The art of losing, p.27
The Art of Losing, page 27
He gets to know the gang who hang around with Véronique and Clarisse, a curious assortment of nice girls who are proud of the fact and young men who like to think of themselves as bad boys. He sometimes thinks that Clarisse’s male friends play at being tough guys for his benefit, prompted by what they imagine of his past, embellishing and inventing brawls they have just won as though trying to turn their mundane existence into a lawless jungle that fits with their fantasies of Hamid’s life.
One night one of the girls giggles as she runs her fingers through the tight curls of his Afro.
“It’s like moss,” she laughs.
Hamid hunches a little, not daring to protest. The hand lingers, toying, poking into the tight curls. He feels hot. People are staring. He tries not to move.
“Stop that,” Clarisse curtly tells her friend.
Dumbstruck, the girl removes her hand. She doesn’t understand Clarisse’s reaction. Later, with aggrieved astonishment, she will claim Clarisse is jealous. After her friends have left, Clarisse tries to console Hamid:
“People did the same thing to me when I cut my hair short.”
He pretends to accept the parallel, although he knows that the two situations have nothing in common. (Years later, Naïma’s youngest sister, Aglaé, will provoke a passionate argument over a family meal by wearing a T-shirt emblazoned: YOUR HAND ON MY AFRO, MY FIST IN YOUR FACE.)
* * *
He listens to the sounds of the city that drift up to the half-open bedroom window, the squeal of brakes, the nocturnal conversations, the music of a distant neighbor, the chirrup of birds so confused by the streetlights that they no longer know when to sleep. Paris, beyond these walls, is immense, and yet the awestruck love he feels for the city is not enough to drown out his bitter feelings of loneliness.
For the first time he finds himself with no one who shares his history. His earliest memories of Clarisse are barely a few months old and they have worn them out already, constantly recalling every second of their first meeting, trying to squeeze out every drop of magic. No one in Paris knows what happened before that evening at the warehouse party. When he left Pont-Féron, Hamid hoped that he might become a blank slate. He believed that he could reinvent himself, only to discover that others are simultaneously reinventing him. Silence is not a neutral space, it is a blank screen on which everyone is free to project their fantasies. Because Hamid remains silent, he exists in a multitude of versions that conflict with one another and, more importantly, conflict with his version of himself—yet continue to exist in the minds of others.
In order to be understood, he would need to tell his story. He knows that this is what Clarisse is waiting for. The problem is that he has no desire to tell his story. She watches anxiously as he drifts away on a sea of silence.
“I can’t tell you over the phone, you have to come home,” Ali interrupts him.
In the background he hears his mother’s voice, pleading and cajoling. Good cop, bad cop, he knows the routine. But today the stench of the phone booth is unbearable and he is desperate to end the call. He agrees to go home for the weekend, hangs up the phone, steps outside, and takes a deep breath.
“Can I go with you?” Clarisse asks.
Hamid hesitates, then shakes his head.
“Some other time,” he says.
If Clarisse spoke Kabyle, she would respond with Yema’s phrase: Azka d azqa, “Tomorrow is the grave.”
* * *
“Maybe his parents want him to marry one of their own?” Véronique says.
Clarisse shrugs. So what? This is what parents do. Since she left home, her mother has tried to set her up with two lawyers, a doctor, and a mathematics professor in Dijon.
“So, have you introduced her to Hamid?” Véronique asks, although she already knows the answer.
