VERNON WAITS UNTIL IT’S DARK and the lights in all the windows have been turned out before climbing over the railings and venturing into the communal gardens. The thumb on his left hand is throbbing, he doesn’t remember how he got this little scratch, but rather than scarring, it is swelling, and he is astonished that such a trivial scratch can be causing him so much pain. He crosses the steep ground, past the vines, following a narrow path. He is careful not to disturb anything. He doesn’t want to make any noise, or for there to be any sign of his presence tomorrow morning. He reaches the tap and drinks thriftily. Then he bends down and runs water over the back of his neck. He rubs his face vigorously and soothes his thumb, holding it under the freezing jet for a long time. Yesterday, he took advantage of the warm weather to have more comprehensive ablutions, but his clothes reek so strongly that as soon as he put them on again he felt dirtier than he had before he washed.
He stands up and stretches. His body is heavy. He thinks about a real bed. About lying in a hot bath. But nothing works. He cannot bring himself to care. He is filled with a feeling of utter emptiness, he should find this terrifying, he knows that, this is no time to feel good, but all he feels is a dull, silent calm. He has been very ill. His temperature has come down, and in the past two days he has recovered enough strength to be able to stand up. His mind is weak. It will come back, the fear, it will come back soon, he thinks. At the moment, nothing touches him. He feels suspended, like this strange neighborhood where he has ended up. The butte Bergeyre is a raised plateau of a handful of streets accessed by flights of stairs, he rarely sees a car here, there are no traffic lights, no shops. Nothing but cats, in abundance. Vernon stares across to the Sacré-Coeur, which seems to be floating over Paris. The full moon bathes the city in a ghostly light.
He is off his head. He has episodes where he zones out. It’s not unpleasant. From time to time, he tries to reason with himself: he cannot stay here indefinitely, it has been a cold summer, he will catch another bout of flu, he needs to take care of himself, he needs to go back down into the city, find some clean clothes, do something … But when he tries to set his mind again to practical problems, it starts up: he goes into a tailspin. There is a sound from the clouds, the air against his skin is softer than silk, the darkness has a scent, the city murmurs to him and he can decipher the whisperings that rise and enfold him, he curls up inside it and he floats. Each time, he is unaware how long he spends swept up in this gentle madness. He does not resist. His mind, shaken by the events of recent weeks, seems to have decided to imitate the heady rush of the drugs he used to take in a former life. After each episode, there is a subtle click, a slow awakening: the normal course of his thoughts resumes.
Leaning over the tap, he drinks some more, long gulps that sting his windpipe. His throat aches since his illness. He thought he was going to die there on the bench. The few things he can still feel with any intensity are entirely physical: a terrible burning in his back, the throbbing of his injured hand, the festering sores on his ankles, the difficulty swallowing … He picks an apple from the far end of the garden, it is sour, but he is ravenous for sugar. Painfully, he climbs over the railings separating the communal garden from the property where he has taken to sleeping. He grips the branches and hoists his body up, almost falling flat on his face on the other side. He ends up kneeling on the ground. He wishes he could feel sorry for himself, or disgust. Anything. But no, nothing. Nothing but this absurd calm.
He crosses the yard of the derelict house where he has set up camp. On the ground floor, what was intended to be a patio with panoramic views of the capital is still no more than an expanse of concrete at one end of which he is sheltered from the wind and the rain, the space is marked out by rusting iron girders. Work on the site had been abandoned several years ago, Vernon had recently been told by a guy working on a building site opposite. The original foundations had been threatening to collapse, there were cracks in the supporting walls so the owner had decided to entirely remodel the house. But he had died in a car accident. His heirs could not reach an agreement. They bickered and fought through their respective lawyers. The house was boarded up and left derelict. Vernon has been sleeping here for some time now, whether ten days or a month he could not say—his sense of time, like everything else, is murky. He likes his hideaway. At dawn, he opens one eye and lies motionless, struck by the sweeping cityscape. Paris is revealed and, seen from this height, it seems welcoming. When the cold gets to be too biting, he curls up and tucks his knees against his body. He doesn’t have a blanket. He has only his own body heat. A fat, one-eyed tabby cat sometimes comes and nestles next to him.
On his first few nights in the butte Bergeyre, Vernon slept on the bench where he collapsed when he first got there. It rained nonstop for days. No one bothered him. Delirious and running a high fever, he had embarked on a fantastical journey, feverishly raving. Gradually, he had come back to himself, reluctantly reemerging from the cozy cotton ball of his hallucinations. An old wino found him on the bench at daybreak and started hurling abuse at him, but seeing that Vernon was too weak to respond, he started to worry about his condition, and developed an affection for him. He brought him some oranges and a box of Tylenol. Charles is a loudmouth and pretty crazy. He likes to kvetch, to ramble on about his native Northern France and his father, who was a railwayman. He laughs hysterically at his own jokes, slapping his thighs, until the laugh turns into a phlegmy cough that all but chokes him. Vernon has taken up residence on “his” bench. After a cursory evaluation whose criteria are unknown even to him, the old man decides to be his friend. He takes care of him. He comes by to check that all is well. He warned Vernon: “You can’t go on sleeping here now that the weather’s cleared up,” and pointed to a house a few feet away. “Get yourself in there and hide out in the back. Make sure you disappear for a couple of hours a day, otherwise the council workers won’t waste any time throwing your ass out. Do it now, because you need to get some rest, get yourself fit, son…”
Vernon did not heed the warning, but on the second sunny day, he discovered that it had been sound advice. The street cleaners were hosing down the sidewalks. He didn’t hear them coming. One of them trained the hose right on his face. Vernon scrabbled to his feet and the cleaner flushed away the cardboard boxes he was using to shelter from the cold. The young black guy with delicate features gave him a hateful stare. “Get the fuck out of here. People don’t want to have to look at your shiftless mug when they open their windows. Go on, fuck off.” And, from the guy’s tone, Vernon realized he would be wise to obey, and fast: otherwise he was in for a kicking. His legs numb from spending so long lying down, he had staggered away and aimlessly roamed the neighboring streets. He listened for the sound of the street sweeper’s engine and tried to get as far away as possible. The injustice of the situation left him completely unmoved. This was the day that he began to understand that there was something seriously wrong with him. He wondered where he had washed up. It took him some time to work out why the area looked so unfamiliar: he could see no cars, could hear no sounds. All he could see were old-style, low-rise houses with little yards. Were it not for the fact that the bench he had just left had a view of Sacré-Coeur, he would have thought that in his bout of fever, he had hopped on a train and wound up at the ass end of nowhere. Or in the 1980s …
Too weak to carry on his perambulations, he went back to the bench as soon as the street sweeper drove away. Rubbing his cheeks with his palms, he was surprised to discover how much his beard had grown. His whole body ached from the cold, he was thirsty, and he stank of piss. He had a clear memory of the events of the previous days. He had abandoned his friend at a hospital after a street brawl that had left Xavier in a coma, without so much as asking whether he would pull through. He had wandered in the rain and found himself here, sick as a dog and happy as a fool. But though he has been expecting it, he has yet to feel the vicious sting of fear. Fear might have prompted him to react. But he senses only his aching body, his own smell, which, truth be told, provided pleasant company. He no longer experienced ordinary emotions. He spent his time staring at the sky, it occupied his days. Just before nightfall, Charles had come back to sit next to him on the bench.
