The art of losing, p.34
The Art of Losing, page 34
Sitting in the train, Naïma cannot shake off the strange impression that she is heading into a trap. She pictures those scenes in movies where a small group marches forward, all too vulnerable to an ambush. As children, she and her sisters would scream at the characters:
“Turn back! For God’s sake, turn back!”
At the time, they were convinced that you had to be as stupid as a movie hero to carry on in spite of the gnawing atmosphere of menace, and that they themselves would be much more sensible. And yet Naïma does not get off at the next station and turn back. She settles deeper into her seat and bites her nails, staring out at the snatches of suburban scenes that flash past between the tunnels.
When she arrives, she finds only a series of small beige pebble-dash houses and streets named after obscure ministers from the Third Republic, as devoid of danger as it is of exotic charm. She sets off on foot for the cul-de-sac the woman mentioned on the telephone, which bears one of those names that exist only in leafy suburbs: Hazel Grove Mews or Great Oaks Way, she can’t remember, a clumsy or perhaps derisive attempt to make residents believe that they are living in the countryside. The artist’s house is identical to the neighboring houses and to those on the next road. There is nothing to suggest that an artist lives here, not the slightest square inch of beauty or folly in this functional, faux-charming building. Nor are there hazel groves or oak trees. Lalla opens the door and, after briefly looking her up and down, says with a smile:
“Fantastic, they’ve sent me the Arab!”
“Kabyle,” Naïma automatically corrects him.
Lalla bursts out laughing.
“Even better! Come on, come in!”
Inside, the house looks as though it were renovated by someone who never planned to live here. Everything is neutral and matching, from the walls to the furniture and the knickknacks. Yet, on closer inspection, the dog-eared books, the piles of letters, the Aït Menguellet CDs, and the drawings strewn between the magazines on the glass-topped coffee table gradually reveal that this really is the home of Lalla Fatma N’Soumer. These objects nudge the little house into another realm, extirpate it from the French suburbs, from a life stretched between Paris, almost beyond reach, and Euro Disney.
Naïma cannot help but compare the house with her grandmother’s apartment, where Algeria is all on display, glaring and garish; Algeria is present in the Muslim calendars pinned to the wall (calendars her grandmother cannot read, Naïma was stunned to realize late in life), the copper trays embossed with Arabic calligraphy, the photo of Mecca in a gilt fame studded with paste stones, the tea service, the packets of sticky dates piled up in every cupboard, and—Yema’s pride and joy—the panoply of pots for making couscous that take up every shelf in the storeroom. Algeria is present on the giant flat-screen television, always on, always tuned to an Arabic channel. It is present in the jewelry on her fingers and her wrists, in the red-and-yellow scarf that covers Yema’s hair, which in itself is marked by Algeria, being carefully hennaed every month. But there is no depth to it. Naïma’s family has been orbiting Algeria for so long that they no longer really know what they are circling. Memories? A dream? A lie?
“Apologies for my rude welcome,” Lalla says as he pours her a coffee. “It’s just that—have you noticed the French tendency to presume that all Algerians understand each other? Twenty years I’ve been here, and it feels like every time I have to deal with an institution, they dig out the duty Arab and send him to meet me.”
“In his office, Christophe Reynie files all the applications he gets from the job center by country of origin,” Naïma says. “And he takes on temporary staff according to the nationality of the artists he’s exhibiting.”
Lalla laughs so hard it triggers a coughing fit. Naïma thinks that he looks like Hemingway with his white beard, the repulsively stained mustache, and the dark eyes that never smile—the smile appears in the lines around his eyes, but there is no warmth in the irises.
She had expected to spend an hour or two with him, that they would exchange contacts, telephone numbers, addresses, and brief descriptions of the works, after which she would make a dash for the train. She had imagined a professional conversation of the kind she usually has with artists, who generally reserve their more artistic conversations, their view of the world, and the outpourings of their souls for Christophe and provide her only with logistical details. But Lalla talks to her randomly about everything and nothing (the expression is misleading; he talks about his life) with a surprising volubility that prevents her from steering the conversation. He confides to her that he sees this retrospective as connected to his imminent death (cancer) and that he finds the prospect as frightening as he finds it appealing. He is not sure that he wants to live long enough to see it.
