Nestled amid hundreds of vineyards and wine cellars, Río Salado was a town to be savoured, like one of its own vintages. Though there were chill January days when the sky was streaked with snow, the town had an aura of perpetual summer about it. The contented inhabitants went joyfully about their business, coming together at sunset to share a drink or some piece of scandal or gossip. Their braying laughter or their righteous anger could be heard for miles around.
‘You’ll like it here,’ my uncle promised as he greeted Germaine and me on the steps of our new home.
The majority of the inhabitants of Río Salado were Spaniards and Jews, who were fiercely proud of having built their houses with their bare hands, of having snatched from this dry, pitted land sweet grapes that would have delighted even the gods of Olympus. They were friendly, impulsive people who would shout across the street to one other, hands cupped like megaphones. They knew each other so well that it was as if they had all been cast from the same mould. It was utterly unlike Oran, where to go from one neighbourhood to another was like moving between centuries, between different planets. Río Salado was easygoing and broad-minded; even the church, which stood next to the town hall, was set back from the square so as not to disturb revellers.
My uncle was right. Río Salado was the perfect place to start afresh. We lived on a hill to the east of the village in a large, bright, airy house set in magnificent gardens and with a small balcony that overlooked a sea of vineyards. The ground floor had been converted into a pharmacy, with a small back office lined with shelves and compartments. A spiral staircase led to the first-floor living room, off which were three large bedrooms and a tiled bathroom with an iron bathtub with claw feet in the shape of lion’s paws cast in bronze. I felt at home here from the moment I first stood on the sunlit balcony watching a partridge soar above the vineyards, and felt myself soar with it.
I was overjoyed. Having been born in the countryside, here in Río Salado I rediscovered the familiar sights and smells of my childhood, the smell of the newly ploughed earth, the silent hills. I was a farmer’s son again, happy to discover that the city clothes I had been forced to wear for so long had not warped my soul. The city was an illusion, the countryside a joy that was constantly renewed, a place where day breaks like the dawn of the world, where nightfall brings with it perfect peace. From the first, I loved Río Salado. It was a blessed place and I could easily imagine gods and titans finding rest here. It was a place of serenity, undisturbed by primordial demons. Even when the jackals came at night to prowl the sleeping town, I felt like going with them, following them into deep forest. Sometimes I would go out on to the balcony to watch them, sly shadows slinking through the vineyards; I could stand there for hours listening for every hushed sound, gazing at the moon, which dipped and seemed to brush my eyelashes.
And then there was Émilie.
The first time I saw her, she was sitting on the porch outside the pharmacy, toying with the laces of her boots. She was a pretty girl with timorous coal-black eyes. I could have mistaken her for an angel were it not that her face, so white it looked like marble, bore the unmistakable sign of some terrible illness.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m waiting for my father,’ she said, shifting to one side to let me pass.
‘You can wait inside. It’s freezing out here.’
She shook her head.
When I saw her some days later she was with her father, a hulking man who looked as though he had been carved from a menhir. He waited by the counter, silent and motionless, as Germaine led the girl into the back office. When they reappeared some minutes later, the man set some money on the counter, took his daughter by the hand and left.
‘What was she here for?’ I asked Germaine.
‘Her injection . . . I give it to her every Wednesday.’
‘Is it serious . . . what she’s got?’
‘Only God can know that.’
The following Wednesday, I hurried home from school so I could see her. She was sitting on a bench opposite the counter, leafing through a book.
‘What are you reading?’
‘It’s a book about Guadeloupe.’
‘What’s Guadeloupe?’
‘It’s a French island in the Caribbean.’
I tiptoed closer, afraid that I might startle her – she looked so fragile.
‘My name is Younes.’
‘Mine’s Émilie.’
‘I’ll be thirteen in three weeks.’
‘I was nine last November.’
‘Are you in a lot of pain?’
‘It’s not too bad.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I don’t know. The doctors at the hospital couldn’t work it out, and the medicine they’re giving me doesn’t seem to do any good.’
Germaine appeared and Émilie went with her, leaving the book on the bench. There was a rose bush in a pot on the sideboard. I picked a rose and slipped it between the pages of the book, then went up to my room.
When I came down again, Émilie was gone.
She did not come for her injection the following Wednesday, nor the Wednesday after that.
‘She must be in hospital,’ Germaine said.
After several weeks, I gave up all hope of seeing Émilie again.
Then I met Isabelle. She was the niece of Pépé Rucillio – the richest man in Río Salado. Isabelle was a pretty little girl with big periwinkle-blue eyes and long hair that cascaded down her back. She thought of herself as sophisticated. She looked down her nose at everything and everyone, but when she looked at me, she suddenly seemed thin and frail. Isabelle wanted me all to herself and woe betide anyone who came too close to me.
Isabelle’s parents – successful wine merchants – worked for Pépé Rucillio, the patriarch of the village. They lived in a huge villa on a street cascading with bougainvilleas near the Jewish cemetery.
