The Library of Forgotten Books (3 page)

“Look,” I said, gazing up at the brilliant stars. “What star sign are you?”

“Virgo,” she said.

“They say your future’s written up there.”

I pulled her close to me and she seemed to me now just a little girl. Her impassive face was that of an innocent, unsure of how to react to the strange world.

She looked past my shoulder as if into another world. Her words came out like a cascade. “I have seen my own death, at the Cinema, you know. I have seen myself being pulled down beneath the water, struggling. I have seen my mouth opening and closing, the way a fish’s mouth does when it is beached. All around me the most wonderful light, as if a thousand multi-coloured lights were cutting at angles...It haunts me. It ruins me.”

I leaned in and kissed her, but it was as if I kissed a mannequin. I kissed her again.

Finally she said, “You still don’t understand, do you? Why do you think I chose you? Why do you think I came to you that first day? It wasn’t for your good looks.”

I stared in incomprehension.

“I saw you at the Cinema. I saw us on the screen together. I had to approach you in the square. I didn’t want to. It was just...the future.”

Her words smashed into me. “Fuck you,” I said. She was like a scam herself. Just when you felt you were about to win, everything was taken away.

She shrugged and we stood there. She seemed so far away from me, as if she was on a screen herself and I just part of the audience. I became aware of someone else next to me. I turned and Guy was saying, “Emanuel...you must come. It’s Petit Pierre.”

Without a look, I left her standing there. Guy and I descended to the wharfs. Along one of the fishermen’s piers, Pierre’s body hung from a wooden pole, wrapped in a fishing net, bloated and black from the water.

Arnaud, the
gendarme
, approached me and said, quietly and seriously, “Are you his legal guardian?”

“He didn’t have family. I’m the closest he had.”

“I’ll make the arrangements. You can pick up the body from the morgue in a few days. It looks like he just fell in the water, got wrapped up in an old net.”

“Save your breath,” I said.

Guy and I turned and saw Philippe Le Flic at the end of the pier, his cigarette burning in the shadows.

As we walked past he said, “Ah. So things have not exactly gone according to plan...”

Guy grabbed me as my body tensed. He stopped me from launching myself at Le Flic. “Come on, come on,” Guy said.

We returned to Marcel’s and remained late into the night, smoking cigarettes, drinking Marcel’s
gout
, liquor sharp and strong. At one point I talked to Marcel at the bar.

“When I was a child,” said Marcel, “I used to collect butterflies. I don’t know why. It’s morbid when you think about it. But the most beautiful ones were always the ones I didn’t catch. And afterwards they would double in size in my mind, the brilliant blues and yellows would become richer, more intense, and they would haunt my dreams. One day, I stopped collecting butterflies.”

“You should have been a songwriter,” I said.

“It’s not her that you want,
mon
ami
, it’s the image of her. Why do you want a woman who can’t love you?”

“Marcel, I don’t know.”

“You’re still a peasant. That’s your problem.”

I returned to our booth and Matthieu joined us. We talked of Petit Pierre’s talents, of how he had perfected an innocent look so well that even we would be taken in by it, before he would crack a sly grin and have us all in hysterics. We talked of his small-animal energy, the way during a scam his hands moved so that they were just a blur.

“It’s your birthday next week,” said Guy. “And we’ve got a surprise for you. It was Pierre’s idea. I can’t tell you what it is. But it’s going to be great.”

At that moment I spied Elena standing out in the street, looking in at me like a ghost. I slipped away from the table as Guy talked on.

“Emanuel,” she said, as I approached her in the square, “I’m death. I’m...”

“You’re not. You’re not to me.” I stepped forward again and kissed her; she pushed me away and I fell to my knees.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I can’t stand you,” she yelled. “You’re so petty. Look at what you want to be—what, a
playboy
, a
criminal
...”

“I just want to be
someone
.”

“You want to be what everyone else thinks of as someone. But is it what
you
think of as someone?”

“I love you.”

“Stop lying.”

I hung my head. What was I? Just a peasant from a hill-town, olive-skinned and narrow-minded and here was she, an actress from the capital who understood things I didn’t even know existed.

She looked at me, smiled sadly, shook her head.

“You’re right,” I said, “I’m nothing.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said and then, a moment later, “I’m going to Paris.”

