‘You need to give him a smack in the mouth, Jonas.’
‘What for?’ I asked wearily.
‘For what he says about Arabs. What he said was outrageous, I expected you to put him in his place.’
‘This is his place, Fabrice . . . I’m the one who doesn’t know my place.’
With that I grabbed my towel and headed back towards the road to hitchhike back to Río Salado. Fabrice came after me, tried to persuade me not to go home so early, but I felt sick at heart and the beach now seemed as bleak as a desert island. It was at that moment that a four-engine plane shattered the silence, appearing over the headland trailing a ribbon of smoke.
‘It’s on fire,’ José shouted, shocked. ‘It’s going to crash.’
The crippled plane disappeared beyond the ridge. Everyone on the beach was on their feet now, shading their eyes with their hands, waiting for an explosion or a cloud of smoke marking out the crash site. Nothing. The plane continued to coast, its engines stalled, but to the relief of everyone it did not crash.
Was this some terrible omen?
Some months later, on 7 November, as night fell over the deserted beach, monstrous shadows appeared on the horizon. The landings on the coast of Oran had begun.
‘Three shots fired,’ roared Pépé Rucillio. The man who rarely showed himself in public was standing on the village square. ‘Where is our valiant army?’
In Río Salado, news of the landings had been greeted like hail at harvest time. The men of the town had convened a meeting on the steps of the town hall. Some glowered with fury and disbelief while others, panic-stricken, had slumped and were sitting on the pavement, drumming their fingers on their knees. The mayor had rushed back to his office, where, according to those close to him, he was in constant contact with the military authorities at the barracks in Oran.
‘The Americans tricked us,’ roared Pépé, the richest man in the district. ‘While our soldiers were stationed in their bunkers, the enemy ships skirted the Montagne des Lions, bypassing our defences, and landed at Arzew without firing a shot. From there, they marched all the way to Tlélat without meeting a living soul, then advanced on Oran by the back door . . . While our troops were still keeping lookout on the clifftops, there were Americans strolling down the Boulevard Mascara. I’m telling you, there wasn’t so much as a skirmish! The enemy marched into Oran and made themselves right at home. What’s going to happen now?’
The day passed in a dizzying whirl of half-truths and wild rumours. Night fell, but no one seemed to notice – in fact most of the villagers did not go home until dawn. By now, they were disoriented. Some swore they could hear tanks roaring through the vineyards.
‘What kept you out so late?’ Germaine demanded, opening the door. ‘You’ve had me worried sick. Where have you been? The whole country is at war and you’re out wandering the streets . . .’
My uncle had emerged from his room. He was slumped in an armchair in the living room, unable to keep his hands still.
‘Is it true the Germans have landed?’ he asked me.
‘Not the Germans, the Americans.’
‘The Americans?’ He looked puzzled. ‘What the hell would the Americans be doing here?’
He jumped to his feet, looked about him contemptuously and announced: ‘I’m going to my room. When they get here, tell them I don’t have time to see them, tell them they can torch the house.’
No one came to torch our house, no air raid troubled the quiet of our fields. A couple of motorcyclists were spotted near Bouhadjar, the neighbouring village, but they turned out to be lost. They drove around for a while, then headed back the way they had come. Some said they were German soldiers, others said it was an American reconnaissance mission, but since no one had ever seen either army up close, we drew a line under the matter and went about our business.
André Sosa was the first of us to go to Oran.
He came back completely confused.
‘The Americans are buying up everything,’ he told us. ‘War or no war, they’re behaving like tourists. They’re all over Oran – in the bars, in the whorehouses, in the Jewish Quarter, they’ve even gone into the Village Nègre, against the express orders of their commander. They want everything: carpets, rugs, fezzes, burnous, tapestries. And they don’t even haggle! I saw one of them give a Moroccan veteran a wad of cash for just some rusty old bayonet from the Great War.’
He pulled a banknote from his back pocket and laid it on the table as though this were proof of what he had said.
