‘Why don’t you come and live with us in Río Salado?’
‘No,’ she shrieked as though I had uttered some obscenity. ‘I can’t leave this place until your father comes back. Imagine if he came back and we weren’t here? How would he find us? We have no family, no friends in this terrible city. And besides, where is Río Salado? It would never occur to your father that we might leave Oran. No, I am staying right here until he comes.
‘But what if he’s dead?’
She grabbed me by the throat and slammed my head against the wall.
‘You little fool! How dare you! Batoul the clairvoyant told me. She saw it in my palm and she saw signs on the water. Your father is safe and well. He’s making his fortune; when he is rich, he will come home. We will all live in a beautiful house with a veranda and a vegetable garden, and there will be a garage for our new car, and all the troubles of the past will be forgotten. Who knows, maybe we might go back and buy back the lands we were forced to sell.’
All this she said quickly, very quickly, with a quaver in her voice and a curious gleam in her eye, as her hands sketched her impossible dreams on the air. Had I known that this was the last time we would ever speak, I might have believed her fantasies; might have stayed with her. But how could I have known?
Once again it was she who urged me to leave; to go back to my adoptive parents.
9
THEY CALLED us ‘the pitchfork’. We were as inseparable as the tines of a fork.
There was Jean-Christophe Lamy, a hulking giant at the age of sixteen. As the eldest of the group, he was the leader. His hair as blonde as a hayrick, he had a permanent smile. Every girl in Río Salado swooned over him, but ever since Isabelle Rucillio had provisionally agreed to make him her ‘fiancé’, he watched his step.
Then there was Fabrice Scamaroni, two months younger than me, a boy who had his heart on his sleeve and his head in the clouds. His sole ambition was to be a writer. His mother, a young widow who was a little crazy, owned businesses in Río Salado and Oran. She lived by her own rules and was the only woman in the whole district to drive a car. The wagging tongues in Río Salado constantly gossiped about her, but Madame Scamaroni didn’t care. She was beautiful, rich, independent. What more was there?
In the summer, we would pile into the back seat of her sturdy six-cylinder truck and she would drive us to the beach at Terga. After a swim, she would throw together a barbecue, stuffing us with black olives, lamb kebabs and sardines grilled over charcoal.
Then there was Simon Benyamin. Simon, like me, was fifteen. He was a short, fat Jewish boy who loved tricks and practical jokes. He was jolly, a little cynical because he had been unlucky in love, but he could be endearing when he wanted to. He dreamed of working in the theatre or the movies. His family was not exactly popular in Río Salado. His father trailed bad luck in his wake. Every time he set up a business it went bust, which meant that he owed money to everyone, even the seasonal workers.
Of the gang, Simon and I were closest. We lived a stone’s throw from each other, and every day he called for me and we would go and meet Jean-Christophe on the hill. The hilltop was our fort. We would meet under an ancient olive tree and look down at Río Salado shimmering at our feet. Fabrice was always last to show up, and always with a basket full of kosher sausage sandwiches, pickled peppers and fresh fruit. Together we would hang out there until late into the night, dreaming up improbable schemes and listening to Jean-Christophe talking about the tribulations he suffered at the hands of Isabelle Rucillio. Fabrice, for his part, drove us insane reciting poems and dysenteric prose strung together with words he had found in the dictionary.
Sometimes we allowed other boys to join us. More often than not this meant the Sosa cousins: José, who shared a tiny garret with his mother and ate gazpacho for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and André – we called him Dédé – who was every inch the son of his father, the stern Jaime Jiménez Sosa, who owed one of the largest farms in the area. André was sometimes a bully, he could be brutal with the hired help but he was kind to his friends. Spoiled and precocious, he was capable of saying outrageous things, seemingly indifferent to who he hurt, but I could never stay angry with him for long. Despite the cruel, casual remarks he made about the Arabs, he was always considerate to me. He did not discriminate; I was invited to his house just as often as his other friends. Yet even in my presence he was capable of disparaging Muslims, as though this was simply how things were. His father ruled his estate like a feudal lord, keeping the countless Muslim families who worked for him packed in like cattle. Wearing a pith helmet and slapping at his boots with a riding crop, Jaime Jiménez Sosa IV was always up at first light and always last to bed. He worked his ‘galley slaves’ until they dropped, and God help the malingerers. He worshipped his vineyards, and any incursion on to his land he regarded as sacrilege. People said that he once killed a goat who dared to nibble on a vine leaf and shot at the flabbergasted shepherd for trying to save the animal.
These were strange times.
As for me, time marched on – I was becoming a man. I had grown almost twelve inches, and when I licked my lips, I could feel a little downy moustache.
It was the summer of 1942, and we were on the beach, sunning ourselves. The sea was crystalline and the horizon so clear that you could see all the way to the Habibas Islands. Fabrice and I were lounging under a sunshade while Simon, wearing a pair of revolting shorts, was entertaining the crowd doing ridiculous dives, hoping his antics might impress some girl, but his Apache war cries simply terrified the children and irritated the old ladies slumped in their deckchairs. Jean-Christophe was posing, holding his stomach in, hands on his hips, showing off the perfect V of his torso. Nearby, the Sosa boys had set up a tent. André loved to put on airs. Whereas other people brought deckchairs to the beach, he brought a tent; if they showed up with a tent, he would turn up with a whole caravanserai. At the age of eighteen, he already owned two cars, including a convertible. This he would drive lazily through the streets of Oran, except when it was time for siesta, when he would tear through Río Salado with an ear-splitting roar. Today, he could think of nothing better to do than mistreat his manservant Jelloul. He had already sent him back to the village three times in the blazing sun, the first time to get cigarettes, the second to get matches, and the third because Monsieur André had asked for Bastos cigarettes, not something that ‘a navvy might smoke’. The village was a fair distance and poor Jelloul was melting like an ice cube.
Fabrice and I had watched the scene play out from the beginning. André knew that the way he treated his manservant annoyed us and took malicious pleasure in winding us up. As soon as Jelloul got back, he sent him off a fourth time to get a tin-opener. The servant, a timid boy, turned on his heel stoically and headed back up the embankment in the sweltering afternoon heat.
‘Give him a break, Dédé,’ José said.
‘It’s the only way to keep him on his toes,’ said André, clasping his hands behind his neck. ‘Give him a break, and next minute he’ll be snoring.’
‘It’s a hundred degrees out there,’ pleaded Fabrice. ‘The poor guy is only flesh and blood, he’ll get sunstroke.’
José got to his feet to call Jelloul back. André grabbed his wrist and forced him to sit down again.
‘Leave it, José. You don’t have servants, you don’t know what it’s like . . . Arabs are like dogs, you have to beat them to get them to behave.’ Then, remembering that I was there, he corrected himself: ‘Well, some Arabs . . .’
Suddenly realising just how offensive his remark had been, he leapt to his feet and raced down to the sea. We watched him dive in, throwing up great sheets of spray. There was an uncomfortable silence in the tent. José clenched his jaw, finding it difficult to contain himself. Fabrice closed the book he had been reading and glared at me.