Article 353 Page 3

  You’re probably right, I told Martial as I handed his paper back, I’ve kept to myself too much these last days.

  As he folded the paper and put it in his back pocket, he said: Kermeur, heaven itself sent us this guy.

  Speaking of heaven, we felt blessed when what began as a persistent rumor going around town became an announcement of our whole future delivered with pomp and circumstance in the mayoralty’s banquet hall. But you shouldn’t imagine a huge hall like they have in big cities, with crystal chandeliers and glass alcoves with happy couples getting married. Ours is just a room that’s a little bigger than the others, a little brighter, too, with a shinier floor that seems to catch the sun at eleven o’clock. I don’t know why, but I’ve always especially liked the sunshine that pours in at eleven o’clock on holidays—if that’s what you would call the day Le Goff invited us in to show off the scale model of the project, with the architects and of course Lazenec in the front row. It felt like a kind of miniature inauguration, with five hundred glasses already lined up on paper tablecloths as if they were part of the ceremony, if “ceremony” is the right word. In any case, it was something to see all of us peninsula people gathered in the hundreds, like we were involved. It really struck me.

  The model was still covered by a red felt drape that Le Goff would pull off when he finished his speech, in the proudest and most majestic gesture of his whole tenure. And what a speech it was, the microphone squealing half the time and him saying that after the tough final years of the century someone had at last dared to cut through the prevailing grayness and that we could thank—you’ll never guess the word he said next: heaven—heaven for bringing us Antoine Lazenec, who needed no introduction, he’d been seen in all the places where he needed to be seen…No, he didn’t say it like that, more like who had been seen everywhere these last months, in the local newspaper, in the soccer stadium, at that charity banquet organized by the club with the animal name. It seemed he suddenly had the gift of being everywhere at once, so that people had long since put a name to his face, the same face that was getting fatter under our very eyes from all his business meetings in fancy restaurants. Those of us shipyard workers and longshoremen who lived on the peninsula were cheerfully watching him trample our flower beds, those same flower beds we’d been tending our whole lives without even knowing he existed, and which certainly didn’t need any fertilizer to make things grow faster.

  Lazenec behaved like a pioneer discovering a new land. We were like naïve, bewildered Indians, unsure whether to shoot a poisoned arrow or welcome him with open arms, but it certainly seemed we chose the second option. When he took the microphone from Le Goff that morning in the mayoralty hall, it was as if a spotlight suddenly lit up his face and the whole village held its collective breath, waiting for the word from a developer.

  He took the microphone and started by thanking Le Goff and, of course, the architects, who were standing like silent mummies in black jackets, then all the local notables who had opened their doors to him—but the doors to what, Your Honor?—without forgetting anyone, not a banker or a mayor or a vice president, all those people he apparently met in back rooms around the city, businessmen of every stripe who were already rubbing their hands at having signed the biggest contract of the decade, and at that moment not sorry to have given up their Sundays to play yet another round of golf or to have yet another drink in some nightclub where business was being done. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, since as an examining magistrate you’re supposed to take a panoramic view of the city’s affairs. Not at the outset, of course, but gradually, day by day, because of your investigations—and I don’t know anything about that because I’m not a judge—but it must be like soaring over the buildings in a hot-air balloon, where each new clue adds more hot air and you rise a little more, so eventually you’re high above the city and the things that connect the city to itself, and you can start to see new streets, not just commercial streets crowded with people on Saturday afternoon, and not the windy side streets but new streets, streets that are—how can I put this?—more aerial, more invisible, streets that only exist on drawings, virtual avenues cutting across the map, from the mayor’s office to the exhibition hall, from the exhibition hall to the Banque de l’Ouest, from the harbor to the courthouse, except that instead of people moving along those streets and avenues that are like cracks sharper than architects’ lines, there’s especially—what?—secrets being told, secrets and money, of course, and also girls, of course, well, not really girls but, let’s say, sex, so that in the end, if you add it all up, the secrets, the money, and the sex, you have everything. Everything, see.

  After that, a kind of silence fell between the judge and me, as if we felt like taking a moment to think of a way to hold it all back—not the events themselves, it was much too late for that, but our feeling of disgust under the gray sky outside the window.

  It’s true that people like me don’t get out enough to learn all the city’s ways, I continued. Yet how far are we from the city? Not even eight miles. But there’s the bridge, and maybe a bridge is supposed to bring people together, but it’s still a bridge, with the ocean under it coming up every twelve hours. We live on a peninsula, remember, so for guys like Le Goff and me, there’ll always been an ocean underneath that cuts us off from certain places.

  You should have seen it when Le Goff pulled away the red drape and we all came close: There in a glass box at least six by nine feet, lit from above by two spotlights, was a scale model of the whole peninsula, with its fields and cliffs, its farms and houses, the church and the village square.

  Our peninsula, I thought.

  And we applauded. I’m not sure what we were applauding—the moment, the scale model, maybe Lazenec himself. We crowded around the model, leaning close and admiring the level of detail, each one looking for their own house on the plastic streets. It was like an electric-train layout in the window of a toy store.

