“I’m not going to play, guys. Don’t start,” I say between two lungfuls of air.
René comes over to me.
“Never say never . . . I’m sure with time . . . Right, okay, it’s not easy to lose your leading hand, but with a good prosthetic you could manage a thing or two.”
I see . . . the future champion is dead but the friend is still there. After all, people come to the academy to enjoy themselves and not necessarily to reach the eternal heights of the most perfect game in the world. It’s a commendable intention . . . but I still had to bite my lip to stop myself swearing at him.
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, just doing a thing or two. At the moment I’m fine, I’ve almost lost the urge to play, but if you keep insisting you’ll end up really hurting me.”
Benoît has started playing, and Angelo has stopped looking at me.
“Do you want a bite to eat?” René asks.
“No, I wouldn’t mind a beer.”
“I know why he rifioose to play, old Antonio. It’s because he hasn’t kept his hand in.”
Complete silence. I must have heard wrong. Benoît almost missed his shot.
“You shouldn’t say things like that when I’m just about to play, idiot!”
“But it’s true, no? Antonio has been dealt a bad hand.”
What do I do? Do I laugh or smash his face in? A smile sketches its way onto Benoît’s lips.
“Got to hand it to him, he used to play masterfully.”
René has gone back to playing, with the others.
“He always knew how to keep the game in hand.”
I don’t understand what’s going on any more. They don’t usually elaborate on things like this, but . . .
“It would only have been a couple of years before he got his hands on the Championship.”
Benoît, very straight-faced, adds to this: “Yup, he’d have seen the competition off hand over fist.”
“Nothing underhand about his style, wouldn’t you say?”
I listen to them in stunned, defenceless silence. Are they my friends or are they not my friends? They’re not leaving me a split second to counterattack.
“He was pretty heavy-handed back there with that art dealer.”
“Well, yes . . . and the police nearly got him with the long arm of the law.”
The laughter starts bubbling up from every direction, and I just stand there like a prick.
“He wants to lay his hands on the culprit all by himself.”
Angelo is trying his best to hold back his laughter. Not for long, just long enough to add: “But, for the billiards, he needs to turn his hand in!”
“Hey . . . did you rehearse this before getting here, or what?” I ask in amazement.
“We just wanted you to try your hand at a thing or two . . .”
“Bunch of arseholes.”
“But if you like, we won’t force your hand, you know!”
Benoît is holding his sides, the other two are bent double, shaking in spasms.
“And the culprit, he want the hand to hand combat . . .”
I look down at the floor, piqued. And, in spite of myself, I can’t help letting out a little snort.
“Do you want me to start handing out punches?” I ask.
“No! Hand on heart!”
That’s the final blow. Benoît collapses onto a seat with his arms crossed over his stomach. René is convulsing, no longer able to contain himself. Angelo wipes a tear from the corner of his eye.
Almost giddy with laughing, he comes over to me.
“You don’t hate us, do you? We’re bastards, no?”
“I’ve known worse.” I said.
The room gradually falls silent again. I go back out onto the balcony with my stomach muscles burning. Nervous laughter, granted, but it’s taken the heat out of the situation. I would like Briançon to have seen me a couple of minutes ago. I’ve accepted the concept that I won’t play any more and I can laugh at myself, but not bitterly or cynically. Soon I’ll find out whether there is a future for me somewhere. Just one last thing to do, then the police can do whatever they want with me. I’ll leave my friends by tomorrow evening. I have no intention of abusing their hospitality. In my little hole today I reconfigured my moral right to revenge, and this time – with the murder I’ve just inherited – I mustn’t stop at anything. No need to have any scruples. When I saw Delarge, on the ground, spewing out his every last hate, I backtracked. I pitied him, not myself. My supplies of rage had gradually run dry. But I’m sure I can come up with one last little spurt. It’s like adrenaline – we don’t know it’s happening, but we still secrete the stuff.
*
René came and released me at the same time as the previous day. The three accomplices know I’m leaving and they’re not so full of jokes now.
“You’ve got stuff to sort out, we know that. Try to come back, one evening, when you’re not scared. If we have to start reading crap papers to get news of you . . .”
Who knows when I might be back . . .? I won’t come back as an outlaw, it’s too uncomfortable, too dusty. I will have thrown off the trappings of a criminal that suit me even less than my own garb as a tramp. I’ll come back relaxed, showered, shaved, at peace with myself.
I’ve asked René to ring the man who isn’t expecting me this evening. The man who works at night, to change the colour of his colours. I absolutely knew he would answer the phone, I had a feeling of certainty the minute I came out of my little hideout to go and breathe the night air.
“I’m so sorry, I must have the wrong number,” René said.
“Hope your balls roll well!” Benoît called, not really sure why he said it.
I left without saying goodbye, and Angelo followed me onto the stairs. I already told him yesterday he couldn’t come with me.
“Non fare lo stupido, get into the car, dickhead . . .”
