Sila's Fortune

by Fabrice Humbert

  Fabrice Humbert was born in Saint-Cloud in 1967. He teaches literature in a French-German lycée near Paris. His previous novel, The Origin of Violence, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2011 and won the first ever French Prix Orange and the Prix Renaudot for best paperback. Sila’s Fortune was the Winner of the Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau 2010.

  Praise for Fabrice Humbert

  ‘Highly intelligent and moving … a novel of rare scope, substance and strength’ Scotsman

  ‘Convincing and poignant’ Jewish Quarterly

  ‘Beautifully written’ Herald

  Sila’s Fortune

  FABRICE HUMBERT

  Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

  A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Fabrice Humbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2010 Le Passage Paris-New York Editions

  Translation copyright © 2013 Frank Wynne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First published as La Fortune de Sila in 2010 by Le Passage

  Paris-New York Editions

  First published in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London ECIR OJH

  website: www.serpentstail.com

  ISBN 978 1 84668 824 9

  eISBN 978 1 84765 848 7

  Designed and typeset by Crow Books

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CRO 4YY

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Sila’s Fortune

  Prologue

  Hotel Cane, Paris, June 1995

  The man ate. The courses kept coming, graced by precious names carefully articulated by waiters: murex, tuna tataki with obsiblue prawns, lacquered pork belly, Sicilian snakes, Buddha’s hand, merinda with rare herbs, goujons of sole in a cornflour veil, white summer truffles … Precious poetry. And the flavours, mingling delicate ingredients into a coherent multiplicity, melted on the tongue in explosions of flavour, constantly conjuring new subtleties.

  But the man, who was about thirty, heavy-set and broad-shouldered, was as insensitive to words as to taste. He consumed this culinary bliss with complete indifference. From time to time he exchanged a few words with his partner, a young woman with a careworn expression, or glanced over at his son, a boy of six or seven wearing a baseball cap who was finding it difficult to sit still.

  There were some twenty tables in the hotel restaurant. The decor was simple, the whole aesthetic was focused on the food and perhaps also on the ballet of the waiters, making room on the tables for new courses.

  The clientele was entirely in keeping with this stately solemnity. An international clientele of refined tastes, some of them guests at the hotel, others discovering one of the finest restaurants in the world. Several couples, a few families, at one table two elegant young men, one olive-skinned, the other blond and pale. Some distance away was a group of four men, obviously a business dinner. At another table sat a stern-faced man of forty or forty-five with a very pretty dark-haired woman. The maître d’hotel spoke to them in Russian.

  The one false note in this serene atmosphere: a boy in a baseball cap. Bored to death, he had decided to get down from his seat and get in the way of the waiters, who, not knowing what to do in such a confined space would stop, stare, then step around him. They glared at his father who carried on eating. Perhaps he did not realise his son was blocking their path or perhaps he thought it unimportant. Whatever the case, he made no attempt to call his son back to the table. A waiter carrying a tray almost tripped and fell.

  ‘Would you please go back and sit at your table?’ he said to the child.

  The boy stared at him, astonished. The father turned to look at the waiter, who repeated himself, this time in English. The boy looked at him obstinately, arms folded, body rigid, refusing to budge. So the waiter, a young black man, took him by the arm and led him back to the table. The father got to his feet, face black as thunder, took a step forwards and punched the waiter in the face.

  ‘Don’t touch my son!’ he roared.

  The waiter stifled a howl. The tray flew from his grasp and crashed to the ground as he buried his face in his hands, trying to stem the blood gushing from his broken nose.

  A stunned silence descended. Everyone had stopped eating to watch. The father, hunkered in his violence, had returned to his seat and persuaded his son to do likewise.

  A distant, contemptuous, slightly disgusted expression could be seen on the face of the Russian. The young dark-skinned man looked about to intervene, as did the Russian’s wife, but a sort of nervous reticence held him back; meanwhile his friend surveyed the conclusion to this display of force, fascinated, lips trembling. The young man made to get up, but seeing no one was prepared to join him and that the black waiter was stumbling away, a handkerchief pressed to his nose, as one of his colleagues frantically tried to pick up the broken plates, he sat down again.

  Around the restaurant there were soft murmurs, then slowly conversations resumed. The father had gone back to his meal. Back turned, indifferent, he ate.

  Part One

  1

  Sila balanced precariously on the lip of a stone wall, left foot slightly higher than his right. There, in the sunshine, a big smile playing on his lips, he stood pissing. Back then, no one could have dreamed that one day, halfway across the world, he would be a waiter standing in a kitchen, his nose broken, waiting to be taken to hospital.

  He laughed as the piss splashed over the photo of a man in a discarded newspaper. The black ink ran and faded, a pale stain eating into the cheek making the large face seem more harsh.

  Sila jumped down from the high wall. Out of curiosity, he gingerly picked up the object of his target practice with two fingers. A white man of about fifty, fat, with grey hair. Sila was about to toss the paper away again when a number caught his eye: two billion dollars. Running a finger under the words, he deciphered the article. From what he could make out the number referred to how much this man earned in a year. But he was not sure he had read the piece correctly. He had been an able student once; then school had stopped.

