Paris Noir (23 page)
Six years earlier, Victor and Leonid had met in London to seal a pact with a rival. They’d ordered some girls—Ilona and Yelena—to celebrate. The evening had gone well, but in the early hours of the morning they’d noticed that the payment for their last African shipment, five million dollars in rough stones, had disappeared. They’d blamed the other criminal, of course, and settled the score with him. Neither of the two would have suspected
those little whores
, as Victor called them, of pulling off the theft. And as for the girls, they waited.
Not long enough, apparently.
A month ago, Ilona had traveled to Antwerp with Polaroids of the uncut set of stones, to find out their market value from some diamond merchants. A rumor had swept through the diaspora before reaching Leonid, who started to watch her. He quickly understood that Yelena had also been in on the job, and his plan was to send some of his men to Italy to get the diamonds back.
Without suspecting anything, Yelena had gotten ahead of everybody by entrusting me with the gift to Ilona. Then her luck turned, and I nearly got myself killed. Bitch. “I’m tired.”
“You’ll be able to rest soon.”
The cops released me the next day. The DA told me to stay in France a few more days for final verifications and then told me that the case would probably be taken to court, and that I would have to come back. I was able to go back to Marc’s place to collect my things, particularly the jacket I’d been wearing that evening, which I’d intentionally left there. Inside was Ilona’s cloakroom ticket.
I’m a really, really patient guy.
Translated by David Ball
Diary
P
aris is a full city. Every morning I empty out my head: It’s like in the country—last day of November—a new blue sky improves—upon acquaintance—with a bare sky—advancing openly emptiness—on a glass tray—sea without spray—sea of ice—and the city disappeared—like in the fields—when time passes—the wind dies down and pain disappears—you take a chair—you sit there—you feel like painting that—nothing oppresses—caresses from beyond …
I’m not going out but I’m not the only one: cocoons, tribes, parties, cells—family cells or others—ghettoes, armored doors, double-paned, triple-locked, padlocked, barricades, everybody standing firm. Nobody moves. To go from my place to the chic neighborhoods, you have to climb on trees, go from branch to branch like the baron in the trees. I’m too acrophobic. Also too claustro to crawl through catacombs. So walk along the asylum, the big prison, the convents and hospitals. Closed spaces. What they call maximum-security areas. Maximum tension. That’s rue de la Santé, from one end to the other. Health Street. The sickest street in Paris.
Iron
It was a fine end of November, abnormally mild. People were swimming in Nice and Biarritz. In some Parisian neighborhoods a vacation mood must have been in the air, the kind of spontaneous fragrance that floods you with pleasure, makes you fall in love, and fills you with bliss in front of a store window or behind a behind. No fragrance like this in other neighborhoods. It wasn’t a good idea to go out today. Outside it was too empty in spots. Real black holes of antimatter. Elsewhere dripping with picturesque. There are days where this city is borderline bipolar. I had zero grams of iron in my blood and I should have known that one way or another this deficiency was going to be turned around—and dangerously so.
In detective novels, demons or buddies always catch up with the guy who has served time: He goes down again, falls again, and dives back into the life again. But like I said, that’s in books. In reality there’s less reality; more things happen inside your head than on the street. Dead things, for example, or old ideas—they don’t have a grave but keep on dying in bits of brain in the unsafe area. All this to say that there are very threatening days when I don’t feel right inside and my life is like an old tape you can’t rewind or even decipher because of the hieroglyphics, belches, obsolete sonnets, postmodern jargon, and intensity levels of collective or individual memory. I needed a technician who could stick his fingers into the softened hard drive of my decomputerized neurons and the visceral tar of my decorticated cortex—not an oncologist. But the vagaries of the medical calendar are such that I had an appointment here, not there, and I couldn’t avoid having to walk the whole length of rue de la Santé. For some it’s a quarantine line, a humanitarian corridor, Social Protection, for others it’s death row. This street stretches out under an infinitely high wall of millstones full of holes like sponges; it’s a street buried alive inside its walls. There I go from jolt to decay.
Health
“A man can live on emotion, doctor, you can’t live on fatigue, you live under it. You can surf on emotion, you’re a flying fish, a land-air missile, but fatigue torpedoes you, it drowns you.”
“Go back home and get some rest.”
“Rest on who, on what?”
“Get out and see people.”
