Chourmo Read Free Page B

happy with simple things.
    I opened a bottle of Saint-Cannat rosé. The quality of Provençal rosés was getting better every year. We drank, to whet our appetite. The wine, from the Commanderie de la Bargemone, was delicious. Beneath your tongue you could feel the warm sun on the low slopes of the Trevarese. Fonfon winked at me, and we started dipping slices of bread in the anchovy purée, seasoned with pepper and chopped garlic. My stomach was aroused at the first mouthful.
    â€œGod, that’s good!”
    â€œYou said it.”
    It was all you could say. One more word would have been one word too many. We ate without talking. Gazing out over the surface of the sea. A beautiful autumn sea, dark blue, almost velvety. I never tired of it. I was constantly surprised by the attraction it had over me, the way it called to me. I’d never been a sailor or a traveler. I’d had dreams, adolescent dreams, of sailing out there, beyond the horizon. But I’d never gone very far. Except once. To the Red Sea. A long time ago.
    I was nearly forty-five, and like many people in Marseilles I liked stories of travel more than travel itself. I couldn’t see myself taking a plane to Mexico City, Saigon or Buenos Aires. I belonged to a generation to which travel meant something very particular. Liners, freighters. Navigation. The rhythm of the sea. Ports. A gangway thrown onto the quay, the intoxication of new smells, unknown faces.
    I was content to take my boat, the
Tremolino
, with its pointed stern, out beyond Ile Maire and the Riou archipelago, and fish for a few hours, wrapped in the silence of the sea. I didn’t have anything else to do. Go fishing, when the mood took me. Or play
belote
between three and four. Or a game of
pétanque
with aperitifs as the stake.
    A well-ordered life.
    Sometimes, I’d set off along the
calanques
, the rocky inlets that line the coast: Sormiou, Morgiou, Sugiton, En-Vau, and so on. I’d walk for hours, with my rucksack on my back, sweating, breathing hard. It kept me in shape. It allayed my doubts, my fears. My anxieties. The beauty of the
calanques
reconciled me to the world. Always. And they really are beautiful. Saying it is nothing, you have to see them. But you can only reach them on foot, or by boat. Tourists always thought twice about it, which was just as well.
    Fonfon got up about a dozen times, to serve his customers. His regulars, guys like me. Old guys especially, who weren’t put off by his bad temper. Or even by the fact that you couldn’t read
Le Méridional
in his bar. Only
Le Provençal
and
La Marseillaise
were allowed. Fonfon was an old Socialist Party activist. He was broad-minded, but not so broad-minded that he could ever tolerate the National Front. Especially not here, in his own bar, where so many political meetings had been held. Gastounet, as the former mayor was familiarly known, had even come once, with Milou, to shake hands with the Socialist activists. That was in 1981. Then disillusionment had set in. And bitterness.
    One morning, Fonfon had taken down the portrait of the President from over the coffee machine and had thrown it in the big red plastic trash can. We’d heard the glass breaking. From behind his counter, Fonfon had looked at us, one after the other, but nobody had breathed a word.
    Not that Fonfon kept his views hidden after that. Nor did he hold his tongue. Fifi-Big-Ears, one of our
belote
partners, had tried to explain to him the previous week how
Le Méridional
had changed. Sure, it was still a right-wing newspaper, but on the liberal side. And anyhow, outside Marseilles, the local pages were the same in
Le Provençal
and
Le Méridional
. So there was no point in making so much fuss . . .
    They’d almost come to blows.
    â€œLook, a paper that made its name inciting people to kill Arabs makes me sick. I feel dirty just looking at it.”
    â€œDamn! We can’t even talk to