Gino suggested I sleep in his room. I told him I wouldn’t be able to breathe, that I preferred the courtyard. He brought me an esparto mat and a blanket and lay down next to me on a piece of carpet. We stared up at the sky and listened out for the noises of the city. When the streets grew quiet, Gino started snoring. I waited to doze off in my turn, but anger caught up with me and I didn’t sleep a wink.
Gino got up early. He made coffee for his mother, made sure she had everything she needed and told me I could stay in the apartment if I wanted. I declined the offer because I had no desire to meet my mother, who would be arriving soon. She came at seven every day to do the housework for the Ramouns. Gino didn’t have any other suggestion to make. He had to go to work. I walked with him to Place Sébastopol. He promised to see me at the end of the day and took his leave. I stood there on the pavement, not knowing what to do with myself. I felt ill at ease and ached all over. The thought of going home repelled me.
I went up onto the heights of Létang to look at the sea. It was as wild as the din in my head. Then I went to Boulevard Marceau to watch the trams with their passengers clinging to the guardrails like strings of garlic. At the station, I listened to the trains arriving in a screech of whistles and pouring their contingents of travellers out onto the platforms. From time to time, an idea would cross my mind and I would imagine myself getting on a train and going somewhere, anywhere, far from this feeling of disgust I was dragging around like a ball and chain. I wanted to hit everything that moved. If anybody looked at me, I was ready to charge.
I only felt a little calmer when Gino returned.
Gino was my stability, my crutch. Every evening, he would take me to the cinema to see Max Linder, Charlie Chaplin, The Three Musketeers, Tarzan of the Apes, King Kong and horror films. Then we would go to a cabaret in Rue d’Austerlitz in the Derb to hear Messaoud Médioni sing. I would then start to feel a little better. But in the morning, when Gino went to work, my unease would return and I would try and shake it off in the bustle of the streets.
Pierre came looking for me. I told him it was all over between us. He called me an idiot and told me that the ‘Yid’ was brainwashing me. I couldn’t control what my fist did next. I felt my ‘pimp’s’ nose give at the end of my arm. Surprised by my action, Pierre fell backwards, half stunned. He lifted his hand to his face and looked incredulously at his bloodstained fingers. ‘I should have expected that,’ he grunted in a voice shaking with bile. ‘I try to help you and this is how you thank me. Well, what can you expect of an Arab? No loyalty or gratitude.’
He stood up, gave me a black eye and finally left me alone.
7
We were supposed to be going to Ras el-Aïn for a walk, but Gino suddenly changed his mind. ‘I have things to sort out at home,’ he said by way of excuse. I walked home with him. And my mother was there, on Boulevard Mascara, a glove in one hand and a bowl of water beside her; she was just finishing washing my friend’s mother. What was the meaning of this strange coincidence? I asked Gino. He replied that I was wrong to avoid my family. I hadn’t set foot in Rue du Général-Cérez for nine months, not since the incident in the Jewish cemetery. I asked Gino if this was a roundabout way of getting rid of me. He told me his home was mine and that I could stay there as long as I wanted, but that my family needed me, and that it wasn’t a good idea to fall out with them.
I was getting ready to leave when my mother grabbed me by the wrist. ‘I have to talk to you,’ she said. She put on her veil and motioned me to follow her. We did not exchange a word in the street. She walked ahead and I trailed behind, wondering what new revelation awaited me round the corner.
When we got home, my mother said, ‘We’re not hard on you, it’s life that’s hard on all of us.’ I asked her why she hadn’t told me the truth about my father, and she replied that there was nothing to say about him. And that was all. My mother went into the kitchen to make dinner.
Nora joined me in the next room. She was even more beautiful than before and her big eyes threw me into disarray.
‘We missed you,’ she admitted, turning away in embarrassment.
She’s growing up too fast, I thought. She was almost a woman now. Her body had blossomed; it demanded celebration.
‘I’m back, that’s all that matters,’ I said.
