The Panda Theory

by Pascal Garnier

  ‘I was on an architecture field trip to Florence. There was a little shop right next door to my hotel. It was dirty, dark and reeked of faraway spices, cheese and cured meat. It smelt of men. It took me four days to pluck up the courage and give in to temptation. The man who cut me five slices of coppa was called Adamo and naturally he was gorgeous. Like mine, his father was dead, and had been a fascist. We were made for each other. Adamo wanted to travel and I had some money saved up. The rest is history. Will that be all?’

  ‘Have you got any Lacryma Christi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll take two bottles then, please. That’s a great story. So what made you choose to set up shop here?’

  ‘We wanted to go far away. This was the perfect place.’

  ‘Do you like it here?’

  ‘No, but “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” as Nietzsche once said.’

  ‘That’s true. My compliments to the chef – the antipasti are delicious.’

  Gabriel had barely finished speaking before the woman pressed a button and a distant-sounding voice crackled out of a loudspeaker.

  ‘Prego?’

  ‘Adamo, a customer wants to pass on his compliments for the antipasti.’

  ‘Grazie! Grazie mille, grazie tanti, grazie mille, graz—’

  ‘Okay, okay. Have a nice evening, sir.’

  ‘You too.’

  Gabriel left the shop, convinced that the voice coming out of the loudspeaker was a broken record, stuck on ‘Grazie! Grazie mille.’

  It wouldn’t come, no matter how much he needed to go. Piss, just piss. It wasn’t rocket science. Even a newborn baby knew instinctively how to piss. But it just wouldn’t come. This appendage hanging out of his flies would end up useless. It didn’t look bad, not too long, not too short, silky smooth, good girth, nice shape, no spots or shrivelling. The toilet he was standing in front of looked like a pelican made of white china, its beak open, waiting patiently for his thing to recover from its momentary bout of amnesia. The sound of clinking cutlery, soft background music and the hubbub of conversation drifted through from the other side of the closed door. Life could obviously go on without him. At that exact moment, only the sunfish in the postcard pinned to the wall above the cistern could vouch for his existence. And it wasn’t helping. The fully inflated creature, bristling with spikes, reminded him of his bladder.

  ‘Come on then – are you or aren’t you?’

  Annoyed, he waved it around in every direction, but soon came to the conclusion that violence never got you anywhere. The more you want something, the further you push it away.

  Okay then, he thought to himself, let’s pretend we’re here to do something else: to study the sunfish’s morphology perhaps, or even to test the quality of the toilet paper. It’s a good brand, thick and soft. Count the tiles on the floor. Twenty, two with bevelled corners. The journey into the afterlife promised to be thrilling.

  ‘Right, come on. I’ve had enough,’ he muttered to himself.

  Disappointed, he tucked himself back in and, out of principle, flushed the toilet. The sound of the rushing water aroused something in his abdomen. Suddenly, he felt an urgent need and everything started all over again.

  ‘Are you all right in there, Gabriel?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. I’ll be out in a second.’

  There was not an olive nor a morsel of pasta left on their plates. Despite the grief and the sorrow, they had been hungry. The two bottles of Lacryma Christi had been drunk. Thankfully, José had brought another two bottles of wine. Rita and he were getting on well. They were all taking comfort from each other. Unhappy people were part of the same big happy family. Rita had shown José the photo of her white poppy and he had shown her a photo of his family in happier times.

  Madeleine watched them tenderly, her head resting on her hand, her elbow on her knee. Which sea was she daydreaming about? How deep was she swimming?

  Everything should stop here, now, when everything was perfect. It should be like this for ever. Gabriel wanted to be able to persuade them to stay as they were, not to move a muscle, not to say another word. Because he knew. He knew. He had been here once before, that day on the terrace, the heat, the closed shutters, Blandine enjoying a siesta, the cats at her feet, a fly buzzing, Juliette in her hammock, the piano playing, the baby wailing, the ferry’s whistle, the smell of the barbecue and the melon skin. That day he hadn’t known. He should never have left the next day. The first one to move would break the charm. Their bubble would burst.