“Imagine,” he says to Naïma, “this will be the first time I’ve been confronted by everything I’ve done, from the sixties to today, a distillation of my life in scrawls of ink and colors. What if, at the last moment, when it’s too late to create something new, I end up thinking it’s shit? That really scares me.”
She offers a few hackneyed compliments that he dismisses with a sigh. A little later, as he empties a packet of speculoos biscuits onto a plate, he returns to his fears.
“I’ve come to terms with my death, that wasn’t too difficult. But I don’t know if I could face discovering that my life was mediocre and die knowing that.”
“How can you come to terms with death?” Naïma asks.
She is convinced that it is simply a figure of speech, a brave man’s vanity. As he sits there in his gray-and-beige armchair wearing a baggy sweater scattered with dog hairs, the artist looks too old, too frail, not to fear an end that is bound to come soon.
“I’ve spent a long time rubbing shoulders with death,” Lalla says, sipping the last dregs of his coffee.
In his youth, he made several attempts to kill himself. It was complicated, he says, suffering from depression as he did in rural Algeria in the 1950s, because the old people simply told him that it was the work of a djinn and no one wanted to talk about his sadness because that would have been tantamount to talking to the djinn and no one was prepared to do that. And then everything changed with the war, when death truly entered his field of vision. He would have been about fifteen. His older brother quickly joined the maquis, and he found himself running messages for the FLN. For Lalla, it was a stunning reversal: when life had been offered to him on a plate, he had not wanted it, but now that it was threatened, he wanted it desperately. He experienced incredibly powerful rushes of adrenaline when he encountered army patrols, and he remembers racing headlong through the woods with a laugh that erupted from his chest, one he could not stop until he had shaken off his pursuers. He has never loved life more than he did in that moment, he says, and he has never again experienced that strange laugh. And so, when the whole country began to breathe again after seven years of horrors, he felt terrified. Terrified that, now that the risk of danger was gone, his death wish would return. This was how he found himself a little later fighting with the Kabyle rebels and how he finally managed to antagonize both the government and the Islamists. Obviously, it was a matter of principle, but it was also a way of reinforcing his fragile existence. Lalla believes that he manages risk in the same way a diabetic manages his insulin. Too little, he wants to die, too much, he will actually die. In 1995, he went into exile, because the Black Decade threatened the precarious equilibrium he had created.
“I’m a suicide case who would be prepared to live forever as long as I felt at risk every day,” he says.
Illness, in the end, is a risk like any other. It is one of the things that encourages him to rejoice in the fact that he is alive. And when death comes, he will have toyed with it so often that it will be entitled to take him once and for all. He knows this: death must be frustrated, given how often he has danced with it, only to slip away.
“Life is violent. My life, at least…”
This last phrase seems to shake him from his thoughts, and he returns his attention to Naïma.
“Was your family involved in the war? When did they arrive in France?”
Hamid told his daughters over and over that to answer this question is not simply a matter of giving a date, it opens a door to a history that still provokes violent reactions. Ordinarily Naïma never specifies the year, only the decade. But she feels at ease here amid the smell of the old dog and the aroma of coffee, and perhaps part of her is hoping that, if she quarrels with the artist, she will be spared the imminent trip to Algeria.
“In ’62.”
His eyebrow rises only slightly.
“Harkis?”
“Yes.”
It is the first time Naïma has heard the word pronounced with an Arabic accent, and the h that takes up so much space gives it a certain additional gravity. Lalla sits back in his chair and looks at her, his face expressionless.
“What about you, what do you think?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What do you think about independence?”
“I’m in favor, obviously.”
