The Last Life (7 page)

At the door, my father stroked my cheek (a tenderness for which, in the moment, I loved him) and my mother hugged me with particular force. "Be good," she said. "Have fun," said I.

By the time I was myself ready to leave, Etienne was long asleep—I checked—and Magda had retreated to her apartment, from which emanated the anguished, overbright blare of some variety special. I stood in the kitchen for a while and listened to its rhythms. It would have been so easy not to go: the plunge into the seeping night seemed an enormous effort, a question mark.

Thibaud made me wait. Even as I cowered in the shadow of a dwarf palm opposite the designated bench, wondering whether to go home, he sidled up, all darkness.

"You came." I smiled in spite of myself.

"Of course."

"What do you want to do?"

"To do?"

"Well, we could hang out here, or walk down to the beach, or—I'd better not go into the hotel because—"

"As if," he said. "Let's walk."

He took my hand in his. It squirmed there, dry, for a second, then lay still, eliciting in me riotous palpitations. I could not speak. He did not speak. He led me, or we led each other (everything between us seemed suddenly to be understood), by the most circuitous route possible to the
chemins de la plage,
to their starting point beneath the swimming pool, where, in the pool's foundations, a porthole like a Cyclops' eye gave vista to the wavering, illuminated water. Perhaps fifty feet above us, the others sprawled and chattered; phrases and whole sentences drifted down—Marie-Jo's laugh, Thierry's voice, breaking occasionally in its insistent chirrup.

From a bench cut into the rock we could map the coast and the sea ahead—the same view as above, interrupted at this lower level by the spikes and billows of the trees. The porthole, at our backs, watched with us.

"We can eavesdrop," Thibaud said, gently scraping my palm with his fingernails. "Let's sit awhile. See if they wonder where I am. See if they guess." We giggled, titillated at the possibility of discovery, at our spying communion. The voices, the whooshing rise and fall of the sea, my blood, the noiseless fingerings between us: as ever, I listened.

It was not long before he leaned into me and murmured "May I?" and kissed my neck. Then it was no longer a matter of the time, or of the others, or of my parents: too immediate and consuming for any of them, his tongue strayed into my ear and onto my eyelids and into my mouth (like a cat, I thought, cleaning her young). It was an intimacy novel and exciting to me; I was at once in the moment and apart from it, able to register the sensation of his saliva cooling and drying on my cheek, the slight roughness of his chin, the surprising coarseness of his curls to the touch, his lemony smell, anxious even as I matched his embraces with my own fervor that my kissing was too zealous, too passive, or too spitty.

By the time we heard the others tramping to the poolside overhead we were lying flat on the bench, me beneath him, my T-shirt rucked up the better to admit his nimble fingers, and a smattering of sharp gravel against my back. Our friends' proximity alarmed me, and I tried to sit up; but Thibaud dismissed my attempt, silencing me first with his hand over my mouth and then with his lips on mine. Our adolescent fumblings fumbled onwards, but for me the sounds beyond our bodies now intruded. We could hear their shuffling feet, and the slap of their discarded clothing on the railing overhead. We could hear their whispers (might they not then hear ours?), then the cascade of splashes as they dived, with the expert timing of showgirls, one after the other. A few droplets splattered through the poolside slats and showered down on us.

Thibaud would not be deterred. Fearing that one of them might slither underwater to the porthole to catch the view (another game of which we never tired), and might instead glimpse our entwined bodies, I advocated a remove, wanted us to tiptoe further seawards and plant ourselves invisibly in the undergrowth. But Thibaud, preoccupied with the buttons of my fly, would have none of it.

"They'll hear us if we move," he hissed. And then again, more gently, his hand sliding from my navel, "May I?"

"I don't know."

"Don't know what?"

"If you may."

"Have you never—?"

"It's not that," I said, although it was, at least in part.

"Have you let other guys?"

"Well, I—" There was, I felt, a right answer to this query, something between prude and slut, between "no" and "yes." Honesty didn't enter into it. "That's for me to know and you to find out," I said.

"So may I? Go on?"

"Sh." The others were clambering from the water, raining their drippings unpleasantly upon us, laughing aloud and jeering at Laure, whose clothes Thierry, in a gesture of love (poor Cécile), had thrown into the deep end. Wily Thibaud chose to take my silence as acquiescence: he slipped his hand uninvited into my underpants, and began, inexpertly, to mash his fingers in the folds of my sex, a maneuver he compounded by stopping my mouth with his ardent tongue.