Isabelle’s mother was a highly strung French woman whose family, people said, were penniless aristocrats (though she was quick to remind everyone that she had blue blood in her veins). Isabelle had inherited little from her mother except her obsession with order and discipline, but she owed much to her father, a handsome olive-skinned man from Catalonia. She had his face – the same high cheekbones, the chiselled mouth, the piercing eyes. Even at the tender age of thirteen, with her aristocratic nose and her regal manner, Isabelle knew what she wanted and how to get it. She was as careful about the company she kept and the image she projected of herself. In a previous life, she told me, she had been a chatelaine.
It was Isabelle who approached me. I was at some festival on the village square when she came over to me and asked: ‘Are you Monsieur Jonas?’ She addressed everyone, young and old, as monsieur or madame, and insisted they do the same to her. ‘Thursday is my birthday,’ she went on imperiously, not waiting for me to answer. ‘You are cordially invited to attend.’ I didn’t know whether this was an invitation or a command. When I arrived at her party on Thursday, feeling somewhat lost in the confusion of her cousins and her friends, she grabbed me and introduced me to everyone: ‘This is my best friend.’
My first kiss, I owe to Isabelle. We were in an alcove of the grand drawing room at her house. Isabelle, her back straight, her chin held high, was playing the piano. I was sitting next to her, watching her slender fingers flutter over the keys. Suddenly she stopped, closed the piano lid carefully and, after a moment’s hesitation – or a moment’s thought – turned to me, took my face in her hands and pressed her lips to mine, closing her eyes in mock passion.
The kiss seemed to go on for ever.
Isabelle opened her eyes again before she pulled away.
‘Did you feel anything, Monsieur Jonas?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Me neither. It’s strange, in the movies, it looks so sophisticated . . . Perhaps you have to be grown up to really feel these things.’
She looked deep into my eyes and announced: ‘Never m
ind. We’ll wait as long as it takes.’
Isabelle had the patience of those who believe that tomorrow belongs to them. I was the most handsome boy on earth, she told me, and in some previous life I must have been a prince. She informed me that she had chosen me to be her fiancé because I was ‘worth the candle.’
After that first attempt, we didn’t kiss, but we saw each other almost every day and dreamed up fantastical plans.
Then suddenly, abruptly, our ‘engagement’ came to an end. It was a Sunday morning. I had been skulking around the house – my uncle had shut himself in his room and Germaine had gone to church – half-heartedly trying to play or read. It was a glorious spring day; the swallows had come early, and Río Salado was scented with jasmine.
I went for a walk, my head in the clouds, and though I had not planned to do so, I found myself standing outside the Rucillios’ house. I called to Isabelle through the window. She did not come down to the door, but peered at me through the shutters for a moment before slamming them open and screaming:
‘Liar!’
From her tone and the incandescent fury of her stare, I knew she hated me – it was the tone, the look that she invariably used when she had decided to declare war. I had no idea of the charges levelled against me; I was completely unprepared for the attack. I stood there speechless.
‘I never want to see you again, Jonas!’ she declared, and I realised this was the first time I had ever heard her address anyone without using monsieur or madame.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ she screamed, infuriated that I simply stood there looking confused. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve never lied to you . . .’
‘Haven’t you? Your name is Younes, isn’t it? You-nes? So why do you go round calling yourself Jonas?’
‘Everyone calls me Jonas . . . What difference does it make?’
‘It makes all the difference!’ she shouted breathlessly, her face flushed as she spat scornfully. ‘It changes everything.’
‘We are from different worlds, Monsieur Younes,’ she said implacably when she had got her breath back. ‘And the fact that you have blue eyes is not enough.’ Then, before slamming the shutters closed, she spluttered contemptuously: ‘I am a Rucillio, or had you forgotten? You surely don’t think I could marry an Arab? I’d rather die!’
As a child, such a glimpse into the adult world can scar you for life. I was shell-shocked; I felt as though I had woken from a nightmare. I would never again look at things the same way. There are things that, though to a child’s eye they seem so trivial as to be inconsequential, come back to haunt you; even when you close your eyes, you feel them drag you down, tenacious and cruel as the pangs of remorse.
Isabelle had ripped me from my safe little world and tossed me into the gutter. Adam cast out of Eden could not have felt more wretched, and the lump in my throat was harder to swallow than his apple.
After what Isabelle said, I began to be more circumspect, more attentive. I noticed that no one in Río Salado wore a billowing haik, and that the dishevelled wretches in turbans who haunted the vineyards from dawn to dusk did not dare come into Río Salado itself, and that my uncle – whom most of the villagers assumed was a Turk from Tlemcen – was the only Arab to have succeeded in putting down roots in this fiercely colonial village.
What Isabelle had said had shocked me.
