The First Man Page 5

  a. If you drown, your mother'll kill you. Aren't you ashamed to let everything hang out like that. Where's your mother.

  late," and right away came the stampede, the quick farewell. Jacques with Joseph and Jean ran toward their homes without worrying about the others. They galloped till they were out of breath: Joseph's mother was quick with her hand. And as for Jacques's grandmother . . . They ran on through the rapidly falling night, panicked when the first gaslamp went on, the trolleys with their lights on receding before them; they ran faster, dismayed to see that night had already fallen, and parted on the doorstep without even a goodbye. On such evenings Jacques would stop on the dark stinking stairs, lean against the wall, and wait for his throbbing heart to quiet down. But he could not wait, and the knowledge made him gasp still more. In three strides he was on the landing; he passed by the door to the toilet for the floor, and he opened his door. There was a light in the dining room at the end of the hall, and, chilled, he heard the rattle of spoons against dishes. He entered. At the table his half-mute unclea went on noisily sucking up his soup; his mother, still young, her brown hair abundant, gazed at him with her lovely gentle look. "You know perfectly well—" she began.

  But his grandmother, of whom he only saw the back, interrupted her daughter; she was erect in her black dress, her mouth firmly set, her eyes direct and stern. "Where were you?" she asked.

  "Pierre was showing me the arithmetic homework." The grandmother stood and came over to him. She

  a. the brother.

  sniffed his hair, then ran her hands over his ankles still covered with sand. "You were at the beach."

  "Then you're liar," the uncle managed to articulate.

  The grandmother passed behind him to get the crude whip, known as a bull's pizzle, that was hanging behind the door, and she gave him three or four lashes on his legs and buttocks that burned till he howled. A little while later, sitting with tears filling his mouth and throat before the plate of soup that the uncle, moved to pity, had served him, he strained every nerve to keep those tears from overflowing. And his mother, after a glance at the grandmother, would turn to him that face he so loved: "Eat your soup," she would say. "It's all over. It's all over." That was when he let go and wept.

  Jacques Cormery awakened. The sun was no longer reflected in the copper of the porthole, but had dropped to the horizon and was lighting up the wainscoting across the cabin. He dressed and went out on the deck. He would find Algiers at the end of the night.

  5 : The Father. His Death The War. The Bombing

  He held her in his arms, right at the door, still out of breath from racing up the stairs four at a time, in a single surefooted dash not missing a step, as if his body still remembered the exact height of each stair. When he had gotten out of the taxi, the street was already lively and still sparkling in spots from the morning'sa sprinkling, which the burgeoning heat was beginning to disperse in mist; he saw her there where she had been long ago, on the apartment's single narrow balcony between the two rooms, over the barber's roof—but this barber was no longer the father of Jean and Joseph; he died of tuberculosis; it goes with the trade, his wife would say, always having to breathe hair—the corrugated-iron roof still carried the same load of ficus berries, bits of crumpled paper, and old cigarette butts. She was there, her hair still abundant but turned white years ago, still erect despite her seventy-two years; she looked ten years

  a. Sunday.

  younger because she was so slender and her strength was still evident—they were all like that in the family, a clan of lean people with a nonchalant manner whose energy was inexhaustible; old age did not seem to have any hold on them. At fifty his half-mute Uncle Emile1 looked like a young man. The grandmother had died without bowing her head. And as for his mother, toward whom he was now running, it seemed that nothing could erode her gentle endurance, since decades of exhausting labor had spared the young woman in her that Cormery as a child had admired with all his heart.

  When he arrived on the doorstep, his mother opened the door and threw herself in his arms. And there, as she did every time they were reunited, she kissed him two or three times, holding him against her with all her strength; and in his arms he felt her ribs, the hard jutting bones of her shoulders, trembling a bit, while he breathed the soft smell of her skin that made him remember the spot, under her larynx, between the two jugular tendons, that he no longer dared to kiss, but that as a child he had loved to nuzzle and fondle on those infrequent occasions when she took him on her knees and he pretended to sleep, his nose in the little hollow that to him had the scent of a tenderness all too rare in his young life. She embraced him, and then, having let go of him, she looked at him and took him again in her

  1. Later called Ernest.

  arms to kiss him once more, as if she had measured in herself all the love she had or could express and found that one measure was still missing. "My son," she said, "you were far away."a And immediately she turned away, went back into the apartment, and seated herself in the dining room that faced the street; she no longer seemed to be thinking of him nor for that matter of anything, and she even looked at him from time to time with an odd expression, as if—or so at least it seemed to him—he were now in the way, were disturbing the narrow, empty, closed universe which she circled in her solitude. What was more, once he was seated by her, she seemed on this day to be seized with some sort of anxiety, and occasionally she would glance furtively out at the street with her lovely melancholy expression, her eyes feverish until she turned to Jacques and they became peaceful.

  The street was getting noisier, and the heavy red trolleys were rattling by more often. Cormery watched his mother, in her small gray blouse set off by a white collar, sitting in profile on the same uncomfortable chair [ ]1 by the window where she had always sat, her back a bit rounded by age, but still not seeking the support of the chair, her hands clasped around a small handkerchief that now and then she would roll into a ball with her stiffened fingers, then leave in the hollow of her dress between her motionless hands, her head turned a

  a. transition.