“Good to see you emerging from your lethargy. About time too!”
Charles had explained that he was in northern Paris, not far from the Buttes-Chaumont. Charles had offered him a beer and half a soggy, squashed baguette that had obviously been lying around in his backpack for some time, and Vernon wolfed it down. “Fuck sake, go easy there or you’ll make yourself sick. You gonna be here tomorrow? I’ll bring you some ham, you need something to buck you up a bit.” The old man was not a tramp, his hands were not calloused, his shoes were new. But he was not exactly fresh as a daisy either. He seemed to spend his time boozing with guys who smelled of piss. He and Vernon sat together for a while, not saying much.
Since then, Vernon has felt weightless. An invisible hand has fiddled with all the buttons on his mixing desk: the equalization is different. He somehow cannot leave this bench. For as long as he is not forcibly ejected, the butte Bergeyre hangs suspended, a tiny, hovering island. He feels good here.
He takes short walks to stretch his legs, and so that he does not spend all day on the bench. Sometimes he will sit on the steps that border his territory, or linger in a street, but he always returns to his point of departure. His bench, opposite the communal gardens, with its stunning view of the rooftops of Paris. He begins to establish a routine.
At first, the builders working on the rue Remy-de-Gourmont ignored him. Then the site foreman came over on one of his breaks and smoked a cigarette while making a telephone call. He had walked straight over to the bench and Vernon had given up his seat, moving away, eager to be invisible, when the guy called to him: “Hey, I’ve been watching you for a couple of days now … Didn’t you used to have a record shop?” Vernon had hesitated—it was on the tip of his tongue to say “No” and go on his way. He was no longer interested in his previous identity. It had slipped from his back like an old coat, heavy and unwieldy. The person he had been for decades had nothing to do with him now. But the foreman didn’t give him a chance—“You don’t remember me, do you? I used to work next door, I was an apprentice in the bakery … I used to pop in all the time.” The face did not ring a bell. Vernon had spread his hands—“I haven’t really got all my marbles anymore”—and the guy had laughed—“Yeah, I get it, life’s fucked you over” … Since then, he comes by every day to chat for a couple of minutes. When you live on the streets, anything that has happened three days in a row is a venerable tradition. Stéphane wears Bermuda shorts and huge sneakers, he has curly hair and smokes hand-rolled cigarettes. He likes to reminisce about the music festivals he went to, to talk about his kids and bitch about his problems with the guys on the building site. He avoids any reference to the fact that Vernon is living on the streets. Hard to say whether this is extraordinary tact on his part or sheer thoughtlessness. He lets Vernon help himself from his pouch of tobacco, sometimes leaves him a bag of chips or the dregs of a bottle of Coke … And he allows him to use the site toilets during the day. This changes everything for Vernon, who has had to dig two trenches in the yard of the house where he sleeps, but even in warm weather it’s difficult digging deep holes with your bare hands and filling them in so they don’t stink … even short-term, it would have brought an end to his squat. Sooner or later, the local residents would have started complaining about the smell.
For the past three days, Jeanine has been secretly coming to visit him. She also feeds stray cats. She brings Vernon food in Tupperware boxes. She does it furtively because the locals have already had harsh words with her about encouraging the homeless to hang around. Vernon is not the first. She told him as much: at first, everyone thought it was a kindness, they wanted to help their fellow man, but there were too many problems: traces of vomit, a radio left on full-blast all night, a garrulous oddball with no sense of boundaries who wanted to go into people’s houses and chat, some guy on psychotropic drugs who talked to himself and scared the local kids … The neighbors had no choice: they had to curb their compassion. Jeanine persists in sharing her dinner with him. She is a tiny little old lady, stooped, well-turned-out, the eyebrows drawn on with pencil are asymmetrical, but her lipstick is always neatly applied, and perfect curls of white hair frame her powdered face. “When I’m at home, I wear curlers all morning, and I’m not going to stop until they put me in the ground.” She dresses in bright colors and complains about the terrible summer weather, because of the pretty dresses she has not been able to wear, “and I don’t know whether I’ll still be here next summer to get the use out of them.” She tells Vernon he is a “little dear, you can tell these things when you get to my age, I’ve got the eye, you’re a little dear, and you have such lovely eyes.” She says the same thing to the stray cats she feeds. She fills bottles of water for Vernon, brings him rice in which she has melted generous quantities of butter. She passes no comment, but Vernon suspects that she assumes that whatever is good for keeping a cat’s coat glossy is good for people. Last night, she brought a few squares of chocolate wrapped in foil. He was shocked by the pleasure he felt as he ate them. For a brief moment, his taste buds almost hurt. He had already forgotten what it was like to put something in his mouth and enjoy the taste.
AS HE DOES EVERY DAY AT ABOUT SIX O’CLOCK, Charles leaves the bookie’s on the rue des Pyrénées and walks up the avenue Simon-Bolivar to the grocer’s near the gates of the park. The boy behind the counter isn’t one for smiling. He barely tears his eyes from the television on which he is watching the cricket as he gives him his change.
