On the hill, in the shade of the olive tree or on the beach, I was now an absence among my friends.
I waited for two weeks before summoning the courage to go back to the big white mansion on the road to the marabout’s house. It was late; the light was failing. I left my bicycle by the gates and stepped into the courtyard . . . and there she was, crouched beneath a shrub with a pair of secateurs, tending to her garden.
‘Monsieur Jonas,’ she said, getting to her feet.
She set the secateurs down on a mound of pebbles and wiped the dust from her hands. She was wearing the same hat with the red ribbon, the same white dress, which, in the light of the setting sun, faithfully described the charming contours of her body.
We stared at each other, neither of us saying a word.
I found the silence oppressive; the drone of the cicadas seemed loud enough to split my eardrums.
‘Bonjour, madame.’
She smiled, her eyes wider than the span of the horizon.
‘What can I do for you, Monsieur Jonas?’
Something in her voice made me fear the worst.
‘I was just passing,’ I lied, ‘so I came up to say hello.’
‘How very sweet.’
Her brusqueness left me speechless. She stared at me as though waiting for me to justify my presence; she did not seem to appreciate my intrusion. It was as though I was disturbing her.
‘You don’t need to . . . I just thought . . . I mean, if you needed help with carrying things?’
‘I have servants to do that.’
Having run out of excuses, I felt foolish, felt that I had ruined everything.
‘Monsieur Jonas, you shouldn’t turn up at someone’s house unannounced.’
‘I just thought—’
She brought a finger to my lips, interrupting me.
‘You shouldn’t think.’
My embarrassment turned to a sort of dull rage. Why was she treating me like this? How could she behave as though nothing had happened? Surely she knew why I had come to see her.
As though reading my mind, she said:
‘If I need you, I will let you know. You must learn to let things happen, you understand. To rush things is to ruin them.’
Her finger gently traced the line of my lips, then parted them and slipped into my mouth, lingering for a moment on the tip of my tongue before returning to rest on my lips once more.
‘There is something you need to understand, Jonas: with women, these things are all in the mind. They are only ready when their thoughts are in order. They control their emotions.’
Not for a moment did she take her resolute, regal eyes from mine. I felt as though I was a product of her imagination, a plaything in her hands, a puppy she might order to roll over so she could tickle its tummy. I had no intention of rushing things, of ruining any chance I might have. When she took her hand away, I realised it was time for me to leave . . . and to wait for a sign from her.
She did not walk me back to the gates.
I waited for weeks. The summer of 1944 was drawing to a close. Madame Cazenave no longer came down to the village. When Jean-Christophe called us all together and Fabrice read his poems, all I could do was stare out towards the white mansion on the hill. Sometimes I thought I could see her working in the courtyard, could make out her white dress through the heat haze on the plains. At night I would go out on to the balcony and listen to the howl of the jackals, hoping it might fill the yawning silence of her words.
Madame Scamaroni regularly took us to the apartment on the Boulevard des Chasseurs in Oran, but I have no memory of the movies we saw or the girls we met. Simon was getting tired of my distracted state. One day, on the beach, he tipped a bucket of water over me to get my attention. If Jean-Christophe had not been there, the joke would have turned into a brawl.
Worried by my sudden change of mood, Fabrice came to my house to ask me what was wrong. He got no answer.
Finally, tormented by the waiting, I jumped on my bicycle one Sunday at midday and raced down to the white house. Madame Cazenave had hired an old gardener and a housekeeper, and I found them having lunch together in the shade of a carob tree. I waited in the courtyard, clutching my bicycle, trembling from head to foot. Madame Cazenave gave an imperceptible start when she saw me standing by the fountain. She glanced around for the servants, saw that they were at the far end of the garden, turned back to me. She stared at me in silence; behind her smile, I could tell she was furious.
‘I couldn’t wait,’ I said.
She came down the small flight of steps and walked towards me.
‘But you have to,’ she said firmly.
She beckoned me to follow her back to the gates, and there, without worrying whether it was indiscreet, as though we were the only two people in the world, she slipped her arms around my neck and kissed me hard. The passion of her kiss was such that I knew that this was the end, that this was goodbye.
‘You were dreaming, Jonas,’ she said. ‘It was just a young man’s dream.’
She took her arms from round my neck and stepped back.
‘Nothing ever happened between us, not even this kiss.’
Her eyes forced me to retreat.
‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, madame,’ I heard myself mumble.
‘Good.’
She patted my cheek, a brisk, maternal gesture.
‘I knew you were a sensible boy.’
I had to wait until it was dark before I went home.
11
I HOPED for a miracle; it never came.
Autumn arrived, stripping the trees of their leaves, and I realised I had to face facts. It had all been a dream. Nothing ever happened between Madame Cazenave and me.
I went back to my old life, to my friends, to Simon’s antics and Fabrice’s feverish idealism. Jean-Christophe had found a way of dealing with the demanding Isabelle Rucillio. With any compromise, he would say, the important thing was to make sure you got something out of it. Life was a long-term investment, he insisted, and fortune smiled on those who played the long game. He seemed to know what he wanted, and if his theories came unburdened with any actual proof, we were more than happy to take him at his word.
With 1945 came a stream of contradictory stories and rumours. Gossiping over a glass of anisette was the favoured pastime in Río Salado. The smallest rumour would be wildly exaggerated, embellished with daring feats attributed to people who for the most part had nothing to do with it. Everyone on the café terraces had a theory about the war. The names Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill rang out like trumpets announcing the final assault. One joker, noting that General de Gaulle looked undernourished, suggested sending him a fine Algerian couscous to fatten him up, thereby making it easier for us to trust him, since Algerians invariably associate power with a pot belly. Everyone laughed and drank, then went on drinking until every passing donkey looked like a unicorn. The mood was optimistic. Jewish families who had left the town when news came of the mass deportations in France began to return home. Slowly, surely, things were getting back to normal. The grape harvest had been exceptional and the end-of-season ball was glorious. Pépé Rucillio married off his youngest son, and for seven days and seven nights the whole district rang to the sound of the guitars and castanets of a famous troupe of troubadours shipped in from Seville. We were even treated to an extravagant display in which the finest horsemen in the region were pitted against the greatest warriors of the Ouled N’har.
In Europe, the Third Reich was crumbling. Newsreels predicted that the war would soon be over, even as the bombing intensified: whole cities vanished in flames and ashes, the sky was black with the smoke of aerial battles, trenches collapsed beneath the caterpillar treads of advancing tanks. The cinema in Río Salado was constantly full of people who only came to watch the Pathé News they showed before the main feature. Allied troops had liberated great swaths of occupied territories and were now marching relentlessly on Germany. Italy was a shadow of its former self. The Resistance and the partisans were inflicting heavy losses on Nazi troops caught in a vice between the Red Army and the advancing American forces.