“Yeah, but what’s the fun in winning with Brazil? Where’s the challenge?”
“You’re the challenge!”
“Shut up! Who’re you choosing, Brazil?”
“Yeah, Brazil.”
“You’re such a pussy! Take Holland, at least.”
“Why Holland? What the fuck do I want with Holland?”
Eliott had a soft spot for Argentina. Hacine alternated between Mannschaft and England, solid teams that played a long game, could make forty-yard passes side to side, fire volleys, and bing, bang: goal! It saved him from having to feint and dribble in midfield. Hacine played a 4-2-4 formation and took every shot he could, no patience. Saïd had cast his lot with the Squadra Azzura. Nobody ever picked Les Bleus. Ever since Platini hung up his cleats, the French hadn’t been able to win a damn thing.
Hacine finally located his teeth at the foot of the halogen lamp. He sniffed them and went into the bathroom. He was barefoot, wearing underpants and a T-shirt with Just Do It on the back. He brushed his denture with toothpaste and put it on his upper jaw. As they did each time, the teeth felt mechanical and uncomfortable for a moment, then settled into their proper place. Hacine looked in the mirror. The teeth were straight, beautiful. And fake.
On his way back to the living room to wake Eliott, Hacine passed the bedroom. Coralie was asleep in bra and panties, because he hadn’t dared to completely undress her. Nelson lay curled up against her belly, panting. He was part fox terrier, part something else. Coralie had pestered Hacine for nearly six months for them to get a dog. He wasn’t too hot on the idea. “They stink,” he said. “A dog costs money, plus you have to walk it, and what will we do when we go away?” “We never go away,” she said. As a result, they now had this cute, demented mutt living with them, and they’d had to find a dog sitter, because they actually did go away after all.
To his great surprise, Hacine enjoyed their stay at the seaside. Coralie had found a camping resort at Six-Fours with parasol pines, three swimming pools, and a bunch of regulars and their families. The two of them drove across France in their Fiat Pronto to spend two weeks doing nothing and hanging out, being cheated by the local merchants and annoyed by the noise of children, while drunk on cicadas, heat, cold rosé, and crowds. Hacine let himself go with the flow. Mornings, they got up early and had breakfast in front of their tent while chatting on relaxingly neutral topics. Their neighbors popped by to say hello. Hacine and Coralie spent whole days in flip-flops, practically naked, breathing in the wonderful dark, sweet smell of sap that rose from the pine needles covering the ground. They then drove to the beach, where Coralie did crossword puzzles and an incredulous Hacine watched people sitting out in the blazing sun. They took turns going swimming, to keep an eye on their things. Then they ate lunches of tomatoes and roast chicken, fried eggplants, rice salad, and sardines. A life of disconcerting simplicity. After lunch they sat dozing in their canvas chairs as the heat settled on them like silence. It was called a siesta. Nearby, shaded by their tent flap, a pair of fifty-year-olds in bathing suits listened to the Tour de France playing quietly on an old transistor radio. More sounds came from the pools, a mixture of muffled splashes and kids shouting.
Hacine was familiar with that feeling of torpor, the smothering heat of noon, and the pleasure of doing nothing. But France was completely different from Morocco. The French brought a particular zeal to their vacations. There was something about their organized laziness that didn’t ring true. Whether in the air-conditioned supermarkets, on the beaches, going to the showers, or doing the dishes, Hacine found them too focused, almost anxious to succeed. And lurking under the surface was that certainty of having to return home. It was like a threat or a safety catch that limited your authorized farniente happiness.
Going back home surprised him even more. Whenever Hacine returned from Morocco with his family, he always felt caught between two kinds of rootlessness. As he and Coralie drove up the A7, he now experienced a completely different kind of melancholy. In the traffic jams, at gas stations, tollbooths, and rest stops, he felt accepted, as if he belonged wherever he was, just like other people. These periodic migrations, the famous French chassé-croisé, where the returning July vacationers cross paths with the outbound August ones, acted as a huge unifying force. As they headed home, already missing afternoons under village plane trees or evening strolls along the waterfront, millions of shorts-wearing citizens enjoyed the pleasant fiction of being free people. That was where French identity was really created, more than at school or in the voting booth. Still, there was another side to this integration by paid vacation: you had to go back to work.
