Read The Reader on the 6.27 Online
Authors: Jean-Paul Didierlaurent
The Reader on the 6.27
Thank you to Sabine,
without whom this book would not exist,
to my father,
who, through his invisible presence, continues to inspire me with his eternal love,
and to Colette,
for her constant support.
Contents
1
Some people are born deaf, mute or blind. Others come into the world afflicted by a nasty squint, a harelip or an unsightly strawberry mark in the middle of their face. And then there are those who emerge with a club foot, or a limb that’s already dead before it’s even lived. As for Guylain Vignolles, he began his life encumbered only by his name, which lent itself to an unfortunate spoonerism: Vilain Guignol – ugly puppet – a bad pun that rang in his ears from the moment he first drew breath, and quickly stuck.
His parents had shunned all the saints’ names listed in the 1976 post office calendar and plucked Guylain out of thin air, not stopping for one moment to think about the disastrous consequences of their choice. Strangely enough, even though he often felt extremely curious about it, Guylain had never dared to ask the reason. Afraid of causing embarrassment perhaps. Afraid too that the banality of the reply would most likely leave him disappointed. He sometimes tried to imagine what his life might have been like had he been called Lucas, Xavier or Hugo. He would even have been content with Ghislain. Ghislain Vignolles, a proper name that would have allowed him to make something of himself, his body and mind well shielded by four inoffensive syllables. Instead, he’d had to go through his childhood dogged by the humiliating spoonerism Vilain Guignol.
During his thirty-six years, he had perfected the art of melting into the background and becoming invisible so as to avoid sparking off the laughter and mockery that never failed to erupt as soon as his presence was noticed. His aim was to be neither good-looking nor ugly, neither fat nor thin. Just a vague shape hovering on the edge of people’s field of vision. To blend into his surroundings until he negated himself, remaining a remote place never visited. During all those years, Guylain Vignolles had spent his time quite simply not existing, apart from on this dismal station platform where he stood every weekday morning.
Each day at the same time he waited for his train, both feet on the white line that must not be crossed at the peril of falling onto the track. That insignificant line on the concrete had a strangely soothing effect on him. Here the stench of death that constantly fogged his brain evaporated as if by magic. During the few minutes before the arrival of the train, he stamped his feet as if trying to sink into the concrete, fully aware that this was merely an illusory reprieve, that the only way to escape the barbarism that lay beyond the horizon was to move away from that line on which he stood awkwardly shifting from one foot to the other, and to go home. He could quite simply give up, go back to bed and curl up in the still-warm hollow made by his body during the night. Escape into sleep. But in the end, Guylain always reconciled himself to toeing the white line, listening to the little crowd of regular commuters gathering behind him, their eyes on the back of his neck causing a tingling that reminded him he was still alive. Over the years, the other passengers had come to show him the indulgent respect reserved for harmless nutters. Guylain was a breath of fresh air who, for the duration of the twenty-minute journey, allowed them briefly to forget the tedium of their lives.
2
The train pulled into the platform with a screech of brakes. Guylain tore himself from the white line and stepped into the compartment. The narrow folding seat to the right of the door awaited him. He preferred the hard orange plastic flap to the softness of the plush seats. The jump seat had become part of the ritual. There was something symbolic about the act of lowering his seat that he found reassuring. As the compartment began to sway, he took the cardboard folder out of the leather briefcase that never left his side. He opened it cautiously and exhumed a piece of paper from between two sheets of candy-pink blotting paper. The flimsy, half-torn page with a tattered top left-hand corner dangled from his fingers. It was a page from a standard six-by-nine-inch format book. Guylain examined it for a moment then placed it carefully back on the blotting paper. The carriage gradually fell silent. Sometimes, there was a reproving ‘Shh’ to silence the few conversations that had not petered out. Then, as he did every morning, Guylain cleared his throat and began reading aloud:
‘
The child stood there, dumbstruck. He had eyes only for the twitching animal hanging from the barn door. The man’s hand moved closer to its quivering throat. The slender blade plunged silently into the white down and a warm jet spurted from the wound, splattering his wrist with bright red droplets. With his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, the father slashed the fur with a few deft movements. Then, his strong hands slowly tugged at the fur, which peeled off like a sock, exposing the rabbit’s streamlined, muscular body in all its nakedness, still steaming from its life cut short. Its head lolled, ugly and bony, its two protruding eyes staring into the void without even a hint of reproach.
’
As daylight barged against the misted-up windows, the words poured out of his mouth in a long string of syllables, occasionally punctuated by silences that engulfed the rattling of the train. For all those fellow commuters, he was the reader, the bizarre character who each weekday would read out, in a loud, clear voice, from the handful of pages he extracted from his briefcase. These were completely unrelated fragments of books. Part of a recipe might find itself teamed up with page forty-eight of the latest Goncourt winner, or a paragraph from a crime novel might follow a page from a history book. Guylain had no interest in the content. Only the act of reading mattered to him. He enunciated the words whatever they were with the same passionate dedication. And each time, the magic worked. As the words left his mouth they bore away a little of the nausea that suffocated him as he neared the plant:
‘
Finally, the blade revealed the mystery. The father made a long incision in the animal’s belly and scooped out the steaming entrails. The string of intestines slithered out, as if impatient to leave the ribcage where they had been confined. All that was left of the rabbit was a tiny, bloody body swaddled in a tea towel. A few days later, a new rabbit appeared. Another ball of white fur that hopped around in the stifling hutch, with the same blood-red eyes that stared at the child from beyond the realm of the dead.