“Obviously…”
He says nothing more. The ambiguous silence is broken by a jangle of keys. Céline comes in laden with shopping bags and cheerfully greets them. This is the woman Naïma spoke to on the telephone. On subsequent visits, she will come to understand that since the old painter fell ill, Céline has been his lover, his nurse, his model, and his assistant, a polymorphous yet discreet companion with gray eyes and an unwavering love. When Céline suggests she stay for dinner, Naïma realizes that she has let the whole afternoon slip away. She leaps up from her chair, brushing biscuit crumbs from her skirt.
“You’ll have to come back,” Lalla says. “I’m too tired now to get my thoughts in order. I’ve talked too much.”
And from his sly smile, Naïma wonders whether he did this deliberately, whether he is not trying to defer the exhibition by swamping it in a torrent of stories, as though, in spite of his protestations of acceptance, he would like to dance with the devil one last time and make his escape.
* * *
The following week, langues-de-chats have replaced the speculoos biscuits on the little plate sitting on the coffee table. It is a box of mass-produced cookies of the kind supermarkets sell by the thousands every day, and yet, as she bites into a langue-de-chat, Naïma thinks of Yema. At some point in her childhood she cannot precisely place in time, her grandmother decided to include Western food in her pantry and in her recipes, as though to prove to her grandchildren that she could move with the times, or because she feared that their little French palates would crave foods that they could not find at her house. Yema tried couscous with fries, mutton pizza, hamburgers in kesra buns, and, of course, every brand of cookies available in the largest Leclerc hypermarket in France. She was so proud of her purchases—entirely based on the images on the packaging—that Naïma and her sisters never dared to tell her that the supermarket cookies were dry and bland and they longed for her to go back to serving honey pastries. Naïma doesn’t know how many langues-de-chats exactly like the one offered by the old painter she choked down, smiling so as not to upset her grandmother. She takes a second bite—the flavor, or rather the absence of flavor, has not changed.
Today, Lalla is wearing a pale yellow shirt and a thick jacket of an old-fashioned style. He looks a little like an elderly uncle in a wedding photograph, or one of those fogyish gentlemen who put on their best suit to go for a drink on Sundays down at the PMU—not to bet on the horses, nor to see the handful of old soaks they are likely to find there, but because it is Sunday, a day for suits and patent-leather shoes. Naïma, determined to be more efficient than she was on her previous visit, immediately steers the conversation to the ink drawings that Christophe wants to procure.
“When did you start working in this form? When do the earliest examples date from?”
Lalla pinches his lower lip between thumb and forefinger.
“In ’65, maybe a little earlier. I can’t really remember. I do know it was a few years after independence…”
He smiles dreamily at this word and, despite urgent (or perhaps slightly panicked) looks from Naïma, he picks up the story of his life where he left off last time, as though it were a book he had carefully bookmarked and slipped under the coffee table waiting for her to come back so that he could easily open it at the right page.
“Independence was … it was a magnificent, tragic shambles. There were wonderful moments, truly wonderful moments. Life was changing. Thanks to socialism, we suddenly had heaps of new friends. Algiers was teeming with foreigners who spoke languages we had never even thought about before. Intellectuals and artists from chilly, far-flung countries who came to give lessons. We were taught to use machines. In almost every sphere of life, whether agriculture, mining, or the plastic arts, the machine was king—or rather we were told that, with them, we could be kings. At first I studied photography and filmmaking. I met René Vautier several times—you know who I mean?—with his obsession for filming truth, of capturing every image of what he called ‘our people on the march.’ He sent me to document a military parade once, I saw former mujahideen on crutches, their stumps on display, I watched wide-eyed, but I didn’t shoot a single second of footage—I completely forgot I had a camera.”
He laughs and, on his upper lip, the whitish mustache squirms like a little animal.
