The Last Life (8 page)

My father, famously
beau garçon
at sixteen, with the pick of the young Algeroises fluttering their lashes at him and cramming furiously for his exams besides, refused the interruption—no, the cessation—of his life. He kissed his mother and his younger sister (whom he called, with the cruelty of adolescence, "La Bête") and sternly shook his father's hand; then turned on his heel and went home to his maternal grandmother (her dainty Frenchness now long wizened, she had become, like a Catholic convert, more African than her offspring, and would prove more difficult to uproot than the statue of the black virgin at Notre Dame d'Afrique), in whose benevolent care he remained till the end, and her end, which came more or less at the same time.

On new soil, a new man, Jacques LaBasse, my grandfather, wanted to accomplish in five years what others took ten to achieve. With unforeseen adversity on his side, he determined that the second half of his life would redeem the humble first. His wish, his vocation, was to build the three-star Hotel Bellevue not into a mans work, but into that of a dynasty; to have people—all people: the locals, the tourists, even those who never ventured to the Mediterranean shore—believe that it had always been and always would be there, a haven of order and quiet for France's
bonne bourgeoisie.
And up to a point, he succeeded.

By that summer of my fourteenth year, the hotel had followed the round of seasons more than twenty-five times, its fifty-three rooms filling and emptying with the regularity of the tides, each change in nature's dress bringing a different clientele: the British and the elderly in the off-season, when the mimosa bloomed or the autumn winds blustered; elegant Parisians and their boisterous children in the heat of summer; a few eccentrics, often alone, and the widows, in the winter months. Each July brought familiar families back for a week or a fortnight or a month at a time, depending on the depth of their pockets. Many of the children I played with in the summertime it seemed that I had always known, although, amoeba-like, the group stretched and shrank and altered. One or two had been coming to the Bellevue for so long that they had learned to swim in that very pool, had first been stung by sea urchins off the rocky beach below, and knew the secret hiding places in the grounds as well as I did. They had been there when the extra parking lot behind the tennis courts—paved over five years at least—was a grassy playground adorned with swing set and slides, and when the potato-faced
patronne
of the paper store down the road still dispensed sweets with one hand while clutching her three-legged, crazy-eyed chihuahua, Milou, in the other. It had been more than three years since a yellow
deux chevaux
had done away with the dog, which seemed, at the time, like forever.

My grandfather's motives, in most things, were unclear to the family. He had always been deemed, by those who loved him, a difficult man and brilliant therefore, a man with a temper, a man gnawed upon by undisclosed demons. (Not that the ways of the family allowed for disclosure: his mystery was his power, and they were all too keen to grant it him.) Family stories spun him into life, stories that my grandmother told with reverent indulgence, or that my mother repeated with a sneer. (My father never spoke about his parent, except in the present. As in: "Papa needs me to work late," or "Papa hasn't been sleeping well." I sometimes wondered if he even knew the stories, or whether he had made it his business not to.) From these anecdotes I, the grandchild, was to cull the essence of the man, who was so resolutely divorced from them in his own person. What was strange to me then was that two women could tell the same tale and draw such vastly differing conclusions.

That same summer, only a month or so before the shooting, my grandmother had imparted one such story—a new one, that, at fourteen, I was only just old enough to hear. When I recounted it again, to my mother, she finished it quite differently, and less kindly, and I now turned both versions over in my mind, as if they might provide some explanation of the sunken, unshaven old man who presented himself, docile, at the police station the morning after the shooting.

That noon my grandmother had filled our lunch, just hers and mine, with my grandfather's past, while he himself dined at the hotel restaurant with potbellied business associates, sucking garlic-stuffed olives and downing them with rosé. Not sentimental by habit, she was dreamy and softened by the vision of her darling in his youth. I'd like to say that at the time I was wholly under her spell, as I had been when I was smaller ("Tell me more, Grand'-mère, more!"), but I wriggled in my seat and twisted my napkin and kept my eyes on the chip of turquoise through the window, eager to rejoin my friends.

I listened nonetheless, more closely than was by then usual, because my grandmother began by shocking me.

