Marius dreamt idly of his youth, spent as a harbour pilot in Marseille. From the quayside, his job was to guide boats into the harbour and ensure they docked safely. It was dangerous work, for he handled heavy ropes and hawsers that coiled about him and pulled taut with a snap. But Marius had loved his job, as he had loved the atmosphere on the docks. He’d been thirty years old with broad shoulders browned by the sun, a cap on his head and a moustache that made women giddy. He’d been handsome and strong, with his whole life ahead of him. He often drank one too many, as they said, and his white marcel smelled of pastis and hair oil, of cologne and cigarettes and sweat. It was a scent adored by Jeannine, the tall doe-eyed brunette who sold tomatoes, and who often buried her nose in his shirt collar and told him it smelled better than the sea. In those days the port was busy with yachts, ferries from Corsica and fishing boats. A few streets away, the city centre was noisy and bustling. Amidst that stew of humanity Jeannine sold sweet tomatoes, wearing a large white apron over a bell-shaped dress. She hailed down passers-by with her singsong voice; she had been so beautiful in those days. At the end of the day, Marius would often bring her an orange he had pilfered from the docks. Oh, those oranges! They were so juicy you could barely resist tearing into them. They were unloaded from the balancelles, old-style schooners that came up the coast from Spain, and tumbled out of canvas sacks and wooden crates like little red suns.
It felt like you could drown in the colours of the port and the crowds that poured on and off the boats, counting and weighing the fruit under the suspicious eyes of the customs men. And there were such smells, such aromas of rotten fruit, of fish, of garbage drying in the hot sun. There were whiffs of tar, of hemp and paint that pervaded the harbours in the age of wooden boats. Far off on the quays, a crane lifted vessels and set them on trailers. They would be pulled to shipyards elsewhere, and their old flaking paint would be burned and scraped away. Sitting on his balcony, Marius smoked a cigarette as he drank his coffee. The sun was rising. He remembered the Fred Scaramoni, the giant of the seas whose booming foghorn used to raise the city from slumber each morning. Night owls grumbled when they heard it, but it was music to the ears of the snail sellers, who cried “À l’aïgo-sau lei Limaçouns!” in the local language of Provence. They were already preparing cones of snails for the Corsicans who would be disembarking, freshly travelled from Ajaccio and hungry in the early morning. Marius observed the port as it awoke. He smiled. The Fred Scaramoni’s siren had never bothered him. At least, much less than the clatter that came when waste and debris was being loaded onto the hopper barges, the marie salopes as they called them back then.
On Sundays, Marius liked to relax. After a game of boules with his friends he would often take dip in the sea, right at the dockside. Despite the debris that floated alongside him, he still took pleasure in the freedom of the water. In places not occupied by the little boats, Marius could see to the bottom. Between the hulls, shoals of tiny fish flitted back and forth. In the shadows, a few mullets slept. They were not fished, for they tasted of mud. Marius sometimes caught rockfish, little bluish-green fish no longer than a man’s finger, but with big bulging eyes. Indeed, when someone in Marseille wore an expression of surprise, they were often said to have “rockfish eyes.” That was how Jeannine had looked the first time he stole a kiss from her, here on the quayside. That was how he remembered it, her rockfish eyes as his heart pounded under his marcel.
Alan Alfredo Geday
Comments