The Kastel Bar is more than two hundred years old and people say the island’s general state of contentment or unhappiness can be measured by the volume of alcohol consumed there. Regardless, it is definitely worth a visit, if only to admire its décor.
The owner – whom everybody knows by the classy moniker the Boche’s son, after his father, the Boche, conceived under the Occupation – has covered his walls with hideous posters of the Breton version of the Paris-Roubaix road cycle race – the Tro-Bro-Léon – each featuring a muddy cyclist in different positions . . . with a pig. You’ll also see lots of models of little pigs scattered about here and there, which must form part of some more extensive collection.
I greeted everybody there and plonked myself in a corner with a glass of cider as I interrogated the Boche’s grandson – fifteen years old and already one elbow on the zinc bar – about the general state of despondency: the Stade Brestois football club had just suffered yet another humiliation.
As for the faces, they were always the same. There was Brieg, who fancied himself as a great skipper, with his traditional cotton tagelmust scarf wrapped around his neck. They’ll be coming to get him soon. Who? To go where? Nobody’s ever known! And Roger Orion, with a face the colour of raw steak, grumbling about . . . That particular night it was the fish-guzzling seals that he dreamt of picking off (and which he did, by the way, pick off) with his shotgun; bugger the marine park! And then there was Lebivic, the local reporter from the Ouest-France, whose most recent feat had been to print the list of losers as the winners of the local elections. And the heron, who used to be a DJ at the island’s old nightclub, which closed in the ’90s after repeated instances of people falling into alcohol-induced comas under their asbestos ceiling.
Obviously, the three Parisians had also made an appearance and were enjoying their big moment of fraternising with the natives – especially the depressed one with glasses, who was in full catharsis mode. Completely hammered, he was busy describing to a handful of louts in revolting, explicit detail how his girlfriend, Alice, had died when a stone stupa had collapsed on her.
Brieg, engaging in diversionary tactics, was insisting that when they come to get him he would be stopping over in Kathmandu – it was all planned – and he’d help those poor people dig a well. He’d already dug one in his garden, which meant he’d been able to water his potatoes the previous summer when the local council had implemented water restrictions. Roger Orion made the very pertinent observation that Kathmandu was 700 kilometres away from the sea and that furthermore it wasn’t water they lacked, given they were at the foot of the Himalayas: ‘The Nepalese couldn’t give a shit about your well,’ he’d added, unkindly. The widower was explaining to them in a thick voice that his girlfriend had completely rejected all the fuckwits in her family – and they had returned the sentiment, calling her a leftie who didn’t know how to maintain her social rank and who was letting the side down. They’re the reason she’s dead, he was wailing; because she’d had to flee to the other side of the world in order to escape them.
The drunks commiserated, nodding their heads in furious agreement, on this dire day – if ever there was one – when Brest still wasn’t going to make the first division.
The tall, plain girl had added that Lili, their dead friend, a fabulous, sweet, intelligent, generous girl – can we just leave it at that, I said to myself – would have dearly wanted her ashes to be scattered into the sea from the island’s cliffs. So, even if they didn’t have any ash to scatter, seeing as she had been – and I quote – ‘buried by force’, they had come to throw her favourite stuffed toys into the water instead!
‘With any luck a seal will choke to death on a teddy bear,’ Roger Orion had felt obliged to conclude.
I decided I’d listened to enough crap for one evening, so I finished my glass and went home to bed. But sleep wouldn’t come; it was as if there were something crawling through my mind, preventing me from relaxing. A feeling of Unheimlichkeit, something strangely troubling. And when I finally did manage to fall asleep, I was woken almost immediately by an appalling nightmare.
Feeling hyper-anxious, I fumbled around for my smartphone to see what time it was, and because I had nothing better to do since I couldn’t get back to sleep, I typed the following words into Google: earthquake Nepal death member of parliament and brought up dozens of hits: Alice de Rigny, daughter of former MP and businessman Philippe de Rigny, had died 40 kilometres outside Kathmandu in horrific circumstances.
Alice de Rigny . . . Philippe de Rigny . . . Blanche de Rigny . . . Suddenly I was wide awake.
I continued my search. Philippe de Rigny headed up oil trading company Oilofina. His son, Pierre-Alexandre, had just been arrested at Abidjan airport as he was about to board his private jet. He had been investigated for corruption in 2014 in relation to a matter involving the contamination of several city tips through the dumping of toxic waste. Super Prick was thus not a name that had been given to him lightly.
I got up and frantically started rummaging through Granny Soize’s papers, hunting for any references to my family on my father’s side. All I found was the photo of my grandmother and her sweet husband, which I knew about already, but this time I looked at it with fresh eyes. I had never appreciated, for example, how showy yet still somehow moving the image was: this tall, proud woman in her traditional dress alongside her old husband perched on his barrel, both of their chests festooned with medals, a pair of improbable butterflies pinned into their velvet case.
I was startled by Granny Soize.
‘Do you get up this early in Paris too?’
‘Tell me, did you know my grandfather?’
‘What sort of a question is that to ask me at six in the morning? Yes, I knew him, but I was very young. When my sister used to come to the washhouse carrying him on her back, she would wedge him between two piles of linen so he wouldn’t fall over. But because I was only knee high to a grasshopper and couldn’t stop staring at the hole in his face, because his face was at exactly the same height as mine, they scolded me – and how that made him laugh . . . laugh and laugh . . . and believe me, that was terrifying!’
‘You’ve already told me about that, but what I want to know is where he came from.’
‘What do you mean where he came from? He came from here, of course!’
‘Granny, de Rigny is not a name from around here!’
‘Your grandfather was a bastard. The baby of a single mother, a Malgorn girl, which she had in Paris, where she’d gone to look for work. He was wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916. His mother looked after him for years, but when it became too difficult she came back here to find him a wife who could take over the reins. He was already an old man and it was my sister he married. But she truly loved your grandfather Renan; apparently he was a very funny man.’
‘I haven’t ever seen Corentine’s tomb. Will you show me?’
And after a visit to the bakery, the minimart and the newsagency, we found ourselves at the cemetery. The tomb, or rather the funerary chapel, of my great-grandmother, was right there at the entrance, a sort of small house to shelter her from the rain.
‘Is that it?’