The Savage Detectives (33 page)

In the morning, El Borrado was like a commuter town. Especially in the summer. Every cave had people in it, sometimes four or more, and around ten o'clock everyone would start to come out, saying good morning, Juliette, good morning, Pierrot, and if you stayed in your cave, tucked away in your sleeping bag, you could hear them talking about the sea, the brightness of the sea, and then a noise like the clanking of pans, like somebody boiling water on a camp stove, and you could even hear the click of lighters and a wrinkled pack of Gauloises being passed from hand to hand, and you could hear the ah-ahs and the oh-ohs and the oh-la-las, and of course there was always some idiot talking about the weather. But over it all what you really heard was the noise of the sea, the sound of the waves breaking against the rocks of El Borrado. Then, as summer ended, the caves emptied, and there were only five of us left, then four, and then just three, the Pirate, Mahmoud, and me. And by then the Pirate and I had found work on the
Isobel
and the skipper told us we could bring our gear and move into the crew's quarters. It was nice of him to offer, but we didn't want to take him up on it right away, since we had privacy in the caves and our own space, while belowdecks it was like sleeping in a coffin and the Pirate and I had gotten used to the comforts of sleeping in the open air.

In the middle of September we started to go out on the Gulf of Lion and sometimes it was all right and other times it was a bust, which in terms of money meant that on the average day, if we were lucky, we made enough to pay our tab, and on bad days Raoul had to give us our toothpicks on credit. The bad streak got to be so worrisome that one night, out at sea, the skipper said maybe the Pirate was bad luck and everything was his fault. He just came out and said it, the way somebody might say it was raining, or he was hungry. And then the other fishermen said that if that was the way it was, why not throw the Pirate overboard right there, and then say at port that he was so drunk he'd fallen in? We were all talking about it for a while, half joking and half serious. Good thing the Pirate was too drunk to realize what the rest of us were saying. Around that time, too, the gendarmerie bastards came to see me at the cave. I was supposed to stand trial in a town near Albi for having ripped off a supermarket. This had happened two years before and all I'd taken was a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a can of tuna. But you can't outrun the long arm of the law. Every night I'd get drunk with my friends at Raoul's and shoot my mouth off about the police (even if I recognized some gendarme at the next table, drinking his pastis), society, and the way the justice system was always on your back, and I would read articles out loud from the magazine
Hard Times
. The people who sat at my table were fishermen, professional and amateur, and lots of young guys like me, city boys, summer fauna, washed up in Port-Vendres until further notice. One night, a girl whose name was Marguerite and whom I wanted to sleep with started to read a poem by Robert Desnos. I didn't know who the fuck Robert Desnos was, but other people at my table did, and anyway the poem was good, it got to you. We were sitting at an outside table, and lights were shining in the windows of the houses in town, but there wasn't even a cat on the streets and all we could hear was the sound of our own voices and a faraway car on the road to the station, and we were alone, or so we thought, but we hadn't seen (or at least I hadn't seen) the guy sitting at the farthest table. And it was after Marguerite read us the poem by Desnos-in that moment of silence after you hear something truly beautiful, the kind of moment that can last a second or two or your whole life, because there's something for everyone on this cruel earth-that the guy across the café got up and came over and asked Marguerite to read another poem. Then he asked if he could join us, and when we said sure, why not, he went to get his coffee from his table and then he emerged from the dark (because Raoul is always saving on electricity) and sat down with us and started to drink wine like us and bought us a couple of rounds, although he didn't look like he had money, but we were all broke so what could we do? we let him pay.

