The First Man Page 15

  with wine pouring out of the vats, and began to pack his bags. The Arab workers were waiting for him in the yard. (There was also a patrol the captain had sent, no one knew just why, with a nice lieutenant who was waiting for orders.)

  " 'Boss, what are we going to do?' "

  " 'If I were in your shoes,' the old man said, 'I'd go join the guerrillas. They're going to win. There're no men left in France.' "

  The farmer laughed: "That was blunt, eh?"

  "Are they with you?"

  "No, he didn't want to hear a word about Algeria. He's in Marseilles, in a modern apartment . . . Maman writes me that he walks around his room in circles."

  "And you?"

  "Oh, me, I'm staying, and to the end. Whatever happens, I'm staying. I've sent my family to Algiers, and I'll croak here. They don't understand that in Paris. Besides us, you know who're the only ones who can understand it?"

  "The Arabs."

  "Exactly. We were made to understand each other. Fools and brutes like us, but with the same blood of men. We'll kill each other for a little longer, cut off each other's balls and torture each other a bit. And then we'll go back to living as men together. The country wants it that way. An anisette?"

  "Light," said Jacques.

  A little later they went out. Jacques had asked if there was anyone left in the area who might have known his parents. No, said Veillard; besides the old doctor who

  had brought him into the world and who had retired right there in Solferino, there was no one. The Saint-Apotre property had changed hands twice, many of the Arab workers had died in the two wars, many others had been born. "Everything changes here," Veillard kept saying. "It happens fast, very fast, and people forget." But maybe old Tamzal . . . He was caretaker for one of the Saint-Apotre farms. In 1913 he must have been around twenty. In any case, Jacques would see the place where he was bom.

  Except to the north, the country was surrounded by distant mountains, their outlines fuzzy in the noonday heat, like enormous blocks of stone and luminous fog, with the once-swampy Seybouse plain extending between them north to the sea under a sky white with heat, its vineyards in straight lines, the leaves bluish from copper sulfate and the grapes already dark, interrupted occasionally by a row of cypresses or clumps of eucalyptus trees sheltering houses with their shade. They were following a farm path where each of their steps kicked up red dust. Ahead of them, all the way to the mountains, the air was quivering and the sunlight was throbbing. By the time they arrived at a small house behind a cluster of plane trees, they were dripping sweat. An unseen dog greeted them with angry barking.

  The mulberry-wood door of the rather dilapidated house was carefully closed. Veillard knocked. The dog barked twice as hard. The sound seemed to come from a small enclosed yard on the other side of the house. But

  no one stirred. "See how trusting we all are," the farmer said. "They're there. But they're waiting.

  "Tamzal!" he shouted. "It's Veillard.

  "Six months ago they came to get his son-in-law, they wanted to know if he was supplying the guerrillas. They never heard another word about him. A month ago they told Tamzal that probably he'd been killed trying to escape."

  "Ah," said Jacques. "And was he supplying the guerrillas?"

  "Maybe yes, maybe not. What can you expect, it's war. But it explains why doors are slow to open in this land of hospitality."

  Just then the door opened. Tamzal, small, with [ ]1 hair, a wide-brimmed straw hat on his head, wearing patched blue overalls, smiled at Veillard, looked at Jacques.

  "He's a friend. He was born here."

  "Come in," said Tamzal. "You will drink tea."

  Tamzal did not remember anything. Yes, perhaps. He had heard one of his uncles talk about a manager who had stayed a few months, it was after the war.

  "Before," said Jacques.

  Or before, that was possible, he was very young at the time, and what became of his father? He was killed in the war. "Mektoub,"2 said Tamzal. "But war is bad."

  1. Two illegible words.

  2. In Arabic: "It was written" (in his destiny).

  "There's always been war," said Veillard. "But people quickly get accustomed to peace. So they think it's normal. No, war is what's normal."a

  "Men are crazy in wartime," said Tamzal as he went to take a platter of tea from the hands of a woman in the next room, who had turned her head away. They drank the scorching tea, thanked him, and went back along the stifling hot path through the vineyards.

  "I'm going back to Solferino with my taxi," said Jacques. "The doctor invited me for lunch."

