Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

Four days later she calls me. She wants some coke.

“I’m sick of going through Maël when I want something. I’d rather deal directly with you. You understand, right?”

I understand, I totally understand, and I tell her to meet me at the Cinq-Av’. I’m a little disappointed, but at least it’s a start: we need to reconnect, be like we were when we were childhood friends.

Before long I’ve become her official dealer, but I must say, to her credit, that she doesn’t treat me that way. Every time she buys a gram of powder or crystal from me, she takes her time, we have a drink together, talk about everything under the sun, about what she’s studying — literature, with little conviction — about her younger brother, the music she likes, the movies she’s just seen. I share less about myself, but still, little by little, I tell her things: my parents, Italy, that Piedmont village where I spent every August from zero to sixteen, smack — something I absolutely don’t want to touch — and my desire for a life that won’t look like the ones I see sinking into the mud all around me.

What can I say, except that the promise we made when we were ten — unformulated, maybe not understood at all — is now being fully kept? The more I see Alice, the more I’m convinced that I was born to love her, her and no one else. I love the natural, spontaneous way she always is with me; I love her veiled beauty, her gray eyes, her straight hair with very slight curls in it, her fresh cheeks and the click of the bracelets on her forearms.

I also love that other Alice, the one she occasionally reveals when she looks at me with an almost wild despair and then pulls herself back immediately. Those days when her lips tremble slightly, when tears come to her eyes, wiped away too quickly for me to mention them, for me to ask her, But what’s wrong, Alice? Alice, please tell me.

All I do is stiffen in my seat and look tough because I know she likes that — it’s my Italian bad-boy side. I still have the Tower in my wallet but I don’t think much about it. I should take it upon myself to burst the tight framework of our relationship, so strangely chaste, and try to learn more about that sadness, about what’s driving her to take more and more drugs — coke, grass, and ecstasy.

One day, I happen to see three parallel scars on her wrist.

“What’s that? You into scarification now?”

“Not anymore. I used to be.”

“What do you get out of that?”

“Dunno. It’s a teenage thing, you know: lots of girls do it. It relieves tension. After, you feel better: you can go on again.”

“What tension?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s over, I don’t do it anymore, okay?”

A short time later, she asks me if I can get her some smack. And I can, of course.

“But what do you want smack for? Nobody does it anymore, you know.”

“All the more reason. I just want to try it. They say it’s not bad for a coke comedown.”

“Except you’ll have a smack downer and that can be mean.”

“Fine, can you get me some or not?”

“Okay. But I want to be with you the first time you do it.”

So she has her first sniff at my place. I tested it in advance, me who never takes anything, just to see if it’s cut with too much crap. I’ve never trusted heroin. It’s not something to party with, it’s not something you have a nice evening with. Besides, Maël and his pals from Roucas-Blanc, La Pointe-Rouge, and the Périer heights never ask me for it. I have just a few customers who buy some, old people who look like they can handle it; otherwise, I wouldn’t sell them any.

What can I say? I give in. I should tell Alice to stick with coke or go get her shit somewhere else. I should tell her: Come on, let’s get the car, I’m taking you to Italy. We’ll walk around Vieux Nice, we’ll swim on the beach at Menton and then, you’ll see, it’s the Roya Valley, you’ll like it; we go over the Tende Pass, we go back down to Torino. I’ll buy you ice cream on Piazza San Carlo, and then, I know a spot, a spot just for you, Alice, an inn under the pines in the mountains, one of my uncles runs it, come on.

But I don’t say anything and she snorts the line I laid out for her on a corner of the table, leans back on the cushions of my folding couch, and says: “Wow! God, Salvatore, it’s too good, you should try it! No comparison to coke!”

And then she gets very talkative because of the magic powder coursing through her veins. She talks a good part of the night, about everything, about adult life: she’s afraid she won’t be able to fit in, she always feels like she’s somewhere else.

“What can I tell you, Salvatore? Everything’s fine but nothing is.”

The midsummer heat has dropped, it’s nice out, we stand at the window and smoke in the summer night, the way I’ve done so by myself for years. I put my hand on her scarred wrist to quiet her and my fingers look for the little serrations of her three scars. “Shhh, be quiet for a minute, you’ll hear them.”

“Hear what?”

“The animals in the zoo. They howl all night.”

She stares at me, stupefied. Unlike coke, heroin shrinks the size of the pupils, which makes her eyes look much lighter, astonishingly blue in her pale face.

“Hey, you’re nuts, the zoo’s closed. The animals left a long time ago!”

“That’s what you think. Just listen.”

She plays the game and listens hard in the direction of the chestnut trees in the park. Her face lights up and she smiles, like I just gave her a priceless gift. “Holy shit, you’re right! I can hear them! I heard a lion! And a bird!”

“That must be a parrot, the birdcage is full of them.”

What can I say? After that midsummer’s night dream impossible to relate, that moment when I thought I’d gotten her to understand that life is sad for everybody but it’s up to her to reenchant it a little, I keep selling her dope: less and less coke and more and more heroin.

She moves to shooting up, the first time under my guidance, in my studio on rue Lacépède, but the next times without me, and without my being able to say or do anything.

She changes, she gets thinner, loses her childish plumpness and the luster of her hair and the sparkle in her eyes. When I try to put a brake on her intake, she smiles: “Please, Salvatore.”

“Alice, it’s just that I don’t want to see you destroy yourself. And it’s my fault too!”

“Nothing’s your fault. If you weren’t here, I’d get it somewhere else. It’s just that I need it, that’s all — to get through a rough spot.”

She always says that: it’s temporary, she’s going to stop. Unfortunately, I know druggies too well, their promises, their lies, and all their lousy little betrayals.

Since I ration her powder and cut it before selling it to her, she finds another dealer. And given the quantities she needs now, I suspect she’s doing some shady things to get the bread. She stops going to classes. “That doesn’t lead anywhere anyway.”

We keep seeing each other. Sometimes she comes to shoot up at my place and I don’t say anything because these days, it’s the only chance I have of spending a little time with her.

“Alice, don’t you see you’re fucking up?”

“And you, you’re not fucking up? Don’t you think you’re going to get busted one day?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Where are you going, Salvatore, with your crappy little drug business? You’re going to do this till you’re how old?”

“Yeah, but at least I’m not zonked out half the time.”

“Right, you’re clean, you’re lucid, you’re in control. And where does that get you?”

I’m not up to fighting with her, I give up right away. “Dunno, Alice. I just want. you to be okay. Less sad.”