  Except that instead of an electric train, the thing that right away caught people’s eye was the five future buildings facing the sea and surrounded by luminous grounds, taller than everything else and putting the château in the shade. They had gone so far as to put tiny people on the terraces overlooking the ocean—only it wasn’t really the ocean but a sheet of blue plastic that represented it—and a long beach with real sand dug from the actual project site. Even the little plastic trees in front of the buildings seemed to have grown during the night. At one point or other that morning, we all lived inside that glass box, which no rain or dust would ever enter. We were drawn to the future like a magnet.

  True, it was just a model, but the sun already seemed to be reflected in its windows and aluminum tracks. Because of the aerial view we suddenly had, we were coming to grips with the coast in this absurd and millennial encounter, seeing it reduced to such a small scale for the first time, and we emerged triumphant. I remember seeing people at the door picking up the prospectus with Les Grands Sables, a Future for the Peninsula in big type and Lazenec’s picture on the back like a flyer in a municipal election.

  But if France were one big casino table, everyone here knows the odds are a hundred to one against you, I told the judge. You’d have to be a gambler, a real gambler, to brave the local economy’s age-old rules and win over people long resigned to failure and weary of the mirages and promises they were so often sold in the local newspapers, without any of them even seeing a start. You had to believe that times were changing, if you know what I mean, that something more urban was reaching out to us, and that seemed to be the direction things were headed.

  Maybe that’s the way it is everywhere now, I told the judge, in all those places that were once villages but you can’t really call towns. All those places where the plains have been paved over and the weeds take revenge by cracking the schoolyard playgrounds. Like everywhere else, it was always a head-scratcher for us when we had to put up new signs marking our city limits. As if w
e were never sure what would justify the boundaries, or what would move them again: vacant lots or farmer’s fields taken over one by one by some visionary developer, or someone who thought he was a visionary and finally became one because sometimes it was enough just to submit some sort of construction plan to the town council, and before you knew it, there was yet another scale model and yet more land being taken over.

  I know what I’m talking about, because I was on the town council too. I would’ve done better to stay on it, now that I know what decision we should have taken. But then again, I probably would’ve done like everyone else. The left and the right pretty much split the council seats between them, and it was all the more comfortable for me because I was with the majority. In those years, if you were a Socialist, you were almost always in the majority. Heck, the whole country was Socialist. We’d already won the national elections twice in a row.

  You were too young then, but you have to realize what 1981 was for us, I told the judge. A year is a funny thing. It takes on a certain hue, and faces emerge from it even thirty years later. And especially 1981, the year Erwan was born.

  We were at the clinic when President Mitterrand’s face was on the TV, as a matter of fact. That was something you’d never forget, the presidential vote count that seemed to be helping my wife give birth, so that the next day—that’s right, the very next day—we had a son, and it’s as if the cars honking in the streets all night long had been as much for Erwan’s arrival as for the new president. In the years since then, that honking has died away somewhere deep in our brains, as if it had shrunk, and in my head, anyway, the events of my times have shriveled. Maybe that phrase doesn’t exist, but I want to invent it in this case, now that I’m finally talking about the twenty or thirty years that have gone through us, or past us. I’m not sure how to say that either, but there was a time when we actually felt we had some wind at our backs. It’s not that the sea is flat calm today; maybe it’s just that I don’t have the ears to hear that wind blowing anymore. That’s what Erwan thinks. He’s often said that I’m now too tired to hear the wind anywhere except at sea, that I’ve aged faster than is normal, whereas for him, that kind of wind still blows very loudly in him, as loudly as the music he used to listen to in his bedroom. I would really like it if music was still playing in his bedroom today.

  But I was tired, and besides, Erwan was getting older and I felt it would be good to have more time to take care of him, so I didn’t run for reelection. That was just as well for me, don’t you know, since it was then that things fell apart with France. Erwan’s mother was named France, see. Well, she’s still named France, but I don’t often call her by her first name anymore, let’s say. She thinks that everything that’s happened since is my fault. Maybe she’s right. I told her that one day: Maybe you’re right, everything that’s happened is probably my fault.

  In any case it was just when I quit the town council that she began to feel I was spending too much time around the house. It’s better for men to be busy all the time, otherwise we become a pain in the neck, or at least women soon feel we’re a pain in the neck, standing in front of the fireplace smoking instead of maybe washing the windows or vacuuming, whereas if we come home from town council meetings at midnight every night, they find that normal. I don’t think she ever understood that, the empty hours I spent in the living room with the Télégramme—assuming I’d managed to go buy the paper—when I’d lie on the sofa and read it cover to cover. So it was better for her to leave, since in the last years I’ve at least doubled the time I spend on the sofa or in front of the mirror over the fireplace, the mirror whose glass is so cracked and cloudy I can hardly see the reflection of my face, just shadows and shapes in front of it. I insisted that she leave me that mirror. It’s not that I don’t want to see what it shows, I told the judge, but I just can’t help it, the longer I look at it, the more I feel like I’m trapped inside the glass, my brain caught in the mist that you might mistake for any other winter morning with the sun trying to shine through it, except it’s paler or washed out by the mirror’s opaque texture. And the closer you get, the more you’re caught by the cloudy cracks in the glass. At times I get lost there, in the fog of the mirror, in my wavy reflection. Sometimes I’m happy to get lost there, but sometimes I get angry, I told the judge, angry at the fog.

