I was bored.
I didn’t like to go to the beach. Now that all my friends had gone, I no longer wanted to laze idly in the sun. The breaking waves snuffed out my dreams; there was no one there to share them with me. When I did go to the beach, as often as not I didn’t even get out of my car. I would park on a clifftop and sit behind the steering wheel, staring out at the rocks and the waves breaking against them in soaring sprays. I could lose myself for hours, parked in the shade of a tree, with my hands on the wheel or my arms behind my head. The cries of the seagulls and the children whirled around me, distracting me from my worries, bringing a sort of peace that I clung to until darkness came and the last glow of a cigarette had flickered out.
I thought about moving back to Oran. I was miserable in Río Salado. I no longer seemed to recognise the place. I was living in a parallel world. I recognised familiar faces, but I was afraid that if I should reach out to touch them, there would be nothing but the wind. It was the end of an era; a page had been turned, and the new page before me was blank, frustrating, unpleasant to the touch. I needed to take stock. I needed a change of scenery, a new horizon. And – why not? – to sever the ties that no longer bound me to anything.
I felt rootless.
I thought about trying to trace my mother and sister. I still missed them terribly. Without them I felt helpless and heartbroken. From time to time I would go back to Jenane Jato in the hope of gleaning some piece of information that might lead me to them. But here, too, I had misjudged things. Jenane Jato was a world of survival and of festering discontent – no one had time to worry about a woman and her deaf-mute child. Every day, thousands of people poured into Jenane Jato. What had once been a shanty town in the scrubland was now a teeming neighbourhood of noisy streets, angry carters, watchful stallholders, crowded hammams, asphalt roads and smoky workshops. Peg-Leg was still there, surrounded now by competition. The barber no longer sat on a munitions crate to shave old men; he had a proper salon now, with a swivel chair and a brass cabinet for his tools. The courtyard house we had once lived in had been completely rebuilt, and Bliss, the broker, was in charge again. He wouldn’t recognise my mother, he told me, since he had never spoken to her. No one knew where my mother and sister were; no one had seen them since the fire. I managed to track down Batoul, who had traded tarot cards and crystal balls for ledgers and accounting books. She was better at business than she had been at dealing with other people’s misfortune, and her Turkish baths were always full. She had promised to let me know if she heard anything about my mother. It had been two years since I had spoken to her.
I thought that looking for my mother again might take my mind off the misery I had felt since Jean-Christophe left, the absence that gnawed at my heart whenever I thought about Émilie. I couldn’t bear to go on living in the same village as her, seeing her in the street, walking past as though I felt nothing when in fact my days and nights were haunted by the thought of her. Now that she no longer came to see me at the pharmacy, I felt the terrible scope of my loneliness. I knew that the wound would not quickly heal, but I could think of no cure. Émilie would never forgive me; she felt terribly bitter, perhaps she even hated me. Her anger was so palpable it burned into my brain. She did not even have to look at me – in fact these days she never looked at me – since even when she turned away I could feel the blaze in her eyes, like underwater volcanoes that a million tons of water and the darkness of the deep could not extinguish.
I was sitting having breakfast in a little café on the seafront in Oran when someone knocked on the window. It was Simon Benyamin. He was wearing a thick winter coat, and when he pushed his hood back, I saw he was almost entirely bald now.
He was surprised and delighted to see me. He pulled open the door and came inside, trailing an icy blast of wind.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to a real restaurant, where the fish is as tender as a teenage girl’s buttocks.’
I told him I’d almost finished. He frowned, then took off his coat and scarf and sat opposite me.
‘So, what’s good in this greasy spoon?’
He waved to the waiter and ordered lamb kebabs, a green salad and a half-bottle of red wine; then, rubbing his hands excitedly, he said:
‘So, are you playing hard to get, or are you just sulking? I waved at you the other day in Lourmel and you completely ignored me.’
‘In Lourmel?’
‘Yeah, last Thursday. You were coming out of the dry cleaner’s.’
‘There’s a dry cleaner’s in Lourmel?’
I couldn’t remember. For some time now I would simply jump into my car and drive wherever it took me. Twice I had found myself in the bustle of the souk in Tlemcen without knowing how I had got there. I was suffering from a waking form of sleepwalking that took me to places I barely knew. Germaine would ask me where I had been and I could not remember.
‘You’ve lost a lot of weight. What’s wrong with you?’
‘I don’t know, Simon. I ask myself the same question . . . What about you, what’s wrong with you?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Then why do you look the other way when you see me in the street?’
‘Me? Why would I look away when I see my best friend?’
‘People are fickle. It’s been more than a year since you dropped by my house.’
‘That’s just the business. It’s growing so fast and the competition is vicious. I spend more time in Oran than I do in Río Salado. Surely you don’t think I was ignoring you?’
I wiped my mouth. I was finding the conversation irritating. There were too many false notes. The Simon who was sitting across the table was not the Simon I knew – the life and soul of the party, my confidant, my ally. In his meteoric rise, he had left me far behind. Maybe I was jealous of his success, of the new car he parked on the village square so the local kids could crowd around and gawp, of his radiant health, the fact that he had lost weight. Maybe I resented his partnership with Madame Cazenave. But I knew it was none of these things. The fact was that I was the one who had changed. Jonas was fading and Younes was coming to the fore. I was becoming bitter and mean, a latent spitefulness, never articulated, that welled in me like heartburn. I could no longer stomach the parties, the weddings and the balls, the people on café terraces. Their good humour irritated me. And I had learned to hate . . . I hated Madame Cazenave, hated her with every fibre of my being. Hatred is corrosive; it eats away at the soul, lives inside your head, takes possession of you like a djinn. How had I come to loathe and despise a woman who no longer meant anything to me? When you can find no reason for your misery, you look for someone to blame. Madame Cazenave was my scapegoat. Hadn’t she seduced and abandoned me? Wasn’t it because of that fleeting mistake that she had made me swear to give up Émilie?
Émilie!
Just thinking of her, I felt myself wasting away.
The waiter brought a basket of bread and a salad of black olives and cornichons. Simon thanked him and asked if he could have his kebabs as soon as possible, as he had a meeting. After two or three mouthfuls, he leaned over the table and whispered, as though afraid someone would overhear:
‘I’m sure you’re wondering what I’m so excited about . . . If I tell you something, can you keep it a secret? You know what people are like . . .’
In the face of my indifference, his excitement faded. He frowned.
‘There’s something you’re not telling me, Jonas, something serious.’
‘It’s just my uncle . . .’
‘Are you sure you’re not pissed off with me?’