  "I'm inviting myself along. Wait a moment. I'll get some food."

  Later, on the plane taking him back to Algiers, Jacques was trying to sort out the information he had collected. Actually he had only gotten a little, and nothing that directly concerned his father. The night seemed strangely to rise from the earth at an almost measurable speed until at last it swallowed the plane that was pushing straight ahead, steadily, like a screw driven into the thickness of the night. But the night added to Jacques's discomfort, for he felt himself doubly confined, by the plane and by the dark, and he was breathing with difficulty. Again he saw the register of births and the names of the two witnesses, real French names like those [you] see on signs in Paris, and the old doctor, after telling him the story of his father's arrival and his own birth, had said the witnesses were local shopkeepers, the first to happen by, who agreed to do his father a

  a. to develop

  favor; they had names from the outskirts of Paris, yes, but that was no surprise, since Solferino was founded by "forty-eighters."1

  "Oh yes," Veillard had said, "my great-grandparents were among them. That's why my old man had revolution in his genes." He went on to say that the first of his great-grandparents to come were a carpenter from Faubourg Saint-Denis and a fine-linen laundress. There was a lot of unemployment in Paris, there was unrest, and the Constituent Assembly had voted fifty million francs to send a colony of settlers.a They promised everyone a house and 2 to 10 hectares. "You can imagine how they applied. More than a thousand. And all of them dreaming of the Promised Land. Especially the men. The women, they were afraid of the unknown. Not the men! They hadn't made the revolution for nothing. They were the kind who believe in Santa Claus. And their Santa Claus wore a burnoose. Well, they got some kind of Santa Claus. They left in '49, and the first house was built in the summer of '54. Meanwhile ..."

  Jacques was breathing more easily now. The first darkness had finished flowing; it had ebbed like a tide, leaving behind it a cloud of stars, and now the sky was filled with stars. Now only the deafening sound of the motors was oppressing him. He tried to summon the face of the old dealer in carob and fodder who had known his father, who vaguely remembered him, and

  1. Veterans of the Revolution of 1848—Trans. a. 48 [numerals circled by the author—Ed.}

  kept repeating: "No talker, he was no talker." But he was stupefied by the noise, it plunged him into a nasty sort of torpor where he tried in vain to evoke his father, to imagine him, but he disappeared behind this immense and hostile land, he melted into the anonymous history of the village and the plain. Details from their conversation at the doctor's came back to him on the same wave as those barges that, according to the doctor, had brought the Parisian settlers to Solferino. On the same wave, and there was no train at the time, no, no—yes, but it only went to Lyon. Then, six barges hauled by draft horses, with the "Marseillaise" and the "Chant du Depart," of course, played by the city's brass band, and the benediction by the clergy on the banks of the Seine with a flag on which was embroidered the name of the village that did not yet exist but which the passengers would create by magic. The barge was already under way, Paris was slipping away, becoming fluid, was going to disappear—may God bless your undertaking—and even the strongest of spirits, the tough ones from the barricades, they fell silent, sick at heart, their frightened wives clinging to their strength, and in the hold they had to
sleep on rustling straw with the dirty water at eye level, but first the women undressed behind bedsheets that they held up in turn. Where was his father in all this? Nowhere, and yet those barges hauled a hundred years ago along the canals at the end of autumn, drifting for a month on streams and rivers covered with the last dead leaves, escorted by hazel trees and willows, bare under the gray sky, greeted in the towns by official fanfare and sent on their way with a

  cargo of new vagrants toward a strange country—they taught him more about the young dead man of Saint-Brieuc than the [senile] and disordered recollections that he had gone to seek. The motors now changed speed. Those dark masses, those sharp-edged dislocated chunks of the night, that was Kabylia, the wild and bloody part of the country—it had long been wild and bloody; that was where they were headed a hundred years ago, the workers of '48 piled up in a paddle-wheeler. "The Labrador" said the old doctor, "that was its name; can you imagine that, the Labrador to go to the mosquitoes and the sun?" Anyway, the Labrador with all its blades paddling, churning the icy water that the mistral was whipping up in a storm, its decks swept for five days and five nights by a polar wind, and the conquerors at the bottom of the hold, deathly ill, vomiting on each other and wanting to die, until they arrived at the port of Bone, with the whole population on the docks to greet the greenish adventurers with music; they had come so far, having left the capital of Europe with their wives and children and possessions to stagger ashore, after five weeks of wandering, on this land with its distant bluish background, where they encountered uneasily its strange odor compounded of fertilizer, spices, and [].1

