The Last Life (13 page)

My index finger insinuated itself into the gummed triangle, the pad of my flesh seeking the path of Thibaud's tongue, breaking the seal stuck by his saliva. It was easy. The envelope, stiff, did not tear. Inside, the single folded square of graph paper was flimsy and unworn. It seemed less substantial even than the envelope's fussy lining. The infant next to me, attracted by the rustling, extended a sticky fist, and I pulled away, pulled my body and Thibaud's fluttering page to the corner of my seat next to the aisle. The stewardess bumped my elbow with her buttock; she was hauling her infernal trolley to the front of the cabin. I was at the front of the cabin. I should have known better than to read Thibaud's letter then. The moment, the possible moment, had passed. But I, resolute, unfolded my momentously awaited page.

Three words. "
Je t'aime, Sagesse.
" That was all it said. I turned the paper over. I was looking for more ink, but there was none. He hadn't even signed it. I had been expecting answers: I was to get none. I stuffed the page back into its casing, unaware till too late that I was speaking aloud. "Fucking useless," I said. The stewardess, the mother, the infant recoiled aghast.

"Orange juice, please," said I.

My grandfather's great-aunt by marriage, Tata Christine, was a solo traveller. Not a glamorous adventuress trailing chiffon scarves to far-flung palaces, but a small, stout woman like an apple doll, with veiny forearms and bowlegs kept hidden beneath a voluminous black dress, always the same black dress, which she wore until it rusted and the seams pulled through. Then she would count out precisely the coins in her purse and buy the exact yardage necessary of the same black cloth, and make the dress anew.

In the two photographs I know of her, her hands are clasped against her ribs, holding herself in, and her hair, knotted in an invisible bun, is parted with military precision down the center of her scalp. By the time the pictures were taken, when my grandfather was a boy, she didn't have much hair, and its steely strands are separated by a wide gulf of parting, like a pipeline along her head. She doesn't smile, but the paucity of teeth left to her in age is evident from the puckering of her mouth. The effect is cheerful, as if she were smiling in spite of herself.

She must once have been young, lithe in billowing muslin and curls, winking and giggling with the laborers and barrel makers in her native Brittany village. She had a girlhood like any other, and a young-womanhood. But she was old and alone, resolutely old and alone, for so much of her long life that it is impossible for me to imagine her any other way.

Algeria was claimed by the French in 1830 and settled by
colons
from 1845 or so onwards—the year of Tata Christine's birth—but it was, throughout her youth, a wilderness of wild animals and violent fevers, a mythical dark shore, where the odds of a speedy demise all but outweighed any prospects. Had I been Tata Christine, I would simply have said no when my new husband—Charles, a policeman, perfectly well employed—proposed emigration. Or perhaps not: perhaps there was no muslin, there were no curls and no flirtations. Perhaps the indistinct outline of North Africa, for all its terrors, was a brighter form than the familiar trees and valleys and pathways of her childhood.

My great-great grandfather, Auguste, was the man with the idea. He was Charles's older brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton future was laid out in the rolls of iron and the stacks of planks to be soaked and hammered into shape. When he heard that land was being given away—a plot for every willing farmer—he dropped his tools and flung off his leather apron and proselytized, like an evangelical, until his own bemused wife Anne and his brother and young Christine, barely twenty, agreed to come with him.

Their journey was not, like mine, a matter of seven hours, mere grisling infants and malfunctioning headsets. The four adults, with Auguste and Anne's first two children, one still at the breast, set off on foot for Marseilles, their pots and blankets and salvaged treasures of home stacked onto a pair of sad-faced donkeys. The party slept in the open air, or in the shelter of generous farmers' barns. They ate poorly, they blistered, they pressed on. They piled aboard a rotten ship at Marseilles, pressed up against the mass of hopeful travellers, and vomited throughout the crossing.

Then they were born into the pitiless light of Africa. Their allotments were swamp in winter, dust in summer, the terrain long the home of vindictive creatures—from the mosquito to the jackal—that did not want to relinquish it. The native population too, elusive in their drapery, passing by at gawking distance, eyed the newcomers with disdain and rage. There was still war, then, between the French army and Algeria's insurgent tribes, a sowing of brutality and ill will that would yield its most bitter fruit only much later. The
colons
clustered in compounds and bolted their doors against the land, dreading the dawn of the new day.

