The First Man Page 7

  "No," she said.

  "But how about the time Papa went to see them cut off Pirette's head?"

  He hit his neck with the side of his hand to make himself understood. But she answered immediately: "Yes, he got up at three o'clock to go to Barberousse."

  a. Relations with brother Henri: the fights.

  b. what they ate: stew of innards, codfish stew, chick-peas, etc.

  "So you were in Algiers?"

  "Yes."

  "But when was it?"

  "I don't know. He was working for Ricome."

  "Before you went to Solferino?"

  "Yes."

  She said yes, maybe it was no; she had to reach back in time through a clouded memory, nothing was certain. To begin with, poor people's memory is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are gray and featureless. Of course there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labor, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death. And besides, in order to bear up well one must not remember too much, but rather stick close to the passing day, hour by hour, as his mother did, somewhat by necessity no doubt, since that childhood illness (by the way, according to his grandmother, it was typhoid. But typhoid does not have such aftereffects. Typhus perhaps. Or else? Here again, all was darkness) since that childhood illness had left her deaf and speaking with difficulty, then prevented her from learning what is taught to even the most wretched, so her mute resignation was forced on her, but it was also the only way she had found to face up to her life, and what else could she have done, who in her place could have found another way? He wanted her to be

  fascinated by describing for him a man who had died forty years earlier and whose life she had shared (and had she really shared it?) for five years. She could not do that; he did not even know if she had passionately loved that man, and in any case he could not ask it of her, for in her presence he too was in his own way mute and crippled; at heart he did not even want to know what there had been between them, and so he had to give up on learning anything from her. Even the one circumstance that had made such an impression on him as a child, had pursued him throughout his life and even into his dreams, his father getting up at three o'clock to attend the execution of a notorious criminal—even that he had learned from his grandmother. Pirette was an agricultural laborer on a farm in the Sahel, quite close to Algiers. He had killed his employers and the three children in the house with a hammer. "To rob them?" Jacques asked as a child. "Yes," said Uncle Etienne. "No," said his grandmother, but without any further explanation. They found the disfigured corpses, the house splattered with blood right up to the ceiling, and, under one of the beds, the youngest child still breathing; he died also, but he had found the strength to write on the whitewashed wall with his blood-soaked finger: "It's Pirette." They searched for the murderer and found him, dazed, out in the countryside. Horrified public opinion demanded the death penalty; it was readily granted, and the execution took place before Bar-berousse prison in the presence of a considerable number of spectators. Jacques's father had gotten up in the night and gone to attend the exemplary punishment

  of a crime that, according to the grandmother, had outraged him. But they never knew what had happened. Apparently the execution had taken place without incident. But Jacques's father was livid when he came home; he went to bed, then got up several times to vomit, and went back to bed. He never wanted to talk about what he had seen. And on the night he heard the story, Jacques himself, when he was lying huddled on the side of the bed to avoid touching his brother, with whom he slept, choked back his nausea and his horror as he relived the details he had heard and those he imagined. And throughout his life those images had followed him even into his sleep when now and then, but regularly, a recurrent nightmare would haunt him, taking many forms, but always having the one theme: they were coming to take him, Jacques, to be executed. And for a long time when he awakened he would shake off his fear and anguish and return to that soothing reality where there was absolutely no chance that he would be executed. Then, by the time he had come of age, world events around him were such that his execution was no longer so unlikely a possibility, and reality no longer assuaged his dreams, but on the contrary was fed during a very [precise] number of years by the same dread that so distressed his father and that he had left to his son as his only clear and certain legacy. But it was a mysterious bond that connected him to the dead stranger of Saint-Brieuc (who, after all, had not thought he would die a violent death either), a bond beyond the reach of his mother, who had known that story, had seen his vomiting, and had forgotten that morning, just as she had not

  realized later on that times had changed. For her the times were always the same: disaster could emerge at any moment without calling out a warning.

