The Last Life (42 page)

"Everything was all right, now," my mother said. "It makes no sense, now. It's the now I can't figure."

"Jacques and I have discussed it, and he's most concerned, he's meeting with the bankers this minute. Because the only reason we can think of—"

"No," my mother hissed.

"The Bellevue has been less than half full for months, headed for debt—not his fault, poor lamb, or not entirely, I'm sure, although Jacques always doubted his business sense, but he so wanted to upgrade, he was desperate for that fourth star ... We have to be sure he didn't enter into contracts without telling us—"

"This is your son! He would never do—would never have done—such a thing."

"Never entertain a mistress either, I suppose? He was avid for a double life, a bigger life. Poor boy. It made him feel real."

"That's absurd. You said it yourself, the women were about sex, that's all. The hotel—he lived for the hotel, he thrilled to run it, properly, his own way, at last, and if your husband hadn't interfered—"

"It is my husband's hotel, my dear."

"Let's not argue. The last thing we need now is to argue. But I swear to you, he would never have gambled the Bellevue, not now, the way things are going. He saw that fellow, over in Cassis, fold last fall—he knows—he knew—that the couple in Carqueiranne are hanging on by the skin of their teeth—he wouldn't risk the hotel now."

"We'll see. We'll hope not. He wanted new bathrooms, throughout, a complete redecoration. He wanted the restaurant revamped. He talked about closing next winter for the work to be done; and if he meant it, if he was prepared to push ahead in spite of Jacques and common sense, behind his father's back—who's to say he wouldn't have signed contracts we know nothing about? He had meetings with architects, with the bank, with contractors, even—just from his secretary's datebook we can tell that much—"

"I don't believe it. You'll see. I can't—how can you—you slander your own son—and his corpse is barely cold!"

"You don't have a premium on grief, my girl. You, who were prepared, as I recall, to decamp at the first sign of trouble, over some fatuous little encounter or two—"

"How dare you! Never! Please—I think we should leave this alone now—we're upset, of course we're upset, and we say things..."

There was a silence. I, through the wall in the kitchen, hardly dared to breathe.

"If not that, then what?" my grandmother asked, disconsolate. "That at least would be a reason. Then we could forgive him. Otherwise—I've racked my brains—"

"As if I hadn't? As if I've slept? The only one sleeping in this house is Etienne, who can't understand, who just can't understand—"

"Didn't the doctor give you something?"

"I don't want to sleep," my mother said. "I want—for God's sake, I want to wake up."

"Could it have been a woman? Do you know? Was there someone, lately, someone new?"

"They weren't special. You said it yourself. They were never special. We were special. Besides, we never discussed it. Not since last spring. A year ago. Not since then."

"But there might have been—I don't know—blackmail—some woman, some secret—a child—I don't know—"

"And he was afraid I'd find out?" My mother laughed, a bitter clip. "Do you really believe he would fear that? A year ago, when I was still in ignorant bliss, I might have accepted that. A year ago, though, he thought he was invincible. If there'd been kids—even a dozen of them—he would have told me. It would have been a source of pride. That's the frame of mind he was in. And now? Now I knew, and he knew I knew, and we went on as if we didn't, but I can't believe, I can't accept—" My mother's voice was pinched. "What does it matter, anyway, why? It's done."

"If it was on account of the Bellevue, it may matter a great deal, to all of us, and for a long time to come."

"It's that he's gone—that's what will matter, regardless. There's no answer to that. We all failed him somehow—"

"Nonsense." My grandmother's voice was shrill. "It is he who failed us."

"We're angry. It's natural that we be angry, the priest said so only this morning. But we shouldn't look to blame, he said. We should pray—"

"We pray, we always pray, we'll continue to pray because that's all we can do—but there are facts, too, to contend with—"

"He was depressed, that's the fact. He was alone, somehow—"

"You're his wife."

"I should have known." My mother began to cry, her breathing loud and ragged.

