Balco Atlantico

by Jérôme Ferrari

Genres: Black Humor; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

In a village square in Corsica lies the body of ardent nationalist, Stéphane Campana, shot down at close range. And over his body weeps Virginie, the young woman who has venerated Stéphane all her life - a veneration that has led her to abandon herself to him and his twisted desires completely.

Meanwhile, brother and sister Khaled and Hayet, who once gazed out to sea from the shoreline path known as "Balco Atlantico" and dreamed of a better future, are now stranded in Corsica. As Ferrari traces the history of Stéphane and Virginie that leads to the shooting in the village square, we encounter the story of Khaled and Hayet and see through their story and the stories of many others in this one Corsican square how a relentless pursuit of happiness and fulfilment can bring us perilously close to despair and disillusionment.

Release date: March 21, 2019

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 272

Sample

Oh, Mama, Mama, I’m going to die, Virginie said, and her sobs were agonising, she felt like tiny stilettos were lacerating her lungs, oh, I will die, Mama, and Marie-Angèle, who loved her daughter more fiercely than all the hatreds she had felt in her life, tightened her embrace, turning her eyes away from the white sock splattered with mud and blood, and answered, yes, you will die of love, I know, and Virginie sobbed with gratitude and said it again, Mama, my life is over, and Marie-Angèle agreed, yes, my love, your life is over, over, and Virginie insisted, I loved him so much, Mama, I loved him so much, and Marie-Angèle told her, yes, you loved him, darling, and you’ll always love him, you will never forget, don’t worry, you will never forget.

No-one wants to hear that one day they will be cured of such pain. The idea of consolation can be intolerable, as Marie-Angèle knew well. She held her daughter close, and held her nose too, as if the horrible stink of shit that rose off the corpse in long, even, sugary waves had followed them into the house, and she knew that in a few months Virginie would recover her lust for life, though it was impossible to tell her that now. Oh, it will kill you, my love, Marie-Angèle whispered, you can be sure of it. Then she gave her something to make her sleep, took off her sock with a frown of disgust, and put her to bed. As I waited in the living room for Virginie to fall asleep, I was mesmerised by her indefatigable voice, vibrant with love and charity, that kept telling her that love would kill her. All those things that leave no trace except in our memory – of those things I cannot speak. Yet I still hear that voice with the same clarity as if it were next to me.

*

I had, it seems, spent a good portion of the afternoon at the bar, alone with Hayet, who was washing glasses in silence, and Vincent Leandri, who did not take his eyes off her. As usual he told me about his life on the shores of the Indian Ocean. He knew I had travelled and that I was in a better position than anyone in the village to understand what he was telling me. Since I’ve got to know him, he’s talked about it more and more. He skips over his career as a nationalist militant, which ended after the fratricide of 1995, about which he says nothing, preferring to return to the dreams of his youth. “You see, Théodore,” he told me, “there was this zebu with an incredibly stupid look, eating a plastic bag, it was blue, I remember. I had dragged myself into a bar to get a coffee, with the world’s worst hangover. There was this guy behind the counter, the owner, a Frenchman, he looked like he was a hundred. And there was a Maori woman hunkered down next to him, some girl he must have been fucking, she was whistling and scratching her ass. I’m telling you, he looked like he was a hundred. He had the same stupid look as the zebu, with yellow eyes. He was missing a few teeth. I won’t even describe the ones he had left. He was completely pickled in low-grade rum, he stank of cirrhosis and death, and I said to myself, how old is he, really? Forty? And I said to myself, that’s you fifteen years from now if you stay here, that’s you. It was like looking in a mirror, understand? That shook me up good, I panicked and came back here. I saved my own life, funny, no? I was proud of myself, I had the feeling I had actually saved my skin. If I had known, I would have been better off dying back there, from cirrhosis or the clap or whatever. Anything.” He went on talking and I stopped paying attention to what he was saying. Vincent is never very happy to be alive, but that day he was particularly bad, a broken man. I could see that what he had become was the fruit of his downfall, I know of what I speak, yet it was almost impossible to think that this feeble old guy, who could scarcely look beyond his shoe tops, had been a strong, respected man five years earlier. In his case, the decline was total. That was probably why I found him likeable. I left him to ruminate by himself and went back to my house about the time Virginie came into the bar. Early in the evening, on my way to Marie-Angèle’s, I came across the gendarmes from Olmiccia in front of her house. They were looking for clues around Stéphane Campana’s body.