“People? Where am I supposed to go? Into a store window, as a mummy? Sit in a heated sidewalk café between two coat hangers? This city is a frustrating mirage. I never go out, doctor, unless you hand me a summons for medical tests. Outside, on street level, you’re closed in, locked up, walled up. You really want me to go out on the street, this street? In the jolted, ultra-vulnerable state you put me in? This street is a black sword, it goes through me backwards, it tears out my guts and my head, it’s a brutal street, it’s sick and crazy and dangerous. You saw the wall? Fifteen yards high, hundreds of yards long, nothing but big millstones and every single one of them wants to get out of the wall and jump on you. Behind the sticky wall a fucking ferocious neighborhood, a human zoo. An Indian reservation, no reservations necessary. A concentration camp universe. The back room, the rubbish, the unsold items, all the ugliness of the most beautiful city in the world. A secret, private collection where you can find everything that’s wrong. It jumps out at you through the walls. I wasn’t educated in violence, and I still don’t know what side I’m on. There are two sides on rue de la Santé, a wall side and a house side. The two sides clash. Those who have almost everything and those who’ve lost everything. This isn’t a Parisian street and I don’t think it ever goes anywhere.”
I don’t remember what he answered. Move along, there’s nothing to see.
“Rue de la Santé is a slit, a geological fault in the exhibitionist system, the opposite of the Operation Open Doors that the City of Lights is putting on right now. It cuts through the eastern part of the 14th arrondissement from north to south, a neighborhood they call residential, in contrast to commercial. In actual fact a neighborhood of nothing. A place dismissed, like a case dismissed. In the game of Monopoly it does not exist.”
“You’re fixating.”
This street, merry as an exhaust pipe, begins at Val de Grâce (military hospital) and ends on rue D’Alésia (defeat of the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix against the Roman general Julius Caesar) at the intersection with Glacière, rebaptized Place Coluche (French comedian, died on a motorcycle at forty-two, founder of the Restos du Coeur soup kitchens); on the even-numbered side it passes by Cochin (civilian hospital), La Santé (only prison inside Paris), and Sainte-Anne (psychiatric hospital). The blind walls of these institutions, confined there until further notice, face deaf buildings anyone is entitled to find ugly, especially after the elevated line on boulevard Saint Jacques, as you get nearer to the outlying neighborhoods where they’ve built modest and low-income housing. Further up, between Arago and Port-Royal, more historical places—convents and religious or monastic institutions; they conceal their rich, permanent heritage behind cleaned-up walls and clumps of trees.
“I’m not fixating, doctor, life put me in the fix I’m in, I have to stay in my room at one end of the street, it shut me up, it hammered me down, and you’re at the other end, one foot in my grave and the other among the fortunate of the earth. I’m stuck with the whole length of this street that’s locked away behind surrounding walls oozing with misery and pain. Only cemetery walls look that much like the walls of asylums and prisons. You don’t know who these walls separate from whom, the living from the dead, the normal from the abnormal, honest people from criminals, the sick from the healthy, animals from human beings—they separate some from others, that’s all you have to know. All you have to do is imagine that behind the walls it’s more than a zoo, it’s a jungle, Africa, hell, and the ghetto of living. Nobody walks on rue de la Santé, and car traffic is rare. People who live here are invisible, protected by their anonymity. Their children don’t play on the sidewalk. Nobody would get the idea of moving here, facing the walls, except for Samuel Beckett who chose to live right across from the prison. He used to say he’d always be on the prisoners’ side, but most of the prisoners never read Beckett; he lived on the other side of the street, the other side of the walls. The walls have the thickness of reality, but on both sides of the walls life has the consistency of a fantasy. On rue de la Santé you can’t see anything but you can hear voices, groans, and shouts, moans, calls, frenzies, revolts, and death throes. You’re never sure. It’s like being at the edge of a deep forest. It’s like a no-man’s-land, the Mexican border or the Berlin wall. Good happy honest normal people never go near asylums, prisons, or hospitals. They have no idea the centuries-old convents even exist. They don’t know what kind of life is lived there, what vices are practiced, or what types of surprises they’re cooking up for us there.