The old man slowly trudges into the parc des Buttes-Chaumont. He is in no hurry. Outside the little Punch and Judy theater, parents are waiting in silence. Inside, their brats are screaming “He’s behind you!” Charles’s bench of choice is on the left, not far from the public toilets. With the flat of his hand, he wipes down the green wooden slats, invariably daubed with mud where some asshole propped his sneakers on the bench to do elevated push-ups. He pops the cap on his first beer using a cigarette lighter. Opposite, two cats are circling, sizing each other up, unsure whether to launch into a scrap.
Charles has always liked this park. Having spent the afternoon sheltering from the pale afternoon light in the dark recesses of a bar, he always comes here for his aperitif. The only problem with the Buttes-Chaumont is the gradient; one of these days, he’ll drop dead climbing the hill.
Laurent comes to join him. He knows his schedule. He always has a beer for him. He endlessly trots out the same five or six stories, punctuated by a booming laugh. The tenth time they heard him bragging about the same fistfight, anyone would feel like telling him to change the record, but Charles does not ask much of his drinking buddies. You can’t be a boozer and be choosy about the company you keep. Laurent is part of his day. Obviously, he would rather it was fat Olga who joined him for his aperitif. He’s always had a soft spot for crazy women. He would happily put up with a whole heap of shit, if on a summer’s evening Olga would whisper sweet nothings in his ear. The first time he saw her, she was wearing apple-green clogs, he had mercilessly mocked her, calling her Bozo the Clown, and she had given him a slap around the face. Charles had to give as good as he got. Olga would have liked to return blow for blow, but she can’t help it, she’s soft-hearted. When she punches, it’s like a kiss. The old man was touched, seeing her hold her own with such conviction, he feels nothing but affection for her. She still bears a grudge because of that first encounter. He likes his women mad and ugly. He’s always pretended the contrary. He nods and agrees when friends talk about women who are no trouble as though they are gems to be treasured, he has often pretended that he dreams of a pretty little thing who wouldn’t bust his balls or throw things but that’s just part of the bullshit men like him tell each other: back when he could have landed himself a nice woman, he stayed with Véro, and every time he’s cheated on her it’s been with women who are no oil paintings. It takes all sorts to make a world. Nice women bore him rigid.
The paths in the park are quagmires. It rained for hours. It’s all anyone seems to talk about in the bar these days, the terrible spring they’ve had. It’ll be a while before people come back for a Sunday stroll. The only people around are the joggers, who seem to have been hiding out in the bushes ready to jump out, panting like they’re being tortured. Some of them, it’s so obvious that what they’re putting themselves through is dangerous to their health. Laurent stares down at his shoes in disgust:
“I don’t suppose you take a size forty?”
“I wear a forty-four. Why are you asking me that?”
“You always have nice shoes. I’m looking for a pair at the moment … I don’t like these.”
“Those are work boots you’ve got on. They’re really uncomfortable.”
“I dragged myself all the way down to the Secours populaire to get shoes … they didn’t have anything. The economy is fucked, people are hanging on to their stuff.”
“Tough shit.”
“I’ll head up to rue Ramponeau tomorrow, maybe they’ll have something in my size, these are chafing my heels, I’ll end up with blisters.”
* * *
On the next bench, a heavyset black man in a silver tracksuit is hectoring some puny little white guy in shorts. In a booming voice, the trainer roars: “Don’t stop, don’t stop, pick it up, come on, pick up the pace!” and the scrawny wimp is bobbing up and down, staring into space, dog-tired and looking like he might have a heart attack. Laurent wastes little time on them, he is fascinated by a big lump of a girl staggering up the path in blue overalls like a drunken cosmonaut. Charles passes Laurent another bottle and says:
“If it was down to me, I wouldn’t allow any sports freaks in the park. They ruin the atmosphere.”
“You’d deprive us of all the pretty little things running around half naked? I mean, take the girl coming toward us right now—it would be a terrible shame if she didn’t get to show off her wares…”
The problem with guys like Laurent—and they are legion—is that you can always predict their reactions. The slim, blond-haired student jogging down the path is of no possible interest. The sort of girl who smells of soap even when she’s running. Not that Charles has a moral scale he applies to the libidos of others. But guys these days are all the same, it’s like they take night classes to be as much like each other as possible. If you split Laurent’s brain in two to look at the inner workings, you’d find exactly the same bullshit dreams as you would in the wheezing middle-manager doing abdominal crunches at the next bench: fat-free, zero-sugar girls, a bit of bling by Rolex and a big house by the sea. Dumb fuck dreams.
There is an order of magnitude between his generation and Laurent’s. His generation didn’t idolize the bourgeoisie. Whatever they claim, the working classes today all wish they’d been born on the right side of the tracks. In Lessines, the town where he grew up, the day was governed by the rhythm of the sirens at the local quarries. They despised the middle-class people from the other side of town. You didn’t drink with your boss. It was a law. In the bars, people talked of nothing but politics, class hatred nurtured a veritable proletarian aristocracy. People knew how to despise their boss. That’s all gone now, and with it the satisfaction of a job well done. There is no working-class consciousness anymore. The only thing that matters to them today is being just like their boss. Give a guy like Laurent power, and he wouldn’t want to force the rich to redistribute their wealth, he’d want to join their clubs. There has been a standardization of desire: they’re all free-market reactionaries. They’d make good cannon fodder.
Farther down the path, standing next to a bank of flowers, four park keepers are smoking with a man in a gray suit. A smiling, broad-shouldered Asian guy, a regular in the park who always wears a Stetson, is walking backward up a steep lawn. He always does this when he comes here, he never talks to anyone. A short-legged, long-haired gray dog runs around him in circles. Charles turns to his drinking buddy:
“Any idea why the Chinese do that?”
“Run up hills backward? Not a clue. Different cultures, isn’t it?”
“That’s true, it’s not something we’d normally do.”
Since spring, Laurent has been living on the abandoned railway track that runs through the park at the bottom of the hill. Not many of them sleep there, and the park keepers turn a blind eye as long as no one walks on the grass at night.