Today was Sunday, July 14, and his job started again tomorrow.
As Hacine drank his coffee in the kitchen, gazing vaguely out at the landscape, he considered this inevitability. It was almost ten, and Eliott was still asleep. Hacine had cleaned most of the mess and mopped up the dog shit. The fridge was nearly empty. Also, he hadn’t done any of those essential jobs they’d hoped to do during the vacation. Theoretically, he was supposed to deal with the bathroom washbasin, which was cracked and needed to be replaced, and also the bedroom window, which let drafts in. He and Coralie had gone to the Mr. Bricolage and Leroy Merlin stores, but came back empty-handed every time. Hacine didn’t know anything about home repairs and was afraid of being cheated, which made him mistrustful, so he wouldn’t talk to any of the salespeople. Fortunately, there were other stores right next door where you could buy home decor items, clothes, video games, hi-fi gear, and exotic furniture and then have a bite to eat afterward. That was the beauty of the area’s outlying commercial zones. You could spend the whole day blowing money you didn’t have in order to brighten your life, without asking yourself any questions. Hacine and Coralie even went to King Jouet and roamed the toy store’s aisles, thinking of how much they would’ve enjoyed that when they were kids, if they’d been able to afford it. As a result, the apartment was full of candles, little plastic lights, fleece blankets, and Buddhist-style knickknacks. Coralie had also sprung for two rattan armchairs with white pillows. With the yucca and the plants in the corners, they gave the place a certain cachet. It would be even better when Hacine got around to putting up a nail to hang the photo of the Brooklyn Bridge that stood waiting at the foot of the wall.
* * *
—
Coralie got up around noon, having waited for Eliott to leave. It was a whole rigmarole when his mother came to get him, and Coralie preferred to stay in bed. Eliott was supposed to be eligible for a handicap subsidy soon, and he and his girlfriend could move into their own apartment. The sooner the better, thought Coralie, who was tired of seeing him squatting here. She walked into the kitchen barefoot. She had been maintaining her suntan every day since they’d gotten back, at the pool and at the little park at the foot of the building, and her white cotton underwear stood out against her brown skin.
“Hi, there.”
She was smiling and in a good mood, even in the morning, even on Mondays. Hacine liked her long body, her muscular legs, her flat stomach. In the winter Coralie wasn’t much to look at. She was a bottle blonde with a nose a bit too big, her eyes moderately light. She wore too much makeup, boots, and hoop earrings, and bundled herself in improbable cashmere sweaters. But once the nice weather arrived, she displayed a slender model’s body: a small chest and perfect shoulders, and not an ounce of fat. Two dimples on her lower back saved her from looking too thin.
Hacine served her coffee, and she stretched, as happy as a cat.
“Did they leave late?”
“Yeah. Fatso slept here.”
“Oh, yeah? Something stinks, doesn’t it?”
With his chin, Hacine pointed to the responsible party, who had walked in after Coralie, paws clicking on the parquet, nose in the air, looking innocent. She chuckled before sitting down. She immediately dove into her bowl of coffee, and Hacine buttered a slice of bread
for her. Nelson gazed at him with pleading eyes. He tossed him a scrap of bread.
“Here you go, you bastard.”
“Don’t call him that,” said Coralie.
“It’s a joke.”
He cleared the table. As he was putting his cup and the plates in the dishwasher, he asked:
“What do you want to do today?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Let’s fuck.”
He swung around. She often enjoyed embarrassing him that way. They had been going out together for nearly eighteen months and sharing the apartment since the spring. She had insisted on that. When they first met, Hacine was still living at his father’s place. The old man had gone back to Morocco but continued paying the tiny rent, and everything went on as before. Where work was concerned, Hacine had gotten a temp job with Solodia, a big industrial cleanup company that landed the famous Metalor account.
