Notes from the Cévennes, page 12
A few days later we saw, lying up in the gutter near the den’s opening, a massive thigh bone, no doubt that of a wild boar. The marten, or two of them, must have dragged it there somehow and found it too big for the hole. The next day it was gone. I asked Jo if she’d removed it. No. Somehow, they must have squeezed it in. There didn’t seem to have been any meat on it, but maybe the marrow would provide protein, and their jaws and teeth would be exercised. There was an air of enterprise about these creatures.
Over the week there was a sudden increase in noise: thumping, skittering, the same screeches. For periods of 10 minutes or so the rave metaphor served well. We could live with it, if it was not too frequent. And then one late afternoon, Jo saw what looked like a puddle on the sitting-room floor. We looked up. The ceiling was dripping every few seconds, and a circular yellowish patch had appeared. ‘Just like that scene in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,’ I remarked. ‘With wee instead of blood.’ A faint whiff of the byre.
I bought mothballs the next day. We already had joss-sticks. I lit several and the draught under the eaves sucked the smoke into the roof space. I tossed the mothballs in for good measure. A bit of a fuss overhead the following morning, and Jo swore she could hear the sound of suitcases being dragged, a huffing and puffing, a ‘where’ve you put my socks?’ squeal. Within a day or two there was silence, but I tossed in a few more mothballs when we thought we heard a thump. The increasing summer heat baking the roof-tiles may have discouraged them, too: they are fussy about temperature.
Where had they fled to? A month later, I found their loo in the garden. Very like badgers in their toilet habits, they dig a hole first. The scats were unmistakably marten-like, full of colourful berries and seeds. Unless, of course, we had a resident badger, too. But I prefer to think that they didn’t want to lose our reassuring scent, and simply moved up the road into their own flat somewhere in the bushes where they can rave as much as they like.
16
A Visit from the City Police
The would-be tagine restaurant below our flat has been afflicted with the same curse as the others before it, dwindling to a rather scruffy café with mainly male habitués, and offering takeaway pizzas no one buys. The scruffiness is mainly due to each of its large panes of glass displaying spiderweb cracks and what look like the impact of bullets. At least it’s quiet. I regret the Moroccan fare, particularly Fatima’s apricot-scattered tagine in its earthenware pot, and told Ajwad so. His mistake, he admitted, was to try to drum up business in the neighbouring quartier a street or two north of ours. He didn’t realise, being an ingénu, that this area is miserably poor and popular with heroin addicts (many of them ex-Foreign Legion, whose vast barracks lie off a main road out of town just a mile or so up the hill). Ajwad’s enthusiasm is catching, even among the dejected, and within days the results were evident: a clientele of sullen appearance happy to stay half the day on the terrace below my study without consuming more than a cup of coffee. Even tourists don’t come near it, congregating in the other cafés in the square, which are thriving.
Sensibly, Ajwad has sublet the business to a young man called Aziz, whose initial zeal has taken the familiar downturn, although a white-jacketed waiter with embroidered cuffs is perhaps a more recent indication of renewed hope. Nevertheless, the stocky form of Ajwad remains a familiar, even ubiquitous sight; not only does he hold forth volubly from his former business premises, mostly into his mobile phone, his apparent fury echoing off the buildings around and putting any lingering tourists off, but he has leased several empty commerces on our street and turned them into unquantifiable stores offering internet services, canned drinks, sweets, mobile phones and a medley of dry goods. A much larger space a few doors up is destined, according to the posters in the windows, to become a 24-hour supermarket with fresh fruit and veg, but has been held up in a dispute over the old-fashioned metal security grille which the Nîmes authorities, having entered the UNESCO city bid and intent on removing anything that might clog the works aesthetically or environmentally, wish to see replaced. ‘I’ve told them where to get off,’ Ajwad told me – and, as usual, the rest of the street.
