"Very well, Madame, we'll make a good Christian of him. How old is he?"
"Nine."
"You're right to have him start the catechism very early. In three years he'll be perfectly prepared for the big day."
"No," the grandmother said curtly. "He must do it right away."
1. An illegible word.
"Right away? But the Communions will be a month from now, and he can only approach the altar after at least two years of catechism."
The grandmother explained their situation. But the priest was not at all convinced that it was impossible to take religious instruction while doing secondary-school studies. With patience and kindness, he cited his own experience, gave examples . . . The grandmother stood up. "In that case he won't make his First Communion. Come, Jacques," and she pulled the child toward the exit.
But the priest hurried after them. "Wait, Madame, wait." He led her gently back to her seat, tried to reason with her.
But the grandmother shook her head like a stubborn old mule. "It's right away or he'll do without it."
At last the priest gave in. It was agreed that Jacques would make his First Communion in one month after an accelerated course of religious instruction. And the priest, shaking his head, accompanied them to the door, where he patted the child's cheek. "Listen carefully to what you're told," he said. And he looked at him with a sort of sadness.
So Jacques added the catechism classes on Thursdays and Saturday afternoons to his supplementary lessons with M. Bernard. The examination for the scholarship and the First Communion were both drawing near, and his days were overloaded, leaving no time for play, even and especially on Sundays, when, if he could put down his notebooks, his grandmother would impose domestic tasks and errands on him, citing the future sac-
rifices the family had agreed to for his education and the many years thereafter when he would no longer do anything for the household.
"But," said Jacques, "I might fail. The exam is hard." And in a certain sense he sometimes would wish for just that, finding that his young pride could not bear the weight of the sacrifices they were always talking to him about.
His grandmother looked at him in astonishment. She had never thought of that possibility. Then she shrugged and, not worrying about the contradiction, "Go ahead and fail," she said. "And I'll warm your ass for you." The catechism course was given by the second priest of the parish: tall, almost endlessly so in his black robe, thin, with hollow cheeks and a nose like an eagle's beak, as hard as the old priest was gentle and good. His method of teaching was recitation, and, though it was primitive, it was perhaps the only method suited to the rough, obdurate children to whom it was his mission to give their spiritual training. They had to learn the questions and responses: "Who is God?"a . . . These words meant absolutely nothing to the young catechumens, and Jacques, who had an excellent memory, recited them imperturbably without ever understanding them. When another child was reciting, he would let his thoughts wander, daydream, or make faces with the others. One day the tall priest caught him making one of those faces, and, believing the grimace was
a. See catechism
aimed at him, thought it right to enforce respect for the sacred character of his office; he called Jacques up before the whole assembly of children, and there, with his long bony hand, without further explanation, he hit him with all his strength. Jacques almost fell under the force of the blow. "Now go back to your place," the priest said. The child stared at him, without a tear (and for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution), and returned to his bench. The left side of his face was smarting, the taste of blood was in his mouth. With the tip of his tongue, he discovered the inside of his cheek was cut by the blow and was bleeding. He swallowed his blood.
Throughout the rest of the sacramental preparation, his mind was elsewhere, and he was looking quietly at the priest, without reproach as without friendship when he spoke to him, flawlessly reciting the questions and responses about the divine nature and sacrifice of Christ; and, a hundred leagues away from the place where he was reciting, he was dreaming of that double examination that now had come to seem a single one. Immersed in his work as he was in that persisting dream, he was moved only, and in an obscure way, by the evening Masses, more and more of them in that dreadful cold church, but the organ made him listen to a music he was hearing for the first time, having until then heard nothing but stupid tunes; dreaming richer, deeper dreams featuring sacerdotal objects and vestments glistening in the semi-darkness, to meet at last the mystery,
but it was a nameless mystery where the divine personages named and rigorously defined in the catechism played no role at all, they were simply an extension of the bare world where he lived; but the warm, inward, and ambiguous mystery that now bathed him only deepened the everyday mystery of his mother's silence or her small smile when he entered the dining room at evening and, alone in the apartment, she had not lit the kerosene lamp, letting the night invade the room step by step, herself a darker denser form gazing pensively out the window, watching the brisk—but, for her, silent— activity of the street; and the child would stop on the doorsill, his heart heavy, full of a despairing love for his mother, and for something in his mother that did not belong or no longer belonged to the world and to the triviality of the days. Then it was the First Communion, of which Jacques remembered little except confession the day before, when he had admitted the only acts he had been told were sinful—very few, that is—and to "Have you had sinful thoughts?" he said, "Yes, Father," at a guess, though he did not know how a thought could be sinful, and till the next day he lived in fear that he would unwittingly let out a sinful thought or, and this was clearer to him, one of those objectionable words that populated his schoolboy vocabulary, and as best he could he held back the words at least until the morning of the ceremony when, dressed in a sailor suit with an armband, equipped with a small prayerbook and a chaplet of little white beads, all supplied by the least poor among their relatives (Aunt Marguerite, etc.), holding a taper in the center aisle in a line of other chil-
dren carrying tapers under the ecstatic eyes of their families standing in the pews, and the thunder of the music that exploded now chilled him, filled him with dread and with an extraordinary exaltation where for the first time he could feel his strength, his boundless ability to prevail and to live, an exaltation that stayed with him throughout the ceremony, taking him away from everything that was happening, including the instant of Communion, and lasting through their return home and the meal to which their relatives had been invited, around a [richer] than usual table, and which bit by bit excited the guests who were accustomed to eat and drink sparingly, so that an enormous gaiety gradually filled the room, destroying Jacques's elation and so shaking him that when dessert came, at the peak of the general excitement, he burst out sobbing. "What's the matter with you?" his grandmother said.
