rules anymore. Only the naïve believed in the solidarity of the poor. Like many others, Rico had found that out soon enough. On the street, it was every man for himself. You could be beaten up for nothing: a sleeping bag, a nail file, a comb, a bottle of wine, a pack of cigarettes—not even a full pack—and money, especially the day when the welfare payments arrived.
How many times had Rico been beaten up since he was on the street? He couldn’t remember. The last time was at Buttes-Chaumont, one afternoon in spring. He was sleeping on a bench and had felt someone’s hands on him. Two young guys were searching in his pockets and even his shorts. He had struggled and the guys had started hitting him. They had taken all his money. Fortunately, Rico remembered, he’d already paid off everything he owed in various bistros. Since then, whenever he was alone, he had avoided certain places, especially stations like Châtelet, Château-Rouge, Pigalle, where he knew you were sure to be robbed.
A Sun for the Dying Page 5