Free Chourmo by Jean-Claude Izzo, Howard Curtis Page B

mouth.
    â€œYou could go down for that,” I’d said to him one evening when I’d paid him a visit. Just to make sure he was at home, and not out selling stolen property in the Belleville project. In an hour, we were going to make a raid on the cellars of the project and pick up whatever we found. Drugs, dealers and other human filth.
    â€œDon’t jerk me around, Montale! Not you too. You and Serge, you crack me up, you know? It’s work. OK? I don’t have job security, but it’s my life. Looking after number one. You know what I mean?” He’d dragged furiously on his joint, thrown it away angrily, then had looked at me, his wrench in his hand. “I’m not going to live here all my life, you know. So I work. Do you really think . . . ”
    I didn’t think. That was what worried me about Arno. “Money stolen is money gained.” The logic Manu, Ugo and I had used when we came on the scene, at the age of twenty. However often you tell yourself that fifty million is a good figure and when you reach it you’ll stop, one of you always eventually does something you didn’t expect. Manu had shot someone. Ugo had gloated, because it was our biggest haul. But I’d thrown up, and left to join the Colonial Army. A whole chapter of our lives had ended abruptly. Our adolescence, our dreams of travel and adventure. Of being free and happy, and not working. No bosses, no chiefs. No God or master.
    At any other time, I could have sailed away on a liner. Argentina. Buenos Aires. “Reduced prices on one-way tickets,” as they said on the old Messageries Maritimes posters. But by 1970 there were no more liners. The world was like us now. No destination, no future. I’d left for free. Spent five years in Djibouti. I’d already done my military service there, a few years earlier. It was no worse than being in prison. Or working in a factory. In my pocket, to keep going, to stay sane, I always had
Exile
by Saint John Perse. The same copy that Lole used to read aloud to us, on the Digue du Large, facing the sea.
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    I had, I had this taste for living among men, and now the earth exhales her foreign soul . . .
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    Enough to make you weep.
    Then I’d become a cop, without really knowing why or how. And lost my friends. Now Manu and Ugo were dead. And Lole was away, in a place where it ought to be possible to live without memories. Without remorse. Without rancor. Coming to terms with life meant coming to terms with your memories. That was what Lole had said to me one night. The night before she left. I agreed with her about that. It was pointless to question the past. It was the future you had to question. Without a future, the present is nothing but chaos. Of course. But I couldn’t get away from my past, that was my problem.
    Now, I wasn’t anything anymore. I didn’t believe in cops and I didn’t believe in robbers. Those who represented the law had lost all sense of moral values, and the real thieves weren’t the ones who stole to put food on the table. They sent ministers to prison, of course, but that was just one of the ups and downs of political life. It wasn’t justice. They all came back sooner or later. In the business world, politics washes everything white. The Mafia is the best example of that. But for thousands of kids in the projects, prison was the start of the downward slope. When they got out, the best was behind them and the worst lay ahead. Whatever dreams they’d had had turned to dust.
    I pushed open the door. It had never had a lock. In winter, Arno put a chair against it to keep it closed. In summer, he slept outside, in a Cuban hammock. The interior was as I remembered it. A military surplus iron bedstead in a corner. A table, two chairs. A small wardrobe. A little gas stove. An electric heater. Next to the sink, the dishes from a meal, all washed. A plate, a glass, a fork, a knife. Serge had lived alone.