AFTER A FEW SECONDS, the mulberry tree managed to poke some of its branches through the open window into the room, almost timidly, by which time it was getting dark and muggy, without doubt due to the summer drought that had lasted for two or three months. Nightmare after nightmare, the memories came flooding back; all thanks to my having been surrounded by the pervasive atmosphere of the civil war (the October riots in Algiers in 1988) and to my wading through blood; all that operating on patients left, right and centre at a hellish tempo.
If Aunt Fatima took a long time to die, so did my grandmother, though in a different manner. Without suffering. With decorum. I have kept an old, sepia-coloured, blurry photograph of her taken on the day she passed away. It was elaborately staged. She had a malicious air to her and wore her formal madder-coloured velvet dress; an ample traditional gown. She wore a complicated hat on her head, which was cone-shaped and had elaborate tiers. She’d asked to be adorned with all her jewellery, and since she didn’t consider her own sufficient or extravagant enough, she’d borrowed some from her neighbours.
Groomed, and decked in splendid jewellery, she was laid on her gigantic bed, which was surrounded by a mosquito net as well as silk and cotton drapery. She insisted a photographer be sent for immediately. The little fellow arrived, carrying his dismantled equipment concealed in a wicker basket, since he worked cash in hand, without a licence. He was almost certainly a nationalist militant who had been banished to our town (part of a widespread policy of internally displacing dissidents favoured by the colonial authorities of the time) who had been denied the right to any legitimate work or to receive any help from anyone and was instead obliged to sign a specific register at the police station twice a day; once in the morning and once in the evening. Knowing the old woman was at death’s door, he took the camera parts out of the basket and put them together in the blink of an eye, and, setting his tripod up a few yards from the bed, pressed the button, thus immortalising that horrible old woman, or rather immortalising her malice, which was the stuff of legend – the way she’d held her husband under her thumb, that rag-doll-like little man with blue eyes and rosy cheeks, who, though virtually beardless, had had the stomach, time and audacity to father a dozen children by her, one of whom was my father.
This was the photograph of the grandmother who had marred my childhood, but who had nonetheless fascinated me enough to make me sneak off behind my mother’s back to watch her for hours on end. A photograph that was yellowish on the back and brown on the front, printed on the kind of paper that hasn’t existed for years, showing my enormous grandmother, who was so obese she could barely walk and whom the women of the house had to carry from room to room, or rather from her bedroom to the kitchen, where she would supervise the preparation of various delicacies (pastries, sorbets, Turkish delight, halva, cordials and or geat syrup) which she would taste by sticking her right index finger into them while they were cooking. This finger was always painted with henna, and she would wash it several times a day, because, aside from being obese and duplicitous, she was also obsessed with cleanliness.
Grandmother was only interested in cooking, and thanks to her constant dipping of her hennaed forefinger into stews, sauces, grilled meats, steamed chicken, braised fish, pastries, pasties, couscous, treacle and honey, she had come to weigh almost 24 stone. Another photograph showed her sitting crosslegged on her bed, leaning against a dozen cushions made out of embroidered percale, with that absurd and hilarious coneshaped, madder taffeta hat on her head. Her plaited hair was so very black, and naturally black at that! According to my mother, my grandmother had never dyed her hair (even though she was crazy about lotions and shaving powders – which she herself prepared, assuming an alchemist’s arrogance in the process – wonderful red lipsticks, stunning mascara, kohl, incredibly rare Arabic gum and so on), even though she had sailed past her 80th birthday and suffered from a whole host of incurable illnesses: diabetes, hypertension, uraemia, proteinuria, gout and phlebitis. Despite my grandmother’s age, her obesity and these painful conditions, her jet-black plaits in this photograph made her look like a young girl.
But it wasn’t only the black plaits that made her look younger, for she had managed to keep her face slender, smooth and rosy despite the misshapen body she disguised under frills and flounces. That didn’t prevent her face from looking stern and authoritative in the photograph, filled with a self-satisfied malice. How she had made my mother suffer! Oh, that brown-coloured photograph where her face is slender and her cheeks are aglow with a youthful rosy tinge; that joke of an ancestress who struck such a natural pose, wearing that pompous, arrogant expression in front of the old militant-turned-photographer. She feared neither death nor any of the people around her; she had no time for God, or anyone else in her family for that matter – save for that moron, Uncle Hocine, who was just as fat as she was, a mama’s boy who clung to her skirts and had made nothing of his life, happy to follow his mother around the kitchen, kissing, touching, caressing and hugging her for the whole world to see.
The communist Fernand Yveton was also an obsession of mine for the rest of my life. Even after I grew up, I never stopped thinking about him, re-reading the newspapers of the day that told the stories of his pathetic fate. I usually wound up phoning Omar, back when we were students in Algiers, and later when Omar passed through Algiers briefly on business, so that we could go and roam the bars of the city and get absolutely plastered. Our words misted over in our mouths and the glasses fell from our hands. We were alone with our nostalgia, our grief still unprocessed, our determined but incomprehensible bachelorhood, our untamed rowdiness. The Algiers bars where we wet our whistles and drowned our sorrows, and where the alcohol tasted like formalin. I knew formalin from the hospital, where I poked around in human suffering for many long hours. Omar started to cry and I tried my best not to follow suit. But I ended up crying anyway. At our age, we must have cut a sorry sight as we continued to nurse our hang-ups and push ourselves into the margins. Our lives had come down to this bar and this sawdust-strewn floor. At the height of drunkenness, it seemed to me that Omar’s eyes had become like a railway station concourse full of emptiness and expectation.
Omar asked, ‘Why is going on benders in ordinary bars always better than getting pissed at my place or yours?’
