Solea by Jean-Claude Izzo, Howard Curtis

and from my address book, because they sympathized with the National Front.
    Once you get to a certain age, you don’t make friends anymore. But you still have buddies. People you hang out with, party with, play cards or bowls with. The years passed like that. With them. Between one person’s birthday and another. Evenings spent eating and drinking. Dancing. The children grew up. They’d bring along their gorgeous girlfriends, who’d seduce their fathers and the friends of their friends, playing with their desire, as only girls between fifteen and eighteen can do. The couples would drink and gossip about each other’s infidelities. And you also saw couples falling apart within the space of a single evening.
    Mavros lost Pascale during one of those evenings. It was three years ago, the end of summer, at Marie and Pierre’s place. They had a beautiful house in Malmousque, on Rue de la Douane, and they loved having friends over. I was very fond of Marie and Pierre.
    Lole and I had been dancing salsa. Juan Luis Guerra, Arturo Sandoval, Irakere, Tito Puente, and to finish, Ray Barretto’s magnificent “Benedicion.” We were out of breath, our bodies fairly aroused after clinging to each other for so long.
    Mavros was standing alone, leaning awkwardly against a wall, a glass of champagne in his hand.
    â€œAre you O.K.?” I asked him.
    He raised his glass, as if in a toast, and knocked back the drink. “Absolutely fine.”
    And he went off to get another drink. He was clearly determined to get plastered. I watched him as he went. Pascale, his girlfriend of five years, was at the other end of the room, deep in conversation with her old friend Joëlle and Benoît, a Marseilles photographer we occasionally met at parties. From time to time, someone would pass, join in their conversation, and walk off again.
    I stood there for a moment watching the three of them. Pascale was in profile. She was monopolizing the conversation, talking nineteen to the dozen the way she sometimes did when she was passionate about something, or someone. Benoît had moved closer to her. So close, he seemed to be leaning his shoulder on hers. From time to time, he’d place his hand on the back of a chair, and Pascale would push back her long hair and then bring down her hand so that it rested next to his, but without touching it. It was mutual seduction, that much was obvious. And I wondered if Joëlle realized what was happening right there in front of her eyes.
    Mavros was dying to join them, but he stayed where he was, drinking alone. With a kind of desperate determination. At one point, Pascale left Joëlle and Benoît, I assumed to go to the toilet, and walked right past him without saying a word. On the way back, she noticed him at last, went up to him, smiled, and asked, very gently, “Are you all right?”
    â€œI don’t exist anymore, is that it?” he replied.
    â€œWhy do you say that?”
    â€œI’ve been watching you for an hour, I’ve been pouring myself drinks right next to you. You haven’t looked at me once. It’s as if I didn’t exist. Is that it?”
    Pascale didn’t answer. She turned around and went back to the toilet. To cry. Because it was true. He didn’t exist for her anymore. In her heart. But she hadn’t yet admitted it to herself. Until she heard Mavros come right out with it.
    One night a month later, Pascale stayed out all night. Mavros was in Limoges, sorting out the details of a fight he was arranging for one of his protégés. He phoned Pascale almost every hour during the night. He started to get worried. He was afraid something had happened to her—she’d had an accident, she’d been attacked. He kept leaving messages for her. The next day, Pascale left him one:
Nothing’s happened to me. I’m not in hospital. I’m all right. I didn’t go home last night. I’m at the office.