With all this commercial gobbling up, along with his vocal decibels and hail-fellow tendency to greet acquaintances, including myself, with a hearty clap across the shoulders followed by a squeeze and a cry of mon frère (even if you have already met that day), Ajwad has become the street’s godfather with bewildering rapidity. If anything, his black leather jacket, half-white eyebrow and forehead bullet scar helps the impression.
Godfathers attract trouble, however. Quite big trouble, for a few weeks last year. The tiny rentable space just to the right of our front door, not to be outdone by its big brother facing the square, also sprouted a crack on its plate glass – a window, as someone jovially remarked, bigger than the shop itself. Having remained frozen in the vandalised state to which its late keeper had assigned it, the space had been suddenly cleared a few days earlier. ‘A pâtisserie,’ Ajwad had boomed in answer to my enquiry. ‘Moroccan specialities!’
We were delighted, but once the ‘gang of yobs’ (as he called them) had taken another boot to the newly cleaned panes, his plans were stalled.
Eventually a set of primitive metal shelves was erected, and a small blackboard unfolded in front, with Alimentation 7 sur 7 scrawled in faint chalk under a Fanta sticker. The promised provisions consisted of no more than fizzy drinks; bottles of lurid sirop jostling the odd beer; and truly bumper packets of crisps. A rota of youthful personnel, frequently gathering on the pavement in their fake leathers or drawn-up hoods, with their muzzled, stud-collared dogs tautly held on steel-chain leashes, would make our own exits and entrances a tiresome process. Nevertheless, I initially greeted them chummily on the basis that just because they looked like drug dealers from The Wire (a TV series we were watching at the time) didn’t necessarily mean that they were. The universal response was a surly glare, as if the use of my own front door was a nuisance to them.
I avoided ticking them off, even when I had to struggle in or out with the shopping or my bulky leather briefcase, dating from the 1960s and reassuringly solid. It was worse for my daughter, home from university. ‘They just stare at me,’ she moaned, giving a decent impression of a sex-starved zombie.
Our pavement threshold had become, almost overnight, their territory. This is temporary, I kept telling myself. I was particularly nervous of the tall, sporty-looking number in jet-black tracksuit and shades with a silver chain around his neck: he manned the half-empty shop on a full-time basis and either ordered the others around or talked intensely and urgently into his mobile. All my instincts told me that, while the others were possibly playing a role, or had fallen into crime through debt and desperation, he was serious, the type to be working out regularly and admiring his pecs. He had a squat, pug-nosed sidekick – pitted cheeks, face liberally pierced with studs, clad from head to foot in over-large denim – who also worried me. A trainer was suspended by its laces from the permanent wire slung across the street for the yearly Christmas lights: this, I already knew, was a signal to clients that the desired goods were nearby. I wanted to consult with Ajwad, but was told that he and his wife were visiting family in the Maghreb.
Like an unsubtle film, things swiftly hotted up. Mercs with tinted windows cruised very slowly past our door, while more men with nothing to do slouched at intervals further up the road. They might as well have been wearing tee-shirts with JE SUIS UN CHOUF printed on them (‘chouf’ being slang for ‘guetteur’, or look-out). I discovered (by asking not them but Google) that your standard look-out made 50 euros a day and risked 10 years in prison. I was starting to get really annoyed, particularly when I learnt how much the tall one in a silver chain was probably earning. On passing the choufs on my way to work at the art school, I took to staring at them with a decent citizen’s disapproving expression, but stopped when I noticed they would get on their mobiles immediately, the next lot up then watching me with an unhealthy interest. Somehow, the idea of being ‘dealt with’ in front of my students was even more alarming.
Yasmine, in the chocolaterie directly opposite, was furious rather than scared: it was bad for trade – her customers being mostly genteel, silver-haired women with a penchant for top-quality Belgian chocolates made on the premises. The street being at its narrowest here, the two worlds were but a few yards apart. What she didn’t know until I told her was that, at around 10 at night, the little shop’s black blinds were drawn down, the door locked from the inside, and some sort of extra business continued on until the early hours – judging by the edging of light around the blinds. I had spotted kids going in, boys aged 12 or 13. Runners, possibly, terrorised into participation. In our very building! What annoyed her most of all was that there was no attempt to hide anything. ‘Where do they think this is? The cité? Casablanca? Such cheek!’ Being Moroccan herself, she didn’t have to mince her words.
