1. Arrival in Charleroi
The residence was a small redbrick house built at right angles to the Museum of Photography in Mont-sur-Marchienne. I had been welcomed in an efficient, understated manner by Christelle, one of the people in charge, who had given me my per diem, and by Jacques, the caretaker. I had been shown around. Everything was clean and functional: grey linoleum, Ikea furniture. There was something universal here which reassured me. Plus, I had been left alone.
In all honesty, I hadn’t anticipated going out during the five days I’d be spending in Charleroi. Before leaving, I had done a bit of shopping: pasta, tuna, sardines, chocolate and a bottle of twelve-year-old cask-aged Glenfiddich. By not going out, I didn’t think I would in any way be betraying the spirit of my stay, the one obligation of which was to write a text about Charleroi in Charleroi. Nobody had ever mentioned that I had to actually go out and about in the city, a city I didn’t know but had no great desire to discover, thanks to its reputation as a social hell.
So I had anticipated staying indoors, keeping as much to myself as possible, not speaking to anyone, and seeing what came of it. I admit I was expecting great things from this experience of solitude. Not only I was sure that nothing bad could come of it, but I also suspected such solitude might reveal a remarkable perceptive ability I hadn’t previously been aware of, that my new-found talent would inevitably be celebrated by the international literary intelligentsia and that – at last, as a consequence hereof – money would start gushing in my direction, setting my mind at rest once and for all: I would not die in poverty.
Maybe things could have panned out that way. I liked the idea, anyway, rather like the footballer who misses a crucial penalty, is driven back to a dressing room pursued by the catcalls of the crowd, and consoles himself for a brief moment with thoughts of the glory that might have been his if everything had gone according to plan.
So. Things might well have happened that way if I hadn’t for some reason, despite having prepared my toilet back with the greatest care – even including eyebrow tweezers, eye drops and cream for superficial burns – forgotten my toothbrush. Those idiots the psychologists would probably claim it was a Freudian slip.
I realized my oversight at about six in the evening, just as I was arranging the contents of the toilet bag on the narrow shelf above the washbasin. I swore, cursed myself, but immediately recovered, put on my shoes and jacket without delay, and set off to buy a toothbrush in a Louis Delhaize supermarket I had spotted on the corner of the Avenue Paul Pastur, less than fifty metres from my little residence.
I can’t help thinking that there are moments in life when fate acts as a genuine force, working for some people and against others, driving some to the summit, dragging others down into the abyss. If then I would have had to put myself in either the category ‘driven’ or the category ‘dragged’, I would without hesitation have selected the latter, and this business of the ‘forgotten toothbrush’ simply confirmed it. Moreover, the supermarket was just closing as I got there.
I resolved to stay calm. I had seen another supermarket as I was coming, a Champion, I think, on the same Avenue Paul Pastur, about one kilometre from where I was now.
So I took my car – that same old, creaky, dented grey Toyota that had dragged me through life for eighteen years – and drove down the avenue, which was lined on both sides with absurd little businesses. I passed a quite abnormal number of solariums and hairdressers, a few snack bars selling pitas, a car body shop, and a fitness club with a broken window mended with a large piece of plywood. I tried to draw a quick conclusion from all this, convinced that you can understand a city from its businesses, but didn’t get very far. Even with hindsight, I’m not quite sure what to think of a city apparently so obsessed with solariums, hairdressers and fitness clubs. It might be understood as a kind of unconscious desire towards the Californian lifestyle. But such an understanding would be to indulge in psychology and, as I have said, I hate psychologists and have no desire to practise their profession for them, even inadvertently.
At last, I got to the Champion, and once again fate intervened. The Champion, too, was just closing.
I had no choice.
I had to go all the way to Charleroi.
2. Charleroi by car
Where is Charleroi? This was the question I asked myself when I got to the bottom of the Avenue Paul Pastur and saw signs indicating all kinds of baffling destinations. Nowhere, however, was the one I was looking for: something like City Centre, Old Town, and even, simply, Charleroi.