  1. Two illegible marks.

  little toward the window. She was just as she had been thirty years ago, and behind the wrinkles he once more discovered the same miraculously young face, the arch of her brows as smooth and polished as if they had been cast with the forehead, her small straight nose, the mouth still clearly delineated despite the tension at the corners of her lips from her dentures. The neck itself, which is so soon laid waste, had kept its form although the tendons were knotty and the chin a bit slack.

  "You went to the hairdresser," Jacques said.

  She smiled with her look of a little girl caught in some misdeed. "Yes, you know, you were coming." She had always been coquettish in her almost invisible way. And, as plainly as she might be dressed, Jacques did not remember ever seeing her wear anything ugly. Even now, the grays and blacks in which she dressed were well chosen. That was the way of the clan, who were always wretched, or just poor, or occasionally, in the case of certain cousins, somewhat well off. But all of them, especially the men, insisted like all Mediterraneans on white shirts and pressed pants, finding it natural that this work of upkeep—constant, given their meager wardrobes—should be added to the labor of the women, whether mothers or spouses. As for his mother,a she had always reckoned that it was not enough to wash other people's laundry and do their housework, and as far back as he could remember, Jacques had

  a. the bony polished brow where the dark and feverish eye was shining.

  seen her ironing the single pair of pants that he and his brother each had, until he left to go off into the world of women who neither iron nor do laundry.

  "It's the Italian," his mother said. "The hairdresser. He does good work."

  "Yes," said Jacques. He was going to say: "You're very beautiful," and he stopped himself. He had always thought that of his mother and had never dared to tell her so. It was not that he feared being rebuffed nor that he d
oubted such a compliment would please her. But it would have meant breaching the invisible barrier behind which for all his life he had seen her take shelter— gentle, polite, complaisant, even passive, and yet never conquered by anyone or anything, isolated by her semi-deafness, her difficulty in expressing herself, beautiful surely but virtually inaccessible, and never more so than when she was full of smiles and when his own heart most went out to her—yes, all his life she had had the same manner, fearful and submissive, yet also distant, the same look she had thirty years ago when she watched without intervening while her mother beat Jacques with a whip, she who had never touched or even really scolded her children; there was no doubt that those blows wounded her too, but she could not intervene because she was exhausted, because she could not find the words, and because of the respect she owed her mother; she had not interfered, she had endured through the long days and the years, had endured those blows for her children, just as for herself she endured the hard days of working in the service of others, washing floors on her knees, living without a man and with-

  out solace in the midst of the greasy leavings and dirty linen of other people's lives, the long days of labor adding up one by one to a life that, by dint of being deprived of hope, had become also a life without any sort of resentment, unaware, persevering, a life resigned to all kinds of suffering, her own as well as that of others. He had never heard her complain, other than to say she was tired or that her back hurt after a big washday. He had never heard her speak ill of anyone, other than to say a sister or aunt had not been nice to her, or was "stuck up." But on the other hand, he had seldom heard her laugh wholeheartedly. She laughed a little more now that she was no longer working because her children were paying for all her needs. Jacques looked around the room, which had also remained unchanged. She had not wanted to leave this apartment where she had her own routines, this neighborhood where everything was easy for her, to go to a more comfortable place where everything would have become difficult for her. Yes, it was the same room. They had replaced the furniture; it was decent now, less wretched. But the pieces themselves were still bare, still pushed back against the wall.

  "You're always poking around," his mother said.

  Yes, he could not keep himself from opening the buffet, which still contained only the bare necessities, despite all his entreaties; its nakedness fascinated him. He also opened the drawers of the sideboard that housed the two or three medications with which this household made do, mixed in with two or three old newspapers, bits of string, a little cardboard box filled

  with odd buttons, an old identification photo. Here even the unnecessary was shabby, because they never had anything superfluous. And Jacques was well aware that had his mother been put in a standard household where objects were as plentiful as they were in his present home, she would only have made use of what was strictly necessary. He knew that in the next room, his mother's, furnished with a small wardrobe, a narrow bed, a wooden dressing table, and a straw-bottomed chair, its one window hung with a crocheted curtain, he would find no articles at all, except, now and then, the small rolled-up handkerchief that she would leave on the bare wooden top of the dressing table.

  That was just what had struck him when he first saw other households, those of his classmates at the lycée or later those of a more well-to-do world: the number of vases, bowls, statuettes, paintings that crowded those rooms. In his home, his family said "the vase that's on the mantelpiece"; the pot, the soup dishes, and the few articles you might find had no names. At his uncle's, on the other hand, one was made to admire the glazed earthenware from the Vosges and you ate off the Quim-per dinner service. Jacques had grown up in the midst of a poverty naked as death, among things named with common nouns; it was at his uncle's that he discovered those proper nouns. And still today, in this room with freshly washed tiles, on this plain shiny furniture, there was nothing except an Arab ashtray made of chased copper, there because he was coming, and a post office calendar on the wall. There was nothing to see here, and

  little to say, and that was why he knew nothing about his mother except what he learned from his own experience. Nor about his father.

