Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

You’re digressing. Just tell me how it happened.

“By chance, love. Okay, I was talking about the lace.”

Nice moments you gave me then. I wondered why that dormant sensuality had suddenly reemerged. But now I understand. It was a sense of urgency. Panic.

“You bastard. No. No urgency, no panic. Just howling out my love differently. I wanted to be the ideal woman. Your little dream. To make her fall back into the shadow, into the great nowhere she came from. And you, into my lace, my waste-squeezers, my tight bodices, my half-cup bras, my straps and my garters, you buried yourself. You took. You hugged, squeezed, kneaded, licked, bit, penetrated, you turned me over and flattened me out for weeks: I was skinned, peeled, hollowed out, seeded, singed, buttered, shredded, peppered, and grilled. Beat. With a wild heart, but not yet satisfied. Thinking I could read in that body. penitence, and your return. no woman was ever fucked like you fucked me. those crazy days. Leave her right away. I. convinced myself that everything had come back to me.”

I was happy. My skin was in a state of bliss.

“Meanwhile, you. repaired your. confidentiality. access to your. you were dreaming. thought that. could convince myself. things were not so clear anymore. ”

I can’t hear you anymore. Everything is howling around us. The surf sounds like a highway, the wind is rushing into my capsule yelping like a mad beast. I’m bouncing around too much, I’m seasick. Can dead people vomit? It was crazy to take me here on a day when the mistral’s blowing, Caroline. Nothing can stand up on the days when it’s blowing. Even the trees drag along the ground, hoping to protect their limbs.

“SO THEY. HAVE A START ON YOU.”

You’re losing your breath. The gusts are hitting your thorax like uppercuts and making you catch your breath with the groans of an old woman with emphysema. I feel carried away. You’ll end up dropping me and I’ll fall to the foot of the rocks. Don’t let that happen, Caroline. I deserve better than being dumped into a pit like an old fridge.

“. NERVE TO TALK ABOUT. DESERVE.”

Please, leave the road. Take me down to the beach. In the hollow of the cove we’ll be sheltered. You’ll be able to put us up against the rocky wall, where our huddled bodies won’t run the risk of being ripped off the ground like wood chips. I’ll be able to hear you again. You’ll tell me everything. And then maybe you’ll feel like leaving me there. The water will come and take me. I can’t wait. I want to end it all. The very last thing I’ll taste before meeting God knows what, God knows where, will be this sand sprinkled with so many pieces of brick polished by the sea that you’d think it was decorated with little orange eggs. And all around, like the edges of some porcelain basin, the white walls of the limestone cliffs twinkling under the moon. It will be beautiful. It will smell good. In fact, it will be better than the walls of a coffin. But you always were headstrong.

“For the moment, it’s your head that’s still strong. Oh, come on. One can laugh at anything.”

You feel like laughing?

“Would that be so scandalous, François? Let’s lighten up a little. I found us a den under this little overhang with two stone steps beneath it, where the wind doesn’t blow in.”

You’re still laughing?

“Sorry. It’s what you said awhile ago. Can you hoist me up to the hospital, Caroline?”

Yes, that’s true, it’s silly. Still, I avoided saying, You’ll hoist me up to Caroline Hospital, Caroline? For years we made those stupid plays on words. And now I’m being careful not to fall into that trap.

“Because you’d still like to keep being dramatic. You want this moment to be solemn. You really have no sense of humor.”

Let’s say that in the situation we’re in, I have a hard time feeling. detached.

“Not that I didn’t help you do it. You know why you’re pissed? Because you see me calm and peaceful. You would rather see me as a Sicilian mourner so you could tell yourself you were indispensable to me, irreplaceable.”

And isn’t that true? You killed me so I couldn’t leave you.

“I think it was more to avenge the insult. To soothe the pain of disillusion. And I’m no longer so sure I feel like accompanying you.”

Oh no. That’s not fair. You’re betraying me!

“That’s exactly why I don’t feel like it anymore. For fifteen years I thought you were a good guy. Two weeks ago I discovered you were a liar — scornful, calculating, and unfaithful. Tonight, I discover you’re monstrously egotistical. I’m beginning to think I deserve better. I’m able to love gently, tenderly, deeply. I know how to build and not doubt. The love I can give isn’t a tag on a wall, it’s a tattoo that doesn’t wash off even if the skin suffers for it. I have a magnificent ass and a brain that works. I can be maternal and bitchy, a saint and a whore. I can read and come at the same time. I think many men would be happy to find me on their path.”

A pearl before swine?

“That’s it. You just summed us up. You’re the one who thought I was interchangeable. Into the scrap heap when there are problems. You found I wasn’t hot or smooth enough, a little clogged up in the burners. So instead of making me shine again with a soft cloth and blowing on the fuse to create sparks, the whole shebang to revive lust — oh, it wouldn’t have taken much. words that lubricate the eyes and the rest. looks that make us flow out of our clothes and into open arms. Well, no: you preferred to throw me into the garbage can and buy something all nice and new, something straight from the factory that starts right up. You couldn’t understand why I wasn’t greeting you in the evenings already on my knees with an open mouth and an avid cunt? You had lost the instructions. Perhaps others will find them.”

You’re being crude.

“It’s not my fault. It’s the island. You don’t bother with amenities here, you’re just above the rock and your flesh is prey to thorns and gusts of wind. Your layers of propriety are ripped away. Only the pulp remains. Look, you can see the city from here, illuminated and hysterical, you can sense the disorder and swarming of all those two-footed ants loving each other, hitting each other, boring each other, seducing each other, forgetting each other, devouring each other, falling asleep, counting their money, putting on makeup, multiplying, repenting, smearing themselves with civilization each at his own level, in any way they can. But us — we’re here, standing in the darkness on the pebbles, swallowing the wind and dust, naked as rats, lured by the depths. We are less than human, we are in quarantine. Don’t make me get out my history books too, you know it and you feel it, we’re quarantined here, in a place to die, a lazaretto. We’re in holy terror of having been contaminated, in the awful wait for the first signs of death throes. Here we have the memory of heads or tails, of croaking right here or being able to get to the other side of this arm of the sea and go on. So yes, I’m crude. I’m getting rid of my skin, I’m watching it fall off in shreds like the plague victims did and I’m stripping myself naked as a rock. And I’m waiting too. I’m waiting to see if the illness is crawling inside me. Or if I’m saved.”

Caroline, I’m lonely.

“I’ve known that feeling — when I realized that the man living with me was no more than a body, because his heart was elsewhere.”

It’s because you’re so hard. Because you’re pushing me around. I have the feeling I don’t exist anymore.

“My still loving you was convenient for you. Now you don’t know anymore, and before you, there’s a precipice. I know. I experienced that kind of pain and amputation.”