‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I’m fed up. You’re constantly shadowing the Duke, and I’m going round in circles.’
Gino adjusted his jacket collar and turned both ways to check the impeccable cut of his suit. ‘Turambo, my poor Turambo, millions of young men would like to be in your shoes, and you reduce the world to these little off-days of yours. Think about what you’ve become. You can’t go out on the street any more without a crowd mobbing you. You’re bored, are you? Some people don’t have that privilege. Take a look outside. People are working until they’re ready to drop just for a piece of bread. Think how much they’d give for a moment’s rest, instead of constantly wearing themselves out, slogging away in the hot sun, doing work even a beast of burden would refuse. Remember what you were just a few years ago and think of how far you’ve come. If you can’t be happy with that, it isn’t God’s fault.’
He took my chin between his thumb and index finger and looked me up and down.
‘You should sulk less and smile more, Turambo. Follow my example and do something about your image. There’s nothing worse than a jaded champion. Tidy yourself up and stop moaning.’
‘The Mozabite says: Only women are beautiful, men are just narcissists.’
Gino threw his head back and laughed. ‘That’s not so far from the truth … By the way, I almost forgot: the gym’s closed for work. The Duke’s planning to spend a fortune on a complete refurbishment. Now that we have a future North African champion, we can’t carry on working in a disused stable. The Duke has ordered a top-quality ring. We’re going to put in toilets, showers and a real office, repaint the walls, tile the floor, replace the windows. When you come back, you won’t believe your eyes.’
‘Come back from where?’
‘Didn’t De Stefano tell you?’
‘No.’
‘You’re going to Lourmel to prepare for your next match. To the house of a man named Alarcon Ventabren. Apparently, the best boxers often go there to get a change of scenery and do a bit of training. The Duke has spent lots of money so that you can benefit from the best facilities. You’re meeting Marcel Cargo in two months. And after that, with any luck, you’ll be able to make a claim on the title.’
Filippi didn’t look happy driving in the heat, sweating profusely in his chauffeur’s tunic. The summer was surpassing itself that late July of 1934. When we lowered the windows, the air burnt our faces; when we put them up, the car turned into an oven. In front of us, the road broke up into an endless chain of mirages. Not a bird ventured into the white-hot sky, not a leaf moved in the trees.
In the seat next to Filippi, Frédéric Pau sat brooding over old resentments. From time to time, he would make an exasperated gesture with his hand. Four of us watched him from the back seat: Gino, Salvo, De Stefano and me.
‘The Duke’s been giving him a hard time,’ Gino whispered in my ear.
On either side of the road, farms were bleached by the mother-of-pearl glare of the afternoon. The fields and orchards were deserted. Only a donkey with its forelegs tied was sliding down a steep path beneath its burden.
Frédéric at last stopped muttering to himself. He pointed to a fruit seller’s hut at the end of the road and asked Filippi to take the path just after it.
‘We can’t go to a person’s house empty-handed,’ I said.
We pulled up on the roadside next to the hut. The fruit seller was sleeping the sleep of the just, surrounded by piles of melons. He jumped up when he heard us slamming the doors, wound a moth-eaten turban round his head and apologised for having dozed off.
‘What’s your name?’ Frédéric asked.
‘Larbi, Monsieur.’
‘Another one!’ Frédéric cried, thinking of Madame Camélia’s servant. ‘Why do you all give yourselves the same name? Are you afraid you’ll be confused with the Turks or the Saracens?’
De Stefano didn’t greatly appreciate Frédéric’s rudeness. He gave me a meaningful look; I shrugged, immune to that kind of insult. The fruit seller was confused, unsure if the Frenchman was teasing him or scolding him. He cleared his throat and tugged at his collar. He was a short, emaciated man with a greyish-brown complexion, wearing a tattered sweater and mud-encrusted trousers. He had a Berber tattoo on the back of his hand and almost no teeth showed when he gave his embarrassed smile. We chose two huge watermelons, three melons and a basket of figs from Bousfer, got back in the car and climbed the path that wound between the arid hills. A few miles further on, we glimpsed a large stone house flanked by an outhouse and a stable. The car went through a gate, passed a trough and stopped at the foot of a tree. A pregnant woman ran to inform the master of the house of our arrival.
