Men Don't Cry

by Faïza Guène

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates’ programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

  MEN DON’T CRY

  Faïza Guène

  translated by Sarah Ardizzone

  In memory of my father.

  In memory of Isabelle Seguin.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  It Might Come in Handy

  Dounia

  Mina and Me

  The Article

  The Diagnosis

  Half of Big Baba

  Youth and Health

  Making Contact

  Aziz’s Farm

  Leaving

  Paris

  The Fly in the Coffee

  The Phone-call

  Social Etiquette

  Le Saphir Bleu

  Let’s Do Lunch

  Back to School

  New Face

  The Tank

  The Big Bare Truth

  The Bud that Destroys the Tree

  Mehdi Mazouani

  Stand By Me

  Tsunami

  Babar Syndrome

  The Fruit That Falls From The Tree

  The Finishing Line

  The Final Destination

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  It Might Come in Handy

  As in all my childhood memories, there was food on the table. Lots of food. And my mother was complaining about the weather being too hot. Or too cold. The point being she was complaining.

  It was the day Big Baba had decided to install that stupid satellite dish. My father looked so pleased with himself when the first Arabic channel popped up on our screen. We watched a fat man with a moustache reading out the football results, while his belt sliced his paunch in two.

  A new world beckoned. Dozens and dozens of channels paraded before our eyes: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Dubai, Yemen, Jordan, Qatar…. My mother was overcome with emotion. At last, Big Baba was giving her the honeymoon she’d always dreamed of.

  No more cold sweats for me when the Tahiti Shower ad came on: ‘Has anyone seen the remote?’

  My mother blushing, her hands pressed to her cheeks: ‘Yéééé h’chouma!’

  My sister, Mina: ‘Look what those feminists have won for us!’

  My mother, in disgust: ‘Tfffou, feminists!’

  My sister Dounia: ‘You’re not going to bring that up again?!’ In the old days, after those kinds of heated conversations, we always switched off the television and sank into a depressing silence. But once our life turned towards a new satellite, my mother swore by the cookery programmes on Abu Dhabi TV, or the Turkish costume sagas dubbed into Moroccan dialect on 2M TV. The atmosphere at home became a touch more folkloric.

  ‘Now that’s what I call work!’ pronounced Big Baba, whistling cheerily as he put his screwdrivers away in his toolbox.

  He loved DIY; fixing things, salvaging.

  Mainly salvaging.

  Our garden had turned into a graveyard of scrap metal. Corroded old washing machines, corrugated iron, park benches, road signs, a tennis umpire’s chair, a dozen typewriters, a restaurant sign, the headlights from a Citroën ZX, a giant freezer and two wooden horses, worn out from their carousel life.

  How does he manage to transport all that junk? we wondered. But he found a way.

  Each time he brought a new toy home, my mother’s blood pressure shot up for several days. ‘Ya Rabi! What are you going to do with that?!’

  And each time, he gave the same ridiculous answer, ‘It might come in handy, one day!’

  He held that nothing should be thrown away. Would you expect any less of a retired cobbler?

  ‘No, it won’t, it will NEVER come in handy! Not today, not tomorrow, not ever! People threw it away because it stopped being handy – it’s useless! My God! Why are you doing this to me? Bring me a glass of water! Quick! My heart! I’m having palpitations! A glass of water!’

  My mother would wince, clutch her chest and down the glass in one: her tragic actress turn.

  Over the years, she had watched her dream French garden, with its symmetrical hedges and tidy vegetable patch, disappear beneath mounds of rusty objects. She was left with no choice but to sit in a chair, her arms dangling and a faraway look in her eyes, as she gazed at the printed fruit on the waxed tablecloth.

  ‘35 years nailing soles onto shoes!’ Big Baba used to say, when I was a kid. ‘Bang, bang, bang! All my life, I wore out my hands so my children could work with their heads!’

  Academic success meant everything in his eyes.

  ‘Sit next to me and tell me what’s written here before I sign it,’ he would say, when we brought our school reports home.

  One by one, I would recite my marks, along with the teacher’s comments, proudly pointing out that there was no red pen in the behaviour column.

  ‘Well done, my son. I’m pleased.’

  Slowly, with a Bic biro, he would affix his miniscule signature; one that was shaky and feverish, betraying nothing of his robust character. Then, like a doctor, he would put the lid back on and clip his biro next to the others in his shirt pocket, even though he couldn’t read or write.

  For years we held a straight course: Big Baba steering his little troop calmly, just as when he was at the wheel of his 1983 Renault 11 Turbo.

  Then came the first hairpin bends: Dounia, my eldest sister, had started growing up.

  There are certain scenes that stick in my mind. Big Baba circling Dounia like a crime squad investigator in full interrogation mode, his hands behind his back.

  ‘Where were you? Have you seen what time it is? I’ll teach you to show me respect. Do you think your name is Christine?’

  I suspect my sister often wished she was called Christine.

  Today, her name might as well be Christine.

  Dounia

  When she was a teenager, Dounia had a best friend: Julie Guérin. That was when the troubles began. Julie triggered the psychological process of my sister’s ‘Christine-isation’.

