Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

Even though you just killed me?

“The logical consequence of my love.”

You’re being cynical.

“True. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. What I expected from the two of us was a child. It was the desire to see us grow old together, loving even the passage of time on our skin. I was beginning to look tenderly at your brow gradually receding, your belly getting soft.”

I loved the wrinkles around your eyes. The scars of your perpetual smile.

“Vile flattery. It didn’t prevent you from finding a younger woman with eyelids as smooth as the belly of a fish. And if I used to smile so much, it’s because you made me happy, because I felt like a queen. A queen doesn’t pout if you forget to say I love you to her. I even managed to keep smiling after I found out.”

Maybe that’s the mistake you made. If you had screamed and cried, if you’d made a scene by smashing the dishes and slapping me silly, I would surely have left her.

“I don’t think so. You keep lying even when you’re cut in half. You had organized your new life. You were on your way out. How could I ever imagine you’d be so stupid? Why would you wait till you’re hurt to get us back on an even keel. No pun intended.”

Ouch! You’re shaking me. I’m being jolted around in my polyester coffin. There’s very little asphalt here and you just turned sharply and made the suitcase swing over the potholes.

“I’m rolling you over the stones. I don’t know if I have the right to venture out here, beyond the boat, but I always felt like it, and today I couldn’t care less about what’s not allowed.”

That takes the cake. You just killed a man. Now you’re developing a keen sense of transgression.

“I’ve always been so very good. This is a liberation proportionate to my former restraint. I’ve always wanted to explore that big, disintegrating structure, right there against the cliff. What a waste. It would have been beautiful cleared up, reconfigured, lived in. It could have been a place for you and me. To raise kids. They would have built a cabin in the white boat. They would have measured themselves against the limestone, the low grass, the naked stone, against their fear of birds, which are not cute little jumping balls here but predators with beaks like drills. They would have learned not to trust their whiteness, their apparent gentleness, their claws as yellow as candy; it would have been a good school for learning to face life.”

You’re fantasizing. You never could have lived here. You’re not made for islands. You would have wilted.

“For sure. But tonight I need to dream. And I want to keep on dreaming about the two of us and our past splendor, like the past splendor of that building.”

Everything is surrounded by fences and No Entry signs. I never knew if it was because of the danger or a vestige of the military installations that practically covered the whole island.

“Forbidding people to do something never made anyone back off in this town. There’s a hole in the fence. Hardly big enough for us to slip through.”

I’m sure that house is a squat. It may not be prudent.

“Chicken! Do you know any squat as silent as this? No, there’s nobody here. Just memories of illegal parties, of course. Murals, graffiti, rotten boards, stumps of doors and furniture. Some shit, maybe human. Greasy old papers. Empty cans. No worse than our street.”

Thanks for thinking of giving me a little freedom. I’m feeling a bit cramped in my box. This breeze grazing my face feels good. So this is where you intend to leave me?

“No, of course not. I just want to look at you again before the hours pass and spoil what’s left of your flesh.”

But it’s dark here.

“No big deal. I can taste you with my fingertips. I feel like imprisoning your skin in mine, so I can take the memory of a caress to where I’m going.”

But you don’t know where you’re going.

“I won’t go very far. We’re on an island. It limits your options.”

What do I look like?

“Still handsome. Hardly blue. It’s just the smell that’s starting to get unpleasant. Like here. It stinks. Dead rabbits and bird droppings. Decomposed vegetation and rotting wood.”

Protect me from the flies.

“That’s what I’m doing. I’m spreading my coat over your body, like the sheets on our bed. There, that’s a lovely image. It brings back happy days. The moments when we fell asleep. When I curled up against you, when you said I was keeping you warm. The awakenings. Our faces all rumpled, not presentable yet. It made us laugh to see ourselves so ugly, before a trip to the bathroom made us radiant for one another again.”

You’re hurting yourself.

“That bothers you? You didn’t have any scruples about hurting me.”

What do you know about my scruples?

“You managed to look me straight in the eye every single day and act as casual as ever, throughout your affair with that woman. Not one eyelash expressing the slightest embarrassment. What esteem for me. I no longer existed. I was simply a nuisance, an obstacle between the two of you.”

Caroline, I’m cold.

“You won’t die from it, François. You’re already cooled down.”

I forgot. Everything. I just remember I was alive, and suddenly I had become nothing but my head in a suitcase. I don’t even know how you killed me. Oh yes. I have a last memory. I know I was about to tell you something important. You were in the kitchen, very sexy, maybe a little too sexy. Very sexy and very sad. We’d spent the last two weeks making love day and night. No. You had spent the last two weeks making love to me, vamping me, making me lose all sense.

“So you had sense?”

I think I was kind of shaky when I left.

“Remember. I killed you just before you told me about her.”

So that’s it? And yet you knew. You had found out everything, I have no idea how.

“It happened in such an unexpected way. one of those chance events that humiliate you more than they get you down, because the first feeling that hits you in the gut is the sudden realization of your own stupidity. Asking yourself. how could I have been dumb enough not to see it? An accident that makes you feel like bursting with laughter like a scary clown with paint smudged all over your face—”

No digressions. Tell me how you found out.

“Shh! Be quiet! I just heard something. Little steps rattling the broken bricks and stones just behind that old wall. ”

Rats. This island is a paradise for rats, seagulls, and rabbits. Here, the rats are kings. Here, they outwit the laws dictated by the capital. Here, they remember that their ancestors imported the Black Death. Boat people with poisoned fleas. And thousands of humans who died in abominable conditions because of a few precautions that were bypassed out of greed.

“You’re insensitive enough to rehash your history books, here and now?”

Oh, because on top of it all I’m supposed to be sensitive? I should spare you? Plane off the rough spots? When I’m the one who’s reduced to. this?

“This what, François? To an avatar of a dead human being, yes. To an imperfect dead man. I had no idea corpses could be so chatty, it wasn’t part of the plan. Your death should have meant your silence. But you’re still the way you always have been. Useless. Cerebral.”

That’s because I’m still full of gray matter. My brain is intact. If you had pulverized it, if you’d shot me in the head—

“I hear a noise. it’s coming closer. Be quiet.”

But you’re the one who’s talking all the time! Me, I’m just a heap of flesh, already soft and oozing into the lining of a suitcase on wheels. My voice is inside your head.

“They’re coming closer!”

It’s the smell of my corpse that’s attracting them. Don’t yell like that, for God’s sake!