Gallic Noir. Pascal Garnier

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СКАЧАТЬ gave off a scent of plain, honest Marseilles soap. Her hip was touching his and their calves brushed occasionally, but he felt no physical desire. They were quite simply where they needed to be at that precise moment. But the clock struck the half-hour and Téléachat came to an end.

      Blanche gave a sigh.

      ‘That was good, wasn’t it?’

      ‘Very good.’

      ‘All those inventions, just to make life easier for us. People don’t take care of things any more. They throw them away as soon as they get tired of them. Listen, I know a lovely graveyard for objects. It’s huge. Would you like to go there?’

      ‘When?’

      ‘Now. It’s not far but we’ll still need to take the car. It’s a real goldmine, you know!’

      ‘Well … Why not? I’ll just get dressed and then we’ll go.’

      The rubbish tip looked like Stromboli, Etna, any one of the world’s volcanoes, a sort of cut-off pyramid wrapped in steam and gases. After parking the car, they had to wade through a greasy black mire bristling with pieces of scrap metal, wooden beams and shards of glass, in order to reach the crater where they dispersed a colony of gulls and crows poking about with their beaks amid swirls of grey smoke. There was a smell of rotten cabbage, compost, the ‘after’ coming into being. A colossal pile of shit. The earth, or rather the sticky mush that made every movement difficult, seemed eager to absorb them at every step, to gobble, suck and digest and then spit them out again, waste among waste, for its sole function was to consume to the point of revulsion. Despite the aid of his stick Brice several times almost went under. He was covered in mud up to his knees, while Blanche hopped here and there, spotless, like the gulls.

      ‘Look, come and see how beautiful it is!’

      The ancient fridge with its rounded corners lay half buried in the mud, its gaping door offering a rust-flecked shelter to the weary sky.

      ‘People chose this, one day, in a department store.’

      ‘A young couple, with no children, because it’s not very big. A wedding present perhaps?’

      ‘That’s it! They took it home to their small apartment … They were happy.’

      ‘Probably.’

      ‘What’s become of them?’

      Blanche suddenly dissolved into tears and began scrabbling around in the mud with both hands, like a madwoman.

      ‘Stop that, Blanche. You might hurt yourself. There’s all sorts of nasty things in there.’

      ‘This earth that takes everything away from us and gives us nothing in return!’

      She stood up again, shaking with anger, and threw a fistful of mud at a gull, which flew off with a squawk.

      Wiping her nose with the back of her hand, she inadvertently gave herself a Charlie Chaplin moustache. Brice burst out laughing.

      ‘What’s funny?’

      He picked up a piece of mirror and held it in front of her. Blanche started laughing too, and all the birds which were picking around nearby flew off, saying to themselves that humans weren’t people you could mix with, that was for sure.

      ‘Brice, promise me you won’t die.’

      ‘I’ll do my best, but …’

      ‘Don’t believe what they tell you. There’s nothing above us, and nothing beneath. Just us, here and now, like survivors of a shipwreck.’

      It was ten o’clock when Élie’s van dropped them off outside the Montéléger house.

      ‘Goodnight, Brice.’

      As she kissed him goodbye, Blanche whispered in his ear, ‘That was such a lovely day, wasn’t it?’ Then she was gone, swallowed up by the shadowy mouth of the porch.

      He went to bed as soon as he got home. The cat grumbled and moved a few centimetres when he rolled himself up in his sleeping bag like a large caterpillar in its cocoon and fell into a deep sleep. For a few hours, men, things and animals would be at peace.

      He had not washed or changed his clothes for three days. The fact that he smelled didn’t bother him. On several occasions someone had rung the doorbell, but he had not answered. Blanche, probably, come to watch ‘things’ on TV. He was slightly cross with himself, but he couldn’t help it, he wasn’t able to speak to anyone. After the release of the pheasants he had been seized by a kind of torpor. He slept as much as the cat, waking only to open a tin of food which he shared with it, before plunging once more into a deep coma. His sleeping bag was covered with cracker crumbs, and tins were piling up at the foot of the camp bed. He had run out of clean clothes, and his hair and beard were itchy. When he ran his hand through them, flakes of dandruff fell on to his knees like the scales of a snake sloughing off its skin. He had no tobacco left and nothing edible in the fridge. The situation was approaching a question of life or death, which can be a hard one to answer.

      It took him a great effort of will to reach the bathroom. The scalding water hit his body like a jet cleaner hosing a crusty wall. It was like a suicide in reverse; he was coming back to life without really knowing why. It was not unpleasant, if a little violent. The eau de toilette smelled of spring. In a box which was starting to develop mould, he found things to wear. The ecru linen suit, cotton shirt and soft slip-on shoes were inappropriate for the time of year perhaps, but they had the merit of being clean.

      The ringing of the telephone made the walls vibrate. It took him a certain time to locate the machine, which he had forgotten existed.

      ‘Hello?’

      Amid a chorus of crackling, he thought he could make out a woman’s voice.

      ‘It’s very difficult to hear you …’

      The voice, almost inaudible and stammering out incoherent syllables, ‘… rice … come … early … ed … ery,’ seemed familiar nonetheless.

      ‘Who is this? Hello? Hello? Emma!’

      Emma. It was Emma! She was calling from a distance and the line was bad, but it was her, of course it was!

      ‘Emma! Darling, where are you? Emma!’

      Then … click. The dialling tone. No more. Bells began pealing wildly in his empty skull. Without understanding what he was doing, he began running around the house from cellar to attic like a lab rat. Really, it wasn’t as big as all that, the house – it even had some pieces missing like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

      At last, out of breath, he caught the cat which was following him in his mad chase and threw it up in the air. ‘I knew it! I knew it! Emma’s immortal. She’ll come back, this evening, tomorrow or the day after, but she’ll come back. She has to!’

      At the wheel of his little car he carried on laughing fit to burst. He was off to fill the fridge with salmon, caviar, champagne, foie gras, all the finest things, to celebrate her return in due style. At a red light he could contain himself no longer and gestured to a lady driving a Ford to wind down her СКАЧАТЬ