‘Leave him alone,’ I told him.
Jean-Christophe looked me up and down.
‘I didn’t ask you for anything,’ he said.
As he limped away towards the exit of the barracks, I couldn’t help but remember all the things we had shared, the memories of our youthful innocence, and a sudden wave of sadness came over me. I watched him shamble away, stooped and stumbling, and as he went, a whole life went with him. I realised that the reason the stories my mother had told me long ago had seemed unsatisfying was because they ended with the era Jean-Christophe had chosen to ally himself to – an era that now shuffled away with him towards some uncertain destiny.
I walked through the teeming streets, through the singing and the shouting, beneath the fluttering green and white flags as the trams clanged and clattered past. The next day, 5 July, Algeria would have an identity card, a symbol, a national anthem and a thousand other things still to devise. On the balconies, women whooped and wept tears of joy. Children danced in the squares, climbing over monuments and fountains, up lamp posts and on to car roofs. Their cries drowned out the fanfares and the tumult, the sirens and the chatter; they were already tomorrow.
I went down to the port to watch the exodus. The quays were crowded with passengers, luggage and waving handkerchiefs. Steamers waiting to lift anchor groaned beneath the weight of the sorrow of those leaving. Families searched for each other in the crowds, children wept, old men slept on their suitcases, praying in their sleep that they might never wake. Leaning on a railing overlooking the port, I thought of Émilie, who might well be here in this crowd of helpless souls jostling before the door to the unknown. She might already have left; she might be dead; she might still be packing her cases in one of the buildings I could see around me. I stayed at the port until the dawn broke, leaning over the railing, unable to reconcile myself to the idea that something that had never really begun was truly over.
4. Aix-en-Provence (Present Day)
. . .’
Fabrice Scamaroni had phoned a week ago to let me know.
These were my uncle’s last words, the words he said to me on his deathbed in Río Salado. Even now, half a century later, his cracked voice still rings in my head like a prophecy: Is it to disprove this truth or to face it that I have come so far? The plane wheels and turns and suddenly, out of nowhere, I see France. My heart stutters, and an invisible hand closes around my throat. It is so intense that I can feel my fingers ripping through the fabric of the armrest. Now I see rocky mountain peaks reflecting the sunlight, perpetual, implacable sentinels that keep watch over the shore, indifferent to the raging sea that dashes itself against the cliffs at their feet. Then, as the plane wheels, Marseille . . . like a vestal virgin lazing in the sun. Sprawled over the hillsides, radiant, dazzling, her navel bared, hip exposed to the four winds, she pretends to sleep, pretends not to notice the murmur of the waves and the whispers that drift in from the hinterland. Marseille, the legendary city, the land of titans, the landing place of the gods of Olympus, the crossroads of lost horizons, manifold because she is boundless in her generosity; Marseille, my last battlefield, where I finally had to lay down my arms, crushed by my inability to accept a challenge, to be worthy of my own happiness.