A plump man in his fifties came out in a wheelchair.
Frédéric took off his hat to greet him. ‘Pleased to see you again, Monsieur Ventabren. You know De Stefano …’
‘Of course, who doesn’t know De Stefano?’
‘The egghead next to him is Salvo, our second. At night, he turns into a ferret, and if you don’t have a padlock on your pantry, you won’t have a pantry left in the morning.’
Salvo attempted an ingratiating smile.
‘This handsome young man in shirt and tie is our accountant Gino. And last but not least, Turambo, a walking legend.’
‘And I’m Filippi!’ cried the Corsican, who was still in the car.
‘Well, gentlemen, you’ve arrived just in time for an aperitif,’ the man in the wheelchair said.
‘In this heat? Cold water would suffice.’
‘Fatma has made lemonade. Please come in.’
It felt good inside. We entered a drawing room furnished with a rustic table, a very old sideboard and a padded bench seat. On a badly proportioned mantelpiece, framed photographs showed a young boxer posing for posterity.
‘The good old days,’ our host sighed.
He invited us to sit down at the table. Fatma, the pregnant woman, served us glasses of lemonade and withdrew. Ventabren let us quench our thirst before announcing that his daughter would be there soon and that she would be in charge of showing us our ‘quarters’.
Frédéric noticed some paintings stacked in a corner. He stood up to examine them closely.
‘I paint in my spare time,’ Ventabren said, coming up behind Frédéric in his wheelchair.
‘You have talent,’ Frédéric admitted after glancing at the canvases.
‘One has to earn a living. My hands dream of brushes but my fists demand gloves. The defeated warrior who wants to eat his fill, even if he has the soul of an artist, chooses to be a brigand.’
‘You’re not a brigand, Monsieur Ventabren. You have a way of capturing the sea that absol—’
‘It isn’t the sea, it’s the sky,’ came a woman’s voice from behind us. ‘You’re holding the canvas upside down.’
A young woman was standing in the entrance hall. She was wearing a red scarf around her neck, a shirt with a low neckline, riding trousers that emphasised the curve of her hips and knee-length boots. In her hand she held a plaited riding crop.
‘If you’re interested in the painting, we can give you a good price,’ she went on.
‘It’s just …’ Frédéric stammered, taken aback, ‘… Monsieur Bollocq likes this kind of painting.’
‘It’s called a gouache.’
‘Of course, a gouache. I’m convinced Monsieur Bollocq will love it.’
‘I don’t suppose he’s very knowledgeable.’
‘But he has good taste, I assure you.’
‘In that case, it’s sold. His price will be ours.’
The young woman gave off a strong sense of authority that immediately intimidated us. She didn’t so much speak as machine-gun the words out of her mouth. Every time her remarks hit home, she would flick her thigh with her riding crop and raise her voice even more as if she were trying to drive Frédéric into a corner. His growing embarrassment inspired in her an arrogance that verged on aggressiveness. But my God, how beaut
iful she was, with a rebellious, almost wild beauty, with her black hair gathered in a ponytail and her piercing eyes.
At a loss, Frédéric didn’t know whether to put the painting down or hold in to it.
Ventabren came to his rescue. ‘Gentlemen, this charming young lady is my daughter Irène. She has no fear of lightning or sunstroke. At an hour when not even a lizard would venture outside, she rides all over the estate on her horse.’
‘My mare, Papa … I’ll change and then I’m all yours,’ she said to us as she went upstairs.
Alarcon Ventabren watched us out of the corner of his eye, flattered by our heavy silence. De Stefano leant over to me and asked me in a whisper if I remembered the girl galloping flat out over the hill on the morning of my very first fight at Aïn Témouchent. I didn’t reply, my eyes fixed on the place where the young woman had been standing a few moments earlier. In reality, I wasn’t seeing the hall, but that white dawn stretched like a screen across which a beautiful horsewoman had ridden to seize the day.
