‘You should go to bed. I’ll ask Élie to come and pick you up in the morning so you can see about your car.’
He woke up howling, his body crushed by the powerful coils of an anaconda. The cat leaped off his stomach, whiskers bristling like foils, while Brice struggled to free himself of the straitjacket his sleeping bag had become. The blue-tinged glow of a new day was seeping in beneath the garage door. It was going to take courage for him to face it. He had a stinking cold, of the sort that leaves you woozy for weeks on end. Shortly before ten, Élie rang the doorbell.
The day was mild and soft. A cotton-wool sky was dabbing at the countryside. Scattered puddles reflected its emptiness. Élie’s reptilian head emerged from under the bonnet of Brice’s car as he wiped his hands on a filthy rag.
‘I thought it was the distributor with all this damp, but it must be something else. We’ll tow it to Loquet’s. He’s a good car mechanic, a pal, he won’t screw it up.’
‘It’s kind of you to go to so much trouble.’
‘It’s not me, it’s Blanche. Help me fix the tow bar then.’
The seat of Élie’s van was as comfortable as a fakir’s bed of nails. Rusty springs poked out, drooling yellow foam. Several times Brice caught Élie looking at him from under the peak of his cap, and shaking his head.
‘It’s extraordinary!’
‘What is?’
‘How much you look like Louis, Blanche’s father.’
‘Yes, so it seems. I’ve been told that before. Did you know him well?’
‘We were born a week apart. We went through everything together, school, First Communion, the army …’
‘What was he like?’
‘Like you and me. A man.’
‘What about Blanche’s mother?’
‘Sophia? Nothing to tell. She was a foreigner. They come and they go, foreigners. She went when the little one was five or six.’
‘You mean she died?’
‘That’s not what I said. She went, cleared off.’
The van bounced with every bump on the road, as if it had hiccups. The river was veiled in mist.
‘What did he do for a living?’
‘Nothing, latterly. He squandered what was left of the inheritance. They still had means at that time. Before that he wanted to be a painter. He had talent. As a small boy he used to paint things so lifelike you’d have thought they were photos – flowers, cherries, animals. Really good. We were from different worlds, but kids don’t worry about that. I taught him how to set snares and he did drawings of what I caught, still lifes, he called them. We got on well. He was a good-looking chap. On saints’ days all the girls would be flocking round, but he wasn’t the sort to take advantage. Painting, nothing but painting … And then we went off to the army, Algeria. He never came back. At least, he wasn’t the same.’
Élie swerved to avoid a dog. The sun was trying half-heartedly to pierce the clouds. An aged sun viewed in the wrong light. Élie chewed his lip as if he regretted saying too much, and yet Brice suspected he wanted to tell him more.
‘I need a pee.’
He parked in front of what must have been a quarry, a section of mountain cut like a huge cake. Brice took advantage of the opportunity to relieve himself as well. Legs apart, side by side, they watered the chalky rock. That sort of situation brings men together.
‘You don’t like me much, do you, Élie?’
‘What the hell’s it got to do with me? What do you want from Blanche?’
‘Nothing. She was the first person I met here. We hit it off. I’m married, you know. My wife …’
‘Yes, yes, I know. Cigarette?’
‘No thanks. You’re very fond of her.’
‘I’ve known her since the day she was born, remember. Life hasn’t been easy on her. As I said, when Louis returned from Algeria he wasn’t the same man. I should say, he was in the commandos. He must have been through a lot to come back looking like a hunted animal. I’ve seen that same look in a fox’s eyes when it’s dragged from a hole, prepared for anything, as ready to die as to kill. He had started drinking. He was always living it up in the big cities. We hardly saw each other. He was still painting, but not the same things, stuff you couldn’t recognise, nightmares – not the sort of pictures people hang over their fireplace. They sold though.
‘One day he came back from Paris with Sophia, who was Russian or Polish, I was never quite sure. She spoke hardly any French but since she never talked to anybody … Louis was mad about her but I don’t think it was mutual. Then Blanche was born and Sophia took off. Louis never got over it. He began going out boozing again. From time to time he’d come home. He used to cry in front of the little girl, and then clear off again. You couldn’t say he didn’t love her, but … Who knows what goes on in people’s heads? He was unhappy. That made me sad for the little one. You could say it was me who brought her up for the first few years. Then one day Louis came back, calmer but worn out. He’d given up painting and was drinking more and more, on his own, drowning his sorrows. One morning he decided to clean his gun. That’s it. It was about ten years ago now. The inheritance had practically all gone. Blanche had to part with what little she owned in order to keep the house …’
Élie prised the cigarette end from his lips and rolled it between his fingers before grinding it under his boot. Despite his weather-beaten complexion, Brice could have sworn he was blushing.
‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.’
‘Maybe it’s because I look like Louis?’
‘Maybe. Right, let’s go.’
After a brief inspection, the mechanic pronounced that the car would be ready in two days. Élie accompanied Brice home without a word. The wind was driving enormous bales of grey cotton wool across the sky.
‘Hello? Hello? Is that you, Emma? Tell me!’
The exchange had been even briefer this time, seconds at most, and there was a horrendous crackling noise, as if someone were pan-frying his heart. Now the only sound coming from the phone in his hand was the echo of the voice he supposed to be Emma’s, cut off by the dreadful monotonous beep of the dialling tone. What exactly was the good of this machine? To the best of his knowledge, it was supposed to connect you with anybody, anywhere, at any time. But on today’s evidence, was it actually doing its job? At the dawn of humanity, just by sticking a shell to his ear the stupidest of bipeds could at least get a direct line to the sea. What progress had been made?
Three blows of his heel and the telephone gave up the ghost. He spread its remains over the floor with the tip of his shoe. There were more reliable ways of getting in contact with absent friends: gongs, foghorns, howling naked on the roof under a full moon, table-turning.
Trampling his phone had partially relieved the headache which had been gripping him since he woke up. Only partially though, because in his mouth there was still an unpleasant taste of something missing. Emma, of course, but something else as well, a sort of whirlpool which, with the noise of a howling tornado, was consuming the incredible heap of junk amid which he lived, or rather had gone to ground in like a badger in its sett.
‘Perhaps I’m dead and I don’t know yet.’
Immediately his hand went to his heart. OK, so it wasn’t Rio Carnival, just an old-fashioned tango, but it was still beating. What, then? There was definitely a leak in the mass of objects behind which he was trying awkwardly to hide. He could distinctly hear a whistling sound, like a punctured tyre. He picked up the cat snoring