1
Rue Wagram echoed to the yells of kids kicking a rag ball. It was one in the afternoon and the sun was beating down. De Stefano’s gym was below street level, facing Porte du Ravin, with the date 1847 — the year it was built — above the door. It was a huge, ugly building, its walls full of cracks, and had once been a stable for thoroughbred horses before being transformed into a makhzan towards the end of the last century. Threatened by a landslide, it was evacuated by the military, padlocked and abandoned to the ravages of time and rats before being taken over in the 1910s by lovers of boxing. The area smelt of horseshit and of the drains that ran off into the wild grass of the gully.
Overcome by the heat, a wafer vendor was dozing in the shade of a basket shaped like an African drum. Facing him, two scrawny brats sat on the pavement, swathed in moth-eaten rags, their eyes as empty as their bellies, like two puppies staring at a piece of sugar. Not far off, a housewife was emptying dishwater outside her front door, her dress pulled up above her knees. Further down, a gang of urchins were harassing an alley cat while an amused old drunk looked on impassively.
The wafer vendor woke when he heard me approach and immediately became defensive. I gestured to him to calm down.
The doors of the gym were open. I walked into a large, depressing-looking sports hall. Light filtered in through the holes in the roof and the shutterless windows and bounced off the filthy tiled floor. To the right of the door stood a small table littered with the remains of food, a dirty glass and a Paloma bottle filled with water. To the left were a few crinkled posters of boxers on the walls. An old boxing ring was just about holding up on a platform, its ropes hanging loose. Behind, a shapeless punch bag hung from its gallows. At the far end, a dilapidated cubicle could be made out through the gloom. I could hear two men arguing, one angry, the other conciliatory.
I took an instant dislike to the place. It stank of mould and defeat.
Just as I was about to leave, a tall, thin man emerged from the toilets, hopping on a wooden leg. ‘Who are you looking for?’ he asked, walking back to the table near the door.
‘De Stefano.’
‘He’s busy. What’s it about?’
‘He asked me to come by.’
‘Was it De Stefano who asked for you and not somebody else?’
I didn’t reply. Doormen often grant themselves an authority they don’t have and shamelessly abuse it. He waved me to a bench.
‘You chose the wrong time, son. At this hour of the day, they’re either eating or sleeping.’
He collapsed onto his chair and started biting into his sandwich.
The two men in the cubicle were still arguing.
‘Why does he call me a monkey?’ one of them said excitedly. ‘Did he pick me off a tree?’
I recognised De Stefano’s voice saying, ‘You know what they’re like at Le Petit Oranais. They aren’t journalists, they’re madmen and racists. They hate wops. Plus, they’re jealous.’
‘Are you sure it’s because they’re jealous, and not because I’m Portuguese?’
‘Absolutely. That’s the way the world is: there are those who become legends and those who make lots of noise because that’s all they can do.’
The doorman swallowed his last mouthful, washed it down with a gulp of water, let out a formidable belch, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said to me in a low voice, ‘Rodrigo’s a nutcase. He’s never been in a ring in his life. He’s made up this idea that he’s a champion and he believes it totally. When he’s having one of his attacks, he comes here and drives us all up the wall. He tells everyone the press are giving him a hard time, that he’s had enough, and so on and so on, and De Stefano likes to tell him he sympathises and tries to encourage him …’
I nodded out of politeness.
‘I think De Stefano gets a kick out of it,’ the doorman went on. ‘He thinks he’s really encouraging a champion and that makes him feel he’s important. He used to be big. He had a whole lot of promising fighters in his stable. Then it all fizzled out, and all he’s left with is nostalgia. So he keeps Rodrigo around in order not to lose the thread, and waits for the good old days to come back …’
The little door of the cubicle opened and a gangling, pale-eyed individual in a threadbare jacquard pullover and a pair of crumpled trousers came out, strutted across the room, saluting the poster of a champion as he passed it, and went out into the street without taking any notice of us.
De Stefano opened his arms wide to greet me. ‘So you made your mind up at last …’
In the street, Rodrigo started shouting abuse at us.
‘That’s Rodrigo,’ De Stefano said. ‘A former champion.’
Behind him, the tall, thin man wagged his finger to deny this.
‘Well, Turambo? To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘You asked me to come by, so here I am.’
‘Congratulations! I promise you won’t regret it.’
‘I don’t see anyone here …’
‘It isn’t time yet. Most of our boxers have to work to make ends meet. But in the evening, it’s bedlam, I can assure you …’ Then, turning to the doorman, ‘Did you deliver the package, Tobias?’
‘Not yet. There’s nobody to mind the shop.’
‘Go now. You know how Toni is. He doesn’t like being neglected. Take Turambo with you. That way, he’ll find a few boys in the ring when he gets back. And tell the baker to send me a snack. I’ll take over; try not to dawdle, please.’
Tobias started to clear the table, but De Stefano told him he’d take care of it and pointed to a package in the corner.
‘Can you carry it for me?’ Tobias asked me. ‘It isn’t heavy, but with my wooden leg …’
‘No problem,’ I said, picking up the package.
Tobias walked fast; his wooden leg banged on the road surface and made him lurch to the side.
‘Did you lose your leg in an accident?’
‘In a garden,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I stepped on a seed, the seed got embedded in the sole of my foot, and in the morning, when I woke up, a wooden leg had grown under my thigh.’
We walked in silence for a while. Tobias was very well known. Everywhere we went, people greeted him. He would trade insults with some, jokes with others, and throw his head back in a shrill laugh. He was a handsome man, very clean beneath his old clothes; without his disability, he could have passed for a commercial traveller or a postman.
‘I left my leg on a battlefield, at Verdun,’ he admitted suddenly.
‘You were in the war?’
‘Like millions of other fools.’
‘And what’s it like?’
He wiped his forehead on his forearm and asked me to pause because of his wooden leg, which was starting to torment him. He sat down on a low wall to catch his breath. ‘You want to know what war is like?’
‘Yes,’ I said, in the hope of understanding a little of what had happened to my father.
‘I can’t make any comparison. It isn’t like anything else. It’s a bit like every nightmare, and no nightmare could describe it. You’re simultaneously in a slaughterhouse, a bullring, a chamber of horrors, down the bottom of a toilet and in hell, except that your pains never end.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘I had two. I don’t know where they are. Their mother walked out on me while I was trying to survive in that abattoir.’
‘Haven’t you tried to find them?’
‘I’m too tired.’
‘I had a father. He was a good man. When he came back from the war, he deserted his family. He left us one night and abandoned us in the mud.’
‘Yes, that kind of reaction is common. War is a strange kind of excursion. You go to it to the sound of bugles, and you come back in the skin of a ghost, your head full of noises, and don’t know what to do with your shitty life afterwards.’