  Julie was popular with all the boys at school; she was slim, wore designer clothes and kept a diary. Her parents sent her to summer camp in the Languedoc-Rousillon, near the border with Spain. Her mother let her go to night-time concerts and pin up posters of some American boy band in her bedroom. I don’t remember the singers’ names, but they were black and bare-chested.

  Julie also had platform shoes, a boyfriend, a cat, a bedroom she didn’t share with anybody else, and she even had permission to celebrate her birthday in her dad’s garage.

  In Dounia’s eyes, Julie was living the dream. My sister was mesmerised, to the point that she was happy to play the friend in the shadows, the one who gets told, ‘Hey! Look after my bag!’

  It’s worth pointing out that my sister’s life was the exact opposite of Julie Guérin’s.

  In addition to her glasses, Dounia wore braces from the age of 15-18. She didn’t know what to do with her long frizzy brown hair, so she braided it, twisted it in a thousand-and-one messy ways and piled it on top of her head. She hid her overweight body under baggy polo shirts and sweatpants. She wasn’t allowed to go out, she shared her bedroom with my other sister, and as for posters, boyfriends, or holiday camps near Spain, let alone birthday celebrations in our dad’s garage, forget it. Dounia’s last resort was a diary, oh yes, because of course there was no danger of my father reading it.

  Spending time with Julie ma
de Dounia feel she was growing wings. She would say things like: ‘At least Julie’s allowed to…’ and ‘Julie’s so lucky.…’ And then, one day:

  ‘Maman, why don’t you ever say, “I love you”? Julie’s mum says it to her all the time.’

  My mother was so taken aback she was briefly lost for words. Her big, brown khol-lined eyes bulged.

  ‘What makes you ask that? You don’t think we love you?’

  Dounia rolled her eyes and shrugged. Then she took a swig of homemade citronnade straight from the bottle, which was guaranteed to infuriate my mother.

  ‘And what about the glasses in the kitchen, are they just for decoration?’

  ‘It’s all right, okay, I haven’t got AIDS.’

  ‘Tfffou!’

  Dounia was becoming insolent. And my mother, as usual, produced her weapon of personal mass destruction: the blame game.

  Aim. Fire!

  ‘Your grandfather was a revolutionary who fought in the war to liberate his country. A brave and courageous man. We were ten children fed on dry bread, who walked barefoot without complaining. You only have to look at all the sacrifices he made to raise us. Do you think we fretted about whether he loved us?’

  ‘Whatever, Maman, I know that story of yours off by heart. You weren’t allowed to play outside. And he pulled you out of school at 13. So what kind of life is that, anyway? A horror movie?’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it! We were living in a different era. He took me out of school because he needed me to look after my brothers and sisters. He raised us to be good people!’

  ‘D’you seriously think you raise your children to be good people by locking them up?’

  ‘Nobody’s locking you up!’

  ‘Yes, they are! You never let me do anything. I’m not even allowed to wear jeans!’

  ‘And that’s why you’re unhappy? Because we don’t want you dressing like a cowboy?’

  ‘It’s called fashion! You don’t understand. Take Julie’s mum, she’s got a young attitude, when she hangs out with her daughter, you’d think they were two friends…’

  ‘Two frrrriends?’

  My mother loves emphasising her astonishment; it’s the dramatist in her.

  ‘Do you think I had children to make myself some new friends? Tfffou! That’s not being a mother. It’s being afraid.’

  ‘What I’m trying to say is, Julie’s mum’s modern. She works in an office and she drives a car.’

  ‘Are you talking about Julie’s mother or Julie’s father, eh? Why would I follow the example of a woman who buys her daughter cigarettes? A woman who’s killing her own child? And who borrows her trousers?’

  ‘Why not? They’re the same size…’

  ‘Fine, so I’m fat. Where’s the problem? I’m no fashion model. But let me tell you, when we were refugees in Morocco during the war, we used to dream at night of eating meat. We endured real hunger. Now I’m nice and plump, hamdoullah.’

  ‘Julie’s mum never asks her to cook or do the washing up. Anyone’d think it was the only thing that mattered in life.’

  ‘Your sister, Mina, loves helping me in the kitchen, but you–’

  ‘Here we go again! You’re always comparing us…’

  ‘What about when you get married, eh? You want me sending you to your husband’s house having learnt nothing?’

  ‘Who cares? I’ll never get married, anyway.’

  A butcher’s knife plunged into my mother’s gut would have had less effect. The stand-offs became increasingly frequent. Before that, we’d never heard any doors slam in our house. But there followed a period when they slammed so often that my father, fuming, took the girls’ bedroom door off its hinges and hung up a curtain instead.

  ‘Now try slamming the curtain!’

  My mother even considered having Dounia exorcised. In the end, she banned her daughter from keeping company with Julie-harbinger-of-bad-luck, who caused her so much trouble.

  ‘She’s cursed, that girl. Cursed!’

