‘What did you say to him?’
‘Nothing . . .’
She looked at her husband as though he were a stranger.
‘No one is judging you, Mahi.’
But my uncle was not talking to us. Though he was staring straight at us, he could not see us. He frowned as though shaking off a bad dream, then he picked up his chair, sat down again, took his head in his hands and did not move.
That night, at about three a.m., Germaine and I were woken by the sound of raised voices. My uncle had locked himself in his study, where he was arguing violently with someone. I dashed downstairs to see if the front door was open, but it was locked and bolted. I went back upstairs. Germaine tried peering through the keyhole to see what was going on, but the key was in the lock.
‘I am not a coward,’ my uncle screamed hysterically. ‘I didn’t betray anyone, do you hear? Don’t look at me like that. How dare you sneer at me. I never informed on anyone . . .’
Then the study door flew open and my uncle emerged, raging, his lips flecked with foam, and pushed past without even seeing us.
Germaine was first to go into the study; I followed her. There was no one there.
Early in the autumn, I saw Madame Cazenave again. It was raining hard, Río Salado was gloomy and dismal, the café terraces were deserted. Seeing her come towards me, I realised that she still had the same ethereal beauty, but my heart did not leap in my chest. Did the rain temper my passion, the dreary weather blunt my memories? I did not care to wonder. I crossed the road to avoid her.
In Río Salado, which drew its vital force from the sun, autumn was always a dead season. In autumn, the masks that people wore in summer fell away like the leaves from the trees and, as Jean-Christophe Lamy discovered, deathless loves took on a sudden brittleness. One evening Jean-Christophe arrived at Fabrice’s house, where we were waiting for Simon to come back from Oran. He did not say a word; he simply sat on the veranda and brooded.
Simon Benyamin had gone to Oran to try his luck as a comedian. He had seen an ad in the paper looking for talented young comedians and thought this was his chance. Stuffing the ad in his pocket, he hopped on the first bus, bound for glory. From his expression when he arrived back, it was clear things had not gone as he had hoped.
‘So?’ Fabrice asked.
Simon slumped into a wicker chair and folded his arms, clearly in a foul mood.
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’ Simon cut him off. ‘Nothing happened. The bastards didn’t even give me a chance . . . I knew straight off that this wasn’t going to be my day. I hung around backstage for hours before I got to go on. The theatre was completely empty; there was nobody there except an old guy in the front row and some dried-up old witch next to him with round glasses that made her look like a barn owl. They had a big spotlight pointed right on me. It was like I was being interrogated. Then the old guy says, “You may begin, Monsieur Benyamin.” I swear it was like my great-grandfather’s voice from beyond the grave. I couldn’t make the guy out. He looked like he could watch a church burn down and not bat an eyelid. I’ve only just started when he interrupts me. “Do you know the difference between a clown and a fool, Monsieur Benyamin?” He’s spitting the words. “No? Well let me enlighten you: a clown makes people laugh because he is both funny and sad; a fool makes people laugh because he is ridiculous.” Then he waved me offstage and shouted, “Next!”’
Fabrice doubled up with laughter.
‘I sat in the dressing room for two hours trying to calm down. If the guy had come in to apologise, I’d have eaten him alive. You should have seen the two of them, sitting in the empty theatre; they looked like a couple of undertakers.’
Seeing us all laughing, Jean-Christophe fumed silently.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Fabrice.
Jean-Christophe bowed his head and sighed.
‘Isabelle is starting to get on my nerves.’
‘Only starting?’ said Simon. ‘I told you at the beginning she wasn’t right for you.’
‘Love is blind,’ Fabrice said philosophically.
‘Love makes you blind,’ Simon corrected him.
‘Is it serious?’ I asked Jean-Christophe.
‘Why? Are you still interested in her?’ He shot me a curious look, then added: ‘You never did get over her, did you, Jonas? Well, I’ve had it with her, she’s all yours.’
‘Why would I be interested in her?’