  ‘Hey, Gabriel. Gabriel. Are you with us? I was just telling them the story of the panda.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the panda.’

  They already had memories in common, some good and some bad. Rita looked younger; there was something childlike about her, as if she had cried herself clean.

  ‘It’s funny. It’s as though you’ve known each other since school.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for the couple of hundred miles between us, then maybe. Having said that, when the two of you came to my restaurant the other night, I thought you and Madeleine were sisters.’

  ‘No, I could never stand my brothers and sisters. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. We’re here now, together. You get the family you deserve.’

  Gabriel blinked; on, off, on, off. Anyone can feel like family in the end; you just have to replace the smiling faces in the identikit photo.

  The thing that had struck Gabriel was how young they were. One was sixteen and the other seventeen. They had stood there, like bored schoolchildren, half listening to a lecture on discipline. They were probably thinking about the football match that the judge was making them miss. They had confessed to everything on their arrest. A fuck-up. It wasn’t their fault if someone had told them to burgle the wrong flat. They had got the wrong door. Shit happens. They were stoned and it was late. They’d panicked when the woman and child started screaming – you know how it is. They were sorry. They would never do it again. They promised. They swore. Their past had been lousy; all they cared about now was the telly and the football score between Les Bleus and Italy. They agreed to pay the price for their youthful error. Fifteen years, five suspended, ten years in prison. They would still be young when they got out. Whether they spent those years on the inside or out made little difference. With their shaved heads, stickingout ears, brand-new tracksuits and trainers, they looked like young sportsmen apologising after an unfortunate defeat: ‘We’ll do better next time.’

  As hard as he tried, Gabriel couldn’t bring himself to hate them. Even before meeting them, even before knowing who had done it, the enormity of the crime had stripped bare his sense of good and evil. It was like a natural disaster, a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, an earthquake, something beyond all comprehension. His lawyer and family were surprised, if not dismayed, by his lack of fighting spirit. They wanted him to show hate, a thirst for vengeance, but Gabriel had none. He had tried to imagine gouging out the eyes of his wife and child’s torturers, but he couldn’t manage it. Curiously, he felt he had more in common with the guilty pair than with his friends as, like him, the two boys failed to feel the difference between good and evil. He would rather watch the final with them. Like them, he had nothing left to say for himself. The guilty one, the real one, was still on the run. The one without name or form that humanity invoked every day. He would never be troubled.

  They heard a roar from outside the courtroom. France were leading 1–0. Lawyers, murderers, victims and judges joined in a silent cheer.

  José had drunk a fair amount and, although he struggled to get up off the couch, he managed to stand up without swaying.

  ‘I have to go. I’m getting up early tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow … Madeleine resurfaced from her reverie. Rita rubbed her eyes and Gabriel looked down.

  Rita poured the last dregs of wine into her glass and finished it in one.

  ‘So then, it’s all over.’

  José blushed as if caught out. His eyes searched in vain for somethin
g to hold on to. He felt guilty. It wasn’t easy playing Judas. He stared down at his feet as if they were made of lead.

  ‘All good things must come to an end.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if they don’t then you won’t realise how good they’ve been. That’s just the way it is, can’t be helped.’

  Rita fell back onto the couch with a sigh, her arm held over her eyes. Madeleine started to clear the table. Gabriel got up and offered his hand to José, who grabbed it as one would a life belt.

  ‘Well, that’s life, isn’t it?’

  ‘C’est la vie. Goodnight, José. By the way, can I come along with you tomorrow?’

  ‘If you want. We’ll all squeeze in.’

  Madeleine offered him her spineless sunfish cheek. Rita didn’t move from the couch. She was sleeping, or at least pretending to. José hesitated as he leant over to kiss her goodnight. He pulled back.

