The Angels Die Read online

  My head held high?

  At the bottom of a basket!

  The only people who die with dignity are those who’ve fucked like rabbits, eaten like pigs, and blown all their money, Sid Roho used to say.

  And what about those who are broke?

  They don’t die, they just disappear.

  The two guards are walking in front of me, quite impassive. The imam keeps on reciting his surah. My chains weigh a ton. The corridor hems me in on either side and I have to follow its confines.

  The outside door is opened.

  The cool air burns my lungs. The way the first gulp of air burns a baby’s lungs …

  And there she is.

  In a corner of the courtyard.

  Tightly wrapped in cold and horror.

  Like a praying mantis awaiting her feast.

  I see her at last: Lady Guillotine. Stiff in her costume of iron and wood. With a lopsided grin. As repulsive as she’s fascinating. There she is, the porthole at the end of the world, the river of no return, the trap for souls in torment. Sophisticated and basic at one and the same time. In turn, a mistress of ceremonies and a street-corner whore. Whichever she is, she’s going to make sure you lose your head.

  All at once, everything around me fades away. The prison walls disappear, the men and their shadows, the air stands still, the sky blurs. All that’s left is my heart pounding erratically and the Lady with the blade, the two of us alone, face to face, on a patch of courtyard suspended in the void.

  I feel as if I’m about to faint, to fall apart and be scattered like a handful of sand in the wind. I’m grabbed by sturdy hands and put back together. I come to, fibre by fibre, shudder by shudder. There are constant flashes in my head. I see the village where I was born, ugly enough to repel both evil genies and manna from heaven, a huge enclosure haunted by beggars with glassy eyes and lips as disturbing as scars. Turambo! A godforsaken hole given over to goats and brats defecating in the open air and laughing at the strident salvoes from their emaciated rumps … I see Oran, like a splendid waterlily overhanging the sea, the lively trams, the souks and the fairs, the neon signs over the doors of nightclubs, girls as beautiful and unlikely as promises, whorehouses overrun with sailors as drunk as their boats … I see Irène on her horse, galloping across the ridges, Gino gushing blood on the staircase, two boxers beating the hell out of each other in the ring in front of a clamouring crowd, the Village Nègre and its inspired street performers, the shoeshine boys of Sidi Bel Abbès, my childhood friends Ramdane, Gomri, the Billy Goat … I see a young boy running barefoot over brambles, my mother putting her hands on her thighs in despair … Discordant voices crowd the black and white film, merging in a commotion that fills my head like scalding hail …

  I’m pushed towards the guillotine.

  I try and resist, but none of my muscles obey me. I walk to the guillotine as if levitating. I can’t feel the ground beneath my feet. I can’t feel anything. I think I’m already dead. A blinding white light has just seized me and flung me far, far back in time.

  I

  Nora

  1

  I owe my nickname to the shopkeeper in Graba.

  The first time he saw me enter his lair, he looked me up and down, shocked by the state I was in and the way I smelt, and asked me if I came from the earth or the night. I was in bad shape, half dead from diarrhoea and exhaustion as a result of a long forced march across scrubland.

  ‘I’m from Turambo, sir.’

  The shopkeeper smacked his lips, which were as thick as a buffalo frog’s. The name of my village meant nothing to him. ‘Turambo? Which side of hell is that on?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I need half a douro’s worth of yeast and I’m in a hurry.’

  The shopkeeper turned to his half-empty shelves and, holding his chin between his thumb and index finger, repeated, ‘Turambo? Turambo? Never heard of it.’

  From that day on, whenever I passed his shop, he’d cry out, ‘Hey, Turambo! Which side of hell is your village on?’ His voice carried such a long way that gradually everyone started calling me Turambo.

  My village had been wiped off the map by a landslide a week earlier. It was like the end of the world. Wild lightning flashes streaked the darkness, and the thunder seemed to be trying to smash the mountains to pieces. You couldn’t tell men from animals any more; they were all tearing in every direction, screaming like creatures possessed. In a few hours, the torrents of rain had swept away our hovels, our goats and donkeys, our cries and prayers, and all our landmarks.

