The First Man Page 16

  * anxiety

  to his people and his son, he too was returned to that immense oblivion that was the ultimate homeland of the men of his people, the final destination of a life that began without roots—and so many reports in the libraries of the time about the use of foundlings for this country's settlement, yes, all these found and lost children who built transient towns in order to die forever in themselves and in others. As if the history of men, that history that kept on plodding across one of its oldest territories while leaving so few traces on it, was evaporating under the constant sun with the memory of those who made it, reduced to paroxysms of violence and murder, to blazes of hatred, to torrents of blood, quickly swollen and quickly dried up, like the seasonal streams of the country. Now the night was rising from the land itself and began to engulf everything, the dead and the living, under the marvelous and ever-present sky. No, he would never know his father, who would continue to sleep over there, his face forever lost in the ashes. There was a mystery about that man, a mystery he had wanted to penetrate. But after all there was only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed forever. For it was just that that his father had in common with the men of the Labrador. The Mahon people of the Sahel, the Alsatians on the high plateaus, with this immense island between sand and sea, which the enormous silence was now beginning to envelop: the silence of anonymity; it enveloped blood

  and courage and work and instinct, it was at once cruel and compassionate. And he who had wanted to escape from the country without name, from the crowd and from a family without name, but in whom something had gone on craving darkness and anonymity—he too was a member of the tribe, marching blindly into the night near the old doctor who was panting at his right, listening to the gusts of music coming from the square, seeing once more the hard inscrutable faces of the Arabs around the bandstands, Veillard's laughter and his stubborn face—also seeing with a sweetness and a sorrow that wrung his heart the deathly look on his mother's face at the time of the bombing—wandering through the night of the years in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up, without a father, having never known those moments when a father would call his son, after waiting for him to reach the age of listening, to tell him the family's secret, or a sorrow of long ago, or the experience of his life, those moments when even the ridiculous and hateful Polonius all of a sudden becomes great when he is speaking to Laertes; and he was sixteen, then he was twenty, and no one had spoken to him, and he had to learn by himself, to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, find his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man and then to be born in a harder childbirth, which consists of being born in relation to others, to women, like all the men born in this country who, one by one, try to learn to live without roots and without faith, and today all of them are threatened with eternal anonymity

  and the loss of the only consecrated traces of their passage on this earth, the illegible slabs in the cemetery that the night has now covered over; they had to learn how to live in relation to others, to the immense host of the conquerors, now dispossessed, who had preceded them on this land and in whom they now had to recognize the brotherhood of race and destiny.

  Now the plane was descending to Algiers. Jacques was thinking about the little cemetery of Saint-Brieuc where the soldiers' graves were better kept than those in Mondovi.* The Mediterranean separates two worlds in me, one where memories and names are preserved in measured spaces, the other where the wind and sand erases all trace of men on the open ranges. He had tried to escape from anonymity, from a life that was poor, ignorant, and mulish; he could not live that life of blind patience, without words, with no thought beyond the present. He had traveled far and wide, had built, had created, had loved people and abandoned them, his days had been full to overflowing. And yet now he knew from the bottom of his heart that Saint-Brieuc and what it represented had never been anything to him, and he thought of the worn and green-encrusted gravestones he had just left, acknowledging with a strange sort of pleasure that death would return him to his true homeland and, with its immense oblivion, would obliterate the memory of that alien and ordinary man who had

  * Algiers

  grown up, had built in poverty, without help or deliverance, on a fortunate shore and in the light of the first mornings of the world, and then alone, without memories and without faith, he had entered the world of the men of his time and its dreadful and exalted history.

  PART TWO

  The Son or The First Man

  1 : Lycee

  aWhen, on October 1st of that year, Jacques Cor-meryb—unsteady on his thick new shoes, bundled up in a new shirt that still had its stiffening in it, weighed down with a satchel that smelled of varnish and leather—saw the motorman, next to whom Pierre and he were standing at the front of the motorcar, pull his crank back to first gear and the heavy vehicle leave the Belcourt stop, he turned back to try to catch a glimpse of, a few meters away, his mother and grandmother still leaning out the window to keep him company for a bit longer on this first journey to the mysterious lycée, but he could not see them because the man next to him was reading the inside pages of La Depeche Algerienne. So he turned to the front and gazed at the steel rails that the

  a. Begin either by going to school and the rest in order, or else by introducing the adult alien and then return to the period from going to school to the illness.

  b. physical description of the child.

  motorcar was steadily swallowing and above them the trolley wires vibrating in the cool of the morning, turning his back, his heart somewhat heavy, on his home, on the old neighborhood that he had never really left except for a few expeditions (they said "go to Algiers" when they went downtown), traveling faster and faster now and, despite Pierre's brotherly shoulder practically glued to his, with a sense of solitude, uneasy about a strange world where he did not know how he would have to behave.