I imagine that this is when Tata Christine ceased to be young. But perhaps not. After all, with the exception of Anne's infant, they all survived the first year. They learned to farm by farming, to shoot by shooting. They made mistakes. If they had prayed before, they prayed far more frequently, their conversations with God colloquial, constant, indispensable. They built a life of sorts. My great-grandfather was born, and two sisters, the last taking Anne's life in exchange for her own. Christine brought them all into the world, although God granted her none of her own, and in this way she found her calling: a midwife, a
sage-femme.

Charles died at forty-two. He might have died anyway, patrolling the streets and bars of his native town, but it was malaria, a specifically African ailment, that claimed him. Christine, all of thirty-eight, sewed her first black dress, slipped into it (now, surely, she was old) and away from their farm, leaving the land to Auguste, his second wife, and their clutch of skinny children.

It was 1883, and Christine began her travels. Back, back on foot and horseback, to the boats. Back, on an emptier ship, to Marseilles, and back, up the winding of time and the roads of her youth, to the place whence she had set out. Was France changed, or was she? Both, doubtless. The winters were too cold. She missed the shine of dark skin, the smells of fragrant spices. She lacked her sense of embattled mission. She quarrelled with her brother, in whose house she was forced to live. Not enough babies were being born to busy her, and those that were fell into the waiting palms of older, more known midwives. When her own sister-in-law called for another woman to deliver her child, Christine—a grey wool shawl around her black dress (still her first)—turned heel and set off back, back again. She was in France for all of a year and a half.

She settled in a cottage in a village not far—a day's travel—from her first, near enough to visit Auguste and his family, but far enough to elude the patriarch's tyrannical reach. She revelled in the rediscovered odors of Africa, in the colors of the sky and earth. She practiced the guttural twitches of the local language. She loved the light. In colonial terms she was an old hand, her wisdom desirable as it could never be in France: Christine soothed mysterious fevers, calmed rebellious stomachs; she knew how to ward off the
schkoumoun
and how to encourage the birth of sons.

A mother, a grandmother to the young women newly arrived from France, she was also in demand for the births in the hills, among the nomads and the mountain tribes. A swaddled man would beat on her door in the night, his bare feet cracked from the journey, and carry her back with him on his donkey to a settlement uncharted by the French, where an Arab or a Berber woman—sprawled, all belly, in a hut or tent, or on a blanket in a cave—puffed and screamed in the back of her throat, awaiting Tata Christine and deliverance. Two days, sometimes three at a time, Christine disappeared into the brush: she did not discuss these travels with her fellow Frenchmen, but they knew. Sometimes they heard the banging at her door, or the saddling of the animals at dawn. They certainly saw the food which appeared, afterwards, upon her shelves: the honeyed cakes and jars of olives that kept Tata Christine almost stout. During the war (the First), food, like men, was scarce; but the people in the hills did not forget her. Even when there were no babies to bring, my great-great-great-aunt's larder was stocked with gifts, bundles that appeared like orphans on her doorstep while she slept: a jug of oil, a basket of eggs, a trio of fat oranges.

When at last she moved into my grandfather's house—his own father, whom Christine had brought into the world, having but recently left it for eternity—she came ostensibly to help her nephew's wife. But the journey to Blida was her last: with a small trunk and her rusted black dress (she was truly ancient then), she came to their house to die. That was something, the one thing, to be undertaken within the embrace of the family. She whose sons and daughters numbered in the hundreds, if not the thousands, their colors and fates as scattered and various as the landscape, shuffled into the LaBasse house and withered there. She was buried next to her nephew, rosary beads between her fingers and her hands clasped—as in the photographs—to her ribs, holding herself in.