A woman hesitates near the bench where they are sitting as though she has lost her way. She is wearing a long red coat buttoned up the front, the sort of coat a little girl might wear; it accentuates her wizened face. She must be a schoolteacher. If she had more contact with adults, she wouldn’t be wearing a coat like that. Laurent raises a hand and waves when he spots her. She seems surprised at first, then recognizes him and comes over:
“Hello. How are things?”
“Cool. Care for a swig?” he says, proffering his cheap wine.
Instinctively, she takes a step back, as though he might force the bottle into her mouth.
“No, no, no thanks. I’m looking for a bar called Rosa Bonheur, do you know which way it is?”
“Always looking for something or other, you…”
Laurent is playing the lady-killer. Charles is embarrassed for him. For fuck’s sake, what are you thinking, expecting a clean, well-dressed woman to drink out of your bottle and listen to your shtick?
“If you’re looking for Rosa Bonheur, it’s simple, take that street there, go straight on, about five hundred yards. Did you ever find that guy, Subutex?”
“No. You never saw him again?”
“Nope … but I can take your details and if I hear anything, I’ll let you know…”
Laurent reels off his patter in the tone of a receptionist. He puffs out his chest, opens the zipper of his thick khaki gabardine, takes out a battered orange notepad, and, flashing a toothless grin, asks the lady to lend him a pen. He’s a pitiful sight when he tries to seem urbane. The lady in the red coat gives a slightly irritated pout and mechanically tugs at a hair between her eyes. Laurent carries on blathering as usual—when he finds himself a new audience, he doesn’t give up easily.
“Vernon got into a right mess because he was hanging out with the wrong tart … You see it a lot in newbies: too easygoing. If I’d seen him with Olga, I would have warned him to watch out. Everyone gets fooled. She seems nice enough at first, but if you hang out with her you end up facedown in the shit … It’s no life for women, living on the streets. And anyway, it’s easier for them to avoid it. If Olga had squeezed out two or three brats when she still could, she’d be entitled to loads of benefits, and let me tell you something, if you’re a single mother, they’ll find you fucking social housing. Guys like us, single men with no kids, we can drop dead … oh, but families, they’re sacred! Not her though, oh no, too much effort to crank out a kid … a useless bitch, that’s Olga. She has to do everything like a man … except when it comes to brawls, oh, she’s more than happy to throw the first punch, but the one who takes the punches is the guy who’s with her…”
“If you do see Vernon, tell him we’re looking for him, yeah? Tell him Émilie, Xavier, Patrice, Pamela, Lydia … we’re all looking for him. Tell him we’re worried … and that we have stuff to tell him, important stuff…”
“So, you gonna give me your number? And what did you say your name was?”
* * *
The woman in the red coat does not know how to say no. Her name is Émilie; reluctantly she mumbles her mobile phone number, then rushes off. She is a little wide in the hips, she moves unsteadily. “Where the fuck d’you know her from?” Charles says.
“There’re a whole bunch of them,” Laurent crows. “All looking for Vernon Subutex, but I’ve no idea where the bastard’s gone…”
“Who is this guy?”
“A loser. New guy. The sort you know can’t hack it. Too weak. Too delicate. I dunno where he’s gone, but it was obvious that the guy would never cut it, living on the street. At least ex-junkies have some experience with it, not him though … too la-di-da. He got in one brawl after another until some friend of his got beaten senseless and left for dead on the street. And then the guy up and disappears. His friends have been trying to track him down ever since…”
“She didn’t seem angry.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think they’re looking to give him a beating … they’re just a bunch of headbangers who’ve been hanging around the park looking for Subutex the last three days.”
“So what does he look like, this guy?”
“French, skinny, nice eyes, long hair, comes on like some faggotty rock star … He’s not much to look at, actually, but he’s a straight-up guy.”
The description sounds a lot like the guy up on the butte Bergeyre. Charles is wary. The guy was so sick, the old man thought he would croak right there on the bench. If he’s in hiding, he’s probably got good reason. We all have our secrets, and we all have our own way of dealing with them.
“So you’ve no idea why she’s looking for him, this woman?”
“Why are you so interested?”
“It’s not exactly common, a lady like that looking for a homeless guy…”
“Never trust women. They’re always hiding something … it’s probably something to do with death.”
“Death?”
“Women are always going on about how all they care about is kids … having kids, looking after kids, all that shit … and we’d like to believe them. But think about it. The only thing women are obsessed with is dead people. That’s their thing. They never forget. They want to avenge them, want to bury them, want to make sure they rest in peace, want people to honor their memory … women don’t believe in death. They just can’t bring themselves to. That’s the real difference between us and them.”
“I don’t know where you came up with that bullshit theory, but I suppose at least it’s original.”
“Think about it when you’re sleeping off the booze tonight. You’ll see. It makes sense.”
“That still doesn’t explain why she’s looking for this guy.”
“No. But I’m happy to shoot the breeze with a lady. I’m an obliging sort of guy. And I like women like her, timid, straitlaced, makes me want to give it to her, wham bam, thank you, ma’am…”
* * *
Charles leaves him to his lecherous ramblings. He is still surprised that the woman in the red coat deigned to talk to them. Charles looks like a tramp. People are reluctant to talk to him. But when he feels like talking to someone, he knows how to go about it. It’s like pigeons and crows; you have to regularly feed them little crumbs of attention. His approach is the same as the little old lady he used to run into around the neighborhood until last summer. She lived on the rue Belleville, and when she came out of her house at six o’clock, the pigeons recognized her. They would flock to her in huge numbers, in the air and on the ground, and follow her. She would scatter fistfuls of seeds and bread crumbs around the base of the trees along the avenue. Feeding pigeons is banned. To anyone who didn’t know what she was up to, the flights of birds synchronously swooping along the avenue Simon-Bolivar were very unsettling. One day, her kids put her in a home. Charles heard the news in the bar opposite the park gates. The old woman owned her apartment. The kids probably sensed the wind changing, the housing crisis coming, they wanted to sell up before the market crashed. Off to the slaughterhouse. She was a frisky old dame, had never touched a drink, the one pleasure of her dotage was feeding the pigeons when she went out for a walk … she wasn’t doing anyone any harm. It makes Charles laugh, people who have kids thinking it’s an insurance policy for their old age. He’s long enough in the tooth to recognize that they’re just feeding greedy baby vultures. No one likes old people, not even their own children.