I put my bag on the rear seat and sat next to Angelo. The angel. To avoid the Place de L’Etoile he went along the Rue de Tilsitt – a precaution that amazed me.
“So, when is the final for the Championship actually?”
“Last week. Bella partita, the guy from Marseille, he won the title. Langloff he come fourth.”
A good position, for a brave last stand.
“What about you, Angelo, didn’t you ever sign up for it?”
“I’m not French, for a start. And I would be out in the first round. I don’t play billiards for the competizione.”
“Well, why do you play then?”
“Oh well . . . I . . . Perche the baize is green and the balls are red and white. It’s the colours of my flag! Ammazza!”
We sat in silence for the whole rest of the journey. On the edge of the Parc Montsouris, not far from the Rue Nelson, he stopped the engine and I put my bag on my lap.
“What can I do now?”
“Nothing. You can’t help me any more.”
“Can I wait downstairs?”
“Don’t be stupid. You don’t know what I’m going to do yet.”
“Are you sure that he is alone?”
“Absolutely sure.”
“And do you have to take that bag?”
Actually, no, he’s right. There’s really only one thing in it that matters to me. I rummage through the old clothes and the papers to get it out. I do it in front of him, ostentatiously, so that he stops wanting to help me. When I have it in my hand, Angelo shudders.
“What are you going to do with that thing? Stop pissing about, Antonio. You’re not going to use that fucking thing.”
Worried then, Angelo. Just what I wanted.
“I’m getting you out of here, come on, forget about it . . . I have family, in Italia, they will find you a place for a few months, and then we will see, you could leave . . . I don’t know . . . put that thing down . . .”
“Do you still want to come with me?”
He doesn’t hesitate: “If you’ve gone mad, I prefer no.”
With gr
eat difficulty I manage to stuff the thing into my inside pocket. It won’t stay there long. I bought it after my convalescence.
“Are you going home now, Angelo?”
“No I’m going back alla’accademia. When I play, it calms me down and I don’t think about anything else.”
And he set off, just like that, without another word. I went up the Rue Nelson, which is no more than a cul-de-sac lined with smart three-storey houses with gardens and rose hedges. At number 44, almost at the end of the street, the general appearance is somewhat different. The garden is abandoned with a shrub covered in dried-out flowers and an abandoned hosepipe by the rusted gate. There are no lights on in the upper floors but on the ground floor, which is slightly downhill from me, I can make out a glow far away, at the back of the house. The gate is waist high – with two hands I could have climbed over it easily, without making a sound and without getting caught on the spikes. Like a petty thief coming to nick apples. I’m left-handed now but I don’t have the background for it.
It didn’t creak too much but I left a strip of my jacket on it. There’s a little gravel path down the right side of the house, leading to another garden at the back, even more ramshackle than the first. Couch grass and wild ivy have grown up all round a huge bay window with sliding doors that takes up one whole wall on the ground floor. I stood in the corner of the building a long time before making up my mind to look in.
Then I saw, at last.
There are two powerful spotlights converging on a wall. Their unbearably white light illuminates a stagnating mess. A trench carving its way through dozens of tins of paint piled up any old how, most of them closed but all of them dripping with crusty dried paint in a mishmash of colours. Empty, upturned paint pots, piles of lids stuck together for untold ages, crushed tubes, a myriad little glasses full of the same greenish soup, with forgotten paintbrushes in them or left on the floor. A copper basin with more paintbrushes, next to a whole load more glasses and splash marks, I keep seeing more of them, thrown here and there around the room. Jungles of newspapers have invaded every last corner of the room, a carpet of papers splattered with paint and torn by heavy footsteps. Floorboards covered in a jumble of paintings, not one of them identifiable. A huge canvas fitted between the floor and the beams on the ceiling exactly matches the dimensions of the wall. You’d swear it was a fresco. Part of it is already no longer white, on the left hand side I recognize the brushstrokes I saw at the Pompidou Centre.
Crouching in front of it, frozen like an animal about to pounce, I spot him at last. Him. Linnel. Ready for work. He almost had to move for me to recognize a human body in amongst that brightly coloured cataclysm. He too is daubed right up to the neck, with his T-shirt and jeans oozing green and black. I get it, he’s trying to lose himself against the rest. Chameleon tactics. He thought I would miss him, camouflaged, motionless, lost in the luxuriance of his own work. He stays there crouching, totally alone, a thousand miles from my prying eyes, perfectly taut and mesmerized by the blank space.
All of a sudden he lies down full length in the morass of newspapers, knocking over a glass of water without even noticing. Then he gets up, in one bound, and dips his brush in a pot drooling with yellow. The brush drips over to a little shelf and dives into a thick layer of white. Linnel stands facing the canvas, arm outstretched.
At that precise moment his hand started to fly.