  Stuffing the article into his pocket with the steel blade, the sharp-edged stone and a length of wire collected during his peregrinations, he went on his way, sometimes walking, sometimes running, skipping about aimlessly.

  At times he seemed to hesitate, to become more cautious in those areas of the city where landmines from the latest war lay buried and forgotten. Once, during a football game, one of his friends had stepped on one of them. He kept his eye on the ground, on the footprints, moving cautiously. Then, either because the danger zone was past, or because he was buoyed by the immortality of youth, he once again began to run and leap like a gazelle.

  He crossed the ruined neighbourhoods, the ochre of ravaged sands, the gutted buildings, stopping only to play for a moment with a grey-whiskered donkey with a filthy coat. He patted the animal’s muzzle, talked to it, then climbed onto its back. The donkey trotted away, braying. Swaying dangerously, Sila clung to the animal’s mane, half fell, hung on by one leg, then let himself crash to the ground beneath the doubtful gaze of a stray dog. And then all three – the dog, the donkey and the boy – remained motionless.

  An hour later, he went down to the beach to join his cousin Falba. A skinny man of about thirty, with protru
ding ribs, wearing nothing but a pagne tied round his hips, Falba was mending his fishing nets. Sila watched him thoughtfully for a while then, without saying a word, he too set to work with the same air of patient indifference. All around them other fishermen did likewise.

  When they had finished their task, they got to their feet. The man barely came up to Sila’s chest. His bronzed body, with its enormous knees and stick-thin legs seemed deformed. There was a thick scar across his belly, the mark of a bullet that had perforated his intestines, requiring a complicated operation at a humanitarian camp. Sila buried his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His fingertips brushed against the newspaper clipping.

  ‘You know how to read, can you explain this to me?’ he said, holding out the printed page.

  Falba looked at the article warily.

  ‘Why don’t you ask the Uncle? I don’t know much about this stuff.’

  Sila nodded. The Uncle. Of course. The Uncle knew everything.

  The Uncle was at home, cooking up a gruel of cornmeal and fish, turning the long ladle in his white-gloved hands. He seemed irritated by Sila’s request, but he picked up a pair of broken glasses with only one cracked lens remaining and carefully read the article.

  ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘In town, it was lying on the ground.’

  ‘And you thought it was interesting?’

  ‘A little. I picked it up.’

  ‘Because of the man’s face?’

  ‘No. Because of the number.’

  ‘Two billion dollars?’ said the Uncle.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s the amount of money this man, an American banker, earned last year.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Sila said with a hint of pride.

  ‘And why did you find that so interesting?’

  ‘Because that amount of money …’

  ‘It’s happening far away. In the United States. It’s not our world.’

  ‘But people obviously talk about him here. In this …’ Sila gestured towards the city. The city of a thousand privations. The city of shanty towns, the city without a city, since it had no centre, no suburbs, nothing but an amorphous sprawl.

  The Uncle shrugged.

  ‘It’s not important,’ he said.

  And with a solemn concentration, he returned to his task.

  Sila left the kitchen, which doubled as a dining room, a living room and sometimes as a bedroom, not for want of space, since the whole building – or what was left of it – was deserted, but simply because there was no way to distinguish one room from another since all were vast, ruined, eaten away by the sand that rose like the tide. There was sand everywhere, pouring through every gap, through the crevices and the cracks. A vast sea of sand was smothering the city and would some day make it one with the desert, like a dream of the past, like a city abandoned by its mirages. As Sila set off again, walking easily, almost dreamily, the Uncle’s words came back to him: ‘It’s not important’. But for the first time the Uncle’s words did not ring true. There was no logical flaw and he could not quite put into words the troubling, slightly awkward feeling that had come over him, but Sila felt ill at ease. Money had never been important in his life – simply getting food every day had been much more crucial – but this fabulous, enormous sum of money unsettled him. It seemed vulgar. He remembered how his mother used to scold him as a child when he was rude. Yes, this American was very rude. All the men in the country, including those up North who drove cars, had probably not earned such a sum in the year. Who knows? Perhaps all of them together would barely earn such a sum in the course of a lifetime. And they were a vast multitude, while the American was just one man. Two billion dollars. How could anyone earn so much? Had he caught millions of fish? Had he stitched piles of clothes that reached all the way to the moon? Had he built buildings, working day and night, brick upon brick, for thousands of years?

  Sila sat down on the ground, hugging his knees. He waited for nightfall. And on the sand he fell asleep like an abandoned child, an adolescent too quickly grown, torn between childhood and manhood.

  He woke, shivering, in the darkness. He had no difficulty finding his way. The Uncle said he could see in the dark like an animal. And it was true that his step, lithe, nimble, unvarying in its rhythm, was like that of an animal. An hour later, having wolfed down some of the Uncle’s gruel, Sila rolled himself in a blanket and continued his night.