She joined us in the drawing room. She had freshened up, changed her shirt and replaced her boots with hemp-soled sandals. Although she was young, she seemed so mature that it was hard to estimate her age. In her hardened gaze, which kept everything it touched at a distance, you sensed an inflexible strength of character. She wasn’t the kind of woman to blush at flattery or overlook an inappropriate remark. I was impressed.
She led us to the outhouse, where there were tidy bunk beds for four people. The sheets were new and the pillows covered in embroidered percale. There was a table with an indigo tablecloth on it, four wooden chairs, a jug on an enamelled tray, a basket of fruit, and a rug on the floor. A crude painting of a boxing match occupied much of one of the walls; it was signed A. Ventabren. Two oil lamps hung from the ceiling beams, their glass clean and the wicks new.
After the ‘dormitory’, Irène showed us into a large adjoining room equipped with a punch bag, a punching ball, wall bars and other bodybuilding tools.
‘Where are the toilets?’ Salvo asked.
‘We say lavatories, Monsieur,’ the young woman shouted at him. ‘They’re outside, behind the carob tree. As for the bath, we don’t have running water, but we do have a well.’
Frédéric asked me if that was all right with me and I said it was.
Alarcon Ventabren insisted that we stay for dinner. Oran being only some twenty-five miles away, we accepted the invitation. While waiting for night to fall, he showed us around the property. Apart from mastic trees, nothing grew in that stony earth stripped bare by the winds from the sea. Ventabren told us that he had chosen to settle here for only one reason: he loved listening to the wind whistle past his window at night. Above all, he had a stunning view over the plain; from the top of his hill, he was ‘closer to God than men’. He told us he had never wanted to become a farmer. He didn’t care for it and certainly had no vocation. After his career as a boxer had ended, he had come here for a well-earned rest. In order to make ends meet, he had built a little gym where a few stars of the ring came to train. The purity of the air, the isolation of the farm and the surrounding calm, he insisted, ensured that a fighter could prepare mentally and physically in the best possible conditions.
The sun was going down. Gino, Filippi and Frédéric stood round the former champion at the foot of a tree; Salvo was tormenting a Barbary fig in search of a ripe fruit. Below the hill, Fatma was going back to her douar, astride a donkey, escorted by a little boy. As for Irène, she had left after showing us our quarters.
I sat on the edge of the well, savouring the shade the setting sun had brought to a countryside severely afflicted by the heatwave. A breeze came up from the coast, as light and gentle as a caress. From my makeshift observation post, I could see everything, capture everything, even the creaking of the stones imploring the evening to relieve them of their burns. Screwing up my eyes, I could make out the steeple of a church in the heart of a little town fading into the twilight. You could sense the sea just behind the mountains, mocking the heat now struggling for breath. I had the impression I was leaving the hullabaloo of the city and its pollution far behind and recovering my senses, now wiped clean of their detritus and totally calm.
Dinner was served in the main hall. As the maid had gone home, Irène took over. She came and went from the kitchen to the table, her arms laden with trays, carafes and baskets of fruit, paying no attention to our chatter. Her father told us about his various fights in Algeria, France and elsewhere, praising some of his opponents, cursing others. Carried away, he would almost rise in his chair, shadow-box and dodge imaginary attacks to show us that he was still skilful and flexible. He was a fascinating character: he would describe the fights as if we were watching them live, which was incredibly exciting. He was so amazingly vivacious, we wouldn’t have noticed if he’d got up and started walking. I found it hard to accept that such a strong man could ever resign himself to being trapped in a wheelchair.
‘I’ve been told you lost the use of your legs in the ring, Monsieur,’ I said.
Irène stiffened at the end of the table. For a fraction of a second, there was a kind of flicker in her impassive eyes. ‘My father doesn’t like to talk about that,’ she said, glaring at me and gathering up the soup tureen.
‘I don’t mind, sweetheart.’
‘But I do.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said to avoid any further upset.
‘Our guest is a boxer,’ Ventabren said in a placatory tone. ‘He has to know these things so as to watch out for them.’
Irène turned and stormed out.
‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Ventabren,’ I said, no longer knowing what to do with my spoon.
‘It’s all right. Irène is still upset about the whole thing. That’s how women are. As far as they’re concerned, no wound ever heals completely.’
