After the War by Hervé Le Corre
Author:Hervé Le Corre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2019-07-24T16:00:00+00:00
29 French film actress, considered the Gallic version of Marilyn Monroe.
17
When André paid him in cash for three months rent in advance, the landlord, whose name is Ferrand, simply nodded and slipped the money into one trouser pocket, while taking the keys to the room from his other pocket. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “And feel free to call me if you need anything.” He lives practically opposite, barely twenty meters away, alone with his mentally ill daughter, Arlette, who can be heard laughing and crying and groaning in the mornings, when the windows are open. Screaming too, sometimes, as if terrified or tortured. The pigeons and all the other birds that hang around on the rooftops fly away. When that happens, the house-keeper quickly closes the window and the scream is suddenly muffled, its faded sound echoing in the street, a ghost dissolved into air.
A bedroom three meters by four, and a sort of living room that’s not much bigger. But clean. Walls, ceilings, floorboards. It has all been renovated, repainted, sanded, polished. A small kitchen has been put together in a little back room: gas stove, cupboard, stone sink. The sole luxury: a little water heater. As soon as the landlord closed the door, André washed in hot water, shivering all the same in his little nook, under that fanlight jammed shut, with the filthy glass through which only the bleakest, dimmest light penetrates, even in the middle of the day.
It’s on rue Surson, a hundred meters from the Quai de Bacalan. Near the river though, the view is only of the railings around the port and the brown concrete of the warehouses. Whole blocks of houses in the area belong to major wine merchants. Acres of storehouses and bottle-filling factories. Trucks shuttle the product to the docks, from where the stuff leaves to be poured down rich people’s throats all over the world.
Often, in the mornings, the entire neighborhood stinks of cheap wine. Today is one of those mornings. André goes out under a clear sky amid a racket of sparrows swooping from the rooftops and rolling in the gutters. A little bit of spring, already in a panic. His fingertips caress the butt of the pistol. He never goes anywhere without it now. There are eight cartridges in the clip. Enough to give him the chance to flee, to believe that it is still possible to emerge from this.
He walks quickly through the cool air, passing a fence intended to hide the ruins of two or three houses destroyed in the bombing raid of May 17th, 1943. The neighborhood is full of these sudden gaps lighting up a narrow street as if some wild urban planner had wanted to create a square. But what you can see after all these years is the plumbing clinging to what remains of a bathroom, walls with faded paint jobs, drab tiling, a whole private interior world exposed to the four winds, a dreary patchwork the only decoration. A flayed part of the city’s back, the skin turned back, left hanging in the impossibility of a scar.
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