"Who could have known? What is necessary, now, is to find a way forward. That's why the facts are important. We can't lose the Bellevue—it would kill Jacques, it would be the last straw—"

"You demon!" My mother cried in a burst of rage. "It's that man and that bloody hotel that killed Alex!"

The silence was icy and absolute; and then my mother's voice came again, in an entirely other register, entreating. "Don't go—please, Madame!—Monique—please. I didn't mean it. We're all upset—beyond upset—I just don't know how—there's no blame—but please, don't, please don't blame Alex."

"Don't you?"

In the kitchen, my cheek against the cool paint of the dining room door, I realized that, intended or no, whatever its reasons, my father's suicide was his one great and defining action, the defiance of his weakness. A raging, faceless beast unleashed to bring change (how we had all longed for change) on the family, it was his Frankenstein, a living thing that would haunt each of us forever, the spectre of his will. My father as a ghost had greater influence than his own father could ever have dreamed of; the single curling of his forefinger at the trigger would shape and sunder us as we could never have imagined, or, in all our wishing, wished. It had a life of its own. This moment in the kitchen was the first time that I realized my father was truly dead, that I glimpsed the enormous gulf between the imaginary and the real, when it dawned on me—confusedly, still—that the latter had ultimate power over the former, rather than the other way around.

We had lived, always, in a world of belief; in which stories created from the past had the weight of truth, in which oar pessimism was the bulwark against disaster and our most privately husbanded hopes the food on which our unlived futures fed. We had believed—in God, in country, in family, in history—and thought faith sufficient; thought that the world, if our faith were astute enough, would bend to it. This in spite of Algeria, in spite of Etienne, in spite of the force of law, the unforeseen obstacles sent by a silent divine, to test us. After all, Jacques had anticipated the fall of French Algeria, and moved his family to safety. Alexandre had built a home for Etienne's preservation from the wider world. My grandfather had founded the Bellevue upon rock, and he, and we, and it, had survived the report of the first gun and its repercussions.

But my father, in truth, had lived only as if he believed; his faith had stayed with his grandmother and his country after all the other LaBasses had left, and had foundered with the sinking coffin. My father, like his cousin Serge, had been only half salvaged, too late, his only abiding belief in the might-have-been. Which we are always without, as I would always, henceforth, be without my father. He had had nothing, in the end, to cling to but fact, of which death was the ultimate affirmation. Stones, the fragments shored up against his ruin, were merely that: fragments, words. And all the telling, which lulled my grandmother and my mother and even me, did not point, for him, to a future; that was a place we were left to seek without him.

I cannot travel to Algiers today. Even if I could, I would not find my father's, my grandfather's, beloved city, even in its traces. It is not merely that the street names have changed, that French statues have been replaced by Algerian ones, the geography altered by construction; it is that I would seek an imaginary city, a paradise conjured of words and partial recollections, a place that never, on the map, existed: just as the Bellevue, today, is not the place it was to my fourteen-year-old eye, although all its landmarks are the same.

When my father died, I began to wonder, to dream, about my almost-uncle, about the shadow-man turfed from the LaBasse home before he was born. He, too, had a life, or had had one, a life which, for all I knew, continued still. His life, like my father's, must have been touched by fate; his story (another dropped bead) limned ours; his was the unmentionable ghost (had my father even known about him? I suspect not: my grandmother would never have told him, and my mother assured me that she did not) that walked alongside my father's, Jacques's sin made flesh, the choice in my father's life made before he had known there was such a thing. Theirs was, perhaps, a might-have-been that could have changed the family stories, the family reality, altered its course even up to my father's last day.

