Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

“Not toward the desert, no. Toward the places we loved. The beach, the inlets a little farther on. We used to plunge our bodies into that water slightly colder than elsewhere and, under your rather pitying look, I would pick up those pink stones, like pyramid-shaped candies, and then polish them and pile them up in candy boxes.”

You always were a pack rat. I wasn’t pitying you. You amused me. I found you beautiful, and so childish. I would watch you walking up and down the beach, your supple little body, so tanned it looked like you’d slipped into it like a dress.

“My body?”

Yes, your body. Which clothes your soul.

“But as for bodies, you preferred hers. We wouldn’t be in this situation today if you had been content with mine.”

That’s only a matter of physical bodies. Now, just when you’re beginning to struggle to climb this road, pulling your suitcase behind you, you tell yourself it’s a body that brought you here — mine. Nothing’s harder than getting rid of a body, right?

“The problem isn’t getting rid of a body, but getting rid of a body one loves. And you know that: I’m not here to get rid of something, but to push us very gently out of life, you and me.”

Do you really mean to take this road? You know it leaves the populated area behind as it moves along the coast. Reckless, isn’t it? You leave behind you the ugly buildings that were once modern and today are only yellowish, the terraces of the restaurants hibernating with all the sadness of summer resorts in January, the empty tourism center and the building they made for the pilots with its facade like an ocean liner. You seem determined, you don’t have the slightest remorse. The streetlamps are still projecting reassuring halos, but soon we’ll be in complete darkness. What have you gotten yourself into? You were always afraid of the dark. When I wasn’t there, you’d sleep with the TV on and the sound off so the glow dancing on the walls could give you the illusion of perpetual daytime.

“I wasn’t afraid of the dark, I was afraid of loneliness. In your absence, everything became terrifying. But tonight I’m not alone. You are near me. I like having you near. Besides, the sky is clear, bleached by the wind, dotted only by the moon. The night will not be dark, it will just be cold.”

And you plan to pull me along behind you like that, to where.?

“I don’t know, François. I didn’t make some grand plan. I want to enjoy not having a goal, having this time free from the hands of clocks. I feel truly free for the very first time in my life, free of all that shit that makes us aware of our human condition. I’m no longer afraid of death or night or what tomorrow will bring. I’m no longer afraid you’ll leave me. I feel in complete harmony with the present. I almost have the feeling that it’s a privilege. Very few people ever get to know this empty, slightly numb serenity and it makes me feel like tasting it, chewing it, absorbing it through each one of my senses. The road is hard, you are heavy, and that’s good. I’m thirsty and soon I’m going to be hungry, but that, too, is good. I know very well that you’re inside my head as I talk to you and—”

I’m in your suitcase, Caroline. Not in your head.

“You’re not entirely in my suitcase. In my head, you are complete. It’s better that way. It makes communication easier.”

Since you’re raising this subject. why didn’t you make me disappear completely? You had the time. You would have spared yourself a lot of trouble. It all started off so well. Cutting me up into little pieces to put me into the blender — a brilliant idea! You always had a practical mind.

“When you’re in a jam, you jump at the first idea that comes into your head. Modern appliances are surprisingly efficient. French quality, oui, monsieur! Once I started I found it pretty easy to do. In fact rather fun, I must admit. Your legs, which dared to run to her. Your arms, which dared to embrace her. I was so angry, and that did me good. But your face. your face, I just couldn’t. It was too much for me.”

And yet it’s my face that did it all. My eyes, which veered from you to her. My mouth, which betrayed you. My tongue, which conveyed the lies—

“Stop it. Spare me the nauseating details. Yes, of course it was your face that offended me, when it was still giving me those casual as-if-nothing-had-happened looks and everyday smiles when you’d just given her a quick fuck. It’s not that I didn’t feel like wiping it out, turning it into a mush of bones and blood, and that’s exactly what I was getting ready to do. but then I just didn’t have the heart. Your face, which I still loved so much—”

What about my torso? My hips? My penis? That, you didn’t eliminate, and yet that’s what started it all.

“Same thing. That stupid love. It was still too strong, you no longer deserved it, but it kept me standing up. Once arms and legs had been blended and thrown into the toilet, I looked at what remained of you, of fifteen years of life together, and I was struck by a sort of astonishment that kept me from going on. I actually felt bad when I realized what I’d just done. Flushing you down the toilet like diarrhea. Is going from mad love to diarrhea really the normal order of things? I couldn’t bring myself to chop up the face I had loved so much, your chest where your heart had throbbed for me, just for me, for so many years, your penis that had thrust for my pleasure alone for so long. No, I couldn’t. That’s when I decided to take us to the island. Think it’s absurd as much as you like. For me, it was the obvious choice.”

And now you’re stopping. You’re hesitating. Are you going to retreat?

“No. I’m taking a last look at this spot. It always amazed me. There are places you can never understand and this is one of them.”

This empty lot?

“Yes, empty’s the word. Empty, as if nature itself never knew exactly how to fill it. Even the few prickly pear trees sticking up here and there look lost. They didn’t even dare grow too tall, for fear of being decapitated by the storms. Everything looks lost. Even that old boat dumped on the scrub, tilting over as if the earth were heaving. It seems to miss the time when they took it onto the water. It’s been forgotten here since. I don’t know. I always saw it here. Year after year, it lets itself be eaten away by the salt, slipping from dirty white to the gray of a rainy sky, stung by moss and seagull shit, and the rough lances of the grass that ended up splitting its belly.”

A bit like our own story, don’t you think? From luminous whiteness to disemboweling.

“Please don’t. We never went through rain.”

Not true. We never went through a storm, but a permanent drizzle kept us wet.

“Because you let go. Because you could no longer take me on board for wild times and sweet pleasures. You’d just answer my loving words with a smug nod before going back to whatever you were doing. It’s easy to speak about drizzle when you let my light go out for lack of I love you’s. Be quiet. Let me look at this land. I’ve always thought nothing illustrated the word desolation quite so well.”

Or a big hodgepodge, like this whole city. Remember? You used to say it yourself: Marseille isn’t a city, it’s an agglomerate, a haphazard conglomeration of arbitrary constructions, a swarming space between entrance and exit signs without anything ever having been thought out. You used to rail against its total absence of harmony, its dislocated, disfigured, patched-up face, glued back together any old way, like you’d treat the broken head of a china doll.

“Yes. I also used to say that if people thought Marseille was beautiful since from some neighborhoods you could watch the sea, it was because it had failed in its vocation as a city. Saying a city is worth something because the nature around it is pleasant is totally absurd. But do you really think we’re here to discuss urbanism? I would so much like to devote these last hours with you to talk about love.”