Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [47]
When she screams, you can hear her in the silence of the night for blocks around. In the summer, if I have my window open, her animal cries split the air above the rooftops like a witch’s broom and come to me.
She doesn’t howl every night, only when she’s scared or when she remembers that day during the German occupation when she came back home to find out that a roundup had taken place and that all her family had been taken away.
Her screams don’t bother me anymore, but on that Christmas Eve, under the thick drizzle that had started up again, in that deserted street whose sidewalks would tomorrow be lined with garbage cans overflowing with oyster shells, they made me shiver. I started to walk faster.
Chez Léon is a big, long room with a bar on the right side. I sometimes go there at the end of the evening to have a drink with the owner, a cocky young guy from Morroco I like; he suggested a couple of years back that we go into business together: The idea was to set up a car deal between North Africa and France. His name is El-Hadji; he’s a fun-loving Muslim with a sexy walk and a soft way of looking at you. Conversations are rather limited with him—sex and money—but it doesn’t matter because you can feel friendship behind the words and occasionally even something like tenderness.
Our friendship nearly suffered a major blow three years ago when he got it into his head that Lola, whom he had known since she was very little, was becoming “a real knockout,” as he put it. I had no desire to see Lola be a member of El-Hadji’s harem even if he’s my friend and a nice guy. But I stuck to the principles of education I’ve always given Lola and I didn’t prevent her from going out with him when he invited her to dinner. A good decision really. After the third time, she said he was the biggest asshole, that he was so fucking thick, and how in the world could a guy like that be my friend. She didn’t set foot in Chez Léon for several months after that and I was able to go back to my routine there, without ever bringing up the business with my pal El-Hadji.
I happened to help him out, professionally, once or twice, and since then, it’s friendship for life between us, he says. I’m not that committed; I only hope he stays here; I don’t want him to drop everything and move to the suburbs—he talks about doing that sometimes. I just want to keep coming here like tonight, like I’ve done for the past ten years since he showed up as a young waiter. I want to keep bathing in the milk of human kindness, as Shakespeare wrote, more or less.
El-Hadji got married six months ago (after I did a little investigation on his bride to be, at his request, to see if she was faithful) and he stopped talking about women for a while. (It’s sort of coming back now.) He’s a complete egocentric: A week after his wedding, he had his sexy head of curly hair clipped because it was more comfortable for wearing his bike helmet; and now that he’d found a serious woman, he didn’t care about being good-looking anymore.
His wife is pregnant now and for the last two or three months he’s been complaining about her big belly and letting