It was all very well for me to pull up the mouth of the plastic bag: it barely reached Jojo’s neck, and his head stuck out. Another way would be to put him into the sack head first, but that still didn’t solve the problem, because then his feet emerged. The solution would have been to make him bend his knees, but much as I tried to help him with some kicks, his legs, which had become stiff, resisted, and in the end when I did succeed, legs and sack bent together: he was still harder to move and the head stuck out worse than before.
“When will I manage really to get rid of you, Jojo?” I said to him, and every time I turned him around I found that silly face of his in front of me, the heart-throb mustache, the hair soldered with brilliantine, the knot of his tie sticking out of the sack as if from a sweater, I mean a sweater dating from the years when he still followed the fashion. Maybe Jojo had arrived at the fashion of those years a bit late, when it was no longer the fashion anywhere, but having envied as a young man those characters dressed like that, with their hair like that, from their
brilliantine to their black patent-leather shoes with velvet saddles, he had identified that look with good fortune, and once he had made it he was too taken up with his own success to look around and notice that the men he wanted to resemble had a completely different appearance.
The brilliantine held well; even when I pressed his skull, to push him down into the sack, his crown of hair remained spherical and split only into compact strips that stood up in an arc. The knot of his tie had gone a bit crooked; instinctively I started to straighten it, as if a corpse with a crooked tie might attract more attention than a corpse that was neat.
“You need another sack to stick over his head,” Bernadette said, and once again I had to admit that girl’s intelligence was superior to what you would expect from one of her background.
The trouble was that we couldn’t manage to find another large-size plastic bag. There was only one, for a kitchen garbage can, a small orange sack that could serve very well to conceal his head, but not to conceal the fact that this was a human body contained in one sack, with the head contained in a smaller one.
But the way things were, we couldn’t stay in that basement any longer, we had to get rid of Jojo before daylight, we had already been carrying him around for a couple of hours as if he were alive, a third passenger in my convertible, and we had already attracted the attention of too many people. For instance, those two cops on their bicycles who came over quietly and stopped to look at us as we were about to tip him into the river (the Pont de Bercy had seemed deserted a moment before), and immediately Bernadette and I start slapping him on the back, Jojo slumped there, his head and hands swaying over the rail, and I cry, “Go ahead, vomit it all up, mon vieux, it’ll clear your head!” And, both of us supporting him, his arms around our necks, we carry him to the car.
At that moment the gas that accumulates in the belly of corpses is expelled noisily; the two cops burst out laughing. I thought that Jojo dead had quite a different character from the living Jojo, with his finicky manners; and, alive, he wouldn’t have been so generous, coming to the aid of two friends who were risking the guillotine for his murder.
Then we started looking for the plastic bag and the can of gas, and now all we had to find was the place. It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse. “Isn’t there a forest at Fontainebleau?” I say, starting the motor, to Bernadette, who has sat down beside me again. “Tell me the way; you know the road.” And I thought that perhaps when the sun had tinged the sky gray we would be coming back into the city in the line of trucks carrying vegetables, and in a clearing among the hornbeams nothing would be left of Jojo but a charred and fetid residue, and my past as well. And as well, I say, this might be the time when I can convince myself that all my pasts are burned and forgotten, as if they had never existed.
How many times had I realized that my past was beginning to weigh on me, that there were too many people who thought I was in their debt, materially and morally— for example, at Macao, the parents of the girls of the “Jade Garden” (I mention them because there’s nothing worse than Chinese relations when it comes to not being able to get rid of them) and yet when I hired the girls I made a straightforward deal, with them and their families, and I paid cash, so as not to see them constantly turning up there, the skinny mothers and fathers in white socks, with a bamboo basket smelling of fish, with that lost expression as if they had come from the country, whereas they all lived in the port quarter. As I was saying, how many times, when the past weighed too heavily on me, had I been seized by that hope of a clean break: to
change jobs, wife, city, continent—one continent after the other, until I had made the whole circle—habits, friends, business, customers. It was a mistake, but when I realized that, it was too late.
Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others. It was all very well for me to say each time: What a relief, I’ll turn the mileage back to zero, I’ll erase the blackboard. The morning after the day I arrived in a new country, this zero had already become a number with so many ciphers that the meter was too small, it filled the blackboard from one side to the other, people, places, likes, dislikes, missteps. Like that night when we were looking for the right place to burn up Jojo, our headlights searching among the tree trunks and the rocks, and Bernadette pointing to the dashboard: “Look. Don’t tell me we’re out of gas.” She was right. With all the things on my mind, I had forgotten to fill the tank, and now we risked ending up miles from nowhere with a broken-down car, at a time when all the service stations were closed. Fortunately, we hadn’t set fire to Jojo yet: if we had come to a halt only a short distance from the pyre, we couldn’t have run off on foot, leaving behind a car that could be identified as mine. In other words, all we could do was pour into our tank the can of gas meant to soak Jojo’s blue suit, his mono-grammed silk shirt, and then beat it back to the city as fast as possible, trying to dream up another plan for getting rid of him.
It was all very well for me to say that every time I had landed in a jam I had always extricated myself, from every lucky situation as well as from every disaster. The past is like a tapeworm, constantly growing, which I carry
curled up inside me, and it never loses its rings no matter how hard I try to empty my guts in every WC, English-style or Turkish, or in the slop jars of prisons or the bedpans of hospitals or the latrines of camps, or simply in the bushes, taking a good look first to make sure no snake will pop out, like that time in Venezuela. You can’t change your past any more than you can change your name; in spite of all the passports I’ve had, with names I can’t even remember, everybody has always called me Ruedi the Swiss. Wherever I went and however I introduced myself, there has always been somebody who knew who I was and what I had done, even though my appearance has changed a lot with the passing years, especially since my head has become hairless and yellow as a grapefruit, which happened during the typhoid epidemic aboard the Stjarna, because, considering the cargo we were carrying, we couldn’t approach shore or even radio for help.
Anyway, the conclusion to which all stories come is that the life a person has led is one and one alone, uniform and compact as a shrunken blanket where you can’t distinguish the fibers of the weave. And so if by chance I happen to dwell on some ordinary detail of an ordinary day, the visit of a Singhalese who wants to sell me a litter of newborn crocodiles in a zinc tub, I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life, my life, which continues even in this place from which I have decided I must not move any more, this little house with a courtyard garden in the Parisian banlieu where I have set up my tropical-fish aquarium, a quiet business, which forces me more than any other would to lead a stable life, because you can’t neglect the fish, not even for one day, and as for women, at my age you have earned the right not to feel like getting involved in new troubles.
Bernadette is a different story. With her I could say I had proceeded without a single error: as soon as I had learned Jojo was back in Paris and was on my trail, I didn’t delay a moment before setting out on his trail, and so I discovered Bernadette, and I was able to get her on my side, and we worked out the job together, without his suspecting a thing. At the right moment I drew the curtain aside and the first thing I saw of him—after all the years in which we had lost sight of each other—was the piston movement of his big hairy behind between her white knees; then the neatly combed hair on the back of his head on the pillow, beside her face, a bit wan, moving ninety degrees to leave me free to strike. Everything happened in the quickest and cleanest way, giving him no time to turn and recognize me, to know who had arrived to spoil his party, maybe not even to become aware of crossing the border between the hell of the living and the hell of the dead.
It was better like that, for me to look him in the face only as a dead man. “The game’s over, you old bastard,” I couldn’t help saying to him, in an almost affectionate voice, while Bernadette was dressing him neatly, including the patent-leather-and-velvet shoes, because we had to carry him outside pretending he was so drunk he couldn’t stand on his own feet. And I happened to think of our first meeting all those years ago in Chicago, in the back of old Mrs. Mikonikos’s shop, full of busts of Socrates, when I realized that I had invested the insurance money from the faked fire in his rusty slot machines and that he and the old paralytic nymphomaniac had me in their power. The day before, looking from the dunes at the frozen lake, I had tasted such freedom as I had never felt for years, and in the course of twenty-four hours the space around me had closed again, and everything was being decided in a block of stinking houses between the Greek neighborhood and the Polish neighborhood. My
life had known turning points of this sort by the dozen, in one direction or the other, but after that I never stopped trying to get even with him, and since then the list of my losses had only grown longer. Even now that the smell of corpse began to rise through his cheap cologne, I realized that the game with him wasn’t yet over, that Jojo dead could ruin me yet again as he had ruined me so often when alive.