There’s someone just like her who comes to the park. An old guy who walks with a stoop, he shows up every day, listening to something on his headphones. He has long hair and wears a threadbare black jacket. With him, it’s crows. As soon as he shows up, they spot him and gather in a circle around him. Crows seem to be much more organized than pigeons. They’re as big as chickens, their feathers are a beautiful glossy black, and they’re unnervingly intelligent to people who assume that animals are dumb. The crows in the park know who they’re dealing with. They don’t need this old guy to feed them—they rip open garbage bags with their beaks and help themselves. But, seemingly, they like to socialize. They don’t just appear when he shows up with the birdseed, they wait for him. And if the guy has to change location because the park keepers are watching, they’re not flustered at all: they follow him and tell each other in crow that the meeting point has changed. The old man stopped coming in early spring, Charles never found out why. He was probably hospitalized. He’s far too young to have been put in a home; however desperate they are to get their hands on the cash, it’s difficult to get rid of a parent who’s healthy, especially if he’s still got all his marbles—you just have to grin and bear it. Charles asked Véro to do a search on the internet to find out what birds eat. And he showed up, every day, at the same spot, and fed the fucking things. He figured someone had to take over. And he realized why some people do it—the crows are as much company as his drinking buddies. They have beady little eyes and they’re funny. Every morning, Charles goes to the pet food section of Bricorama. It stinks to high heaven, and there are flies swarming over the split sachets of dog food—he has to wade through all this, with his back aching and his bum knees, he’s none too steady on his feet, he’s circling the drain, that’s old age for you, it’s normal. But he clings on. It was only with age he developed this mania for being kind.
Charles won the lottery. No shit. This dried-up old boil. What a joke. He often puts money on the horses, rarely on the Lotto. But like all the suckers down at the bookie’s, he sometimes filled in a slip, tempted by some rollover jackpot. What was most surprising was not that he won, but that he was in front of a television on the night of the drawing, was too lazy to get up and change the channel, and there were no batteries in the remote. It was only as a result of the sequence of coincidences that he bothered to watch the drawing—he never imagined he would be among the winners. Then again, that’s the whole point of the lottery: it could be anyone. Even him. He always plays the same numbers, his mother’s birth date. Easy to remember. The balls started to roll down the tubes—he has never understood people who play regularly, there is nothing more boring than a Lotto draw. And, one after another, his numbers started to come up with the terrifying precision of fate seeking you out, you and no one else. It woke him from his doze. His chest tightened as his heart hammered faster. It is not a pleasant feeling, intense joy. In an instant he was stone cold sober. Véro was lying next to him on the sofa, sleeping like a stone, mouth gaping, lips stained with wine. If she had woken up at that moment, he would have given her a wallop—anything rather than admit that he had thought he’d won. Because, obviously, at first, being unaccustomed to life serving up pleasant surprises, he assumed that he was off his rocker, that any minute now he would spot the catch.
Staggering between drawer and jacket pocket, he managed to find the play slip. This was nothing short of a miracle, since he had carelessly crumpled it into a ball. Ten minutes earlier, he would have been incapable of walking as far as the toilet without collapsing, now suddenly he was nimble as a goat. His synapses were firing at random. In the moment, he was too shaken even to feel happy. He tried to reason with himself—you old shitbag, stop tying your brain in knots with your drunken nonsense, you made a mistake, you’ll see things more clearly tomorrow, okay, so maybe you’ve got a couple of winning numbers—but the jackpot? Come off it! You haven’t got the brains you were born with. He had not slept a wink that night. He lay on the bed, fully clothed, then got up and dragged himself to the armchair, tried to wake Véro, cracked open a beer, drained it standing by the window, then went back to bed. But it was no use.
In the morning, he was down at the bar by 8:00. He had carefully copied out his numbers, checking twice to make sure there were no mistakes, examined the play slip this way and that, but could see nothing suspicious. He had sat himself at the bar, right at the back, settled in the shadows—it hardly mattered, at this time of the morning there was no one there that he knew and the Chinese couple who had taken the place over when Ahmed, the previous owner, had kicked the bucket—a burst aneurysm while he was sitting watching TV one night—were not likely to engage him in conversation: they had chucked him out more than once when he was drunk, he was not in their good graces. But this was his watering hole, and he still came here every morning.
Charles had opened the newspaper and checked the numbers again. In the morning light, on an empty stomach, it seemed even more monstrous than it had the night before. This brutal disruption in his rhythm inspired more fear than joy. He almost bitched that life never left him in peace. It just went to show we don’t know we’re born: he could have sworn that he hated his life and would have given anything to change every single aspect of it. But now that it had happened, he was clinging to old habits as though someone were threatening to evict him from his home with a kick in the ass. Two million. What do you say to that, you fat fuck? Overnight, it seemed, Charles had lost his happy-go-lucky indifference. For more than sixty years, he had trudged through the day from alcohol-induced coma to early evening aperitif, bellowing at everyone in the bar about how he didn’t give a flying fuck about anything, and not to bother him. The easy life was over.