  ‘So then, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Goodnight, José.’

  Madeleine emptied the ashtrays full of dreams while Gabriel opened a window. The party spirit swirled out and dissolved in the rectangle of velvety darkness like fine drizzle evaporating. Madeleine joined Gabriel at the window.

  ‘I’ve drunk too much.’

  They both leant against the windowsill, as though holding on to a ship’s rail as it pulled out of harbour. The street was quiet.

  ‘Have you ever been happy, Gabriel?’

  ‘Yes, once. It frightened me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it was the last time.’

  ‘I don’t know if I should envy you or feel sorry for you.’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘You’re going to leave, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course, like everybody else.’

  ‘To go where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Somewhere like this probably.’

  ‘So why don’t you stay?’

  ‘It’s not up to me.’

  Below, on the opposite pavement, a blind man walked by. He would have passed by unnoticed if it hadn’t been for the tippy-tappy sound of his white stick. The sound of a shadow.

  ‘What about him? Do you think he knows where he’s going?’

  ‘Definitely. A blind man’s at home in darkness.’

  ‘This evening, everybody was happy – José, Rita. But you weren’t. What’s stopping you from being happy?’

  ‘I’m not unhappy.’

  ‘I love you, Gabriel. It’s stupid, but it’s true.’

  The blind man turned a corner. The sound of his stick gradually faded away before disappearing completely. The town lay still, bathing in dreams in which everybody was a hero. He had to sleep. Sleep.

  ‘I’m going back to the hotel, Madeleine. It’s late.’

  She’d never been as beautiful as she was then. Much more beautiful than her geranium.

  ‘That’s a nice gun you’ve got there, Françoise.’

  ‘It belonged to my husband. He was a great hunter. I clean it regularly. It’s in perfect condition, like when he was alive.’

  The little girl resembled a wild strawberry trampled by an elephant. Her small hand still gripped the saxophone with which she had just played a flawless, if slightly fast, rendition of Au Clair de la Lune for Gabriel. Beside her, as if asleep, her brother sat leaning against the wall, his arms slack by his sides, his legs extended, his chin resting on his chest, in the middle of which the buckshot had left a hole the size of an orange. Françoise lay in the hallway, a few feet from the door. She was faceless, as if a mask had been ripped violently off her. José was at the foot of the stairs on his back, his arms outstretched, his mouth wide open and his eyes burning with shock. The echo of the last gunshot still rang in the stairwell. José had been halfway up the stairs when he saw Gabriel on the landing with the gun in his hand.

  ‘Gabriel? What on earth—’

  The force of the gunshot blew him away.

  Gabriel stepped over José’s body, put the gun on the kitchen table and filled a large glass with tap water. The smell of gunpowder had dried his mouth. Everything had happened so quickly, two minutes at most.

  Happiness is a calamity you can never recover from. As soon as you catch a glimpse of it, the door slams shut and you spend the rest of your life bitterly regretting what is no more. There is no worse purgatory and no one knew that better than Gabriel. The Westminster clock struck eleven, immortalising the moment for ever. He felt vacant and hollow, his bones and arteries empty, as if all the blood that had been spilt had been his own. He was hungry and wanted a beer. That was what the two kids had done after they had torn his family apart. They had gone and plundered his fridge and drunk some beers. That must be the normal reaction. His path back to the car was strewn with abandoned luggage.

  It was always like that with the horizon: you never knew where it really ended. There had to be a hole in it, that was it, an unending chasm. And the sky. It has to break into day, but you sense that it doesn’t really want to. It’s a sky that would rather go back to bed.

  Gabriel parked the car on the roadside. He had a pressing urge. His jet of urine swept over the wild grass and unnamed indestructible plants. Once a year they blossomed, producing scrawny and charmless flowers as well as seeds, which allowed them to reproduce. All for nothing. They weren’t edible and would never look good in a bouquet. Like humanity, a lot of creation is totally pointless. And yet it is this kind of landscape that is the most resistant. You could piss on it for ever.

