Vie Francaise by Jean-Paul Dubois

Author:Jean-Paul Dubois [Dubois, Jean-Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49853-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Consuelo and Talgo watched me leave the way one would step back from a booby trap.

The Boeing left on time and I barely made it on board. Padded with paper money, bundled in bills, I was armored in currency. I'd stuffed it everywhere. In the pockets of my trousers, shirt, jacket, raincoat, in the linings of my clothes, around my waist, and even in my socks, wrapped around my ankles. During a few fleeting bursts of euphoria, I rejoiced to think that I had prevailed over those two sleazeballs, escaping alive from their den of thieves. An instant later, I would be awash in anguish, afraid that I'd been conned, or scammed by some mathematical sleight of hand in the exchange rate. Bathed in perspiration, my hands clammy and trembling, I shut myself in the toilet to hastily recount the small packets of my loot. Or rather, of this money that would relieve my mother of her most pressing worries.

When I slipped behind the wheel of my car in the parking lot of the airport in Barcelona, I must have looked like one of those disaster survivors who grin beatifically at everything in sight, grateful to their rescuers and ready to love the whole world until the end of time. I turned the ignition key and my ancient Triumph's six cylinders rushed headlong into the throes of combustion. Another few hundred kilometers and my mission would be over. On the highway leading to the border crossing at Le Perthus, it occurred to me that while French capital was fleeing abroad in all directions during that May, I must have been the sole French citizen plotting to bring money into the country.

This comical predicament then veered into the grotesque. About twenty kilometers from the border, the engine began making a strange metallic gargling that ended in a sharp crack—followed by utter silence. For a moment the Triumph seemed to glide serenely above this problem, but, overtaken by reality, it slowed inexorably to a stop in the emergency lane. The timing chain had just snapped. A full day's work—if you had all the pieces on hand and if the crankshaft and valves had survived this devastating breakdown. Even before I went to call a tow truck from the roadside emergency telephone, my first reflex was to collect the many bundles of pesetas I had concealed in the glove compartment and the side pockets of the doors and hide them again in all the pockets of my clothes. I was just finishing that operation when I noticed a Seat pulling in behind me: the Guardia Civil had arrived.

The proceeds from that apartment were cursed: Spain and Catalonia were making me pay a high price for that familial collaboration! Since those two policemen would definitely find it strange that I crackled like an old newspaper whenever I moved, they were going to frisk me, and I would be locked up in the worst prison cell on the peninsula along with Arias Navarro and other elderly brutes of the regime.

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