  Jacques turned in his seat; he was half asleep. He saw his father, whom he had never seen, whose very height he did not know, he saw him on the dock at Bone

  1. An illegible word.

  among the emigrants, while the pulleys hoisted off the poor possessions that had survived the voyage and disputes broke out about those that were lost. He was there, resolute, somber, teeth clenched, and, after all, was this not the same road he had taken from Bone to Solferino, almost forty years earlier, on the wagon, under the same autumn sky? But the road did not exist for the migrants: the women and children piled onto the army's gun carriages, the men on foot, cutting by guesswork across the swampy plain or the spiny brush, under the hostile eyes of occasional groups of Arabs watching them from a distance, accompanied almost constantly by a howling pack of Kabyle dogs, until at the end of the day they reached the same country his father had forty years earlier—flat, surrounded by distant heights, without a dwelling, without a single plot of cultivated land, only a handful of earth-colored military tents on it, nothing but bare empty space; to them it was the end of the world, between the deserted sky and the dangerous land,* and then the women cried into the night, from exhaustion, and fear, and disappointment.

  The same arrival by night in a wretched hostile place, the same men, and then, and then . . . Oh! Jacques did not know about his father, but for the rest, that was how it was, they had to pull themselves together in front of the laughing soldiers and settle into their tents. The houses would come later, they would be built and the land would be portioned out, and work, blessed work,

  * unknown

  would save them all. "But they couldn't have it right away, that work ..." said Veillard. The rain, the Algerian rain, enormous, brutal, unending, had fallen for eight days; the Seybouse had overflowed. The water came up to the tents, and they could not go out, brother-enemies in the filthy promiscuity of the great tents resonating under the interminable downpour, and to escape the stench they cut pieces of hollow reed so they could urinate from the inside out, and as soon as the rain stopped, they at last went to work building flimsy huts under the orders of the carpenter.

  "Ah! Those good people," said Veillard, laughing. "They finished their little shacks in the spring, and then they were entitled to cholera. If I can believe my old man, that's how our ancestor the carpenter lost his daughter and his wife—they were right to be reluctant about the journey."

  "Well yes," said the old doctor, striding up and down, still erect and proud in his leggings; he could not sit still. "They died ten a day. The hot season came early, they were roasting in the huts. And as for hygiene ... In short, ten of them would die a day." His colleagues in the military were overwhelmed. Peculiar colleagues, incidentally. They had exhausted all their remedies. Then they had an idea. You had to dance to stir up the blood. And every night after work the settlers would dance between two burials to the sound of a violin. Well, it was not so badly thought out. With the heat those good people sweated out everything they had, and the epidemic stopped. "It's an idea to explore." Yes, it was an idea. In the hot humid night—between the huts

  where the sick were sleeping, the violinist sitting on a crate, a lantern by him with mosquitoes and insects buzzing around it—the conquerors in long dresses and wearing sheets would dance, sedately sweating around a big fire of branches, while at the four corners of the encampment sentinels were on watch to defend the besieged people against black-maned lions, cattle thieves, Arab bands, and sometimes also raids by other French settlers who were in need of distraction or supplies. Later on, they finally gave them land, scattered plots far from the shantytown. Later on, they built the village with earthen walls. But two-thirds of the emigrants were dead, there as everywhere in Algeria, without having laid hands on a spade or a plow. The others remained Parisian in the fields, plowing in top hats, gun on the shoulder, a pipe between their teeth—and only pipes with covers were allowed, never cigarettes, because of fires—and quinine in their pockets, quinine sold in the cafes in Bone and in the canteen in Mondovi as an ordinary drink, to your health, accompanied by their wives in silk dresses. But always the gun and the soldiers around, and even to do the laundry in the Sey-bouse an escort was needed for those who in the old days would hold a peaceful salon while working at the washhouse in the rue des Archives; and the village itself was often attacked at night, as in '51 during one of the uprisings when hundreds of cavalrymen in burnooses circling the walls fled seeing the stovepipes the besieged people aimed at them to simulate cannons, building and working in an enemy land that refused to be occupied and took its revenge on whatever it found, and why was