‘Just look at what they do with their money . . . This is a hundred-dollar bill. Have you ever seen a French banknote scribbled over like this? They’re autographs. It’s stupid, but it’s the Yanks’ favourite game. They call it ‘Short Snorter’. You can do it with other notes too. Some of them have rolls of bills all like this. They’re not trying to get rich, they’re just collecting them. See those two autographs there, that’s Laurel and Hardy, I swear it is. That one there is Errol Flynn, you know, the guy who plays Zorro . . . Joe gave it to me for a crate of wine . . .’
He picked up the note, stuffed it back in his pocket and, rubbing his hands together, told us he’d be going back to Oran within the week to do some deals with the GIs.
As the fear subsided and people realised the Americans had not come as conquerors but as saviours, others from Río Salado headed for Oran to see what was going on. Little by little, the last pockets of suspicion died away and people stopped posting guards over the farms and the houses.
André was keyed up. Every day, he jumped in his car and headed for Oran to barter, and after each sortie he would come back and try to impress us with his treasures. We had to go to Oran for ourselves to corroborate the wild stories circulating about the Yanks. Jean-Christophe pestered Fabrice, who pestered his mother to drive us there. Madame Scamaroni was reluctant, but eventually she relented.
We left at dawn. The sun had barely risen above the horizon when we reached Misserghin. Jeeps droned back and forth across the roads and the fields. In the streams, GIs, stripped to the waist, washed themselves, singing loudly. There were broken-down trucks along the verge, their hoods up, surrounded by listless mechanics. By the gates of the city, whole convoys waited. Oran had changed. The GIs teeming through the streets gave the place a carnival air. André had not been exaggerating – there were Americans everywhere: on the boulevards and the building sites, driving their half-tracks through the chaos of camels and tipcarts, dispatching units to the nomads’ douars, filling the air with dust and noise. Officers in civvies honked their horns to cut a path through the mayhem. Others, dressed up to the nines, lounged on the terraces of cafés with lady friends while a gramophone played Dinah Shore. Oran was operating on American time. It was not only Uncle Sam’s troops that had landed, they had brought his culture with them: their ration boxes were crammed with condensed milk, chocolate bars, corned beef, chewing gum, Coca-Cola, Twinkies, processed cheese, American cigarettes and white bread. Local bars were playing American music, and the yaouleds – the shoeshine boys – who had suddenly meta-morphosed into newspaper sellers, dashed from the squares to the tram stops howling ‘The Stars and Stripes’ in some incomprehensible pidgin English. From the pavements came the rustle of magazines ruffled by the breeze: Esquire, The New Yorker, Life. Fans of Hollywood began to adopt the traits of their favourite actors: they swaggered as they walked and curled their lips into a sneer even as the merchants in the souks effortlessly learned to lie and haggle in English.
Río Salado suddenly seemed like a backwater. Oran had taken possession of our souls, its clamour pulsed through our veins, its audacity cheered us. We felt drunk, caught up in the commotion of gleaming avenues and teeming bars, made dizzy by the constant weaving of the carts, the cars, the trams, while the girls, insolent but not flighty, their hips swaying seductively, whirled around us like houris.
There could be no question of going back to Río Salado. Madame Scamaroni headed back alone, leaving us in a room ove
r one of her shops on the Boulevard des Chasseurs and making us promise not to do anything foolish in her absence. Hardly had her car turned the corner than we began our invasion of the city. Oran was ours: the Place des Armes, with its rococo theatre; the town hall, flanked by its colossal bronze lions; the Promenade de l’Étang, the Place de la Bastille, the Passage Clauzel, where lovers met; the ice-cream stands that served the finest lemonade on earth, the lavish cinemas and Darmon’s department stores . . . In its charm and its daring, Oran lacked nothing, every spark became a firework, every joke an uproar, every drink a celebration. Ever generous and impulsive, the city was determined to share every pleasure and despised anything it did not find entertaining. A sullen face could ruin its equanimity, a killjoy sour its mood; it could not bear to see the cloud darken its silver lining. Every street corner was a party, every square a carnival, and everywhere its voice proclaimed a hymn to life itself. In Oran, pleasure was not simply a state of mind; it was a cardinal rule: without it, the whole world was a mess. Beautiful, alluring and well aware of the spell she cast over strangers, Oran was bourgeois in an understated fashion. She needed no fanfare and was convinced that no storm – not even the war – could curb her flight. Oran was a city of airs and graces, people referred to her as la ville américaine, and every fantasy in the world was becoming real. Perched on a clifftop, she gazed out to sea, pretending to languish, a captive maiden watching from a tower for Prince Charming to arrive. She was pleasure itself, and everything suited her.
