Germaine found me slumped by the window, face pressed against the glass. For once, she did not disturb me. She tiptoed out of the room and soundlessly closed the door.
16
I THOUGHT about jumping on a train and getting as far away from Río Salado as possible. I thought of Algiers. Of Bougie. Of Timimoun. But I could not picture myself strolling down a boulevard, or sitting on a rock staring out to sea, or meditating in a cave. I could not run away from myself. Whatever train or plane or boat I took, I would end up trailing this unshakeable thing that filled me with its bile. But I knew I could not go on brooding in my room. I had to go away. It did not matter whether I went a thousand miles or simply to the next village, I needed to be somewhere else. It was impossible for me to live in Río Salado now that Simon had married Émilie.
I remembered a deranged evangelist who used to preach on market days in Jenane Jato. He was a tall man, thin as a rake, who wore a threadbare cassock. Every week he would stand on a rock, ranting and raving: ‘Misery is a dead end that stops at a brick wall. If you want to escape it, you must back out carefully, never taking your eyes off the wall. That way it looks as though the wall is receding.’
I had gone back to Oran, to the neighbourhood where I had lived with my uncle. Perhaps I was trying to go back in time to my schooldays so that, older, wiser, I might return to the present, a virgin in mind and body, with a thousand opportunities open to me and the wisdom not to waste them. Seeing my uncle’s old house did nothing to ease my pain. I did not recognise the place – it had been repainted green, the bougainvillea had been ripped out, leaving the low wall bare, the shutters on the windows were closed. There was no echo of my childhood here.
I knocked on the door of the house across the street, but it was not Lucette who opened it. ‘She’s moved,’ a strange woman said to me. ‘She didn’t leave a forwarding address.’
I wandered around the city, listening to the dull roar from the football stadium, but it could not drown out the roar within me. In Medina J’dida – the ghetto where Arabs and Kabyles lived – I sat on a café terrace and watched the crowds on the Tahtaha square, convinced that I would eventually spot the ghost of my father in his green coat. Men in starched white burnous moved among beggars in rags and tatters. An ancient world was being rebuilt here of bazaars and hammams, silversmiths, cobblers and tailors. Down the centuries, Medina J’dida had never given up hope. It had survived cholera, it had survived scorn and contempt. It was Muslim, Arabic and Berber to its fingertips. Cut off behind the Moorish walls of the mosques, it rose above the insults and the slander, considered itself dignified and noble, proud of its craftsmen, of folk heroes like S’hab el Baroud and his Raqba – respectable criminals who charmed children and women of easy virtue and made the locals feel secure. How had I managed to live without this part of my birthright? I should have come here regularly to fill the gaps in my identity. Río Salado and I no longer spoke the same language; how should I speak now? When I lived in Río Salado, had I been Jonas or Younes? Why, when my friends laughed, did I hesitate a moment before laughing with them? Why had I always felt that I had to carve out a place for myself among my friends? Why did I feel guilty whenever I met Jelloul’s eyes? Had I simply been tolerated, integrated, biddable? What had stopped me from being myself, forced me to identify with the society I was growing up in and turn my back on my own people? I was a shadow, indecisive, easily led. I was constantly listening for some slight, some insult, the way an adopted child is more aware of his parents’ momentary indifference than he is of their love. But even now, as I tried to redeem myself in the eyes of Medina J’dida, I suspected I was still deluding myself, absolving myself and looking for someone else to blame. If Émilie had slipped through my fingers, who was to blame – Río Salado, Madame Cazenave, Jean-Christophe, Simon? The fault, I knew, was mine; I had not had the courage of my convictions. I could find excuses for myself, but the blame would still be mine. Now that I had lost face, I was looking for a place to hide.
Tahtaha loosened the vice-like grip of my fears and failings, and my pain subsided as I wandered through the crowds, watching the tireless dance of the water-sellers, bells on their ankles, water skins slung across their chests, coloured hats whipping in the wind as they pirouetted in a whirl of frills and flounces, pouring cool water flavoured with oil of cade into copper goblets, which passers-by drank down like magical elixirs. I imagined myself slaking my thirst with the crowd, smiling as the water-seller performed a quick dance, frowning as someone ran off without paying, ruining his good humour . . .
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ The waiter roused me from my thoughts.
I wasn’t sure of anything . . .
And why wouldn’t people leave me in peace?
The waiter stared at me, puzzled, when I got up to leave, and it wasn’t until I got back to the European part of the city that I realised I had left without paying.
In a smoky bar where discarded cigarette butts lay smouldering in the ashtray, I stared at the glass in front of me, which seemed to be mocking me. I wanted to drink myself senseless – I felt myself unworthy to resist temptation – but though I tried to pick the glass up a hundred times, my arm refused to bring it to my lips. ‘Got a cigarette?’ asked the woman sitting next to me. ‘Pardon?’ ‘Guy with a handsome face like yours has no business being miserable.’ Her breath stank of alcohol. I was exhausted. I could barely see clearly. She was so caked in make-up that she barely had a face. Her eyes were invisible behind grotesque false eyelashes, her large mouth was flaming red, her teeth stained from smoking. ‘You got troubles, pretty boy? Well don’t worry, I’m here to sort them out . . . The good Lord sent me to find you.’ She slipped her arm through mine and, with a jerk, pulled me away from the bar. ‘Come on . . . there’s nothing for you here . . .’
For seven days and seven nights she kept me in a squalid little room on the top floor of a fondouk that stank of hashish and beer. I can’t say whether she was blonde or brunette, young or old, fat or thin. I remember only her big lips and her voice, ruined by cigarettes and cheap booze. Then one night, she told me I’d had my money’s worth and pushed me towards the door, kissing me on the mouth – ‘That one’s on the house.’ Before I left she said, ‘Get a grip on yourself. There’s only one god here on earth, and that’s you. If you don’t like the world, make one you like better. Fortune smiles on those who smile on her.’
Strange how sometimes we find the wisdom we lack in the most unlikely places. My life had been turned upside down, and it was a drunken whore who set me on my feet again with a few choice words in a sordid room in a dark, dingy hotel that reeled and swayed with the sound of sex and fighting. By the time I reached the door of the fondouk, I was feeling better and the evening breeze cleared my head completely. I walked from one end of the seafront to the other, looking out at the boats in the port, the cranes on the quays, and deep in the night, the trawlers moving over the silent waters like fireflies mirroring the stars. Then I went to a Turkish bath, where I scrubbed myself clean and slept the sleep of the just. The next morning at dawn, I caught the bus back to Río Salado, determined that if I caught myself wallowing in self-pity for even a moment, I would rip my heart out with my bare hands.