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La nuit du pigeon*
Jean-Baptiste Baronian

Espace Nord, Noir de Noir, Editions Labor • 2006 • 210 pages

Etienne Borgers
Translation: Anne Foster

 

Jean Malherbe is a long-term unemployed man who leads a quiet life in a modest part of Nivelles, a small sleepy town about thirty kilometres from Brussels. He has never fully achieved his potential in his working life, something which he isn't at all concerned about. He used to change jobs all the time but has been unemployed for eighteen months since being sacked by la Sadec where he had worked for seven years. There are few job prospects in the region even for a thirty year old, and he resigns himself quite readily to this miserable way of life, until the day when, as he is leaving the dole office after his weekly signing-on he is accosted by a stranger who offers him a chance to earn some money. Lots of money. Because he has nothing to lose, but on the defensive nevertheless, he listens to this complete stranger who, without beating about the bush, asks him to kill someone according to the instructions he will be given. The target is a union leader of whom Malherbe is vaguely aware through the union at la Sadec. Obviously the work is well paid. But why him, an ordinary man very far removed from a professional killer. His paymasters are attracted by his past as an elite marksman in the army. The money sounds good. It should help get him out of his miserable existence. Without being particularly concerned he accepts the job but in spite of the money is rather nervous about his role. He is worried by the fake employment contract for a company which seems not to exist and the men or sometimes a limousine who follow him everywhere. Jean Malherbe seems to slide towards paranoia, suffocated by inconsistencies, cut off from the real world by the panic which seizes him, continually pulling him in all directions and blinding him. He thinks he is in love with the beautiful Simone whom he meets out of the blue in a bar on the outskirts of Nivelles, a bar also used by the man who recruited him. But even the relationship he begins with the young woman seems full of contradictions and questions.

His panic persists until the night when, in a disused building in Nivelles where he has hidden to escape the people who are forever on his tail, he kills a man who had attacked him. Consumed by a growing sense of panic, Malherbe goes to Charleroi, follows the instructions given to him to prepare for the hit, but acts irrationally and is unable to assess calmly the behaviour of people he meets, even those he is close to. Believing he is getting himself out of the hellish situation he is stuck in, he actually gets deeper and deeper into the mire his paymasters have created.

La Nuit du Pigeon is written in the first person and is a novel about isolation and distress. It plunges us straightaway into the stifling world of the central character. His character lives in the present, in a familiar reality and is unable to see himself in a future that he can only imagine as hostile and insane and over which he has no control and to which there is only one solution – to flee.

Written in a concise and fluid style, J-B Baronian describes for us the descent of Jean Malherbe towards the depths of inner despair. He is a man lost in his own internal labyrinth. The story is told coolly and with a certain detachment and reflects the life of this character torn between indifference and rampant imagination.

The greyness of his everyday life is transformed into a sombre and murky story which ends in tragedy and ridicule. All this bears the hallmark of Baronian, an author whose deceptively simple, straightforward and concise style is pure elegance, but a very dark elegance for all that.

Note: this novel was published in 1982 under the pseudonym Alexandre Lous.

* Dirty Work