You’re in the South Now
You’re in the South Now
Machete in Carcasonne
When Romain laughs it comes from the bottom of his chest, making his whole body shake with delight like an engine turning over. He takes me in his huge arms and kisses me roughly on each cheek.
“Ça va, cousin? Niiiice boy.”
He laughs again and squeezes my skinny shoulders, stopping just short of crushing them to dust. He has ragged, black stubble and his long hair is pulled back by a comb headband. His eyes are drooping and slightly slanted, one of them encircled by a pale purple bruise. He’d been in a fight with a soldier the night before.
It’s 3 pm; I’ve just left the restrained silence of the train from Lyon and we’re standing outside a dingy bar near the station, the blue turrets of la cité rising up in the distance. Carcasonne is a small city in the south of France best known for the perfectly restored medieval fortress that surrounds the center, and slightly less well-known for its rugby teams. My cousin plays rugby à treize, known as rugby league in Australia and practically unknown everywhere else.
“Let’s drink, putain!”
Romain throws his cigarette to the ground and I follow him through the screen door inside. We lean on the long wooden bar and he orders two shots of Machete. The barman grins like a wolf and takes down an unmarked bottle from the top shelf. Machete is a brown spirit of unspecified alcohol content infused with chillies, small lumps of which float ominously on top of the evil smelling liquid. It burns like acid all the way down and, as I lower my glass, I realize there’s already another one lined up and the barman is preparing us a couple of bottles of Pastis.
“You’re in the South now, boy. You have to drink la jaune.”
We head back to the table where his sister, Julie, and their friends are sitting. Pastis is an aniseed flavored liquor that turns cloudy yellow when you mix it with ice and water; hence, the nickname la jaune. Romain also adds a squirt of mint syrup, turning the yellow to a milky, unappetizing green. We sit and talk in a bastardized mix of French and English through the afternoon, as more and more of their friends turn up. Romain is greeted with equal parts wary respect and ecstatic affection. He is as charismatic and good-looking as his five siblings: his intimidating size is offset by his spontaneous, thunderous laugh. He moves through the crowd, filling empty glasses and clawing fistfuls of cash from his pockets to pay for more and more bottles of Pastis.
He drags me to the bar again for some snacks: small wooden bowls of duck hearts, lightly cooked in garlic and herbs. They are succulent and light and we eat ravenously, stabbing through them with toothpicks, then he picks up the bowl and drinks the blood that has collected in the bottom. It drips down his chin and into his shirt.
By this stage the spirits have caught up with me and it seems perfectly natural when he tells me that our next stop will be a tattoo parlor.
“I want to get My Brother’s Keeper,” he says, tracing a line underneath his collarbone. “Like the Bra Boys, but in French: Gardien de mes Frères.”
As we stagger through the cobbled streets, Julie relates the history of the Bra Boys to her friends in French. A semi-criminal gang of surfers from the beach suburb of Maroubra in Sydney, the Bra Boys are famous for fighting police and out-of-towners. They spawned a documentary narrated by Russell Crowe and members of the gang often get the slogan ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ tattooed across their chests.
“Our family are like them: we look after each other.”
The tattoo artist squints, delicately trying to clear a patch in Romain’s thick, black chest hair as we crowd around him in the cramped room, jeering and swearing in a drunken stupor. Impatiently, Romain snatches the razor from him and begins ripping into the hair, small slits of blood springing up across his chest. Everyone cheers.
An hour later we are out on the street again, the new tattoo covered in plastic cling film, swigging vodka on our way to the next bar. Romain puts his arm around my shoulders.
“Allez, let’s get this night started. Niiice boy!”