After that, whenever we met, she would stalk past, head high as a butcher’s hook, as though I had never existed. Nor did it stop there: she invariably imposed her prejudices on others. If she had decided to hate someone, she insisted all her friends do so too. I watched as a yawning gap opened up around me in the school playground, my classmates deliberately shunned me.
It was for Isabelle’s sake, too, that Jean-Christophe Lamy picked a fight with me at school and beat me to a bloody pulp. Though he was a year my senior, Jean-Christophe had little to boast about, since his father was the son of a caretaker. But Jean-Christophe was hopelessly in love with Pépé Rucillio’s indomitable niece, and he hoped by beating me up to show her how much he loved her, how far he was prepared to go.
Shocked by the sight of my injuries, the teacher called me up before the whole class and demanded that I name the ‘little savage’ who had done this. When I refused, the teacher ordered me to hold out my hands and thrashed me with a ruler, then made me stand in the corner for the rest of the day. After class, he had me stay behind, thinking he could coerce me into giving him the name of the culprit. Still I refused, and eventually he let me go.
When she saw the state of me, Germaine was livid. She demanded to know who had done this to me, but again I stubbornly refused to answer. She insisted on taking me back to the school so she could find out what had happened, but my uncle, who was slumped in a corner, dissuaded her. ‘You’re not taking him anywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s high time he learned to stand on his own two feet.’
Some days later, as I was wandering through the vineyards, I saw Jean-Christophe Lamy and his two henchmen, Simon Benyamin and Fabrice Scamaroni, coming across the fields towards me. Though their manner was not hostile, I was terrified. They did not usually play around here; they hung around the town square or played football together on a patch of waste ground. The very fact that they were in my neighbourhood was not good news. I didn’t really know Fabrice. He was in the class above me: I often saw him reading comics in the playground. He seemed an unremarkable boy whose only talent was his ability to give Jean-Christophe an alibi when he needed it, but I suspected that he might wade into the fight if things turned nasty. Not that Jean-Christophe needed any help; he knew how to throw a punch. Simon was a different matter. I did not trust him at all – he was wildly unpredictable, capable of head-butting a friend just to put an end to a boring conversation. He was in the same year as me, and was the class clown. He always sat at the back and constantly persecuted the clever students. He was a dunce who would complain when the teacher gave him a bad grade, and he hated girls – especially the pretty, clever ones. Simon and I had met on my first day at the school. He and his gang had crowded around me and jeered at me, at the scabs on my knees, at my delicate features, ‘like a little girl’, at my new shoes, which they said made me look like a frog. When I did not react, Simon called me a sissy. After that, he ignored me.
Jean-Christophe was carrying something under his arm. I watched carefully, waiting for him to signal to his friends. Strangely, I saw no sign of the malicious grin, the tenseness in his movements he usually exhibited when about to beat somebody up.
‘We’re not here to hurt you,’ Fabrice said.
Jean-Christophe approached me warily, looking embarrassed, even apologetic. His shoulders sagged under the weight of some invisible burden.
He held out a package.
‘I came to say sorry,’ he said.
I did not take the package, suspecting some practical joke, so he placed it in my hands.
‘It’s a wooden horse. It means a lot to me, but I’d like you to have it. Take it, please, and forgive me.’
Fabrice stared at me, willing me to forgive him.
Once he felt that I had a grip on the package, Jean-Christophe took his hands away and whispered: ‘And thanks for not telling on me.’
In that moment, the friendship between the four of us, one that was to prove among the most important in my life, was sealed. Later, I discovered that Isabelle, furious at Jean-Christophe’s hapless attempt to impress her, had insisted he apologise to me in the presence of witnesses.
Our first summer in Río Salado began inauspiciously. On 3 July, Algeria was rocked by Operation Catapult, in which a British naval squadron bombed the French fleet at the Battle of Mers-el-Kébir. Three days later, before we had had time to weigh the extent of the disaster, His Majesty’s Air Force returned to finish the job.
One of Germaine’s nephews in Oran, a cook on the warship Dunkerque, was among the 1,297 sailors killed in the raid. My uncle, who was gradually, inexorably withdrawing into himself, refused to come
to the funeral, so Germaine and I had to go without him.
The city of Oran was in a state of shock. The whole population had gathered on the docks and was staring aghast at the burning barracks. Many of the ships had been on fire since the first bombing raids, and thick clouds of black smoke now choked the city and veiled the mountains. What had happened was all the more shocking because the warships the British had bombed had been in the process of laying up, the French having signed an armistice with Germany two weeks earlier. This war that people had assumed posed no threat to this side of the Mediterranean was now on our doorstep. After the initial panic and confusion, there was mayhem. Half-truths and rumours were rife, and people seemed prepared to believe even the wildest and most terrifying stories. There was talk of a German invasion, of nightly parachute drops outside the city, of massive bombing raids targeting the civilian population and dragging Algeria into this savage war, which even now was returning all of Europe to the Stone Age.
What the day owes the nigth Page 10