The Influence Peddlers

by Hedi Kaddour

  While going over these overwhelming hypotheses again and again, Belkhodja ended up seeing a less somber side to them: Si Ahmed in dire straits, that meant that Belkhodja should be able to get what he wanted from him. If the caïd agreed to the loan, and he must still have something to lend, even if he in turn had to borrow from Bensoussan, if he agreed, he could then display the loan as a sign of his solvency. A borrower is always suspect, not a creditor! When he developed this hypothesis, Belkhodja felt better, but Si Ahmed, in his oil-infused parlor, spent his time repeating that he didn’t have any money, and that, even if he did, he wasn’t a banker.

  Belkhodja tried in vain to break this cycle and became lost in the thoughts that Si Ahmed gave him all the time in the world to ruminate by making him wait alone in the parlor where their meetings took place; and one day Belkhodja had understood that the smell of olive oil that bothered him wasn’t coming from the back of the house, from the place where meals were prepared, but from behind a door in a corner of the parlor, from a place from which also came the sound of the cricket. He dared to open the door a crack, and the cricket fell silent. Cans, eight rows of ten cans, twelve-gallon cans, a strong smell of extra virgin—Si Ahmed was stockpiling a thousand gallons in his house? For what occasion? To sell at a profit on the eve of the next Ramadan? It was a very dense odor, a luxury oil. Belkhodja went back to sit in the parlor. If the caïd put so much oil in a room next to his parlor, he must have a good quantity stockpiled elsewhere. That day Belkhodja didn’t say anything, but the next time, he began to talk about the oil, just like that, in small increments. The smell, it was a good smell. He complimented Si Ahmed on it, and Si Ahmed said to him: Don’t talk to me about my oil, it costs me a great deal! When he accompanied Belkhodja to the door, the conversation centered no longer on a request for money but on the olive oil, and it was Si Ahmed who now voiced a request, and who sweetly asked Belkhodja not to speak to him about his oil, a true sin, and Belkhodja felt that he had to honor that sweet request, which promised indulgence in the days to come.

  Belkhodja was a king of rugs, but didn’t know much about olive oil, except that it could be very lucrative. Si Ahmed had begun to tell him the story: the Romans, the region covered with olive trees, then ruin for centuries, and the reconquest, trees more than a hundred years old. Did you know that a tree gives its best harvests between fifty and a hundred and fifty years old? And the pressing, the cold pressing . . . Si Ahmed clapped his hands. A servant entered. Si Ahmed gestured with a hand. The servant returned with a plate and a small dish that contained salt. He placed the plate and the dish on the low table in front of Si Ahmed and Belkhodja. He took a silver ewer from a corner of the room, as well as a basin and a napkin. “Set that down!” said Si Ahmed, who wanted to pour the water on his guest’s hands himself. Belkhodja did the same for him while the servant went to get a round loaf of bread whose warm odor had invaded the room, and a bottle filled with an oil of such pale green that it was almost golden. He put everything on the table. “Leave us!” Si Ahmed ordered, contemplating the table with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now you are going to understand,” he said to Belkhodja while pouring a large pool of oil onto the plate, then taking a pinch of salt, scattering it over the oil, breaking the round bread, detaching a piece, crust and bread, dipping the piece of bread in the oil, and he held it out to Belkhodja. The bread smelled good, the warmth spread the aroma of the oil, and Belkhodja had in his mouth a taste that could become that of his wealth, Si Ahmed saying: You can even smell the quality of the mule that turned the grindstone to crush the olives, a patient beast, well fed. Not as strong as an ox or a camel, you don’t need that, the grindstone isn’t too heavy. And you can’t put too many olives into the crusher at once; the right crushing must be fine but remain consistent. The quality of the mule, and then the quality of the press cloths, my friend, the pressing filters, the fine quality of the esparto grass to make the press cloths, and the quality of the arms of the men at the press, men worthy of creating liquid gold, and I almost forgot: picking by hand, not with a stick. You must never harm the tree, or the fruit will remember.