Nora smelt good, like a meadow in spring. Her black hair fell over her round shoulders and her chest carried the promise of maturity.
We could think of nothing further to say.
Our silence spoke for us.
I was in love with her …
Aunt Rokaya opened her emaciated arms to me. ‘Silly fool!’ she scolded me affectionately. ‘You should never be angry with your family. How could you live with your friend so close to here and ignore us?’ She undid a scarf hanging from her blouse and handed me the silver ring that was in it. ‘This belonged to your grandfather. The day he died, he took it off his finger and made me promise to give it to my son. I never had a son of my own. And you’re more than a nephew to me.’
Aunt Rokaya had grown thinner. In addition to the paralysis of the lower limbs that confined her to her straw mattress, she complained of whistling in her ears and terrible headaches. The amulets the quacks prescribed for her had no effect. She was nothing now but a ghost with blurred features, her skin grey, her eyes full of stoic suffering.
Rokaya had the sickness of masterless people. She had contracted it in Turambo, when her home was a patched-up tent. At that time, the cauldron on the wooden fire only gurgled to stave off hunger. The flavourless crops grew once a year; the rest of the time we lived on roots and bitter acorns. By the age of five, Rokaya was looking after her grandfather’s one goat. One night, the goat’s throat had been torn out by a jackal because the pen hadn’t been properly closed. She had felt guilty about that all her life. Whenever misfortune struck us, she would say it was her fault – it was pointless to tell her that she was not to blame. At the age of fourteen, she was married off to a club-footed shepherd who beat her to make her submit to him. He knew he was the lowest of the low and had married her to make himself feel important. So when she so much as looked at him, he considered it an outrage. He died, killed by a bolt of lightning, and the villagers saw the hand of God in that thunderbolt from heaven. A widow at nineteen, she was remarried to another peasant who was just as bad. Her body would forever bear the marks of the mistreatment meted out to her during her second marriage. Rejected at the age of twenty-six, she was handed over for the third time to a pedlar who set off one morning to sell samovars and never came back, leaving his wife eight months pregnant. Rokaya gave birth to Nora in a barn, pushing with all her might, a cloth in her mouth to stifle her screams. At the age of forty-five, she was at the end of her tether. She looked twice her age. Her sickness had eaten her up inside with all the methodical greed of a colony of termites. I had always felt sorry for her. Her face bore the traces of an old sorrow that refused to vanish. It was through Rokaya that I had thought I understood that there are tragedies that obstinately remain on the surface, like ugly scars, in order not to fall into oblivion and thus be absolved of the harm they have caused … Because the damage returns as soon as it is forgiven, convinced it has been rehabilitated, and then it can no longer stop. Rokaya kept her wounds as open as her eyes, in order not to lose sight of even the slightest pain she had suffered for fear of not recognising it if it had the nerve to knock at her door again. Her face, in a sense, was a mirror where every ordeal displayed its duly paid bills. And the ordeals strove to make an inextricable parchment of her facial lines, all of which led back to the same original crime, that of a child of five who had neglected to close the pen where her family’s one goat was kept.
We had dinner in the main room, all four of us gathered round a low table, Rokaya lying a little further away in a corner. Mekki had merely given a little smile when he came home. He didn’t say a word to me. His status as head of the family spared him certain obligations. But he was pleased with my
return to the fold. Nora had difficulty swallowing her spoonfuls of soup. My presence disturbed her. Or rather my gaze. I couldn’t stop glancing at her out of the corner of my eye, seeing nothing but her full mouth, which strove to silence what her eyes demanded. I too had grown up. I was nearly seventeen and well built, and whenever I smiled at my reflection in the mirror, my face displayed a kind of fleeting charm. Nora harboured feelings for me that went beyond pure innocence. Those nine months of separation had revealed us to ourselves. Our silence betrayed an inner feverishness that was too much for us. In our traditions, we didn’t know how to deal with those kinds of feeling. We let them simmer in secret and sometimes completely stifled them. They were feelings which were hard to bear and too dangerous to be brought out into the open. Words, in that platonic but intense debate, would have seemed indecently crude, since with us the senses were expressed in darkness. In that place, touch was more eloquent than poetry.