“You’ve said that before. And have you gone? What’s in Paris anyway?”

She came to me and held my head against her and ran her hands through my hair and said, “Paris is the only place for people like us.”

I took her back to my little apartment with its view of an alleyway, and the far off church spire. We lay there together, holding each other through the cool summer night, and my mind was a jumble of thoughts and feelings. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” I asked myself. And, “Make the most of this, while it lasts.”

Before she slept, she said, “I thought you were just a criminal, all bluff and bluster. But there’s something else. Sometimes you make me feel...make me feel.”

The next afternoon we sat together in the Cinema. On the screen, buildings with rounded shoulders were hidden within vast green forests and a changed humanity—shorter, with bigger eyes—moved slowly. The reel changed and Le Tour Eiffel towered above the beautiful boulevards of Paris. The vision zoomed across to Montmartre where people sat on the steps of Sacre Coeur and watched a jazz band play as the sun descended over the Parisian skyline. In the crowd, huddled together, were two figures. Again it was Elena and me, arm in arm. We both looked a little older, our faces lined, the planes of our faces broader. The vision cut away just as the Elena on the screen leaned back and rubbed her bulbous and pregnant stomach.

As we walked across the square in the late afternoon I said, “It’s meant to be. You and I are bound together. I’ll wind up the gang and come to Paris with you in two days.”

She looked out over the town and said, “We could live in the
Quartier
Latin
. A little apartment and have lunch at the same hotel each day. But my death–”

“It’s only an image. It’s only a film,” I said. “It’s not real. Let me say goodbye to Marcel and I’ll meet you at your Hotel.”

Marcel was busy in the kitchen so I took a booth at the rear and ordered anchovies in oil and red wine. My life had been turned upside down and was now full of possibility, full of uncertainty.

Philippe Le Flic walked towards me from the front door. He stopped beside the booth.

“Fuck off,” I said to him.

“I thought you might have thought differently.” He turned around and dragged a chair across.

“Well, we can’t always know what’s going to happen,” I said.

“Petit Pierre certainly didn’t.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t risk reaching for my stiletto, so my fingers clamped around my fork.

“He still didn’t know what was going to happen when I wrapped him in that net. He was going to betray you, you know.”

I leaped upon him and he fell backwards. My arm was back, and then it plunged forward, fork in hand at Le Flic’s face. He batted towards me like a bug on its back, legs flapping as the fork drove into his left cheek, and through it. There was no scream, just the unexpected hardness of bone. I was wrenched backwards, onto my feet, pulled by an unexpected and powerful force. Marcel’s arms were wrapped around me so I couldn’t move. Le Flic stood up, the fork protruding from his cheek like a hat hanger on the wall. He didn’t cry: he was no little boy. He pulled at it, but it was lodged too strongly. With two hands he reached up again, this time emitting a deep groan, and he pulled and pulled and it silently came loose with a rush of blood.

Marcel had dragged me from the place. He whispered in my ear, “Hit me.”

I swivelled my elbow at head height and connected with him. He went down. I ran.

Not knowing where to hide, I made my way to the Hotel du Lac, to wait in the foyer for Elena or for the
gendarmes
. Eventually the receptionist asked me, “Would you like me to see if she’s in, sir?”

I looked at him: how did he know about me?

He called, spoke a few words and said, “She’s upstairs. Room 403.”

I made my way through those opulent halls. To my astonishment, a projector was set up in her living room, and on it a black and white film showed a young man and a woman in a Parisian apartment.

“How many boys have you slept with?” asked the woman onscreen.

The young man added up things on his hand and then gave up.

“You have a projector,” I said to Elena.

“Don’t you love film?” she said.

We watched the film and she put on another, and I felt as if I had never seen a movie before. I saw jump-cuts and camera angles. I saw the images as consciously created and I was doubly fascinated by them. I forgot about the following day, my birthday, and the disastrous path I was on. I forgot about the surprise Guy and Matthieu had organised. The future lay before me like a blank slate, a road in the night. I couldn’t tell where the next turn would be.

I fell asleep on the couch, seeing visions of young men smoking cigarettes and having long discussions about how to live. I was, in a strange way, happy.

