The Last Life (31 page)

In this way, the question was endlessly avoided. Carol knew—it was a bead in the family history repeatedly burnished—about Alexandre's hasty departure from Algiers, about his grandmother's burial at sea, about the lost apartment (for which small restitution was made only when I was fourteen, in the very months I have described, almost thirty years after the event) and the lost heirlooms, which rendered the few bent photographs, the scattering of spoons, so precious. But what of his arrival in Marseilles?

His parents and sister met Alexandre at the port, and tried to reimburse the Gambettas for his passage, but the couple, ever honorable, refused. All my grandfather could offer them was a lift to the train station (a small gift, but one which, given their luggage, required Monique and her daughter and bleary Alexandre to remain an extra hour at the docks, seedy even then, an hour during which my usually reticent grandmother would not let go of her son, her nose buried in his stale shirt as though he were every reminder of the world, and the mother, she had lost), and a wave good-bye as they boarded for the long ride to Toulouse and Madame Gambetta's nephew. And then? Then the LaBasse family drove home to the Bellevue along the winding crests of the coast, in silence, Alexandre asleep behind his father, who spied on him occasionally in the rearview mirror and shook his head in baffled dismay.

Alexandre was, in that spring and early summer so rudely interrupted, to have prepared his baccalaureate. Once in France, the summer before him, he acknowledged himself unready and enrolled, for the fall, to repeat his final year of school. But there were months before September—months in which he might study, or hike the Alps with friends (his younger sister was to go, in August, to Switzerland—already, although she had not yet met her future husband, her inclinations drew her there), or even, resuming his former hobby, comb the beach for girls (the way a budding naturalist tracks beetles, or fossils) with whom to watch the sunset. But he claimed tersely that he had grown unused to companionship, and spent the mornings sleeping and the sultry afternoons in his bedroom, not reading, not even piecing jigsaw puzzles, merely sitting on the edge of his bed—alert, as if awaiting a call—his head cocked vaguely to the wash of the surf.

His father grew impatient, assigned him tasks around the grounds. The hotel was still new, and there was much to be done: walkways to be paved and lanterns to be installed, scrub to be cleared of rocks and speckled with flower seeds. Alexandre proved an unhelpful recruit: he would either lie and say he had gone to work when he had instead strolled down to the headland and the fishermens village below; or else turn up late, when the sun was already scorching, and maneuver clumsily among the paid laborers, more a hindrance than a help.

"He's bone idle. It's pure laziness. We've raised a bloodsucking monster," fumed Jacques, in front of his son. "Look at him. Too stunned even to blink. Blink, you idiot. Blink!"

His mother said nothing while her husband browbeat the boy, but later, after bedtime, she would slip into his room with a steaming cup of verbena ("So soothing—drink!") and sit with him, the soul of patience, waiting for explanations, until he turned his face to the wall, the tisane untouched and cold, and said only, "Goodnight, Maman."

Alexandre did not cry (which was just as well; his father would have slapped him), nor did he speak. Obdurate, he volunteered nothing. He could not even be bothered to tease his sister, who needled him constantly to no avail and finally confided to their mother, "He must be in a very bad way. He's positively moronic. It's frightening, almost."

"He's homesick," Monique informed Jacques. "We can't imagine the disintegration he has witnessed. He needs time."

"Crap. He's homesick, fine. He needs to work. His future is here. This is his home now. Why isn't he studying? He doesn't even read, for heaven's sake. This is France; he is French. He's got to move on."

"You know it's not as simple as that." Monique herself missed the routines of her Algiers life, the afternoons with friends now dispersed from Normandy to the Pyrénées. She felt she understood her son. "Starting again isn't always easy."

"Of course not. It takes work. And that slug of a boy doesn't know the meaning of the word."

Monique did not argue with her husband. She never had; it was a matter of education and principle. She said, quietly, "I think you judge him harshly, my love."

"And I think you spoil him. Rotten."