  "Papa?"

  She looked at him, and now she was paying attention.a

  "Yes."

  "His name was Henri, and what else?"

  "I don't know."

  "Didn't he have any other name?"

  "I think he did, but I don't remember." Suddenly distracted, she gazed at the street where the sun was now beating down with all its force.

  "He looked like me?"

  "Yes, he was your spitting image. He had blue eyes. And his forehead was like yours."

  "What year was he born?"

  "I don't know. I was four years older."

  "And you, what year were you born?"

  "I don't know. Look in the family book."

  Jacques went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. Among the towels, on the top shelf, were the family record book, a pension book, and some old documents in Spanish. He came back with the papers.

  "He was born in 1885 and you in 1882. You were three years older."

  "Ah! I thought it was four. It was a long time ago."

  a. The father—interrogation—war of 14—Attack.

  "You told me he lost his father and mother when he was very young, and his brothers put him in an orphanage."

  "Yes. His sister too."

  "His parents had a farm?"

  "Yes. They were Alsatians."

  "At Ouled-Fayet."

  "Yes. And we were at Cheragas. It's right nearby."

  "How old was he when he lost his parents?"

  "I don't know. Oh, he was young. His sister left him. That wasn't right. He didn't want to see them anymore."

  "How old was his sister?"

  "I don't know."

  "And his brothers? Was he the youngest?"

  "No. He was the second one."

  "But then his brothers were too young to look after him."

  "Yes, that's it."

  "Then it wasn't their fault."

  "No, he held it against them. After the orphanage, when he was sixteen, he went to his sister's farm. They made him work too much. It was too much." "He came to Cheragas."

  "Yes, to our place."

  "That's where you met him?"

  "Yes." Again she turned her head away, toward the street, and he felt himself unable to continue along that line. But she herself went in another direction. "You have to understand, he didn't know how to read. They didn't learn anything in the orphanage."

  "But you showed me postcards he sent you from the war.

  "Yes, he learned from M. Classiault."

  "At Ricome."

  "Yes. M. Classiault was the boss. He taught him to read and write."

  "How old was he?"

  "Twenty, I think. I don't know. All that was long ago. But when we were married, he had learned about wines and he could work anywhere. He had a good head on his shoulders." She looked at him. "Like you."

  "And then?"

  "And then? Your brother came. Your father was working for Ricome, and Ricome sent him to his farm at Saint-Lapotre."

  "Saint-Apotre?"

  "Yes. And then there was the war. He died. They sent me the shell splinter."

  The shell fragment that had split his father's skull was in a little biscuit can behind those same towels in that same wardrobe, with the dry and terse cards written from the front that he could recite by heart. "My dear Lucie. I'm well. We're changing quarters tomorrow. Take good care of the children. I kiss you. Your husband."

  Yes, in the depths of the night when he was born during their move, an emigrant, child of emigrants, Europe was already tuning its cannons that would go off in unison several months later, chasing the Cormerys from Saint-Apotre, he to his army corps in Algiers, she to her mother's little apartment in that wretched neighbor-

  hood, carrying in her arms the baby swollen with mosquito bites from the Seybouse. "Don't tr
ouble yourself, Mother. We'll leave when Henri comes back."

  And the grandmother, erect, white hair pulled back, her eyes bright and hard: "Daughter, you'll have to go to work."

  "He was in the Zouaves." "Yes. He was in the war in Morocco."

  It was true. He had forgotten. In 1905 his father was twenty years old. He had been on active duty, as they say, against the Moroccans.a Jacques recalled what M. Levesque, the principal of his school, had told him when he ran into him on the streets of Algiers several years earlier. M. Levesque had been called up at the same time as his father. But they spent only a month in the same unit. According to him, he did not know Cormery well, for the latter had little to say. Hardened to fatigue, closemouthed, but easygoing and fair-minded. On just one occasion, Cormery had seemed beside himself. It was at night, after a scorching day, someplace out in the Atlas Mountains where the detail had made camp at the top of a hill protected by a rocky pass. Cormery and Levesque were supposed to relieve the sentinel at the bottom of the pass. No one answered their call. And, at the foot of a hedge of prickly pears, they found their comrade with his head back, bizarrely facing toward the moon. And at first they did not recognize his head because of its strange shape. But it was very simple. His

  a. 14

  throat had been cut and that ghastly swelling in his mouth was his entire sexual organ. That was when they saw the body, with the legs spread wide, the Zouave's pantaloons slashed, and, in the middle of the gap, that swampy puddle, which they could see by the now indirect light of the moon.a A hundred meters farther on, this time behind a large rock, the second sentinel was displayed in the same position. The alarm was sounded, the number of sentries doubled. At dawn, when they had gone back up to the camp, Cormery said their enemies were not men. Levesque, who was thinking about it, answered that for them that was how men should act, that we were in their country, that they fought by any and all means.