We were caught up in her spell.
‘Hey, rednecks!’ André Sosa yelled to us.
He was sitting on the terrace of an ice-cream parlour with an American soldier. From the way he waved, it was obvious he was trying to impress. He looked dashing: his hair was scraped back and plastered down with brilliantine, his shoes freshly polished, and his sunglasses hid half his face.
‘Hey, come join us,’ he called, getting up to fetch more chairs. ‘They do the best double-chocolate malt here, and the best snails piquant.’
The soldier shifted over to make room, and watched confidently as we surrounded him.
‘This is my friend Joe,’ said André, delighted to be able to introduce the Yank he had been boasting about. ‘Our American cousin. He comes from a godforsaken hole just like ours. He’s from Salt Lake City and we’re from Río Salado, which means Salt River.’
He threw his head back and gave a forced laugh, delighted by this notion.
‘Does he speak French?’ Jean-Christophe asked.
‘Kind of. Joe says his great-grandmother was French, from Haut-Savoie, but he never really learned the language, he picked it up while he was stationed here in North Africa. Joe’s a corporal. He fought on all the fronts.’
Joe punctuated André’s comments by nodding vigorously, clearly amused to see us all raise our eyebrows in admiration. He shook hands with the four of us and André introduced us as his best friends and the finest stallions in Salt River. Although he was thirty and had been in the wars, Joe still had a boyish face, thin-lipped, with high cheekbones that seemed too delicate for a guy of his build. His keen eye lacked any real acuity and made him look a little simple when he grinned from ear to ear; and he grinned whenever anyone so much as looked at him.
‘Joe’s got a problem,’ André told us.
‘Is he a deserter?’ asked Fabrice.
‘No, Joe’s no coward – he lives for fighting. The problem is, he hasn’t had it off for six months and his balls are so full of spunk he can’t put one foot in front of the other.’
‘Why?’ asked Simon. ‘Don’t they issue hand towels with the rations?’
‘It’s not that.’ André patted the corporal’s hand gently. ‘Joe wants a real bed with red lampshades on the nightstands and a real flesh-and-blood woman who can whisper dirty things to him.’
We all burst out laughing and Joe joined us, nodding his head, his smile splitting his face.
‘Anyway, I’ve decided to take him to a whorehouse,’ André announced, throwing his arms wide to indicate the extent of his generosity.
‘They won’t let you in,’ said Jean-Christophe.
‘They wouldn’t dare refuse André Jiménez Sosa . . . They’re more likely to roll out the red carpet for me. The madame at Camélia is a friend – I’ve put so much money her way, she melts like butter as soon as she sees me. So, anyway, I’m going to take my friend Joe over there and we’re going to fuck their brains out, aren’t we, Joe?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Joe twisted his hat nervously in his hands.
‘I wouldn’t mind going with you,’ Jean-Christophe ventured. ‘I’ve never done anything serious with a woman. You think you could arrange it?’
‘Are you crazy?’ said Simon. ‘You’re not seriously thinking of going into a dive like that with all the diseases the whores have got?’
‘I’m with Simon,’ said Fabrice. ‘I don’t think we should go. Besides, we told my mother we’d behave ourselves.’
Jean-Christophe shrugged, leaned over to André and whispered something in his ear. André gave him a superior look and said, ‘I can get you into Hell itself if you want.’
Relieved and excited, Jean-Christophe turned to me.
‘What about you, Jonas, are you coming?’
‘Absolutely . . .’
I was more shocked than anyone to hear myself say this.