  Actually no one could have given them advice. Pierre and he realized very soon that they were on their own. M. Bernard himself, whom they in any case would not dare disturb, could tell them nothing about this lycée he did not know. At home ignorance was still more complete. For Jacques's family, Latin, for example, was a word that had absolutely no meaning. That there had been (besides primitive times, which they on the other hand could imagine) times when no one spoke French, that civilizations (and the word itself meant nothing to them) had succeeded each other with such different customs and languages—these truths had not reached them. Neither the images, nor things written, nor word of mouth, nor the veneer of culture acquired in everyday conversation had reached them. In this home where there were no newspapers, nor, until Jacques brought them in, any books, no radio either, where there were only objects of immediate utility, where no one but relatives visited, a home they rarely left and then only to meet other members of the same ignorant family—what Jacques brought home from the lycée could not be as-

  similated, and the silence grew between him and his family. At the lycée itself, he could not speak of his family; he sensed their peculiarity without being able to articulate it, even if he could have overcome the insuperable reticence that sealed his lips on the subject.

  It was not even differences of class that set them apart. In this country of immigration, of quick fortunes and spectacular collapses, the boundaries between classes were less clear-cut than between races. If the children had been Arab, their feeling would have been more painful and bitter. Besides, though they had Arab classmates in school, there were few in the lycée, and they were always sons of wealthy notables. No, what set them apart, and Jacques even more than Pierre, because their peculiarity was more pronounced in his home than in Pierre's family, was that it was impossible for him to connect his family to traditional values and stereotypes. To the questions asked at the beginning of the year, he could of course ans
wer that his father was killed in the war, that after all was a position in society, and that he was a "pupil of the nation,"1 which everyone understood. But after that the difficulties began. In the printed forms they were given, he did not know what to put under "parents' occupation." At first he put "home-maker" while Pierre put "post office employee." Pierre explained to him that homemaker was not an occupation but was said of a woman who kept her own home and did her own housework.

  1. Children of men killed in the war, who were entitled to a small stipend for school supplies—Trans.

  "No," said Jacques, "she takes care of other people's houses, especially the shopkeeper across the street."

  "Well," Pierre said hesitantly, "I think you have to put down 'domestic' "

  That idea had never occurred to Jacques, for the simple reason that this all-too-rare word was never spoken in his home—and this for the reason that no one there had the feeling that she was working for others; she was working first of all for her children. Jacques started to write the word, stopped, and all at once he knew shame and all at once1 the shame of having been ashamed.

  A child is nothing by himself; it is his parents who represent him. It is through them that he defines himself, that he is defined in the eyes of the world. He feels it is through them that he is truly judged—judged, that is, without right of appeal, and this judgment by the world was what he had just discovered, and, with it, his own judgment on the hard heart that was his. He could not know that once become a man, one is less deserving for not recognizing these evil feelings. For one is judged, for better or for worse, by what one is and much less on one's family, since it even happens that the family is judged in its turn by the child become a man. But it would have taken a heart of rare and heroic pureness for Jacques not to suffer from the discovery he had just made, just as it would have taken an impossible humility for him not to react with anger and shame to what his suffering had revealed to him about his own nature. He

  1. sic

  had none of those qualities; instead there was a hard and nasty arrogance that helped him at least on this occasion, making him write the word "domestic" on the form with a firm hand and take it, his face expressionless, to the monitor, who did not even notice it. Along with all that, Jacques had not the slightest desire to have a different family or station in life, and his mother as she was remained what he loved most in the world, even if that love was hopeless. Besides, how can it be made clear that a poor child can sometimes be ashamed without ever being envious?

  On another occasion, when he was asked his religion, he answered: "Catholic." Asked if he should be enrolled in the course in religious instruction, and remembering his grandmother's fears, he said no. "In short," the monitor said deadpan, "you are a non-practicing Catholic." Jacques could explain nothing of what went on in his home, nor could he say the bizarre way his people dealt with religion. So he firmly answered, "Yes," which made people laugh and won him a reputation for stubbornness at the very moment he felt himself most at sea.

