‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m waiting for my father,’ she said, shifting to one side to let me pass.
‘You can wait inside. It’s freezing out here.’
She shook her head.
When I saw her some days later she was with her father, a hulking man who looked as though he had been carved from a menhir. He waited by the counter, silent and motionless, as Germaine led the girl into the back office. When they reappeared some minutes later, the man set some money on the counter, took his daughter by the hand and left.
‘What was she here for?’ I asked Germaine.
‘Her injection . . . I give it to her every Wednesday.’
‘Is it serious . . . what she’s got?’
‘Only God can know that.’
The following Wednesday, I hurried home from school so I could see her. She was sitting on a bench opposite the counter, leafing through a book.
‘What are you reading?’
‘It’s a book about Guadeloupe.’
‘What’s Guadeloupe?’
‘It’s a French island in the Caribbean.’
I tiptoed closer, afraid that I might startle her – she looked so fragile.
‘My name is Younes.’
‘Mine’s Émilie.’
‘I’ll be thirteen in three weeks.’
‘I was nine last November.’
‘Are you in a lot of pain?’
‘It’s not too bad.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I don’t know. The doctors at the hospital couldn’t work it out, and the medicine they’re giving me doesn’t seem to do any good.’
Germaine appeared and Émilie went with her, leaving the book on the bench. There was a rose bush in a pot on the sideboard. I picked a rose and slipped it between the pages of the book, then went up to my room.
When I came down again, Émilie was gone.
She did not come for her injection the following Wednesday, nor the Wednesday after that.
‘She must be in hospital,’ Germaine said.
After several weeks, I gave up all hope of seeing Émilie again.
Then I met Isabelle. She was the niece of Pépé Rucillio – the richest man in Río Salado. Isabelle was a pretty little girl with big periwinkle-blue eyes and long hair that cascaded down her back. She thought of herself as sophisticated. She looked down her nose at everything and everyone, but when she looked at me, she suddenly seemed thin and frail. Isabelle wanted me all to herself and woe betide anyone who came too close to me.
Isabelle’s parents – successful wine merchants – worked for Pépé Rucillio, the patriarch of the village. They lived in a huge villa on a street cascading with bougainvilleas near the Jewish cemetery.
Isabelle’s mother was a highly strung French woman whose family, people said, were penniless aristocrats (though she was quick to remind everyone that she had blue blood in her veins). Isabelle had inherited little from her mother except her obsession with order and discipline, but she owed much to her father, a handsome olive-skinned man from Catalonia. She had his face – the same high cheekbones, the chiselled mouth, the piercing eyes. Even at the tender age of thirteen, with her aristocratic nose and her regal manner, Isabelle knew what she wanted and how to get it. She was as careful about the company she kept and the image she projected of herself. In a previous life, she told me, she had been a chatelaine.
It was Isabelle who approached me. I was at some festival on the village square when she came over to me and asked: ‘Are you Monsieur Jonas?’ She addressed everyone, young and old, as monsieur or madame, and insisted they do the same to her. ‘Thursday is my birthday,’ she went on imperiously, not waiting for me to answer. ‘You are cordially invited to attend.’ I didn’t know whether this was an invitation or a command. When I arrived at her party on Thursday, feeling somewhat lost in the confusion of her cousins and her friends, she grabbed me and introduced me to everyone: ‘This is my best friend.’
My first kiss, I owe to Isabelle. We were in an alcove of the grand drawing room at her house. Isabelle, her back straight, her chin held high, was playing the piano. I was sitting next to her, watching her slender fingers flutter over the keys. Suddenly she stopped, closed the piano lid carefully and, after a moment’s hesitation – or a moment’s thought – turned to me, took my face in her hands and pressed her lips to mine, closing her eyes in mock passion.
The kiss seemed to go on for ever.
Isabelle opened her eyes again before she pulled away.
‘Did you feel anything, Monsieur Jonas?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Me neither. It’s strange, in the movies, it looks so sophisticated . . . Perhaps you have to be grown up to really feel these things.’
She looked deep into my eyes and announced: ‘Never mind. We’ll wait as long as it takes.’
Isabelle had the patience of those who believe that tomorrow belongs to them. I was the most handsome boy on earth, she told me, and in some previous life I must have been a prince. She informed me that she had chosen me to be her fiancé because I was ‘worth the candle.’
After that first attempt, we didn’t kiss, but we saw each other almost every day and dreamed up fantastical plans.
Then suddenly, abruptly, our ‘engagement’ came to an end. It was a Sunday morning. I had been skulking around the house – my uncle had shut himself in his room and Germaine had gone to church – half-heartedly trying to play or read. It was a glorious spring day; the swallows had come early, and Río Salado was scented with jasmine.
I went for a walk, my head in the clouds, and though I had not planned to do so, I found myself standing outside the Rucillios’ house. I called to Isabelle through the window. She did not come down to the door, but peered at me through the shutters for a moment before slamming them open and screaming:
‘Liar!’
From her tone and the incandescent fury of her stare, I knew she hated me – it was the tone, the look that she invariably used when she had decided to declare war. I had no idea of the charges levelled against me; I was completely unprepared for the attack. I stood there speechless.
‘I never want to see you again, Jonas!’ she declared, and I realised this was the first time I had ever heard her address anyone without using monsieur or madame.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ she screamed, infuriated that I simply stood there looking confused. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve never lied to you . . .’
‘Haven’t you? Your name is Younes, isn’t it? You-nes? So why do you go round calling yourself Jonas?’
‘Everyone calls me Jonas . . . What difference does it make?’
‘It makes all the difference!’ she shouted breathlessly, her face flushed as she spat scornfully. ‘It changes everything.’
‘We are from different worlds, Monsieur Younes,’ she said implacably when she had got her breath back. ‘And the fact that you have blue eyes is not enough.’ Then, before slamming the shutters closed, she spluttered contemptuously: ‘I am a Rucillio, or had you forgotten? You surely don’t think I could marry an Arab? I’d rather die!’
As a child, such a glimpse into the adult world can scar you for life. I was shell-shocked; I felt as though I had woken from a nightmare. I would never again look at things the same way. There are things that, though to a child’s eye they seem so trivial as to be inconsequential, come back to haunt you; even when you close your eyes, you feel them drag you down, tenacious and cruel as the pangs of remorse.
Isabelle had ripped me from my safe little world and tossed me into the gutter. Adam cast out of Eden could not have felt more wretched, and the lump in my throat was harder to swallow than his apple.
After what Isabelle said, I began to be more circumspect, more attentive. I noticed that no one in Río Salado wore a billowing haik, and that the dishevelled wretches in turbans who haunted the vineyards from dawn to dusk did not dare come into Río Salado itself, and that my uncle – whom most of the villagers assumed was a Turk from Tlemcen – was the only Arab to have succeeded in putting down roots in this fiercely colonial village.