"I don't know, I don't."
And his exasperated grandmother slapped him. "That way you'll know why you're crying," she said.
But in truth he did know why when he looked across the table at his mother, who was giving him her small sad smile.
"That's well over with," said M. Bernard. "Well, now we get to work." A few more days of hard work, with the last lessons at M. Bernard's (describe the apartment?), and then, one morning at the trolley stop near Jacques's home, the four pupils were grouped around M. Bernard, each equipped with writing pad, ruler, and pen case, and Jacques could see his mother and grand-
mother waving energetically to them from their balcony.
The lycée where the examination was given was all the way across town, at the other end of the arc the city makes around the bay, in a district that had once been rich and dull, but, thanks to Spanish immigrants, had become one of the most crowded and lively parts of Algiers. The lycée itself was a huge square building that dominated the street. You entered i
t by steps at either side and, in front, large monumental steps flanked on both sides by meager gardens planted with banana trees and1 protected from student vandalism by wire fencing. The central steps led to an arcade connecting the steps at the two sides; from the arcade opened the monumental door used on major occasions, to one side of which, for everyday use, was a much smaller door that led to the glassed-in cabin of the concierge.
It was in that arcade—among the first students to arrive, who on the whole were able to hide their nervousness under a casual manner, except a few whose anxiety was betrayed by their pale countenances and their silence—that M. Bernard and his pupils were waiting in front of the closed door, in the early morning when the air was still cool and the street still damp before the sun covered it with dust. They were a good half hour early, huddled silently around their teacher, who found nothing to say to them and then left, saying he would return.
1. No word appears here in the manuscript.
Indeed they saw him come back in a few minutes, elegant in the felt hat and spats he had put on for the occasion, holding in each hand a package of tissue paper wrapped and twisted at the top to make a handle, and as he approached, they saw that the paper was spotted with grease. "Here are some croissants," said M. Bernard. "Eat one now and save the other for ten o'clock." They thanked him and ate, but the heavy dough once chewed was difficult to swallow. "Don't lose your head," the teacher kept saying. "Carefully read the wording of the problem and the subject of the composition. Read them over several times. You'll have time." Yes, they would read it over several times, they would obey him, with him there were no obstacles in life, it was enough to let themselves be guided by him. Now there was a hubbub by the smaller door. The students, numbering about sixty, headed in that direction. An attendant had opened the door and was reading a list. Jacques's name was one of the first to be read. He clutched his teacher's hand, he hesitated. "Go, my son," said M. Bernard. Jacques, trembling, went to the door, and, as he was going through it, he turned back to his teacher. He was there, big, solid; he was smiling calmly at Jacques and nodding reassuringly.a
At noon M. Bernard was waiting for them at the exit. They showed him their work papers. Santiago was the only one who had made a mistake in a problem. "Your composition is very good," he said tersely to Jacques.
a. check scholarship program.
At one o'clock he accompanied them back. At four o'clock he was still there, and he looked over their work. "Come on," he said, "we have to wait." Two days later the five of them were again in front of the small door at ten o'clock in the morning. The door opened and the attendant again read a list of names, this one much shorter, of the successful candidates. In the clamor Jacques did not hear his name. But he received a joyful slap on the back and heard M. Bernard say to him, "Bravo, moustique. You passed."
Only the nice Santiago had failed, and they gazed at him with a sort of absentminded sadness. "It doesn't matter," he said, "it doesn't matter."
And Jacques no longer knew where he was, or what was happening, they were coming back all four on the trolley; "I'll go see your parents," M. Bernard said, "I'll go to Cormery's first because he's the closest," and in the poor dining room full now of women—there were his grandmother, his mother, who had taken the day off for the occasion (?), and their neighbors the Masson women—he stayed close to his teacher's side, breathing one last time the odor of cologne, pressing against the hearty warmth of that solid body, while the grandmother beamed in front of her neighbors. "Thank you, M. Bernard, thank you," she said, and he patted the child's head.
"You don't need me anymore," he said, "you'll have teachers who know more. But you know where I am, come see me if you need me to help you." He went out, and Jacques was left alone, lost among the women; then he dashed to the window and looked out at his teacher,
who waved at him one last time and who was leaving him alone henceforth, and, instead of the joy of success, a child's immense anguish wrung his heart, as if he knew in advance that this success had just uprooted him from the warm and innocent world of the poor—a world closed in on itself like an island in the society, where poverty took the place of family and community—to be hurtled into a strange world, one no longer his, where he could not believe the teachers were more learned than the one whose heart was all-knowing, and from now on he would have to learn, to understand without help, and become a man without the aid of the one man who had rescued him; would have to grow up and bring himself up alone, and it would be at the highest cost.