‘I guess we ought to tell the police,’ I said, being careful not to glance too suspiciously through her plate glass at the men stationed opposite. I knew for a cast-iron fact that at least two of the local police force’s motorcycle fleet were hooked on hashish. I didn’t want to end up dangling on a rope as an informer.
She shook her head dismissively. ‘You don’t think the police know? That lot are being watched already. The cops are just biding their time. They have to know when to swoop.’
‘As long as there isn’t a shoot-out. You know how it is. Innocent bystanders.’
She handed me a truffle praline with a comforting smile. ‘Just be patient. Oh, and here’s one for your wife.’
A few days later, at the end of an exhausting ten-hour shift, she flipped. She told me afterwards how she’d locked up shop, turned round and caught them ogling her, and let fly at them. ‘I know what you’re up to! You’re just trying to ruin our quartier, to bring it down to your level! You disgust me! You’re not wanted here! OK?’ Apparently, faced with her tirade, they looked shamefaced. What, even the tall guy in black? ‘Well, maybe not him.’ I told her to be careful – adding that, if they came for her, she should offer them some distracting truffes. Her laugh was heartening.
Jo joined me on a modest reading tour across the Channel. On our return, the tiny shop was closed, the blackboard folded inside. No one hovered on the pavement. The café was its usual desultory self. Yasmine told me that the armed cops had swooped on Thursday afternoon. ‘Just like that.’ The tall one in black (I knew it!) had been bundled into the squad car and was now in prison awaiting trial. ‘They’ve got something on him,’ she said. ‘Robbery with violence, or worse. They’ve turned the place upside down.’ That would have been hard, I thought, given its meagre furnishings, but it did look a mess.
For a month or so, the odd window-tinted Merc continued to cruise slowly past, and dodgy guys in shades occasionally hovered by our threshold, looking perplexed rather than menacing. Someone – possibly the returned Ajwad, who’d claimed to have had nothing to do with the ‘stupid’ choice of tenant – stuck a handwritten sign on the shop’s glass door: NO PARKING IN FRONT OF THE WINDOW, PLEASE. Since there were no goods to display, and no vehicle could possibly park there without blocking the entire street, this seemed like another mysterious signal. Accosting me a little later, Ajwad offered the space to me (for a nominal price) ‘for your car, frère. No more parking charges.’ He was clearly no longer subletting. The cost was absurdly small, as would the car using it have to have been.
One late afternoon, the front-door bell buzzed. I opened the sitting-room window and looked down. Four men: two positioned at the corners opposite, two looking up at me. One flashed a card. ‘Police,’ he called up. Plain-clothes, evidently. I hurried down, imagining some family disaster, and opened the door to the card-flasher, short and bald and dressed in a pale blue puffa jacket and brown slacks. His expression was unfriendly. ‘We’re looking for the gang of young men that live here.’ ‘Not here,’ I replied, chuckling at the very idea. He frowned. ‘Who does live here, then?’ He was trying to peer in past my shoulder. I was conscious that what he could see – a cramped stairwell whose peeling cream distemper and bare steps hadn’t been touched since before the Great War – would have instantly fuelled his suspicions. After all, he was a detective.
‘Well, me, with my family, we live here. Monsieur Thorpe. I co-own the building,’ I added, reckoning this would make me more authoritative.
He glanced across the street at his own choufs in their sunglasses, stationed opposite and on the corner, who now appeared distinctly twitchy. ‘And who else?’ I stepped outside to indicate the windows above us. ‘Well, I live at the top with my family, the flat on the first floor to the left is being done up by Monsieur Lafont, who owns it . . .’
