Vernon Subutex Three

by Virginie Despentes

  *

  Marie-Ange and Sylvie were lying on a purple sarong embroidered with Indian elephants, in the shade of a yellow parasol. Pénélope had introduced them to Stéphanie, who sat down with them, since she didn’t know anyone else at the camp. Further off, people were joining groups to take part in workshops – she hadn’t bothered to find out what kind, she wasn’t interested. Discussion groups, thanks but no thanks. Group hypnosis, not her kind of thing. Olivier was nowhere to be seen, otherwise she would have given him an earful: what the fuck is this place? Sylvie had not wanted to take part in anything either. Stéphanie spent the afternoon listening to people talk about life at the camp. Sylvie could talk at you for four hours straight without thinking to ask what you did for a living. And, in fact, this was how it had begun, their strange indolent complicity – that afternoon, lying on the grass with three girls she had just met. There was something childlike about the atmosphere between them – more bloody gentleness – a way of seeing each other, of joking.

  *

  As night drew in, no-one turned on a light. The girls sat chatting in the darkness. It was not dark enough to trip or bump into things, but you had to be attentive to capture an expression, a change of tone, a gesture.

  Gradually, the crowd began to gather in the hulking former printworks where the ritual or ceremony was to take place. The vast room was plunged into semi-darkness. Stéphanie had found herself alone. Since it was impossible to see exactly what everyone else was doing, being on one’s own was not embarrassing in the way it usually was – she didn’t have to worry about what other people might think, about Olivier seeing her from a distance and thinking, poor thing, she’s hopeless in social situations, about some stranger judging her: “It’s because she’s not pretty enough, no-one’s interested, she’s a wallflower.” She had only to huddle close to the wall, wrapped up in a blanket, and she disappeared. She had thought about the Thiéfaine lyric, “solitude is not a shameful disease”, and, in that moment, her whole plan for the evening was to close her eyes and doze off – catch up on a few hours’ sleep before heading back the next day. She no more believed in the magic of this gathering than she did in the chemtrails explained to her by the rock critic who she now spotted in the distance, whirling round, like some dazed, ageing dervish. From the loudspeakers placed at random along the walls came a soft, bizarroid techno drone, sound waves that occasionally prickled the base of her spine, her throat or her solar plexus . . . A mic was passed from hand to hand, people had come prepared with short texts, poems or political manifestos. She paid no heed to the words. She did not resent Olivier for bringing her here, because the trip had done her good, she felt as though she had been away for days. But she couldn’t understand why he would drive all night to listen to adolescent poetry over a backwash of boats creaking or the earth crumbling. She had probably fallen asleep. She recognised the first bars of “Roadhouse Blues”. After that, she remembers nothing until she was suddenly wide awake. The voice of Grace Jones was echoing around the building. The centre of the room was filled with people – the silhouettes had converged and were moving, some slowly, others still entwined, or tracing circles around each other. And then she saw – not with the clarity of a hallucination brought on by acid or shrooms, but even so she saw, and could not claim it was a dream since the illusion lasted long enough for her to be entirely aware of it – light waves surrounding the bodies and she could perceive ribbons of energy, writhing and moving between people. She is a rational person. Unless on drugs, she did not expect to see coloured streamers connecting people.

  She doesn’t like it when people read her cards, she doesn’t believe in the supernatural, she has no truck with spells and curses. But here, in the darkness, she could see things that did not exist. And the most unsettling thing is that she did not deliberate, did not decide to get up – she simply found herself on her feet, hands in the air, an idiot smile plastered to her face. She was dancing. And although she was not touching anyone, not brushing up against another body, she recognised the feel – she was orgasming. It had nothing to do with sex and yet this was the most incredible fuck she’d ever had in her life.