‘Because you’re the one she’s in love with,’ he yelled, banging the table.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Fabrice and Simon looked from me to Jean-Christophe. He clearly hated me.
‘What are you telling me?’ I said.
‘I’m telling you the truth. Whenever she knows you’re around, she’s impossible, she’s always sneaking looks at you. If you’d seen her at the last dance, there she was on my arm and then you show up and she starts fooling around just to get your attention. I nearly slapped her.’
‘Love might be blind, Chris, but I think jealousy has got you seeing things.’
‘I am jealous, you’re right. But I’m not seeing things.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Fabrice interrupted, sensing there was trouble brewing. ‘Isabelle manipulates people, Chris, it’s what she always does. She’s just testing you. If she didn’t love you, she would have dumped you long ago.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I’ve had enough. If the girl I love spends her time looking over my shoulder, then maybe it’s better if I walk away. To be honest, I don’t know if I was ever really serious about her.’
I felt uncomfortable. This was the first time anything had upset the friendship between the four of us. Then, to my relief, Jean-Christophe turned and pointed at me. ‘Ha! Fooled you, didn’t I? You fell for it hook, line and sinker!’
No one laughed. We all still believed Jean-Christophe had been serious.
The next day, as I wandered to the village square with Simon, we saw Isabelle and Jean-Christophe arm in arm, headed for the cinema. I don’t know why, but I ducked into a doorway so they wouldn’t see me. Simon was surprised by my reaction, but he understood.
3. Émilie
12
ANDRÉ INVITED everyone in Río Salado to the opening of his ‘American Diner’. While it was easy to imagine André as a feudal lord, prowling his vineyards, slapping his riding crop against his boots, beating his workers and dreaming of Olympus, the idea of the son of Jaime J. Sosa running a bar, opening bottles of beer, left us speechless. André had changed since his trip to the United States, where his friend Joe had taken him on a dazzling odyssey. America had opened his eyes to a life we could not even begin to understand: something he referred to with mystical fervour as ‘the American dream’. When asked what exactly he meant by it, he’d shift from one foot to the other, then frown and explain that it meant living however you pleased and to hell with taboos and propriety. André wanted to shake us out of our bourgeois provincial habits – he found it intolerable that young people in Algeria did as they were told, played only when they were permitted and did not go out unless they were invited. Society, he maintained, could be judged by the energy, the spirit, the passion of its youth. It was the arrogance of the young that revitalised each new generation. According to him, the youth of Río Salado were deferential, docile sheep, chained to the customs and ideas of a bygone era, completely out of touch with the brave new world in which young men should ‘burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars’. In Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in New York, he told us, young people were busy wringing the neck of filial pieties, shaking off the yoke of family to spread their wings, like Icarus.
The winds of fortune had shifted and now favoured the American way, André maintained. A country’s fortunes could be judged by its thirst for change, for revolution, but in Río Salado generation followed generation and nothing ever changed. André had decided that urgent changes were needed, and could think of nothing
better than a California-style diner, to shake us out of our obscene, provincial, antiquated sheep-like instincts; to turn us into rebels with a cause.
André’s diner was outside the village, behind the R.C. Kraus vineyards, on a patch of waste ground where we had played football as children. For the opening night, some twenty tables, each with a huge parasol, had been set out on a gravel terrace. As soon as we saw the boxes of wine and lemonade, the crates of fruit, and the grills set up around the perimeter, we relaxed.
‘We’re going to eat till we throw up.’ Simon sounded excited.
Jelloul and a handful of other workers moved between the tables, laying out napkins, setting out carafes and ashtrays. André and his cousin José, Stetson hats pushed back off their heads, legs apart, thumbs hooked into their belts, stood proudly on the steps leading up to the diner.
‘You should buy a herd of cattle,’ Simon said, nodding at André’s ten-gallon hat.
‘You don’t like my diner?’
‘As long as there’s food and drink . . .’
‘Well then, stuff your face and shut up.’