The old steel mills owned dozens of residential buildings in the valley, little row houses for workers and a few big ones for the engineers and bosses. Since the shutdown, all this property had been so neglected, it was literally falling into ruin. It took a long time for Metalor’s holding company to recognize its responsibility and decide to deal with the problem. Solodia had won the bid, and they now had at least three years’ worth of work. For Hacine, it was simple. In the morning he and two or three other guys showed up at a building armed with buckets, sledgehammers, and crowbars, and they started smashing whatever they could. At first, it was an enjoyable kind of destruction derby. You knocked down plaster panels, smashed brick walls, ripped out old lead plumbing. It was childish fun to see a wall come down, then tip the whole thing over with a kick of your heel. By noon, there was practically nothing left to be seen. Thick dust hung in the air; the guys protected themselves with paper masks. When the initial work was done, you had to clear the rubble. The men took turns. One group filled the buckets while the other hauled and emptied them in the dump truck. You carried beams and pipes on your shoulder.
At first, Hacine worked like a maniac. He hustled in the stairways, confusing aggressiveness with strength, taking the steps at a run, always in a fever, worried, in a hurry to finish. Jacques took him aside. He wasn’t the boss, and he didn’t earn much more than anyone else, but he was the guy who gave the orders.
“Listen…”
Jacques told him what was what. This job has no end, he said. After this bucket, there will always be another bucket. After this apartment, another apartment will come along. There will be other walls to knock down, other places to demolish.
“Your alarm clock goes off at six every day. No point in knocking yourself out.”
At that moment, Hacine was tempted to punch him in the nose. But he already felt sore all over, and besides, Jacques weighed a good 220 pounds. Hacine’s anger settled with the dust. Riding home in a truck, he felt like shit, weary and misunderstood. He watched the gray landscape endlessly rolling by the window. The sky didn’t promise anything else. Jacques was right. There was no point in hurrying. Hacine studied Jacques in the rearview mirror, his Rica Lewis jeans, old-fashioned work boots, and big, rough hands. He worked with a flannel belt around his lower back. He didn’t talk much.
The following Monday, Hacine struggled to get up, and he arrived late. The others gave him a hard time. “Slacker!” Jacques told them to leave him alone. And he took Hacine aside again.
“When it’s time, it’s time,” he said.
Hacine gradually caught the rhythm by watching the older man. He noticed that Jacques followed certain rituals to pace himself and break up the day. A cigarette at eight, another one at ten, with coffee. At eleven, he turned up the volume on the radio because it was time for his favorite broadcast. He tried to do most of the work during the morning, so as to take it easy in the afternoon. Similarly, he put in the most effort early in the week. There were all sorts of tricks to conquer this desert, this uniform stretch of time that awaited you when you got out of bed and then extended forever, until you retired. Hacine understood that. His time didn’t belong to him. But you could always trick the clock. On the other hand, there was nothing he could do about this basic fact: wills other than his own were making the rules for his body. He had become a tool, a thing. He was working.
Hacine probably wouldn’t have held on all by himself. When he thought about it, nothing had ever accustomed him to holding on. And besides, was it even a good idea, to hold on, to become a reliable person, a poor slob like his father? But there was Coralie.
Honestly, he’d lucked out. On paper, their relationship made no sense. She had a technical diploma, a good job at the prefecture, and was super cute. Plus, the first time Hacine met her at Derch, he was completely drunk. Two months later he was having lunch with her parents. Her father did maintenance at a high school. He was a very likable guy, big talker, union man, hair all gone, pullover sweater. Her mother worked at Solin, the last silk mill in the area. She had thoughtfully cooked fish. The old man was less subtle. He simply took out a bottle of Bordeaux, and Hacine drank it without any fuss.