  *

  The sun came up and she was still dancing. She had gently emerged from the trance at the same time as the other convergents. She had tracked down Olivier, smiled at him, and two hundred kilometres down the road, as they were hurtling back to Paris because she had to work early the next morning, she became aware that the smile had not left her lips. For several days, she found herself enveloped by this mild, very distinct state of euphoria. And when Pénélope had suggested that they meet up for a drink with the girls at Sylvie’s place, she had immediately accepted.

  *

  The washing machine beeps to indicate the cycle is finished. Stéphanie sets down her newspaper and automatically gets to her feet, obedient to the house. To her time-consuming need to be regulated. She piles the wet laundry into a basket and takes it into the bedroom to hang it next to the window. She is also anxious because this will be the first time she has gone on holiday with Lucas’ father, Max, since their separation.

  When she arrived back from the convergence, she was still spaced out when Max brought Lucas home. Her eagle-eyed ex had said, “You’ve met someone . . . over the weekend, you met someone . . .” She related her strange adventure with Olivier. Max listened, pulling ridiculous faces and saying, “What’s with this New Age bullshit, honey, honestly, don’t you think it’s time you did something with your life?” He rarely missed an opportunity to let her know he thought her work was mediocre, that she should make a new life for herself, have another child – because, for women, the clock is always ticking – take herself in hand, etc. Max has a knack for demolishing her morale, which also gives him the opportunity to console her – he is adept at both.

  Two weeks later, he came back to pick up Lucas and she mentioned the weekend in Barcelona. “Guess who I’m going with. You remember Xavier? I’m going with him – well, with his girlfriend. The other girl is going out with Patrice – you remember Patrice – though he’s not coming because he has to work.” And against all odds, Max said: “I’d love to go with you. I think it would be good for Lucas to see us together sometimes. We’ve been separated for long enough that I don’t think he’d get his hopes up . . . I think he’d realise that his parents are close enough to want to spend a little time together. Don’t you think it would be good for him? To see that adults can have other relations besides the nuclear family?”

  She had not wanted him to come. The idea was absurd. Agonising. But Max is someone who takes no notice when a person says no. Every time she reads an online profile of the narcissistic pervert, she thinks of the man who fathered her son. A man who always ends up getting what he wants.

  Narcissistic pervert . . . The phrase completely describes his behaviour and yet says little about him. Max was brilliant. He was funny, sophisticated, original, intelligent and caustic. He would take any subject and interpret it according to his highly individual intellectual perspective, he would shed a new and pertinent light on it. He saw the world from above, or at an angle – he was never quite where you expected him to be. Stéphanie owes a lot to him. Being with him changed her. Max was both demanding and generous. When they first met, he believed in her, supported her, pushed her, encouraged her. Then he got bored. She had disappointed him. He remained affectionate. But distant. As he might with someone he found profoundly tedious, whose best efforts were no longer good enough. She had simply not been good enough. A thought that she found devastating.

  It is not that love is blind. You can see what’s happening. You know you’re being conned. You correctly analyse the situation. And still you stay. That’s what’s so bewildering. Stéphanie couldn’t tell herself, I woke up one morning and I realised that he was gaslighting me so I decided to leave him. The evidence was already there. She had not been oblivious to the six hundred and fifty clues that indicated the guy was toxic. But love is not a cost�
��benefit analysis – you don’t say to yourself: I’m getting out because this situation isn’t good for me. Being Max’s wife was more important than being happy. Because he was amazing. You don’t stay with a “narcissistic pervert” because he blows hot and cold or because he undermines you. You stay because he is more brilliant than any man you’ve ever met before, than any man you will ever meet after. You stay because you realise that you’re lucky to be granted access to such intelligence, such power. You stay because you know that, after this man, you will always be a little bored. Stéphanie lost a lot, being with Max. He cheated on her, humiliated her, lied to her, got her to believe that she was mediocre . . . and even so, it was worth it.