‘Empty?’
‘Yes,’ I chuckled again, a little more nervously, ‘but I can assure you that it’s uninhabitable, full of tools. And that one to the right is rented out.’
‘To whom? This man here?’ He was tapping on the male name above the letter-slit in the antique door.
‘Yes. Except that he’s not . . . Well, he’s in fact . . . He’s a woman, pour dire vrai.’
‘Hein?’
‘I mean, not officially . . . He really is one, though. Une dame. But officially, you see, he’s still a monsieur.’ I was floundering under his confused gaze; he didn’t even hear the word transgenre. Instead of a criminal gang, he had unearthed a mad Englishman busy digging his own judicial grave with every sentence. ‘Anyway, she lives on her own. With her small dog.’
I then pointed to my left, to the tiny and empty shop. ‘There were a few young people in there,’ I said, feebly. He shook his head. He evidently knew all about that lot.
‘Or you could try the café,’ I suggested, pointing the other way, feeling like the rat-like squealer who gets done in without any audience regret. ‘The pizzeria, en effet, these days,’ I added, as he still looked confused.
‘Someone’s made a real mistake,’ he growled, as if it was my own, and repeated our address. ‘They said they were here. Right here,’ he added, jabbing a finger past my elbow. Fleetingly, I imagined them secreted in the empty flat, hunched under their hoods, slipping in and out without us having a clue.
He refused to tell me why they were of such interest, just adding that he wanted ‘to talk to them’, and made no attempt to enter, despite his trio of heavies. Somehow, I must have been convincing. The four men left with a last desultory glance up and down the street. I gave my own ocular sweep of the terrain before stepping back in, turning the lock firmly behind me, twice. I paused on the way up before the empty flat’s ancient door, stripped of paint but not varnished. I even listened out for shufflings.
I didn’t think I would mention this visit to Ajwad, although I did tell M. Lafont.
Then, almost overnight, the little space became a barber’s shop, lined with mirrors and faux-leather chairs, the window filled with large posters of young men in 1970s haircuts. Its open door revealed a shadowy, murmurous interior, with barely room between the knees to swing a pair of scissors. At the time of writing, custom is picking up, but the barber himself, a friendly man in his forties from Meknès (a city we stayed in and liked), still spends much of the time forlornly smoking on the pavement, reminding me of the village wig-maker in Madame Bovary, who Emma watches ‘walking up and down, from the mairie to the church, gloomily awaiting customers’ and who longs ‘for some shop in a city.’ Nîmes is a city, but at times it feels as small and predictable as Emma’s Tostes. He informs me that Ajwad has just left for Morocco ‘definitively’. He had too loud a voice – an observation which may well be metaphoric as much as literal. ‘Un charlatan,’ he adds, with no need now to keep his own voice down. ‘He owes money to everyone.’
I indicate my overgrown, chestnut tangle, admitting that it’s mostly been cut by my wife for the last few years, and book an appointment for the afternoon. I anticipate further revelations in the barber’s chair. He looks pleased. ‘By the time I’ve finished,’ he says, chuckling, ‘there won’t be a trace of your wife left up there.’
17
Arches and Bulls
The urban practice of flânerie, perfected in the nineteenth century by the likes of Flaubert and Victor Hugo (‘Errer est humain, flâner est parisien’) demands effort and will: strolling idly about with the senses on alert is too easily put off for busier pursuits, not least squinting at your mobile phone. The area of Nîmes north and east of our apartment, outside the historic centre, is perfect for the true flâneur. The inhabitants range through all the classes bar the upper, most streets are not yet done up and the many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, from grand to extremely modest, are tinted in the sooty brown coat of long neglect. This is even true of the grand house or hôtel built by the renowned antiquarian and botanist Jean-François Séguier, a neglected érudit whose library and collection of fossils (‘empreintes’, as they were called at the time) made Nîmes even more of a compulsory stop on the European Grand Tour.