"Your grandfather," she said, "was not the youngest of three children. I think you're old enough to know this now."

I sniggered. It seemed such a preposterous statement. Her glare was grim, and her skin splotchy.

"Your grandfather was the youngest of four. His brother, Yves, was the eldest, and Paillette, of whom you've heard—"

"Yes, of course."

"Was nearest him in age. But they had another sister, too. Estelle."

"Estelle?"

"She was a good bit older than your father—"

"Grandfather."

"Yes. And she disappeared when he was nine."

The story was not about Estelle's disappearance, but about a reunion, the reunion between them many years later, when my grandfather was studying in Paris.

"He was summoned," my grandmother explained. "He wouldn't—he couldn't—have found her otherwise. He never even looked. He was aware, of course, that she and Paulette wrote to one another, secret letters that their mother didn't know about; he had always been aware of that. But home—and Paulette, Yves, and their Maman—was so far from the life upon which he had recently embarked, and Estelle was further still, but a faint flicker in the memory."

That afternoon, she told me, a wet afternoon in November, the air made more melancholy by the leaden drizzle in which Paris excels, he had declined to join his comrades in their Saturday round of the cafés and had set off in the opposite direction, towards the Jardins du Luxembourg.

His mind was full of home, but not of Paulette or Yves or Maman, not of the crowded little house in Blida that he was delighted to have escaped. No, it was the glow of Algiers that illuminated his eye: the sparkling white buildings climbing the hillside behind the port, the azure glitter of the bay, the alleys of steps winding towards the sky, and the paths of the Jardin Marengo, scented by jasmine and passionflower, overhung with banana fronds—all these sites suffused with the blush of first love.

"I was his first true love," my grandmother continued, her eyes on the sea's hazy horizon. "Or so he has always said. And I became his wife. He seemed young when we first met—he's three years younger than I am, you know. I was teaching kindergarten in a small school in the city. He was staying with cousins in the capital. I was charged with the care of, among others, their daughter, the daughter of these cousins, and he, studying for his special university exams, volunteered one afternoon to pick her up. You know this. I've told you this before."

Thereafter, his walk to the school became a daily break from his studies, and the child's tiny hand in his a quotidian pleasure. A pleasure, too, to pass the time talking to the little girl's schoolmistress, trying, with his wit, to catch her averted eyes. My grandmother was smitten; how could she not be? He was so handsome, and dark, and fierce, and she could tell at once that his mind was like a great force, a wind. She knew he would pass his exams, although he claimed he wasn't sure.

Eventually they walked together, two young adults, in the early evenings, and he learned the curves and rises of the city with her hand, not the little girl's, in his. When he returned to Blida they wrote daily; and when he was accepted to his
grande école
in Paris, the triumph was tinged with misery for both of them, almost an ache, at the thought that their future together would be postponed.

They parted at the quayside, he dry-eyed and hopeful, eager for France. His letters that first autumn in Paris were full only of his yearning for my grandmother, she said, and into that yearning he fed all his nostalgia for their beloved homeland. Paris was dark, he convinced himself, not because it was a northern city where the sun rarely shone, but because she was not there. (Later he would learn that it was dark simply because it was dark, that in winter its days were as abbreviated as a stifled sneeze; but that in June, when the twilight spun out, golden, until almost eleven, that city, too, unfurled its wonders, love or no.)

That Saturday, the park was empty of its usual clamor of children and parents and young lovers. The splash of the fountains was indistinguishable from the splashing of the rain, and Jacques stood awhile, watching the drops skitter on the surface of the pond. Heavy with water, the trees sagged, their branches beckoning in the wind, their leaves waxy. Potbellied benches squatted in the gravel, dripping as if bereaved.

