The Lost Sailors

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  She smiled back at Nedim. She didn’t feel the slightest resentment. He was an asshole, no different than hundreds she’d seen pass through the Habana. A show-off. Naïve, obviously. Not malicious. Not brave, either. She’d never have imagined he would dare to ask her about her scar. Most people didn’t. Most even avoided looking too long at that part of her face. That star-shaped mark, like a broken mirror. If anyone tried it—man or woman, it didn’t matter which—the way she looked at them, the words she used, were calculated to confront them with their own defects, their worst weaknesses.

  Amina had forgotten the blood trickling down her cheek like hot, thick tears, but not the shock of the blade on the bone, nor the way she screamed when she’d felt it. It was engraved on her memory even more than on her skin. Ever since that night, she’d only had to close her eyes, at any time, to relive the second when the knife had touched her cheek. The sheer humiliation of it.

  With a single word, she could hurt, not Nedim’s flesh, but his masculine pride, that cock between the thighs they all displayed like an outward sign of domination. She had a large repertory of cruel remarks. They were on the tip of her tongue, bursting to be let out.

  Lalla was sipping her peppermint cordial and watching Amina closely, waiting. Waiting for Amina to come out with one of those malicious phrases that would cleanse her, at the same time, of Nedim’s obscene glances.

  Amina sipped at her Coke. “Yes,” she said simply, “that’s a whole other story.”

  And Nedim didn’t insist. Once he’d asked the question, he knew he was sailing close to the wind. He knew she would come out with some stinging response that would humiliate him. He had seen the words forming on Amina’s lips. He could almost have read them. As usual, Nedim hadn’t thought before opening his mouth. Deep down, he pitied her. The scar was an insult to her beauty.

  He lowered his eyes, took a swig of his beer, glanced for a moment at Lalla’s thighs, then turned back to Amina. “That was dumb of me, Gaby. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it.”

  Without asking Lalla, he grabbed her pack of cigarettes and lit himself one.

  Shit, he felt bad about it. He really did.

  It was her father who’d sold her to Bruno Schmidt. For how much, she didn’t know. But he really had sold her. She’d just come home from school, that day. Eager to get down to work. She had some reading to do. Her exams were coming up, and it felt as if the closer they got, the less she knew. She wanted to get her high-school diploma, go to college, and become a teacher. That was the future she’d mapped out for herself.

  The apartment was empty, and that surprised her. Her mother was always there when she got home. She cleaned houses in the morning, and took in ironing in the afternoon. But that didn’t worry her too much. Her mother may have been out delivering or collecting clothes. Paying the monthly bills was a constant worry.

  It was the end of May and the weather was already very hot. She had a large glass of water in the kitchen and then decided to take a shower and get changed before she tackled Balzac again. Balzac bored her. He was a show-off. She preferred Dumas. Queen Margot, The San Felice, The Count of Monte Cristo. But Dumas wasn’t on the curriculum . . .

  Schmidt was there when she came out of the shower. He was standing there, holding out a towel and smiling. She screamed, and he slapped her twice, hard. The blows left her speechless.

  “Shut your mouth, bitch!”

  He grabbed her arm and dragged her across the apartment.

  “We’re going to have a good time, you and me,” he said. “Got any objection to that?”

  “Let go of me,” she said, trembling. “Let go of me, please.”

  He squeezed her arm harder, and pulled her around so that she faced him. “Let go of you? You’re mine, sweetheart. Mine. For life. I bought you. Paid cash, too, without even sampling the merchandise first.” He laughed. “But I’m sure you’re worth it. You’re a virgin too, so I hear.”

  He opened the door to her parents’ bedroom and pushed her toward the bed.

  “No!” she cried.

  Schmidt slapped her a few more times. “You scream again, and I’ll really knock some sense into you.”

  Amina started sobbing.

  “That’s it, bawl your eyes out,” he said, taking off his pants.

  He walked up to her, his cock standing taut in front of him. She’d never seen one before.

  “No . . .” she sobbed, curling up in a ball on the bed.

