The First Man Read online

  love with all his heart, and that until that moment he had always doubted whether she loved him.

  Performances at the movies held other pleasures in store for the child . . . The ritual took place on Sunday afternoon and sometimes on Thursday. The neighborhood movie house was just down the street from their building and bore the name of a Romantic poet, as did the street alongside it. Before going in, you had to pass an obstacle course of Arab peddlers' stands bearing helter-skelter displays of peanuts, dried salted chick-peas, lupine seeds, barley sugar coated in loud colors, and sticky sourballs. Others sold gaudy pastries, among them a pyramid of creamy swirls sprinkled with pink sugar, and still others displayed Arab fritters dripping with oil and honey. A swarm of flies and children, both attracted by the same sweets, buzzed and shouted as they chased each other around the stands amidst the curses of the peddlers, who feared for the stability of their goods and who brushed both flies and children away with a single gesture. Some of the peddlers had found shelter under the marquee that extended over one side, others had put their gummy riches out under the strong sunlight and the dust raised by the children's games. Jacques would escort his grandmother, who had sleeked back her white hair for the occasion and fastened her eternal black dress with a silver brooch. She would sedately part the howling kids who blocked the entrance and present herself at the one ticket window to buy "reserved" seats. Actually the only choice was between these "reserved" seats, uncomfortable folding chairs that opened noisily, and the benches toward

  which the children surged at the last moment, bickering over their places, when a side door was opened for them. At each end of the benches was stationed an usher, armed with a leather whip, who was responsible for keeping order, and it was not unusual to see him expel an overly boisterous child or adult. In those days the theatre showed silent films, the newsreel first, then a short comedy, the main feature, and finally a serial shown at the rate of one episode per week. The grandmother particularly liked these serials, where each episode ended in suspense. For example, the muscular hero carrying the wounded blond girl in his arms would start out on a vine bridge over a canyon torrent. And the last frame of the weekly episode would show a tattooed hand severing the vines of the bridge with a crude knife. The hero would continue proudly on his way despite the warnings shouted by the spectators in the benches.a The question then was not whether the couple would escape—no doubt on that score being permitted—but only how they would extricate themselves, which explains why so many spectators, both Arab and French, would come back the next week to see the lovers stopped in their mortal plunge by a providential tree. The show was accompanied throughout on the piano by an old maiden lady, who met the jeers of the benches with the calm stillness of her thin back shaped like a bottle of mineral water capped with a lace collar. At the time, Jacques thought it a mark of distinction that this

  a. Riveccio.

  impressive lady wore her fingerless gloves during the most torrid hot spells. Nor was her job as easy as one might have thought. Providing musical commentary to the news, in particular, required her to change melodies according to the nature of the events being shown on the screen. She would go without transition from a lively quadrille accompanying the spring fashion shows to Chopin's Funeral March for a flood in China or the funeral of a personage important on the national or international scene. Whatever the piece, it was always imperturbably performed, as if ten little mechanical instruments were executing precise maneuvers on the old yellowed keyboard that had been ordained once and for all by clockwork. In that hall with bare walls, its floor littered with peanut shells, the smell of cresyl mingled with a strong odor of humanity. It was the pianist, in any case, who silenced the deafening racket by launching with full pedal into the prelude that was supposed to set the mood for the matinee show. A great throbbing sound announced that the projector was starting, and that was when Jacques's ordeal began.

  Since they were silent, the films would project a certain amount of written text intended to clarify the plot. As his grandmother was illiterate, it was Jacques's job to read these texts to her. Despite her age, his grandmother was not at all hard of hearing. But first of all he had to make himself heard over the sound of the piano and that of the audience, whose vocal responses were plentiful. Furthermore, though the texts were extremely simple, his grandmother was not very familiar with some words and others were completely unknown to

  her. Jacques, for his part, did not want to disturb their neighbors and was especially anxious not to tell the entire hall that his grandmother did not know how to read (sometimes she herself would be embarrassed enough to say, raising her voice, at the beginning of the show: "You'll have to read to me, I forgot my glasses"), so he would not read the text as loudly as he might have. The result was that the grandmother only half understood, and would insist that he read it again and louder. Jacques would try to raise his voice, the shushes would plunge him into a vile shame, he stammered, the grandmother scolded him, and soon another text appeared, all the more mysterious to the poor old woman because she had not understood the preceding one. Confusion would only compound until Jacques found enough presence of mind to sum up in a few words a crucial moment in, for example, The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. "The villain wants to take the girl away from him," Jacques would firmly articulate, taking advantage of a pause in the sound of the piano or the audience. It all became clear, the film went on, and the child could breathe easier. Usually that was the extent of his worries. But some films on the order of Les Deux Orphe-lines were really too complicated, and, caught between his grandmother's demands and the ever-angrier reprimands of their neighbors, Jacques would end by remaining completely silent. He still remembered one of these performances when the grandmother, beside herself, had finally walked out, while he followed her in tears, distressed at the thought that he had spoiled one

  of the poor woman's rare pleasures and that it had been paid for out of their meager funds.a

