Frederic, Friday
It was the following morning, really while I was changing meter to the Competitions of the east, that the last ones among the crowd. Taken a different carriage from mine but of the same train. I thought that I would not have been able to study her/it while he/she was reading his/her book; I wanted to do him/it, as had already happened.
I didn't succeed in remaining in bed that morning, to the hotel on Fridays are day of arrivals and departures. The managers howled in Indian orders to the attendants that raced on and down along the steep staircases of the building. For this the meter was so full, it was really the Parisians' business hour. A petit I would have enjoyed dejeuner to the Café du Pont Neuf, by now become my preferred place to inaugurate the morning.
To every station a small group of employees tried to compress us in the carriages, among it shouts her and the nervousness, preventing any type of movement. The atmosphere he was heating, the temperature increased and lower case letters droplets of sweat he went forming on my forehead. The odor, after a pair of stations, it was already important.
To Les Halles I felt my body push himself/herself/themselves in before; I tried to rotate me on the pole to which I was anchored, then a puff of blonde hair me proper comparì behind the shoulders. It was her, the biondina with the white Wayfarer. Its body supported him to mine; I felt its forms slip on my coat. I tried to turn to the right the head and to the left, quickly, looking for a visual contact, in the hope that understood that I was me. But the doors were closed behind of her just gone down by the carriage. The train left again slow and I left her/it to me to the shoulders.
I entered to the Café du Pont Neuf: the place was empty, only the intense traffic on the long Seine entered by force the silence of the caffetteria. I took a seat me to the usual table, and in to look for the cigarettes in the pockets of my trench, I found me a ticket that I didn't remember to have. I turned him/it to me among the hands.
TOMORROW. SUNSET. PONT DES ARTS.
E.
Cazzo. It was her. It was the biondina. It had to have inserts me him in pocket on the meter, when you/he/she had approached me to go down. You knew that I was there. You/he/she had done him he/she waits for.
The heart began to beat me strong: if I paid attention I could almost see him/it paw under the shirt. I took a seat me, I looked at the ticket, I studied the handwriting of it, I reread a couple of times it. Then another pair. Then still two. It was not able whether to be her; going to look for in the meander hidden of my memory I didn't find nessun'altra explanation.
I realized only in that precise instant that I was living. What something was happening. What it seemed too effortless me to have a plan and to complete him/it. I had to improvise for the nth time.
The breakfast arrived to me in the meantime. The bigliettino was staid on the table, under the cigarettes. I held far it, as if you/he/she could contaminate me. I tried to ask me thing I would have done and as but inside of me I already knew to have decided. I could not risk to fall in some loving complication, neither of certain I would have presented to that sort of appointment. I was in Paris there and I had a purpose, I had a plan and I would have gone on. I taken the ticket, I rolled up him/it and I drowned him/it in the coffee that you/he/she had remained in my cup. This way, a thought in less with which to have to make the accounts. Anybody waste of illusions, ahead in my road.
«Garçon! Garçon, him the vous plait, y to-t-the one téléphone?» I said stopping a waiter that passed me to the shoulders.
«Oui, monsieur. You-bas.»
«Puis-je utiliser?»
«Oui, monsieur.»
The telephone was really behind the cafe, in a narrow angle drawn by the intersection of two walls. During the sleepless night that I had passed you/he/she had come me an idea: I wanted to unpack me. I wanted to see Frederic again, they were years that I didn't see him/it. With him I have seen things that normal people will never see in one hundred lives.
Frederic immediately responded me: among the confusion that wound his/her voice we succeeded in putting us of accord to see us at eight o'clock in that evening to the Café Les Deux Margots.
I wandered for Paris, doing before and back for the Champses Elysée to the search of something of very expensive and very useless that the desire of compulsive shopping would have satiated that lay still latent on the back seat of my brain. I didn't find anything to the height of my compulsionis but at seven and half o'clock precise is sat to the Café Les Deux Margots and I looked with mistrustful air the abbey of Saint Germain des Pres, the most ancient church in the city, that practically rose me of forehead.
God.
I had eleven years, his/her grandmother and I Pine cone knelt to the feet of the bed we recited Our Father before going to sleep. I tightened strong the fingers, weaving her one with the others, I closed the eyes and I repeated word for word the prayers that went out of the mouth of his/her/their grandmother producing a kind of echo joky.