Around four in the morning we said our good nights. The Pirate and I headed for El Borrado. On our way out of Port-Vendres, we walked along quickly, singing as we walked. Then, where the road stops being a road and turns into a path that winds through the rocks to the caves, we slowed down, because even drunk as we were, we both knew one false step in the dark could be fatal with the waves breaking down below. There's usually plenty of noise along that path at night, but on this particular night it was mostly quiet, and for a while all we could hear was the sound of our footsteps and the gentle surf on the rocks. But then I heard a different kind of noise and I don't know why but I got the feeling there was someone behind us. I stopped and turned around, and looked into the dark, but I didn't see anything. A few feet ahead of me, the Pirate had stopped too and was standing there listening. Neither of us spoke, or even moved, and we just waited. From very far away came the whisper of a car and a muffled laugh, as if the driver had lost his mind. And still we didn't hear the noise that I'd heard, which was the sound of footsteps. It must have been a ghost, I heard the Pirate say, and we both started walking again. At the time, it was just him and me in the caves, because Mahmoud's cousin or uncle had come to get him so he could help get ready for the harvest in some village near Montpellier. Before we went to bed the Pirate and I smoked a cigarette, looking out to sea. Then we said good night and went off to our caves. I spent a while thinking about my stuff, the trip I had to make to Albi, the
Isobel
's bad streak, Marguerite and the Desnos poems, an article about the Baader-Meinhof group I'd read that morning in
Libération
. Just when my eyes were closing I heard it again, the footsteps coming closer, stopping, the shadowy figure that made the footsteps and watched the dark mouths of caves. It wasn't the Pirate, that much I knew, I knew the Pirate's walk and it wasn't him. But I was too tired to get out of my sleeping bag or maybe I was already asleep and still hearing the footsteps, and at any rate, I thought that whoever was making the noise was no threat to me, no threat to the Pirate, and if it was somebody looking for a fight then he'd find one, but for that to happen he would have to come right into our caves and I knew that the stranger wouldn't come in. I knew he was just looking for an empty cave of his own where he could sleep.

The next morning I found him. He was sitting on a flat rock like a chair, watching the sea and smoking a cigarette. It was the stranger from Raoul's, and when he saw me come out of my cave he got up and offered me his hand. I don't like strangers to touch me before I've washed my face. So I stood there staring at him and tried to follow what he was saying, but all I could catch were stray words: "comfort," "nightmare," "girl." Then I headed off to Madame Francinet's orchard, where there's a well, and he stayed where he was, smoking his cigarette. When I got back he was still smoking (he smoked like a fiend) and when he saw me he got up again and said: Alain, let me buy you breakfast. I didn't remember telling him my name. As we were leaving El Borrado I asked how he'd found the caves, who had told him that there were caves at El Borrado where you could sleep. He said it was Marguerite, he called her the Desnos reader. He said that when the Pirate and I left he stayed behind with Marguerite and François and asked if there was somewhere he could spend the night. And Marguerite had told him that there were some empty caves outside of town where the Pirate and I lived. The rest was simple. He ran and caught up with us and then he chose a cave, and unrolled his sleeping bag, and that was it. When I asked him how he'd made his way across the rocks, where the road is so bad it isn't even a road, he said it hadn't been so hard, we were ahead of him and all he did was follow in our footsteps.

That morning we had coffee and croissants for breakfast at Raoul's, and the stranger told me his name was Arturo Belano and he was looking for a friend. I asked who his friend was and why he was looking for him here, in Port-Vendres. He took the last francs out of his pocket, ordered two cognacs, and started to talk. He said his friend had been living with another friend, his friend was waiting for something, a job, maybe, I can't remember, and his friend's friend had kicked his friend out of the house, and then when Belano heard about it he went looking for him. Where does your friend live? I said. He doesn't have a home, he said. And where do you live? I said. In a cave, he said, but he was smiling, like he was kidding. In the end, it turned out that he was staying with a professor at the University of Perpignan, in Collioure, nearby. You can see Collioure from El Borrado. And then I asked him how he'd learned that his friend had been kicked out. And he said: my friend's friend told me. And I asked: the same one who kicked him out? And he said: that's right. And I said: in other words, first he kicks him out and then he tells you? And he said: what happened was, he got scared. And I asked: what was it that scared this so-called friend? And he said: that my friend might kill himself. And I said: so you mean that even though he thought your friend might kill himself, this friend of your friend goes and kicks him out? And he said: that's right, I couldn't have put it better myself. And by then he and I were laughing and half drunk, and when he left, with his little pack over his shoulder, when he left to go hitchhiking around the closest towns, well, by then we were pretty good friends. We'd had lunch together (the Pirate joined us a little later), and I'd told him how unfairly I was being treated by the judges in Albi, and where we worked, and when it started to get dark he left and a week went by before I saw him again. And he still hadn't found his friend, but I think he'd more or less given up on it by then. We bought a bottle of wine and took a stroll around the port and he told me that a year ago he'd worked unloading ships. This time he was only here for a few hours. He was dressed better than before. He asked me how things were going with my case in Albi. He also asked me about the Pirate and the caves. He wanted to know if we were still living there. I told him no, that we'd moved to the boat, not so much because of the cold, which was creeping in, as for financial reasons. We didn't have a franc and on the boat we at least got hot meals. A little while later, he left. According to the Pirate, the guy was in love with me. You're crazy, I said. Why else would he come to Port-Vendres? What does he want here?

