Article 353 Page 7

  In the silence of the photos spread in front of us, my shame seemed to swell up like an inner tube, my shame at never telling anyone anything, because I, the 1981 Socialist, had invested all my cash in a real estate project. That’s something you can’t understand, I told the judge, but I just couldn’t talk about it, I couldn’t admit that I’d put my entire layoff bonus into a real estate venture. Not an old Socialist like me, do you understand?

  But I gather there were some other guys like you who also lost their bonuses, he said.

  Yeah, but guys like me, as you say, they weren’t any more visible than I was. Each of us was hunkered down in the silence of his own trap. Best not to know the list of people who were taken in—guys like me, sure, who were no quicker than me to notice a gloved hand gently reaching into their wallet. I’m not saying it was a good thing that we kept quiet. I’m only saying that it was us. So for a long time, nobody knew. Not Erwan. Not France. Not Le Goff. For a long time, each of us lived all alone with a well yawning under our feet and just a flimsy grille covering it. What I’m saying is that getting rid of a guy like that was acting for the common good.

  His elbows propped on the desk, the judge silently looked at each photo of the disaster and spread them out in front of him—the mud, the sea, the sky—like they were postcards he might’ve brought back from various trips, or a losing hand he’d laid down in some poker game.

  Look there, I said, that’s him with my son, Erwan.

  They look like they’re getting along, said the judge.

  You take a twelve-year-old kid and a guy with a Porsche who drives him to stadium suites to watch his favorite soccer team, what do you think’s going to happen?

  It probably went on for two years, Lazenec’s habit of swinging by our place to pick up Erwan and take him along. Maybe you think he did it to make amends, because my money had long ago gone up in smoke, right? No, it wasn’t even that. Because the problem is that even with a bad guy, even the worst of bastards, there are times when he’s not a bastard, times when he’s not looking to do harm. And believe me, that doesn’t make things easy for people like me. People like me need logic, and logic says that a bad guy should be bad all the time, not just a third of the time. In fact, maybe it’s even worse than that. Maybe the guy never thought of doing anything evil, really evil, the evil that’s written deep down in each of us. Maybe there’s always something that justifies and absolves it, or erases it. I mean this guy followed his line, and the line told him to sell apartments, to sit on café terraces and pitch them, and his line told him that taking other people’s money would cause him no pain. So maybe that’s the same line that led him to become fond of Erwan, to the point of picking him up for soccer games, except that he honked from the end of the path because he didn’t want to face me too often. Not that he was the kind to slink around, in spite of all the times I pestered him to find out if things were moving and if we could hope that soon, yes soon, maybe after two years or three years…I still believed in it as much as I did the very first day, I had total faith. Something in me would say: Of course for a project like this, three years is nothing surprising, what with all the codes to meet and the signatures to get, of course it’s normal. And Lazenec knew how to feed the flame. If you ever got more curious, if for some reason you started asking about techniques or materials, he would talk about this crooked supplier or that building code keeping him from moving ahead, and it was like a game of blindman’s buff that he won every time. All that worked on me, Your Honor, patience and obstacles swept away with each smiling promise, so just imagine the effect it had on a twelve-year-old kid.

  I fell silent again for a moment, to give the judge time to picture it. Then I asked, Do you have children too?

  He said: Yes, I have a son.

  I wish you all the best for him.

  The judge nodded a few times, his head moving up and down like an automaton I’d wound up with the key in his back. His face took on a kind of brotherly expression, and instead of him being a judge and me a guy under arrest, we were just two fathers facing each other and projecting our stories into each other’s eyes.

  One thing’s for sure, though: That boy, that little Erwan who looked up at me to see if it was okay to get into Monsieur Lazenec’s Porsche, he doesn’t exist anymore. Today he would be more likely to smash the Porsche into a wall if he saw it on the village streets with the window wide open and the same old Lazenec waving broadly to everyone right and left. Because if one person hasn’t changed up until today, it’s Lazenec.

  Until yesterday, the judge corrected me.

  I’m sorry, that’s right, until yesterday. Up until yesterday he was like a king on the church square, and he continued to swagger in front of us, his creditors, and even then, even after five or six years and his reputation getting around like a yellow snake at the bottom of the harbor, he would still manage to find yet another innocent sparrow to write him a nice little check. And the money continued to leap from one saddle to the other because there was always a new horse joining the race to make the last link of the chain. But you know the rule, I said to the judge: A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And if one of them breaks, it doesn’t hold, and your boat drifts away in the night. With a little luck, you wake up at dawn out at sea, in the slanting sunrise. But it’s just as likely that in the hour after the break you hear the terrible crash of the hull being driven onto the rocks, water pouring into the cabin, and at best, at the very best, you’re able to swim to shore.

  Don’t blame me, but sometimes I have strange images that come to mind, I told the judge. They never last for long; it passes. But as long as they’re there, I stare vacantly, my eyes turned to a screen that had come down inside me, and you have to wait. So the judge waited. And in my head, it was like an iron frame with right angles tearing at time.

  The judge never seemed bothered by those long empty seconds that punctuated what I said, when in my head certain sentences left a fixed plan in their wake, an image that lasted and couldn’t be erased anymore.