Having no other choice but to continue as soon as the light had turned green, I veered left and drove beneath that long ribbon of concrete known as the Ring, the shape of which resembles the corpse of an invertebrate animal that has given up the ghost after a great deal of suffering.
Following the flow of traffic, in the heavy heat of that late afternoon in August, I drove alongside the canal and found myself in something approximating an avenue torn apart by construction works. In fact, construction works seemed to be an integral part of the place in which I was and which I still cannot bring myself to call a ‘city’. Granted, there were houses: smaller and bigger buildings with grimy windows on the sills of which, in defiance of botanical logic, persons unknown were trying to grow flowers whose dying petals were reminiscent of dirty underwear. There were also businesses on both sides, huge signs for fast food, more hairdressers and then, of course, more solariums: dingy cafés whose interiors were decorated with plastic palm trees illumined by bluish fluorescent lights. In some areas, there were even people, mostly trying to pick their way through the rubble and dust of clearly neglected building sites.
Despite the abundance of discreet sites, their collective impression was that of a handful of dice flung across a casino table. There didn’t seem to be any of what is pretentiously called ‘urban planning’ or, if otherwise, it must have been entrusted to a child who was both angry and untidy and who, after emptying the Meccano box, had given up trying to read the instructions and left the room, leaving the pieces strewn on the floor.
By now I was definitely in Charleroi. Or more exactly, in a geographical spot called Charleroi but which seemed a city in name only, apart from the fact that it had things like a town hall, a police force and perhaps even, as absurd as that may seem, a land registry.
I had already resigned myself to the fact that, at this hour and in this place, there was no chance now of finding any kind of toothbrush. I thought of calling Christelle, the person in charge of the residence at the Museum of Photography, and asking her to lend me a toothbrush, even a used toothbrush. I would have undertaken to replace it with a new one, which I would buy the next morning, as soon as the shops – the Louis Delhaize supermarket for example – opened. But I was afraid that, one way or another, this request for a toothbrush might be interpreted as the manifestation of a strange and ambiguous sexual despair, and so I gave up on the idea.
I stopped in a sloping street, one that came from nowhere and led to nowhere else. I could have gone back to the residence at Marchienne-au-Pont, next door to the Museum of Photography, to finish off that bottle of twelve-year-old Glenfiddich and try to erase the marks of dental frustration from my mind. But something in me resisted this idea. Hadn’t Jack London tramped the icy plains of the Klondike? Hadn’t he, too, explored the shady alleyways of the East End of London? After all, I was an author! A minor author, but an author all the same!
A pale blue Mitsubishi passed me.
I started following it.
It had been a sudden whim, but after a few minutes it seemed to me that following this pale blue Mitsubishi was doubtless one of the best ways to discover the place. I made up my mind to follow it for as long as possible and then, in an hour or two, go back to my residence and put down on paper whatever I had been able to discover about its owner. This could be a good way into the 4,500-word text I had been commissioned to write and for which, so far, I was profoundly lacking in ideas.
So I followed the pale blue Mitsubishi, and did so without too much difficulty, given that we were moving with all the speed of a fairground pony. People behind hooted their horns and overtook us, but I wouldn’t allow myself to get flustered. I just kept following that pale blue Mitsubishi, in which I already saw a fellow sufferer, a comrade in this soul-destroying place, perhaps even a friend, thanks to whom a sense of direction would be imparted to the incredible tangle of these streets.
