‘I hope my writings will prove useful to future generations,’ he had said.
‘They will be your gift to posterity,’ I replied, thinking it best to flatter him.
His features tensed. ‘Posterity has never made the grave’s embrace less cruel,’ he said. ‘It simply assuages our fear of death, because there is no better cure for our inevitable mortality than the illusion of a beautiful eternity. But there is one illusion I still hold dear: that is the thought of an enlightened nation. That is the only future I still dream of.’
When I looked out into the distance from my balcony and saw nothing looming on the horizon, I wondered if there was life after war.
A week after Pépé Rucillio’s speech, André Sosa came to see me. He parked his car opposite the vineyards, leaned out of the window and waved for me to come down. I shook my head. He opened the car door and stepped out. He was wearing a large beige coat, unbuttoned to reveal his pot belly, and a pair of leather boots that came up to his knees. From his broad smile, I knew he had come in peace.
‘Fancy coming out for the day in the old banger?’
‘I’m fine where I am.’
‘Okay, then, I’ll come up.’
I heard him say hello to Germaine in the hallway, climb the stairs, then open the door to my room. Before he stepped out on to the balcony to join me, he glanced around at the unmade bed, then crossed the room to the mantelpiece on which sat the wooden horse Jean-Christophe had given me a lifetime ago, after he beat me up at school.
‘Those were the good old days, weren’t they, Jonas?’
‘Days don’t get old, Dédé, we’re the ones who get old.’
‘You’re right. It’s just a pity we don’t improve with the years, like our wine.’
He came outside, propped his elbows on the balcony and surveyed the vineyards.
‘No one in the village thinks you had anything to do with the fellagas. Krimo was completely out of order. I saw him yesterday and told him to his face.’
He turned to me, trying not to look at my bruises.
‘I feel bad that I didn’t come sooner.’
‘What good would it have done?’
‘I don’t know . . . You don’t fancy coming with me to Tlemcen? Oran is impossible now, people are being murdered every day, but I need a change of scenery. Río Salado depresses me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘We won’t stay long. I know a little restaurant . . .’
‘Don’t, Dédé.’
He shook his head slowly.
‘I understand – not that I approve. It’s not good to hole up here, brooding over your bitterness.’
‘I’m not bitter. I just need to be on my own.’
‘Am I bothering you?’
I stared off into the distance so I would not have to answer.
‘It’s insane, this thing that’s happening,’ he sighed, leaning on the balcony again. ‘Who would have thought our country would be brought so low?’
‘It was obvious, Dédé. A whole nation lay down while we walked all over them. Sooner or later they were bound to get up. That’s when we lost our footing.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
This time I turned to him and said:
‘Dédé, how much longer can we go on lying to ourselves?’
He brought his fist up to his mouth and blew on it, measuring his words carefully.
‘It’s true, there was a lot wrong with how things were, but to go from there to waging a vicious, all-out war? It’s not right. There are hundreds of thousands dead, Jonas; that’s too many people, isn’t it?’
‘Are you asking me?’
‘I’m lost . . . I honestly don’t understand what’s happening to Algeria. And the French obviously don’t either. They’re talking about self-determination. What exactly do they mean by that? Does it mean we wipe the slate clean and start again with everyone equal, or . . .’
He did not finish the sentence. His disquiet turned to anger; his knuckles were white.
‘De Gaulle doesn’t understand a fucking thing about our suffering,’ he said, referring to the General’s famous statement to the Algerians on 4 June 1958 – ‘I have understood you’ – which had stirred up the crowds and given their illusions a stay of execution.
A week later, on 9 December 1960, the whole population of Río Salado went to the neighbouring village of Aïn Trémouchent, where the General was holding a meeting that the parish priest called the ‘last prayer mass’. The rumours circulating had prepared people for the worst, but they were not to be persuaded. They were united by fear and so blinkered they would not see the harsh truths bearing down on them. I had heard them, at dawn, taking their cars out of the garages, forming a convoy, joking and laughing to each other, shouting to drown out the insistent voice that would not let them sleep, the voice that said endlessly, relentlessly, that the die was cast. They laughed, they argued, they pretended they still had some say in the matter. But they no longer believed it; their brash self-assurance was belied by their bewildered faces. They hoped that by keeping their spirits up, by keeping up appearances, they might compel destiny to see reason, force its hand, produce a miracle. They had forgotten that the countdown had already begun, that there was nothing left to salvage. Only a blind man would have carried on walking through their dark Utopia, waiting for a day that had already dawned on a new era; an era in which they were to play no part.
I went out and wandered the deserted streets. Then I headed out past the Jewish cemetery to see the charred ruins of the house where, in a fleeting moment, I had had my first sexual experience. A horse stood grazing next to the old stables, indifferent to the shifting fortunes of men. I sat on a low wall; sat there until noon, trying to picture Madame Cazenave. All I could see was Simon’s car in flames, and Émilie, half naked, clutching her child.
The cars came back from Aïn Trémouchent. They had left Río Salado that morning in a fanfare of horns, waving the tricolour; they returned like a funeral cortège, their flags at half-mast. A pall fell over the village. Every face bore the signs of mourning for a hope long since doomed, a dream they had tried to keep alive with prayers and incense. Algeria was to be Algerian.
The following morning, on the front of one of the winemaker’s cellars, someone had had daubed in red paint the letters FLN.
In the spring of 1962, Oran held its breath. I was looking for Émilie. I feared for her. I needed her. I loved her and had come back to tell her so. I felt ready to brave hurricanes and thunderbolts, to flout every sacrilege, every blasphemy. I could not bear to go on longing for her, reaching out to touch her only to feel her absence in my fingertips. I told myself, she will turn you away, she will say terrible things, she will bring your world crashing down around you, but still I went. I was no longer afraid of breaking the oath I had made, of crushing my soul in my fist; I was no longer afraid of offending the gods, of living in infamy to the end of my days. At the bookshop, someone told me that Émilie had left work as usual one night and that they had not heard a word from her since. I remembered the number of the tram she had taken the last time I had come here. At every stop I got off and scoured the nearby streets. I thought I recognised her in every woman I passed on the street, in every shadow disappearing round a corner or into a doorway. I asked for her in grocers’ shops and police stations; I asked the postmen and although I came back empty-handed every night, never for a moment did I feel I was wasting my time. How could I hope to find her in a city under siege, in this midst of the chaos, the fury of men? Algerian Algeria was being delivered by forceps in a torrent of tears and blood as French Algeria lay bleeding to death. And even after seven years of war and horror, though both were on the brink of exhaustion, they still found the strength to go on slaughtering one other.