Fabrice and Simon still had no idea why Jean-Christophe had left. They suspected Émilie had been cheating on him, but they could not be sure. Émilie did not seem to think she had done anything wrong. We saw her from time to time, in the bookshop helping Madame Lambert, or window-shopping on the main street. Jean-Christophe’s decision to join the army surprised a lot of people – it was something that would not have occurred to most boys in Río Salado. It was as though he was punishing himself. He had said nothing in his letters about the reason why he had turned his back on his freedom, his family, his village in favour of army regulations and a life of willing obedience.
Simon’s was the last letter.
I never received mine.
Émilie still came by to see me. Sometimes we just stood and stared at each other, not saying a word, not even a greeting. Was there anything left to say? We had said all we had to say to one another. Émilie believed I needed time, and was prepared to be patient; I felt that there could never be anything between us, but how could I convince her of this without offending her or outraging the whole village? Her suggestion that we should be together was impossible, unnatural. I was distraught, I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. Émilie did not try to rush me, but she did everything in her power to keep in touch. She thought I was feeling guilty about Jean-Christophe and that sooner or later I would get over it, that her great dark eyes would wear me down, would overcome my inhibitions. Now that we knew that Jean-Christophe was alive and well, things between us were less tense, but though he was not here, his absence was the gulf that separated us, cast a shadow over our thoughts, clouded our plans. Every time she came, Émilie would see it in my face. She would arrive with some speech she had spent the night preparing, but when the moment came, her courage failed her. She no longer dared to take my hand or place her finger on my lips.
She invented bizarre ailments so that she could come to the pharmacy for some exotic medication. I would jot everything down on my notepad, call her when her prescription arrived. When she came to collect it, she would think for a moment, make some trivial comment, ask some anodyne question about how she should take the medication and then leave. She desperately hoped she could force me to react, trigger some realisation that would allow her to open her heart to me again. I did nothing to encourage her, pretended not to notice her mute insistence, struggled not to give in, convinced that if I showed any weakness she would redouble her efforts.
Though I reluctantly persevered in this crude strategy, I felt heartsick. Every time Émilie came into the shop – or rather every time she left – I realised that she occupied my every waking thought. At night, I could not sleep until I had summoned up her every gesture, her every silence. During the day as I worked behind the counter, waiting for her to appear, every customer who stepped through the door reminded me of her absence, and I found myself pining for her. I flinched every time I heard the door chime, became irritable when I realised it wasn’t her. What was happening to me? Why did I hate myself for being a sensible young man? Should decency prevail over honesty? What was love if it could not triumph over blasphemy and sacrilege, if it bowed before taboos, if it did not stay true to its own wild obsession? Seeing Émilie heartbroken seemed to me to be worse than breaking my promise to her mother, worse than all the blasphemies in the world.
‘How much longer is this going to go on?’ she finally asked me.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Of course you know. I’m talking about us . . . Why are you treating me like this? I come to this dingy little pharmacy to see you, and you pretend you can’t see that I’m suffering, that I’m hanging on, that I’m waiting. It’s as though you want to humiliate me. Why? What have you got against me?’
‘I . . .’
‘Is it because I’m a Christian and you’re a Muslim?’
‘No.’
‘What, then? Don’t tell me you don’t care about me, that you don’t feel anything. I’m a woman, I can sense these things. I don’t understand what the problem is. I’ve told you how I feel about you; what more can I do?’
She was angry and tired, close to tears, her fists clenched as though she wanted to grab me by the throat and shake me until I came apart.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can’t what?’
I felt embarrassed and miserable. Like Émilie, I was infuriated by my cowardice, my indecisiveness, my inability to give her back her freedom and her dignity, even if I knew that whatever was between us could not last. I felt that I was lying, that I was somehow testing myself even though there was nothing to prove, nothing to overcome. Was I trying to punish myself? How could I decide? Émilie was right, I did have feelings for her, but every time I tried to accept the fact, my heart rebelled. What would this love be that was built on sacrilege, with no blessing, no dignity? How could it survive the scorn and contempt that would rain down on it?
‘I love you, Younes . . . Are you listening?’
I said nothing. ‘I’m leaving now. This time I won’t come back. If you feel the same way, you know where to find me.’
A tear trickled down her cheek, but she did not wipe it away. I was drowning in her great dark eyes. Slowly she drew herself up and left.
‘Pity . . .’
My uncle was standing behind me. It took me a moment to realise what he was referring to. Had he heard what we were saying? He was not a man to eavesdrop. He and I had talked about everything – everything except women. The subject was taboo, and in spite of his wisdom, his liberal values, a sense of propriety prevented him from raising the subject with me. In our community, such things were traditionally only ever alluded to, or they were dealt with by proxy – by asking someone else to do so. My uncle would have asked Germaine to speak to me about it.
