No, I don’t want to talk about my brother today. We’ll just look at all the other Musas in this dive, one by one, and imagine — as I often do — how they would have survived a shot fired in bright sunlight or how they managed never to cross paths with that writer of yours or, in a word, how they’ve managed not to be dead yet. There are thousands of them, believe me. They’ve been dragging their feet since Independence. Strolling along beaches, burying dead mothers, looking out from their balconies for hours. Damn! Sometimes this bar reminds me of the old folks’ home where your Meursault put his mother: the same silence, the same discreet aging, the same end-of-life rituals. I started drinking a little early, but I’ve got a good excuse: my acid reflux attacks, which tend to come at night … Do you have a brother? No? Good.
Yes, I love this city, even if I adore bad-mouthing it at least as much as I do bad-mouthing women. People come here looking for money, or the sea, or a heart. No one was ever born here; everybody comes from the other side of the only mountain in sight. Incidentally, I wonder who sent you here and how you found me. It’s hardly credible, you know, for years nobody believed us, Mama and me. The two of us, we ended up burying Musa, really. Yes, yes, I’ll explain it to you.
Ah, there he is again … No, don’t turn around. I call him “the bottle ghost.” He comes here almost every day. As often as I do. We acknowledge each other without ever saying a word. I’ll tell you more about him later.
III
These days, my mother’s so old she looks like her own mother, or maybe her great-grandmother, or even her great-great-grandmother. Once we reach a certain age, time gives us the features of all our ancestors, combined in the soft jumble of reincarnations. And maybe, in the end, that’s what the next world is, an endless corridor where all your ancestors are lined up, one after another. They turn toward the living descendant and simply wait, without words, without movements, their patient eyes fixed on a date. Mama’s already living in a kind of institution, that is, in her dark little house, her little body huddled up in there like a last piece of hand luggage. The diminishment that comes with old age often strikes me as incredible, compared with the long history of a whole life. Anyway, an assembly of ancestors, condensed into a single face, seated in a circle, and facing me, as though to judge me or to ask me if I’ve finally found a wife. I don’t know my mother’s age, just as she has no idea how old I am. Before Independence, people did without exact dates; the rhythms of life were marked by births, epidemics, food shortages, et cetera. My grandmother died of typhus, an episode that served by itself to establish a calendar. My father left on a December first, I believe, and since then, that date’s been a reference point for measuring the temperature of the heart, so to speak, or the beginning of the big cold.
You want the truth? I rarely go to see my mother nowadays. She lives in a house under a sky where a dead man and a lemon tree are loitering. She spends her days sweeping every corner of that house. She’s rubbing out traces. Of whom, of what? Well, the traces of our secret, which was sealed one summer night, and which caused me to make the definitive leap into manhood … Be patient, I’ll tell you about it. So Mama lives in a kind of village, Hadjout, formerly known as Marengo, seventy kilometers from the capital. That was where I spent the second half of my childhood and part of my youth, before going to Algiers to learn a profession (government land administration) and then returning to Hadjout to practice it. It was routine work that offered powerful nourishment to my meditations. We — my mother and I — had put as much distance as possible between us and the sound of breaking waves.
Let’s take up the chronology again. We left Algiers — on that famous day when I was sure I’d spotted Zubida — and went to stay with an uncle and his family, who barely tolerated us. We lived in a hovel before being kicked out by the very people who’d taken us in. Then we lived in a little shed on the threshing floor of a colonial farm where we both had jobs, Mama as a maid of all work and me as a chore boy. The boss was this obese guy from Alsace who ended up smothered in his own fat, I believe. People said he used to torture slackers by sitting on their chests. They also said he had a protruding Adam’s apple because the body of an Arab he’d swallowed was lodged in his throat. I still have memories from that period: an old priest who would sometimes bring us food, the jute sack my mother made into a kind of smock for me, the semolina dishes we’d eat on big days. I don’t want to tell you about our troubles, because back then they were only a matter of hunger, not injustice. In the evening, we kids would play marbles, and if one of us didn’t show up the following day, that would mean he was dead — and we’d keep on playing. It was the period of epidemics and famines. Rural life was hard, it revealed what the cities kept hidden, namely that the country was starving to death. I was afraid, especially at night, of hearing the bleak sound of men’s footsteps, men who knew that Mama had no protector. Those were nights of waking and watchfulness, which I spent glued to her side. I was well and truly the uld el-assas, the night watchman’s son and heir.
Strangely enough, we gravitated around Hadjout and its vicinity for years before we were able to settle in behind solid walls. Who knows how much cunning and patience it cost Mama to find us a house, the one she still lives in today? I sure don’t. In any case, she figured out what the right move was, and I must acknowledge that she had good taste. I’ll invite you to her funeral! She got herself hired as a housekeeper and waited, with me perched on her back, for Independence. The truth of the matter is that the house belonged to a family of settlers who left in a hurry, and we ended up occupying it during the first days of Independence. It’s a three-room house with wallpapered walls, and in the courtyard, a dwarf lemon tree stares at the sky. There are two little sheds on the side of the house, and the entrance has a wooden doorway. I remember the vine that provided shade all along the walls and the strident peeping of the birds. Before we moved into the main house, Mama and I resided in an adjacent shack, which a neighbor uses as a grocery store today. You know, I don’t like to remember that period. It’s as if I was pushed into begging for pity. When I was fifteen, I worked as a farm laborer. One day I got up before dawn; work was rare, and the nearest farm was three kilometers from the village. Do you know how I got a job? I’m going to confess: I let the air out of another worker’s bicycle tires so I could show up earlier than he did and take his place. Yes indeed, that’s hunger for you! I don’t want to play the victim, but it took us years to cross the dozen or so meters that separated our hovel from the settlers’ house, years of tiny, fettered steps, like slogging through mud and quicksand in a nightmare. I believe more than ten years passed before we finally got our hands on that house and declared it liberated: our property! Yes, yes, we acted like everybody else during the first days of freedom, we broke down the door, took the tableware and the candlesticks. What happened? It’s a long story. I’m getting a bit lost.
The rooms in that house have always been very dark. It’s like there’s a wake going on all the time, the lighting’s so bad. Every three months, I show up there to doze a little and look at my mother for an hour or two. After that, nothing happens. I drink some black coffee and get back on the road, go to a bar, and start waiting again. In Hadjout, everything looks pretty much the same as it did at the time when your hero accompanied his alleged mother’s coffin to her grave. Nothing seems to have changed, if you don’t count the new cinder-block buildings, the storefronts, and the extreme idleness that looks like it’s the rule everywhere. Who, me? Nostalgic for French Algeria? No! You haven’t understood a word I’ve said. I was just trying to tell you that back then, we Arabs gave the impression that we were waiting, not going around in circles like today. I know Hadjout and its surroundings by heart, right down to the stones in the roads. The village has grown bigger and less orderly. The cypresses have disappeared, and so have the hills, under the proliferation of unfinished houses. There are no more roads through the fields. As a matter of fact, there are no more fields.