Since then, his life was in balance. Buying household appliances compensated for the travails; the prospect of a vacation made the long days bearable. Coralie broke up the week’s monotony, and his pals, weed, the Canal subscription, and Tomb Raider did the rest. All things considered, it amounted to a perfectly acceptable little life.
Anyway, since losing his teeth, Hacine no longer made waves. They had found him in the L’Usine men’s room, lying in a pool of his blood. His father knelt down and took him in his arms. At the hospital, he came to see him every day. Then, after the trial, Bouali went back to Morocco, for good this time. When Hacine got him on the telephone these days, he heard the voice of a stranger, a man being erased, barely touching things, dissolving. Hacine had been promising himself to go see him soon for months now. But he was afraid to find himself nose to nose with a ghost. Coralie helped him with this, too. The impossible heritage, with death hovering nearby. She would take his hand and say, “Fuck me hard, honey,” simple things that pierced his loneliness.
But Hacine was going back to work tomorrow and felt as heartsick as a schoolboy. From his kitchen window, he could see the valley, all those idiots crowded together in happy families, and on Sunday, besides. The new little apartment building on the heights where he and Coralie lived was nice. It was half condo, the rest rent subsidized, with concrete courtyards, gas heat, double glazing, and common areas that still smelled new. Coralie had found it, of course. The view was terrific; you could see the whole town and as far as Guérémange to the east. Oddly enough, the panorama gave Hacine the blues. Looking down and seeing other people like ants made you ask yourself the big questions.
Having finished her coffee, Coralie stretched and yawned widely, her head thrown back, legs stretched, slippers dangling from her toes. The image reassured Hacine.
“Seriously, though, what are we doing?” he asked.
“I don’t know. We could stay home.”
Again, she reached for him, smiling. He leaned over and took her fingers, and they kissed above the table. A noisy little peck. Coralie looked him over.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You have that look…”
She imitated his scowl, and he shrugged.
“Come on,” she said. “You’re not gonna screw up the whole day just because you’re going back to work tomorrow.”
“That’s not it.”
“I know you.”
He stiffened. Even now, years later, Hacine still had that funny way of holding his body, a posture that made him look like an offended chicken. Coralie couldn’t help giggling.
“What now?”
“What, nothing. Come on, it’s our last day!”
She stood up and began to get busy. She walked into the living room and it immediately se
emed cleaner and brighter, without his quite being able to say why. Hacine had witnessed those instant metamorphoses a hundred times. It took very little—some item, the fall of a curtain, practically nothing—but once Coralie had gone through a place, it was completely different. She’d left for three days of training in March, and the apartment became a shambles, almost turning into a cave. On the last evening Hacine even preferred to go eat at McDonald’s rather than stay home.
Her little worker-bee job done, buzzing in the corners and bringing in sunshine, Coralie decided what they would do next. While she got dressed, Hacine made sandwiches, packed a blanket, and filled the cooler. An hour later they were on the shores of Le Perdu lake. They picked a spot in the shade, spread the blanket, and stretched out with her head in his lap.
“Did you think to bring the Coke?”
“Yeah.”
“And the chips?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you love me?”
Hacine kissed her hand, which he was holding. It was nice to be lying on the grass under this old tree, watching the water’s metallic sheen, the windsurfers, the children crouched in the muddy sand.
They ate with their fingers, then went swimming. Coralie was usually talkative, and Hacine enjoyed listening to her. She would often hatch plans and he would wind up saying, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” But for once they didn’t talk. It felt like the day after a drunken party. They touched each other lightly, happily. Hacine wanted her. He stroked her shoulder, his index finger following her collarbone. He could feel her skin, sticky and soft under his fingers. At one point, a big raft cruised by in the distance. It had been cobbled together with boards, with drums for floats and a mast stuck in the middle. The kids on the raft wore life jackets and were paddling with pieces of wood. You could hear them a hundred yards away. A big French flag flew from the mast.
“Today’s Bastille Day, you know,” said Coralie.
“So what?”
And Their Children After Them Page 31