Give us our daily bread today, you put again to us our debts as we put again them to us to our debtors and us not to induce in temptation but free us from the evil.
Growing, I had had my daily bread - a bread of luxury, could say -, I had not had debts neither so much less debtors but I had had a lot of temptations and nobody was ever worried about to free me from the evil. With to spend some years, God had passed by her/it" d" capital to that lower case letter, you/he/she had become, more than a divinity to which to believe, a character fantascientifico to which to give the guilt.
At that time I wondered me if God, one any in the kingdom of the skies, pits to knowledge of my plan, if you/he/she would ever have forgiven once me arrived of there or if I would have wandered for the eternity lost in an infernal forest.
«Hey, mon loves!»
«Frederic!»
It woke up me from the thoughts ultradivini; it was hidden behind a pair of expensive black glasses and it gave me a vigorous handshake. You/he/she was made to have been growing the beard for the last time that we were seen there. It was tall, thin, of those nervous skinniness and apparently deprived of muscles. The dug face, the wrinkles of expression on the forehead that you/they sprouted to every word as ripples on the sea. The nerves threw him the neck that sprouted from the white shirt. That deep furrows in face gave him many more years of those that it had in reality. The beard was naturally crinkle, hard, prickly also to the sight. You removed the glasses. The clear eyes, languid, they looked me lost over my mass at fire. A few years had passed.
«Mon loves, that plaisirs. Does thing bring yourself in the dear and old Paris?» Frederic mixed Italian and French in sublime way, making his/her poetic language and sopraffina. It beveled the erres, it rounded off the vowels, it disarranged the accents, putting every single word as astride a continuous Russian mountain.
«Nothing of main point, is taken me some day off from the job, the last times they have been really hard. The first flight that I have found available have taken. and eccomi here in Paris.»
«Oh, there east merveilleux. We have to organize something. You feel, it comes me to mind so, we drain then here there something later I know that there is a party in house of one friend of mine, there is good stuff.»
«Frederic, be sincere: there is good stuff or do you have good stuff?»
«Naughty boy! You are not not at all changed.»
We initialed our infernal pact with a smile accomplice. Took Frederic, throwing him/it for the apron, a waiter that was passing and it ordered the first one of the four gin-tonic that we would have consumed.
After a couple of hours we staggered long Boulevard de Saint Germain to the search of the house of a mysterious Antoine.
«Antoine, Antoine, où es-you?» it howled Frederic in the receiver of the jail cell.
We laughed as prey crazy person to hysterical crisis: the tablets that we had furtively swallowed were climbing.
Finally and unexpectedly we located a front door from which a big quantity of
people entered and went out,: very beautiful models, young boys from the artificial hair. Aloft, on the ceiling that was glimpse by the windows, lights were projected by the thousand colors stroboscopici. The lower part of the dances music shot to all volume arrive thin in the street.
«Putain merde! The east ici! He/she lives here Antoine, from the that we salt.»
To every ramp of staircases the music did more and more him strong. People camped out anywhere for the whole building; the door was open. We owed it stuffed road among a group of models that you/they danced embarrassed to the hypnotic rhythm of some hits French. Antoine was embraced twos blonde and busty poles, he/she wore a negligee that a clone ache made him/it succeeded of Hugh Hefner.
Frederic saw him/it, the hand tightened him and they was given a confidential pacca on the shoulder, apostrophizing himself/herself/itself with some vulgar Parisian regard.
«You know the girls, Frederic?»
«No monsieur, doesn't know her.»
A diabolic sneer appeared on the face of Frederic, it mimed a sort of it counts with the finger index aimed toward the two conigliettes and it stopped him on that of right.
«To like to know her/it, mademoiselle.»
The takings the hand and it grazed her/it to him with the lips. Before drawing near to her it had out of the already half mouth language. It ended in that some coniglietta for some second, then he turned verse of me and it told me:
«Hey hand, if you want to serve you, you do as if I were at your home. That has remained of left.»
«I believe that I will give me to the alcohol.»
«You do as you believe mon you love, me house es on house.»
I looked at Antoine to look for the approval of the landlord.
«You go you go, I pray» it told me pointing out me the impromptu cafe in the other room.