And yet, he’d already lived several lives. He had watched his mother rake the ground with her teeth to be able to feed them; he had seen his father disappear overnight and never attempt to see his wife or his kids; he had been an apprentice when strikes broke out in Belgium in the sixties; he had been a champion pétanque player and a truck driver, a pen pusher and a ruthless card sharp, a bill poster and a cuckold, a brawler and a plasterer. His greatest passion in life had been the bottle, the bars and the twenty-four-hour corner shops. He was a lucky drunk. The bottle had never disappointed, never let him down. He has offered flowers to silly women and mooned like a lovestruck idiot over pretty girls, he has had dozens of lovers, each more moronic than the last. The sluttiest was an upper-class bitch with a title in front of her name, her family still had a tumbledown château but she liked to slum it in seedy bars. She’d had his kid. He’d told her: I don’t want to be a father, this was back in the eighties, she said she was having it anyway and if you don’t like it, tough, you should have had a vasectomy, asshole. She wasn’t wrong. He had never acknowledged the kid. Never tried to see him. Véro got pregnant too. But when he said I don’t want to be a father, she had gotten rid of it. She had sulked for a bit, held it against him, but she got rid of it. And she did it on her own, didn’t ask him to go with her, didn’t ask him for a single franc. She’s ballsy. She took it like a prole. Nothing binds people like adversity, working-class people learn to stick together. Véro is the old-fashioned model, the sort that come when a teacher marries a farmer, they never betray their man. He could tell it hurt her, not being able to have the kid. And it did something to him too. But you have to be realistic, a couple of pissheads like them, the poor brat could have spent the whole night bawling, it wouldn’t have woken them. And with the face on the two of them, what would the little fucker turn out like? Anyway, she got rid of it. Unlike the bitch with the fancy name. If news of Charles’s good fortune reached the ears of the phony baroness, she’d be banging on his door with a paternity test in seconds. And men don’t get any say in the matter, they’re fathers whether they like it or not. She’d demand a wad of cash and drag him through hell and back to get it. Véro would end up climbing the walls and screaming at him, and she’d have every right.
In fact, he didn’t plan on telling Véro either. At least not yet. He’d do some thinking before opening that particular Pandora’s box. He had trudged up the rue des Pyrénées and gone into a post office to consult a telephone directory. He wanted to track down the number of Française des Jeux, but the woman at the counter, a sly, fat black woman, had laughed in his face. There were no telephones and no directories in post offices anymore. He saddled a high horse: “You’re telling me I can’t make a phone call at the PTT? Now I’ve heard everything!” and she smiled and took him down a peg or two: “Come off it, you’re a bit young to still be calling it the PTT.” Not as dumb as she looked, it turned out. Mollified, he had sighed and walked out without making a scene. He had headed up to the place Gambetta, but the brasserie that he remembered having a pay phone in the basement had been completely refurbished. They can’t help themselves. You have something that works just fine, it’s solid, sensibly designed, everyone’s happy, but then someone has to come along and knock it down and replace them with some newfangled gizmo no one understands. The latest thing, apparently, is bars where drunkards feel unwelcome. Your key target group, and you chuck them out. And then they complain that businesses are closing all over the place. But a bar can’t survive on three tourists chomping on a croque monsieur. You need regulars propping up the bar if you’re going to make it, guys who would sell their house for a drink. If you’re selling booze, you need alcoholics, not lightweights sipping strawberry kir.
So Charles had bought a telephone card. Shit, if this turned out to be all in his head, if he hadn’t won anything, he’d have blown ten euros on a phone card he would never use again. Charles is wary of telephones. His hearing is not good these days, he doesn’t understand what people are saying. It’s a pain, he ends up yelling random stuff into the receiver. He had set off in search of a public phone booth, a quiet spot where no one was likely to recognize him, push open the door, and yell: What the devil are you doing? Come on, let’s go and sink a few quick ones.
He did not know how to phrase the question he wanted to ask. “I have a winning slip in my possession,” or “I’m calling to get a little information about the jackpot.” Like all working-class men, he found it difficult to have to deal with organizations. He didn’t want to sound like he was a moron, and the more effort he made to speak properly, the more blatant it would be.
The girl on the other end of the line had heard it all before. She put him at ease. He obviously wasn’t the only pleb to contact Française des Jeux. And probably not the worst. She quickly understood what he was getting at—a winning ticket was something she often dealt with, please hold the line, he had listened to Ravel’s Boléro, then some other henchperson had listened to him reel off his confused story, asked him to repeat the numbers on his ticket, and said, why don’t you come here now and we’ll check it out together, and Charles had panicked, it was a reflex he had when dealing with organizations—No, I can’t come right now, I’ve got a lot of things going on—and the guy on the other end said patiently, Monday, come on Monday, here’s the address, don’t worry, you can remain anonymous, completely anonymous, no, don’t worry, there’s no one hanging around outside the building waiting for jackpot winners, all sorts of people come and go in this place, it would be impossible to tell you from a winner coming to make a complaint, or an employee—obviously, within the organization a number of people will know your identity, but we have very strict confidentiality clauses, as you can imagine, you’re not the only person to be in this situation, no, even if you’re too old to be an employee, there won’t be photographers trying to take your picture at the door, if I can offer a little advice, don’t try to disguise yourself, sometimes with the best intentions we end up making things worse, so no glasses, no wigs … Clearly, he was not the first person to win the jackpot.
Back at home, he had regretted postponing the meeting until Monday. He was scared even to go and take a shit in case a window might blow open, knock over a radio that might open the drawer of the nightstand, a gust of wind and pff—no ticket. If you thought this was a flippant joke, you could think again … He had even gone easy on the sauce, in case he did something stupid. That’s how bad it was … And it was not just this fear that fate would play a nasty trick on him, a reaction typical of his class, the glitch that screws everything up, fate devising some improbable ruse to ensure that proles stayed in the shit, where they belonged … There was a deeper fear. What was he going to do with all this cash? Jesus fucking Christ, in three days and three nights without a wink of sleep, he had had enough time to consider the problem from every possible angle: A house? What the fuck did he want with a house? And where would it be, this house? In some godforsaken hole where no one knew him? In the South, with all the idiots and the fascists? With bars full of hunters who can talk about nothing except slaughtering coypu. In the nineteenth arrondissement, where the bars are about as friendly as a Supermax prison? Normandy? What the hell would he do with himself anywhere but here? A house—that was all he needed. Had he ever wanted to buy a house? The idea of being a homeowner bored him rigid. And the thought of having to visit a lawyer and all the damn paperwork … No, no, no. This was not how he intended to spend his old age.
He had gone, as arranged, to Française des Jeux. They expected him to be thinking in terms of investments, shares, long-term funds … As he listened, stoically, to the gobbledygook of the junior manager, he felt as though he were slowly turning into Jean Gabin in a gangster movie, as though at any moment he might declare, “Listen, sonny, are you planning to bust my balls for much longer?” But he said nothing, he waited patiently until they allowed him to leave with his check. Having spent a lifetime sneering at those who made money without lifting a finger, he was not about to start speculating on the stock market now.