  By morning, apart from the survivors shivering on the mud-covered rocks, nothing remained of the village. My father had vanished into thin air. We managed to dredge up a few bodies, but there was no trace of the broken face that had survived the deluge of fire and steel in the Great War. We followed the ravages of the flood as far as the plain, searched bushes and ravines, lifted the trunks of uprooted trees, but all in vain.

  An old man prayed that the victims might be at rest, my mother shed a tear in memory of her husband, and that was it.

  We considered putting everything back that had been scattered by the storm, but we didn’t have the means, or the strength to believe it was possible. Our animals were dead, our meagre crops were ruined, our zinc shelters and our zaribas were beyond repair. Where the village had been, there was nothing but a mudslide on the side of the mountain, like a huge stream of vomit.

  After assessing the damage, my mother said to us, ‘Mortal man has only one fixed abode: the grave. As long as he lives, there’s nothing he can take for granted, neither home nor country.’

  We bundled up the few things the disaster had deigned to leave us and set off for Graba, a ghetto area of Sidi Bel Abbès where wretches thrown off their lands by typhus or the greed of the powerful arrived by the score.

  With my father gone, my young uncle Mekki, who wasn’t very far into his teens, declared himself the head of the family. He had a legitimate claim, being the eldest male.

  There were five of us in a shack wedged between a military dumping ground and a scraggy orchard. There was my mother, a sturdy Berber with a tattooed forehead, not very beautiful but solid; my aunt Rokaya, whose pedlar husband had walked out on her over a decade earlier; her daughter Nora, who was more or less the same age as me; my fifteen-year-old uncle Mekki, and me, four years his junior.

  Since we didn’t know anyone, we had only ourselves to rely on.

  I missed my father.

  Strangely, I don’t remember ever seeing him up close. Ever since he’d come back from the war, his face shattered by a piece of shrapnel, he’d kept his distance, sitting all day long in the shade of a solitary tree. When my cousin Nora took him his meals, she’d approach him on tiptoe, as if she was feeding a wild animal. I waited for him to return to earth, but he refused to come down from his cloud of depression. After a while, I ended up confusing him with someone I may once have seen and eventually ignored him completely. His disappearance merely confirmed his absence.

  And yet in Graba, I couldn’t help thinking about him every day.

  Mekki promised we wouldn’t stay long in this shanty town if we worked hard and made enough money to rebuild our lives somewhere else. My mother and my aunt decided to start making biscuits, which my uncle would sell to cheap restaurants. I wanted to lend a hand – kids a lot weaker than me were working as porters, donkey drivers and soup vendors, and doing well – but my uncle refused to hire me. I was bright, he had to admit that, I just wasn’t bright enough to handle rascals capable of beating the devil himself at his own game. He was particularly afraid I’d be skinned alive by the first little runt I came across.

  And so I was left to my own devices.

  In Turambo, my mother had told me about dubious shanty towns inhabited by creatures so monstrous I had bad dreams about them, but I’d never imagined I’d end up in one of them one day. And now here I was, slap bang in the middle of one, but this was no bedtime story. Graba was like an open-air asylum. It was a
s if a tidal wave had swept across the hinterland and tons of human flotsam and jetsam had somehow been tossed here. Labourers and beasts of burden jostled each other in the same narrow alleys. The rumbling of carts and the barking of dogs created a din that made your head spin. The place swarmed with crippled veterans and unemployed ex-convicts, and as for beggars, they could moan until their voices gave out, they’d never get a grain of corn to put in their mouths. The only thing people had to share was bad luck.

  Everywhere amid the rickety shacks, where every alley was an ordeal to walk down, snotty-nosed kids engaged in fierce organised battles. Even though they barely came up to your knee, they already had to fend for themselves, and the future they could look forward to was no brighter than their early years. The birthright automatically went to the one who hit hardest, and devotion to your parents meant nothing once you’d given your allegiance to a gang leader.