  Si Ahmed told about his oil the way storytellers told stories at the marketplace, when everyone is in a circle around them, and they have to know how to hold the attention of all those people, prevent them from going to another teller. It isn’t easy to talk about oil the way one would talk about the adventures of a hero or a lion, but Si Ahmed was able to do it. Belkhodja complimented him, without mentioning his money worries. Then Si Ahmed left the oil aside. He changed the subject. They spoke for a long time about what some of their friends were doing, their successes, failures, especially deaths, which makes one aware of the fragility of all one’s joys, the unexpected nature of the blows of destiny, unexpected for humans. Of course, Si Ahmed said, humans discover only too late that which has been written forever, and then Belkhodja spoke of oil again, of the pleasure that it brought. It wasn’t an ordinary oil, not a simple odor; when you breathed it, it really tickled the palate, the back of the mouth; it was so strong that it was a taste even before tasting it. And Si Ahmed became softer and softer under the compliments paid to his oil. He had come to its fabrication belatedly, an olive grove that he brought back, that he had enlarged, and now he sold the best oil in the South, ghemlali oil, of a purity . . . You know they even ask for it in Paris? Do you know how much a bottle sells for in Paris? Even the Transméditerranéenne orders from me for its hotels and ships!

  Si Ahmed sighed, rubbed his palms together, and went back to describing his oil: They bought it without even tasting it. Si Ahmed could have doubled his production by using certain processes, but he wanted only the best quality.

  Belkhodja said to himself that it was too good, all that oil, right there, waiting to be sold, the oil in the room next door, and above all the oil that must be stored elsewhere, where? It was too good, no, it was a sign—Raouf and his father—God had sent him the wound and the remedy. And what Belkhodja didn’t see, in Si Ahmed’s darkened parlor, was the shine of a wood saw, the shine that it has when it is newly purchased in a store, the black shine of the blade of a saw in the caïd’s eyes.

  Belkhodja began to calculate the difference between what he would have to pay Si Ahmed for all that oil in cans, and a retail selling price, perhaps even by the quart, half at least by the quart, the rest by one or two gallons—it was as if the devil himself had decided to buy all of Si Ahmed’s stock by using Belkhodja—how much would he have? Enough to fill a truck at least, that was certain, a very large truck, probably two. Si Ahmed had become Belkhodja’s prey. He couldn’t lend. He must also be in dire straits, much more than Belkhodja. He had no more money, and he kept his oil because he couldn’t sell it anymore, because he already owed money to buyers whom he knew. That’s why he wasn’t keeping it in a warehouse in the town and was hiding it right in the middle of his house. Otherwise his creditors would have taken his oil. Raouf’s trip to Europe must have ruined Si Ahmed. What Belkhodja had said to the police about the caïd’s son hadn’t been a blunder. Things were in order. It was thanks to that denunciation that Si Ahmed was now struggling and at the mercy of Belkhodja. The son’s trip to Europe, and probably the baksheesh to the French to be left alone—the French rarely took bribes, but when they did they were always big—to save a son, all this oil in a house, in the dark, thousands and thousands of gallons, a true fortune, that one could increase, a truck, two trucks filled with the best quality oil, twenty, thirty thousand francs, maybe not that much, or by mixing a bit, at least twenty-eight thousand.

  26

  GREAT MURMURINGS

  While visiting Paris they also sometimes stopped to catch their breath, in cafés with red banquettes, copper railings, and walls covered with mirrors that multiplied the lamps and faces. Gabrielle discreetly took note of a patron who was saying to his neighbor: “The cocktails are expensive, but when you’ve had four or five you don’t feel like dinner anymore, and that’s something.” And that other man who seem
ed to be looking at nothing: they had seen him come up from the stairs leading to the toilets in the basement, seeming in a hurry, but constrained, a waiter pushing him from behind with the flat of his hand. They were in a brasserie on a square opposite the Jardin du Luxembourg. The waiter, his teeth clenched, was muttering a few words, “Asshole, you’re going to see what you’ll see!” The owner, behind the cash register, as calm as his employee was agitated, started to talk on the telephone. They couldn’t hear what he was saying. “They look like Laurel and Hardy,” Kathryn murmured. The man whom the waiter was now holding against the bar was fairly tall, fat but big. He could have gotten away from the waiter with a simple movement of his hips, but he didn’t do anything. He stood there, placid. His red eyes went from the bar counter to the dining room. His chin trembled as if he were going to cry.