  I don’t blame you for not understanding, I said, given how long it took me to understand, to put the right words to this whole mechanism, but now I get it, I understand how he managed to stay among us in his Porsche and all the restaurants of the city. Basically, the more absurdly you act, the more room for maneuvering you have because as long as the person opposite you hasn’t keyed that into his calculator, as long as he hasn’t built a little machine to tame the absurdity, he’s paralyzed. Great boxers know this, that it’s only when their opponent’s game is in their box, that is, only when it’s finally locked in their brain like on a little music-box turntable, only then do they know how to fight, but before that you just take punches, and that’s all. And the more punches you take, the less lucid you are, and the less lucid you are, the more punches you take, you understand? Go to Le Goff’s grave and ask him what he thinks of this.

  The judge leaned back in his leather armchair, sighed wearily, and asked: But hadn’t Le Goff invested too?

  Le Goff is a bit more complicated, Your Honor.

  And I fell silent again, with Le Goff hanging like a projected slide in the wave of air circulating between heaven and my chair, and it refused to leave the screen too quickly.

  I think it’s Catherine’s face that first comes up for me when I say Le Goff’s name. Especially the tears streaming down her cheeks on the day of the funeral. She did everything she could, I told the judge, everything a wife could do to keep her husband from falling down the well. Except that a moment comes when there’s nothing you can do for somebody, no way to pull them out, even though they’re shouting, “Save me!” Because their whole body is pulling them in the other direction, and there’s nothing you can do against the broken glass we drag behind us, a bit like the sound of a mirror rattling on the wall, a sound that’s sometimes impossible to fight. I think that with Le Goff, that noise had long been getting louder and l
ouder, all those times he came to my place to see for himself how the work was going, coming more and more often, as if we were two soldiers taking turns on guard duty at my kitchen window, two soldiers looking through binoculars to see if the enemy was on the move. And for a long time, Le Goff put a good face on it. For a long time, our optimism continued to float above the rubble and the bulldozer tracks, even those many times when we sat smoking on my terrace, watching as excavators knocked the trees down one after another. We felt upset, seeing the machines do their work, but we both kept looking to the future.

  I never told Le Goff I’d invested, never mentioned the fourth-floor three-bedroom place with an ocean view. Of course not. To the contrary, I would tell him, This whole project is good for the commune, but it really doesn’t concern me. As I tried to face him with my own lie, I watched new worry lines appear on his forehead as the months passed. Seeing him on my terrace, smiling, or in the newspapers with Antoine Lazenec, reassured me, of course. After all, he had endorsed the sale of the property. After all, he was the mayor.

  Martial thought he was doing the right thing. And so did we, most of us, that is, from the town council to the café tables, everybody followed his lead because he thought he was acting like a man of his times, and what were his times? A shipyard closing and the promise of a future, so he insisted that for the rest of us, us leftists, it was time to change.

  And for changing, we sure changed. Him even faster than me, becoming more and more somber, preoccupied, and oppressed. You could measure it by the growing redness of his cheeks as he began spending more and more time in bars. For a mayor, it’s true that he was always happy to toss one down, but over time we could tell this was different, with Catherine herself going to fetch him from the back of some café. After those last two years, do you know what he looked like? Maybe an old sea captain who starts to realize that he isn’t in command of anything anymore, that even the movement of the tides has stopped in his mind, leaving seaweed to spread in his brain. That’s the way Le Goff seems to me now, like his head was polluted with dirty, stagnant water.

  I’d wished he’d stop coming by, stop standing in my garden telling me a thousand things I’d rather not know, except it was clear that the rattle of the mirror in his skull was gradually rising to a roar like a waterfall crashing on rocks, and that in the course of time I began to understand, yes, understand—this will sound stupid—the opacity of things.

  And then of course there was one time too many.

  There’s always a last time, isn’t there? And of course we call it the one time too many because it’s the last one. But the fact is, he came over one November evening, I saw him approaching like a shadow staggering along the path, muttering stuff I couldn’t make out. Just from the way he was walking, I could tell that it wasn’t as usual. It was one time too many, his standing out against the white gravel. His wandering the peninsula one time too many.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that it wasn’t the wind that was making Le Goff walk like that but lord knows how many glasses he’d drunk alone in his office. I began to understand the words he was saying in his hoarse voice: that he was the lowest of the low, that he’d really been screwed, that we’d all been screwed. And then he saw me in the distance and seemed to stagger a little less, as if he had a direction to take and it straightened him up, as if I were a beacon in his darkness. He picked up his pace toward me, and when he was still a few yards away in the darkness, he started shouting, You’ve been screwed too, Kermeur, you’ve been screwed big-time.

  Hearing him that way, it felt as if the trees in the dusk looked darker and more tangled than usual and seemed to be falling on me, as if there were a persistent, mocking rumor snaking through the air. I had the impression that the pines and the ferns and the thick dune grass, all of them proud to be living in their world, a world without an evil word or thought, had a secret they were whispering about me. I would’ve liked to have been a tree that day, you know. And Le Goff was still coming closer, still shouting those awful things into the falling night, saying, “Kermeur, you were no better than the rest,” and after all these years, it was the first time he used the familiar “tu” with me.

