The farting fly

 

I knew the adventurer Sylvester in California.  He was then, let us say, a portraitist. The main part of his clientele was made up of ladies of little virtue. He saw himself above all as an artist and nothing less than one of the best. I do not believe that he exaggerated his professional qualities, he was undoubtedly competent in the field. Perhaps he was famous for other subjects, but I never had the opportunity to see the works he produced before this period of his life.

I would like to point out that Sylvester had a fairly high opinion of himself in all areas.  Perhaps I was a good interlocutor for him, because I lacked self-confidence at the time and I considered myself very honored to have received the attention of such a man.

We were very different, but he gave me a lot intellectually, because he was a scholar. On the friendly level, he was also a good comrade. He was often generous enough to share his meals with me at a time when I was already not rich.

The adventurer Sylvester was a strong and solid man, although a cocaine addict. With a dark complexion, he had an educated bad-boy charm that could disturb the damsels in search of thrills; all the more so as he had a very manly voice. He wore the sailors' ear ring and one could guess a past where bad taverns had had their place. 

I noticed that his teeth were a bit damaged, the usual legacy of those who lead a broken life.  The adventurer Sylvester had travelled through South America, North America and all the bad places. But his point of reference remained Paris. He had grown up in the 12th arrondissement, near the former Museum of the Colonies, which surprised me greatly, because it was then an unremarkable neighborhood where quiet bourgeois people lived, not young people in love with revolutions. 

Some people are looking for adventure, others are living it. Sylvestre was of that race. I don't think he had been confined to Paris for long, where his friends must have belonged more to the milieu of Apaches and hoodlums than accounting students. The adventurer Sylvestre told me more about his friends in leftist circles and his good adventures on the concrete than about "rallies" in well-to-do districts. That said, he had a certain education, an erudition that could not come from self-taught effort alone. I suspect that he was born a bourgeois and then got sloppy when he came in contact with the street.

He liked to talk about his complicity with the IRA, his personal pantheon being probably more on the side of Marthe Michel than Cadoudal. But we didn't talk much about our political ideas. We had emigrated there and I was no longer interested in chapel issues. We had then the exile in common and few arguments to confront us. Overseas, our friendship was easier, because the journey allowed us to tell only the bare essentials.  Many recreated their past in this way.

Today, because of my duties as a family man, I no longer seek the friendship of men like the adventurer Sylvester.  He is and will remain an eternal desperado, the kind of man who does not fit in my peaceful world of a family man. 

I don't know much about this man after all. He didn't talk about his family. I deduce, as I said before, that he must have been rather rebellious to his original environment. I imagine that he was the kind of intelligent, subversive kid who didn't fit into the family mold and who ended up slamming the door of the bourgeois apartment at the age of fifteen or sixteen. I have some clues about this since the adventurer Sylvestre had told me that he had indeed frequented certain terraces, such as the Café Flore, in search of ladies in their forties in search of affection in exchange for payment. That could only be the fact of a young man penniless and, with the passage, already seriously damaged morally.

It is certain that the adventurer Sylvester had an extremely pessimistic vision of human society.  According to him, women were all venal and men inherently unreliable.  Of course, since the adventurer Sylvestre had always chosen to frequent the underworld, where one finds the greatest concentration of venal women, swindlers and psychopaths, he had reinforced his convictions.  The respectable circles did not welcome this man with the appearance of a marginal and with pupils dilated by the consumption of coke. His human experience remained therefore partial...

Did he suffer from it? He pretended not to, confining himself to frequenting only the underbelly of the city, but I think, deep down, he would have liked to meet an honorable woman, capable of exchanging intellectually and emotionally with him.

His life choices led him to find only lost, venal or crazy girls.  Perhaps if he had wanted to shave, his fate would have been different.

When I left Los Angeles, the adventurer Sylvester had plans to leave North America as well. He wanted to go to Brazil where he had already lived with a woman, an actress of little virtue. She was obviously from the favelas and owed her sultry career to the adventurer Sylvestre, who had launched her through his connections and money. Olivia, I think that was her name, probably didn't understand that she was the adventurer's marital dream.  In his own way, he had wanted to make this street girl a respectable woman, his new start in the New World. 