7 : Mondovi: The Settlement and the Father
aNow he was grown up . . . On the road from Bone to Mondovi the car that J. Cormery was in passed slow-moving jeeps bristling with guns ...
"M. Veillard?"
"Yes."
Framed in the doorway of his small farmhouse, the man gazing at Jacques Cormery was short but stocky, with rounded shoulders. With his left hand he held the door open, with his right he firmly gripped the jamb, so that while opening the way to his house he was at the same time barring the way. He must have been about forty, judging by the sparse graying hair that gave him a Roman look. But his tanned face with its regular features and bright eyes, his legs in khaki pants, a bit stiff but without fat or belly, his sandals and blue shirt with pockets made him seem much younger. He stood still listening to Jacques's explanation. Then: "Come in," he
a. Horse-drawn vehicle train ship plane.
said, and stepped aside. As Jacques went along the small whitewashed hallway, furnished with only a brown chest and a curved wooden umbrella stand, he heard the farmer laugh behind him. "So it's a pilgrimage! Well, frankly, you're just in time."
"Why?" asked Jacques.
"Come into the dining room," the farmer answered. "It's the coolest room."
The dining room was half veranda, with blinds of pliable straw, all but one of them lowered. Except for the table and buffet, both of blond wood and modern in style, the room was furnished with rattan chairs and deck chairs. When he turned around, Jacques saw that he was alone. He went to the veranda, and, through the space between the blinds, he saw a yard planted with ornamental peppertrees among which glittered two bright-red tractors. Beyond that, under a sun that at eleven was still bearable, began the rows of the vineyard. A moment later the farmer returned with a tray on which he had lined up a bottle of anisette, glasses, and a bottle of ice water.
The farmer raised his glass of milky liquid. "If you'd waited any longer, you might have found nothing here. And in any case not a single Frenchman to tell you about it."
"It's the old doctor who told me your farm is the one where I was born."
"Yes, it was part of the Saint-Apotre property, but my parents bought it after the war." Jacques looked around. "You were certainly not born here," Veillard said. "My parents rebuilt everything."
"Did they know my father before the war?"
"I don't believe so. They had settled right by the Tunisian border, then they wanted to move closer to civilization. For them Solferino was civilization."
"They didn't hear about the former manager?"
"No. Since you're from here, you know how it is. We don't preserve anything here. We tear down and we rebuild. We think about the future and forget the rest."
"Well," said Jacques, "I took your time for noth-ing.
"No," the other man said, "it's a pleasure." And he smiled at him.
Jacques finished his drink. "Did your parents remain near the border?"
"No, it's the forbidden zone. Near the dam. And it's obvious you don't know my father." He too swallowed the rest of his drink, and, as if he found an extra stimulus in it, he burst out laughing: "He's a real settler. Of the old school. You know, the ones they're bad-mouthing in Paris. And it's true he's always been a hard man. Sixty years old. But long and thin like a puritan with his [horse's] head. A kind of patriarch, you see. He sweated his Arab workers, and, in all fairness, his sons also. Then, last year, when they had to evacuate, it was a real free-for-all. Life i
n that region had become intolerable. You had to sleep with a gun. When the Raskil farm was attacked, you remember?"
"No," said Jacques.
"Yes, the father and his two sons had their throats cut, the mother and daughter raped over and over, then killed ... In short . . . The prefect was unfortunate
enough to tell a meeting of farmers that they would have to reconsider [colonial] issues, how they treated the Arabs, and that now a new day had come. Then he had to listen to the old man tell him no one on earth was going to lay down the law about his property. But from that day on he didn't open his mouth. Sometimes at night he would get up and go out. My mother would watch him through the blinds and she'd see him walking around his land. When the order to evacuate came, he said nothing. His grape harvest was over, his wine was in the vats. He opened the vats, and he went to a spring of brackish water that he'd diverted long ago, and he turned it back to run into his fields, and he equipped a tractor with a trench plow. For three days, at the wheel, bareheaded, saying not a word, he uprooted the vines all over his property. Think of it, that skinny old man bouncing around on his tractor, pushing the accelerator lever when the plow wasn't getting a vine that was bigger than the others, not stopping even to eat, my mother bringing him bread, cheese, and [sobrasada], which he ate calmly, the way he had done everything, throwing away the last chunk of bread and accelerating some more, all this from sunrise to sunset, without even looking at the mountains on the horizon, nor at the Arabs who'd soon found out and were watching him from a distance—they weren't saying anything either. And when a young captain, informed by who knows who, arrived and demanded an explanation, he said to him, 'Young man, since what we made here is a crime, it has to be wiped out.' When it was all finished, he headed toward the farmhouse, crossed the yard that was soaked