Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [103]
I laboriously explained my business to this Willy, who didn’t answer because, as the boss confided to me, he’d had his vocal cords slit in Kigali, in 1994. Willy listened to me, staring straight into my eyes as if I were finally confessing that I was responsible for the massacre of his family and his whole people, as the commander-in-chief of the French army that protected the Hutu militia who murdered 800,000 Tutsis with machetes and screwdrivers. The manager seemed to agree, she wasn’t laughing anymore either. Willy disappeared and came back with a package wrapped up with tape. He put the package in a plastic envelope and then in a Nicolas wine-bottle bag. He put it on the bar and again I thought of my boy unwrapping his presents under the Christmas tree. It seemed polite to order a beer and buy one for Willy, but the manager said fuck off, asshole, we’ve had enough of you.
“Yeah, we had enough of you,” Willy echoed. “Fuck off or I’ll gut you like a chicken.”
I thought my guts had been emptied out already but I didn’t get into an argument.
Episode
I went back by crossing through Sainte-Anne. It’s a shortcut, and a peaceful walk. You’d think it was a big convent with its tennis courts, archways, statues of men on horseback (or not), a romantic garden, and a decent cafeteria with reasonable prices. My daughter is a performer there sometimes. It took her a long time to find her way. When she was thirteen she became introverted and anorexic and I really thought she would become a nun, but that’s when she came back to us with bright red hair and a black mouth, fishnet tights and parachute boots. She was inseparable from her girlfriend Fred who had the same deadly pale gargoyle face tattooed with aggressive devils and pierced from eyebrows to lips with square-headed nails. Which is why, when Fred jumped out of the fourteenth floor across from our apartment, first I thought I saw the two of them together, but I was seeing double at that time anyway. Now I see clearly, I see simply, I see things the way they are. I think my daughter was the one who pushed Fred, the way you push away your evil genius. So my daughter wasn’t so crazy, but she was crazy enough to be locked up in an asylum with a room kept for her here for the last five years.
“No such thing as crazy,” she said to me last time. “I’m paranoid because of you. I was unable to sublimate my homosexual desire, which you never recognized, into a social drive. You never accepted Frederique as my sister because then your attraction to her would have been incestuous.”
“I wasn’t her father.”
So we sort of had an interesting discussion, I mean it went way beyond the disgusted faces and monosyllabic yells our father-daughter dialogue had been reduced to. At the time she was part of a theater group in her psychiatric hospital. If there had been an audience she would have turned her back on it, and if she’d had a script to recite she would have watched out for spying ears. But there was no script, no audience, just a director, who in fact didn’t have a stage. Nonetheless, my daughter had found her way and if some might say it was a dead-end street, what could they say about their own way? I really felt like consoling my daughter and telling her that her little dead-end was finer than the widest highways. I knew where I could find her, she usually hid behind big trees to throw stones at the birds. I don’t look anything like a bird and yet when she saw me she screamed and threw a handful of big pebbles. I think she recognized me. At least she recognized a man. A potential rapist: She hates that. That’s the way she’s been, especially since her nonpsychiatric episode a year ago. She was doing better, she’d gone back to school and even found a temp job as a cashier to pay for it since I was unemployed at the time, but the boss kept telling