I swallowed different glasses of alcohol; I wandered for the rooms of that house without destination. Frederic had disappeared, Antoine was busy to touch the fondoschiena of every girl that passed him before. I was lost and I was happy. I didn't think about anything, the drunk one was turning in body, the worries were drowsy, the feelings made my complete painless self-destruction. And so the time and the space deformed him, they became larger for then to suddenly become adherent to my body. Alice came to mind that you/he/she had followed the Bianconiglio for then to end risucchiata from a hole in the garden. Where was my hole? In which I was fallen inside?
It was as when he was children, it didn't rub me of nothing if not that it arrived tomorrow. Growth had been only a loss of time. I didn't want worries, pain, anxieties, attended.
«Mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen. the. poussiere magique!»
A boy went out howling from a room with in hand a silver tray on which you/they were spread out about ten strips of dust white. The same that had not brought me to the other world for a hair.
I don't know what it happened me, but in a second the sight was dazzled me and I was forced to close the eyes. Once reopened, reality reappeared deformed and it assumed the forms of Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! before collassare in a world apart.
The boy with the tray was a clown that with the shoes of different longer measures you/he/she crushed the feet to whom found before. All around, the walls turned him into heavy curtains, glimmering, from circus.
Antoine reappeared from behind a couch elefantesco with a funny tuba on the head and, brandishing his/her baton, he/she invited all to participate in the show. Curling himself/herself/itself the moustaches and polishing himself/herself/itself the gaiters, it gave a pat to every spectator that entered.
«Is the show that difference does my friends! You come!»
On the floor, sawdust and sand they inserted the feet to the ground. Moving myself on the disconnected ground I looked aloft where trapeze artists and jugglers took around the normal laws of the physics.
Oh, Frederic. The magician. He/she wore an used tuxedo, full of rolls, colored. It made bows and somersaults, deadly jumps and it always reverted standing. To the center of the footstep the other artists had made him space. The public remained in silence and looked me, there of side to him. In the dark, we were illuminated only by an eye of ox.
«There east the magique, mon loves!»
You removed the heavy mantle that covered his shoulders, it shook him/it in front of itself as in the bullfights to attract the attention of the bull. It made an express movement and behind it a tavolino appeared. It supported us above the cylinder and it dusted him/it with a bright powder that extracted from the pockets.
«There east the magique, mon loves! It looks.»
It planted a hand in the hat and it extracted an unusual white rabbit of it with the sideburns to the Elvis Presley. The rabbit skipped about here and there, before staying himself/herself/themselves to few meters from us and you/he/she waddled singing some toward of Hound Dog.
Frederic recalled my attention shaking the hands in front of my eyes. Manipulating my imagination.
«Nothing is as it seems. There is no makeup, there is no deception. the fee concerns.»
You inserted the hands in pocket, the public kept silent; the powder magic descents as snow on the cylinder from which some puff of greenish smoke raised him.
Galleries give, the public admired in silence, with the eyes aimed fumante to the hat.
It went out a to be bright, a donnina from the green short suit hovered him in the air, it made a pair of pirouettes around me and then it veered aloft. It circled, it fell, taken back quota and it stopped him in front of my nose. He/she kissed him/it to me in point of feet.
«It is yours» the sweet green fatina whispered me before disappearing in a cloud of smoke.
In front of the me, on the table, a glass of green liquid. To a snap of fingers of the magician Frederic, fell from the tall one a lump of sugar that quickly loosened him. It extracted from his/her pocket a vial, that brought on the side a writing: laudanum. From it it made to go down a pair of drops in the glass, that the liquid of blood tones dirtied. To the second snap of fingers the liquid takings fire emanating a timid fiammella bluish, that slowly went to grow weak him up to go off himself/herself/themselves.
«This is for you, mon loves. A sip and street. A piece of world is yours. Et voilà!»
Still before entering that fraction of second in which difference is understood among correct and wrong, the warm green liquid already filled my cheeks, the guts and the stomach.
The circus extinguished him, it was struck dumb and implose on himself before returning to the reality, the same one in which I found me completely overdone on a couch to house of Antoine.
I opened the eyes, a due curtain of imaginary smoke to the mix of drugs and alcohol he/she clouded completely my sight. A light dizziness confused my thoughts and for an instant I found it hard even to remember where I was.
The wind, a door that beats, warm, the ocean, the last summer to the Cleopatra Palace of Los Cristianos to Tenerife.
Astrid.