After dinner, Mekki claimed to have an appointment with his Mozabite partner and left; my mother cleared the table. Rokaya was already asleep. And it was that evening, taking advantage of a moment’s inattention, that I put my hand on Nora’s breasts. For the first time in my life, I touched the pulse of a fraction of eternity. Never would my fingers know a stronger sensation. Nora leapt back, startled by my gesture, but I could see in her wide eyes that she was flattered. She hastened to join my mother, while I retreated to the balcony, my heart racing, with the feeling that I held at the tips of my bold fingers, still heavy with Nora’s flesh, all the euphoria of the world.
In the morning, I had the impression that Medina Jedida was celebrating something. Faces were radiant and the sun-drenched streets seemed to have awoken to better days. In reality, it was I who was exultant. I had dreamt about Nora, and in my dream I had kissed her on the lips; as far as I was concerned, I had really kissed her. My mouth was anointed with an exquisite nectar. My chest was filled with joy, and my heart soared. Drained of all my venom, I had forgiven everything’. I even went to my uncle’s shop to show him I bore him no grudge. His partner, a Mozabite short in stature but enormously erudite, invited me to a café and we drank two pots of tea without realising it. He knew all the herbs and their qualities. I would listen to him for a few seconds then, between the names of flowers or aphrodisiac plants, the quivering image of Nora would catapult me through a thousand potential acts of daring.
It was after midday when the Mozabite took his leave of me.
I went back to Rue du Général-Cérez.
My mother was at the Ramouns’. Rokaya was dozing on her straw mattress. Nora was in the kitchen watching the cooking pot. I looked in all directions to make sure there was nobody else in the house. My cousin guessed what was going on in my head. She immediately became defensive. I approached her, my eyes riveted on her lips. She brandished her spatula. Her eyes did not reject mine, but it was a question of integrity. With us, love wasn’t paramount; it was subject to all kinds of proprieties and thus became almost a trial of strength. Nevertheless, I felt capable of climbing the sacred mountains and walking all over them, twisting the neck of convention, mocking the devil in his den. My body was in a frenzy. Nora backed into the wall, her spatula raised in front of her like a shield. I could see neither the barriers nor the wrong of it; I saw only her, and nothing else around us mattered. My face was an inch from hers, my mouth offering itself to her. I prayed with all my might that Nora would do the same and I waited for her lips to meet mine. Her breath mingled with mine but Nora did not yield. A tear rolled down her cheek and abruptly quenched the fire devouring me. ‘If you have any consideration for me, don’t do that,’ Nora said … I became aware of the extent of my selfishness. You don’t stamp on the sacred mountains. With my finger, I wiped the tears from my cousin’s cheek. ‘I think I came back earlier than expected,’ I said to save face. She looked down and nodded. I ran to rejoin the bustle of the streets. I was happy, and proud of my cousin. Her attitude had made her grow a hundredfold in my heart and in my mind.
I don’t know where I went that day, or how I managed to stay upright until Gino returned.
‘I’m seriously in love,’ I confided in him while he was changing in his room.
‘Nothing is serious about love,’ Madame Ramoun said from her bed.
Gino frowned. He gestured to me to lower my voice. We both laughed up our sleeves like two impudent children caught in the act. I glanced over my shoulder. Madame Ramoun had a broad smile on her sweat-streaked face.
‘I need a job,’ I said to Gino. ‘To become a man.’
‘Is that the condition your lady love has set you?’ he teased me, laughing.
‘It’s my condition for being worthy of her. I want to have a life, don’t you understand? Up until now all I’ve done is drift.’
‘I can see you’ve got it bad.’
‘I have! I don’t even know where I am any more.’
‘You lucky dog.’
‘Couldn’t you have a word with your boss?’
‘You don’t know anything about motor mechanics, and old Bébert is a bit of a stickler about things like that.’