We were dead drunk! But fully aware that we had once more cocked a snook at convention... Omar never spoke about the fates of either his father or younger brother when we drank in those bars.
As for me, I was obsessed with Fernand Yveton’s fate: he stood out as an example, perhaps because he was innocent and my mother had been so fixated on him – to the point where she began to identify with him, comparing the way in which she had been unfairly accused of adultery with the way Yveton had been sentenced to death and guillotined for a crime he didn’t commit.
I forgot about Omar and his guilty conscience, his steadfast dedication to bachelorhood, as well as those inextricably entwined memories of our family life. I forgot about our youthful depravities, my own family’s nauseating quagmire. Instead, I became obsessed with history’s twists, its U-turns and its horrors. History, or rather an accumulation of trivial details. This process of stratification. That meticulous arrangement of human suffering. Nothing more.
THE EUROPEAN PUBLIC SEES
THE EXECUTION OF THE COMMUNIST
TERRORIST AS THE ULTIMATE PROOF
OF FRANCE’S DETERMINATION
TO PUNISH THE TERRORISTS
Fernand Yveton hadn’t behaved like some of the other natives: the Ali Chekkals, the Alain Mimouns, the Abdessalems (Abdessalem was a rather mediocre but hunky tennis player who was a sell-out as well as a sleaze). A shameless bunch of careerists one and all, who sold their loyalties to the highest bidder or, in some cases, hedged their bets.
CALM HAS BEEN RESTORED TO
THE WHOLE COUNTRY
AFTER THE ALGIERS RIOTS
OF DECEMBER 1960.
The war had been terrible. Some luxury hotels had been blown up, leaving hundreds dead and injured under the rubble, innocent people for the most part who had been caught in the maelstrom of the revolutionary uprising. Numerous hip cafés, fine restaurants and nightclubs had been laid to waste by the Organisation’s bombs. (After the end of the war, Omar and I learnt that one of the eccentric twins had belonged to an exclusively female underground network of bombers in Algiers, with members from all walks of life – Hassiba Ben Bouali, Zohra Drif, Djamila Boupacha, Annie Steiner, Raymonde Peschard, Jeanne Messica and one of the twins – Mounia or Dounia?) Trains were blown apart by mines while crawling through tunnels and rock faces, suddenly catapulted into the air, then turned into a solid mass of soft, turgid putty. Buses were sprayed with bullets, crumbling into a tangle of broken parts and human remains. Convoys of soldiers were trapped in surprise ambushes, refineries ravaged by fires (Mourepiane, Le Havre). Those were real bomb attacks! That was war!
ANOTHER FRIEND OF FRANCE
IS MURDERED. THE BASHAGHA
ALI CHEKKAL WAS MOWN DOWN
BY A KILLER AT THE STADE DE
COLOMBES WHERE
THE FRENCH CUP FINAL
WAS BEING PLAYED WITH
FC TOULOUSE BEATING SCO ANGERS 6–3.
In his cell, Fernand Yveton often dreamt about the poor white neighbourhood where he grew up, which bordered the shanty town populated by Arabs or Negroes or natives... Places he could no longer see clearly, that is to say visually, but recalled by smell: the breeze that converged on the squalid tenements came from the sea and the city, aggravating the already sickening stench of the open sewers, of rancid oil, of rank tiny fishes being fried, of urine trickling along the ground – itself a stamped-down mixture of porous asphalt, sand, pebbles – iron filings, mud, rotten vegetables, the remains of chickens that had been gutted and their entrails which had been thrown outside people’s homes, tangy, sour fruit, beef that had been dried and salted by the brine that gnaws away at everything and makes it reek, detritus washed up by the sea that the children would collect in aluminium cans to play with, or sometimes even eat, and vomit that smelt strongly of alcohol, on which someone had thrown a handful of bran. Right in front of the shanty town’s only bar. In addition, there was stagnant, silty water everywhere, yellowish excrement, salted cod hanging from wires stretched across the Arab, Negro, Maltese, Sicilian or Sardinian streets, and the pungent odour of hung, pickled anchovies. Under some ruins lay the decomposing bodies of cats that had been skinned by a sadist, an old soot-skinned sailor who silently stalked the surroundings of the spring where Yveton used to set his bird-traps as a boy. Everywhere the oppressive, musty smell of poverty, misery, sweat, fear, and the miasma of corpses and urine...
This built-up tension gave Yveton the impression of having sound waves and electrical currents running through his body, as if the blood that soaked the prison walls around him left its traces in his guts, chiselling away at him and coating him with a layer of rock salt, the sort used by the barbarians, which they didn’t use to season their food, but to rub into the wounds of martyrs.
Yveton felt obliged not to give in to either surprise or distress in the eventuality that he was sentenced to death, not only for his own sake, but also because he had a vague hunch that such weakness on his part would have angered Béa. The sound of blood, blending with the snatches of sleep and coma, seemed to be absorbed by, or dissolve into, the glory of the broken, decapitated, maddened and castrated bodies by the simple cowardly act of those political string-pullers sitting in their plush offices.
Once more, Fernand Yveton was able to call to mind a range of flavours, smells and sensations, all thanks to the proximity of the bodies of his comrades imprisoned in the night who couldn’t retreat to the safety of their own caves and their walls oozing with moisture and red paint. When the inevitable execution of a militant was announced, a murmur quickly spread through the entire prison, growing louder as it went.
Omar and I eventually reached a bitter conclusion: that all power was oppressive and unjust, and that the colonial class had simply been replaced by a nomenclature of bloodsucking Algerian nababs.
Back in the plane, Omar seemed to have calmed down.
The plane was beginning its descent.