  As for his mother, she never came to these performances. She could not read either, and she was half deaf besides. Beyond that, her vocabulary was even more limited than her mother's. Even today, her life was without distractions. In forty years she had been to the movies two or three times, had understood nothing, and it was only in order not to displease those who invited her that she would say the dresses were pretty or that the one with the moustache looked like a very bad man. Nor could she listen to the radio. And as to the newspapers, sometimes she would leaf through those that were illustrated, would get her sons or granddaughters to explain the pictures, would decide that the Queen of England seemed sad, and close the pages to gaze once more out the same window and watch the activity on the same street that she had been contemplating through half her lifetime.b

  a. add symptoms of poverty—unemployment—holiday camp summer in Miliana—blowing the bugle—expelled—Doesn't dare tell her. Speak up: well we'll drink coffee tonight. From time to time it changes. He looks at her. He's often read stories of poverty where the woman is valiant. She didn't smile. She left to go in the kitchen, valiant—Not resigned.

  b. Bring on Uncle Ernest old, before—his portrait in the room where Jacques and his mother were. Or have him come after.

  Étienne

  In a sense, she was less involved in life than her brother Ernest,1 who lived with them; he was stone deaf, and he expressed himself as much by onomatopoeic sounds and gestures as with the hundred-odd words at his disposal. But Ernest, who could not be put out to work whenhe was young, had haphazardly attended school and learned to make out the letters of the alphabet. He did go to the movies sometimes, and he would come home with an account of the film that astounded those who had already seen it, as the wealth of his imagination would make up for what he had missed. Moreover, he was shrewd and crafty, and a sort of native intelligence enabled him to make his way in a world and among people who nonetheless remained obdurately silent to him. Thanks to that same intelligence, he would bury himself ev
ery day in the newspaper, where he could

  1. Sometimes named Ernest, sometimes Etienne, it is always the same person: Jacques's uncle.

  make out the headlines and so have at least a nodding acquaintance with world affairs. "Hitler," he would say, for example, to Jacques when he had come of age, "no good, eh."

  "No, that wasn't good."

  "The Huns, always the same," the uncle added.

  "No, it wasn't that."

  "Yes, there're some good ones," his uncle acknowledged. "But Hitler that's no good," and right after, his love of a joke gaining the upper hand: "Levy" (that was the mercer across the street) "he's scared." And he guffawed. Jacques would try to explain. His uncle would become serious again: "Yes. Why he wants to hurt the Jews? They're like other people."

  He always loved Jacques, in his fashion. He admired his success in school. He would rub the child's skull with his hard hand on which tools and manual labor had left a hornlike callus. "Got a good head, this one. Hard"—and he tapped his own head with his big fist— "but good." Sometimes he added: "Like his father."

  One day Jacques took the opportunity to ask if his father had been intelligent.

  "Your father, hard head. Did what he wanted, always. Your mother always yes yes."

  Jacques was unable to get any more out of him.

  In any case, Ernest would often take the child with him. His energy and vitality, finding no outlet in speech or in the complex relations of social life, would explode in his physical life and its sensations. Even on awakening, when someone shook him out of the hermetic sleep of the deaf, he would rear up wild-eyed, bellowing

  "huhn huhn!" like a prehistoric beast that wakens each day to a strange and hostile world. But once he was awake, his body and its functioning made him secure on his feet. Despite the hard labor of his job as a cooper, he liked to go swimming and hunting. When Jacques was still a child,a his uncle would take him to Sablettes beach, make him get up on his back, and immediately set out to sea with a rudimentary but powerful stroke, making inarticulate sounds that translated first his surprise at the coldness of the water, then his pleasure at being there or his anger at an errant wave. "You not scared," he would say from time to time to Jacques. Yes, he was afraid but did not say so; he was spellbound by the solitude where they were, between the sky and the sea, one as vast as the other; when he glanced back, the beach seemed like an invisible line, and an acid fear would grip his stomach and, with the beginnings of panic, he pictured the immense dark depths below where he would sink like a stone if ever his uncle should let him loose. Then the child would clutch the swimmer's neck a little tighter. "You scared," his uncle said right away.

  "No, but go back."

  Docile, the uncle turned, took a few breaths, and set off again as confidently as if he were on terra firma. On the beach, and hardly out of breath, he rubbed Jacques vigorously, with great gusts of laughter, turned aside to urinate with a loud splash, still laughing, then would