‘I’ll learn.’
Gino pursed his lips in embarrassment, but promised to see what he could do.
He managed to persuade his boss to take me on as an apprentice.
Old Bébert told me straight away that I was to watch the others at work and not touch anything. He first asked me a lot of questions about the jobs I had done, about my family, whether I was ill and whether I had a criminal record. Next, he showed me the barrels for storing used oil, the broom cupboard and the cleaning materials and immediately put me to the test. As Gino was busy working on the innards of a large car, half buried under the bonnet, I had to get on with it by myself and familiarise myself as quickly as possible with the different sections of the garage. Old Bébert watched me from his booth, one eye on his registers, the other on what I was doing.
At about one o’clock, Gino took me to a kiosk where you could sit at a table and order sandwiches. I wasn’t hungry; instead I was wondering if the stale air of the garage suited me. I felt a bit out of my depth among those stubborn mechanics. Gino sensed I was disorientated and talked about all kinds of things just to lighten the atmosphere.
Three young Roumis were lounging on the terrace. The fair-haired one stopped stirring his coffee when he saw us take our seats at the next table.
‘Arabs aren’t allowed here,’ he said.
‘He’s with me,’ Gino said.
‘And who are you?’
‘We’re not looking for trouble. We just want a bite to eat.’
His two companions looked us up and down. They didn’t seem inclined to leave us alone.
‘They should put a sign up over the door,’ the youngest of the three said. ‘Dogs and Arabs not allowed.’
‘What’d be the point? They can’t read.’
‘In that case, why don’t they stay in their own pen?’
‘They can’t keep still either. God created Arabs to piss everyone off.’
Gino hailed the waiter, a dark-skinned adolescent, and gave him our order.
The fair-haired Roumi was looking at my clothes and sniggering. ‘What’s the difference between an Arab and a potato?’ he said. After looking around the table with an affected air, he cried, ‘A potato can be cultivated.’
His two companions laughed sardonically.
‘I didn’t quite get that,’ I said to the fair-haired one, ignoring Gino’s hand under the table trying to restrain me.
‘There’s no point even trying. You’ve been playing with yourself so much, you’ve addled your brains.’
‘Are you insulting me?’
‘Let it go,’ Gino said.
‘He’s not showing respect.’
‘No kidding!’ the fair-haired one retorted, leaving his table. He towered over me. ‘Do you even know what respect is?’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Gino begged me, already on his feet.
I heaved a sigh and was getting ready to leave when the Roumi caught hold of the collar of my shirt. ‘Where do you think you’re going, you Arab scum? I haven’t finished with you yet.’
‘Listen,’ Gino said, trying to reason with him, ‘we don’t want any trouble.’
‘I’m not talking to you. Watch your step, okay?’ He turned back to me. ‘Well, Arab, cat got your tongue? Apart from playing with yourself, what else can you do with your hands, you little —?’
He didn’t finish his sentence. My fist catapulted him over the table. He span round amid the cups and bottles and collapsed to the ground in a clatter of breaking glass and crockery, his nose smashed and his arms outstretched.
‘I can punch,’ I said in reply to his last question.
The other two clowns raised their hands in surrender. Gino pulled me firmly by the wrist and we walked back up the boulevard to the garage.
Gino was angry with me. ‘Bébert doesn’t want any trouble in the neighbourhood. I moved heaven and earth to get him to agree to try you out.’
‘What did you want me to do? Let that idiot wipe the floor with me?’
‘He was just a layabout. I admit he was asking for it, but it wasn’t necessary. You have to learn when it’s best just to leave it, Turambo. If you start dwelling on the things that make you angry, you won’t get far. You have a trade to learn, with a possible job at the end of it. So be patient and, above all, be reasonable. There are pests like that on every street corner. You could spend your life knocking them out, but they’d only keep coming. They annoy me too; I may not make a big deal out of it, but it’s not for lack of self-respect.’
The Angels Die Page 10