“I don’t think I was ever cut out for machines. Actually, I thought that dreaming about machines was a peasant farmer thing. It reminded me of my father saying to me, One day maybe we can get a tractor, as though this in itself was a goal in life. So I went back to painting and drawing. That was something I enjoyed. I went to the École des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, and that’s where I met Issiakhem. I was impressed by him, obviously, but not for artistic reasons (I never understood what it meant to say someone was good or bad at painting, I’m not sure I really understand it now), no, I was impressed because I knew he was the person who had designed the five-dinar banknote, to me that was the epitome of success. I mean, you paint something that gets hung in a gallery, good for you, it’ll look good on your CV. But a five-dinar note! They’re everywhere, all the time. Everyone gets to see them. What you’ve painted is spilling from wallets and scarves and socks, ka-ching, your painting is in cash registers in shops, it gets deposited in banks, hidden under mattresses. I think one of the reasons I’ve never liked painting large works is because I was so impressed by Issiakhem’s damn five-dinar notes.”
This time Naïma laughs with him. Céline appears in the doorway. She does not ask what they find so funny, does not try to join the conversation. She simply stares for a moment at the two faces lit up by laughter, then, with a little frown, she goes back to her work. Naïma wonders whether, like her, Céline is aware that the painter is pouring out secrets that, at first blush, seem spontaneous and random—those ramblings of old people that seem to proceed like a ship with a broken tiller—but end up creating an impenetrable wall of words that prevent her from broaching what she is here to talk about. Or perhaps it is not that he is actually building a wall of words—this is another possibility—but it is Naïma who is turning a sweeping conversation into a heartfelt monologue because her responses seem so insignificant that she forgets them as soon as they are uttered, while Lalla’s stories hold her spellbound, as though he is Scheherazade and she the sultan—since, if the sultan in his palace of arabesques and fountains actually did ever interrupt the storyteller, the various versions of the Thousand and One Nights make no mention of the fact, the tales are not punctuated by their incidental conversations, which Naïma, like the sultan, promptly erases from her memory to preserve only the intoxicating nectar of the stories. The artist glances at the doorway, empty now that Céline has disappeared, and carries on:
“Anyway … the problem is that it wasn’t long before people realized that independence wasn’t everything. Power is never innocent—who said that, Shakespeare?—so why do we go on believing that we can be governed by good people? Those who want power badly enough to seize it are those with monstrous egos, overweening ambitions, they are all potential tyrants. If not, they wouldn’t seek out the role … As soon as Ben Bella was elected, people claimed that the vote had been rigged, that he should never have been president, that he had circumvented the internal negotiations. I didn’t listen, because I wanted independence to be a beautiful thing. But by 1965 it was difficult to believe we were living in a democracy … Has anyone ever told you about Boumédiène’s coup d’état?”
Naïma shakes her head, and Lalla’s eyes immediately light up, filled with the anticipatory pleasure of telling the tale. He leans forward.
“You’re an artist, you’ll enjoy this. So, imagine, Pontecorvo was in the middle of filming The Battle of Algiers at the time, so people were used to seeing tanks and soldiers and the whole panoply of war in the streets. When people saw Boumédiène’s men, they thought Pontecorvo was shooting a particularly big scene that day. ‘He’s good,’ they said. And in fact the soldiers took advantage of the confusion: ‘No need to panic, it’s just a movie.’ Except it was a real-life coup d’état and the next morning they started to hunt down their enemies. And the whole thing started all over again, the arrests, the disappearances … It’s terrible to disappear like that. I was painting like a madman, hoping that this would stop me from disappearing. I wanted to be famous so that my name at least would live on after me, even if my body disappeared…”
He offers the plate of cookies again, and Naïma, whose mouth is still coated with soggy crumbs, takes another. Eating langues-de-chats and listening to stories of another era, she feels as if, for a few hours, she is a child again.
“Anyway, in those first years, people were creating all over the place,” Lalla continues. “It was as though art was an itch we had to scratch. The theater world in Algiers, for example, was bubbling with ideas. There were performances every night, theater companies sprouted like poppies in the fields, there was Kateb Yacine’s company, obviously, but…”