  As he closed his flies, Gabriel’s gaze was drawn to the clump of brambles opposite. Despite its apparent chaos, there seemed to him to be a deep-rooted architectural logic to this tangle of barbed branches. It wasn’t just coincidence that one stalk had wound itself round another three times. Nothing was left to chance. Everything happened for a reason. It was fascinating. The icy wind blew its foul breath in his face. Gabriel felt tired. He climbed back into the car, tipped the seat back and turned on the radio. The presenter was telling a stupid joke but it made him laugh. A man walks into a bar …

  The space outside the Faro where José had been parked that morning was still empty. Gabriel pulled up, cut the engine and closed his eyes. He remembered the big brasserie at the end of the street where the two young businessmen had argued over the babies’ bottles and their mismatched teats. Sauerkraut, that’s what he wanted. A good plate of sauerkraut.

  ‘What are you doing, Rita?’

  ‘I’m cooking an egg, can’t you see?’

  Her face was swollen. She wore a baggy tracksuit and dirty slippers. With her arms folded in front of the stove, she stared into the pan of boiling water, watching the egg dance from side to side. Everything seemed too big for her, her skin, her clothes, her life. The little girl with the white poppy was once again forgotten in the purse at the bottom of the bag. She had the same air of resignation as José had had that morning when picking up his kids, his neck stretched out to take the yoke of a life already written and planned in advance. A look that said every day was like a Monday morning.

  ‘José lent me his car. I was thinking, I could take you to the hospital if you want.’

  ‘Um, yeah, I guess so. Only if you want.’

  ‘It is today you’re going, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I’ll eat my egg and then we can go. The coffee’s still hot if you want some.’

  The dishes from the night before had been washed and stacked precariously in the drainer. Opposite Gabriel, Rita carefully peeled the shell off her egg. Once finished, she took her time looking at the egg before taking a bite. The coffee was lukewarm.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Twenty past three.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night. How are José and the kids? And their grandmother?’

  ‘They’re fine.’

  ‘Good. He’s nice, José, not complicated, not needy. He doesn’t ask for much.’

  ‘Have you heard anything from Marco?’

  ‘I called
the hospital this morning. They didn’t want to give me any details. He’s not dead though. Right, I’ll put some clothes on and then we can go.’

  ‘You’ve got a bit of egg yolk in the corner of your mouth.’

  ‘Ah, thank you.’

  Warehouses and retail parks selling all sorts of useless tat sprouted on the edge of town, amid the turn-offs and roundabouts. They were all overburdened with signs, logos and giant arrows shouting ‘Come on in! This is where it’s at!’ But actually finding the entrance was always a nightmare. A windscreen wiper squeaked annoyingly.

  ‘Pull over at that café there. I have to get a drink before the hospital.’

  The supermarket café was full of people coming and going. But they could all have been the same person, more or less successfully disguised, with moustaches, glasses, wigs or shaved heads. Rita was already on her third beer She wasn’t talking, preferring instead to smoke and chew her fingernails, her gaze drifting towards the car park full of puddles.

  ‘Are you worried, Rita?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. I’m fed up with going nowhere. I feel like I’ve been pedalling just to stay still my entire life. José’s got his kids, a family …’

  ‘You’ve got Marco.’

  ‘Yes, or maybe he has me. I’ve been a whore for him and now I can be his nurse! When happiness doesn’t come, there’s nothing you can do about it. Last night was good though, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it was good.’

  ‘At least that’s something. Let’s go.’

  The hospital wasn’t that different from the shopping centre. It was also a cube-shaped block, probably dreamt up by the same architect, but with stretchers instead of shopping trolleys, humans instead of groceries. Here, as at the supermarket, business was good. Gabriel struggled to find a place to park. Rita fidgeted in her seat.

  ‘Gabriel, let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Hold on, it’s fine, I’ll find a space. Look, there’s one over there.’