“Denz.”
“You know him?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t,” says Jude, “but I really like his work.”
The woman stands up abruptly.
“Excuse me, but I must go. . Jude, I’ll come by to pick you up around seven tonight.”
A whiff of Nina Ricci.
“WHO WAS THAT?” I ask.
“I don’t know. .” Jude lets out. “She showed up yesterday morning, and she’s been back every two hours since then.”
“Do you know what she wants?”
“I don’t know that, either. .”
“No idea?”
“Well, yeah, but I’m a bit afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of her. . I don’t know what’s happening to me. Barely a week ago I couldn’t imagine anything like this, and now, all of a sudden, everyone wants to meet me. But it isn’t me who’s changed. .”
He stops and holds his head in his hands.
“What do you want from me? I can’t understand a thing. . She’s beautiful, rich, she knows everyone, and here I am with nothing. I live in Poste Marchand with an old, sick aunt. I don’t know what there is here that a woman like her would find attractive.”
“Your talent. There are some women who only get turned on by new talent.”
“What talent?” he says, banging his head against the wall. “I steal things from here and there: rock, jazz, rara, konpa direct, Spanish music. . I didn’t invent a thing.”
“Maybe, but it makes a good sauce.”
He stops pacing the floor and stares at me fixedly, his face looking feverish.
“It’s funny you should mention sauce. I’ve always been interested in cooking, but for some reason my aunt has never wanted to teach me.”
“But music is a lot like cooking, isn’t it, Jude? Oddly enough.”
His eyes light up.
“Maybe that’s it!” he exclaims. “I like talking to you. . I don’t even know your name. .”
“Fanfan.”
“I didn’t sleep all night, Fanfan. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that woman. I felt like I was caught in a funnel. And now I don’t know whether I was dreaming or wide awake.”
“You must be tired. I’ll leave now so you can get some rest.”
“But you came all this way. .”
“I just came to tell you that Denz would like you to drop by some time.”
His face lights up.
“I’d like to meet him. He’s been my idol for such a long time. He does cool arrangements,” he says with a feeble smile. “It’s just that my aunt is sick. I have to look after her.”
He takes up his guitar and begins to play one of his tunes, then puts the instrument back on the table.
“She said she’ll come back to get me at seven o’clock, about, but I’m sure she’ll be back before that. If only I knew for sure what she wanted from me. My head hurts, like someone’s been sticking long, thin needles right through my skull. . You’ll come back? We could talk some more. I feel a connection between us. .”
“Yes, I’ll come back another time,” I say, heading for the door.
As I’m about to go through it I turn and see him already stretched out on his iron cot. On his back, arms crossed over his chest and his mouth sagging open. Exhausted.
Outside, the strong smell of garbage goes right to the back of my throat. I didn’t get a good look at the quarter on my way here, so I decide to walk around a bit, taking a different route back. Just after I turn my second corner I see a new Mercedes parked under a tree. It’s her! He was right. She shoots me a cold glance, as though she’s never seen me before. She has the shut-down look of a bird of prey on the point of making its fatal swoop. Fatal, that is, for the rabbit. The minute I reach the car it begins to roll slowly down to the house of the young musician whose talent the critics have unanimously declared to be the hope of our generation.
One Good Deed
CHARLIE QUIT SCHOOL during second term for one very simple reason: he was too beautiful to spend the whole day cooped up in a classroom. Women had been after him for a long time. He was still a virgin when his geography teacher offered him a ride home and then took him to her house instead. Since then, Charlie realized he could get anything he wanted out of women. So what was the use of staying in school when real life was bustling out on the street? The sweet, ripe fruit of the tree of good and evil was dangling inches from his outstretched hand. And Charlie had a good appetite. All the girls adored him except one: his sister, who, curiously, was not particularly gifted by nature. Every time she bragged that she was Charlie’s sister, someone would always say: “But how is that possible!” After that, she changed tactics. Now she says: “Charlie may have looks, but I have intelligence.” But she might as well save her breath. Sometimes I think it best to just say nothing and give in to your fate. Charlie is beautiful, that’s all there is to it. There are those who reveal themselves to be beautiful only after you’ve looked at them for a certain length of time, and others who, as they say, have beautiful souls. At the risk of repeating myself, Charlie is beautiful, by which I mean that whenever he enters a room, heads turn: women look at him with an avidity bordering on dementia (they literally devour him with their eyes), and men with a certain pique. A truly beautiful man is rarer than you might think. At first it was incredible. Charlie would scoop up any woman who gave him a certain come-hither look (and did they ever really look at him any other way?), so that his miniscule room on Christophe Avenue became a kind of bordello. A new girl would arrive as the previous one was leaving, still fixing her hair. Sometimes they met in his bed. These days, however, he’s being more selective. He’s been known to turn down a staggering beauty and go home with a woman who is more fun to be with, or who makes him laugh, or even one who is downright ugly but has a certain charm, or an interesting walk, or even one who seems to have accepted the fact that no one will ever be interested in her. When he goes to a disco, no one, not even Charlie himself, has the slightest idea who he’s going to leave with.
BEFORE WE GO too much further, you should know that Charlie’s parents are poor but respectable. His father threw him out of the house the day he quit school. He went to live with one of his cousins in Carrefour-Feuilles. Said cousin being an Adventist preacher, very strict, who prayed every night at nine o’clock, went to bed at nine-thirty, and didn’t let anyone in after ten. After a month of this monastic regime, during which he believed he was going insane, Charlie moved in with a friend who lives in Pacot. This arrangement didn’t work, either, since the friend’s young wife fell for him in a big way, placing him in an embarrassing situation. He found himself stuck between a benefactor and a woman for whom he felt no desire whatsoever. One of the cardinal rules in the lover’s social code is: never live under the same roof with a woman you’ve turned down. Once again, Charlie had to pack his bags. Eventually he found the miniscule room on Christophe Avenue, above a shoe store. He’d kept in touch with his mother and sister, despite their being absolutely forbidden from contact by his father: no members of the family (including uncles, aunts, and cousins) were allowed to so much as speak to him. “I have only one child,” he was heard to say, watching Rachel do her homework. Ever since discovering the great injustice done to her by nature in the matter of aesthetics, she had sought solace in her studies (it could have been worse: it could have been religion). But since her brother’s banishment, Rachel has stopped hating him. Especially now that their parents are getting old. They still work in service for the Abels, a rich family that owns many houses, including the villa in Bourdon. Madame Abel picks them up in the morning and brings them back each evening (a job she never leaves to her driver). Work at the Abels isn’t all that demanding, except for the stairway that becomes steeper with each passing year. They are good Christians who treat their domestics charitably. As far as cooking is concerned, the ambassador (François Abel was the Haitian ambassador to London during the Second World War) isn’t hard to please. His menu hasn’t varied in twenty years, except that for the past two years he hasn’t drunk so much as a glass of water after six o’clock in the evening. What the ambassador brought back with him from London (apart from a box of Cuban cigars given to him by Winston Churchill during an unforgettable meeting) was a sense of discipline, sartorial elegance and a heightened respect for the individual. Charlie’s elderly parents are therefore treated with the same respect that the ambassador would accord to his colleagues, astonishing in a country where domestics are often treated like slaves. To Charlie’s father, it goes without saying, the ambassador is a living god. Work is evenly divided in the Abel household, where it is believed (as one believes that Jesus is the son of God) that England is the most civilized country on the planet. Charlie’s mother works inside (kitchen, cleaning and telephone), while his father looks after things around the yard (garden, garage, raising the gate whenever he expects the ambassador’s car to arrive). In this way the peaceful lives of these two couples (masters and domestics) have run for more than twenty years.