Clarisse mutters that if Hamid does not want her to meet his parents, she is not going to introduce him to hers. She clings to this idea of reciprocity so she does not have to examine the real reasons she has never mentioned Hamid’s existence to her family. The fact that she spends her time carefully refashioning the world with her hands often allows her to ignore the questions going around and around inside her head. But she cannot quite silence her thoughts, and from time to time fragments of answers flicker through her mind, waiting for her to have the courage to consider them. Her uncle Christian did his military service in Algeria and brought back a seemingly never-ending string of epithets for the local people: crouille, bicot, l’arbi, fatma, ton, raton, melon, mohamed, tronc-de-figuier, fellouze … He says them for a laugh, to provoke a reaction, but although Clarisse’s parents scowl, she has never heard them criticize his comments. Not that she believes that her parents are racist, a heinous word that seems somehow remote and applies to Nazis in uniform, to skinheads who are ready to say anything to differentiate themselves from hippies, to the new political party chasing votes of which Jean-Marie Le Pen was recently appointed president. The problem is not that Hamid is an outsider: on the contrary, the fact that he comes from Algeria means that, like it or not, he is already part of Uncle Christian’s history and the history of Clarisse’s family. And in that story, he is not one of the good guys. Clarisse would need to create a palimpsest, to overwrite Christian’s earliest inscriptions with the story of her love for Hamid. She does not know whether she is capable of that.
* * *
The train speeds through the lush countryside where cows flaunt their mottled coats of black and white. Hamid ignores them just as he ignores the person sitting next to him and his attempts at conversation: he is not interested in anything other than Clarisse. He does not understand why he has to continue being the family secretary once he has left home. (In his night classes, this is referred to as “dereliction of duty.”) He is afraid this means that he will never truly leave Pont-Féron and treats this first enforced homecoming as though it were a permanent state of affairs—one that he will dread for years to come. His sullen mood is his way of making his parents pay for the things they have not yet asked of him.
Once he is settled at the living room table and Yema has set out the coffee and a plate of kaab el ghazal that leave his fingers and lips white with powdered sugar, Ali lays a large manila envelope on the table and warily points out the official stamp of the Algerian government. It is because of the stamp that they have not dared ask a neighbor or the little ones to read it—Hamid uses “the little ones” to refer only to his youngest brothers and sisters, while Ali and Yema use the phrase to refer to all their children—except Hamid—since, in their eyes, the others will never quite be adults, never quite responsible.
Hamid tears open the envelope and, one by one, takes out a sheaf of documents of various colors, careful not to look at any until he has them all arranged on the table. The documents they have been sent are in two columns, one Arabic, one French, each running toward the opposite margin, each superbly oblivious to the other, two systems of writing the world that are utterly different.
Hear ye! Hear ye! Hamid hears his inner child proclaim as he begins to read the contents to his parents: By the power vested in these documents, and in the name of the Agrarian Revolution, Sieur Ali is hereby enjoined to ratify the transfer of his lands to those working the aforesaid lands. He struggles to find the right words to translate the bureaucratic language into Arabic, but Ali and Yema quickly realize what it is about and their faces fall. The letter requests that they give up the olive groves, the fig trees, the houses, and the stores to Hamza and to Djamel’s family. According to the revolution, private property no longer exists except as usufruct. He who tills the land, owns the land; it is as simple as that. Ali must also give up a number of his fields because their total area exceeds that permitted under the new agrarian policy. The surplus land will be transferred to a farming cooperative and later redistributed to khammès—peasants too poor to buy their own plot who, until now, have paid rent to landowners in order to be allowed to cultivate some of their acreage. (In fact, the documents Hamid reads are more succinct—it is Naïma’s research that fleshes out the aims of the revolution.)
In one of the drawers of the monstrous dresser, Yema has kept keys to the old house and the barn. Her first instinct is to go and fetch them, as though the letter is demanding that she send back these keys she has taken with her everywhere. She stares at them, clasps them in her plump fist, not saying a word. It is not as though she thought she would ever need them again, but these worthless keys strung on a frayed length of cord did keep alive the notion that they were landowners, the notion that there were fields on the far side of the Mediterranean that belonged to them, were waiting for them—perhaps just as they themselves were waiting, motionless, quiescent.