  He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to him, so that her head was close to his cock.

  “Suck me,” he said.

  She was still sobbing. She heard a click, and saw that he was holding a knife. He placed the blade on her forehead. The steel felt cold. Slowly, he slid the blade down from her forehead to her cheek, from her cheek to her neck, and there he held it still. Against her neck. The edge of the blade pricked her skin.

  “I’ve killed lots of you people with this knife. Gooks, too. They’re just as shifty as you Arabs. But I’ll tell you, none of their women could resist this. None of them . . .”

  The blade pressed against her skin. She could feel the vein in her neck throbbing fit to burst.

  “I’ll tell you this. Those bitches weren’t as lucky as you. You see, you, sweetheart . . .”

  He pressed slightly on the handle of the knife, and instinctively, Amina moved her neck forward, bringing it closer to Schmidt’s cock. She could see a network of small purple veins under the transparent skin. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth.

  “Suck,” he said.

  The thing was in her mouth. A hideous lump of blood-engorged flesh.

  “You see, you can do it. You can all do it.”

  Afterwards, he fucked her. When she had no more tears, when she felt as if she’d cried herself out—forever—he left her lying on the bed, put away his knife and got dressed. She didn’t move, didn’t even pull the sheet up over her body. She had nothing more to hide. She didn’t exist anymore. She wasn’t dead, no, it was worse than that, she wasn’t anything. Just a body empty of all feelings.

  Schmidt bent over her. “So long,” he said, and smiled.

  She didn’t have the strength to spit back in his face the slime he’d discharged in her mouth. She wished he was dead, and she begged all the gods for her wish to be granted. And Schmidt did die. Several months later.

  By the time her mother came home, Amina had almost finished packing a traveling bag. She was convinced her mother couldn’t do anything more for her. She hadn’t been able to protect her from her father’s whoremongering. She couldn’t stop Schmidt from coming back. Her life had been overturned. If she wanted to live, she had to get away. Start a new life. She wouldn’t forget the insult. She wouldn’t forget the shame. But she believed that a life was possible in between the insult and the shame. Because now she had anger in her belly.

  She had taken another shower. Washed every inch of her body, every nook and cranny of her skin that Schmidt had caressed, kissed, or even just touched, ending with the genitals. Meticulously, she washed her vagina, rinsing it several times, then the clitoris, the labia. She had never done this so carefully before. Any vestige of teenage modesty was gone. Finally, she slipped a soapy finger inside her ass. Schmidt, as he fucked her, had put his finger deep inside.

  Her bag was in the living room. She was ready. Her mother couldn’t look her in the eyes. They weren’t mother and daughter anymore, but two women who had nothing in common now but their unhappiness.

  Her mother hugged her. “I’m going to leave, too,” she murmured.

  They didn’t say anything else to each other. Not even goodbye. Later, maybe, they would be able to talk again. For today, words had lost their meaning. Words were empty. And so were the two women.

  The evening she came out of a pizzeria with Diamantis and saw her father on the opposite sidewalk, she knew it w
asn’t by chance. Misfortune hadn’t gone away. It was still lurking. She looked around her, sure that Schmidt was going to appear from somewhere. She was overcome with fear. Not an ordinary human fear, the kind that grabs you in a moment of unawareness or weakness. No, this was a deep, endless fear, unreasonable and unreasoning.

  For months, she had been playing hide-and-seek with her old life, avoiding all the places where she could be found. She hadn’t gone back to school. She’d stayed for two months with a friend named Miriam, an older girl she’d met at a party, who worked at the Dames de France. It was Miriam who’d gotten Amina a job there. For the vacations to start with.

  But Marseilles is a village. You hang around the bars, you go to the movies, you stroll on the streets, you take a bus . . . It’s inevitable that one day, someone will recognize you and tell the people who are looking for you. Amina was sure Schmidt was looking for her. He probably wasn’t the only one. He had paid her father, and he wanted a return for his money. All his money.

