‘What has Mario got that I haven’t?’
‘Self-control. Humility. He’s someone who thinks, is Mario. He knows his business. He has ideas. Ideas so big that when he has two of them at the same time, one has to kill the other so they can both stay in his skull.’
‘Why, don’t you think I have ideas?’
‘Yes, but they’re so feeble, they dissolve on their own in your pea-sized brain. You think you’re punishing De Stefano by losing a match? You’re making a big mistake, my young friend. You’re ruining your prospects. If you want to go back to your souk and watch the donkeys being eaten by flies, no problem. You can do what you like provided you don’t come back and complain about the flies, which’ll be after you this time. De Stefano will get his hands on a champion in the end. There’ll only be one loser, and it won’t be him.’
Gino said much the same thing to me when I got back to the flat. ‘There’s no shame in losing,’ he said. ‘The shame is in not doing anything to win.’
I knew I’d been wrong, but every cloud has a silver lining. Losing so painfully to Gomez was the moment I woke up. With my pride hurt, I vowed to redeem myself. It was no longer De Stefano running after me, but the other way round. I trained twice a day. On Sundays, Gino would take me to the beach and make me run on the sand until I was dizzy.
Around mid-July, a military boxer from the naval base at Mers el-Kébir agreed to fight me. A ring was set up on one of the quays, in the shadow of a huge warship. The area was packed with sailors. Officers in their dress uniforms occupied the front rows. When night fell, floodlights illuminated the quay as if it was broad daylight. Corporal Roger appeared in a white robe, a tricolour scarf around his neck. His arrival set off a wave of hysteria. He was a close-cropped, hefty-looking man with bulging muscles, his right shoulder adorned with a romantic tattoo. He danced around a bit, waving to the human tide, which waved back. The bell hadn’t stopped ringing when an avalanche of blows landed on me. The corporal was trying to knock me out from the start. His comrades cupped their hands around their mouths and yelled at him to kill me. There was a terrible silence when my left hit him in the temple. Cut short in his frenzy, the corporal staggered, his eyes suddenly empty. He didn’t see my right coming and fell backwards. After a moment of stunned silence, cries of ‘Get up’ were heard, and spread through the base. In pride of place among his fellow officers, the commander was on the verge of eating his cap. Much to the joy of the sailors, the corporal braced himself against the floor of the ring and managed to get up. The bell stopped me from finishing him off.
Salvo slipped a stool under my backside and began to cool me down. The minute’s break went on and on. There were people in the opposite corner and the referee was deliberately not disturbing them; he was letting the corporal recover. De Stefano was ostentatiously looking at his watch to remind the man in charge of the bell of his duty. The fight resumed when the corporal at last deigned to tear himself away from his seat.
Apart from his buffalo charge, which sent him flying into the ropes, the corporal was no firebrand. His right was weak and his left was just hot air. He’d realised he was out of his league and was trying to gain time by subjecting me to exhausting clinches. I knocked him out at the end of the fourth round.
As good losers, the officers invited us to the mess, where a banquet awaited us. The banquet had been intended for the victory of the local champion, which they had thought was a foregone conclusion, and the band that were supposed to have appeared that night left their instruments where they were and didn’t turn up at all. It was a grim party.
De Stefano was on cloud nine. Our clash of egos was nothing more now than a distant bad memory. I resumed my training with ferocious determination and had two successful fights in the space of forty days, the first in Medioni, with an obscure celebrity, the second with Bébé Rose, a handsome guy from Sananas who collapsed in the third round from an attack of appendicitis.
In Rue Wagram, the local kids were starting to make me their hero; they would wait for me outside the gym to cheer me when I came out. The shopkeepers would raise their hands to their temples in greeting. I still hadn’t had my picture in the newspaper, but in Medina Jedida, a legend was spreading through the alleyways, embellished as it passed from mouth to mouth until it verged on the supernatural.
3
Gino told me that a group of gypsies from Alicante were appearing in La Scalera and that he wouldn’t miss them for the world. He lent me a light suit for the evening and we set off for Old Oran. The coopers were going back to their cellars and the street vendors were putting away their gear. Night had taken the city by surprise while the people on the street were still living their daytime lives. It was always like that in winter. The people of Oran were used to the long days of summer, and when these grew shorter without warning, they went a little crazy. Some automatically went home, others lingered in the watering holes for want of anything better to do, until night brought out its own, and the few shadowy figures who still dawdled here and there were suspicious.
We strode across the Derb and took a few short cuts to get to the Casbah. Gino was really excited.
‘You’ll see, it’s a brilliant group, with the best flamenco dancers in the world.’
We climbed several stepped alleys. In this part of the city, there were no street lamps. Apart from the wailing of babies that could be heard every now and again, the quarter seemed dead. Then at last, at the end of the tunnel, a semblance of light: a lantern hanging as if crucified over the door of a stunted shack. We climbed more stepped alleys. From time to time, in the gaps between the houses, we glimpsed the lights of the harbour. A dog barked as we passed and was yelled at by its master. Further on, a blind accordionist tormented his instrument under an awning, standing there in his wretched state like a statue. Beside him, watching over his whores huddled in the shadows, a potbellied pimp, his loose-fitting jacket open to display his flick knife, was dancing a polka. Gradually, in places, life resumed. We came to a kind of disused barn where whole families had piled in to watch the gypsy show. The performance had begun. The group of musicians occupied a stage at the end of the room. A stunning beauty in a tight-fitting black and red dress, castanets on her fingers and her hair in a tight bun, hammered boldly on the floor with her heels. There were no free seats and the few benches in front of the stage were collapsing under the weight of the people on them. Gino and I sat down on a hump to see over people’s heads and … What did I see, on a patch of beaten earth, aping the dancer? I had to rub my eyes several times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Yes, it was him, stamping his heels on the ground frenetically, moving his hips and buttocks in grotesque contortions, drunk but still lucid, his shirt open on his ebony torso and his tartan cap pulled down over his face … Sid Roho! Sid Roho in the flesh, still delightedly making a spectacle of himself! He couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw me waving at him. We threw our arms round each other. The noise of our reunion made the spectators turn to look at us; they frowned and raised their fingers to their lips to silence us.
Sid Roho pulled me outside and we hugged each other again.
‘What are you doing around here?’ he asked.
‘I live in Medina Jedida. And you?’
‘I have a place in Jenane Jato. For the moment.’
‘And how are you managing?’
‘I’m always in two places at the same time; sometimes I’m in a mess, but I get by.’
‘Do you like it in Jenane Jato?’