"That's nice, isn't it?" he muttered in my ear as his finger crept, snail-like, inside me. "You're not sorry?"

His hip bone crushed my thigh. His fingers were cold in so warm a place, and his manipulations felt exploratory, even clinical; or perhaps it was merely the unlikeliness of this boy's hand in this position—of me, of us, in this position. It wasn't unpleasant, nor was it particularly arousing. "So this," I thought, "is what it's like." Afraid, above all, of disclosure, I didn't utter a sound.

Our first awakening was the report of the gun. It burst, a massive cracking sound. We later learned that the bullet had struck the wooden railing just above us.

This initial explosion bloomed into wild screams and symphonic wailing. I heard my grandmother shrieking, "My God, my God, Jacques!" and Cécile's voice, recognizable only by its pitch, a keening chant overlaying the others' yelps: "Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck." I didn't hear my grandfather at all. His rage was concentrated entirely in the rifle blast; it had no other voice.

Thibaud was off me, and I was struggling with my jeans, still angling and engorged. "Jesus," he said, and though nobody was listening for us, I waved him to be quiet. "What happened?"

To my later shame, I didn't go to my friends. I couldn't. Doomed on all sides: by my parents, if discovered; among my peers, an assassin by association. Thibaud ran off, but not before he promised not to betray me. Incredibly, the black sea glittered ahead, its rising and falling unabated, and I lurked there, by the porthole, listening.

"He's crazy. Completely crazy."

"He'll pay for this."

"You bet he will."

"Christ, Cécile, you okay?"

"I'm hit—on the arm"—Thierry, in tears—"I'm bleeding."

"Look at Cécile's back, for Chrissakes!"

"Are you joking? Can you see anything?"

"Somebody get an ambulance! Call the police!"

"Can you walk? She can walk, I think."

"Just about."

"Call the fucking cops. Murderer. I'll get my mom."

"Where'd he go?"

"Where can he go? They'll get him. We all saw him. Jesus fuck."

"He's insane. He'll go to jail for this."

"I'm bleeding."

"It's a scratch, Thierry. Cécile, can you walk? Where are her clothes? Where are my clothes? We can't take her naked."

"We shouldn't take her anywhere. Wait for the ambulance."

"Don't be ridiculous. This is crazy. I can't believe this is happening."

"Should we wash her off?"

"In the pool? Don't be sick. Cécile, Cécile sweetie, talk to me. Can you walk as far as the driveway, for the ambulance?"

"Who's going to tell her parents?"

"Fuck her parents. Where are they?"

"In the hotel, you nit. Stop blubbering."

"I think I'd better go to hospital too."

"Whatever—look, I can't believe this. My God."

And then the sound of Marie-Jo's mother, out of breath, almost hysterical, and close behind other voices, men's and women's, huge flashlights jerking and swinging and a dawning like daybreak overhead as they inspected Cécile's blood-dripped back under the glare.

"There's no bullet hole. The bullet's not in her," said a man, someone's father. "For God's sake, get her parents."

I crept away, skirting the paths, ducking in the undergrowth at the sound of footsteps, hidden behind an oleander bush by the gate as the ambulance careened past, all red lights and honking. Once on the road, I ran. I sped the half-mile as though invisible, as though I or it weren't there at all, as though I were guilty, with Thibaud's spit tasting now like blood in my mouth, and a voice pounding in my head with every footfall, "It didn't happen. It didn't happen. This never happened. It didn't happen."

And in the door, and up the stairs, and first I crawled under my bed and cried, and then I stood up and took off my clothes and went into my bathroom and brushed my teeth furiously without running the water (it didn't happen, it didn't happen), and I put on my nightgown and lay in bed staring out at the sinking moon, willing it all away, pretending I was asleep. But the lemony smell of Thibaud's skin was on my skin; and when my mother woke me the next morning (softly, softly, things were that bad), I knew it was all true.