I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told. In fact, looking in perspective at everything I am leaving out of the main narration, I see something like a forest that extends in all directions and is so thick that it doesn’t allow light to pass: a material, in other words, much richer than what I have chosen to put in the foreground this time, so it is not impossible that the person who follows my story may feel himself a bit cheated, seeing that the stream is dispersed into so many trickles, and that of the essential events only the last echoes and reverberations arrive at him; but it is not impossible that this is the very effect I aimed at when I started narrating, or let’s say it’s a trick of the narrative art that I am trying to employ, a rule of discretion that consists in maintaining my position slightly below the narrative possibilities at my disposal.
Which, if you look closer, is the sign of real wealth, solid and vast, in the sense that if, we’ll assume, I had only one story to tell, I would make a huge fuss over this story and would end up botching it in my rage to show it in its
true light, but, actually having in reserve a virtually unlimited supply of narratable material, I am in a position to handle it with detachment and without haste, even allowing a certain irritation to be perceptible and granting myself the luxury of expatiating on secondary episodes and insignificant details.
Every time the little gate creaks—I’m in the shed with the tanks at the end of the garden—I wonder from which of my pasts the person is arriving, seeking me out even here: maybe it is only the past of yesterday and of this same suburb, the squat Arab garbage collector who in October begins his rounds for tips, house by house, with a Happy New Year card, because he says that his colleagues keep all the December tips for themselves and he never gets a penny; but it could also be the more distant pasts pursuing old Ruedi, finding the little gate in the Impasse: smugglers from Valais, mercenaries from Katanga, croupiers from the Varadero casino and the days of Fulgencio Batista.
Bernadette had no part in any of my pasts; she knew nothing of the old business between Jojo and me that had forced me to eliminate him like that, maybe she believed I had done it for her, for what she had told me of the life he has forced her into. And for the money, naturally, which was no pittance, even if I couldn’t yet say that I felt it in my pocket. It was our common interest that kept us together: Bernadette is a girl who catches on right away; in that mess, either we managed to get out of it together or we were both done for. But certainly Bernadette had something else in the back of her mind: a girl like her, if she’s going to get by, has to be able to count on somebody who knows his way around; if she had got me to rid her of Jojo, it was in order to put me in his place. There had been all too many stories of this sort in my past, and they had all been total losses for me; this was why I had retired from business and didn’t want to go back into it.
And so, when we were about to begin our nighttime wanderings, with him all snappily dressed and sitting properly in the back of the convertible, and her sitting beside me up front, forced to stretch one arm back to hold him steady, as I was about to start the engine, suddenly she flings her left leg over the gearshift and puts it on top of my right leg. “Bernadette!” I cry. “What are you doing?” And she explains to me that when I burst into the room I interrupted her at a moment when she can’t be interrupted; never mind whether with one of us or the other, she had to pick up at that same point and keep on till the end. Meanwhile with one hand she was holding the dead man and with the other she was unbuttoning me, all three of us crammed into that tiny car, in a public parking lot of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Wriggling her legs in contortions—harmonious ones, I must say—she sat astride my knees and almost smothered me in her bosom as in a landslide. Jojo meanwhile was falling on top of us, but she was careful to push him aside, her face only inches from the face of the dead man, who looked at her with the whites of his widened eyes. As for me, caught by surprise like this, with my physical reactions following their own course, obviously preferring to obey her than to follow my own terrified spirit, without even having to move, since she thought of everything—well, I realized then that what we were doing was a ceremony to which she attached a special meaning, there before the dead man’s eyes, and I felt the soft, very tenacious grip closing and I couldn’t escape her.
“You’ve got it wrong, girl,” I would have liked to say to her. ‘That dead man died because of another story, not yours, a story that hasn’t ended yet.” I would have liked to tell her that there was another woman between me and Jojo, in that story not yet ended, and if I keep skipping from one story to another it’s because I keep circling around that story and escaping, as if it were the first day
of my escape, the minute I learned that she and Jojo had joined forces to ruin me. It’s a story that sooner or later I’ll also end up telling, but in the midst of all the others, not giving more importance to one than to another, not putting any special passion into it beyond the pleasure of narrating and remembering, because even remembering evil can be a pleasure when the evil is mixed I won’t say with good, but with variety, the volatile, the changeable, in other words with what I can also call good, which is the pleasure of seeing things from a distance and narrating them as what is past.