  Another day, the literature teacher, having handed out to the students a form concerning some internal matter, asked them to bring it back signed by their parents. The form, which enumerated the things students were forbidden to bring to school, from weapons to magazines and including playing cards, was written in such choice language that Jacques had to summarize it in simple terms for his mother and grandmother. His mother was the only one able to put a crude signature at

  the bottom of the form.a Because, after her husband's death, she received* her war widow's pension every quarter, and because the government, in this case the Treasury—but Catherine Cormery just said she was going to the treasure, for to her it was just a name, void of any meaning; to the children, on the other hand, it suggested a mythic place with limitless resources where their mother was admitted from time to time to draw small amounts of money—asked for her signature each time, after the first time when she had problems, a neighbor (?) had taught her to copy a sample of the signature "Widow Camus,"1 and she managed to do this more or less well, but anyway it was always accepted. However, the next morning Jacques discovered that his mother, who left long before him to clean a store that opened early, had forgotten to sign the form. His grandmother did not know how to sign. She managed to keep her accounts with a system of circles that, according to whether they were crossed once or twice, represented ones, tens, and hundreds. Jacques had to return the form unsigned, saying that his mother had forgotten, was asked if no one in his home could sign, answered no, and discovered from the teacher's surprised look that this circumstance was more unusual than he had believed.

  He was even more disconcerted by the French boys

  a. the reminder. * collect 1. sic

  brought to Algiers by the vagaries of their father's careers. The one who gave him the most to think about was Georges Didier;a their common liking for French classes and reading drew them into a very close friendship, of which Pierre moreover was jealous. Didier was the son of a very devout Catholic. His mother "made music," his sister (whom Jacques never saw, but he dreamed delightfully about her) did embroidery, and Didier, according to what he said, intended to enter the priesthood. Extremely intelligent, he was uncompromising on questions of faith and of morals, where his convictions were dogmatic. He was never heard to utter a dirty word, nor to refer, as other children did with endless self-satisfaction, to the body's natural functions or to those of reproduction, which in any case were not as clear in their minds as they liked to say. The first thing he sought from Jacques, once their friendship was established, was that he give up dirty words. Jacques had no difficulty giving them up with him. But with others those words would easily slip back into his conversation. (Already taking shape in him was the many-faceted nature that would make so many things easy for him, would make him adept at talking anyone's language, at getting along in any surroundings, at playing any role, except . . . ) With Didier, Jacques understood what it was to be a middle-class French family. His friend had a family home in France where he went on vacations; he was forever talking or writing to Jacques

  a. come back to him at his death.

  about it, that house with an attic full of old trunks, where they saved the family's letters, souvenirs, photos. He knew the history of his grandparents and his great-grandparents, also an ancestor who was a sailor at Trafalgar, and this long history, vivid in his imagination, also provided him with examples and precepts for everyday behavior. "My grandfather would say . . . Papa thinks that ..." and in that way he would justify his sternness, his imperious purity. When he spoke of France, he would say "our country" and he accepted in advance the sacrifices that country might demand ("your father died for our country," he would say to Jacques . . . ), whereas this notion of country had no meaning to Jacques, who knew he was French, and that this entailed a certain number of duties, but for whom France was an abstraction that people called upon and that sometimes laid claim to you, a bit like that God he had heard about outside his home, who evidently was the sovereign dispenser of good things and bad, who could not be influenced, but who on the other hand could do anything with the people's destiny. And this impression of his was even stronger among the women who lived with him. "Maman, what is our country?"a he asked one day.

  She looked frightened as she did each time she did not understand. "I don't know," she said. "No."

  "It's France."

  "Oh, yes." And she seemed relieved.

  a. discovery of the Fatherland in 1940.

  Whereas Didier did know what it was; the family through its generations was a potent presence to him, and the country where he was born through its history—he called Joan of Arc by her first name—and so were good and evil denned for him as was his present and future destiny. Jacques, and Pierre also, though to a lesser degree, felt themselves to be of another species, with no past, no family home, no attic full of letters and photos, citizens in theory of a nebulous nation where snow covered the roofs while they themselves grew up un
der an eternal and savage sun, equipped with a most elementary morality that, for example, forbade them to steal, enjoined them to protect their mothers and women, but was silent on a great number of questions concerning women, and relations with their superiors . . . (etc.)—children, in short, unknown to and ignorant of God, unable to imagine a future life when this life seemed so inexhaustible each day under the protection of the indifferent deities of sun, of sea, or of poverty. And in truth, if Jacques was so devoted to Didier, no doubt it was because of the boy's heart that was so smitten with the absolute, so utterly loyal to his passions (the first time Jacques heard the word "loyalty," which he had read a hundred times, was from Didier) and capable of a charming tenderness, but it was also because he was so different, in Jacques's eyes, his charm being truly exotic, and attracting him all the more, just as Jacques later on, when he was grown, would feel himself irresistibly drawn to foreign women. The child of the family, of tradition, and of religion had the allure for Jacques of some tanned adventurers who return from

  the tropics guarding a strange and incomprehensible secret.