  She felt so afraid that evening that she decided to go straight home. She didn’t feel well, she told Diamantis. It must have been something she’d eaten. He was determined to see her home, but she said she wanted to go alone. She hailed the first taxi that passed, and hurried away like a thief, fear twisting her stomach, mumbling, “Call me tomorrow.”

  Once in the taxi, a little calmer now, she started worrying about Diamantis. Wouldn’t Schmidt and her father grab him and force him to tell them where she lived? She didn’t feel ashamed that she’d abandoned him like that. Or even that they might hurt him. She was afraid, and even though she was glad to have met Diamantis, he meant nothing to her. Almost nothing.

  Huddled deep in her bed, she was gradually overwhelmed by the feeling that she’d been a coward. It wasn’t true that Diamantis meant nothing to her. She knew that. He was the first man who had restored her trust in life through the way he acted. And she had known him for only three days! All night, she prayed that no harm should come to him. She was ready to give him up, if she had to, rather than let him fall into Schmidt’s hands. She stayed at home the next day. And for the two days after that, Diamantis made her forget all about Schmidt and her fear.

  Schmidt didn’t find her until nine days after Diamantis had left. Amina was happier than she had ever been. Diamantis had written to her, as soon as he got to Barcelona. A postcard in very bad French. He told her how he’d walked along the Ramblas, thinking about her. He told her about the canaries, the goldfinches, the parrots, and all the other birds, red, green, blue, whose names he didn’t know, and fish, too, large and small, multicolored, swimming in huge tanks. He told her about the statue of Christopher Columbus in the harbor. He talked about love. His love for her.

  Diamantis had called her, too. To hear her voice. To tell her how much he missed her. To tell her he was coming back. “Do you—?” “Yes,” she had said. “Yes, yes, yes. I love you.” “Yes, yes,” over and over again. They had arranged to meet within an hour of the boat arriving. They didn’t want to miss a second of happiness.

  Schmidt caught up with her on Rue Pythéas, not far from the harbor. He had a friend with him. She just had time to notice her father, a few steps behind them, before she felt the point of the knife in her back. Then Schmidt’s breath, stinking of anis. They pushed her into a narrow street, Traverse de la Tour. There, he pinned her up against the wall and put the knife to her throat.

  “So, bitch, we meet again!”

  He played with the knife. He liked to do that. She felt the blade brush against her cheek.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello to your darling Bruno?”

  She wasn’t afraid. She was calm, very calm. She thought of Diamantis, who was arriving tomorrow. The happiness he’d given her, which had wiped out all the pain. In return, she’d given him everything in one night. Her body and her soul. Her heart. What she had given him, no one could now take from her. She was his forever. Dead or alive.

  She kicked Schmidt hard, in the balls. He bent double with the pain. But it was a second too late. The blade cut her cheek, under her eye. She thought it was only a scratch. She ran. She had to get away. She crossed Rue Saint-Saëns without looking. She heard a screech of brakes. The hood of a car bounced her in the air. She was aware of falling, her head knocking against the asphalt, blackness coming up to swallow her. She was dying.

  When she opened her eyes, there were people around her. Men and women, whispering. She was in a bed. A man bent over her. “It’s going to be all right now,” he said.

  She put her hand up to her cheek. It was covered in a huge bandage.

  “I did what I could,” the man said. He smiled, then turned and called, “Ricardo!”

  A man came toward the bed. A good-looking, well-dressed man of about fifty. Someone pushed a chair toward him and he sat down.

  “My name’s Ricardo. That was my car you stepped in front of. You’re fine. I mean, the impact didn’t do any damage. As for the other thing . . . I’ll tell you this, darling, that’s a deep cut.”

  Amina closed her eyes, then opened them again and looked first at the man, then around her at the room and the people in it. She didn’t like the man’s familiarity, there was something threatening about it.

  “Where am I?”

  “At a friend’s. Gisèle, come here!” he ordered.

  She didn’t like his tone of voice.

  Gisèle came toward the bed. A short woman who looked like a Barbie doll. Tight-fitting black dress and stiletto heels. Too much make-up. A vulgar, showy woman. Amina looked at Ricardo again, but couldn’t figure him out.