Alexandre, in part, did not know what to do with this new life. Growing up in Algiers, chafing at his father's yoke, he had imagined himself a popular local entrepreneur, perhaps a restaurant owner like Gambetta. He had foreseen a life of boisterous inclusion and not-too-much work, cossetted by the city's fountains of delight: an elegant wife, a dark-skinned concubine or two, leisurely weekend retreats to the cooler air of the mountains, dusk beneath the almond and jujube trees while little children—his own, or other people's—scampered in the dust. He had not thought practically; he had not been ambitious beyond the city of his birth. When his parents and sister had left for France, he had seen their departure above all as a liberation from his father's nagging, a release from lectures about the importance of a practical, mathematical education and enforced hours bent over calculus problems as of little interest to him and as unintelligible as Sanskrit runes.

In France, both literally and metaphorically, Alexandre was
dé- paysé:
only the Mediterranean and the gnarled pines were familiar. Here, his father had built a gated enclosure to stand for the family and its home. Jacques's ambitions for his son had crystallized just as Alexandre's own, always murkier, evaporated; my father, in whom initiative had never been encouraged, felt stymied, and stifled. Beyond the hotel gates might as well have been Zanzibar, or Miami: he did not want to know. But he could not breathe in his father's house either. He began to suffer, in that summer, from asthma attacks. ("Allergies," his mother concluded. "Is it jasmine? Is it lavender? Is it milk?") Speaking little, he felt, by August, that he had lost the ability to form most words: he simply could not speak. Eating, too, became an obstacle. His Adam's apple seemed a fat, fibrous pith in his craw, around which only the occasional jug of water might slither.

In his dreams—bright, hot dreams to which he clung for as long as he was able, as they were so much more vivid than his waking hours—he walked the familiar route from his grandmother's apartment to the port, empty of life, empty. He sucked the bitter taste of soot in his throat, walking faster each time, his steps echoing, his skittering eyes scanning the alleys and windows for snipers, and his heart boomed like a gong. In the dreams he knew that the last boat had gone, that he had been left behind, but that something vital awaited him, if only he could make it to the port in time, and alive. Sometimes shots rang out and he ducked, trembling, into a doorway, or threw himself under a car; sometimes he made it to the Place du Gouvernement with its fig trees and stalwart equestrian Due d'Orléans (almost there!), only to find the square seething with Muslim youths who cried out and pointed and set upon him, tearing at his clothes; sometimes he came across a bicycle or a car to speed his journey, only to discover that its tires were flat or its engine was out of order. Never, no matter how he forged on, no matter how his semiconscious mind insisted on prolonging the dream, never did he make it to the port and its mysterious promise.

Alexandre didn't think to run away; he had nowhere to go. Mostly, he didn't want to wake up to the tangle of sheets and his father's haranguing. He didn't want to be at all.

In September, dressed, like a doll, by his mother, Alexandre followed his sister down to town, to the lycée—the very one, with its cobbled forecourt, and doubtless with the same walleyed janitor who mopped the floors in my day. He was growing gaunt (hard for me to imagine, but it is true); he fumbled with his cuffs. He skulked in the back of the classroom, his face turning, involuntarily, to the window's light. The teacher's French babbled foreign in his ear; his pen, slippery, would not stick between his fingers; he took no notes.

Had he not been handsome, he might have escaped the scrutiny of his fellow students, if not of his teachers. But the girls flirted with him, and the boys found, in this, a reason to attack. When he opened his mouth, they mocked his accent; they ridiculed his clothes; they taunted him as a freak, a racist, an African. They cursed his provenance, and his presence. They parrotted their parents' politics and argued the Algerian War around him as though he were a bottle of beer. He said nothing, which only enraged them further. He did not tell his parents, or his teachers; and his sister, who witnessed his daily punishment, remained mute as a calf, trying, hidden in her clump of girlfriends, to dissociate herself from this pariah.

"We weren't even living together, until this summer," she confided to those who would listen, "and when he arrived, he was someone completely different. It's like I never knew him. He frightens me. He doesn't eat."

Then, one lunchtime, in the quiet of winter, Alexandre, like a spirit released from stone, rose up in a fury and battered one of his tormentors. He broke the boy's nose and shattered his eardrum, while half the school stood watching in a respectful semicircle, Marie among them. Before the principal could stumble from his post-prandial nap to the yard, my father had fled, his jacket and satchel in a heap by the gate, his shirtfiront streaked with blood.