Hamid can see the distress of his tiny mother and his aging father, but he does not share their pain. He can only endorse the principles of agrarian reform, which conform to those in a book lent to him by Stéphane. He tries to tell his parents that the program of reform is a means to a more just world, but Ali shrugs and Yema turns away. Hamid changes tack: They have not even set eyes on these fields for ten years. What do they care whether the fields belong to them, to his father’s brother, or to a tenant farmer? What difference does it make? He insists because he knows his parents are powerless against the relentless march of the revolution. The bureaucratic civilities of the letter do nothing to hide the fact that there is no alternative to dispossession.
* * *
“You’ll have nothing to leave to your children,” Ali says sadly.
Hamid laughs. He finds it difficult to imagine what his hypothetical children would do with groves of olives and figs a thousand miles away.
“Your father planted those trees for you, for them,” Yema says reproachfully. “You don’t understand anything.”
He has heard this phrase so often that he doesn’t stop to think, doesn’t search his heart for some compassion. One day he will draw up a list of all the things that his parents do not understand.
“Fine,” he says defiantly, “if the trees are mine, I will be the one to give them back to Algeria. That way, everyone is happy.”
As he reaches for the pen, Hamid receives the last slap he will ever get. Ali half rises from his seat and lashes out across the table with all the weight of his clumsy posture. His large hand hits Hamid on the chin.
“Show a little respect,” he mutters. “Just a little respect.”
Hamid feels the pain radiate from his jaw through his whole face. He has bitten his tongue and it is bleeding; he can taste copper in his mouth. Yema quickly brings him a damp tea towel. He does not notice her concern or her panic. He picks the pen up off the floor and, in a triumphant rage, signs the documents in his father’s stead.
“Li fat met,” he says, pushing the papers into the middle of the table.
The words resurface from an ancient past and, in the process, they consign it to limbo. Li fat met: The past is dead. Hamid has just signed its death certificate. He does not spend the night as he had promised his mother and the little ones, but storms out of the apartment.
As he slams the door, he hears Yema sobbing—that strange dove-like cooing she makes when she cries—but he refuses to be moved. He paces around the cité, head down, saying nothing to anyone. He vows never to come back here, and for long months he keeps his promise. (Ali, for his part, will not get in touch with his son when he travels to Paris the next month.)
From this moment, Hamid will cherish the miles separating him from Pont-Féron. At the station, he waits a long time for a train to finally arrive and take him back to Paris, scrolling back the dreary landscape that he ignored a few hours earlier, whose expanse he savors now that he is determined never to cross it again.
* * *
He arrives home at nightfall. The blow to his jaw has flowered into a bruise. In the narrow hallway, he takes off his coat and his shoes, pretending not to notice Clarisse’s anxious looks.
“What happened?” she asks finally.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She insists. She trails after him as he goes into the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen. She has a right to know, she says, then corrects herself, says she needs to know, please. She feels humiliated, being forced to plead for information. She carries on only because, having started, she can think of nothing else, not even of saying nothing (especially not saying nothing). When she blocks his path in the hallway, he angrily asks why she’s so fascinated by his family. Is it because she finds them quaint and exotic?
“Because let me warn you right now: there’s no camel.”
Clarisse’s lips begin to tremble, her face crumples. Hamid lights a cigarette and smokes in silence, refusing to look at her.
“I’m sorry,” he says eventually.
As she is drifting off to sleep as far from Hamid’s arms as the bed will allow, Clarisse wonders whether she should break up with him. You can’t be in love with someone’s silence, she thinks, it doesn’t make sense. She shouldn’t care about the things Hamid refuses to talk about, she should accept that his past is not part of their present, that he’s free to do as he likes. But because she feels that he carries it with him constantly, that his past affects him, affects them, she cannot bring herself to consider it a closed book. To her, it is like a secret life that he is living in parallel to the life they live together. It is more hurtful than another woman, she thinks, or some shameful addiction he refuses to acknowledge, simply because it has been going on for longer, because with every second he spends with her, he is silently reliving twenty years that are closed to her. Maybe, Clarisse thinks, her skin chafed by the sheets as she tosses and turns, maybe she should break up with him. But when she sees him sleeping, and imagines that this might be the last time she will ever see his face, the closed eyes, the narrow chest swelled by the calm, regular breaths of sleep, she feels like crying, the very thought of a breakup crushes her heart like the hand of an ogre. What can she do? She decides to stay with him but to share less with him, to keep secret certain thoughts of her own, certain memories, certain achievements. She decides to establish a level playing field, one that might make Hamid’s silence less painful.