I did not, of course, go to Aunt Eleanor's to die. My life was just beginning, a fact I could never forget because it was so often repeated to me by Aunt Eleanor herself, given as she was to vigorous, impromptu hugs: "Lambkin, it'll all be okay. Don't be down. Your life is just beginning and it's gonna be great." She was as solid as my mother was fragile, an athletic woman in her mid-forties with a muscled jaw and a corona of auburn hair. Her traits were not unlike my mother's, but they sat differently, molded into an American form. Her eyes blinked more nakedly in their sockets. She favored denim or shorts on weekends. She came home from work with pink sneakers and sweat socks below her tailored skirt—an almost parodic indignity to my European, teenaged eye. She bleached, rather than waxed, her downy moustache, robustly unafraid of imperfection.

From the moment my plane landed at Logan Airport, America ceased to be mine. It had been, for me, a shining thing in the mind, the imaginary place of my future, the way Algeria was the imaginary place of my past. But Algeria would shimmer intransigent, forever untouchable; while America, what I saw of it that summer, assaulted me and was itself.

They were all waiting outside the smoked glass doors, the four of them, peering and waving and baring their orthodontic excellence (little Rachel's was still in progress, her mouth a glittering fiesta of tracks). They encircled me and seized my luggage: I clung to my handbag as Rachel tried, almost violently, to claim it. Ron, Eleanor's husband, kissed me on both cheeks ("You are French, after all," he joked in his nasal, high-pitched voice) and I got a mouthful of his beard, twice. He was a big man, and hairy, like my father, but sloppy somehow.

It was evening, but still hot, and the station wagon thumped on potholes as we wound out to the highway. The furnace breeze blew in the half-open windows and I turned my nose to it, breathing still the airplane smell, taking in the scrub and wreckage, the endless necklace of car lamps stretching into the dusk I stared at the world beyond the car for miles; Becky and Rachel stared, surreptitiously, at me. I felt like crying.

"It's such a treat for us, isn't it, girls? It would've been great if your mom and dad could've come too, but this is a busy time for them, so ... next time, right girls?"

Becky punched her sister's thigh for the hell of it, although she was in principle too old for such tormenting.

"Mom," Rachel wailed.

Once off the highway, Ron pulled into a gas station. Here at least the smell was familiar, and the coil of the pump. The road beyond looked big. There was nothing that wasn't man-made between us and the horizon: a strip of shops, asphalt, neon.

"It's a long way to come by yourself, isn't it? We were afraid we'd miss you, or that we wouldn't recognize you, but you look just the same. Doesn't she?"

"I don't remember," said Rachel. Becky didn't say anything. She just eyed me, my clothes and my hair and the goose bumps up my arms from the breeze.

"Isn't that so, Ron," Eleanor asked as he swung himself back into his seat and wiped his hands on his jeans. My father never wore jeans. "Doesn't Sagesse look just the same?"

"You look like your mother. Just the same," he agreed, and laughed, although I didn't know why.

They were referring to my nine-year-old self. We had come to visit in the spring, that year, after a trip to Washington, D.C., and New York, without my brother. Eleanor hadn't seen Etienne since she had come to France, when he was three. The cousins had never seen him, not old enough to remember. Becky was looking at me, I thought, to see if my retarded, crippled brother and his wheelchair were discernible in my person. Or maybe my almost-assassin grandfather. I didn't know whether she knew about "the incident," why I was there at all. Perhaps she was just looking. I felt uncomfortably young among these people, and tired at the sound of their voices; but older than Becky, although she was older than I was.

I remembered the last, the only, visit. I had had a chocolate brown suede jacket then, bought in New York. I had worn it the entire time, aware that Becky coveted it. She played tapes of Bruce Springsteen and Tears for Fears, wanting to impress. She insisted that the French couldn't make rock music, and I told her she just couldn't understand it. She made fun of my accent, when I didn't believe that I had one. She was just trying to get back at me, my mother said, because she was insecure. Her room was decorated with Laura Ashley wallpaper, a mass of little pink flowers. I had been forced to sleep in there with her, stretched out under a quilted coverlet that matched her own, in a bed the twin of hers, suffocated by her music and her stuffed animal collection. I had hated her. But she looked different now: reassuringly sullen. I, more subtly than she, looked her up and down. She was almost sixteen. She had three studs in her left ear. I could smell patchouli and cigarettes on her clothes.