He vanished. He didn't go home. He hadn't been seen on the bus or in the streets downtown. Night came and there was still no sign. Morning dawned, and his bed lay empty. Jacques raged; Marie cowered; Monique schemed and fretted. A search was begun. The train station was checked, and the naval barracks. A team of policemen winnowed the mountainside behind the town, beating the grasses. Even my grandfather, by the second day, paused in his tempest to pray. My grandmother turned back Alexandre's coverlet, left his bedside lamp alight. She had thought she understood him, but could not will her way into his mind. They were trapped, two nights and three days—a short time, comparatively—as Alexandre in his grandmother's apartment had been trapped, in the moment between the past and the rest of their lives.

A fisherman in the hamlet below the Bellevue found him, before nightfall on the third day, huddled, semiconscious and quivering, in an abandoned cottage at the end of the single row of houses closest to the rocks and the buffeting winter waves. The fisherman had been looking, at his wife's behest, not for my father but for his errant cat, a fat marmalade puss whose immiment litter had pushed her out of her home in search of privacy.

At first, the fisherman thought my father was dead. The man's throat prickled from the ripe stink of urine and vomit. He noted the angle at which the boy slumped, and even in the half-light could discern the blood on his white shirt. And then he heard, between the waves, the ragged crackle of my father's breathing, and caught sight of the bottles upturned around him on the musty floor.

Somehow, from somewhere, my father had procured both sleeping pills and brandy (was this planned? Had they been hoarded for months? Were the pills so old as to be his grandmother's, slipped among the treasures in his canvas sack in case of need? And the brandy: neither then nor later did any shopkeeper admit to having seen him, a wild-eyed, bloodied boy, let alone to having offered him the cup of oblivion) and had attempted his own end. Incompetently, as it transpired, but with greater conviction than his own father might have expected. Never in danger of actually expiring from his toxins, Alexandre in those seventy-two hours had nevertheless contracted an impressive case of pneumonia, in part because of his weakened state, in part because of his undress and the force of the cold sea air. Sweat-sogged and burning, he was lugged like a carcass up to the road, and an ambulance. He almost died, not directly by his own hand, but certainly by his own intention.

The recovery was slow: my father had a new, and further place to travel from. When he arrived, he was a different young man, closer to but not exactly like the boy he had been before his troubles began, the boy he had been growing up in his parents' house in Algiers. With this difference: he did as he was told. He seemed to welcome his father's tyrannical guidance, and if it was only a semblance of welcoming, then he hid his true feelings well. It was as if the brandy, or the bilgewater, had leached him completely of his desires, so that he might be filled, and fulfilled, by other people's. No, this is not entirely true: he retrieved his desire for girls, his Don Juan nature. Which could also be seen as a willingness to become any girl's desire. Protean, quicksilver, he impersonated an earnest student for the young librarian; a flattering cad for the cynical waitress; a male Marianne for my mother.

Alexandre waited out the next summer, and returned to the same lycée the following fall, beginning his final school year for a third time. Students who remembered the incident of the winter before could not reconcile the easy, muscled lad with his sullen predecessor, and somehow came to accept that this Alexandre LaBasse, gadabout charmer, was quite literally a new student. So his life resumed its course: he studied, although not hard; he dated; he made jokes and played pranks; he passed his exams, and went on to the local university for several more years of the same. His trough was never again mentioned by his parents, except to each other. Carol didn't ask, and wasn't told, until too late.

In the spring of 1991, a scant month before my sixteenth birthday and not long after Easter, twenty years into my parents' communal life, on a pristine late April morning when the burgeoning lime-colored foliage waltzed on its boughs and a submarine bubbled up for air in the harbor before breakfast (I remember it clearly: my father on the lawn, in dew-soaked espadrilles, with binoculars, counting the seamen as they sprang from its hatch grateful for the sight of land), my father, in his starched striped shirt, kissed us one by one, more wetly than was usual, so that I wiped a daub of spittle from my cheek, and he shut the front door behind him with a delicate click. It was early, especially as his recent enthusiasm for the Bellevue had waned, and he often lingered over breakfast—toast, and more toast, buried under jam—until after I had left for school.