André came down the steps and hugged us all, groping Simon’s crotch playfully.
‘Hey! Hands off the family jewels!’ Simon yelped, jumping back.
‘Some jewels!’ André quipped, herding us towards the bar. ‘You’d be lucky to get two francs on a flea-market stall.’
‘What are you betting?’
‘Whatever you like . . . I’ll tell you what, a number of beautiful young ladies will be joining us this evening. If you can manage to seduce one, I’ll pay for a hotel room – and not just any hotel; I’m talking about the Martinez.’
‘Deal!’
‘Dédé is like a machine gun,’ said José, who considered his cousin to be a paragon of rectitude and gallantry. ‘When he goes off, there’s no stopping him.’
André took us on a tour of his ‘revolution’. The diner was nothing like any café we had ever seen. It was painted in bright, garish colours; behind the bar was a huge mirror with a silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge etched into the glass. There were tall upholstered bar stools, brass shelves groaning beneath the weight of bottles and curios, bright neon signs and strange gadgets. The walls were plastered with huge photographs of Hollywood stars. The shutters were closed and the curtains drawn, so the ceiling lights gave off a warm muted glow while wall sconces cast blood-red shadows all around. The seats, bolted to the floor, were arranged in booths like the seats of a train around rectangular tables on which were scenes of the American Wild West.
In the next room, a pool table took pride of place. No café in Río Salado or Lourmel had a pool table. The one André had imported for his guests was a work of art, beautifully lit by a hanging lamp that all but touched the table.
Picking up a pool cue, André chalked the tip, then leaned over the table and lined up his shot using his knuckles as a rest. The rack of coloured balls exploded across the table, ricocheting off the cushions.
‘From now on,’ he declared, ‘people here won’t go to a bar to get drunk. At my place, they’ll come to play pool. And this is only stage one. I’ve got three more tables on order, which should be here by the end of the month. I’m planning to set up a regional tournament.’
José appeared with beers for the others and a soft drink for me, and suggested we go take a table on the terrace until the other guests arrived. It was about seven p.m. The sun was slipping slowly behind the hills, shooting its last glimmers through the vineyards. From the terrace, we had a perfect view of the surrounding plains and the road that wound its way to Lourmel. A bus dropped passengers just outside the village: people from Río Salado on their way back from Oran, and Arab labourers coming in from the building sites in the city. The labourers, clearly exhausted, cut across the fields with bundles under their arms, heading for the dirt track that led to their village of squalid shacks.
Jelloul watched me watching them, and as the last labourer disappeared around a bend in the dirt track, he turned and shot me an unsettling glance.
As the sun sank behind the hills, the Rucillio clan rolled up – Pépé’s two youngest sons, some of their cousins and their brother-in-law, Antonio, who worked as a cabaret singer in Sidi Bel-Abbès – in a spanking new Citroën straight from the factory, which they parked near the entrance where everyone could see it.
André greeted them all with the back-slapping good humour of the rich, and then escorted them to the best seats.
‘You can be rolling in it and still smell horse shit for miles around,’ complained Simon, piqued that the Rucillio family had walked past without so much as a nod to us.
‘You know what they’re like,’ I said.
‘I don’t care – they could at least have said hello. We’re hardly the dregs of society: you’re a chemist, Fabrice is a poet and a journalist, I’m a civil servant.’
It was not quite dark as the terrace began to fill with beautiful girls and young men dressed to the nines. Older couples arrived in gleaming cars, the ladies in evening gowns, their escorts wearing suits and bow ties. André had invited the cream of Río Salado society and every notable family for miles around. In the crowd we could make out the son of the richest man in Hammam Bouhadjar. His father owned a private plane and on his arm was one of Oran’s rising singing stars, who was surrounded by eager fans showering her with compliments, eager to light her cigarette.