The red-light district In Oran was behind the theatre on the Rue de l’Aqueduc, a squalid alleyway with stairs at either end that reeked of piss and teemed with drunks. Hardly had we set foot in the alley than I felt horribly uncomfortable, and it took every ounce of energy not to turn tail and run. Joe and André raced ahead, eager to get inside. Jean-Christophe followed close behind. He was clearly intimidated and his attempt at seeming offhand was unconvincing. He turned round from time to time and winked at me, to which I responded with a nervous smile, but the moment we passed anyone shifty we swerved out of the way and made as if to leave. The brothels were all lined up on the same part of the alley, their front doors painted in garish colours. The Rue de l’Aqueduc was heaving; there were soldiers, sailors, furtive Arab men terrified of being spotted by a neighbour, barefoot boys running errands, Senegalese pimps with flick knives tucked into their belts watching over their livestock, ‘native’ soldiers wearing tall red fezzes – a feverish yet somehow muted tumult.
The madame at the Camélia was a giant of a woman with a voice that could make the earth quake. She ruled her demesne with a rod of iron and was bawling out an ill-mannered customer on the steps as we arrived.
‘You fucked up again, Gégé, and that’s not good. You want to come back here and see my girls? Well, it’s down to you. If you keep acting like a thug, you’ll never set foot in my house again. You know me, Gégé, when I put that little red cross next to someone’s name, I might just as well be digging his grave. You understand what I’m saying, or do I need to draw you a picture?’
‘Don’t act like you’re doing me some big favour,’ Gégé protested. ‘I come here with my cash, all I’m asking is that your whore does what she’s told.’
‘You can stick your money up your arse, Gégé. This is a brothel, not a torture chamber. If you don’t like the service, you can take your custom elsewhere. Because if you try something like that again, I’ll rip your heart out with my bare hands.’
Gégé, who was almost a dwarf, rose up on the tips of his shoes and glared at the madame, purple with rage. Then he rocked back on to his heels and, livid at having been publicly ticked off by a woman, elbowed his way past us and disappeared into the crowd.
‘Serves him right,’ yelled a soldier. ‘If he doesn’t like it, he can take his business elsewhere.’
‘That goes for you too, Sergeant,’ the madame said. ‘You’re no saint yourself.’
The soldier shrank back. The madame was clearly in a bad mood, and André realised that things might not go his way. He managed to persuade her to let Jean-Christophe in, given his height, but could do
nothing for me.
‘He’s just a kid, Dédé,’ she said. ‘He still smells of mother’s milk. I can turn a blind eye to your blonde friend here, but this little cherub with his blue eyes, there’s no way. He’d be raped in the corridor before he even got to a room.’
André made no attempt to insist. The madame was not the sort to go back on a decision. She told me I could wait for my friends behind the counter, instructing me not to touch anything or speak to anyone. I felt relieved. Now that I had seen the brothel, I didn’t want to go any farther; the place turned my stomach.
In the waiting room, veiled by curtains of smoke, the hunters, looking shrunken and dazed, eyed their prey. Some of the men were drunk and they grumbled and jostled. The prostitutes were displayed on a long upholstered bench in an alcove carved into the wall of the corridor that led to the bedrooms. They sat facing the customers, some of them barely dressed, others squeezed into see-through corselets. It looked like a painting of ruined concubines by a despondent Delacroix. There were big girls rippling with rolls of fat, breasts stuffed into bras the size of hammocks; scrawny women with dark sunken eyes who looked as though they had been dragged from their deathbeds; brunettes in cheap blonde wigs; blondes wearing so much make-up they looked like clowns, one breast casually exposed. The women sat in silence, patiently scratching their crotches, smoking, eyeing the cattle opposite.
Sitting behind the counter, I contemplated this world and regretted ever having ventured inside. It smelled of adulterated wine and the stench of rutting flesh. A terrible tension hung in the room like some noxious gas. One spark, one misjudged comment, one wrong look and the whole place could go up . . . The decor, although contrived and naïve, did its best to be cheery: delicate wall hangings framed with velvet, gilded mirrors, cheap paintings of nymphs dressed as Eve, matching lamps and mosaic walls, empty love seats in the alcoves. But the customers seemed oblivious to all this; they could see only the half-naked girls on the long bench. Veins throbbing in their necks, all but pawing the ground, they were eager to get started.
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