‘I was in the back office, the door was open . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Maybe it’s for the best. An accidental indiscretion can be fortuitous. I overheard you talking to that girl, and I thought: close the door. But I didn’t close it. Not out of misguided curiosity, but because I have always loved to hear one heart speak to another – to me it is the most glorious music in the world. May I?’
‘Of course.’
‘You can stop me whenever you want, son.’
He sat on the bench, studying his fingers, then, looking down, he said in a distant voice:
‘For a man to think he can fulfil his destiny without a woman is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation; it is recklessness and folly. Certainly a woman is not everything, but everything depends on her. Look around you, look at history, think about the whole world and tell me what man is without woman; what are his promises, his prayers when it is not her praise he sings? A man may be as rich as Croesus, as poor as Job, he may be a slave or a tyrant, but there is no horizon wide enough if woman turns her back.’
He smiled as though speaking to some distant memory.
‘When woman is not the supreme ambition of man, when she is not the goal of all things in this world, then life holds no joys, no pains.’
He slapped his thigh and got to his feet.
‘When I was young, I used to go out to the Great Rock and watch the sunset. It was magnificent. This, I thought, was true beauty. Later I saw plains and forests shrouded in a quiet mantle of snow, I saw palaces set in glorious gardens and many wonders, and I wondered if this was what paradise would be like.’
He laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘Well, I can tell you now that without women – without the houris – paradise would be a still life.’
His trembling fingers dug into my flesh, shaking my whole being. Like a salamander, my uncle had been reborn from his ashes.
‘Sunset, springtime, the blue of the sea, the stars in the sky, all the things that entrance us exert their magic only in the orbit of woman, my son . . . Because beauty, the one, true, unique beaut
y is woman. The rest, all the rest, exists simply to adorn her.’
His other hand seized my other shoulder. He stared into my eyes, searching for something. Our noses were almost touching, our breath mingled. I had never seen him like this, except perhaps on the day he came to tell Germaine that his nephew had become their son.
‘If a woman loves you, Younes, if she truly loves you, and if you have the wisdom to appreciate this great privilege, then there is no god to touch you.’
Before going back upstairs to his study, standing with one hand on the banister, he said:
‘Run after her . . . One day, man will surely be able to catch a comet, but all the glories of this world will not console the man who allows the real opportunity in his life to slip away.’
I did not listen.
Fabrice Scamaroni married Hélène Lefèvre in July 1951. It was a beautiful wedding; there were so many guests that the marriage took place in two acts: one for the village, the other for colleagues – a contingent of journalists including the editorial team of L’Écho d’Oran – artists, athletes and much of the cream of Oran society, among them the celebrated writer Emmanuel Roblès. Act One took place in Aïn Turck, on the vast beachfront estate owned by a rich friend of Madame Scamaroni. I felt ill at ease at the reception. Émilie was there on Simon’s arm. Madame Cazenave was there, looking a little lost. Her partnership with Simon was thriving; their fashion house already dressed the richest ladies in Río Salado and Hamman Bouhadjar, and in spite of tough competition was becoming the leading fashion house among well-to-do women in Oran. During the crush at the buffet table, Simon stepped on my foot. He didn’t apologise. He looked for Émilie in the crowd and headed straight for her. What had she told him? Why was my oldest friend suddenly behaving as though I did not exist?
I was too tired to ask him.
Act Two was for the people of the village; Río Salado was determined to celebrate the marriage of its favoured son in privacy. Pépé Rucillio donated fifty sheep and paid for the finest méchoui specialists to come from Sebdou. André’s father, Jaime Jiménez Sosa, offered the newly-weds a vast swathe of his estate for the occasion, which was bounded by palm trees hung with drapes and silks and garlands. Plush benches were set out among the trees, tables groaned under the weight of food and flowers. In the centre, a huge marquee had been erected, lavishly decorated with rugs and cushions. The servants, mostly Arab boys and beautiful young black men, were dressed as eunuchs in embroidered waistcoats, billowing calf-length breeches and yellow turbans studded with jewels – it looked like a scene from the Thousand and One Nights. Here, too, I felt awkward. Émilie did not leave Simon’s side for a moment, while Madame Cazenave watched me like a hawk as though afraid of some jealous tantrum. In the evening, a famous orchestra of Arabo-Judaic music from Constantine, the mythical hanging city, thrilled the assembled company. I was barely listening, sitting on a crate at the far end of the festivities. Jelloul brought me a plate of food and whispered in my ear that the look on my face would curdle all the happiness on earth. I knew I looked miserable; I knew that instead of sitting sulking, spoiling everyone else’s enjoyment, I should go home. But I couldn’t. Fabrice would have been offended, and I was determined not to lose him too.
With Jean-Christophe gone, Fabrice married and Simon being elusive since starting up in business with Madame Cazenave, my world felt emptier. I got up early, spent my day in the pharmacy, but as soon as I pulled down the shutters in the evening, I had no idea what to do. At first I went to André’s diner and played pool with José and then headed home; later I stopped going out at night altogether. I would go up to my room, pick up a book and read the same chapter over and over without making any sense of it. I could not seem to concentrate, even when serving customers in the pharmacy. More than once I misread a doctor’s scrawl and handed over the wrong medicine. Sometimes I would stand in front of the shelves for minutes at a time, unable to remember where something was. At dinner, Germaine would have to pinch me under the table to wake me up. I barely ate. My uncle felt sorry for me, but he said nothing.
