The Last Life (23 page)

She, whom I met more than once and found harried, but in a pleasing way, like a worn blanket, was politically liberal—of the generation of '68, as my father was also, although he only chronologically and in no other sense—and so had few social dealings with my parents; but in a town of that size they had, naturally, met, and the distance between them was purely theoretical. Frédéric and I were, to put it bluntly, of the same social class, with the same manners and similar discontents; and as I got to know him, I realized that his reputation as a dealer stemmed from a single incident in which, on a dare, he had stolen from his mother a quantity of temazepam; and on his association with Sami and Lahou andjacquot, which my former friends could not explain to themselves in any other way.

Doubtless, rumors began to circulate about me, too: I could not fail to note the glances that followed me in my new circle. With Lahou or Frédéric at my side, I passed Marie-Jo every so often and saw her stop talking and stare and then take up her chatter all the more heatedly, jigging her head in my direction and casting a furtive, telltale eye my way. She would have been talking about me regardless, I told myself; at least now she had something else to say; at least I didn't have to imagine that the night by the swimming pool was always on her lips.

She may have thought I was going out with Frédéric—had I been observing myself from afar it would have seemed plausible. He was tall, and not unattractive, although his ears stuck out too far. He had a low laugh, the sound of which evidently pleased him, as he would prolong it by seconds beyond its natural end. He was clever, if not as clever as he assumed, and appealingly reckless, and bored with the town and its people.

"I chose my friends," he said once, as he walked me to the bus stop after an afternoon spent dropping coins in a video arcade, "because all the others are cretins. They're so fucking boring, and they think everything's just fine. They'll settle in their little lives and become just like their parents, and go to Paris once a year and think it's so cool and impressive. Fuck that."

"And Sami's different? Or Lahou?"

"You don't have any idea, do you? They're on the move, girl. They've already asked so many questions and taken so many beatings for it that whatever happens from here on, they come out ahead."

"Not if they don't finish school."

"You think a university education is everything? You think it'd change their lives? There's no work for anybody, sweetheart. Who needs it?"

"Who are you kidding?"

"You're so bourgeois, Sagesse. No different from the rest."

"And you?"

He shrugged.

"So you'll ride a motorcycle to your law classes. That'll make you special?"

"I won't rot in this town. Nor will Sami."

I was quiet, wondering whether he believed what he said.

"Only two more years," he went on, "and I'm out of here."

"Lucky you."

I wasn't going out with him. I can't say it hadn't occurred to me (dear Thibaud, to whom I had never written, no longer seemed a consideration; I shuddered to think what he would have made of my life as it was), but Frédéric wasn't interested. He claimed to fancy only older women, and dark-skinned ones, which I took to be an affectation. I suspected him of being in love with Lahou, at least a little, a devotion which would consign him to celibacy for some while to come.

It was around the time of that conversation, in November, that Marie-Jo was caught in bed with a young soldier from the barracks. I heard this news from my parents, at supper.

"What about your friend, then?" asked my father, piling his plate with dollops of creamed spinach.

"Who?" I had not mentioned the new gang at home, fearful of my parents' displeasure, and certain, somehow, that they were only temporary company.

"Marie-José."

"Oh, her." I wrinkled my nose.

"Well you might. Can't say I'm sorry you've drifted apart under the circumstances."

I thought he meant the trial, although it seemed to me odd that he would refer to it so cheerfully, and I concentrated on cutting my meat.

"Extraordinary behavior."

"What?"

"This business with the soldier."

My father was as much amused as anything—his sense of humor was always bawdy—but my mother shifted in her chair, and when he was explaining the facts only slightly more explicitly, she interrupted him—"Alexandre, don't!"—in a way that made him stop. But he continued chuckling to himself as he ate, a man undauntable, as he was in those strange months of zeal and mania. Later, when it had passed, I would marvel at my father's hummingbird speed, at the fluttering ubiquity of his thick-bodied self; and still later, we would come to see it as a kind of madness, and a foreshadowing. I have no photographs from that autumn, but if I did, my father would be smiling hugely in all of them, his lips stretched apart, the glimpsed cavern of his mouth the only darkness, the hint that his grin was too broad to last.

