Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

He read Don DeLillo who had written magnificent pages on the accumulation of waste, of garbage, of everything man no longer wanted or needed, magnificent, disturbing pages but nobody ever talked about those pages, it was just literature.

He dragged himself along the streets, swearing and arguing with everybody and cursing the day he had moved here. Filth was everywhere despite all the signs saying Do not leave garbage here. Violators will be prosecuted and despite the cleanliness police who rode slowly around on their bikes, enjoying a bit of sun. He had nightmares, dreamed of dirt and filth and people who wallowed in it, enjoyed it and he spent hours and hours cleaning his apartment, the building, the street but there was always more of it and he could no longer put things in perspective. He kept washing his hands, over and over.

Once upon a time there was a city called Marseille and a man lived there, he was in a bad mood and was drinking beer on the Vieux-Port, he had made a decision and his eyes wandered off over to cours Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves and way beyond. Dominique, the owner, observed him, still grouchy, she said, tapping him on the shoulder. Three generations of men had come to her bar and she was sincerely attached to her customers, they were the apple of her eye, she said, which didn’t stop her from occasionally throwing them out to teach them good manners.

It’s not the way it used to be, she said as she sat down next to him. People don’t know how to live anymore, they are so cautious, so reasonable. Can you believe it? Yesterday I served organic tomato juice and Diet Coke all day long. Not one bottle of champagne in a whole year. People are so uptight. The one leads to the other. Not like back in the day when they would down tequila while listening to rock and roll.

He didn’t answer, he just looked at her and wondered if in those days people used to be that dirty and when she met his eyes, she kept quiet for a long time. Then she said. You know, you scare me. Are you okay? You look weird. He didn’t say anything for a very long time and then, heavily, he stood up and said it was time for action, he said that from now on he would take care of everything, she had nothing to worry about and he walked out.

Sparing no efforts, he worked meticulously to put his plan in place, studied all the possibilities on the Internet, from how to make a homemade bomb to programming a detonator, and bit by bit he bought what was needed and slowly his apartment was transformed into a bomb kitchen. He was in no hurry, he had all the time he needed. He wanted to show the world that Marseille could become a clean city but first you had to get rid of the garbage.

And then he was ready. Taking advantage of National Heritage Day he entered city hall and walking from floor to floor he placed explosives everywhere he could without anyone noticing anything. He was a discreet man.

After spending the evening at l’Unic, he went home and wrote in his diary all night and when day broke and the garbagemen had left, he went out and prowled the neighborhood and stuck explosives under the dumpsters on rue Sainte, rue Glandèves, rue Molière, and rue Beauvau. On place Général-de-Gaulle he waved at the owner of the Brasserie de la Bourse, who, thanks to his cousin at city hall who had given him the keys to the city faucets, tapped into the water main every morning to clean his sidewalk. He set explosives there too.

The rat who often went shopping for food at the garbage heap on cours Jean Ballard near the newsstand saw the man bending down by the containers, one after the other and he, the rat, scuttled away fast. He didn’t understand what was going on, only that something was going on, he could see that the man’s expression had changed again and thought that this did not bode well. The rat had the instinct of a rat. As far as he was concerned, the existence of mankind was not inevitable, men were there one day, then maybe gone the next, it didn’t matter but meanwhile the rat distrusted them. The rat lived in the present and, if possible, out of men’s sight.

Late in the afternoon, the man strapped an explosive belt around his waist, he made sure his diary was in full view on the table, he took his phone and went for a last beer at Bar de la Marine and when he had finished his beer, he caught the last ferry and when the ferry was in the middle of the harbor, he took out his phone and triggered the explosives, they all went off at the same time, like the clamor that should have arisen during the inauguration of Marseille as the European Capital of Culture, although his own fireworks were more spectacular and blew him up too.

Some Marseillais were gathered around the Vieux-Port. It stinks worse than usual, said one of them. Yeah, we don’t have any more garbage cans, said another. The guy who did that wasn’t right in the head. Look, even a rat got obliterated. Jeez, said still another.

Once upon a time there was a city named Marseille and it was the dirtiest city in France until the day a man decided to sacrifice his life and since the day he blew up city hall and the dumpsters near the Vieux-Port as a protest against filth and corruption, the city has been cleaned up and kept clean because this is a tale and a tale always has a happy ending.

La Plaine

In Paris, it would be Montmartre. In Marseille, it’s la Plaine. Where a mound of earth flattens out, attracting artists to it like flypaper. But if many a child of the Muse takes flight from the heights of Montmartre, in the underworld of la Plaine, all they do is get glued down. They should find the energy to leave. But la Plaine is a contagious disease you catch at bars where ill-fated artists make the world over, make the world over and over and over every single day with their mouths, and soon they can’t do anything with their hands but lift their glasses, drowning their talent and good will in beer and pastis. And yet they thought they would lift the world up. Magnificent bums who think they’re celebrated because they celebrate themselves and each other, who think they’re powerful at the beginning of each month because they buy their colleagues a round with the little money they collect from the government, who think they’re handsome because they appeal to drunks and druggies of the opposite sex, who think they’re geniuses because they don’t sell anything and think they’re funny because they really are.

But if Montmartre is a beginning, la Plaine is an ending. We’re near the end of the twentieth century and you still have to go up to Paris to make it? True, often the friends who’ve done that made out better than they did here, but you have to say they also slacked off a lot less. Their example isn’t enough to motivate the majority of the troops. These indolent intellectuals have drawn a rebellious slogan from their laziness about succeeding: They want to “succeed here at home” and they’re even capable of singing it to you in Provençal! A legitimate demand. The demand of an activist. But it’s pathetic. A denial of reality: there’s nothing to do in Marseille except go around it ten times over or take a high-speed train to Paris.

Maurice is one of those people who believes in la Plaine. It must be said that he fits right in — he’s from La Belle de Mai, another neighborhood of people without a euro in their pockets. An equally working-class neighborhood, just more industrious. From there, this far-off paradise of artists seemed another world to him. When he plunked his bags down in la Plaine, he thought he’d arrived. and he still thinks so, for he has time, young blood runs in his veins and he has a head brimming with dreams well anchored to the ceiling. Maurice is convinced he’ll become a rock star overnight, just like the legion of musicians who’re invading the neighborhood by the hundreds. Rock bands form every day, rehearsing for a while in a cellar or a garage before playing in the local dives. They’re acclaimed by the same people who played there the night before and the ones who’ll play there the following night, giving them the illusion of an audience. They’re not necessarily real bars, often makeshift places where liquor is sold without a license, pretending to be covered by the 1901 law regulating “nonprofit associations,” which hardly even exist here. You can also find drugs there, a business transacted without a license anyway.