’
Without even looking up, Guylain delicately extricated a new sheet:
‘
In a desperate bid to escape, the men had instinctively flung themselves face downwards, pressing deeper and deeper into the bosom of the protective earth. Some scraped away the soil with their bare hands, like mad dogs. Others curled into a ball and offered their fragile spines to the deadly shrapnel raining down on them. All were huddled up – a reflex as old as time. All except Josef, that is – he had remained on his feet amid the mayhem and, in an insane gesture, had thrown his arms around the trunk of a tall silver birch facing him. The tree oozed a thick resin through the gashes streaking its trunk, fat tears of sap that beaded on the surface of the bark then seeped slowly downwards. The tree was emptying itself, just like Josef, whose burning urine was streaming down his thighs. With each new explosion, the birch quivered against his cheek and trembled in his embrace.
’
Guylain scrutinized the dozen or so pages exhumed from his briefcase until the train drew into the station. As the echo of the last words he had uttered died away on the roof of his mouth, he looked up at his fellow commuters for the first time since boarding the train. He encountered disappointment, sadness even, on their faces, as he often did. It was as fleeting as the swish of a horse’s tail. The compartment emptied quickly. He too rose. His seat snapped shut. The end. A middle-aged woman whispered a shy ‘thank you’. Guylain smiled at her. How could he explain that he wasn’t doing this for them? Resignedly, he quit the warmth of the train, leaving the day’s pages behind him. He loved knowing that they were stuffed snugly between the base and the back of the folding seat, far from the murderous din from which they had been rescued. Outside, the rain was pelting down even harder. As always, walking towards the works, he heard old Giuseppe’s grating voice in his head.
You’re not cut out for this, kiddo. You don’t know it yet, but you’re not cut out for it!
The old boy knew what he was talking about. He had never found anything better than red plonk to give him the strength to go on. Guylain hadn’t taken any notice, naively believing that in time he would get used to it. That the routine would intrude into his life like an autumn fog and numb his mind. But even after all these years, at the sight of the high, grubby, peeling perimeter wall, his throat was always assailed by nausea. On the other side crouched the Thing, well hidden from view. The Thing was waiting for him.
3
The gate squeaked gratingly when he pushed it open to enter the works. The noise jolted the security guard, who looked up from his book. The 1936 reprint of Racine’s
Britannicus
which he was holding was so well thumbed that it looked like a wounded bird. Guylain wondered whether Yvon Grimbert ever left his post. He appeared to be blithely oblivious to the discomfort of this flimsy three-by-two-metre shelter at the mercy of the elements, as long as the big plastic storage box containing his books was always by his side. He was fifty-nine, with classical theatre the only true love of his life, and it was not unusual, between two deliveries, to see him slip into the role of Don Diego or drape himself in the toga of an imaginary Pyrrhus, his powerful arms sweeping the air of his cramped hut, abandoning for the duration of an impassioned speech his thankless role that consisted of raising or lowering the red and white barrier at the entrance to the works, for which he earned a pittance. Always dapperly dressed, Yvon was particularly meticulous when it came to grooming the pencil moustache that adorned his upper lip, never missing an opportunity to quote the great Cyrano de Bergerac: ‘All words are fair that lurk ’neath fair moustache!’
The day he had discovered the alexandrine, Yvon Grimbert had fallen head over heels in love. Faithfully serving the twelve-syllable line had become his sole mission on earth. Guylain liked Yvon for his wackiness. For that, and perhaps too because he was one of the few people not to have succumbed to the temptation of calling him Vilain Guignol.
‘Morning, Monsieur Grimbert.’
‘Morning, kiddo.’
Like Giuseppe, Yvon insisted on calling Guylain ‘kiddo’.
‘Fatso and Dumbo are already here,’ he said. Yvon always referred to them in that order and never the other way around. Fatso before Dumbo. When he wasn’t versifying, the security guard spoke in terse sentences, not because he was sparing with words but because he preferred to save his voice for the only thing that was really worthwhile in his eyes: the alexandrine. As Guylain headed for the vast metal machine shed, Yvon recited two lines of his own composition at his receding form:
‘
The rain falls on my hut, sudden and mysterious,
The drumming won’t let up, loud as hail delirious.
’
The Thing sat there, huge and menacing, right in the centre of the plant. In the fifteen years he had worked there, Guylain had never been able to call it by its real name, as if the simple act of naming it might be to acknowledge it, to demonstrate a sort of tacit acceptance, which he did not want at any cost. Refusing to name it was the last bastion he had managed to erect between it and himself, to avoid selling his soul to it for good. The Thing would have to be content with only his body. The name engraved on the colossus’s steel side evoked the stench of imminent death: Zerstor 500, from the verb
zerstören
, which means ‘to destroy’ in Goethe’s beautiful tongue. The Zerstor Fünfhundert was an eleven-tonne monstrosity produced in 1986 by the Krafft GmbH workshop, south of the Ruhr. The first time Guylain had seen it, the greyish-green colour of its metal shell had not really surprised him. What could be more natural than this warlike colour for a machine whose only purpose was to destroy? At first glance, it looked like a spray booth or a giant generator, a giant rotary printing press even, which was the ultimate irony. The Thing’s sole apparent pretension seemed to be ugliness. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. In the middle of the grey concrete floor, the beast’s gaping mouth formed a dark four-by-three-metre oblong leading to the unknown. There, sheltering in the dark, beneath a huge steel funnel, sat the fearsome contraption, a machine without which the plant would have been merely a useless warehouse.