  a. 9 years

  congratulate himself on the fine functioning of his bladder, slapping his belly with the "Good, good" that accompanied all his enjoyable sensations, among which he made no distinction, whether they were of excretion or of nutrition, stressing in each case and with the same innocence the pleasure they gave him, and always wanting his family to share his pleasure, which at the dining-room table would provoke a protest from the grandmother, who accepted that these things were discussed, and even spoke of them herself, but, as she would say, "Not while we're eating," though she put up with his watermelon act; the fruit had a great reputation as a diuretic; Ernest adored it and he would begin his consumption of it by laughing, by mischievous winks at the grandmother, by an assortment of sounds of inhaling, regurgitating, and slurping, and after the first few mouthfuls that he would bite right down to the skin, he would perform a whole pantomime in which with his hand he would repeatedly demonstrate the journey the handsome rose and white fruit was supposed to make from his mouth to his penis, while he made faces and rolled his eyes to illustrate how spectacularly he was enjoying himself, all this accompanied by: "Good, good. Washes you out. Good, good"—until it was so irresistible that everyone would burst out laughing. This Adam-like innocence caused him to attach exaggerated importance to a series of fleeting ailments he would complain of, frowning, his gaze turned inward as if he were scrutinizing the mysterious night of his organs. He claimed to be suffering from a "stitch," its location varying widely, or a "lump" that wandered all over the

  place. Later, when Jacques was attending the lycée, his uncle would question him, in the belief that there was one science that applied equally to everyone, showing him the small of his back: "Right there, it pulls," he would say. "That's bad?" No, it was nothing. And Ernest would go out relieved, descending the stairs with his small hurried steps to join his comrades in the neighborhood cafes, with their wood furnishings and zinc bar, smelling of anisette and sawdust, where Jacques sometimes had to go fetch him at dinnertime. It was not the least of the child's surprises to find this deaf-mute at the bar surrounded by his comrades and talking his head off while they all laughed, laughter in which there was no mockery, for his friends adored Ernest for his good nature and his generosity.a b c d

  a. the money he'd set aside and gave to Jacques.

  b. Of medium height, a bit bowlegged, his shoulders somewhat stooped under a thick shell of muscle, he gave the impression despite his slender build of an extraordinarily virile strength. And yet his face was and for a long time would remain that of an adolescent, delicate regular features, a bit [ ] [a word crossed out—Ed.] with his sister's beautiful chestnut eyes, a very straight nose, bare eyebrows, regular chin, and beautiful thick hair—no, a little wavy. His physical beauty in itself was why despite his handicap he had had several adventures with women, which could not lead to marriage and were necessarily brief, but at times had the appearance of what is usually called love, like that affair he'd had with a married shopkeeper in the neighborhood, and sometimes he would take Jacques to the Saturday night concert in Bresson Square that looked out on the sea, and the military orchestra on the bandstand played The Bells of Corneville or tunes from Lakmé, while in the

  (continued)

  Jacques would be well aware of that when his uncle took him hunting with his comrades, all of whom were coopers or workers at the port or on the railroad. They got up at dawn. Jacques was responsible for awakening his uncle, whom no alarm could rouse from his sleep. Jacques himself responded to the ringing, his brother turned over in bed grumbling, and his mother, in the other bed, stirred softly without awakening. He got up groping his way, struck a match, and lit the small kerosene lamp on the night table that stood between the two beds. (Ah! the furnishings in that room: two iron beds—one single, where the mother slept, the other double, where the two children slept—a night table between the two beds, and, across from the night table, a wardrobe with a mirror. At the foot of the mother's bed was a window that faced the yard. Below that window was a cane trunk covered with a crocheted blanket. While he was still small, Jacques had to kneel on the trunk to close the shutters of the window. And no chair.) Then he would go to the dining room, shake his uncle, who bellowed, looked up in terror at the lamp over his eyes, and finally came to his senses. They

  (continued)

  midst of the crowd that was moving around the [ ], Ernest in his Sunday best would make sure his path crossed that of the cafe owner's wife dressed in raw silk, and they would exchange smiles of friendship, the husband occasionally saying a few amicable words to Ernest, whom he surely never saw as a potential rival.

  c. the la mouna laundry [words circled by the author—Ed.]

  d. the beach pieces of bleached wood, corks, sea-worn fragments of glass ... reeds from cork trees.

  dressed. And Jacques heated leftover coffee on the little alcohol burner while his uncle packed sacks with provisions: a cheese, sobrasada sausages, tomatoes with salt and pepper, and a half loaf of bread cut in two where a big o
melet made by the grandmother had been inserted. Then the uncle for the last time checked the double-barreled shotgun and the cartridges, over which a great ceremony had taken place the night before. After dinner they had cleared the table and carefully cleaned its oilcloth cover. The uncle had seated himself at one side of the table and gravely set before him, by the light of the big kerosene lamp lifted down from its hanging position, the pieces of the disassembled gun that he had painstakingly greased. Sitting at the other side, Jacques waited his turn. So did the dog Brillant. For there was a dog, a mongrel setter, boundlessly good-natured, who couldn't hurt a fly, the proof of that being that if he happened to catch one on the wing, he would spit it out with a disgusted look accompanied by a great display of outstretched tongue and smacking of his chops. Ernest and his dog were inseparable, and there was a perfect understanding between them. You could not help thinking of them as a couple (and only one who neither knew nor loved dogs would see that as ridiculous). And the dog owed the man obedience and love, while the man agreed to have only this single responsibility. They lived together and never left each other, sleeping together (the man on the dining room couch, the dog on a skimpy bedside rug that was threadbare), went to work together (the dog would lie on a bed of wood shavings,