‘I love you, Younes . . . Are you listening?’
I said nothing. ‘I’m leaving now. This time I won’t come back. If you feel the same way, you know where to find me.’
A tear trickled down her cheek, but she did not wipe it away. I was drowning in her great dark eyes. Slowly she drew herself up and left.
‘Pity . . .’
My uncle was standing behind me. It took me a moment to realise what he was referring to. Had he heard what we were saying? He was not a man to eavesdrop. He and I had talked about everything – everything except women. The subject was taboo, and in spite of his wisdom, his liberal values, a sense of propriety prevented him from raising the subject with me. In our community, such things were traditionally only ever alluded to, or they were dealt with by proxy – by asking someone else to do so. My uncle would have asked Germaine to speak to me about it.
‘I was in the back office, the door was open . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Maybe it’s for the best. An accidental indiscretion can be fortuitous. I overheard you talking to that girl, and I thought: close the door. But I didn’t close it. Not out of misguided curiosity, but because I have always loved to hear one heart speak to another – to me it is the most glorious music in the world. May I?’
‘Of course.’
‘You can stop me whenever you want, son.’
He sat on the bench, studying his fingers, then, looking down, he said in a distant voice:
‘For a man to think he can fulfil his destiny without a woman is a misunderstanding, a miscalculation; it is recklessness and folly. Certainly a woman is not everything, but everything depends on her. Look around you, look at history, think about the whole world and tell me what man is without woman; what are his promises, his prayers when it is not her praise he sings? A man may be as rich as Croesus, as poor as Job, he may be a slave or a tyrant, but there is no horizon wide enough if woman turns her back.’
He smiled as though speaking to some distant memory.
‘When woman is not the supreme ambition of man, when she is not the goal of all things in this world, then life holds no joys, no pains.’
He slapped his thigh and got to his feet.
‘When I was young, I used to go out to the Great Rock and watch the sunset. It was magnificent. This, I thought, was true beauty. Later I saw plains and forests shrouded in a quiet mantle of snow, I saw palaces set in glorious gardens and many wonders, and I wondered if this was what paradise would be like.’
He laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘Well, I can tell you now that without women – without the houris – paradise would be a still life.’
His trembling fingers dug into my flesh, shaking my whole being. Like a salamander, my uncle had been reborn from his ashes.
‘Sunset, springtime, the blue of the sea, the stars in the sky, all the things that entrance us exert their magic only in the orbit of woman, my son . . . Because beauty, the one, true, unique beauty is woman. The rest, all the rest, exists simply to adorn her.’
His other hand seized my other shoulder. He stared into my eyes, searching for something. Our noses were almost touching, our breath mingled. I had never seen him like this, except perhaps on the day he came to tell Germaine that his nephew had become their son.
‘If a woman loves you, Younes, if she truly loves you, and if you have the wisdom to appreciate this great privilege, then there is no god to touch you.’
Before going back upstairs to his study, standing with one hand on the banister, he said:
‘Run after her . . . One day, man will surely be able to catch a comet, but all the glories of this world will not console the man who allows the real opportunity in his life to slip away.’
I did not listen.
Fabrice Scamaroni married Hélène Lefèvre in July 1951. It was a beautiful wedding; there were so many guests that the marriage took place in two acts: one for the village, the other for colleagues – a contingent of journalists including the editorial team of L’Écho d’Oran – artists, athletes and much of the cream of Oran society, among them the celebrated writer Emmanuel Roblès. Act One took place in Aïn Turck, on the vast beachfront estate owned by a rich friend of Madame Scamaroni. I felt ill at ease at the reception. Émilie was there on Simon’s arm. Madame Cazenave was there, looking a little lost. Her partnership with Simon was thriving; their fashion house already dressed the richest ladies in Río Salado and Hamman Bouhadjar, and in spite of tough competition was becoming the leading fashion house among well-to-do women in Oran. During the crush at the buffet table, Simon stepped on my foot. He didn’t apologise. He looked for Émilie in the crowd and headed straight for her. What had she told him? Why was my oldest friend suddenly behaving as though I did not exist?
I was too tired to ask him.
Act Two was for the people of the village; Río Salado was determined to celebrate the marriage of its favoured son in privacy. Pépé Rucillio donated fifty sheep and paid for the finest méchoui specialists to come from Sebdou. André’s father, Jaime Jiménez Sosa, offered the newly-weds a vast swathe of his estate for the occasion, which was bounded by palm trees hung with drapes and silks and garlands. Plush benches were set out among the trees, tables groaned under the weight of food and flowers. In the centre, a huge marquee had been erected, lavishly decorated with rugs and cushions. The servants, mostly Arab boys and beautiful young black men, were dressed as eunuchs in embroidered waistcoats, billowing calf-length breeches and yellow turbans studded with jewels – it looked like a scene from the Thousand and One Nights. Here, too, I felt awkward. Émilie did not leave Simon’s side for a moment, while Madame Cazenave watched me like a hawk as though afraid of some jealous tantrum. In the evening, a famous orchestra of Arabo-Judaic music from Constantine, the mythical hanging city, thrilled the assembled company. I was barely listening, sitting on a crate at the far end of the festivities. Jelloul brought me a plate of food and whispered in my ear that the look on my face would curdle all the happiness on earth. I knew I looked miserable; I knew that instead of sitting sulking, spoiling everyone else’s enjoyment, I should go home. But I couldn’t. Fabrice would have been offended, and I was determined not to lose him too.
With Jean-Christophe gone, Fabrice married and Simon being elusive since starting up in business with Madame Cazenave, my world felt emptier. I got up early, spent my day in the pharmacy, but as soon as I pulled down the shutters in the evening, I had no idea what to do. At first I went to André’s diner and played pool with José and then headed home; later I stopped going out at night altogether. I would go up to my room, pick up a book and read the same chapter over and over without making any sense of it. I could not seem to concentrate, even when serving customers in the pharmacy. More than once I misread a doctor’s scrawl and handed over the wrong medicine. Sometimes I would stand in front of the shelves for minutes at a time, unable to remember where something was. At dinner, Germaine would have to pinch me under the table to wake me up. I barely ate. My uncle felt sorry for me, but he said nothing.
Events seemed to gather pace, but since I was too tired to keep up, they began to leave me behind. Fabrice and Hélène had their first child – a beautiful chubby-cheeked little boy – and moved to Oran. Shortly afterwards, Fabrice’s mother sold her house in Río Salado and moved to Aïn Ture. Whenever I walked past their derelict, boarded house, I felt a lump in my throat. A part of my life had disappeared, an island had vanished from my archipelago. I began to avoid the street, to go around the block, to pretend that part of the village had never existed. André married a cousin three years older than him and took off for the United States. They went there for a month, but the honeymoon was indefinitely extended. He left José to run the diner, though it no longer drew the crowds it once had now that the novelty of playing pool had palled.