I wasn’t pardoned. I was sentenced to hard labour for life. No sooner was I back on my feet than I was sent back to prison. The guards were convinced I was faking it. They would set traps to catch me, harass me constantly, get other convicts to make my life impossible. Whenever one of my attacks came on, they would put me in solitary.
The months, the years finally returned me to the inexorable march of fate. I had again become a full-time convict. A filthy animal in a zoo of horrors. I found myself sparing the cockroaches after being accustomed to squashing them beneath my shoe; they had one advantage I didn’t have: they could go where they wanted without asking permission. The rats struck me as less repulsive than the smiles of the military police. Whenever a bird came and landed in the courtyard, I envied it with all my might, and I was jealous of the grain of sand that joined the storm and went travelling around while I remained stuck in my cage, rotting like carrion. At night, whenever some poor bastard howled in his sleep, you pitied him because he would be even less happy when he woke up. In that grim exile, the days wore mourning; no light reached us. In prison, you had no more respect for yourself than you had pity for the condemned man being dragged to the scaffold.
I extorted money from queers, beat up loudmouths, pledged allegiance to gang bosses and gave up my rations to those who were stronger than me.
There was no place for God in prison. Every reprieve had to be negotiated on the scales of survival. A misplaced look, a superfluous word, a moan louder than the others, and you were automatically buried, without distinction of colour or religion. You had to keep alert; the slightest careless mistake was paid for. I learnt to scheme, to betray, to stab in the back, not to look away when a cellmate was being raped and to look elsewhere when he was being bled dry. I wasn’t proud of myself and it didn’t matter. I told myself my turn would come, so there was no point in feeling sorry for the first served. I sometimes slept standing up to make the bastards think I was waiting for them, and when they came to rouse me with the tip of their boots, I played dead.
Prison was like a recurring nightmare. The hell of the sky trembled before the hell of men, and horned devils licked the boots of the guards, because nowhere on earth, neither on the battlefields nor in the arenas, did life and death know such contempt as the one in which they merged within the walls of a prison.
I was released in 1962, at a time when the jails were full to bursting with political prisoners. I was fifty-two years old.
When I came out of prison, I didn’t recognise my towns or my villages; no faces looked familiar. Alarcon Ventabren had given up the ghost, his farm had fallen into disrepair, and the path that led to it had disappeared beneath the wild grass. All that remained of the Duke was a rambling fable that young gangsters spiced up to make themselves seem important. Oran was nothing like any of my memories. Rue du Général-Cérez had forgotten me. The old men shielded their eyes with their hands and looked me up and down. ‘It’s me, Turambo,’ I would say to them, shadow-boxing. They would step out of my way, wondering if I was in my right mind.
Strangers were living in my parents’ house. They informed me that after my father died, my mother had followed Mekki, who had chosen to settle near Ghardaïa where his in-laws lived. My search led me to a rudimentary graveyard. On a grave, a name half erased by sandstorms: Khammar Taos, died 13 April 1949. Judging by the state of the grave and the ugly, scrawny bush that had grown over it, nobody had visited the place in a long time.
I looked for my uncle but couldn’t find any trace of him.
It was as if the earth had swallowed him up.
Back to Oran. On Boulevard Mascara, the haberdasher’s was now a shop selling television sets and radios. Above the door was a sign saying Radiola. Upstairs, an Arab family were living in the Ramouns’ flat. Gino had left the country without leaving a forwarding address. During my imprisonment, he had married Louise, the Duke’s daughter, and run a large company making domestic appliances before a bomb attack reduced it to rubble. I never heard from him again. I myself had no fixed abode where I could be contacted. I wandered where the seasons took me, like a lost, faded, stunned spectre, incapable of situating myself in relation to people and things. There was fury in the gloom, and the burning sun couldn’t supplant the inferno of my country at war. Worn down to nothing, I hated myself for being no more than my misfortunes. The world that welcomed me was totally alien to me.
The history of a nation coming to painful birth was being written, putting mine aside. A history in which the miracles had nothing to do with me.
I had left my life behind me in prison; I was reborn to something I couldn’t care less about, too old to start again from scratch. With no bearings or convictions, I wasn’t capable of beginning all over again. I no longer had the strength. I had survived only to learn, to my cost, that a ruined life cannot be put right.
I didn’t find love again either. Did I look for it? I’m not sure. It wasn’t a man who had left prison after a quarter of a century of self-denial, it was a ghost; my heart only beat to give rhythm to its fears. At first, back in the world of the living, I would be reminded of Irène’s perfume by the smell of the woods. I would embrace a tree trunk and stand there in silence. In the world of the living, the dead are only entitled to prayers and silence. I didn’t dare dream of another woman after Irène. Nor did any woman want to stay with a wild-eyed convict who smelt of tragedy from miles away. My face told a story of expiation; my words reassured nobody; there was nothing in my gaze but the blackness of the dungeons and I could no longer smile without giving the impression that I wanted to bite … Yes, my brother, you who give no credit to anything but redemption, who question the facts and curse genius, who jeer at the virtuous and praise imposters, you who disfigure beauty so that horror might exult, who reduce your happiness to a vulgar need to cause harm and who spit on the light so that the world may return to darkness, yes, you, my twin in the shadows, do you know why we no longer embody anything but our old demons? It is because the angels have died of our wounds.
I looked for work in order not to die of starvation; I was a ragman, a nightwatchman, a caretaker of vacant property, an exorcist without a flock and without magic. I stole fruit from the markets and chickens from remote farms; I begged for charity and the leftovers of revellers, escaping the snares of the days as best I could. My fists, which had once deposed champions, were no longer much use for anything; I had cut off three fingers to make my jailers feel sorry for me — in prison, people thought of all kinds of nonsense that might give them back their freedom. What freedom? I had clamoured for mine, but, once released, I didn’t know what to do with it. I roamed from town to douar, sleeping under bridges. Strangely, I missed my cell; my fellow convicts seemed dearer to me than my lost family. The country had changed. My era was long gone.
I was arrested on military sites and subjected to brutal interrogations, was interned in a refuge for vagrants, then went back to being a tramp. A ragged drunk, I reeled through dubious neighbourhoods, yelling at the top of my voice, dribble on my chin and my eyes rolled upwards, and I fled blindly from boys who stoned me like a mangy old dog.