  The owner hung up the phone. He looked at the man, then turned his head toward the large windows that looked out onto the square. Everything was calm. The other patrons hadn’t seen anything. At the bar, the presence of the large guy, the waiter, and the owner seemed natural. Raouf asked Ganthier what was going on. Ganthier didn’t know any more than he. Gabrielle asked: “Are you going to continue to play the innocents?” They couldn’t respond. Gabrielle, in a harder tone: “You’re not going to tell me you don’t understand!” Kathryn started to laugh. It echoed around the room. She was leaning back, her back pressed against the leather of the banquette, her hands holding the edge of the table, a hearty laugh, aimed at the hypocrisy of men. The owner and his employee seemed worried. Kathryn became serious. Gabrielle said to Ganthier and Raouf that she was going to take them to the women’s toilets to show them what gentlemen did at the right height in the walls and doors, a Parisian specialty Kathryn said, and she pointed at what they hadn’t noticed, a small, hand-cranked drill that the man with the red eyes was holding, yes, in the left hand, behind the folds of his raincoat.

  “The instrument of the crime,” Gabrielle said, “We call that a chignole in French!” Kathryn added that in the States such things were rather rare: the men are more impulsive; they’re not content simply to watch.

  While they were talking, two police officers on bicycles arrived at the door, kepis, dark blue capes.

  “Note the capes, young Raouf,” Ganthier said, “They are weighted with lead. When you roll them up they make a very effective club. Now you know what awaits you if you continue to frequent your dear friends!”

  “The police are involved in everything here,” Raouf had replied, “They target men with ideas as well as men with drills.”

  “Are you sure your friends have only ideas? And nothing with which to follow up their ideas? Not strikes, violent ones?”

  “Maybe . . . That would be great, a large, anticolonial strike, over three continents.”

  “One can always dream!”

  Raouf sighed: “At least we would stop being the voyeurs of our plight.”

  The policemen parked their bicycles against the front window of the brasserie, the owner frowning with displeasure. They came in. The owner and the waiter greeted them, a four-way discussion, voices low. The man with the drill didn’t say anything.

  “What a sad sack!” said Kathryn.

  After a few minutes the officers left with the man. One of them took the bicycles; the other handcuffed the defeated man to his arm. The three of them stopped in front of the roundabout where the cars and buses were slowed by careless pedestrians or a carriage whose cracking whip brought to mind a circus parade around a basin in which a nymph and a bronze triton were gripping a huge shell. Kathryn and her friends were watching the officers and their prisoner, who were now going up rue Soufflot, Gabrielle saying:

  “Poor guy!” And Ganthier:

  “Well-cut clothing, not really ugly. He should have a wife like everyone else, but no, no wedding ring. He doesn’t like women, he just likes his torment.”

  Kathryn, her heart suddenly clinching from Ganthier’s words . . . Torment, that’s not true, one doesn’t love one’s torment.

  Then they, too, left the brasserie, continued their stroll . . . One doesn’t love one’s torment, one tries to know, one has the right to know, and to look for a letter . . . A jealous Kathryn saw herself going through the pockets of a coat, a jacket, a mad curiosity, and the fear of being caught, one is already mad, no, one is ill, that’s all, you’re afraid of losing him, searching since it doesn’t mean anything. During that time the other Kathryn joked with her friends, discovered the city, walked briskly in the cold, kissed Raouf. Everyone was there; calm returned in the noise of their heels on the pavement. Raouf sometimes trotted to keep up with his lover, and the shop windows were the best. She forgot Metilda. She was no longer with her torment. She looked at coats, dresses, purses, scarves, shoes, more dresses. She had converted Gabrielle to shopping. Raouf and Ganthier followed.

  The women had been on war footing since the morning, the time when crowds surged out of the large mouths of the Metro, streams of people of all sorts, beautiful clothes that had gotten off the red first-class cars, and others, employees, secretaries, switchboard operators, clerks in department stores, delivery men, accountants, milliners with round boxes.