At home in his kitchen, he felt more deflated than anything else. So what’re you going to do with all this loot, old man? Buy a new suit? Can’t be bothered. Travel? I’d rather die. He didn’t like suitcases, sunshine, sandy beaches, and certainly not “getting away from it all.” What then? Talk about a problem … he would treat himself to a couple of young things. He was not remotely bothered by the idea of some hot babe rimming his ass just because she was after his money … but how would he find them? The bars where he hung out were not exactly teeming with sexy young things … Jesus, he hadn’t even gotten his hands on the money yet and already all he could see was hassle, trips to the bank, mountains of paperwork, new friends, hypocrisy, complications of all kinds …
For a long time, he sat in a daze, staring at the fridge. Véro had woken up by now and kicked up a hell of a racket because apparently he had forgotten to buy olive oil and it was his turn. She swallowed a dessert spoon of oil every day at four o’clock before her first aperitif, supposedly it lined the stomach and made it easier for her to hold her liquor. Charles had let her rant, he had slipped on his coat without a word and thought, I’m going to find myself a whore. This is what he would spend the money on. But when he got to the massage parlor on the rue de Belleville—the one he’d heard so much about from his drinking buddies—he had peeked his head in the door: plastic chairs and reflexology posters. And turned on his heel.
He had had his fair share of prostitutes, back when they used to hang out behind the gare Saint-Lazare. Sometimes, he would hang around for half an hour before plucking up the courage to ask a girl “How much?” He was shy around women, except when he was drunk. For all that, women tended to like him. He had known the great ladies of the night, the sort you didn’t mess around with. They were no prettier than the working girls today, but they were witty, they could reduce a man to silence, you had to behave yourself. Later, when you had to go cruising for them on the boulevards, it was less practical. He didn’t own a car. He had to walk everywhere. They never had a room. When they moved out to the suburbs beyond the périphérique, he gave up. He wasn’t about to take a train just to get his cock sucked … When the Chinese invaded Belleville, he had gotten laid once, down a dark alley, with a woman in an anorak who was energetic and good-natured, but she didn’t speak a word of French and he didn’t find it as exciting if you couldn’t even pass the time of day. He had thought: There you go, even whores were better in the old days, and he had never bothered to find out about the girls working the boulevard de la Villette. He hadn’t been interested, just as he wasn’t today. He wasn’t about to force himself just because he’d come into some money. He had paid for a round of brandies at Le Zorba, then met up with Véro, as always, at the bookie’s on the rue des Pyrénées. If anyone had told him that one day he’d hit the jackpot only to find himself, as usual, him and Véro, at each other’s throats …
Véro is like an old shoe, he slips it on and he feels comfortable. There is no such thing as chance, twenty years with the same woman, however ugly and annoying, must mean you like something about her. He had still not said anything to her. He had decided to keep it to himself. He was afraid that news of his good luck would spread like wildfire and hordes of women would spring out of nowhere, claiming he was the father of their children, demanding DNA tests and grasping for his money.
Gradually, he had become accustomed to his circumstances and had decided what he was going to do with the money: nothing. It came as a surprise even to him, but having thought about it, his life seemed to him the best that he could lead. He would carry on, but better. He visited the barber more often, he had always cared about his appearance. Now he could afford peanut butter, brand-name beers, and razors with five blades … The days of hunching over chill cabinets in Dia, checking the price of camembert, were over: he picked whatever he liked. Véro was suspicious. She came up with the idea that he had secretly inherited money—a dead uncle whose house had been sold off. As though he came from the sort of family where uncles were likely to own anything other than their own asshole … but when she noticed that, on the whole, they were eating better, drinking more, she distinctly smelled a rat. And it intrigued the old cow. From time to time, Charles thought he should probably marry her—the problem was, it would not be easy to pop the question without arousing suspicion: Why would he suddenly want to marry this fat lump? From this point, whenever he heard about someone or other unexpectedly kicking the bucket—a heart attack, or run over by a moped—a nagging worry would ruin his whole day. Shit, Véro would be seriously pissed off if he bought the farm without making sure she inherited … This whole thing with the jackpot was a nightmare. It was a constant fucking hassle.
His first real pleasure as an old man with money had been a pair of sneakers from Go Sport. It just sort of happened: his old shoes were uncomfortable and he’d decided, fine, I’ll buy a new pair. In his head, he was imagining an elegant pair of brogues, but he had no idea where he would find such a thing and instead found himself sitting in Go Sport while a young man presented him with various types of sneakers. He had tried on a pair, out of sheer curiosity. Suddenly, a whole world opened up before him: here, finally, was a field in which “progress” was not a meaningless word. Shoe design had reached a scientific perfection and there he was, still lumbered with a pair of old clogs. After that, he bought a new pair of sneakers every month. Though he tried to hide them, Véro had sharp eyes and she launched into a tirade: “Looks like you’ve been frittering away your pocket money—you’re losing your marbles, old man.”
He had never invested the money. It had been an instinctive decision. He was not about to become a crook at his age. The young manager who looked after his post office account practically wet himself when he saw the new balance. He started inviting him to high-profile soccer matches, but Charles had no interest. Stupid fucking sport. No, he had no intention of talking about his money with anyone. This was one of the more pleasant surprises that came with being rich. Until you are in a position to say “no,” it is impossible to say you are incorruptible. He would never have thought it of himself. He had assumed he would be vile, self-seeking, that he would lose his head over the zeros on a check. Not at all. He discovered that it cost him nothing to say “no.” No. Even so, he took a real pleasure in watching the snot-nosed manager at the post office jump up like a jack-in-the-box every time he came in to post a letter. Charles gleefully tore him off a strip: What the hell were you thinking, coming to talk to me while I’m in line? Are you out of your mind? Do you want the whole neighborhood trailing after me begging for money? The poor kid could only blush and stammer his apologies. Charles was the most important customer in this branch, probably in the whole arrondissement. What a display.