  His grandmother,a on the other hand, had a more accurate picture of things. "You'll end up on the gallows," she would often tell Jacques. Why not? It was no longer unusual. She did not know that but, being the person she was, nothing would have surprised her. Erect in her long black robe of a prophetess, uninformed and stubborn, she at least had never known resignation. And she more than anyone else had dominated Jacques's childhood. Raised by her parents from Mahon on a small farm in the Sahel, she was very young when she married a slender and delicate man, also of Mahon origin, whose brothers had already settled in Algeria by 1848, after the tragic death of the paternal grandfather, a sometime poet who composed his verses mounted on a donkey and riding around the island between stone walls that bordered vegetable gardens. It was during the course of one of these outings that a scorned husband shot poetry in the back, in the belief that he was punishing a lover but misled by the silhouette and the broad-brimmed black hat, thus killing a model of familial virtue, who, however, left nothing to his children. The eventual result of this tragic misunderstanding in which a poet found his death was the settling on the Algerian shore of a nest of illiterates who multiplied, far from any school, harnessed to a life of exhausting labor under a

  a. Transition.

  ferocious sun. But the husband of Jacques's grandmother, judging by his photos, had kept something of his poet grandfather's inspiration, and his thin face with its clear-cut features under a lofty brow, and his dreamer's expression, did not suggest that he could hold his own against his young, beautiful, and vigorous spouse. She gave him nine children, of whom two died in infancy, another was saved only at the price of being handicapped, and the last was born deaf and partly mute. She raised her brood on that somber little farm while doing her share of their hard common labor; she sat at the end of the table with a long stick at hand that spared her any superfluous speech, the guilty one being immediately hit over the head. She held sway, demanding respect for herself and her husband, whom the children had to address in the polite form of speech, according to Spanish practice. Her husband would not long enjoy this respect: he died prematurely, worn out by sun and labor, and perhaps by his marriage, without Jacques ever being able to discover what disease he died of. Left alone, the grandmother disposed of the little farm and went to live in Algiers with her younger children, the others having been sent out to work as soon as they were old enough to be apprenticed.

  When Jacques had grown up enough to observe her, she was impaired by neither poverty nor adversity. Only three children were still with her. Catherine,1 who

  1. On page 8 Jacques Cormery's mother is given the name Lucie. From here on, she is named Catherine.

  did housework for others; the youngest, the handicapped one, who had become an energetic cooper; and Joseph, who had not married and who worked for the railroad. All three earned paltry wages that, combined, had to support a family of five. His grandmother managed the household's money, and that is why the first thing that
struck Jacques about her was her penny-pinching—not that she was a miser except in the sense that we are miserly with the air we breathe that keeps us alive.

  It was she who bought the children's clothes. Jacques's mother came home late in the day, and was satisfied to watch and listen to what was said, overwhelmed by the energy of the grandmother, to whom she relinquished everything. Thus it was that Jacques, throughout his life as a child, had to wear raincoats that were too long, for his grandmother bought them to last and counted on nature for the child's size to catch up with that of the clothing. But Jacques grew slowly, not really deciding to sprout till he was fifteen, and his raincoat would wear out before he grew into it. Another would be bought on the same thrifty principle, and Jacques, whose classmates mocked his dress, had no recourse but to puff out his raincoat at the waist in order to make what was ridiculous look original. Anyway, these brief episodes of shame were quickly forgotten in the classroom, where Jacques regained the upper hand, and on the playground, where soccer was his kingdom. But that kingdom was prohibited, because the playground was made of cement and soles would be worn out so quickly that his grandmother had forbidden

  Jacques to play soccer during recess. She herself bought her grandsons thick solid boots that she hoped would prove immortal. In order to stretch out their longevity, she would also have the soles studded with enormous cone-shaped nails, which were doubly useful: you had to wear out the studs before wearing out the sole, and they enabled her to detect infractions of the ban on playing soccer. Running on the cement yard did in fact quickly wear down the studs and give them a shine that betrayed the guilty one. Every day when he got home, Jacques had to report to the kitchen, where Cassandra presided over the black pots, and, with knee bent and sole facing up, in the posture of a horse being shod, he would have to show her his soles. Of course he could not resist the call of his friends and the lure of his favorite sport, and he would apply himself not to attempting an impossible virtue but to disguising the resulting sin. So on leaving school, and later the lycée, he would spend a good deal of time rubbing his soles in damp earth. Sometimes this ruse was successful. But the time would come when the wear on the studs was glaringly obvious, or sometimes the sole itself would be damaged, or—the worst of catastrophes—the upper sole would be detached from the lower by an awkward kick against the ground or the grille that protected the trees, and Jacques would come home with a string tied around his shoe to hold it together. Those were nights for the leather whip. The only consolation his mother offered the weeping Jacques was: "You know they're expensive. Why can't you be more careful?" But she herself never laid a hand on her children. The next day, they