“Life here is not Parisian, no sidewalk cafés, no shops, no strolling around in the sun. It’s a life of shadows. The banks of the Seine and the Champs-Élysées are elsewhere, but the Seine is a bland sauce and the Champs-Élysées is paved with soft stones. The History of France is declaimed out there, under l’Arc de Triomphe. Paris is a grandiloquent city; it shines but leaves everyone in the dark, and the featherless Gallic Rooster is disguised as a phosphorescent peacock. The history of the French people is no longer written in newspapers or books, it went to sleep somewhere between long ago and formerly, between elsewhere and further away, but rue de la Santé is the bottom you hit before you bounce up again. De Gaulle and Mitterrand were treated in Cochin, all the great criminals made a stay in the prison, and in Sainte-Anne the pathways are called Maupassant, Baudelaire, or Antonin Artaud. Rue de la Santé is a black knife, a cutthroat alley, a cold trench, a fault, a slit, a scar, a short silence, and a draft of cold air. Every particle of air is a piece of shrapnel slashing through your brain. Far from the crowd, the passerby you encounter is an escapee, a survivor on suspended sentence, a jailbird, an abnormal person, or even an anchorite. At any rate a foreigner, not a citizen. He can’t be a tourist, an employee, or a storekeeper. A neighbor, perhaps, but from what side? He can’t ignore you, there’s nowhere he can look, he wants to hug you—or bump you off. He seems to know you, or recognize you. He already saw you in good company when he was in the padded cell, or solitary, or on a gurney, in prayer or in sorrow. It’s not the clash of civilizations, it’s the drift of continents. The guy in front of you is an iceberg in a thick fog. You’re ready to fight to the death, because this is where it’s happening, on rue de la Santé, at last you’re going to battle, after wandering around this fucking snail-shaped city for years without finding your niche—or the exit.”
Camus
“Mom died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. But I know she died today. Or maybe yesterday, I didn’t know. What does it matter? Yesterday, today, dead or not, her or me? Last night I reread Camus’s
The Stranger
to fall asleep. Result: I didn’t sleep at all. I dreamed that a dog who was allowed to go anywhere was dragging me by the sleeve through the sleaziest places you could think of, dungeons of passing time, the bottoms of which you could never get out of since the social elevator’s broken and the competition is international, I was in a nine-square-yard cell with two other inmates, I was on a hospital bed next to a cancer of the liver, I was like an overmedicated zombie in a cafeteria in Sainte-Anne and the dog was telling me to hurry up, we still had to visit the Catacombs and the Montparnasse cemetery. That dog finally left me alone but I began thinking about our appointment. I really shouldn’t have done that, because I hold you completely responsible for making me come here and then leave without getting anything. It would have been better not to come and not to think about it.
“At 9:30 a.m. I left the house at the last minute to see if I had any mail. There was that letter from the eviction officer about my unpaid rent and the eviction notice. My father died penniless and my mother worse, all alone, she’d even lost her mind. Paris was off limits for her, because of her blood pressure and the high rents. For her, Paris was no way to live. For me, that’s all there was. In the ’60s I’d already burned down all the projects outside Paris with napalm the way cobalt can get rid of your cancer.”
General-in-Chief of the Middle Class
“When I was a kid I always dreamed of the Champs-Élysées, the banks of the Seine, and the Quartier Latin. I lived twenty miles from Paris in low-income housing. My father was general-in-chief of the middle class and a representative of smalltown France. That just shows you he didn’t exist. He used to bike back from the station and into the parking lot in front of the neighbors’ cars and their wives’ windows. Of course he had battle plans and naval maps in his pockets but he wouldn’t spread them out in front of his family who had homework to do or dinner to make. In the ’50s and ’60s the son of a modest wage earner in the southern suburbs could consider a career as a teacher in Paris. Paris was a conquerable citadel. The kind of target you could hit. It seemed to me the right spot for a young man with some French culture to have the firm illusion he’d be living in the center of the world. But it wasn’t a target made of concentric circles, it was more like a spiral with a constantly moving center. The more Parisian I was, the more of a stranger I was. An immigrant. I didn’t even give myself the right to vote, or a work permit. I would settle into apartments without paying the rent until I got evicted. I could always manage to melt into the city, I looked like seaweed, the spitting image of the crowd. I lived by writing and lying; in other words I lived on nothing. Most of the time I lived underwater, in the fog, but with the technique of the flying fish, I had flashes of scintillating lucidity that lead me to say I actually did live. Or at least I think so.”
Impoverishment
“It seemed to me that in the ’70s, as I emerged in Paris, I was reproducing the fate of all humanity, I was like that fish with legs coming out of the ocean and becoming a monkey in a few million years, then a man; I was on dry ground, the promised land. I came from the southern suburbs, I didn’t realize I was leaving that impalpable, infinite, slimy old-people’s home to its economic stagnation and unemployment, hopelessness and mindlessness. I landed at the Porte d’Orléans, and I stuck there, all around Denfert, Montparnasse, and Port-Royal, without ever crossing the Seine. At least back then, the people of the 14th looked middle class and not yet like a bunch of chickenshits sliding into impoverishment. But I didn’t want to be prosperous. I wanted to be Verlaine or François Villon. Verlaine ended his life here, in the hospital neighborhood, going from sleazy hotel to hospice, from the arms of Eugénie Krantz and Philomène Boudin, well-known prostitutes, to the less tender arms of the hospital sisters in their habits.”