Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

“A loud rustling of wings behind me. Those aren’t rats. they’re birds. There are lots of them. They’re snatching up the last gleams of day, they’re so white, so immaculate that they seem to be shining from inside, like children’s phosphorescent toys. They look like an army of little ghosts moving toward us.”

I think you should shut my lid. They’re coming to devour me.

“I think I’d get the better of them.”

Well, you’re not thinking straight. You’ll be no match for their beaks.

“They’re so white. You can’t be so cruel when you’re so pure.”

Bullshit. That’s what you thought of love, and look where that got us.

“Right. I’m packing you up again. Onward.”

Where to?

“You’ll see. A spot that’s more protected. The wind is beginning to rage. I want to go where we’ll be more sheltered. From the wind and the creatures that want to tear you away from me. Today, I’m the one who’s making the decisions. And it’s out of the question that anyone else, man or beast, gets to decide what to do with you.”

It’s lighter outside. You were right: the full moon puts us in a very theatrical spotlight. We deserve at least that. What a tragedy, don’t you think? Your dear Hamlet chatted with a skull too. You’re very Shakespearean tonight.

“That’s exactly what I was telling myself yesterday. You, on the other hand, floated around in an Éric Rohmer film, eaten away by a very noble dilemma — shall I kiss Jeanine or Monique? — while I was torturing myself with Elizabethan sorrows. It all comes down to this, you see. Wrong set.”

You’re having trouble moving uphill again. You’d be almost funny, blown around like this by the wind. Your hair like Medusa’s snakes, your coat like a sail swollen by the storm, and that wind breaking in front of you rising like a wall.

“It burns my face. Don’t be fooled, all right? These tears are due to the icy wind whipping at me, they aren’t tears of sadness or remorse.”

Look, you can’t go forward anymore. It’s comical. It reminds me of a scene in The Gold Rush, when the cabin’s leaning over and Charlie’s skidding back and forth, sucked backward by gravity. I’m glad I can come up with something funny, considering the situation.

“Happy man.”

How did you find out? Caroline. you started to tell me, but we were interrupted.

“A mistake with our computer, François. I clicked on the wrong icon and I came upon your mailbox that you’d left open. Which didn’t affect me one way or the other at first, since I never had the slightest curiosity about your contacts and messages. Never felt the urge to rummage through your private life, because you weren’t supposed to have one. one apart from me, I mean. Another life. Everything had seemed so transparent to me for the last fifteen years. We were so close, like a real family. But my eye caught the first line of your inbox: Me, Sonia (149). And the first sentence of your last message: My love. I can’t wait to. My love, I can’t wait to. And Sonia’s not me.”

So you opened it and read it.

“Not right away. I remained planted there like a very old tree. I was so old, all of a sudden. No need to open it to realize that the catastrophe had happened. At that moment, I understood everything. Everything. The awareness of my idiocy overwhelmed me. A world had just ended. And that world was the one that kept me standing, the one that pushed me forward in life. And it was crumbling now, because of the wrong reflex of my forefinger on a mouse. like on the detonator of a bomb. You tell yourself that if you hadn’t made that unfortunate little slip, the day would have continued along like all the other days, but it’s too late. a whole life is called into question.

So I walked out of the study, I walked through the apartment, and, for a long time, I looked at the tangible traces of the two of us — objects, gifts, books, photos. the dirty dishes in the sink, your fingerprints on the glasses. That whole material pretense of love going down the drain before my eyes. I touched everything with my fingers. I went to sniff your clothes. I went to look at the hollow the ghost of your body left in our bed. A moment that seemed interminable, mute, paralyzed with stupidity, before making up my mind to go back to the computer and click on that infinite exchange of messages.”

In short, you did the most masochistic thing possible.

“Coming from you, a despicable analysis like that doesn’t surprise me. What would you have liked me to do? Close it all up fast, relegate the rest of my life to a personal access code and keep being cheated on without saying anything, pretending not to know? No, love, the end was on its way. The least I could do was try to understand why. So then, yes, at that moment I read it all. Months of nauseating messages, you and her bellowing out your stinking desire, weaving your schemes, organizing your disgusting double life, your dates, thrusting into each other in elevators, the justifications served up to your spouses when you came home a bit late, planning to break off and giving us ridiculous, revolting nicknames — both me and him. Rubberdick for him, The Nun for me, cooing novel words. Oh, my love. All the things you told her. told that stranger. words that even when we were at the height of our passion, you never said to me. Never. ”

I’m not the type who pours out his feelings. I never was.

“Pours out, you say? I love you. Saying I love you to your wife is so hard to do? And the worst of it, you see, is this absence of words had never scandalized me. Until I discovered that another woman had been able to inspire you to use them. Or get them out of you with forceps, it hardly matters. And you want to know something? I closed my eyes. and I imagined, just for a minute, that you were saying all those wild things to me, all those silly teenage words, all those jokes bordering on pornography, those naughty whispers, those words of wonder, those compliments you say at the end of a party, the enamored or excited babble, those dissertations on her beauties, hidden or half-visible, those comments on the folds of her intimacy and the orifices of her body. and those whole pages of I LOVE YOU, yes, yes, in capital letters. ”

Love isn’t only in words. I shared fifteen years of my life with you. I was the first one to talk about getting married.

“No, that’s true, not only in words. With me, you started with the principle that your presence alone, near me, that sleeping next to me, our common address for so many years, replaced words of love. Realizing in a fraction of a second that all those words, all that slightly silly or frankly dirty poetry you were serving her up on a trowel. flowery vomit that could have made me laugh, well, I would have loved so much to hear it. at least once. So I read and reread 149 messages like stabs to the heart, and with every line I could feel my body shrinking, melting, becoming as fleeting as a smoke ring. ”

So that’s when you decided to kill me.

“Not at all. At no time did I decide to kill you. Didn’t even cross my mind. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that’s my tragedy: no premeditation. I made the decision to reconquer you, you idiot. To fight. You have to fight for the things you hold dear, right?”

I remember now. One day I found you more tender, more catlike, more in love.

“More in love, no. I was never less in love. More giving, that’s the word. Much more prosaic, in short. Sex. Sex as a weapon, not of mass destruction, but of sly reconquest. You wanted sex, I was going to give it to you. And then suddenly I dredged up all the little sexy underwear that had been sleeping in the drawers, the sluttish paraphernalia I’d considered pathetic at my age, astonished that it still fit me fifteen years later and I could find myself beautiful in it. Laces, ribbons, hooks that bite into the skin, trussing up the body so expertly it takes your breath away; dresses that don’t allow you to sit, spike heels that scratch the floor — I threw myself at your neck in all those frills I didn’t think I needed anymore to get my soul to enter yours, because my God, I thought that those flimsy garments, no matter how charming, were useless when you were truly in love. Truly, you see. Going through beautiful landscapes together, hearts unfolding at the noise of a key announcing a return, wanting to kiss every one of our scars, that was more important than anything else for me. More important than the various lickings, dunkings, and suckings whose pleasure, after all, only lasts a moment. Telling myself that every day that went by with our voices mingling more than our organs was a multiple orgasm in itself.”