  put Jacques in espadrilles and took his shoes to the shoemaker. Two or three days later he would get them back dotted with new studs, and once more he would have to learn to keep his balance on his slippery unstable soles.

  The grandmother was capable of going still further, and even after so many years Jacques could not recall this story without a shiver of shame and disgust.* He and his brother were given no pocket money, except occasionally when they would agree to go visit a shopkeeper uncle or an aunt who had married well. It was easy in the case of the uncle because they liked him. But the aunt had a way of rubbing in her comparative wealth, and, rather than feel humiliated, the two children preferred to go without money and the pleasures it would procure them. In any event, and although the pleasures of the sea, the sun, and the neighborhood games were free, fries, caramels, Arab pastries, and in Jacques's case certain soccer matches required a little money, at least a few centimes. One evening Jacques was coming home after doing errands, holding at arm's length the dish of potatoes and cheese that he had taken to the neighborhood baker to be baked (they had neither gas nor range in their home, and they cooked on an alcohol stove. So there was no oven, and when they had something to bake they would take it all prepared to the baker, who for a few centimes would put the dish in the oven and keep an eye on it), the dish before him steam-

  * where shame and disgust mingle

  ing through the dishtowel that protected it from the dust of the street and made it possible for him to hold it around the edges. The string bag filled with provisions bought in very small quantities (a half-pound of sugar, a quarter-pound of butter, twenty-five centimes' worth of grated cheese, etc.) did not weigh heavily in the crook of his right arm and Jacques sniffed the good smell of potatoes and cheese as he made his way nimbly through the working-class crowd that at this hour was milling around on the sidewalks of the neighborhood. At that moment a two-franc piece slipped through a hole in his pocket and fell clinking on the sidewalk. Jacques picked it up, counted his change, which was all there, and put it in his other pocket. "I could have lost it," he thought suddenly. And the next day's match, which till then he had banished from his thoughts, now returned to his mind.

  No one had actually taught the child what was right and what was wrong. Some things were forbidden and any infraction was severely punished. Others were not. Only his teachers would sometimes talk about morality, when the curriculum left them the time, but there again the prohibitions were more explicit than the reasons for them. All that Jacques had been able to see and experience concerning morality was daily life in a working-class family where it was evident no one had ever thought there was any way other than the hardest kind of labor to acquire the money necessary to their survival. But that was a lesson in courage, not morals. Nonetheless, Jacques knew it was wrong to hide those two francs. And he didn't want to do it. And he would

  not do it; maybe he could do what he'd done before, squeeze between two boards to get in the old stadium at the parade grounds and see the match free. That was why he himself did not understand why he did not immediately give back the change, and why, a little later, he came from the toilet and declared that a two-franc piece had fallen in the hole when he dropped his pants. Even "toilet" was too exalted a term for the small space that had been improvised in the masonry of the landing of the one upper floor. A Turkish-style hole had been drilled in a mid-size pedestal jammed between the door and the back wall. The place was without air, without electric light, without faucet, and they had to pour jerry cans of water in the hole after each use. But nothing could keep the stink from overflowing into the stairs. Jacques's explanation was plausible.a It saved him from being sent back out on the street to look for the lost coin, and it cut short any further action. Yet Jacques felt a pang as he announced his bad news. His grandmother was in the kitchen chopping garlic and parsley on an old board that was green and pitted with use. She stopped and looked at Jacques, who was waiting for her to explode. But she remained silent and studied him with her icy-clear eyes. "You're sure?" she said at last.