  It was brief. His cousin Falba woke him before dawn with an affectionate prod. Sila groaned, but a few seconds later he was up and rekindling the fire. They gulped down their gruel, then, without a word, they headed for the ocean. They padded across the sandy beach. They pushed the boat out. All along the water’s edge others were pushing, other bodies stretching and shoving. The first boats were already passing the wall of waves, the white wall of breakers that marked the end of the shallows. Beyond was freedom, the open sea.

  Sila’s belly quivered at the contact with the cold water. Then he leapt into the boat and began to row, as Falba was already doing, paddling with surprising power and pace given his slight frame. The waves propelled the boat back towards the beach; to make headway they had to make the most of the ebbtide.

  ‘Now!’ shouted Falba.

  This was the signal. Sila heaved on the oar with all his strength. The dark skiff plunged into the streaming white foam, faltered for a moment, seemed to slip back, until, with a powerful stroke of the oars, the boat reached the peak, quivered for a moment on the crest of the huge wave, then tumbled back onto the glassy expanse of ocean. They headed out towards the open sea, paying out the nets, heading for those places where fish were plentiful. Falba constantly bemoaned the fact that there were fewer fish now than when he was young. When he was a boy, he would say, there were so many fish they would leap into the boat. Now the shoals had thinned, and catches were smaller. Falba believed that, scared away by the war, the fish had sought refuge in some secret kingdom in the heart of the ocean.

  ‘It’s the noise of the bombs that scares them away,’ he would say.

  The Uncle always looked pained when Falba said such things.

  ‘Fish are deaf. They don’t have ears, they have gills.’

  ‘In that case how do you explain the fact that they’ve disappeared?’ Falba would say, his hands on his hips. ‘You remember what the catches used to be like …’

  But today, the catch was good. Swimming along the seabed like a broadnose shark, merging with the rocks and the algae, Sila managed to gather three big lobsters, which he brandished triumphantly as he broke the surface.

  They got an excellent price for them at market. A slim young girl approached. She was holding out her hand to take the lobsters when, honking its horn, the ramshackle Mercedes belonging to the Commander made its habitual entrance, driving at great speed and ploughing into the sand in order to stop since it had no brakes. The Commander, in full uniform, climbed out and, with military bearing, strode over. Every week, he bought their finest fish and he paid handsomely, never haggling too much.

  ‘Would you like some lobsters, Commander?’ Falba called to him.

  The young woman turned towards the Commander without a word.

  ‘I’ll take them all,’ said the Commander, ‘I adore lobster.’

  ‘They’re already taken,’ Sila whispered to his cousin. ‘This girl was here …’

  ‘The Commander comes first,’ snapped Falba.

  Sila got to his feet.

  ‘We’d love to sell you all of them, Commander, but this young woman was here before you. You’ll have to share.’

  The Commander shuddered. Sila handed him two lobsters, keeping one back for the girl. His honour was safe: two lobsters, that might be enough. Nonetheless, to make clear his displeasure, the Commander tossed the coins on the ground, stalked off without a word, climbed into the car and roared off, the horn blaring.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the young woman.

  Sila nodded.

  ‘Are you out
of your mind,’ Falba fumed as soon as she had left, ‘refusing to sell the Commander the lobsters?’

  ‘I didn’t refuse, the girl was here first. Anyway, he got his two lobsters.’

  ‘He wanted all of them. He’s our best customer and he’s a commander.’

  ‘The war’s over. There’s nothing for him to command any more.’

  ‘But he won’t come back. Besides, once a commander, always a commander.’

  At the end of the morning, as Sila looked at the coins and banknotes in his hand, the proceeds of the whole day’s catch, he realised it would take hundreds of thousands of years of catches as good as today’s for them to earn as much as the American. And once again he was overcome by a disagreeable feeling, a feeling he could not put a name to, which was neither envy nor hatred but a sort of vague disapproval.

  They went home and gave the money to the Uncle. Then Sila went back to his wandering around the city. He was kept busy playing football for a while. He ran, defended, scored two goals, shouted. The bundle of paper and plastic which the players tried as best they could to fashion into a football finally burst and the match had to be abandoned. The boys gradually drifted off in groups, commenting on their exploits, and by the time he came to the outskirts of the city Sila found himself alone. The wind was blowing. Ruins rose up against the desert, abandoned strongholds. Vestiges of the destruction. In a few years more the sand would cover them, swallowing a little more of the ghostly city. The Uncle often said they were all on borrowed time. That they were not living but surviving, like the nomads of the sands, and that even their survival was the product of memory: they existed so they might remember the war. And as that memory slipped into oblivion, they too slipped slowly into the shifting African sands.

  A city of old men and children. A city whose women had disappeared, been raped, kidnapped, murdered; whose men had been tortured, slaughtered, imprisoned. The children had grown, become adolescents, their lives would pass as in a dream. A breath of wind shifting the sands.