  After her parents’ divorce, Julie tried to commit suicide and everyone in the neighbourhood felt sorry for her. With one notable exception.

  My mother flaunted her mocking smile in full view of Dounia.

  ‘You see! If your friend Julie’s life was as wonderful as you claim, she wouldn’t have wanted to die!’

  Heavy silence, a hate-filled stare, followed by tossing of hair and, for the finishing touch, storming off to the bedroom with no door.

  ‘You’ve got no heart, Maman. No heart.’

  If there had been a door, Dounia would have slammed it, for sure. It was a scene worthy of the Mexican soaps dubbed into Arabic that my mother couldn’t get enough of. To be honest, Dounia and Maman wiped the floor with those Latina drama queens…

  In the years that followed, the situation with Dounia deteriorated. The outside world was full of Julie Guérins, and my parents tried in vain to keep their daughter in the nest. Threats and punishments didn’t work any more. My mother, who was so cunning when it came to the blame game, had emptied all her cartridges. Her sudden palpitations and mounting blood pressure didn’t change anything.

  We had already lost Dounia.

  As for Big Baba, he became resigned to this turn of events. He avoided confrontation and started behaving as if his daughter no longer existed, ignoring my mother’s cries for help: ‘Do something, Abdelkader!’

  He took to mending the bicycles of local children in his shed at the bottom of the garden.

  Dounia would return home later and later, with no explanation, letting on very little about her life. She almost never ate with us and kept to herself, her nose buried in her books. She studied hard, came first in all her subjects and, after leaving school with top grades in her baccalauréat exams, began studying Law as well as holding down a part-time job.

  The transformation had begun. Within a few months, her curves had disappeared, along with her brace, she’d traded her pair of geeky glasses for contact lenses, paid for a hair straightening treatment and even started wearing make-up. She had become distant, dry and colourless, but I had already guessed that outside the house, she was a very different Dounia.

  The summer she turned 20, my big sister announced that she would no longer be joining us for the traditional family holiday back in the old country.

  Her decision to forgo our annual return to the bled marked a breaking point for my parents. Up until then, they had both been hoping this was a passing phase.

  ‘It’s called an “adolescent crisis”.’

  ‘What’s that? A virus? A disease?’

  ‘It’s the kind of disease you can only catch in Europe! If you hadn’t brought me here, and we had raised them in Algeria instead, Dounia would never have caught it!’

  ‘Yes, but if I hadn’t brought you here, then, at this time of day, you’d be milking a cow, feeding the hens, washing the laundry in the oued and fetching drinking water from the well!’

  ‘That’s enough of your silly ideas! You know perfectly well they don’t live like that anymore. They’re doing better than we are. Algerians are the Americans of the Mahgreb. Do you want to hear my view? If you hadn’t brought me here, I would see my family every day, and I’d be able to gaze at the lemon trees and almond trees I planted in my garden instead of watching Stop signs springing up alongside rusty washing machines.’

  At the time, I was just a kid who liked re-enacting the Trojan war in the garden, but I remember that when my sister distanced herself from us, something snapped in our family.

  I loved Dounia because she asked my opinion on lots of matters, and her wallet was stuffed full of cash. There were so many notes sticking out of it I thought she was a millionaire. She bought me my first console and paid for the occasional trip to the cinema.

  While forging a brilliant university career, Dounia was a waitress at La Cour des Miracles, a smart brassiere in the centre of town.

  One Saturday, she took me there after I had promised not to breathe a word
to our parents. She didn’t want them finding out, because back then she still felt guilty. My father didn’t lack for set ideas about things. In his eyes, a waitress was a prostitute with a tray in her hand and an apron round her waist. It goes without saying that I kept the secret out of loyalty, but also because I was dreaming of her buying me that pair of Adidas Stan Smiths for when I started secondary school.

  Dounia had a new group of girlfriends who were customers at the brasserie. They drank white wine and left lipstick smears on the rims of their stemmed glasses. I remember the way they laughed as they exhaled their cigarette smoke, which seemed to fill every nook and cranny. They wore short skirts and one of them kept asking another: ‘Do you think he’ll, like, call me back? But like, do you actually think he will, though? Call me?’

  A group of 20-year-old Julie Guérins had helped awaken my sister’s inner ‘Christine’.

  I bet these girls wouldn’t go down well with Maman, I thought to myself as I watched them.

  And then, on my way back from the toilets, I noticed Dounia hastily putting down a glass of wine and passing a lit cigarette to one of the Julies at the table. ‘Don’t pull that face!’ she said to me, looking embarrassed and miming ‘Shhh!’ with a finger to her lips, followed by a conspiratorial wink. Aged ten, I was shocked.

  I was silent on the bus, on the way home from La Cour des Miracles.

  ‘Why aren’t you talking, Mourad?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘Is it because you saw me drinking?’

  I feigned interest in what was going on at the back of the bus. I felt betrayed.

  ‘Yes. And smoking too!’

  ‘It’s your own fault, you shouldn’t pee so fast… Anyway, don’t mention it to anyone, okay? Promise?’

  ‘All right, promise, I won’t say anything.’