I had gone with Astrid. Yes, I don't remember badly. I had asked him him an evening that we were gone out to drink something. Yes, yes, it seemed success from some hour before how much the memory was clear. He/she wanted to pass to take me with his/her auto. I don't know why, it perhaps did her/it feel more main point, wanted only perhaps to be kind. We would have gone to the cinema and then to drink in some local. A smile ignited me on the face, she to an intersection had collided with the car that had before.
«Eye! Eye!» I had howled her, anchoring me to the seat with the hands, while with the right foot I looked for the pedal of the brake that I obviously had not found. What a country house. You had wanted to call his/her father, I was so embarrassed that I had been behind everybody of it, apparently disinterested, with the look downward, hoping that that moment ended the first possible. I don't know if it were for that small accident or because you/he/she was fallen in love indeed of me, but to the cinema it didn't
release an instant my arm.
We ended together in bed and, not to seem even more merda of that that I/you was not already, asked her if he/she wanted to spend a few days with me to Tenerife. Also because it didn't suit me to go alone there. We remained badly when, to return you, didn't call once anymore her back.
A window that squeaks, the breakfast in bed and the swash of the waves on the waterline of white sand. The door beat again and I got scared me.
I got up me of release. No, it was not Tenerife, it was not the ocean. It was Paris, it was night, there was pluvius perfume in the air, a curtain to my shoulders waved patriotic, pushed by the French wind.
And so, standing in the empty apartment of Antoine, I wondered me that end had made all the people. Frederic slept, extended supine on a proper carpet close to a puddle of vomit.
«Hey friend, is better perhaps that we raise us from the balls.» The tolds him throwing to small kick on his side. He responded me with a mixed grunt.
The apartment was empty; I turned in the hope to succeed in finding the bath, pushed by the demand of an immense urination. A model was huddled up behind an armchair of skin and slept with a thread of saliva that went down her from the mouth and a man you/he/she was extended under to the table of the kitchen to naked breast, with the tied up tie in forehead. How disgusting, I thought. A nauseating odor was beginning to climb long my nostrils and I had to suppress a retching.
I turned a pair of rooms, to end in that that I suppose pits the bedroom of Antoine, after all on the right; a door approached from which it filtered some light made me hypothesize it dealt with the bath.
I entered rubbing me the eyes with the hand, trying to avoid that the intense light of the neon bossily entered my head still gotten used to the faint light in which the apartment was lowered.
When I removed from me the fingers from the eyes, the scenery that introduced me before it was totally unexpected. The white relative in front of me brought a showy spot of blood that had begun to strain downward and really under, extended in the tub idromassaggio, the naked body of Antoine. It had the open skull and part of his/her brain you/he/she was squirted behind of him. From the right hand the revolver that had used for shooting him dangled. Here is thing was, not a door beaten by the wind but a hit of gun.
I didn't succeed in removing the eyes from that gruesome scene; only some second later, when I realized the gravity of the situation, I raced away frightened to look for Frederic. It was in the living room that he was systematizing the rubbed suits.
«Frederic! Frederic! Antoine is shot! It is out with the brain of, in bath!»
«What you are saying?» it said unbeliever, lifting him/it look on me, and it directed him with fast footstep toward the bath while the jacket inserted him.
After some according to I saw him/it return of raced by the bedroom of Antoine, but they arrived first his curses.
«Merd! Merd! Merd! Street of here! Street of here!»
He/she took me for the shirt and it dragged out me without giving me the possibility to recover the jacket; I saw the girl get up behind the armchair of skin and to devote us an interrogative glance while it was directing him in direction of the bath.
I gone down the steps two twos, more times risking to fall. Frederic continued to repeat" merd" without never taking care himself/herself/themselves to check that I was behind of him. Just gone out of the building, it began to race and I succeeded in placing side by side me to him up to that we didn't hide there to take breath to some hundred meters from where he/she lived Antoine.
We had the fiatone and folded up, supported on the knees, we looked at there as to the search of an answer. You felt a cry: it was probably the girl that had found Antoine in a lake of blood.
«Now the paramedics will arrive and, very probably, also a beautiful po' of police» Frederic told in a low voice me with still the turned look to the windows of the building of which we were hardly gone out.
The history of that suicidal crazy person explained me as to give him a justification of that that was happened and after few minutes the gendarmeses and the paramedics arrived preceded by their deafening sirens bitonali.