He had thus found himself in endless entanglements, eaten up in the Brazilian sauce. There, his Rousseauist romanticism, his dreams of social justice could not be understood. So he had prosaically paid until the girl's career started.  He had, in the process, financially strengthened the situation of the parents, who were aware that their daughter's beauty was their only chance to get such a "pigeon".  Then, she had had to throw him out when he had been ruined, leaving him for another naive person to pluck.  The last I heard, the new turkey was another Frenchman who had taken his tropical conquest to Morocco...

How could a man as experienced as the Sylvestres adventurer have been so naive? I think it had to do with the difference in social and economic context. In a country like Brazil, where kids are killing themselves in the favelas, a little Frenchman in revolt is easy prey. Undeniably, the adventurer Sylvestre was a more credible tough guy in the small circle of quiet and well-educated French-speaking youth to which I belonged then. 

The adventurer Sylvestre had returned to Brazil, for the pleasure of burning his wings again. This time, he had been involved in financing a discotheque in Belo Horizonte, while he had been completely cleaned out of his last dollars and lost a lot of weight due to an unknown illness. He had sent me a picture asking me if I recognized him.  As I looked at the picture, I couldn't help but express my concern.  He had vaguely joked that he would soon die from "rotting of the foundation". I did not dwell on the revelations implicit in this convict's joke.

A few weeks later, he was back home, running around the hospitals trying to save his life. I got in touch with him again. He didn't seem to be in any way anxious about dying. But he looked around at the people and the streets with boredom. He had not lost the desire to go back. He could not think of anything else. He wanted to get back to the sea air, to fulfill an old dream before he died. 

Surprisingly, he recovered. At least, that's what he told me. However, he remained singularly thin. I didn't want to worry about it, so I didn't talk to him about it anymore. 

He had made his decision one day, and in a man like him, a decision takes everything away. He wanted to leave on a boat, a sailboat of his own.  So he bought this little nine-meter sailboat in Toulon. It was quite old and rather decrepit, but he had realized his dream: to live aboard a sailboat. As soon as the purchase was made, he had painted the new name of the boat with a stencil: "La mouche qui pète" (The farting fly).  He had no solid experience in navigation; he had only read one or two books on the subject. He had a compass, some blankets, two backpacks and a lot of recklessness.  It wasn't much. 

He wanted to leave the next day. As I had come to see him, on the quay where he had moored, he proposed me, as a joke, to accompany him.  I was then in a too calm period of my young life. I didn't say anything right away, but I started to consider it. The adventure was offered to me while, on the other side, it was a reasonable suicide, a daily life without scope, a funeral announced. 

After a moment of reflection, I told him that I would like to go with him. He was surprised, but did not insist, elegantly giving me the opportunity to change my mind. I only took the time to go back to my parents' house, to pack a bag and I met him on the bridge that evening. 

There he finally took me seriously. He simply pointed to a place in the cabin where I could slip my bag. It was narrow and quite uncomfortable. But I was delighted with the promise of adventure. We shared a can of food and took a final walk around Toulon. There were not many people, except for a few North Africans who were dealing pot in the deserted streets. Sylvestre wanted to stop for a drink in a snack-hall.  The place was sordid, but we were in a good mood, already left for adventure, for other worlds populated by fascinating characters, treasures offered to the audacity and the imagination.  We returned to the boat quite early. I don't know if Sylvester slept. I stayed awake, listening to the lapping of the waves on the hull of this boat. On the other side, under me, it was the water.  I imagined nights on the open sea with hundreds of meters of waves. There was only a thin polyester hull separating me from the water. I ended up falling asleep very late. 

Soon after, when I woke up, Sylvester was working on the deck. It was early, maybe five o'clock. But the captain had decided to leave the port quickly, before there were too many people. I didn't have time to eat.  We had to leave, Sylvester had waited too long.  His idea was to sail to Morocco. This pleased me, because the land would never be too far away and Morocco was an African invitation, a gateway to the dark continent, an adventure with permanent sunshine and unfettered adventure. 

I quickly realized that Sylvestre had a rather theoretical knowledge of navigation. Once we left the harbor, getting out of the sail was quite laborious. I was not a great help, although I was willing. The wind is an unreliable ally and the sea currents seemed much more powerful than this changing wind which did not blow very often towards the west.

