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November 4 - December 17, 2018
He didn’t look away quickly enough. Their eyes met. She froze, pulled the belt of her bathrobe tighter, and went into the kitchen.
Life had slipped through their fingers, faster than money.
Her lips rested on his forehead, then on his lips. A furtive, tender kiss. If happiness existed, he’d just come close to it.
He couldn’t get enough of her smile, her mouth. He clung to her eyes.
I remembered a song by Aznavour: Poverty isn’t so hard in the sun. I don’t suppose he’d ever been here, to this pile of shit and concrete.
That was the future, waiting to go on some kind of course, whatever it was. It was better than waiting for nothing at all.
They’d lost, of course. You can never win against the arbitrary decisions of the men in suits.
there was sadness in the action, and the anger that goes with sadness.
Pleasure involves respect, and respect starts with words. That’s something I’ve always thought.
letting myself be transported by her smile, the shape of her lips, the dimples in her cheeks, the astonishing mobility of her face. Looking at her, and feeling her knee against mine, gave me a chance not to think.
We’re slaves, not idiots. That’s all you have to understand.”
After the love, I went back on the other side of my border. Back to the territory where I have my own rules, my own laws, my own code, and my own stupid obsessions. The territory where I lose my way, and where I lost the women who ventured onto it.
That sense of some distant, unknown country from where she’d come and toward which she seemed to want to return.
Her fingers were burning hot. I felt as if she was branding me. For life.
She was already running away from this world, to a place where there was nothing but shit, piss and tears. And the dust she’d be eating forever.
Of course, every new caress would only have taken us closer to the inevitable: break-ups, tears, disillusionment, sadness, anguish, loathing. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to the mess that human beings make of this world.
Only the cicadas continued their whine, indifferent to human tragedies.
Fucking sky. Fucking cicadas. Fucking country. Not that I was any better.
In fishing, you cast the rod, then concentrate on the float. You don’t cast the rod just any old how. You can recognize an angler by the way he casts. Casting is part of the art of angling. Once you’ve attached the bait to the hook, you have to let yourself be imbued by the sea and the play of light on it. It isn’t enough to know that the fish is there, under the surface. The hook has to touch the water as lightly as a fly. You have to anticipate the bite, to strike the fish at the very moment it bites.
As a detective, he was a whole lot better than most, a whole lot better than me.
But I couldn’t resign myself to long-line fishing. You catch a lot of fish that way. Pandora, sea bream, gurnard, goby. But I don’t enjoy it. You attach hooks every six feet along the line, and let it trail on the water. I still had a long line in the boat, just in case. For days when I didn’t want to get home empty-handed. But to me, fishing meant a rod and line.
When the world opens its eyes, reality reasserts itself, and you’re back with the same old shit.
They emerged from the shadows, as silent as cats. By the time I realized they were there, it was too late. They pulled a thick plastic bag down over my head, and two arms slid under my armpits and around my chest and lifted me off the ground. The arms were like steel. I was pinned against the guy’s body. I struggled. A powerful blow hit me in the stomach. I opened my mouth and swallowed all the oxygen that was still in the bag. Shit! What was the guy hitting me with? A second blow. Same strength. A boxing glove. Fuck! A boxing glove! There was no more oxygen in the bag. Shit! I kicked out with
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Since the morning I’d taken six Dolipran, three Guronsan and gallons of coffee. I wasn’t feeling great, but I was still standing.
It was only a few minutes from Marseilles, but people said: I live in L’Estaque. Not Marseilles.
He kept wringing his hands. There were beads of sweat on his forehead.
Best case scenario, the boys would be taxi drivers, like their dad. And the girl a trainee hairdresser. Or an assistant at Prisunic. Ordinary French people. Citizens of fear.
But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does is bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.
The more unemployment there was, the more aware people became of the immigrants. And the number of Arabs seemed to be increasing along with the unemployment!
And that’s what the Arabs were doing, stealing our own poverty off our plates!
Other kids are given candy, poor kids get beaten.
He looked me up and down. The bad pupil. Bottom of the class. His contemptuous look didn’t scare me. I’d been used to looks like that ever since elementary school. I’d been insolent, a fighter, a loudmouth. I’d had my fill of lectures, both individually and as part of a group. I looked straight back at him, my hands in the pockets of my jeans.
Where happiness is an accumulation of insignificant everyday things. A ray of sunlight, a smile, washing drying at a window, a boy dribbling with a tin can, a song by Vincent Scotto, a slight breeze lifting a woman’s dress...
Outside, it still smelled bad. I couldn’t do anything about that. Neither could anyone. It was called life: a cocktail of love and hate, strength and weakness, violence and passivity.