Chinese lanterns were lit and floated above the terrace. José clapped his hands for silence and the noise died away. André went up on to the stage and thanked his guests for coming to celebrate the opening of his diner. He began with a crude joke that made his guests, who were more used to refinement, somewhat uncomfortable, then, deploring the fact that his audience was not broad-minded enough to let him continue in a similar vein, he cut short his speech and left the stage to the musicians.
The evening began with music the like of which no one in Río Salado had ever heard, all trumpets and a double bass. The audience were left cold.
‘It’s jazz, for God’s sake!’ André cursed them. ‘How can anyone not like jazz?’
The jazz band began to realise that if Río Salado was only sixty miles from Oran, its musical taste was a million miles away. Being professionals, they continued to play for a while, then, as an encore, they played something that sounded like a curse. The crowd barely noticed when they finally left the stage.
Though André had anticipated that this might happen, he had at least expected his guests to treat the finest jazz band in Algeria with some respect. We watched his grovelling apology to the furious trumpeter, who seemed to be saying that he would never again set foot in this godforsaken, culturally benighted hole.
As André and the bandleader argued, José introduced a second band – a group of locals this time. From the moment they took the stage, the whole audience heaved a sigh of relief, and the floor was suddenly filled with people dancing and swaying.
Fabrice Scamaroni invited the mayor’s niece to dance and eagerly led her on to the floor. I asked a shy girl, who politely refused me, though I managed to convince her friend to take the floor. Simon did not dance, but sat in some strange state of rapture, his plump, childish face in his hands, gazing at what seemed to be an empty table at the far end of the terrace.
When the musicians took a break, I walked my dancing partner back to her seat, then went back out to where Simon, oblivious of my presence, sat smiling vaguely, still staring into the distance. I waved a hand in front of his eyes but he didn’t react. I followed his gaze and I saw . . . her.
She was sitting alone at a table that had been hastily added and so had no tablecloth or napkins. I glimpsed her as she appeared and disappeared between the swaying dancers. Suddenly I knew why Simon – who could usually be relied on to turn any social event into a circus – seemed so serene. The mere sight of this girl had left him speechless.
She was wearing a pale, figure-hugging dress and elbow-length gloves; her black hair was p
ulled up into a chignon. With a smile as delicate as a wisp of smoke, she gazed out at the dancers without seeing them, her chin perched on her gloved fingertips, absorbed in her own thoughts. From time to time she vanished behind the shadows that whirled about her, only to re-emerge like a nymph appearing from a lake.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Simon gasped.
‘She’s magnificent.’
‘Just look at those eyes. I’ll bet they are as black as her hair. And her nose! Her nose, it’s perfect . . .’
‘Easy does it.’
‘And her lips, Jonas, have you seen her tiny rosebud lips? How does she manage to eat?’
‘Hey, Simon, come back down to earth!’
‘What would I want to do that for?’
‘Because it’s a long drop from that cloud of yours.’
‘I don’t care . . . For a beauty like that, I’m happy to take a tumble.’
‘And how exactly do you plan to win her over?’
At length he looked at me, and I saw a sad smile steal over his face.
‘You know perfectly well I’ve got no chance,’ he said. The sudden change of tone was heartbreaking, but he soon rallied. ‘Do you think she’s from Río Salado?’
‘I don’t think so. We would have seen her before now.’
‘You’re right.’ Simon smiled. ‘I could never have forgotten a face like that.’
We both held our breath as we watched a young man saunter over to the girl and ask her to dance, then both of us let it out in a sigh of relief when she politely declined.
Fabrice came back from the dance floor bathed in sweat, dabbing his face with a handkerchief. He leaned over to us and whispered:
‘Have you seen the girl sitting on her own, at the far end of the terrace?’
‘You bet we have,’ Simon replied. ‘I don’t think there’s a man here who can look at anyone else.’
‘I’ve just been dumped because of her,’ Fabrice explained. ‘The girl I was dancing with nearly gouged my eyes out when she caught me looking at her. Have you any idea who she is?’
What the day owes the nigth Page 16