The pale blue Mitsubishi passed a roundabout and turned right, just before a dead-end street clogged with black rubbish bags and the entrance to a motorway slip road. It and I were now driving, almost at a crawl, along a little road with the concrete pillars of the Ring on the right. At the feet of the pillars, short, dry, prickly vegetation survived as best it could amid all the refuse that had somehow ended up there: bottles of fabric softener, a supermarket trolley, a suitcase full of holes – in short, a whole museum of the misfortunes of life. And on the left, a kind of car park under construction that, at that period of the year and at that time of the day, looked more like an accidental scattering of rubble on an area of wasteland. On either side of this little road, as amazing as it might seem, there were people: three or four quite young tramps accompanied by two honey-coloured poodles fighting over a plastic bag, an unhealthily thin man sitting on a yellow-painted block looking down in surprise at his forearm, and two or three women. There was an African woman of about fifty, her face as inscrutable as a high-voltage cabin, wearing tight-fitting black leggings and a white miniskirt. Nearby, a woman with dyed blonde hair, faded jeans, and suede boots, and a big lady with black hair and a vaguely Gothic look but with an R’n’B influence and a nod in the direction of German expressionnism.
The pale blue Mitsubishi followed another street that ran alongside a river with brown oily water, and turned right into yet another street.
In days gone by, this must have been a busy shopping street, but the broken windows, closed shutters and boards nailed diagonally across the doors made me think of the tartar that would settle on my teeth once it got dark. This street, the Rue Léopold, resembled a kind of Pompeii: here too, a civilisation had come to a terrible end after some unforeseen disaster, leaving behind only the skeletons of a history that was lost on me, and a few sad ghosts by way of memories.
When I got back to my little residence, I was to learn, courtesy of the Internet, that this street, an area notorious for its prostitutes and watering holes known as ‘the triangle’ – I had no idea why because it wasn’t at all triangular in shape – had been condemned to make way for a project pretentiously dubbed the ‘Phoenix’. I didn’t know anything about the Phoenix project and I still don’t know anything about it. I even have my doubts that anybody knows anything about it. There were photomontages of what it was going to be, photomontages that looked like advertisements for a household cleaning product: thirty-somethings with children frolicking along the broad paths of green-filled parks beside the bluest of river waters, smiling tradesmen serving colourful drinks to couples at leisure. (In their blunt desire to depict an ideal, images of architectural projects have always scared me as much as revolutionary manifestoes declaring that the new man was just around the corner). Anyway, the Phoenix project wasn’t going to be the way it looked in those pictures, it couldn’t possibly be the way it looked in those pictures, unless the project, as well as planting greenery, getting rid of the prostitutes and paving the street, also managed to change the earth’s axis so that the grim climate of Belgium came to resemble that of Fiji. It wasn’t going to be the way it looked in those pictures, it couldn’t be the way it looked in those pictures, because those pictures didn’t take into account the fact that life, quite simply and quickly, wears things out, dirties them, spoils them. That after a very short time, probably even instantaneously, the trees of the Phoenix project, the paved streets of the Phoenix project and the shop windows of the Phoenix project would come under attack from pollution, grime, parasites and disease. That the thirty-somethings in the photomontages would be thirty-somethings with problems that grind them down, that they would age quickly, that they would smile less than when they strolled for the first time along the streets of the Phoenix project. That when they strolled there for the second time, it would be without the smiles they had in the photomontage. That the children would be like children today: children lacking in sunlight, children mostly badly fed and overfed, children terrified by the silent anxieties of their thirty-something parents in a region of Europe and of the world which, after the good times and the bad times, was feeling, without daring to say so, that time was now running out.
As I followed the pale blue Mitsubishi along the Rue Léopold and then, once again, between the deserted car park and the pillars of the Ring, the Phoenix project was already a lie whose only reality, right now, was that it had driven a handful of tired whores onto a patch of waste ground, next to piles of rubbish bags.
I finally abandoned the Mitsubishi, wishing the driver good luck in finding whatever he was looking for, and went back to my little residence in Marchienne-au-Pont, next to the Museum of Photography. I looked at a werewolf movie on my computer. Towards midnight, an extremely violent storm broke over the whole region. To general indifference, alarms started howling all over, including in the Avenue Paul Pastur, that avenue lined with hairdressers and solariums that leads down to Charleroi.
3. Charleroi on foot
The next day, the first thing I did was go to buy a toothbrush at the Louis Delhaize supermarket. I chose it carefully, making a beeline for the most expensive kinds, the ones whose properties had been scientifically proved. Then, once I got back, I cleaned my teeth meticulously, for a long time.