  I wasn’t scared of these street urchins; I was scared of becoming like them. In Turambo, nobody swore, nobody looked their elders directly in the face; people showed respect, and if ever a kid got a bit carried away, you just had to clear your throat and he’d behave himself. But in this hellhole that stank of piss, every laugh, every greeting, every sentence came wrapped in obscenity.

  It was in Graba that I first heard adults speak crudely.

  The shopkeeper was getting some air outside his shack, his belly hanging down over his knees. A carter said, ‘So, fatty, when’s the baby due?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘A baby elephant,’ said the shopkeeper, putting his hand on his flies. ‘Want me to show you its trunk?’

  I was shocked.

  You couldn’t hear yourself breathe until the sun went down. Then the ghetto would wrap itself around its troubles and, soothed by the echoes of its foul acts, allow itself to fade into the darkness.

  In Graba, night didn’t come, didn’t fall, but, rather, poured down as though from a huge cauldron of fresh tar; it cascaded from the sky, thick and elastic, engulfing hills and forests, pushing its blackness deep into our minds. For a few moments, like hikers caught unawares by an avalanche, people would fall abruptly silent. Not a sound, not a rustle in the bushes. Then, little by little, you would hear the crack of a strap, the clatter of a gate, the cry of a baby, kids squabbling. Life would slowly resume and, like termites nibbling at the shadows, the anxieties of the night would come to the surface. And just as you blew out the candle to go to sleep, you’d hear drunks yelling and screaming in the most terrifying way; anyone lingering on the streets had to hurry home if they didn’t want their bodies to be found lying in pools of blood early the following morning.

  ‘When are we going back to Turambo?’ I kept asking Mekki.

  ‘When the sea gives back to the land what it took away,’ he would answer with a sigh.

  We had a neighbour in the shack opposite ours, a young widow of about thirty who would have been beautiful if only she’d taken a little care of herself. Always in an old dress, her hair in a mess, she’d sometimes buy bread from us on credit. She’d rush in, mutter an excuse, snatch her order from my mother’s hands and go back home as quickly as she’d come.

  We thought she was strange; my aunt was sure the poor woman was possessed by a jinn.

  This widow had a little boy who was also strange. In the morning, she’d take him outside and order him to sit at the foot of the wall and not move for any reason. The boy was obedient. He could stay in that blazing heat for hours, sweating and blinking his eyes, salivating over a crust of bread, with a vague smile on his face. Seeing him sitting in the same spot, nibbling at his mouldy piece of bread, made me so uneasy that I’d recite a verse to ward off the evil spirits that seemed to keep him company. Then, unexpectedly, he started following me from a distance. Whether I went to the scrub or the military dumping ground, every time I turned round I saw him right behind me, a walking scarecrow, his crust in his mouth. I’d try to chase him away, threatening him, even throwing stones at him, but he’d just retreat for a few moments then, at a bend in the path, reappear behind me, always keeping at a safe distance.

  I went to see his mother and asked her to keep her kid tied up because I was tired of him always following me. She listened without interrupting, then told me he had lost his father and so he needed company. I told her I already found it hard to bear my own shadow. ‘It’s your choice,’ she sighed. I expected her to lose her temper like the other women in the neighbourhood whenever they disagreed with something, but she just went back to her chores as though nothing had happened. Her resignation made me feel sorry for her. I took the boy under my wing. He was older than me, but judging by the naive grin on his face, his brain must have been smaller than a pinhead. And he never spoke. I’d take him to the woods to pick jujubes or up the hill to look down at the railway tracks glittering among the stones. In the distance, you could see goatherds surrounded by their emaciated flocks and hear the little bells teasing the lethargic silence. Below the hill, there was a gypsy encampment, recognisable by its dilapidated caravans.

  At night, the gypsies would light fires and pluck their guitars until dawn. Even though they mostly twiddled their thumbs the lids of their cooking pots were constantly clattering. I think their God must have been quite a good one. True, he didn’t exactly shower them with his benevolence, but at least he made sure they always had enough to eat.

