Cédric Fabre - Marseille Noir

“No, they took turns. They only raced evenings and nights. Everything stopped at sunrise.”

André sighed and tossed his butt aside.

“But for the hard-core fans, the real show was the middle-distance race. The guys used to bike at top speed behind motorcycles that droned like mad. People called them ‘the butterflies.’ The middle-distance racers were really crazy. They went up to sixty miles an hour or more, faster and faster, until one of them finally cracked and picked up his foot. You see the stakes? How do you know when and how to stop?. The guys who couldn’t do it got killed.”

“Like Gustave Gamay?”

He looked disappointed. “How do you know?”

I turned around and pointed to the name above the entrance. “It’s the name of the section.”

He burst out laughing, then his laughter degenerated into a fit of coughing that echoed along the rows of seats. “You’re a little wiseguy, that’s what you are.”

He shot me a hard punch in the shoulder and it hurt. He’d been a boxer for sure.

“Yes, Ganay. He was the best middle-distance racer. A daredevil who worked as a stagehand at the Alcazar. That guy was no chicken. And then one night in Paris at the Parc des Princes, he went too far too fast. Like a poker player who raises the ante without the cards. A last bluff. He slipped under his bike and the butterfly dragged him all around the track. You can just see the victory lap. ”

And so, according to Dédé, it was from that day on that we in Marseille hated the Parc des Princes. Why shouldn’t we? It had robbed our champion cyclist from us. I didn’t dare ask if Ganay took steroids.

André let his eyes wander over the hills again. Under it all, he seemed like a sad guy. He turned to me and looked me straight in the eye. I saw something like reproach.

“It was an accident, understand. An accident.”

It was cold, but I ordered lemon ice cream anyway.

The last time André came, I could tell it would be the last. He was shivering despite the fact that spring was coming in. It must have been close to the beginning of March. The sun was early. Dédé’s features had hollowed out and his complexion had taken on the color of Grandma’s cigars. He didn’t smoke at all. Not in the car and not afterward.

I almost asked him what sport the Chevalier Roze had starred in, the one who gave his name to the last section of stands. But he didn’t give me a chance. And this time, we didn’t even go up. We stayed down below, in front of the entrance to the stands.

“The Chevalier Roze, see, was a nobleman who’d acted heroically during the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720. He took a team of convicts with him and they threw all the corpses that were rotting in the streets into old abandoned wells. He caught the plague, but he survived. A miracle!”

At least one of them didn’t die. I thought about it so hard that André laughed and said: “You were starting to think this goddamn stadium was a graveyard, weren’t you? Well, that’s not completely wrong. ”

His face darkened and his hand mechanically groped for the packet of Marlboros that was no longer in his pocket.

“It’s such a graveyard here that they built a purification plant under the stadium that produces the best water in Europe. That’s what it takes to administer extreme unction to our dead.”

I never saw André again. I asked Grandma why he didn’t come around anymore. And she answered the less I knew, the better.

On July 28, 2000, Patrice de Peretti, the most famous fan in Vélodrome Stadium, died of a coronary aneurism. A sad end for “Depé,” known throughout all the stands in Europe as the emcee of the MTP, the Marseille Too Powerful fan club. For years, rain or shine, winter or summer, in Turkey or in Denmark, he harangued his troops. Stripped to the waist, always. On the radio they said Olympique de Marseille fans wanted to rename a section in his honor. I had to go to the stadium before it was too late. I took the Prado, sped my BMW up to the gate where I used to enter with André. The same flunkey came to the gate. I lowered the window and said: “Back in the day, I came here in the morning a couple times with Dédé, you remember?”

His face lit up. “Dédé! Yes, of course.”

He pulled open the gate and let me in. I parked right in the middle of the empty lot. There were more people working than usual because there’d been a championship game against Troyes the night before. They had to spruce up the field, pick up the trash. I walked around the arena to get to the north stands. During the night, members of the MTP had sprayed Depé’s name all over the walls of the Ray Grassi section. They even rubbed off the boxer’s name to replace it with the name of their martyr, carried off at the age of twenty-eight by his love for the club and for ganja. A second death for the former featherweight. His section was now the Depé section. With the can of black spray-paint I’d brought, I added an accent on the first “e,” erased the foot of the “p,” and completed the letter. Then I admired my work. The Dédé section. To make my own homage.

I walked back to the car. The flunkey held the gate open for me respectfully.

“How long ago did he die?”

“Seventeen years. ”

“That doesn’t make us any younger. You were. ”

“Thirteen.”

“He always talked about his kid, his little guy. Always.” He shook his head and sighed heavily. “When you lose your father, you never recover, ain’t that right?”

I didn’t say anything. I had no idea. I started up the BMW. Opened the window and lit up a Marlboro. I could see Notre-Dame de la Garde. The Holy Mother up there on the top of her hill was giving me the finger. I drove toward the sea in the summer heat.

Le Panier

1

The music woke me up. Like it does about three times a week. The streets aren’t wide in this neighborhood. Often just alleys, but elsewhere, venturing even into the broadest ones would be thought of as taking your life in your hands. I have noisy neighbors who only have a very vague notion of time and politeness. They wear me out too. Between them and my students.

I’d collapsed on my couch when I got back from school. Fell asleep right away and slept like a log. When the music woke me up, for once it was at a decent hour, so I wasn’t going to complain. Actually, it was the right time to go out, take a little walk, maybe get a bite in one of the new joints around here. I live in Le Panier, the heart of the city, but it’s also becoming its belly, a neighborhood crammed with trendy little restaurants. Geographically, it’s a hill overlooking the sea, a labyrinth of alleys where it’s hard for cars to get through, a challenge to the past, in continual flux but always anchored by the perpetual movement of the sea and the immigrants who hang onto it, wave after wave. The men and women who live here come from Africa, Europe, and Asia; they’re black, white, and yellow, Arabs and Europeans, people of the land and islanders, poor and rich. Well. rich, that’s pretty new. Before, the few rich people of the neighborhood were more or less members of the thugocracy. Since I moved here, I’ve become one of the many specialists on the subject. Like a true geography teacher, I’ve tried to understand if there was some kind of determinism or fate, if there was any link between a land that welcomes immigrants and the birth of organized crime, and if Le Panier could be seen as a neighborhood with a curse on it, branded by that fatality. I think the answer is yes.

I shook myself awake, got up, looked in the mirror, and slipped a book in my pocket — I always take a book with me — and walked briskly to the place de Lenche. The old Greek agora, from the very beginnings of the city: a square that slopes downward, looking over the nearby sea, full of cafés and restaurants, with a theater, as if Greek tragedy had taken root here for all eternity, God knows why. Tragedy begets violence and, in this respect, eternity is not an illusion: what is more eternal than violence?. Before the Vieux Quartier, the Old Neighborhood, as it was called for a long time, was razed to the ground by the Germans and the Vichy government in January 1943, it was the dark side of Marseille, a huge bordello where sailors from every sea refueled on fresh meat, a labyrinth of every kind of trafficking, the dead end for every naïve fool.