In the beginning, when first this ghostly image appeared before my mind's eye, I wondered whether he walked, quite literally, beside us, whether Khalida's son, a bastard with green eyes, had been packed, by his distraught mother, off to France at the tender age of eleven or twelve, in the company, perhaps, of his youngest uncle, then himself a lad of little more than twenty. This uncle had been a boy, doubtless, known peripherally to my father at the lycée in Algiers, an indigenous wunderkind a few years ahead, bespectacled and sallow, with a downy smudge on his upper lip and a thoughtful manner, who had begun his studies—engineering, most likely—at the city's university at the height of the troubles and, in despair, had sought the advice of an admiring tutor, whose finest deed was salvation of this brilliant Berber student and the finagling, for him, of a place in the course in the tutor's native Lyons. And when, worn by years of solitary striving, by the disapproval of her family and by the strife into which her son was growing, Khalida—more like an aunt than a sister after all, the force responsible for her youngest brother's education—when she learned that he was leaving, seizing opportunity where the mustachioed French mathematician had offered it, she begged her kin to take Hamed with him, to free him from her sinful yoke, his fatherlessness, and to settle him in a good school in Lyons, where she might follow as soon as her finances (the money scrimped from mopping and cooking, the extras from her mending work) permitted.

And so, at the airport, at around the same time as Jacques, Monique and Marie took flight, beneath a winter sun that in its icy brilliance spared no crease or fissure, the trio stood near the check-in counter among the milling hatted Europeans and their girdled wives, alongside the clique of Air France attendants lounging in their pressed uniforms, as the rotors of the airplane roared their practice run outside the terminal. Khalida, wrapped in her frayed fringed shawl, pressed her green-eyed boy to her bosom, his paltry cardboard case beside them on the ground, and wailed softly from her belly, her tears falling into his hair, while his uncle waited, eyes averted to the tarmac and the greasy plate glass that separated him from it, stroking his downy lip and blowing cigarette smoke through his nostrils like a dragon.

Little Hamed, in his short trousers, beneath which his scabbed brown knees trembled imperceptibly, submitted to his mother's embraces with his eyes open, not knowing what the parting meant, not knowing whether to cry ("Be brave, my little one," his mother murmured, by which he deduced that he should not, but that he should want to). He tried to imagine what might lie ahead, and unable to, seeing in his mind's eye schoolbook images of snow-covered gables and crenellated castles, wondered what French air would taste like, whether he would find there the familiar smells of cypress, dung, the sea.

Installed in a cold-water flat on the outskirts of Lyons, uncle and nephew did not talk often, and then never of home. Hamed yearned for his friends, for his mother's touch—for the murmur of her voice—while his uncle, immersed in his studies, forgot, or did not know, to perform the simplest parental duties, like prepare a solid meal or set a fixed bedtime. The little boy grew hard and resourceful, foraging for cold supper and amusing himself in the apartment after school, a quiet, fierce child, all but friendless among the towheaded, taunting Catholics who were his classmates. He endured school as well as he was able, a place where teachers expected little of him and peers still less; he lived without, in every sense.

Khalida did not—could not—come. With the help of other brothers, she wrote, occasionally, in French, to her newly French son, stilted, formal encouragements and exhortations that divulged little about the state of the city, about the FLN threats and the new-minted, marauding OAS. Hamed's young uncle guardian raised his head from his books only to lament the divisiveness: he lived in a pure world of numbers and graphs, and preferred to stay there, knowing that neither France nor Algeria was, at that juncture, a fit place for a brilliant Berber uninterested in politics, but that in France, at least, he could hide for a while from the revolutionary call of his generation.

After the peace accords, after the French had retreated from Algeria, Hamed's French life grew worse, not better, a life in which he was marked for misery by the crimp of his hair and the tinge of his skin; but he had become savage enough to contend with it. Savagery is far from schoolwork: he excelled, instead, at fistfights and shirking, at avoiding the lycée where he had been jeered at and pelted with pebbles. He located other boys like himself, marooned far from home, and they banded together. As soon as he could, his voice broken, his own lip darkening, his arms sturdy and muscled, he abandoned the schoolyard and signed on as a mechanic's apprentice, willingly condemning himself to a fate of blue monkey-suits and oily spanners. His uncle, by then respectably employed by the city at his professor's recommendation, pursed his lips in vague disapproval but did not intervene. There were girls, there were cafés: they constituted pleasure of a kind, and Hamed, to his distant mother's dismay, did not see or did not want to see that this, as a Muslim in France without a raft of diplomas, was all there would be, for years to come.