I saw it twirling through space, darting here and there like a wasp, making scattered dabs of light appear. I saw it flitting in every direction, far from the rest of his body, creating its own anarchic and obvious geometry. I saw it skim airily over a forgotten area, then change its mind, abruptly, and come back to pick up more colour. More feverish than ever, it flew off again in a series of jerking movements, dispensing black arcs in every direction, most of them broken in exactly the same place, going back over some of them to make them smoother or more curved.
Linnel came back to his senses, his eyes scanned the entire room to unearth another, thicker brush. Same mixture, same speed, more gobs on the floor. Back on the canvas, his hand flattened up against it to trace a long strip of colour until the brush ran out of paint. Now streaming with yellow, it started lurching furiously along the same line, skidding off track in places and recovering along the horizon it had just created.
I sat down in the cold grass. I rested my head against the metal upright of the window frame without taking my eyes off that hand which fell back down exhausted for a few seconds, hanging limply by his side with the paintbrush.
Linnel dropped it where it fell, then overturned the pot of white paint, which was almost empty. He took a screwdriver and kneeled down next to another, a big new one. Having ripped off the lid, he mixed the paint with a stick and dunked a wide brush in so that it was gorged with white. Now using both hands, he swept over the entire canvas with an almost transparent veil. I witnessed the metamorphosis as a live show. All of the work so far started a process of rebirth beneath the veil. The dabs that were still wet seemed to blossom, the arcs joined together of their own accord, the trajectory of the dark line stood out against the unicity of the background, and the zigzags, along the edge, all shifted in the same direction, as if to escape the frame.
Linnel lies down on his front, stammering out an absurd gasp. I rest my forehead against the window-pane. I’ve never seen anything so moving in my life.
But I’ll get over it.
I slid one of the French doors open but it took a ridiculously long time for the noise to rouse him. Still, he did deign to look up. He looked me up and down with his empty eyes. I thought I should make the most of his prostrate position to pin him to the ground, but I realized that he had no desire to stand up.
“Already?” he asks, barely even surprised.
He sort of sits up, on one elbow.
“I’m feeling a bit groggy. Would you mind letting me pull myself together for a minute?” he says.
I smiled, remembering that the first time we met he was nothing like so polite.
“If you’d come fifteen minutes earlier you would have disturbed me. You’ve come to make a fuss, haven’t you? To fuck everything up . . .”
“The only way to fuck this place up would be to tidy up the shit on the floor a bit.”
“What shit?”
I forgot that he was mad. But this time there was no alcohol involved, or irony. We’re alone together, without an audience. This evening he isn’t the star turn, there are no fans or journalists or buyers. Just me.
“Let’s get this straight between us without any dramas. I can’t stand dramas,” I say.
“The drama’s up there on the wall,” he says, pointing to the canvas. “The only drama worth anything. I’ve had my quota for the evening. What do you want? What do you really want?”
First of all I’d like him to stop posturing, wipe off that air of detachment, that relaxed expression. And I know how to go about it: I just have to answer the question, really answer it. Without lying. With one simple gesture. I took out the thing Angelo was so afraid of. Once I had it properly in my grasp, I aimed at a wooden shelf halfway between Linnel and myself. I kneeled down too. And with one sharp blow, I buried the cleaver into it.
He stared at it stupidly, as if trying to see himself reflected in the blade. Very gently, on his backside, he gradually backed away from the cleaver. I took the handle again to ease it out.
“Don’t move. Or this horrible thing could land anywhere, wherever luck would have it, and it’s not your hand you’re in danger of losing.”
“You didn’t go all the way with Delarge, so . . . why now?”
“I calmed down, it wasn’t worth it any more. And, anyway, there wouldn’t have been any point in taking Delarge’s hand, all it ever does is shake hands with critics and sign checks. In other words, nothing. He was among the nine tenths of humanity who never wonder about the extraordinary tool they have at the end of each arm. Yours has just given me the most beautiful demonstration in the world.
A painter at work.”
“Did you see?”
“I loved it. You have that gift, the magic key, the one that opens all the doors. The one I’ve no longer got. God, it would be lovely for my poor left hand to hold your right one. While with the other one – the one that’s still inept – you call for an ambulance.”
He’s got it. He didn’t need me to repeat it.
“I could make a call right now . . . To Delmas . . . I could still admit the truth to him . . .”
“And then what? You’d go to prison? And you’d carry on painting. No way. I’d rather you told me how you did it, to Delarge, because I haven’t yet chopped off a single hand in my life, I need advice.”
He pushes aside two or three glasses so that he can lie down more comfortably. I realize I’m going to have a lot of trouble putting the fear of God into him.
“It’s easy, you know . . . I’d been looking for a way to get rid of him and his blackmail for twenty years. That evening he gave me a cry for help, you’d just left. When I saw him sobbing on the floor, slumped there in his own gallery, I realized I’d finally been given an opportunity I couldn’t miss. All I had to do was cut his hand off and everyone would obviously think it was you. You’re the prick who’d just finished defacing a Kandinsky. You’ve no idea what you did there. What an irresponsible arsehole . . . you can’t do that to the memory of a man who thought painting was everything.”