Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

It will soon be day. The island will start to fill up with people again. What will you look like when you walk past tourists and groups of schoolchildren with your stinking little suitcase?

“No one will come. On stormy days the shuttles don’t leave the port. So we’re condemned to stay for a few more hours or maybe two days here with the birds. You have nothing to worry about. Our fate will be settled by then. We’re not going to hang around here forever.”

Up to now I could still read into you a little, thanks to a strange omniscience, certainly due to my new state. But that’s beginning to slip away from me too. Like you.

“Putrefaction holds many mysteries. ”

You chose the steepest paths. You could have taken me down to the Morgeret inlet and sunk me cleanly. But you chose to climb farther up, to the very top of the cliff, to walk along the walls of the fort. I don’t understand you anymore.

“You haven’t understood me for a long time.”

You want to throw me from the top of the cliff? It’s not nice. That makes no sense.

“I haven’t decided anything yet.”

Birds make their nests up high. They’re aggressive right now. Not only will they see you as an intruder, you’ll tempt them with the choice dish you’re dragging after you. I think we’re really in deep shit.

“I’ll watch them. It will surely do me good to see how you can fight to protect your home and stop strangers from destroying what you’ve patiently built up. Something I didn’t succeed in doing.”

Are you talking about her?

“Yes. I’m talking about that creature out of nowhere who took everything away from me. It’s all the more cruel, you know? To be robbed of everything by a phantom. You don’t need a typhoon for citadels to collapse: a simple breeze is all it takes. At one time, I thought I had gotten over it. There was so much mingling of flesh once again. But that was without taking last night into account. when you came to see me in the kitchen without hearing how hard my chest was thumping inside. coming to me with your confessions while I was cutting up the chicken. You just chose the moment when I was separating the flesh from the bones and the head from the joints with the Japanese knife that has that special blade — child’s play! — wearing that dress with all the cleavage, lost in the great hurricane of my thoughts, he loves me, he loves me, that appetite he has for me can only be mad love, and there you are, you come in and watch me with a worried look, you seem to be beating around the bush and then, suddenly, after a little cough, you dump that horror on me. Caroline, I have to talk to you. I’m in love with another woman. But what came over you? Why did you have to choose precisely that moment!”

She’d just told me she threw her boyfriend out. I wanted to rise to the situation. To accelerate the process and dive headfirst into our promises. It was as if I was anesthetized. You could have been holding a strainer, a skimmer, a whip, or a pepper mill and I couldn’t have told the difference.

“At that moment, there was a kind of explosion. Is that what hatred is? That blast, the whole inside of you shattering? I simply turned around. The hand that held the knife found its way without my help. It went in with the sound of soft suction, a special blade, yes, the precision of a scalpel. You rolled your eyes, wide with amazement, before you collapsed with your hands squeezing your abdomen and I just stood there, equally stupefied, and it all came back to me. I saw us again as we were during those two weeks when I knew, my days of struggle, my days of the dance of the seven veils, of purrs, of rapture, of tingling skin, and I suddenly realized that in that whole period, at no time did you hold your hand out to me, initiate a caress, or ask for an embrace. I had done all I could. I had given myself blindly, I had opened myself unconditionally like a fruit that cannot do otherwise than gush out of its skin, and you — all you had done was take, taste, and quench your thirst, but without desire, without love, without anything more than a rush of blood. On the floor, you were opening and closing your mouth like a fish that doesn’t understand anything, and I looked at you, leaning over you, I watched you sinking into the great nowhere too, enjoying the way I was avenging my failure, my humiliation, and my disillusion. I loved watching you die, my dear. Oh yes, I loved so much telling myself that you would never live with her and I would remain your wife to the very end. And then came the time when you passed over to the other side.”

Don’t remember. No, no. Don’t.

“It’s better that way. You would have witnessed my collapse and it was not a pretty sight. The last image that you have of me is that of a pinup girl, although a slightly hollow-cheeked pinup girl, cutting up a chicken and perched on stilettos like nails anchoring her to the floor. But what happened afterward, that night huddled against you, trying to absorb your last warmth through the pores of my skin, kissing your face, murmuring words of farewell — you didn’t witness that and it’s much better that way. You would have been contemptuous of that scene, the image of your wife in tears next to your inert body. Much too soppy — the epilogue that’s usually served up with funeral music in the background, just before the fadeout. Count yourself lucky.”

Felt. nothing. Like the. darkness. Until. crossing.

“You seem to have a hard time talking. It’s not my story that’s upsetting you, I suppose.”

My mind. blurred.

“At last a bit of rigor mortis! Soon you’ll be reduced to silence, and that’s good news. You’ll be absent for real: I will be a widow at last. Not bad, that widow. Especially if she’s merry and free. I feel so free! It must be because we’re on a promontory and from the other side of the depths growling down below, the city continues to deploy its lights, vulgar but so alive, like a promise of continuity. I look at that constellation of small lamps and I think that there are so many men out there on the other side. So many men who will want to love me, to tell me the words that push girls’ little buttons and give them back their desire to live. François, my man, if I can still call you that, I think it’s the ideal moment to ask you for a divorce. That won’t shock you too much, will it? It’s what you were getting ready to do anyway.”

Leave?

“Don’t tempt me!”

. itch.

“Shh! It’s so easy to insult someone. Keep your dignity. After all, you’re the one who got us into this situation and I’m taking it rather well, right?”

Love.

“No, no. The end is unknitting your brain, that’s all. Those are illusions brought on by the open air, by that geological purity that’s blinding us; it’s that apotheosis of rock and water, touched now by the first gleams of dawn, which passed over us like the blade of a knife and peeled the bark off us. It may be nothing more than panic and urgency. Remember panic and urgency? Easy to confuse them with love. You weren’t able to tell the difference.”

Ost. Don’t know. What’s.?

“Well, François, you’re getting soft up there.”

Where are?

“Everything’s slipping away from you, isn’t it? I know. It’s tragic to see life leaving us.”

Oline.

“Yes, honeybun.”

Oline. Not leave. Alone.

“Look at the last home I found for you! At the foot of those crosses that seem to stand there like an ancient premonition of our story. Those big metallic crosses pretending to look like a graveyard by the sea when in reality it’s much more prosaic, just aborted plans for bunkers. That’s life for you: you plan big things and it all comes to zilch. You want to build citadels, they end up as perches for seagulls. Speaking of which. you won’t be alone. The birds are coming closer.”