One afternoon, after seeing a film on TV, Véro had wedged a cigarette lighter in the crack of her ass and was walking around, careful not to let it fall—apparently it toned your buttocks. Charles teased her as she strutted about, and pointed out that, in the movie, the actress had a pert little ass, whereas she could barely get hers through a doorway—the real miracle would be if the lighter did fall.
“How can you expect to tone that flabby ass? Before you could start toning, you’d need to melt off the fat.”
She launched into a rant about how, before she met him, she’d been slim and curvy, Belleville’s answer to Mariah Carey, how he was the one who filled the fridge with sugary shit and the cupboards with potato chips, so it was hardly surprising she was losing her figure. In the twenty years he’d known her, Véro had always been built like a brick shithouse, but she was convinced that she had once been beautiful. Whenever she cornered some sexy young thing at the bar, she would launch into endless stories about back when she was a stunner and had all the men panting after her. Urban myths. She’d always been ugly as sin. At least in her case, growing old involved no regrets.
But by now Véro was in full flow: it was his fault that she was no longer svelte, and while she was at it, she wanted to know where he had suddenly gotten all this money from, it made her sick to think she was sharing her life with a man who’d had kids behind her back, and had obviously come into an inheritance, a tidy sum too, but was obviously ashamed to admit it.
“You’re such a miserable fucking bastard … do you really think that just because some uncle left you ten thousand euros when he croaked, everyone’s going to be hanging around you like vultures? I pity you, I really do … Well, spit it out then, how much did you inherit?”
“What difference would it make if I did inherit money? Would you know what to do with it? You’re hardly going to go out and buy clothes, you’ve got the classy chassis of a battered old rattletrap. So what then? You want to go to the hairdressers? You’ve barely got four hairs on that cue-ball head of yours. Get your mustache waxed? If that’s all, just wait there, I’ll go get my razor. Come on then, what is it you want? You want to get liposuction? So do it, get yourself liposucked, you old hag, just let me drink my beer in peace.”
He thought she might trot out her old lady dreams, talk about a house in the country where she could live out her days. Like all the working-class women who’ve had it drummed into their heads that nirvana is owning your own little house with your own little garden. One look at the state of Véro’s bedroom, and you wouldn’t want her to have a little house—Christ, no. The woman is feral.
Véro had simply shrugged, she was resigned to the fact that her dreams were in vain, but was content to nurture them, and without a flicker of hesitation, she said: “If I had money, darling, I’d go to see New York. New York, Los Angeles, the Grand Canyon, Chicago.” Her tone was one he did not recognize, there was no bitterness, no resentment; in fact she sounded like an excited little girl; and he could have gone for the jugular, mocked her for letting down her guard so easily, but he said nothing, he allowed himself to be moved. She had this in reserve, the old bag. She had no idea that he could afford to pay for such a trip, she had just blurted it out, not trying to be shrewd, to hoodwink him. It was a dream she had set aside, one she cared about, one she nurtured. Twenty years he had been trailing after her from bar to bar, propping her up when she stumbled, listening to her throw up at home, and never once had she told him about it. And now there she was, smiling, showing her rotten teeth—she still has a full set of fangs, but given the color and the state of them, she’d be better off without. He snubbed her, out of habit. But she had amazed him. Three months before, with his head in a vice and the never-ending pressure to pay the bills, he could not have allowed himself the indulgence of finding her poignant, in fact he would have laid into her for talking such shit. Three months earlier, he had not even been curious to know what she thought. So this was the secret of having money: having space enough to indulge in flights of fancy.
“You’re not going anywhere, you old whore. You haven’t even got a passport, you wouldn’t have the first idea how to buy tickets, and if you got there, what the hell would you do?”
“You really are full of shit. Going to the States is no more complicated than taking the métro, except the ticket is different. And if I needed my passport, I’d just go and get it. All my papers are in order, I’ll have you know.”
“You wouldn’t move that fat ass of yours an inch. Drunks are all the same, they’re all mouth.”
“Why am I even bothering to talk to you? You’ve never been anywhere in your life. You’re a boor. You’ve always been a boor.”
“I don’t like traveling. Besides, what could you do there that you can’t do here?”
“I’d go for a walk, dipshit. I’d drink scotch, I’d take a taxi, go see a park, if there are squirrels, I’d try to catch one, I’d listen to the locals talking with no subtitles, I’d take the subway. You’ve never been anywhere, you don’t know what it’s like abroad.”
“You’d be just one more fat fucking tourist.”
Véro had had a life before she devoted herself to propping up bars full-time. For more than twenty years, she’d been a teacher. Had taught literature. She’s the only person he knows who’d been dumb enough to get herself fired from the state education system. Four months’ vacation a year, twenty hours of classes a week, and even that was too much to ask of her … Charles hates the idea of traveling. There is nothing he hates more than the thought of packing a suitcase, unless it is the prospect of brushing his teeth somewhere far from home. He has never taken her anywhere, the old nag. There was no way he was going to fritter away his cash on pathetic trips.
* * *
A late, blazing sun has obliterated all trace of the earlier downpour. Charles feels the heat stab at his thigh through the fabric of his trousers. A park keeper in khaki overalls is pushing an empty wheelbarrow and whistling. A couple passes, the man striding a few steps ahead of the woman, swinging his arms with a military air. Charles changes his mind. It was a bad idea to let the woman in the red coat disappear without first letting Vernon know people were looking for him.
“Can you give me the number of the woman in red? Just in case…”
“You know where Vernon is?”
“No.”
“Oh yes, you do, I know you … Don’t be a bastard, let me in on the secret … Or maybe you’ve got your eye on the babe in the red coat for yourself, is that it?”
“Take a good look at me. How do you rate my chances of convincing her to have a quick fumble in the bushes?”
“Depends. If she really wants to know where this guy is, maybe she’d be willing to…”
“There you go! That’s the reason I’m not going to tell you where Vernon is. I’ll open the last beer, you’ll give me her number, and we’ll change the subject.”
“Come on, let me in on the secret. I knew this guy Vernon before you did.”
“Get up. We’re going for a little walk.”
Copyright © 2015 by Virginie Despentes and Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle
Translation copyright © 2018 by Frank Wynne
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the chorus from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1993 by Leonard Cohen, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.