An hour before, Marie-Angèle explained, he parked and was stepping out of his car when he got his guts blown out by two shots from a hunting rifle. When she heard the sound, Virginie came running out of her room, where she had holed up earlier that afternoon, no doubt to prepare herself in such a scandalously lubricious manner that her mother felt nauseous when she tried to imagine the nature of the preparations and where, apparently, she was waiting, stark naked, in her socks, her pudenda shaved. Whatever the case, that was how she presented herself, with the addition of a black band around her neck, when she sprinted down the stairs, crossed the living room where Marie-Angèle, her ears stuffed with earplugs, was trying to concentrate on her book, then dashed into the street and threw herself on her lover’s corpse. Fifteen minutes later, the gendarmes found her in that position, sprawled over the body, perverting the crime scene with her screams, tears and nudity while her mother looked on, praying. Virginie continued to howl when they asked her nicely to move aside, and when the gendarmes finally tried to lift her off by force, she scratched one of them in the face, elbowed the second in the groin, bit the third on his hand and redoubled her howling, so the captain of the brigade was reduced to ordering her to be dragged away by her feet, which was what was done while she clung to the man she loved, trying to dig her fingers into his wounds, lick his blood and paint her face with it. As she struggled, she lost a sock that fell in the dust. Then she suffered a convulsion and let herself be pulled along the ground without further resistance. Her mother’s arms closed around her and pulled her into the house.

The captain was intrigued. In the current political situation, there was no obvious reason that would explain the murder of a nationalist leader. Five years ago, and five hundred metres from there, in front of the bar, Dominique Guerrini, less lucky than his friend Vincent Leandri, had been killed in similar circumstances. But that was during the war between the underground factions and that war was long since over. The captain hoped the murder was not the sign of renewed hostilities. The other unexplained factor was the extraordinary stink the corpse was giving off. A police official examined the dead man’s shoes and discovered shit deeply ingrained in the grooves of the textured soles. I turned to go back to Marie-Angèle, and as I left, I heard hysterical laughter and the sound of retching.

*

Marie-Angèle hugged her daughter’s naked body very close, it was stained with bloody earth, and she almost felt Virginie was a baby again, she told me later that night, if it weren’t for that single sock like a window swinging hideously open onto a world of perversion she would have preferred to know nothing about. She was shivering with hatred. Besides me, no-one knew the prayers she uttered before the body were really expressions of thanks. “Oh, Théodore! I’m not much of a believer but I thanked God for letting me gaze upon the corpse of that pig with my own eyes!” she told me – you see, she told me everything. At that very moment, the widow of Stéphane Campana was learning that her husband had gone and gotten himself killed in front of another woman’s house, and that his last words to her had been lies, but Marie-Angèle didn’t think about that. When Virginie was asleep, she took my hand, sat me next to her, and put her head on my shoulder as if seeking rest. She needed rest from the nine years of hatred and silence, rest from the eyes of Stéphane Campana staring at her daughter’s crotch as she sat cross-legged on the wall by the fountain one summer night when she was thirteen, dressed in little blue cotton shorts, no bigger than a handkerchief and gaping open, rest from her inability to stand up to Virginie who forced the man’s presence on her under her own roof, rest from the endless evenings vainly blocking her ears to keep from hearing the noises that echoed down from her room, not the sounds of love and tenderness, but a savage, unnamable racket of bestial coupling, because Virginie was too lost in love to maintain even the strict minimum of propriety, rest most of all from the recurrent expression on her daughter’s face, it exhausted her, an expression of gravity and complete seriousness, the gravity and serious concentration that children are capable of, the absolute delight when she looked at him or thought of him, her devotion, her implacable stubbornness, her utter refusal to consider anything beyond the devastating insanity of her passion, and then constantly, what was worse, her expression of pure innocence, of immaculate awareness, “for my daughter is a kind of saint,” Marie-Angèle told me, “the way my mother was a saint, the same race and the same ilk, made for the same kind of martyrdom.”

*

At the age of ten, and this I took the trouble to note down, Marie-Angèle’s mother had at her disposal no more than a dozen words with which to express herself, and it became clear that she would not acquire one more. She was, to her credit, a particularly pretty and docile little girl. She was allowed to wander through the village and out into the countryside as she loved doing. But when she was fifteen, she became pregnant. Her parents undertook an indignant but fruitless search to discover who in the village could have been guilty of so great an abomination. A boy was born to her, but died of heart failure a few weeks later, to the intense relief of her grandfather who was in no hurry to raise a bastard along with a feeble-minded little thing. A few months later, the war having broken out and the Italians occupying the region, Marie-Angèle’s mother became pregnant again. The reassuring hypothesis of rape seemed less and less probable in her parents’ eyes, and they had to face the painful fact that their daughter’s moral sense was even less developed than her intelligence. Since there was a good chance that the father was an Italian soldier, which was intolerable, an old-fashioned abortion was carried out, using a knitting needle. Miraculously, Marie-Angèle’s mother survived the procedure, which earned the family the unpleasantness of a priestly visit in order to officially benefit, through the grace of a common confession, from divine mercy. At the news. . .