Elena and I had a breakfast of croissants, orange juice and coffee. The table cloths were white,
les garçons
were polite, the sun was out. I was twenty-seven years old.

Guy and Matthieu were waiting in the foyer, and we followed them along the gentle slope from the Hotel down between the cliffs, and then through the little houses to the wharf.

When we reached the end of one of the piers Guy turned to me and said, “Here we are!”

“Ah, the surprise,” I said.

Gently rocking in the water beside the pier was the yacht,
The
Tomorrow
, her lines sleek, her paint gleaming white and blue.

“Oh no,” said Guy. “This isn’t the surprise.”

We cast off and Matthieu, something of a sailor, steered us out to sea, the boat slapping against the choppy waves, spray flying out into the air ahead of us. Eventually we turned to starboard, out beyond the rocky headlands. The wind felt good on my face.

As we came close to the Sparkling Grotto, Guy ducked into the cabin and came up with a filled canvas bag. He looked at me, smiled and said, “It’s a secret.”

We lowered our sails next to one of the smaller wooden rowboats moored close to the grotto and Matthieu dropped anchor.

“Come on,” said Guy. “Matthieu and Elena will stay with the boat.”

I looked at the rowboat, at the grotto mouth, so small and dark in the cliff-face, the water rising and falling like the bottom lip on a gaping mouth. Events had lined themselves up, one leading to another. Guy and Matthieu both knew what was within the grotto. I could not fight the two of them.

“I’ll come too,” said Elena.

Guy shrugged.

“You’d better–” I began.

“I’ve always wanted to see the grotto,” she said definitively.

Matthieu stayed with the yacht, and the three of us climbed into the rowboat, Guy’s canvas bag hitting the wooden planks with a thud. He took the oars and rowed us towards the mouth. As we came close, the waves lifted us up and dropped us down. At the right moment, just as the wave was receding, he rowed us forward and I grabbed onto the rocky roof of the cave mouth and pushed off.

Brilliant flashes of light surrounded us, fractured and multicoloured, as if we were bathed in a kaleidoscope. The walls of the grotto were hard to make out as light and colour bounced off them. Some seemed close, others far away. Above us little holes in the cliff wall allowed the sun to shine into the grotto and the crystalline rocks caught the light and sparkled like little stars in the night. Elena gasped.

“Well hello,” said Le Flic, standing in a boat, a great fishing net in his hands. “Happy birthday.”

It had been inevitable, from the moment I had insulted him, to the moment I had driven the fork into his cheek; like links in a chain the events had led me here, as I knew they would.

“Just spare Elena,” I said. To protect her, I stood up in the dinghy which, rising and falling on the waves, floated closer to Le Flic’s, now perhaps twenty feet away.

Guy unzipped the bag and pulled out an old French rifle.

“It’s a pity you brought her,” said Le Flic.

Guy turned to me and said, “Emanuel, I offer you your birthday present. What would you like to do with him?” He turned with his gun and pointed it at Le Flic, whose face collapsed in on itself.

“Guy, we agreed. This man is going nowhere. I’m a
gendarme
!”

Guy grinned. “And I’m crazy.”

There was silence and I knew what had to happen. Le Flic had to die. But I could not give the order.

“Please. Don’t...I won’t...” Le Flic’s eyes seemed flat and empty, as if he were dead already.

Our boats drifted closer together.

Le Flic threw the net. A shot went off. I heard a cry as the net flew towards me. It came from Elena. She threw herself in front of me, and the boat rocked wildly. The net struck her and she toppled further forward. “No,” I cried and reached out, but it was too late. There was a splash and a shower of crystalline water and she was gone. In front of me, Le Flic fell to his knees and looked down at himself in incomprehension. He placed a hand against his bloody chest and looked up towards us.

I dived into the water. Rays of light cut through it at many angles. Beneath me I saw a blob of colour and I dived deeper, kicking my legs ferociously. Pressure built in my ears. I lost a sense of up and down. I reached the net in which Elena was caught. Her mouth was not opening and closing, like that of a beached fish. Instead she lay there passively, staring at me as if she had always known this would happen. I reached into my boot and took my stiletto. It was made for stabbing, not cutting. I tried to cut anyway. The rope was thick. After a moment I threw the stiletto away.