Halfway through October he showed up again. I was stretched out on my bunk daydreaming when I heard someone outside saying my name. When I went out on deck I saw him sitting on one of the piles. How's it going, Lebert, he said. I went down to say hello and we lit cigarettes. It was a cold morning, there was a light fog, and no one was around. Everybody, I guessed, must be at Raoul's. In the distance you could hear the sound of winches where a boat was being loaded. Let's get some breakfast, he said. All right, let's get some breakfast, I said. But neither of us moved. We saw a person walking toward us from the seawall. Belano smiled. Fuck, he said, it's Ulises Lima. We were quiet, waiting for him, until he got to where we were. Ulises Lima was shorter than Belano but sturdier. He was carrying a little pack over his shoulder like Belano. As soon as they saw each other they started to talk in Spanish, although their greeting, the way they greeted each other, was casual, flat. I told them I was heading over to Raoul's. Belano said all right, we'll come by later, and I left them there, talking.

The crew of the
Isobel
were all at the bar. They were looking gloomy, for good reason, although if you ask me it only makes it worse to get depressed when things are going badly. So I came in, took a look around to see who was there, made a joke in a loud voice or made fun of them, and then I ordered coffee and a croissant and a cognac and started to read
Libération
from the day before, since François usually bought it and left it at the bar. I was reading an article about the Yuyu of Zaire when Belano and his friend came in and headed over to my table. They ordered four croissants and the disappeared Ulises Lima ate all four. Then they ordered three ham and cheese sandwiches, one for me. I remember that Lima had a strange voice. He spoke French better than his friend. I don't know what we talked about, maybe the Yuyu of Zaire. All I know is that at a certain moment in the conversation Belano asked me if I could find work for Lima. I wanted to laugh. All of us here are looking for work, I said. No, said Belano, I'm talking about a job on the boat. On the
Isobel
? But it's the
Isobel
's crew that's looking for work! I said. Exactly, said Belano. So there has to be a free spot. And in fact, two of the fishermen from the
Isobel
had found construction jobs in Perpignan, which would keep them busy for at least a week. We'd have to talk to the skipper, I said. Lebert, said Belano, I'm sure you can get my friend the job. There's no money in it, I said. But there's a bunk, said Belano. The problem is, I doubt your friend knows anything about fishing or boats, I said. Of course he does, said Belano, don't you, Ulises? A shitload, said Ulises. I sat there looking at them because it was obvious it wasn't true, all you had to do was look at their faces, but then I asked myself who was I to be so sure what people did. I've never been in America. What do I know about the fishermen over there?

That same morning I went to talk to the skipper and I told him I had a new crew member for him, and the skipper said: all right, Lebert, he can take Amidou's bunk, but only for a week. And when I got back to Raoul's there was a bottle of wine on Belano and Lima's table, and then Raoul brought out three plates of fish soup. It was pretty mediocre soup, but Belano and Lima kept going on about how it was French cooking at its best. I don't know if they were making fun of Raoul or themselves or if they were serious. I think they were serious. Then we ate a salad with boiled fish, and it was the same thing all over again, compliments to the chef, what a salad, what a classic Provençal salad, when it was obvious that it was hardly decent for Roussillon. But Raoul was happy and anyway they were paying cash, so what more could he ask? Then François and Marguerite came in and we invited them to sit with us and Belano made everyone eat dessert and then he ordered a bottle of champagne, but Raoul didn't have champagne and he had to settle for another bottle of wine, and a couple of the fishermen from the
Isobel
who were at the bar came over to our table and I introduced them to Lima. I said: this guy is going to work with us, he's a sailor from Mexico, yes sir, said Belano, the Flying Dutchman of Lake Pátzcuaro, and the fishermen said hello to Lima and shook his hand, although something about Lima's hand struck them as odd, of course it wasn't a fisherman's hand, that's something you notice right away, but they must have thought the same thing I did, which was who knows what the fishermen are like in a country that far away. The Fisher of Souls of the Casa del Lago of Chapultepec, said Belano, and things went on like that, if I'm remembering right, until six in the afternoon. Then Belano paid, said goodbye to everyone, and left for Collioure.