  “You can stay here for a few days. Gisèle will take care of you. Won’t you, Gisèle?”

  “Of course. You’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

  “I . . .” She couldn’t speak. She moistened her lips. “I’m thirsty.”

  It wasn’t what she’d wanted to say, but she really was thirsty.

  “Dominique!” Ricardo called. “Bring some water and a glass!”

  She drank slowly.

  “I have things to do,” she managed to say. “I can’t stay here.”

  “Out!” Ricardo said to Gisele. Then he leaned over her. “Listen, Amina, don’t try to sweet-talk me. We called your father fifteen minutes ago. He told us you left home. He also told us you were a whore who got men all excited. He mentioned a friend of his, Schmidt I think the name was. Said you’d driven him crazy . . .”

  She’d stopped listening. They had looked in her bag for her papers. She thought about Diamantis’s postcard. What he had written. And the P.S. he had added. We’ll be back on the 22nd. Berth 112.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “One o’clock. Why?”

  Diamantis was coming tonight. She closed her eyes, without replying. Before then, she’d get out of here. She’d find a way. For the moment, she wanted to sleep. She didn’t give a damn if it was here or somewhere else. She couldn’t take anymore. Tonight . . .

  Ricardo’s voice seemed to come from a long way away, as if wrapped in cotton. “We’ll take care of your friend the sailor.”

  Nedim touched Amina’s arm in a friendly way.

  “Sincerely, I’m sorry.”

  He looked again at the star-shaped mark under Amina’s eye, with an expression full of tenderness.

  “Don’t worry, Nedim,” she said, touched by his sincerity. “I’m not angry at you.”

  “In that case, cheers!” he said, reassured, and raised his glass. “I don’t like to hurt women.”

  21.

  WHAT’S THE POINT OF THE TRUTH?

  WE ASK OURSELVES

  Amina looked at her watch. She’d given up hope that Diamantis would come. She was meeting Ricardo at seven-thirty at Le Son des Guitares, on Place de l’Opéra. “We’ll have an aperitif and then go have dinner somewhere.” She couldn’t get out of it. Not after last ni
ght, when they were supposed to have dinner at Le Mas with a couple of friends and she hadn’t showed up. She hadn’t been able to face it. She was still reeling from the shock of seeing Diamantis.

  “Didn’t you want to go for a swim?” she asked Lalla.

  She wanted to be alone. It was a nuisance that Lalla and Nedim were here. She needed to think, not to keep up a conversation.

  “Aren’t you going?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe . . . You two, go.”

  She looked at Nedim, then Lalla. Lalla ought to understand that she wanted to be alone.

  “But I don’t have any trunks,” Nedim said.

  “They hire them out,” Lalla said. “Leave it to me.”

  She stood up and went inside the bar. Nedim couldn’t help watching her, greedily, as she walked away. Shit, maybe once they were in the water, he could put his hand on her ass.

  “You’re going to ruin your eyes,” Amina joked.

  “There are worse things in life than that!” he replied. “And it’s free.”

  Amina smiled. There was something she liked about this guy. A kind of natural sincerity. You just couldn’t hate him, even if you couldn’t stand a single thing he said or did. She knew she had a tendency to reduce men to their lowest common denominator. Because for most men, women were either bimbos to be fucked or just plain bitches. That was their world. A simplistic world, which inevitably led to tragedy and death. She was sure Nedim thought that way. And yet Diamantis seemed to like him. Why else would he have gotten involved in his affairs? Why would he have taken on his debts?

  “She’s my daughter.”

  She hadn’t meant to tell him that, it just slipped out. Because of Nedim’s sincerity, which she found touching. How long was it since she had last taken the time to listen to a man with any other thought in mind than screwing him out of as much money as possible? They all told the same stories. They lied. To other people, and to themselves. None of them was capable of telling the truth, even for a second. But maybe that was all down to her job. What was the point in telling the truth to a hostess in a cocktail bar?