“This will also be fun to tell when we’re out of it,” I said to Bernadette, getting into that elevator with Jojo in the plastic sack. Our plan was to drop him off the terrace of the top floor into a very narrow courtyard, where the next morning whoever found him would think of suicide or else a misstep during a robbery. And what if someone got into the elevator at one of the other floors and saw us with the sack? I would say the elevator had been called upstairs just as we were taking out the garbage. In fact it would soon be dawn.
“You can foresee all possible situations,” Bernadette says. And how could I have managed otherwise, I would like to say to her, having to watch out for Jojo’s mob for so many years, when he had his men in all the key cities of the big traffic? But I would have to explain to her the whole background of Jojo and that other woman, who never stopped demanding that I get him back the stuff that they said they lost through my fault, demanding I put around my neck again that chain of blackmail that still forces me to spend the night looking for a resting place for an old friend in a plastic sack.
With the Singhalese, too, I thought there was something behind the visit. “I don’t handle crocodiles, jeune homme,” I said to him. “Try the zoo, I deal in other articles, I supply the shops downtown, private aquariums in people’s apart-
ments, exotic fish, at the most turtles. They ask for iguanas now and then, but I don’t stock them. Too delicate.”
The boy—he must have been eighteen—stayed put; his mustache and eyelashes seemed like black feathers on his orange cheeks.
“Who sent you to me? Satisfy my curiosity,” I asked him, because when Southeast Asia is involved, I am always distrustful, and I have my own good reasons.
“Mademoiselle Sibylle,” he says.
“What does my daughter have to do with crocodiles?” I cry. It’s true, she’s been living on her own for some time now, but whenever I hear news of her I become uneasy. I don’t know why, the thought of children has always inspired me with a kind of remorse.
And so I learn that in a boîte on Place Clichy, Sibylle does a number with alligators; at first the news made such a nasty impression on me that I didn’t ask for further details. I knew she was working in nightclubs, but the idea that she exhibits herself in public with a crocodile seems to me the last thing a father could wish as the future of his only daughter; at least for a man like me, who had a Protestant upbringing.
“What’s it called, this great nightclub?” I say, livid. “I’d like to go and have a look for myself.”
He hands me a little cardboard advertisement, and I immediately feel cold sweat down my back, because that name, the Nouvelle Titania, looks familiar to me, all too familiar, even if these are memories from another part of the globe.
“And who runs it?” I ask. “Yes, the manager, the boss!”
“Ah, Madame Tatarescu, you mean…” And he lifts the zinc tub again, to take the litter away.
I was staring at that tangle of green scales, claws, tails, gaping mouths, and it was as if I had been clubbed on the skull, my ears transmitted nothing now but a grim buzz, a roar, the trumpet of the beyond, as soon as I had heard
the name of that woman from whose destroying influence I had managed to tear Sibylle, covering our traces across two oceans, constructing for the girl and me a calm, silent life. All in vain. Vlada had caught up with her daughter, and through Sibylle she again had me in her power, with the capacity only she possessed for rousing in me the fiercest aversion and the darkest attraction. Already she was sending me a message in which I could recognize her: that roiling of reptiles, to remind me that evil was the only vital element for her, that the world was a pit of crocodiles which I could not escape.
In the same way I looked, leaning from the terrace, down at the bottom of that leprous courtyard. The sky was already brightening, but down there the darkness was still thick, and I could barely make out the irregular stain that Jojo had become after hurtling through the void with the flaps of his jacket spread out like wings and after shattering all his bones with a boom like a firearm’s.
The plastic sack had remained in my hand. We could leave it there, but Bernadette was afraid that if they found it, they would be able to reconstruct the way things had gone, so it was best to take it away and get rid of it.
On the ground floor, as we opened the elevator, there were three men with their hands in their pockets.
“Hello, Bernadette.”
And she said, “Hello.”
I didn’t like the idea of her knowing them, especially since the way they dressed, though more up to date than Jojo’s, betrayed, to my eyes, a certain family likeness.
“What are you carrying in that sack? Let’s have a look,” the biggest of the three says.
“See for yourself. It’s empty,” I say, calmly.
He sticks one hand into it. “What’s this, then?” He takes out a black patent-leather shoe with a velvet saddle.