The Hotel Bellevue was my grandfather's house built on rock. It hadn't always been there, hadn't been handed to him, in its ice-cream-colored glory, with its sculpted pathways and meticulous flora, all eyes to the sea in front of it. He had chosen the land in the late 1950s, already a man fully grown and fighting failure. It was scrubby terrain then, a naked clifftop on an unfashionable part of the coastline, with only a military barracks and a fort nearby, and a few isolated villas buried behind cypress trees further along the road.

He, too, was nothing, or so he later maintained, a man in the first flush of middle age whose early promise had been distracted and sapped—by his mother, by the war, then by his wife and children. When he stood on the clifftop and imagined his hotel there, he was turning the page on a thousand disappointments and turning his back on the country he loved. (This is only a manner of speaking, of course, because he set himself, and his future, to face his past: from his hotel, had his vision been God-like, he would have been able to peer over the rolling Mediterranean and, when his eye again found land, it would have been on the shores he had so recently left behind, where his son (my father) and daughter and wife and cousins remained. It would have been—would still be, if any of us could see so far—on Algeria.)

My grandfather's father was a baker, his mother a teacher, both of them born on the far-flung soil of what was then only newly France. My grandfather was born there, too, in 1917, the youngest of four children, although for many years I was told they were only three. Raised in Blida—a town I long imagined as dusty and forsaken, though it is in fact famously lush—he grew up largely fatherless, his square-jawed papa having fallen into his flour, struck down by a heart attack, when little Jacques was only nine. My grandmother came into the world not far from there but a society apart, the daughter of a moderately comfortable civil servant and his delicate French wife living in the city of Algiers. And my father: by the time he drew breath, as the Second World War labored to its close (even, indeed, as mainland France regained its freedom), he had Africa in his blood, from both sides. The earth on which he planted his feet for the first time was France and yet not France; and he grew up believing it would always be home.

My grandfather lost that faith, not so early, but earlier than many. He never spoke of why, of how doubt crept into his frame and spread until it became certainty of a different fate; but history speaks for him. In the spring of 1958, he crossed to Marseilles to scout for a patch of land, taking leave from his position as the deputy manager of the St. Joseph Hotel, on another clifftop overlooking the Bay of Algiers; and he did so in the immediate wake of that tribulation that has since been tided the Battle of that city. He didn't tell his family of his plan, but assumed that in time they would understand, if only because they had seen the violence, because the daughter of one of their friends—the friend a stout matron with a spun-sugar coiffure, with whom my grandmother regularly played bridge—had lost her slender legs when the Casino bomb went off (the very bomb that disembowelled the unfortunate and misnamed bandleader Lucky Starway), and was still, months later, propped in a hospital ward, trying to reimagine her future in the metal embrace of a wheelchair.

The transaction, a matter entirely of borrowed funds, with a wealthy university comrade of my grandfather's as a silent partner, took some time; and the construction of the edifice—stylish, by the day's standards, an early forebear of those modern, terraced structures which have usurped the waterfront from Monte Carlo to Marseilles—took a good while longer, three years during which my grandfather shuttled back and forth between the colony and the
métropole.
By 1961, he had bowed out of his job at the languishing bastion of Algerian
hôtellerie.
(The St. Joseph's employees were all, ostensibly, Swiss-trained; but this was and had always been a lie, and by that late date in the French colony's brief history, no promise of Swiss service was sufficient to lure tourists to those unsettled shores. The world's journalists swarmed the panicked city, but they searched out more modest accommodations, indifferent to the quantity of starch in their linens. Only a clutch of mysterious Americans, Mormon-like in attire and sobriety, clacked along the hotel's hushed corridors, and conducted their business in hushed tones.) He, my grandmother and my Tante Marie installed themselves in the staff block in the specially designed penthouse—the very same—from which they oversaw the finishing touches on my grandfather's great plan.

My father, Alexandre, did not at once join his parents. For the very reason that his father decreed it, he refused, even then, to accept that he might have to. This was not the beginning of his rebellion: that had begun much earlier, and even through my child's eyes I could detect its vestiges in the continuing subterranean struggles between father and son. My grandfather, from the beginning, did not want my father, his firstborn, impediment to freedom and the shimmering success that Jacques, still so young, the war just ending, dreamed of. And if later he changed his mind and claimed his heir and tried to clasp him to his breast (a matter purely of speculation on my part—in our family, who would ever discuss such things?), by then it was too late. With regard to his parent, my father's heart, like that of the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen, had turned to ice.