There was nothing forcing me to go out again. In fact, reason alone urged me to stay within the walls of my little residence and get down to work. That indeed was what I did, spending all morning and part of the afternoon recounting what I had done the previous day. But as I worked and as the time passed, a desolate anxiety grew within me: the fear that I might be taken for some sort of ‘weirdo’.
To understand that, it is necessary to recall the position of my little residence. It was, as I’ve said before, situated beside, and at right angles to, the Museum of Photography in Mont-sur-Marchienne. In fact, it belonged to the Museum, which used the room at the front for storing boxes of posters and books. Therefore, the director and staff of the Museum were sure to know what was happening in this little house. Whether the light was on or off. Whether the dark blue curtains were drawn or open. Whether I was present or absent from this little residence, at the Museum of Photography in Mont-sur-Marchienne, they were sure to know. That was why I was afraid I would be taken for a weirdo. Not that I really know why. Maybe because I actually am a weirdo and I dread it being found out and added to a long list of charges against me which will be brought out one day. Or perhaps because I’m not a weirdo at all and the idea that anybody could doubt my complete normality is terribly hurtful to me.
Either way, towards the middle of the afternoon, as a clear, disagreeable sun took over from a leaden sky, my fear of being taken for a weirdo turned to genuine terror, which swept away any reluctance I might have felt at the thought of going out, and so I went out. I slammed the door to make sure that everybody knew I had gone, coughed more loudly than was absolutely necessary, and, with a final flourish, dropped my keys on the blue stone steps.
I drove down the Avenue Paul Pastur, which was almost familiar by now, and got to the bottom and the aforementioned series of signs indicating Hospitals / Railway Station / Belgian Radio / Local Government Offices, but of course still no City Centre. As I had the day before, I followed the flow of traffic, which was fairly light, but this time, just like a normal person visiting a city in a normal way, I parked.
If it hadn’t been for its very peculiar feeling of chaos, or the impression that the place where I was was rather like the body of a dying man who has decided, in his exhaustion, to give up resisting death, then indeed, the street in which I stood might almost have resembled a normal avenue made up of shops and café terraces, lined with a few trees. This avenue, which was in fact a boulevard – the Boulevard Tirou – seemed to be a sample of another city, a city that might be real, or that might be stuck in the middle of the rough draft of another city that nobody would ever finish.
But this impression of normality did not withstand even a cursory inspection. Facing me, the hotel Leonardo interlocked in a strange way with a branch of the BNP-Paribas-Fortis bank next to the Employment Office, outside which some local government employees were smoking and talking about past and future holidays. Opposite, the huge building of the Christian Trades Union Federation was adorned with a menacing relief of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child, who in his turn was carrying a miner’s lamp. Dwarfed beneath the feet of this virgin with her empty eyes carrying an empty-eyed baby, there knelt three miners, also with empty eyes.
I was on the Boulevard Tirou, standing by the door of my dented, creaky Toyota, not sure where to go, but certain that I had to go somewhere. A man standing by the door of his car but going nowhere might well be taken for a weirdo and, as I’ve said, being taken for a weirdo was precisely what I was trying to avoid.
On the pavement opposite me, the first person who passed was a girl of about twenty, thin but with huge breasts, her hair corroded by a decade of decolorising shampoo. I decided to do what I had done the day before, with the pale blue Mitsubishi. It had worked the day before, it would work again: I was going to follow her.
I set off. At a reasonable distance in order not to attract attention. Not staring at her, but using my peripheral vision.
The girl was walking quickly, straight ahead. It was obvious she wasn’t shopping; it was obvious she knew where she was going. The two of us, with her in front and me behind, walked the whole length of the Boulevard Tirou. There were a few clothes shops here, some more hairdressers and a number of tattoo parlours, one of them offering something mysteriously called ‘medical piercing’.