  “They aren’t paid much,” said Gabrielle, “but it lets them say, ‘I work in Paris near the Opera.’”

  They saw a world of tense faces go by.

  “Yes,” said Gabrielle, “they’re in a hurry, that’s the modern rhythm,” and she told about newcomers who stood in front of their bosses, stopwatch in hand, giving each person the time he was entitled to. Yes, they do say, you’re entitled to, and if you don’t want it, that’s your right. You can always go back to your slow-rhythmed province, to Lure or Mombard: I work near the Lure train station, would you really want to say that?

  Kathryn and Gabrielle went in, looked around, bought or left without buying, Gabrielle saying without embarrassment:

  “I should buy more often, instead of always waiting to lose a few pounds.”

  At Bailly the saleslady opened a box of pumps while singing Kathryn’s praises, her slender ankles, her high arch, “You have a Greek foot,” Kathryn thinking, I’d be surprised if the cow of Tyrol has one.

  “Raouf, is Tyrol in Austria?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t remember.”

  At the cash register Kathryn paid while looking at the staircase leading to the floor above along a wall covered with a large mirror. In the middle of the mirror were two incongruous warnings, “Watch Your Step,” and “Hold onto the Railing.” Kathryn asked the clerk:

  “Is the staircase that dangerous?”

  “It’s not the stairs, it’s the mirror . . . The customers watch themselves going down and they forget they are on the stairs, we’ve had some serious accidents, and it’s the same with men.”

  They left. More clothing stores.

  “Hey, the fashion is coming back!” said Ganthier sarcastically, he pointed at a large window, three dressed mannequins, massive figures, long, black skirts, dark green vests.

  “It’s a Swiss shop,” said Gabrielle, “not German.”

  “German Swiss!” said Ganthier. It could also be Austrian, the hems of the dresses were decorated with red and gold embroidery, as were the busts and vests, Kathryn caught Raouf looking at a bust, she must have large breasts, likes to have them held, Kathryn suddenly seeing a Metilda lying in the window, a bus passed behind them, a depressing dark cloud, I’m crazy, no, I’m ill, and now she is everywhere, he has to talk to me about it, I don’t ask much of him, tell me what he did, just one night, probably, the last one, I’m tired of being crazy.

  The quartet started off again, Kathryn holding Raouf’s arm, looking at their reflection in another window, I look younger than my age, he looks older, we make a nice couple, we don’t need a cow from Tyrol. She decided to dress Raouf; Gabrielle enthusiastically supported her: an entire afternoon at Old England, between mirrors and laughter, Raouf in tweed, velvet and
cashmere, Ganthier surprised to see that it looked pretty good on him, but still calling him a dandy. They then went into a Félix Potin. The food came from all over the world. Raouf stopped and said:

  “Look, that bottle of olive oil, it’s fifteen times more expensive than in Nahbès, I’m going to become an oil merchant in Paris,” Ganthier congratulating Raouf:

  “A nice conversion to capitalism, young man! The future is to the intermediaries.”

  They went back out, looked for a taxi. A sudden shout, a young girl hitting a sixty-something-year-old man on the head with her umbrella, a bowler hat rolling on the ground, the woman shouting at people to be witnesses: “He pinched me!” The man picked up his hat and left, very dignified. Kathryn felt sick: Is that how men end up?

  They heard the cries of the newspaper sellers, like gulls in a storm, each shout trying to overpower the others, “Woman from Auvergne has throat cut in bed by a Russian!” or “New lies from Germany,” or “Polish are arrested for stealing children,” some very ugly faces on the front pages, and then “Crisis in Berlin!” Farther away, the sound of an accordion coming out of the entrance to a building.

  “Traveling musicians, they must be in the courtyard,” said Ganthier.

  “They are paid less and less,” said Gabrielle.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the radio and record players.”

  One evening Kathryn decided to accompany Raouf again to the rue de la Grange-aux-Belles without telling Ganthier. They first went to Mokhtar’s, a friend of Raouf’s and Chemla’s, Kathryn wearing trousers, a gray jacket, a cloche, no makeup. In Mokhtar’s room a cold wind came in through the gaps in the door and windows, drops of humidity on the walls, Raouf saying to Mokhtar: