Zenith Hotel (7 page)

They call him Moby One. His real name’s Luc. He likes cigarettes, beer and mopeds. Proper ones, Motobécanes, blue, copper, red or black. He knows all the different models. Luc has made a workshop in his little ground-floor apartment. There are grease stains on the carpet, you trip over
coked-up
cylinder heads, but he doesn’t care, it’s much more convenient to take a magneto rotor flywheel to bits at home than out in the street.

For Luc, true freedom is to ride a moped until he can no longer feel his legs. He loves the wind whipping his face, the thrumming of the engine, the white fumes that follow him like his lucky star.

Luc lives with his parents. He has the ground floor. The ’rents are upstairs, on the first floor. Luc’s no longer a teenager, except he’s separated from his wife and he packed in his job. He started buying more and more six-packs and before he
even knew it, at thirty-eight he was back living with his parents. Lucky they took him in,
otherwise
he’d be sleeping under a bridge or beside the railway tracks.

He lives on the ground floor and repairs mopeds. He’s always loved tinkering with engines. He had his first bike when he was fourteen, a second-hand BB Sport. Not the one with the fuel tank under the saddle, but a real sports bike: horizontal tank, chromed cap, racing mirror, the whole caboodle. The ’rents didn’t know, he kept it from them for six months. The neighbours told on him. But
impudent
little Luc wasn’t going to be pushed around. He took to the road with his BB Sport and rode for weeks with no idea where he was going. For the first time in his life, he felt free to do what he wanted. He rode alone on the B roads, the god of the tarmac, ‘FLYING BB’ written in capital letters on his little full-face helmet. He had the works – the jacket and the badge. It looked good,
sellotaped
to his shoulder. He made up slogans. Speed king. Born to be BB Sport. He was free.

By the time he reached Orange, he was flat broke. His coil was burnt out, he had to get it
sorted. Sitting by the canal – the BB Sport proudly upright on its kickstand – he sat smoking the
cigarette
butts he’d collected in the city centre. That’s when he met Pio.

Pio was sad. He walked along the towpath with a springing step. His wife had just died. Hit by a school bus.

He offered Luc a cigarette. An English brand that wouldn’t burn his lips like his lousy butts.
Gestures
like that go straight to the heart. Luc broke down; he cried all the tears in his body, those litres of salt water that he’d been holding in for so long.

They became friends. Pio took Luc back home, a house with stucco walls haunted by the wife he had lost.

In the little neon-lit garage, they repaired the BB. Brand new.

Pio owned an old AV 98. They decided to go on a trip together – Flying BB and Jumping AV, on the road again.

Pio dusted off his biker jacket from his youth. He dug up the little chest buried at the bottom of the garden. It contained a tidy sum, enough to keep the pair of them going for several months.

He locked up the house and they donned their helmets and jackets. They were off, full throttle, headed for Switzerland and its huge lakes.

Pio had hitched a little trailer to the back of the blue bike. It was tidier than all those bundles
dangling
from the rack. They had a tent made of
synthetic
material and tools galore. In the evenings, after riding all day, exhausted, they smoked by the fire. The pair of them made a hell of a team. Luc and Pio, Flying BB and Jumping AV, racing along the B roads at top speed.

Like true friends, they got their hands dirty, argued, repaired accelerator cables and de-coked the exhausts.

Freedom blew at their backs – it ruffled the strands of hair hanging down their necks.

Luc was too young to have had a wife and couldn’t understand the huge grief Pio felt in the pit of his stomach. Although unable to comprehend it, he had always been smart enough to respect other people’s sadness. He didn’t try to feel it or sniff it, he simply bowed down before it as he would have knelt in front of a holy statue. He understood that this sadness was stronger than Pio. The main
thing was to live with it, like a parasite that you feed with your own blood. It sucks at you but it’s better to let it drink a few drops of blood than to chase it away and have it harrow you to the bone in retaliation. No, don’t get rid of it. Live with it, go off on your moped and occasionally stroke the bitter melancholy that claws at your stomach. You have to nurture it to stop it consuming you, you have to give it the sincerest part of your being. You won’t get over it, all your life there’ll be this gaping wound deep in your heart. But don’t worry, it won’t stop beating.

The further they rode, the less Pio felt that sadness in his gut. They had to think about survival, finding food, fuel for the bikes, a place to sleep and have a wash. All these little tasks distracted him from the ghost of his departed love. On the moped, he was fleeing his wife’s shadow, fleeing his sorrow, he was living, at last and in spite of everything. Jumping AV, king of the B road, invincible, more powerful than the rain, more powerful than the black ice.

But what was Luc running away from? He hadn’t really suffered – apart from being bullied by Jojo Légende at school. No, Luc had no official excuse
for running away. He just wanted to be free. What would he say when he went home? What would be his excuse? There are sadnesses that can’t be explained.

Eventually he’d have to go home, have to explain, have to go back to his boring schoolboy life – rubbish at maths, bullied by Jojo Légende,
desperately
in love with the pretty Mathilde Arnaud. Mathilde! He often thought about her when he was on his moped. She was so beautiful with those dark shadows under her eyes and her fair hair. One night when he couldn’t sleep, sitting at his schoolboy’s desk, he’d written her a poem. Four pompous verses extolling the beauties of autumn and the depth of his feelings. He’d reread it a hundred times, proud of his pen and of the melancholy lines he demanded of it. He never gave her the poem. He’d kept it hidden away under his mattress for a long time, and then one day, in a moment of sadness, he’d torn it up like a train ticket. He felt ridiculous; it made him blush to think about it when he was alone in his bedroom or in the school playground. He’d been so besotted with little Mathilde. When he was at a loose end,
he thought about her. He pictured her running in her grey tracksuit, going up the school staircase or chatting to her friends. She had everything, she was pure as snow, he said so in the poem.

He thought about her less now, but sometimes her image would cloud his gaze. The road flashed past but in front of him was nothing but a pretty succession of Mathildes. One smiling, another sad or annoyed, a multitude of Mathilde Arnauds unfolding before him, replicated to infinity like reflections in a hall of mirrors. They danced, cried, shouted or swore, all those lovely Mathildes
swimming
before his eyes. A rose-tinted veil of mist, dazzling, sparkling, in all the sincerity of his
foolishness
. He couldn’t force anything; his love was both that of a child and of a man, a bastard object, more poignant than anything else.