The details of Marie-Jo's transgression I gleaned at school: "He was inside her, on top of her"; "she'd only just met him"; "her mother stood there until he was dressed and then marched him out." I was intensely pleased by Marie-Jo's misfortune, and even forgave my mother the stiff little sex talk that she subsequently felt prompted to foist on me.

My mother, at that time, had been much alone. When my father was tending to his grand new responsibilities, she moved in paths mysterious to me. She frequently went out, but I did not know where to: she was not shopping, because we strove to save money; nor carousing, because her temperament and the temper of the time did not allow it. Sometimes, I knew, she was at my grandparents', and sometimes plunged into her charity work (she sat on the board of a homeless shelter, and took, in those days, even greater solace in those less fortunate than we). I knew, too, that she prayed, in church, alone, as regularly as she had her hair done or her nails manicured. This was a habit of long standing, and often, finding her away from home, I pictured her in her pew, her eyes on the Virgin and her nostrils full of incense.

On the afternoons when my huddle disbanded early, or when I couldn't bear to idle alongside them yet again, I drifted back to an empty house, empty but for Etienne and his nurse, Magda, who lounged, feet up, on the white sofa and passed the hours leafing through romance magazines (
True Love, Wild. Passions),
picking at her fingernails and keeping only the most desultory eye on my snoozing brother. By myself, I roamed the corridors, disturbing the still air, sampling perfumes in my parents' bathroom, testing the mattresses in the spare bedrooms, slipping, shifdess, and coming to settle in my own room, lying on my bed with the door shut. I came to feel secure in the quiet, which was, as it turned out, unfortunate.

But as for my mother: she did not turn to me, as she always had before, for confidences. As she whittled her bony self, she ate her words rather than her meals. She spoke to Etienne, who could not understand, in whispers; and to me, hardly at all. Although I pretended otherwise, I missed her perfumed confabulations in the kitchen or at my bedside, precious as they grew rare. When she came to see me, already in bed, in the wake of Marie-Jo's exposure, the sex talk seemed an occasion, a reaching out.

"I don't have to tell you about the risks," said Maman, smoothing my duvet with her manicured hand. The diamonds of her ring sent sparkling shafts along the wall.

"No."

"It's so different from when I was a girl. It's a dangerous thing. In so many ways. Not just physically, but emotionally too. That, at least, hasn't changed. You have to be ready for it. And you can't be, not so young. Your friend—"

"She's not my friend." I stuck my chin under the sheet. I was lying down. Only my nose and eyes were exposed.

"Whatever. She risks her life before it's begun. I hope we've raised you not to be so foolish."

I sat up again. "Don't worry, Maman."

"You're all still children. And morally—"

"I know."

"Faith is so important. You're old enough to realize that."

I didn't answer. Faith, from what I could see, played very little part in any of our lives then, in spite of our weekly pilgrimage to mass.

"I trust you," she said. "I know you wouldn't disappoint me."

She gave me a look, as she said this, that let me know she didn't trust me at all. Or perhaps that was merely the interpretation of my guilty conscience. I was spending my time learning how to be invisible in familiar territory—a homespun version of my American lessons—and had grown unaccustomed to scrutiny.

In a corner of myself, I actually envied Marie-José's humiliation. Caught, she was released from the efforts of extremity. I knew that she was under curfew, that she could no longer go out at night, that her mother organized family weekends and trips to the theater to keep her daughter in check; and while at school we concurred that this was cruel punishment indeed (what teenager spends time, happily, with her parents?), I secretly longed similarly to let go, to be told, to be saved as my brother, in spite of everything, was saved.

What—can I be truthful, I wonder?—was my brother to me, in all this confusion? A sack, a pod, a thief, myself, sagacity, bridge of life's terrible isolation and its most hideous emblem. He alone was resolutely himself, fast against the swirling current in that time, and yet he alone knew what that self was, if knowing was part of him. And only he was protected from that current, by our efforts, and that only for a while. He disgusted me (if this is the time to be truthful, then I will concede he always had): his spittle and the redness of his mouth; his translucent skin, the fingers like fronds, the buckling spine that snaked its semisolid way beneath his surface. And the smells: his odors, those we spend our lives couching and disguising, of piss and shit and sweat; and then, too, the sweet, milky baby scent right up against his neck, which was the scent of home. I raged and hid my rage; he was nothing and all things. He was, I sometimes told myself, what was left over from the past, whereas I was what would be. But we were the same, and he was inescapable, and how could I not love him for that? He alone kept every secret; he alone holds them still.