  I would have preferred if you had stayed angry at the fog, and only the fog, he said.

  Yes, that’s for sure, I said.

  So as not to have to meet his gaze for too long, I dropped my eyes to the bound penal code standing upright on the desk. I didn’t dare look even a millimeter farther up the cover, as if it were a wall too high that you’d have to climb just to see what was on the other side. On the other side of the laws, provisions, and paragraphs, he wasn’t seeing crimes and spectacular crime scenes anymore but only convictions and sentences, so that the only thing to be read on the judge’s face, which I didn’t want to look at, was prison corridors I could imagine myself being led along in handcuffs with my head down, looking at the harbor through the cell windows upstairs, waiting for a visit by France. Which wasn’t very likely to happen, I realized.

  So there you have it, I told the judge. He fooled everybody. I’ll say this: If we could just glimpse the demon lurking in people’s hearts and see it instead of a smooth, smiling face, it would be obvious, wouldn’t it?

  Looking down at his desk, the judge leafed through his pile of accumulated paperwork, opening one folder after another. Finally he found a picture, glanced at it for a moment, and slid it toward me. It was a newspaper photograph taken that day with Lazenec and Le Goff and a few other suits in the frame. They were all standing in front of the scale model and smiling like children in a class photo.

  Look at him, I said. Who does he look like? He looks like you or me.

  You really don’t expect the devil to look like Robert Mitchum, do you? he asked.

  No, of course not, not Robert Mitchum. But you could certainly see a photo like that in some movie, pinned to the bulletin board in a police station, with the faces outlined in black felt-tip pen. But that’s easy for me to say now. On that morning, as the glasses of white wine started going around, the very word “developer” seemed to sparkle like sunlight.

  Le Goff was strutting in front of the scale model and I remember his voice when he said to me, It looks like the real thing, doesn’t it? He patted me on the shoulder, trying to retrieve some friendly thing that was slipping away from us, something that we were now in danger of losing as he moved through the crowd with the same energy as when he celebrated his victory in the election. Standing right next to the model, he’d suddenly justified his two terms as mayor in front of all the regional big shots who had bothered to come, the people who would give their speeches in turn, either hailing the future or cracking jokes about the weather. That day I realized they really had decided to locate their seaside resort here, despite the fog over the shipyards that never lifts and the wind that blows two days out of three. But each of them was careful not to use the actual expression “seaside resort.” They used more modest phrases instead, like “apartment block” or “complex,” and one they especially liked, “real estate complex.”

  All in all, it felt like a wedding, I told the judge. Even the women had gotten dressed up. The children were running this way and that, except Erwan. He stayed right next to me the whole time. I remember that very well because it was the day before he turned eleven, and that afternoon I had promised we would go to town to buy him a new fishing rod for his birthday. That’s right, he was only eleven when this whole business started. His voice was still high, and he certainly wasn’t thinking of piercing his nostrils. I sure can’t pat him on the head the way I did that day, and he sure isn’t about to look up at me the way he did and ask, Are we going to buy an apartment in the model?

  And I remember smiling as I answered: I don’t think so, Erwan. This project isn’t for us.


  Le Goff was standing nearby and he overheard, so he leaned down to Erwan and said: Your father isn’t the kind of guy to go into real estate, you know.

  I smiled without answering, and for good reason. I didn’t have anything to say and I didn’t know any more about all this than a ten-year-old kid, any more than Erwan did, who was looking at the model like a toy he might’ve enjoyed building. And if I could’ve understood that morning how Erwan’s mind would soon be working, if I could’ve understood that at ten or eleven you can already be so open to a father’s affairs, for sure I would’ve made him go play hide-and-seek or something with the other children.

  Maybe Le Goff found me a little distant, or worried, I don’t know, but he felt he had to add something like: Don’t worry, Martial, for us, you’ll always be our groundskeeper.

  As a matter of fact, I wanted to talk to you about that, I said. It bothers me a little to ask you this, but Erwan and I are happy where we are, so do you think I’ll be able to go on living there among all these big projects?

  Lazenec himself was standing nearby. All that time he was never more than ten feet from the model, as if he always had to cast his shadow over the buildings and the green spaces, and over the tiny people on the rooftop terraces. You would’ve thought Lazenec was like a rain cloud hiding the sun from them. Le Goff waved to him, and he came over to us.

  Monsieur Lazenec, Le Goff said, you know Kermeur, don’t you?

  Of course, he answered.

  About his house at the entrance of the estate, he’d really like to know if—

  Before Le Goff could finish his sentence, Lazenec said: Oh yes, that’s right, you mentioned that little easement problem.