Antoine was tall, a quarantenne from the thin hair and a disputable taste in to dress. Apart the tired but charismatic look, what struck more was his/her radiant smile. It loved the money, it loved them in way spropositato. To the beginning of the eighties you/he/she had discovered the hen from the gold eggs in a new and revolutionary aesthetical laser for the total epilazione. You/he/she had sold, after years of searches of marketing and assuming hundreds of commercial thirsty of blood, this machinery first in France and then in half Europe, riempiendo in that way his/her checking accounts in the tax havens to time of record. Unfortunately, greed had brought him to betray all the clients taking advantage of himself/herself/itself the bona fide of the same and increasing the advantage to excess zeros of its small financial empire. There were so causes and trials, the clients slowly began to go out of the franchising and they put on together in associations to have an award of damages. It was really during the inauguration of a new Spanish center from the architecture avant-gardist, that discovered that all of its good, the Ferraris, the yacht and its houses had been pawned and the total defeat of its empire was hardly begun.
The various trials sentenced the guilt for him and for two lawyers his/her advisers: you have to indemnify partly all the people involved in the fraud. However a happy existence was guaranteed, considering that halves its possessions were of agencies dummy in the islands Cayman. That child of puttana of Murphy had really reason, however: if something is able badly andar, you/he/she will do him/it. And it was so that Antoine, besides losing the job, lost also his wife and the two children. They escaped to Saint Domingo with the most trusted of the commercial ones of Antoine, gone out with the police record cleaned by the trial, the same agent that had made him earn his/her first million of European. Antoine, destroyed and worn out from the events, were accompanied again therefore with an attractive American actress of soap-work that had been testimonial of its products. That however it squandered him in the turn of a few months a beautiful mountain of money to the Casino of Montecarlo, where you/they had taken residence. It was so that Antoine, after having given her a sonorous led and to have taken a report for maltreatments and abuses, left her/it and it devoted him to the druf traffic and prostitution. The fame of Antoine to Saint Germani de Pres was known: if it served you something illegal, you had to ask to him. He/she knew very well that one day all would be ended, that one day a platoon of gendarmes would be raced above for the staircases of its apartment, you/he/she would have broken down the door and you/he/she would have accompanied him handcuffed in the cell that had been assigned him by the destiny. It was not afraid, rather it laughed us, and I believe in all honesty that was preparing an escape in some warm place and to the shelter from the French law.
Despite pits late night, they were assembled some curious that were stopped by the hands it stretched out in before of some agents. Some window of the buildings of forehead ignited and on the windowsill curious other comparirono to the search of explanations to that whole noise.
We remained different hidden minutes, without never looking us, but devoting all of our attention to the movements that were being happened really in front of us. When the body of Antoine was transported in the street extended on a stretcher in a lot black, did I ask to Frederic: «we won't end in the country houses, true?»
«No, I don't believe. They cannot wait to remove from him him from the balls. It is a problem in less to which will owe to think. Besides the dynamics it is clear: you/he/she is done out. To find him/it with the shed brain on the walls of the bath and a revolver anchors fumante in hand he/she leaves few other hypotheses to the case. Them two, will be made even a night in barracks to have some information on the facts and on the whole drug that you/they will surely find in the house,» and it pointed out the girl and the man that I had seen before findi
ng the body of Antoine. You/they were talking to two agents and they had a cover on the shoulders, gives the cold and the damp of the night.
«You feel Frederic, I return in the hotel of it. I am tired, I have headache, I have just seen a man that is made to jump the brains and I is not understanding anything. I hope for you can forgive me if I leave here you this way. Thanks of the company.» The gaves to pacca on his shoulder and The gots further me. He didn't greet me, didn't even dissuade for an instant the look from house of Antoine and, gotten further me of some meter, I felt him/it shout: «Hey! You want one of these!» throwing out of the pockets from the jacket two pouches of cocaine.
I turned me and I made a gesture of anger with his hand as to want to say" it allows to lose" without a thread of voice went out me of the mouth. I saw a taxi in distance. Perhaps the only one on call to that time in all Paris.
I arrived in front of the Montmartrois when the first lights of the dawn made capolino behind the roofs of the city. Hardly I was in room I vomited in the sink the whole taste of that night, I got out of me the shirt and I threw her/it against the wall as to want to kill her/it. I still fell asleep me before touching the bed sinking in a mattress that seemed to swallow me.
The war is over Page 8