His melancholia was willed, but he indulged it nonetheless. In Algiers, he thought, Monique would be at home with her mother, perhaps sunk in the velvet armchair by the window, bent over her embroidery, or over a book. ("I had written to him, not long before, about Proust," my grandmother explained, "whom I had just discovered, and whose enveloping sentences I adored. Upon receipt of my letter, he had rushed to the secondhand booksellers on the quay and acquired a dog-eared copy in four volumes. Each night in bed he read a dozen pages, and felt he was reading them with me. I felt it too. In Gilberte, in Albertine, so unlike his beloved, he found my face, and my eyes, the color, he used to say, of the Mediterranean.") And was she reading? Probably, with the cadaverous marmalade cat snoring in the cushions of the sofa opposite, and her mother stretched out in the bedroom on her high, shiplike bed, in her stockinged feet. Later, when the sun was low in the sky, Monique and her mother might go walking, arm in arm; or perhaps they would be joined by cousins and aunts, for an afternoon of honeyed Arab pastries and conversation. He imagined her distracted, withdrawing from the chatter to pace the balcony and pause, chin in hand, gazing out to the harbor, towards France.

When he reached his building, the
bleu
with which the concierge smilingly presented him took him utterly by surprise.

"Perhaps a little girlfriend?" she suggested with a wink. "Mind, now, that you don't bring her back here. I keep a respectable house." She flicked at his shoulder with her duster, and giggled, before retreating behind her curtained glass door to the thick crackle of the radio and her singleted spouse.

He could not imagine who might be writing to him, from within Paris itself, and worried that the letter might contain bad news: he had not been thinking of his mother, or of his sister or brother, after all. He had forgotten that his four-year-old nephew was ill, sorry information of which his mother had apprised him in her last letter: "Poor little Henri," she had written, "has been stricken with a terrible fever. The doctor has been here, and we keep the boy wrapped in cool cloths which heat up immediately and are changed at once; but his fever seems inexhaustible. All depends on the next day or two and the will of God. To lose a firstborn son is a tragedy, as I know all too well. Yves and his wife worry and cannot sleep; we are all praying, and I know that you, too, pray with us."

But then he reflected that there was nobody in Paris to bear news of a faraway death, had there been one. Aside from his classmates—who never sent messages through the post—he knew few people in the city.

The elaborate script was unfamiliar. Glancing at the signature he did not realize, initially, that it was his sister's: Estelle was a name so long unpronounced in the LaBasse household that he had come to think of her as dead. Only when he returned to the salutation— "
Men ckerfière
"—did it strike him; whereupon he took up the letter and sank backwards, onto the edge of his bed. Afterwards he could not say whether he emitted the sound of his shock, or simply covered his mouth as a precaution.

"My dear brother," the frothy hand implored, "how long has it been? What memories can you have of me? I see you only as a boy in short pants. But fate has brought us both to Paris, and so, I hope, we will meet again. I am not here for long, having only recently arrived from Nice; I will be departing Monday for London on my way to America. Little brother, there isn't much time. Please come, this evening at eight, to my hotel. Room 426, the Ritz, Place Vendome. You see that life has not treated me so badly. There is much to tell, and so little time. Do not disappoint me. Your loving sister, Estelle."

Jacques had not seen her in almost eleven years. Shortly after their father's death, when Jacques was nine, and when his academic precocity had only just begun to announce itself, Estelle had taken flight. Seven years older than he, she was their parents' second surviving child, as unlike their eldest brother Yves in temperament as Jacques was himself. Paulette, thirteen at the time, midway between Estelle and Jacques, adored her sister, and had refused to disown her. Estelle was everything Paulette was not, which might have caused resentment in the younger, plainer girl, but instead had inspired fierce loyalty, even pride. Paulette was not particularly intelligent, but she was convinced of Estelle's genius. Like all of the LaBasse family, devout, she did not on that account condemn Estelle's lapses: she simply prayed for her sister, and lit candles for her, and savored her infrequent letters, a delicious secret kept between Paulette and the local postmistress.

Jacques had known about these letters, and in adolescent arguments with Paulette had more than once threatened to reveal them to their mother. But he had never read one, and thus had no idea of what Estelle had been doing these many years, nor of where she had been living. As he dressed to leave, it seemed suddenly remarkable to him that he had nurtured so little curiosity about this sister, that after she had vanished from their lives, and after their mother's copious weeping had trickled to a halt, he had accepted her loss, like that of his father, as irrevocable fate.