And when I came home to that house and thought it empty although he was there, it was because—how to describe it?—it was as if when I stood alongside him only I were in the room. But this is not correct: it was as if I, and more than I, a superfluity that was yet not superfluous, shared the space. Words cannot hold what he was, and is; chimerical, they cannot give him shape. He wavers beyond them, but always
there:
if "home" had for me a name, it was his. And now that we are no longer under the same roof, now that his scent is with me only occasionally, in the back of my throat, in the moments between sleep and wakefulness (or at those rare times when I visit him, in his ice-green room across the ocean; and then only in whiffs behind the sticky pink assault of disinfectant), he is still home to me, in all its lost possibility.

What I have here, around me, in my books and in the jumbled roaring wonder of the crumbling city, is not that. I could not live and be myself with my brother; I was, inevitably, only too eager to escape him when the time came (as, it transpired, were we all in our ways). But when I die, I want to be buried beside Etienne.

I may say, and it may have seemed, that faith played only a small role in our lives, then: but that, too, is disingenuous. Even at fourteen, I was well aware—as I stretched my unbreakable leash and ventured into faithlessness—that the bonds of faith, religious and otherwise, governed the tiniest movements of our household. I might have mocked confession or communion, or my mother's quiet meditations with the saints; any one of the wayward and declining LaBasses might have indulged our darkest impulses; and yet we knew ourselves to be bound to our faith, cement-bound, blood-bound, in a proximity shared only by a few hundred thousand, those who were, like us, exiles of French Algeria.

I didn't question such matters. Even when I stamped my tiny foot in teenage rebellion, it was a gesture accompanied by the whimper of the already defeated. The logic of my upbringing was indisputable: we were Catholics, we were French, we were Algerian. Ours, as a personal heritage, a gift indeed, most particularly for us, the Europeans of North Africa, was the doctrine of Original Sin.

St. Augustine is Algeria's first child, her most celebrated offspring. He is all of us, and his is our abiding legacy. Born in fourth century Bone (
bled el-Aneb:
in Arabic, the "land of the jujubes"), half Berber, a boy who caught nightingales and stole fruit from the pear trees for his pleasure, he grew hard and fearsome in his Christian age. But he remained human: he revealed his faults—he confessed—for their redemption. He cast the harsh light of Africa upon his religion, upon the here and now, a present reality of guilt and punition; but he lived for a corresponding beyond, a perfection hereafter; and my family's dreamed perfection, always past, or beyond possible, was but a mirror of his.

Some would contend that Albert Camus, godless in this godless century, provides the errant confessor with an Algerian rival, but Camus's stoic philosophies of humanism and justice, of a moral stance in the face of our mortal futility; his hopeful search for peace among men—they are but a naive and timorous flicker in comparison, everywhere overshadowed by Augustine's imperious, outraged, all-seeing Divine, able to weed out even the dissemblers. (Who else would consider the falsely faithful a tribe that merited address? St. Augustine was nothing if not a cynic.) Augustine's gimlet eye is always on the gates to his City of God, that gilded metropolis which shimmers forever in an impossible tense, like my brother, like an Algeria forever French.

And St. Augustine, for all his humanity, his youth of pleasurable sin, his reassuring comprehension of our lapses and his inspiring and familiar devotion to his mother (a cultural characteristic of the
pieds-noirs,
if you believe our historians, right up there with
soubressade
and siestas), in spite of all this which draws him into our hearts, his most abiding contribution, his primary offering is, of course, the doctrine that binds and condemns us, the one that orders our species to pay for Adam and Eve's indulgence. And for St. Augustine's, for that matter. Chez LaBasse, we all knew it from the cradle—all except Etienne, I suppose, who might have been considered to embody it instead—and as the time drew near for my grandfather's trial, it was the premise behind our prayers, and the unspoken dread in our conversations. All of us, generation upon generation, living—no, wallowing—in Original Sin, endlessly punishable for it, shaky in our mistrust of grace.