The winds of fortune had shifted and now favoured the American way, André maintained. A country’s fortunes could be judged by its thirst for change, for revolution, but in Río Salado generation followed generation and nothing ever changed. André had decided that urgent changes were needed, and could think of nothing better than a California-style diner, to shake us out of our obscene, provincial, antiquated sheep-like instincts; to turn us into rebels with a cause.
André’s diner was outside the village, behind the R.C. Kraus vineyards, on a patch of waste ground where we had played football as children. For the opening night, some twenty tables, each with a huge parasol, had been set out on a gravel terrace. As soon as we saw the boxes of wine and lemonade, the crates of fruit, and the grills set up around the perimeter, we relaxed.
‘We’re going to eat till we throw up.’ Simon sounded excited.
Jelloul and a handful of other workers moved between the tables, laying out napkins, setting out carafes and ashtrays. André and his cousin José, Stetson hats pushed back off their heads, legs apart, thumbs hooked into their belts, stood proudly on the steps leading up to the diner.
‘You should buy a herd of cattle,’ Simon said, nodding at André’s ten-gallon hat.
‘You don’t like my diner?’
‘As long as there’s food and drink . . .’
‘Well then, stuff your face and shut up.’
André came down the steps and hugged us all, groping Simon’s crotch playfully.
‘Hey! Hands off the family jewels!’ Simon yelped, jumping back.
‘Some jewels!’ André quipped, herding us towards the bar. ‘You’d be lucky to get two francs on a flea-market stall.’
‘What are you betting?’
‘Whatever you like . . . I’ll tell you what, a number of beautiful young ladies will be joining us this evening. If you can manage to seduce one, I’ll pay for a hotel room – and not just any hotel; I’m talking about the Martinez.’
‘Deal!’
‘Dédé is like a machine gun,’ said José, who considered his cousin to be a paragon of rectitude and gallantry. ‘When he goes off, there’s no stopping him.’
André took us on a tour of his ‘revolution’. The diner was nothing like any café we had ever seen. It was painted in bright, garish colours; behind the bar was a huge mirror with a silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge etched into the glass. There were tall upholstered bar stools, brass shelves groaning beneath the weight of bottles and curios, bright neon signs and strange gadgets. The walls were plastered with huge photographs of Hollywood stars. The shutters were closed and the curtains drawn, so the ceiling lights gave off a warm muted glow while wall sconces cast blood-red shadows all around. The seats, bolted to the floor, were arranged in booths like the seats of a train around rectangular tables on which were scenes of the American Wild West.
In the next room, a pool table took pride of place. No café in Río Salado or Lourmel had a pool table. The one André had imported for his guests was a work of art, beautifully lit by a hanging lamp that all but touched the table.
Picking up a pool cue, André chalked the tip, then leaned over the table and lined up his shot using his knuckles as a rest. The rack of coloured balls exploded across the table, ricocheting off the cushions.
‘From now on,’ he declared, ‘people here won’t go to a bar to get drunk. At my place, they’ll come to play pool. And this is only stage one. I’ve got three more tables on order, which should be here by the end of the month. I’m planning to set up a regional tournament.’
José appeared with beers for the others and a soft drink for me, and suggested we go take a table on the terrace until the other guests arrived. It was about seven p.m. The sun was slipping slowly behind the hills, shooting its last glimmers through the vineyards. From the terrace, we had a perfect view of the surrounding plains and the road that wound its way to Lourmel. A bus dropped passengers just outside the village: people from Río Salado on their way back from Oran, and Arab labourers coming in from the building sites in the city. The labourers, clearly exhausted, cut across the fields with bundles under their arms, heading for the dirt track that led to their village of squalid shacks.
Jelloul watched me watching them, and as the last labourer disappeared around a bend in the dirt track, he turned and shot me an unsettling glance.
As the sun sank behind the hills, the Rucillio clan rolled up – Pépé’s two youngest sons, some of their cousins and their brother-in-law, Antonio, who worked as a cabaret singer in Sidi Bel-Abbès – in a spanking new Citroën straight from the factory, which they parked near the entrance where everyone could see it.
André greeted them all with the back-slapping good humour of the rich, and then escorted them to the best seats.
‘You can be rolling in it and still smell horse shit for miles around,’ complained Simon, piqued that the Rucillio family had walked past without so much as a nod to us.
‘You know what they’re like,’ I said.
‘I don’t care – they could at least have said hello. We’re hardly the dregs of society: you’re a chemist, Fabrice is a poet and a journalist, I’m a civil servant.’
It was not quite dark as the terrace began to fill with beautiful girls and young men dressed to the nines. Older couples arrived in gleaming cars, the ladies in evening gowns, their escorts wearing suits and bow ties. André had invited the cream of Río Salado society and every notable family for miles around. In the crowd we could make out the son of the richest man in Hammam Bouhadjar. His father owned a private plane and on his arm was one of Oran’s rising singing stars, who was surrounded by eager fans showering her with compliments, eager to light her cigarette.
Chinese lanterns were lit and floated above the terrace. José clapped his hands for silence and the noise died away. André went up on to the stage and thanked his guests for coming to celebrate the opening of his diner. He began with a crude joke that made his guests, who were more used to refinement, somewhat uncomfortable, then, deploring the fact that his audience was not broad-minded enough to let him continue in a similar vein, he cut short his speech and left the stage to the musicians.
The evening began with music the like of which no one in Río Salado had ever heard, all trumpets and a double bass. The audience were left cold.
‘It’s jazz, for God’s sake!’ André cursed them. ‘How can anyone not like jazz?’
The jazz band began to realise that if Río Salado was only sixty miles from Oran, its musical taste was a million miles away. Being professionals, they continued to play for a while, then, as an encore, they played something that sounded like a curse. The crowd barely noticed when they finally left the stage.
Though André had anticipated that this might happen, he had at least expected his guests to treat the finest jazz band in Algeria with some respect. We watched his grovelling apology to the furious trumpeter, who seemed to be saying that he would never again set foot in this godforsaken, culturally benighted hole.
As André and the bandleader argued, José introduced a second band – a group of locals this time. From the moment they took the stage, the whole audience heaved a sigh of relief, and the floor was suddenly filled with people dancing and swaying.
Fabrice Scamaroni invited the mayor’s niece to dance and eagerly led her on to the floor. I asked a shy girl, who politely refused me, though I managed to convince her friend to take the floor. Simon did not dance, but sat in some strange state of rapture, his plump, childish face in his hands, gazing at what seemed to be an empty table at the far end of the terrace.