In the morning, when he wakes, Hamid finds Clarisse looking at him. Something in her face alarms him—he can make out the resolution made that night in a deep furrow carved between her brows, in the fact that the corners of her mouth are drooping a little more. He longs to talk to her, but none of his thousand faces seems prepared to open up, none is practiced in the art of intimacy. He closes his eyes again without saying a word.
“Who is it?”
The voice on the other end of the line answers in Kabyle. Kader hands the telephone to his father and simply says:
“Mohand.”
He does not know who this man is, he has no memory of the members of the association in Palestro, but from his father’s face he can tell that the call comes as a surprise.
“Salaam Alaikum,” Ali says, taking the receiver.
He says nothing else, not, It’s been a long time, not, What do you want? He leaves Mohand to explain that he is in France, in Lyon, staying with his nephew, but that he is planning to head north to see his cousins. Maybe they could meet up.
“Of course,” Ali says. “Let’s meet in Paris.”
He says it as though it is a town close by, a place he knows intimately and visits regularly.
“You shouldn’t see him,” Yema says. “He’s a vile man. A murderer.”
“He’s one of us,” Ali says.
If the letter about the Agrarian Revolution had not provoked a quarrel that has made the silence between father and son even more opaque, Ali might have asked Hamid to join them and, at the same time, through Mohand, given him back a sliver of the Algeria they had left so abruptly. Hamid might have recognized Mohand as one of the guests at his circumcision, might have been pleased to see him again. And if that happened, perhaps Hamid might have spoken about him to Naïma, about the man on the far side of the Mediterranean who had the courage, the clarity of mind, or the good fortune to fight on the right side. But Ali is too proud to take the first step and contact his son. He goes alone to this meeting that—were I not to write about it—would sink, with his death, into complete oblivion.
On the appointed day, he dons his best suit (his only suit) and takes the train to Paris. He meets Mohand at the Gare Montparnasse. Mohand is waiting on the windy platform, wearing his best coat (his only coat). The two men awkwardly shake hands. It has been more than ten years since they last saw each other. Now in their fifties and graying, they search each other’s faces for the ravages of time they do not notice in their own reflections. And when they walk, they throw back their shoulders, trying to look like the memory they think they left behind.
Ali, in his role as a French citizen, treats Mohand as a tourist, which means that by extension he must pretend to be Parisian. He vaguely points out various monuments that all look much the same to him. Meanwhile, all he can think is: Does my son live nearby? Is this a familiar sight for him? Together, they wander the streets, saying little or nothing, and, when it is time to eat, Ali stops in front of a restaurant with windows lettered in gold and a velvet interior. The doorman looks at them in astonishment. Much as Ali would like to pretend that he is a habitué of such places, he is ill at ease from the moment they step inside. He does not know how to move, how to speak, where to look. He doesn’t know how to sit down without jostling the other diners. He doesn’t know what to order or—worse still—how to order. He can tell that Mohand has noticed his discomfort, and this simply makes matters worse. As the waiter brings a first course that he did not want, Ali asks in a tone he hopes sounds casual how things are going back in the bled. Mohand sighs and, his mouth full of herring, says things are not good.
“We’re draining the country and filling up France. There are no men left in the village. The only men left are the cripples and the lunatics. The ones who can’t work. The ones who are happy to let their mothers cook for them. Or the ones who’ve come back saying France has broken them, worn them out, that they’re not fit for anything anymore. Which is probably true. When you look at their faces, they seem very old. You, too, Ali, I’m sorry to say it but you look old. It’s something France does to people, that’s just how it is. You’d have been better off staying at home.”