Events seemed to gather pace, but since I was too tired to keep up, they began to leave me behind. Fabrice and Hélène had their first child – a beautiful chubby-cheeked little boy – and moved to Oran. Shortly afterwards, Fabrice’s mother sold her house in Río Salado and moved to Aïn Ture. Whenever I walked past their derelict, boarded house, I felt a lump in my throat. A part of my life had disappeared, an island had vanished from my archipelago. I began to avoid the street, to go around the block, to pretend that part of the village had never existed. André married a cousin three years older than him and took off for the United States. They went there for a month, but the honeymoon was indefinitely extended. He left José to run the diner, though it no longer drew the crowds it once had now that the novelty of playing pool had palled.
I was bored.
I didn’t like to go to the beach. Now that all my friends had gone, I no longer wanted to laze idly in the sun. The breaking waves snuffed out my dreams; there was no one there to share them with me. When I did go to the beach, as often as not I didn’t even get out of my car. I would park on a clifftop and sit behind the steering wheel, staring out at the rocks and the waves breaking against them in soaring sprays. I could lose myself for hours, parked in the shade of a tree, with my hands on the wheel or my arms behind my head. The cries of the seagulls and the children whirled around me, distracting me from my worries, bringing a sort of peace that I clung to until darkness came and the last glow of a cigarette had flickered out.
I thought about moving back to Oran. I was miserable in Río Salado. I no longer seemed to recognise the place. I was living in a parallel world. I recognised familiar faces, but I was afraid that if I should reach out to touch them, there would be nothing but the wind. It was the end of an era; a page had been turned, and the new page before me was blank, frustrating, unpleasant to the touch. I needed to take stock. I needed a change of scenery, a new horizon. And – why not? – to sever the ties that no longer bound me to anything.
I felt rootless.
I thought about trying to trace my mother and sister. I still missed them terribly. Without them I felt helpless and heartbroken. From time to time I would go back to Jenane Jato in the hope of gleaning some piece of information that might lead me to them. But here, too, I had misjudged things. Jenane Jato was a world of survival and of festering discontent – no one had time to worry about a woman and her deaf-mute child. Every day, thousands of people poured into Jenane Jato. What had once been a shanty town in the scrubland was now a teeming neighbourhood of noisy streets, angry carters, watchful stallholders, crowded hammams, asphalt roads and smoky workshops. Peg-Leg was still there, surrounded now by competition. The barber no longer sat on a munitions crate to shave old men; he had a proper salon now, with a swivel chair and a brass cabinet for his tools. The courtyard house we had once lived in had been completely rebuilt, and Bliss, the broker, was in charge again. He wouldn’t recognise my mother, he told me, since he had never spoken to her. No one knew where my mother and sister were; no one had seen them since the fire. I managed to track down Batoul, who had traded tarot cards and crystal balls for ledgers and accounting books. She was better at business than she had been at dealing with other people’s misfortune, and her Turkish baths were always full. She had promised to let me know if she heard anything about my mother. It had been two years since I had spoken to her.
I thought that looking for my mother again might take my mind off the misery I had felt since Jean-Christophe left, the absence that gnawed at my heart whenever I thought about Émilie. I couldn’t bear to go on living in the same village as her, seeing her in the street, walking past as though I felt nothing when in fact my days and nights were haunted by the thought of her. Now that she no longer came to see me at the pharmacy, I felt the terrible scope of my loneliness. I knew that the wound would not quickly heal, but I could think of no cure. Émilie would never forgive me; she f
elt terribly bitter, perhaps she even hated me. Her anger was so palpable it burned into my brain. She did not even have to look at me – in fact these days she never looked at me – since even when she turned away I could feel the blaze in her eyes, like underwater volcanoes that a million tons of water and the darkness of the deep could not extinguish.
I was sitting having breakfast in a little café on the seafront in Oran when someone knocked on the window. It was Simon Benyamin. He was wearing a thick winter coat, and when he pushed his hood back, I saw he was almost entirely bald now.
He was surprised and delighted to see me. He pulled open the door and came inside, trailing an icy blast of wind.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to a real restaurant, where the fish is as tender as a teenage girl’s buttocks.’
I told him I’d almost finished. He frowned, then took off his coat and scarf and sat opposite me.
‘So, what’s good in this greasy spoon?’
He waved to the waiter and ordered lamb kebabs, a green salad and a half-bottle of red wine; then, rubbing his hands excitedly, he said:
‘So, are you playing hard to get, or are you just sulking? I waved at you the other day in Lourmel and you completely ignored me.’
What the day owes the nigth Page 21