He poured himself a drink.
‘It did happen in a ring,’ he went on. ‘In Minneapolis, on 17 April 1916. I was almost thirty-five and I wanted to retire in style. I was twice North African champion, French champion and ranked second in the whole world. A friend of mine, an influential English businessman, suggested I end on a high note with a gala match. I was booked to meet James Eastwalker, a black American, a former light heavyweight who’d become a wrestler. Not knowing the man, I thought I was being offered a chance for a last stand. It wasn’t like that at all. I was being put on display like a circus animal. I was so disappointed, I refused to get in the ring. Then someone said I was chickening out and my Algerian blood was roused. It was a real bloodbath. The black man punched like a blacksmith. And me like Vulcan. It was obvious that one of us would not make it out of there. But I lost my temper and, in a match between two madmen, losing your temper is unforgivable. I tell you that because you have to get it into your head. When you lose your temper, you don’t think. You hit out and you lose sight of the basics. I don’t know how I left my sides unprotected. An anvil came down on my pelvis, compressing my stomach. I fell to one knee just as the bell rang, but the black man pretended not to have heard, and his other fist, the stronger one, smashed into my chin while I was trying to recover my senses and get my breath back. I went over the ropes and fell on the corner of the judges’ table. I heard my back crack and I blacked out.’
‘What happened then?’
‘In boxing, son, it’s when you think you’ve made it that everything goes wrong. I’d gone to America in triumph and I came back home in a wheelchair.’
After dinner, Frédéric and Gino got in the car and begged Filippi to drive them back to Oran. De Stefano, Salvo and I continued talking to Ventabren late into the night, sitting on the porch round a lantern bombarded by insects. It felt good. An invigorating coolness bathed the countryside. From time to time, you could hear the howl of a jackal, immediately answered by stray dogs in the darkness.
Ventabren talked a lot. It was as if he was sweeping away the cobwebs from a century of silence. He could talk for hours on end without letting
anyone else get a word in edgeways. He was aware of it, but how to stop? Confined to his chair, he spent most of his time gazing out at the plain and confronting his memories. His nearest neighbour was miles away, below the hills, too busy taking care of his vines to pay him a visit.
De Stefano was getting bored. However many times he took out his pocket watch to indicate to our host that it was getting late, it was impossible to stop the flow of words. It was Salvo who put an end to Ventabren’s chatter. He told our host that if we wanted to get up at dawn and take full advantage of the time for training, we should go to bed now. Even then, Ventabren felt he had to tell us one last anecdote before letting us go.
We lit the two oil lamps in the outhouse. De Stefano undressed in front of us; he took off his pants without any embarrassment and lay down on the sheets. He was hairy from head to foot, with clumps of thick hair on his shoulders and a horrible curly fleece on his chest. Salvo thought his backside was like an orang-utan’s and advised him to ‘give his left posterior a trim’ if he didn’t want a colony of creepy-crawlies to invade it. ‘I’d happily offer you my right posterior so that you can show me the extent of your expertise,’ De Stefano retorted. We laughed a lot before turning out the lights.
Through the skylight next to my bunk, I could see the upstairs window of the main house. The light was on and it cast Irène’s silhouette on the red curtain as she undressed. She too went to bed in the nude. When she switched off the light, the night was at last able to reclaim the whole of the countryside.
2
The Duke had chosen the right place for me to recharge my batteries. What a joy it was to wake up in the morning far from the din of the souks and the fish markets! No dumping carts, no motor horns, no iron shutters being raised with a terrifying racket. The calm of the countryside was so perfect that the dream continued long after I got out of bed. I washed my face in the trough, breathed in the smells of the uncultivated fields and the orchards that reached us from the bottom of the plain, put my hands on my hips and let my gaze become one with the landscape. Emerging out of nowhere, the braying of a donkey gave me back the authenticity of the world, while the sight of a shrew running wildly in the dry grass aroused in me a sublime sense of simplicity. It was magical. I saw myself as a child standing on a large rock, wondering what there was behind the horizon. I wanted to stay there for all eternity, my peasant streak awakening in me.
The Angels Die Page 23