  I heard a shutter squeak shut not far off, and a couple of lights seemed to go out at the same time, and I thought I would’ve liked to close my own shutters right then, seeing as how Le Goff kept shouting my name in the damp air, and that I was never more conscious that my name was Kermeur. He seemed to be forcing himself to laugh between sentences and, as he got closer, this time more quietly, in a way more sarcastically, he stood in front of me and said, So you went and invested in real estate, eh?…You’re the sly one…But you can’t hide anything from the mayor, nope, nothing at all, the mayor sees everything, the mayor knows everything…

  What’s with you? I said. What are you talking about? You’re completely drunk.

  Le Goff went on: We all have our little secrets don’t we?, while shifting from one leg to the other like a roly-poly toy, that’s what he looked like that evening, a roly-poly who couldn’t steady himself, trying to light a cigarette out of the wind under my porch roof and taking a drag as if it were pure oxygen. He pressed his face against my window to look inside to be sure I was alone, which I was. Erwan had gone to watch the game at the stadium and I’d quit going with him some time ago. Le Goff tried to crush out his cigarette, but the wind blew it away before his foot reached it.

  There I was, standing with Le Goff, who was shouting all this nonsense to the rooftops, so what could I do? I invited him in. Don’t stand there, I said, come inside. Which he did, he came into my house, and without being asked sat down, or I should say collapsed, on the sofa. I went to the kitchen to see what I could find to give him to drink and perhaps for me as well because I figured we were going to spend quite some time together and it might be best if we were in the same state. So I brought out a bottle of whiskey, that’s right, whiskey, I told the judge. That evening I felt like having whiskey.

  It sort of calmed him a little to sink into the sofa, his weight crushing the cushions, and I could see he was trying to get a grip and straighten up a little. He even started using the formal “vous” again. He said he was sorry that it was only like this, in this condition, that he could even come here, but that there weren’t a lot of people he could talk to right now, and that I was the first person he had to apologize to.

  Me? I asked.

  I owe an apology to the whole town, he said, the whole town.

  He didn’t need to say much more for us to see the twisted shape of events appear right before our eyes, under the ceiling light, meaning the somewhat blurry collection of missing buildings, false smiles, and thousands of banknotes.

  And I happen to know, he continued, your five hundred thousand francs, I know exactly where they are.

  Well, so what? I asked. What difference does that make?

  Oh, not much, he answered, not much. He poured himself another drink, stared into the bottom of his glass, and added, It’s more like I’m here to help you kiss them goodbye.

  Your Honor, I don’t think I understood everything he meant by the phrase “kiss them goodbye,” but in my head it felt like a huge tarp was being dragged over the whole peninsula, like a black tide rising from the bottom of the ocean to wash its filth all over the harbor. And it suited the wind that was blowing then, a wind that suddenly felt like a thickish, dark layer, and suited this impossible night where everything seemed to be hardening and orbiting some dark moon.

  But the strangest thing was that Le Goff wasn’t telling me anything new, more like he’d brought the last piece you put on top of a house of cards, the one you know will make everything collapse, but you long ago understood that each of the preceding stages led to this one, the collapse, so all I said, maybe out of pride too, all I said was, You’re the mayor, Martial, it’s up to you to do something.

  Le Goff’s eyes seemed to be having troubl
e focusing anywhere. He looked at me with pity, or the feeling that he was way ahead of me, and came out with this rather dry statement: Do something? No, there’s nothing to do, it’s been a long time since he staked me out like a tethered goat.

  I didn’t understand what he meant by that right away. What does “like a tethered goat” mean, Your Honor? But I have had time to understand since, and especially that a certain Antoine Lazenec already knew what it meant, and what a stake was, and that any town councillor in France could be turned into a goat or an ass and tied to it with a bridle around his neck. That he knew, all right. And for Le Goff, Lazenec didn’t have to work hard to slip it over his head. It wasn’t something to be splashed across the newspapers, more like a belt of explosives cinched good and tight around Le Goff’s waist, and he better not try to loosen it or else it would blow up.

  I don’t quite understand, said the judge.

  Well, let me talk. Let me finish and we’ll see if you get it. Me, you better believe I understood pretty quickly, with the whiskey in my belly, my thinking took a shortcut that day, because in a flash that lit up my mind, I asked, So you invested too, Martial?

  Le Goff raised his eyes to me, looking a little more directly, a little more heavily, and he stayed like that for a long time in silence.

  The problem wasn’t just that Le Goff had invested, Your Honor. He could’ve bought ten apartments if he’d felt like it. The problem was that he’d invested all right—but not his own money.

  No. The town’s money. He invested the town’s money, you see? He put down payments on ten apartments pretty much like me, except that ten times five hundred thousand francs comes to five million, and for a commune like ours, five million francs is the chasm between solvency and bankruptcy. That was the thing Le Goff had come to tell me that evening, that he had bankrupted the town. I think that’s how he put it: I bankrupted the town.