  We met Pedro the gypsy in the scrub. He was pretty much the same age as us and knew all the burrows where game went to hide. Once his basket was filled, he’d take out a sandwich and share it with us. We became friends. One day, he invited us to the camp. That’s how I learnt to take a close look at these tricksters whose food fell from the skies.

  In spite of a quick temper, Pedro’s mother was basically good-natured. She was a fat redhead with a moustache, a lively temperament, and breasts so large you couldn’t tell where they stopped. She never wore anything under her dress, so when she sat on the ground you could see her pubic hair. Her husband was a broken-down septuagenarian who used an ear trumpet to hear and spent his time sucking at a pipe as old as the hills. He’d laugh whenever you looked at him, and open his mouth to reveal a single rotten tooth that made his gums look all the more repulsive. And yet in the evening, when the sun went down behind the mountains, the old man would wedge his violin under his chin and draw from the strings of his instrument laments that were the colour of the sunset and filled us with sweet melancholy. I’d never again hear anyone play the violin better than he did.

  Pedro had lots of talents. He could wrap his feet round the back of his neck and stand on his hands, he could juggle with torches; his great ambition was to join a circus. He’d describe it to me: a big tent with corridors and a ring where people went to cheer wild animals that could do amazing things and acrobats who performed dangerous stunts ten metres above the ground. Pedro would gush, telling me how they would also exhibit human monsters, dwarfs, animals with two heads and women with bodies you could only dream about. ‘They’re like us,’ he’d say. ‘They’re always travelling, except that they have bears, lions and boa constrictors with them.’

  I thought he was making it all up. I found it hard to picture a bear riding a bicycle, or men with painted faces and shoes half a metre long. But Pedro was good at presenting things, and even when the world he raved about was far beyond my understanding, I happily went along with his crazy stories. Besides, everybody in the camp let their imagination run riot. You’d think you were at an academy for the greatest storytellers on earth. There was old Gonsho, a little man with tattoos from his thighs up to his neck, who claimed he’d been killed in an ambush. ‘I was dead for a week,’ he’d say. ‘No angel came to play me a lullaby on his harp, and no demon stuck his pitchfork up my arse. All I did was drift from sky to sky. Believe it or not, I didn’t see any Garden of Eden or any Gehenna.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ said Pepe, the elder of the group, who was as ancient as a museum piece. ‘Fi
rst, everybody in the world would have to be dead. Then there’ll be the Last Judgement, and only then will some be moved to heaven and others to hell.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me that people who kicked the bucket thousands of years ago are going to have to wait for there to be nobody left on earth before they’re judged by the Lord?’

  ‘I’ve explained it to you before, Gonsho,’ Pepe replied condescendingly. ‘Forty days after they die, people become eligible for reincarnation. The Lord can’t judge us on one life alone. So he brings us back wealthy, then poor, then as kings, then as tramps, as believers, as brigands, and so on, to see how we behave. He isn’t going to create someone who’s in the shit and then condemn him without giving him a chance to redeem himself. In order to be fair, he makes us wear all kinds of hats, then he takes an overall look at all our different lives, so that he can decide on our fate.’

  ‘If what you say is true, why is it I’ve come back with the same face and in the same body?’

  And Pepe, like an infinitely patient teacher, replied, ‘You were dead for only a week. It takes forty days to pass on. And besides, gypsies are the only ones who have the privilege to be reborn as gypsies. Because we have a mission. We’re constantly travelling in order to explore the paths of destiny. We’ve been given the task of seeking the Truth. That’s why since the dawn of time, we’ve never stayed in one place.’

  Making a circular movement with his finger at his temple, Pepe encouraged Gonsho to think for a few moments about what he’d just told him.

  The debate could have gone on indefinitely without either of them agreeing with the other. For gypsies, arguing wasn’t about what you believed, it was about being stubborn. When you had an opinion, you held on to it at all costs because the worst way to lose face was to abandon your point of view.