  Lucas did not jump up and down at the idea that his father was coming with them to Barcelona, in fact he found the thought of having both his parents with him a little dreary. So, Max made promises – the Dragon Khan rollercoaster at PortAventura, tickets to a football match . . . promises he would not keep. That was his thing. When he says, “We’ll have an amazing weekend,” he’s sincere. He’s persuasive. Later he reneges and, because he feels guilty for reneging on his promises, he becomes aggressive. He looks for reasons to justify his behaviour. But Lucas is too young to mistrust his own father. He was taken in.

  *

  As she hangs out the laundry, she turns on the radio. They are talking about the migrant ship that sank off the coast of Libya on April 19. Eight hundred dead, they say. Twenty-eight survivors. They mention Syria Eritrea Somalia Libya. A cartography of terror. At the centre where she works, they sometimes deal with refugees. They get caught with crack. The voices of the experts who talk about this shipwreck never quaver. You get used to things. Not long ago, she had a boy of about twenty in her office. He had learned to speak French at the detention centre where he was held when he arrived. He told her about how his parents were massacred. About the money for the crossing. She was distraught. She found it discomfiting that he had learned to speak French so easily. What he is interested in is his papers. Not rehab. There is nothing she can do for him. You get used to things, of course. But even then, you can still remember a time when people pretended that human life had some value.

  Stéphanie has been dosing the plant on the tiny balcony with heavy shots of fertiliser this year. The thing has grown into a shrub, it has produced bursts of flowers. Of a pink that is much paler than last year.

  CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO HIM WHY CLOTHING MANUFACTURERS sew on labels so that they itch around the waist? You’d almost think they do research to find the fabric that will chafe most. And even if you carefully and meticulously cut the fucking thing off with a pair of nail scissors, it still itches. Xavier would like to track down the bastard who gets a kick out of designing these things, break both his legs and see whether he still finds it funny to ruin the lives of the people who buy his clothes.

  He had been forced to buy an emergency T-shirt because he hadn’t packed enough clothes. He had never imagined Barcelona would be so hot in spring. He had assumed light sweater, jacket, jeans, not sweltering heatwave. He found himself wandering a pedestrian precinct in the city centre at 10.00 a.m. He didn’t feel disoriented: the shop signs are the same as the ones on his street. Doesn’t matter where you go, it’s always the same shit. Except that here, you need a pedestrian permit to be able to wander around without walking slap-bang into a tourist. They travel in herds, you have to wait ten minutes to cross the street. There are Germans, Chinese, Russians . . . all pug-ugly. Maybe governments make a selection of their most unprepossessing citizens before dropping them on Barcelona. Unsurprisingly, the French are the worst. Noisier, more arrogant and more aggressive than tourists from anywhere else. He’s not planning to come back anytime soon. He feels sorry that he belongs to this horde of parasites.

  Xavier is waiting on the pavement with his dog while Marie-Ange and their daughter are buying a few things in a minimart run by Pakistanis. He studies the people inside, standing motionless in front of shelves of butter and cream. They are all painstakingly reading. Give them the complete works of Tolstoy and you couldn’t get them to sit still, but when it comes to buying a litre of milk, you’ve got their complete attention. It’s probably also because it’s cooler next to the chill cabinets. Fucking stupid idea to come to a city like this in spring. The heat is crippling. Xavier loathes sunshine. He got more than he bargained for.

  It was Marie-Ange who had come up with the idea of having lunch in the apartment Pénélope and Sylvie are renting. Everyone was sitting out on terraces, under huge parasols, in a lovely, quiet little plaza. Xavier had already checked out the menu and decided on the fried fish he was going to order when the ladies suddenly decided they wanted a healthy meal. They’re terrified of putting on weight. It’s true the Spanish seem to like their oil. But all they need to do is go for a thirty-minute jog every morning, they wouldn’t put on an ounce. Instead, there had to be a forty-five minute debate to decide who was going to buy what to make lunch – and now here he is, standing outside the minimart, waiting for it to be over.