The girl turned into a pedestrian street that smelled of vomit and then into a sloping street where there were works going on, the Rue de la Montagne. This street, scarred by the detritus of the Phoenix project – rubble, dust, wobbly wooden planks laid across holes – was almost entirely filled with boutiques and mobile phone shops. Advertisements blatantly sang the praises of the new Samsung Galaxy. There were quite a lot of people about, especially teenage girls whose features and hair colour indicated their Mediterranean descent. But they had been born here, collateral victims of an industrial revolution that had come to an end, and they had grown up amid the ruins of the mines and ironworks, and the ugliness had flowed over them, the dusty climate had shaped them, and so no doubt had poverty and a lack of prospects and a vague fear of the future and, as a reaction perhaps, an unconscious hatred of the world.
The girl I was following was still walking. She didn’t have good shoes, just iron-heeled boots made of plastic covered with a thin layer of imitation leather. Every now and again, either her left or right ankle would yield under the pressure and abruptly twist at right angles, probably coming close to breaking, but, like a soldier who has taken a bullet in the arm at the front, the girl continued on her way as if nothing had happened. I remember admiring her courage, I remember thinking I might approach her and tell her that I was alone in this city I didn’t understand, that I’d been following her in order not to seem like a weirdo, which was probably a paradox because it actually made me a weirdo. Be that as it may, I’d tell her that, having followed her and seen her stumble over the insidious traps of the Phoenix project, I admired her bravery and that, even if she didn’t look like the photographs the boutiques in the Rue de la Montagne displayed in their windows, even if she didn’t have a Samsung Galaxy, even if her hair was as stiff and corroded as the guardrails on the Ring, even if her thinness could only mean that she was ill, even if, like all the other girls, she hated the world, I would be delighted – if it wasn’t any trouble for her – if she were to drop by my little residence next to the Museum of Photography, perhaps in the evening, where we might even make love.
But we had already reached the top of the hill, and were now facing the town hall, a building without the slightest interest, apart from the nefarious reputation of some of its past and present occupants. The girl sat down next to a group of young men she seemed to know. One of them, who was very pale, with an olive-green Nike cap pulled down over his head, a blackish goatee and a mouth like a thread of saliva, stroked one of her big breasts with a gesture so natural I was quite impressed.
I walked back down, feeling a little sad, obviously, and more of a stranger than ever to the city. On the way down, because of the relative altitude of what, in Charleroi, they call the ‘upper town’, I had a view of the horizon, and discovered the outlines of the slag heaps that surrounded the city like monsters who had died of exhaustion after crawling kilometre after kilometre and, straight ahead, the enormous metallic skeletons of the factories of Marcinelle, which, on this suddenly sultry August afternoon, had the beauty so peculiar to tragedies. And all around, in whichever direction I looked, that awful Ring, the guardrail of which, like the carapace of a venomous insect, had been painted a grotesque sky blue, no doubt on the advice of a psychologist who thought of it as the colour of reassurance. Only here it had become the colour of the lie told to an entire city.
In the window of a travel agency, stuck on with Sellotape, was an advertisement for the Marcinelle Leisure Centre. It was a photograph of a large swimming pool, doubtless taken in summer, with a half-naked crowd lying around it. It occurred to me that the thin girl with big breasts I had followed earlier and her goateed boyfriend might be among them, enjoying their ‘leisure’, trying to get rid for a moment of the depressing feeling that their city was not a city, but a space to which a population that nobody really had any idea what to do with any more had been confined to with cold brutality, a bit like those Indians herded onto reservations in the western United States to die of alcohol and poverty.
Translated from French by Howard Curtis
Howard Curtis (London, 1949) has translated some seventy books from French, Italian and Spanish, including works by Flaubert, Balzac, Simenon, Pirandello, Leonardo Sciascia, Luis Sepúlveda, Francisco Coloane, Jean-Claude Izzo, Beppe Fenoglio, Pietro Grossi, Gianrico Carofiglio and Franz Hellens, among many others. He has received the John Florio Prize and the Premio Campiello Europa.