  Jacques thinking about his mother while the plane rose and now was coming down? Picturing that wagon bogged down on the road from Bone, where the settlers had left a pregnant woman to go for help and found her with her belly slit and her breasts cut off.

  "It was war," said Veillard.

  "Let's be fair," added the old doctor. "We shut them up in caves with their whole brood, yes indeed, yes indeed, and they cut the balls off the first Berbers, who themselves . . . and so on all the way back to the first criminal—you know, his name was Cain—and since then it's been war; men are abominable, especially under a ferocious sun."

  And after lunch they had walked through the village, similar to hundreds of other villages all over the country, a few hundred small houses in the simple style of the end of the nineteenth century, laid out on several streets that met at right angles where the larger buildings were—the cooperative, the farm bank, the recreation hall—and everything led to the metal-framed bandstand, looking like a carousel or a large Metro entrance, where for years the village men's choir or the military band had given concerts on holidays, while couples in their Sunday best strolled around it, in the heat and the dust, shelling peanuts. Today was also a Sunday, but the army's psychological warfare branch had installed loudspeakers in the bandstand, the crowd was mostly Arab, and they were not strolling around the square; they were standing still and listening to the Arab music that alternated with speeches, and the French people lost in the crowd all had the same look,

  somber and turned to the future, like those who long ago had come here on the Labrador, or those who landed other places in the same circumstances, with the same suffering, fleeing poverty or persecution, finding sorrow and stone. Such were the Spaniards of Mahon, ancestors of Jacques's mot
her, or those Alsatians who in '71 had rejected German rule and chosen France, and they were given the land of the Arab rebels of '71, who were dead or imprisoned—dissidents taking the places kept warm by insurgents, persecuted-persecutors from whom his father descended, who, forty years later, arrived in this place, with the same somber and determined manner, his thoughts only on the future, like those who have no love for their past and renounce it; an emigrant himself like those who lived and had lived on this land without leaving a trace except on the worn and greened-over slabs in the small settler cemeteries such as the one Jacques had visited with the old doctor at the end of the day after Veillard had left. On one side, hideous new construction in the latest funerary fashion, embellished by the cheap religious art on which contemporary piety is expended. On the other, under the old cypresses, between paths covered with pine needles and cypress cones, or else by damp walls with the oxalis and its yellow flowers growing at their feet, old tombstones, hardly distinguishable from the earth, that had become illegible.

  Whole mobs had been coming here for more than a century, had plowed, dug furrows, deeper and deeper in some places, shakier and shakier in others, until the dusty earth covered them over and the place went back

  to its wild vegetation; and they had procreated, then disappeared. And so it was with their sons. And the sons and grandsons of these found themselves on this land as he himself had, with no past, without ethics, without guidance, without religion, but glad to be so and to be in the light, fearful in the face of night and death. All those generations, all those men come from so many nations, under this magnificent sky where the first portent of twilight was already rising, had disappeared without a trace, locked within themselves. An enormous oblivion spread over them, and actually that was what this land gave out, what fell from the sky with the night over the three men returning to the village, their hearts made anxious by the approach of night, filled with that dread* that seizes all men in Africa when the sudden evening descends on the sea, on the rough mountains and the high plateaus, the same holy dread that has the same effect on the slopes of Delphi's mountain, where it makes temples and altars emerge. But on the land of Africa the temples have been destroyed, and all that is left is this soft unbearable burden on the heart. Yes, how they died! How they were still dying! In silence and away from everything, as his father had died in an incomprehensible tragedy far from his native land, after a life without a single free choice—from the orphanage to the hospital, the inevitable marriage along the way, a life that grew around him, in spite of him; until the war killed and buried him; from then and forever unknown