To my horror, we had to move away from the coast to avoid the many reefs that bristled in the shallow waters. Once, we had a cargo ship which expressed very noisily its irritation to see us on its way. Seeing this huge metal mass coming towards us when the wind was hardly pushing us was a test of nerves. We barely made it through, but the waves pushed by the behemoth almost capsized us.  It was a humiliation to be such poor sailors. But it took more than that to make us give up the call of the sea.

I had thought of taking a cap to protect myself from the sun that was burning my skin.  Sylvester laughed to see me dressed like in winter, but I didn't want to get sunburned.  The first day was long. I was not bored, because we talked a lot with Sylvester. In the evening, I was exhausted from having been on the lookout for dangers as much as from the little rest I had taken the day before.  We had not come very far.  I believe that Sylvester hoped to make about forty miles a day. We had not even reached La Ciotat.

We decided to drop anchor among other sailboats. We dived to get back to the coast.  The water was cool and a light wind was chilling us. We arrived on a gravel beach, overgrown with garbage, bordered by sharp rocks. We had no equipment, not even a small boat to reach the coast, no matches to make a fire. There was nothing and nobody there but a road a little further. We swam back and spent part of the night shivering. The next morning, we got our heads out of the boat. It was late and we had recovered. Unfortunately, the weather was not good, the wind was shaking the sea. It was cold. We looked at the other boats anchored in the bay. They seemed deserted. We decided to wait for the weather to calm down. At the end of the morning, the weather was not better. We had to decide to stay there.  The bad weather lasted three days. Three days of having to stay on a boat agitated by the waves, laid down by the wind, without being able to leave it, without being able to reach the shore. 

The lesson was profitable in that it convinced me of the excellence of coastal navigation. What would have become of us in the open sea, tossed about by the elements? We had a few canned goods, but we could not make any food. It was difficult to sleep in this weather.

One morning, another boat came banging against ours, its mooring lines had broken. We went out to push it back. It was raining a thick drizzle downwind. We could hardly see.

Suddenly, I had the idea of going aboard the wandering boat. I knocked on the door. It was closed.  I tried to open it. Fortunately, the door held and I did not have the opportunity to steal anything. If I had found some useful objects, I would have become a thief.

Sylvester watched me and said nothing. Eventually I got back on board our sailboat and we left the foreign boat to crash further against the rocks.

The next morning, the weather was fine. We left early, I had a bad conscience.  A few days of discomfort had been enough to make me a thief. I discovered that my wise and good boy side was only a varnish authorized by the relative comfort of my life.

We sailed for a few days to the Spanish coast, until the boat sank one morning, off Sitges.  The hull was rotten, a seal had broken, leaving a hole, a small hole. Soon, other holes appeared...

We could not do anything, we only had time to gather some belongings and to swim to the coast. The sea pushed us on the wave-breaking rocks of the Chapel of Sant Bartomeu i Santa Tecla.

After a final effort, we managed to get up on the terrace, at the feet, if I may say so, of the Mermaid.

We sat down with our feet in the air. I attacked, after a long moment of dejected silence:

"So, what do we do now?"

You do what you want. I'm going to find a way to get "The Farting Fly" back.

How?

I don't know. I'll find another boat, here.

You don't want to continue on foot?

No, I'll go by boat.

It was a way of letting me know that he wanted to be alone. The next few days the adventurer spent getting drunk in the bars of Barcelona's Barri Gotic.

When he started to use coke, getting closer to even more toxic environments, I decided to stay away. I knew his penchant for drugs and junkies.  It was a side of his character that did not interest me.

I continued the journey to the south of Spain, and then I went home. I had not had the courage to face the dangers of Africa alone.

I don't know if the adventurer Sylvester is still of this world. The last time I spoke to him, I was worried about his health and, knowing his life, suggested that he put himself in order before God. He told me that he had met him. God, according to him, was the Dalai Lama. I don't think Tenzin Gyatso himself made any serious claims to deity.

Was this a provocation on the part of my friend, I cannot say, because he did so much. How to open the eyes of a child of May 68, fed with the principles of the Revolution and the writings of the Marquis de Sade? 

I really wish him to have had the time to settle his accounts. He was a good friend of the road, fallen on the ground, the fault of Voltaire, the nose in the stream, the fault of Rousseau...

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