  "Yes, I felt it drop."

  She was still studying him. "Very well," she said. "We shall see."

  a. No. It was because he had already claimed to have lost the coin in the street that he had to find another explanation.

  And Jacques, horrified, saw her roll up her right sleeve, baring her knotty white arm, and go out on the landing. He dashed into the dining room, on the verge of throwing up. When she summoned him, he found her at the washbasin. Her arm was covered with gray soap, which she was rinsing off in a gush of water. "There was nothing there," she said. "You're a liar."

  He stammered: "But it could have been washed down."

  She hesitated. "Maybe. But if you're lying, it'll be your tough luck."

  Yes, it was his tough luck, for in that instant he understood it was not avarice that caused his grandmother to grope around in the excrement, but the terrible need that made two francs a significant amount in this home. He understood it, and now he clearly saw, with a spasm of shame, that he had stolen those two francs from his family's labor. Even today, watching his mother at the window, Jacques could not explain how he could have failed to return those two francs and yet have enjoyed going to the match the next day.

  His grandmother was also linked with other shameful memo
ries for which there was less legitimate cause. She had wanted Henri, his older brother, to have violin lessons. Jacques had dodged this by claiming he could not continue to do so well in school with this extra work. So his brother had learned to scrape a few horrible sounds from a frigid violin, he could play popular songs with a few false notes. For fun, Jacques, whose voice was quite true, had learned the same songs, without any idea of the calamitous consequences of this innocent pastime.

  Sure enough, on Sunday, when his grandmother's married daughters,a two of whom were war widows, would call on her, or her sister, who still lived on a farm in the Sahel and spoke the Mahon dialect more readily than Spanish, would come to visit, after she had served big bowls of black coffee on the oilcloth-covered table, his grandmother summoned her grandchildren to give an impromptu concert. The dismayed boys brought the metal music stand and the two-page scores of well-known tunes. They had to perform. Jacques followed the zigzags of Henri's violin as best he could, singing "Ramona," "I had a wonderful dream, Ramona, we'd gone away just you and I," or "Dance, O my Djalme, this night it's you I want to love," or else, staying in the Orient, "Nights of China, nights of caresses, night of love, night of ecstasy, of tenderness ..." On other occasions the grandmother would make a special request for more true-to-life songs. So Jacques would sing: "Is it really you my man, you whom I so loved, you who vowed, God knows you did, never to make me cry." As it happened, this was the only song Jacques could sing with real feeling, for at the end its heroine repeats its touching refrain in the middle of a crowd watching the execution of her wayward lover. But the grandmother's favorite song was one she no doubt loved for its melancholy and tenderness, which one would seek in vain in her own nature. It was Toselli's "Serenade," which Henri and Jacques brought out with quite a bit of brio,

  a. Her nieces.

  although the Algerian accent was not really suited to the enchanted hour evoked by the song. On a sunny afternoon, four or five women dressed in black, all of whom except the grandmother had put aside the black mantillas that Spanish women wear, were seated in a row around the poorly furnished room with its rough-cast white walls, and were nodding gently in approval of the outpouring of the music and the lyrics—until the grandmother, who had never been able to tell a do from a si, and for that matter did not even know the names of the notes of the scale, would break the spell with a curt "You made a mistake," which took the wind out of the performers' sails. We were there, the grandmother would say when the thorny passage had been gotten through in a way satisfying to her taste; once again the women would rock in time to the music, and at the end they applauded the two virtuosi, who hastily packed up their equipment and went out to join their comrades in the street. Only Catherine Cormery had remained silent in a corner. And Jacques still remembered that Sunday afternoon when, as he was about to leave with his music, his mother had said, in reply to one of the aunts who complimented her about him, "Yes, that was good. He's intelligent," as if there were any connection between the two statements. But when he had looked back, he understood the connection. Her face was quivering, her gentle eyes feverish, and she gazed at him with an expression that made him recoil, hesitate, then flee. "She loves me, then she loves me," he said to himself in the staircase, and at the same time he realized how desperately he loved her, that he had craved her