  She can spend three hours buying broccoli and a dozen eggs. He knows his wife. She reads the labels of every product. She’s capable of learning the language just to annoy the sales assistant. Meanwhile, he’s dying of heatstroke and the dog has her tongue hanging out. Xavier keeps bending down to touch the tarmac to make sure it’s not burning her paws. There are a lot of dogs in the city. He wonders how they survive the heat. His has been wandering like a lost soul searching for a patch of shade.

  He loathes the heat because it makes everyone sluggish. But it also poses serious fashion problems: ridiculous hats, hideous sunglasses, short shorts, repulsive footwear. A smorgasbord of grotesquery, a cut-up of the worst that humanity can produce. He is surrounded by a sea of morons, drunken teenagers, fat women in sarongs, kids hamming it up for their parents’ photos, lard-arses gorging on multicoloured ice creams . . . And the most preposterous, the most commonplace: tourists on wheels. They rent bicycles, scooters, rollerblades, skateboards, anything as long as it moves, and they glide around with smug smiles almost running over everything and everyone in sight . . .

  Recently, his wife has been complaining that Xavier hates everything. What does she expect? Have you seen the shit we’re surrounded by? And you want me to clap and cheer? He is not about to sit down and look at passers-by and think, they’re clean, that’s good, or, they’re not going around killing people, that’s great. Casting a benevolent eye over the world is fun: level zero.

  He hates the yachts lined up in the harbour on the far side of the avenue. He abhors them, despises them with a fury that is delectable. When he was young, common people would walk along the marinas and stop to gaze at rich people’s yachts. They were symbols of travel, of the exotic, of true luxury. These days the poor don’t stop and stare anymore. Wealth is something they experience like a slap in the face as they pass – they take the beating, like an uppercut. Why would anyone drool over these things? Metric tonnes of shit, all looking like oversized plastic toys. The only advantage to these things is that everyone knows how expensive they are. The way Xavier sees it, anyone shelling out money for a yacht should have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. The glories of the one per cent. A line of utterly identical yachts. All that differs is the size. It’s the size that allows them to say to their neighbour, “Look, I’ve got more money than you.” There’s only one flag that flies on these yachts. The flag of tax evaders who stash their money in offshore accounts, who cook the books, who aren’t subject to the same laws as everyone else. The flag of the one per cent and their inner circle. The owners may have been born in different countries, they may be Chinese or Arabs or Russians, but they all sail under the same flag. The language of banking is a metalanguage. It has taken the place of universal Newspeak. Compared to this, the divine right of kings was a botch job, a ham-fisted system that allowed anyone to slip through the net. The language of banking is something else. No-one can escape it.

  Where
are the fucking terrorists when you need them? Why couldn’t they come here and blow them all up – one after another, like a roll of firecrackers. If anyone needed conclusive proof of the imbecility, the rank uselessness of those warriors of the apocalypse, this is it: they’re capable of spreading terror, but they’re utterly fucking useless when it comes to attacking the people who are really screwing up the world. If they came here and blew everything to smithereens, Xavier wouldn’t be the only one to think: yeah, well, maybe they’ve got a point . . . Even guys like him would be forced to admit that they have a goal, a purpose, a plan.

  In front of the yachts, four black guys are sitting on a low wall with huge Lidl bags between their legs. They’re not talking. They’re waiting for the police to move on so that they can spread out their blankets and sell their junk. Fake Nikes, fake Chanel handbags. Poor bastards don’t exactly look like they’re happy. No-one can tell him they wouldn’t have been better off staying in their own country. How much does a guy selling fake Adidas make? How much can he afford to send home to the family every month? Go figure . . . Last night Marie-Ange got a foot massage from a Chinese woman worn out from hunkering on the sand all day long. He had asked himself the same question – how much does she get to send home at the end of the month?

  *

  What the limousine liberals don’t understand is, just because he thinks “these migrants would be better off back where they came from” doesn’t mean he’s incapable of realising that their lives are shit, that they’re victimised in ways that are inhuman and shouldn’t be encouraged. Ferrying that misfortune to countries that are already at bursting point is absurd. It might not be a pleasant thought, but it stands to reason.