He thought about her less now, but sometimes her image would cloud his gaze. The road flashed past but in front of him was nothing but a pretty succession of Mathildes. One smiling, another sad or annoyed, a multitude of Mathilde Arnauds unfolding before him, replicated to infinity like reflections in a hall of mirrors. They danced, cried, shouted or swore, all those lovely Mathildes swimming before his eyes. A rose-tinted veil of mist, dazzling, sparkling, in all the sincerity of his foolishness. He couldn’t force anything; his love was both that of a child and of a man, a bastard object, more poignant than anything else.
They were close to the Swiss border. Lakes and tranquillity would be theirs, Fricâlin cheese and hot chocolate, watchmaking, dirty money, and all that. Switzerland had been the obvious choice. Before leaving, Pio had let that drop like a stone in a well. He had never set foot there and neither had Luc, but as long as he was on his bike, he didn’t care where he went. So Switzerland it was. It would be cool, a glorious change of scene. Switzerland was nice, like a miniature country where there was no danger of getting lost. There was something comforting about it, something healthy and blooming like a roundabout. The fields, the green grass, the spring breeze. The smell of freshly washed sheets.
In Switzerland, they took photos with Pio’s old reflex camera. One for his wife (Jeanne Robert, Plot 72d, Saint Martin cemetery, France), and the other for Luc’s parents which, all things considered, was pretty dull. They hung around in Switzerland for a while, and then it was time to go home. You always end up going home, it was inescapable. The return was less thrilling.
Pio walked into his empty house, and Luc plucked up the courage to face the fossils, while dreaming of Switzerland.
2
He settled down, but he never really got mopeds out of his system. He bought T-shirts and posters. At first, it made Marine laugh being trundled around on the back of a 99Z. She said she liked it, that it reminded her of her youth. Then she fell pregnant. They lived together, and Luc had a job as a landscape gardener. Things were going well, they waited for the arrival of little Hector or little Eugénie – they didn’t know the baby’s sex.
Marine ended up having a miscarriage. Out of her womb came just a shrivelled embryo. It was tough for her. It was tough for him too. They both drank to forget, then came the medication and the words you suck in between your cheeks.
One morning she walked out on him. Luc found himself alone with his schnapps and his sadness. He tried to put an end to it, and failed. We know the rest, he went back to live with his parents.
He repairs mopeds and sometimes sells one to pay for beers and extras. He doesn’t have a wife, only a few girls from the bar he screws occasionally. They’re sales girls.
The café is just opposite Le Bon Marché. He knows them all. His mates have road-tested them too. They sell perfume and hats. On their feet all day. So in the evenings it’s natural for them to sit on a stool at the bar drinking kir and smoking menthol cigarettes. There’s Camille, Anna and little Margot, nicknamed Bouboule. She’s a bit chubby, Bouboule, but they still like her. Always game for a quickie in the toilet. She likes doing it, she doesn’t ask for anything in return. She’s seen all sorts of cocks, she has. The guys from Le Babylone for starters, even the washer-upper was entitled to his blow job. The washer-upper’s black, they tease him sometimes. They say it’s only in fun. They laugh at his accent, they say his cock is the biggest that Bouboule has ever sucked.
Le Babylone closes at 9 p.m. But after that, the owner invites the guys and the girls to have another few drinks for the road. Luc’s one of the guys, he’s there every night. He looks down a little on his drinking companions, he finds them coarse. But hey, they’re mates and without them he’d be very lonely in his ground-floor room every night. So he carries on going to Le Babylone, gets wasted on beer, staggers back home, alone, or with Bouboule, and falls asleep without thinking about it.
All in all, Luc’s a sad guy. He repairs mopeds, he smokes beers and drinks cigarettes.
‘How do I know you’re not a cop?’
‘How do I know you’re not?’
‘I’ve got a moped, cops don’t ride around on mopeds.’
‘Look at me. I’m an old prostitute.’
‘OK, let’s go…’
I’ve never had a pet. Maybe I should have. They seem happy with their dogs, their cats or an orange fish swimming round and round in its bowl. People say goldfish are suicidal, that they dive head first out of the water so as to die, just like that, on a marble mantelpiece.
It’s crossed my mind, of course, a few times. But I’ve never seriously considered it. It takes guts to kill yourself. I’ve never been really tempted. I try to put it out of my mind. I have a sort of self-preservation instinct that makes me think of something else. I don’t need any external stimulation, my little thoughts are enough to make me forget my woes.
They say you have to let it all out, that you have to pour out your troubles, talk about them to people around you, think about your neuroses, about the role your parents played. I don’t know. So long as I can forget, park all that in a corner, far away from my mind, locked away in a metal box, I’m actually fine. I don’t go there. Maybe you think I don’t have the courage. What a cheek! I can’t live any other way. So it’s fine with me if I don’t have the courage, repress things in my subconscious or in a corner of the room. I don’t want to analyse myself. I don’t give a stuff about my case. My case bores me.
So I watch, I try to understand. I watch the streets and my neighbours’ apartments. I watch the old people in the métro and the cars going past. All that teeming humanity – which doesn’t need me to teem – keeps me entertained.
I rest my shoulders against the traffic light. I know these lights too well. It’s my patch, next to the Quick burger place, at the bottom of Rue d’Amsterdam. An intersection’s a good spot, there are twice as many people going past. The poor girls in the Bois de Boulogne have the mud to contend with. I prefer the pavement. I’m part of it from top to toe. It’s my life. My heart has taken on its colour. It’s grey and worn. My soul sweats the filth of the city. People crush out their cigarettes and spit out their chewing gum on it. Sometimes they drop money. They spit on it, but most of all, they trample my soul, sweep it and roll on it too. They tap on it while listening to music. They hurry over me, sometimes lingering for a while when the weather’s nice. The sky rains on it, hails on it. My soul is by turns scorching when it’s hot, or covered in ice when it snows. It’s beginning to warp. There are widening cracks which will eventually swallow it up.