The Angels Die Read online

  Disorientated by the forest of identical houses and the inextricable web of avenues, I undertook to walk up and down my street from end to end several times, in order to memorise the landmarks. When I had learnt how to find my door with my eyes closed, I extended my curiosity to the neighbouring streets, then to the surrounding boulevards, and within a week I knew Medina Jedida by heart.

  My uncle went into partnership with a herbalist, a Mozabite, and set up shop in the Arab market. I would take him his meal at midday and the rest of the time I would wander.

  Oran was a breathless adventure, a crossroads where every era came together, each in its own finery. Modernity offered up its lures, to which the old reflexes responded only reluctantly, as if tasting a suspicious fruit. The native population understood that a new era was under way and wondered what it had to offer them, and at what price. Frenzied and intimidating, the European city flaunted its ambitions, but something in its gorging didn’t tally with their own frugality, and they were too uncertain of their place to claim a slice of the cake. Things were not distributed equally, and chances did not come to everyone. The cards had been unfairly dealt. The gulf between the haves and have-nots was too wide to bridge; segregation, which reduced the unknown other to abstraction or cliché, kept the communities in a state of heightened mistrust. At that time, Oran was stewing in a mixture of doubt and confusion, fuelled by prejudice and insularity. You wouldn’t be mad enough to entrust your mother to your neighbour.

  I walked for hours and hours without noticing, engrossed in the mysteries of the various neighbourhoods, which slowly revealed themselves. My search for work took me from one end to the other of the southern plateau of the city, which was strewn with the tents of nomads from the desert. Beyond the Jewish cemetery, in a kind of no man’s land trapped between Sananes and the parade ground, was a little patch of countryside disfigured by urban life, reducing its rustic charms to hollowed-out building sites; amid the skeletal orchards, a handful of houses still dripping with wattle and daub and covered in sheet metal laid the foundations for a soon-to-be village. A little further on was Lamur, a vast stretch of purple clay laid out in rudimentary courtyards. Muslim city dwellers did not look kindly on the shacks the peasants arriving from the hinterland erected around their territory in a hotchpotch of rotting tarpaulins and wooden beams; squabbles erupted daily between the locals and the newcomers, which forced the latter, who were becoming intrusive, to fall back on Jenane Jato, a dangerous area where you wouldn’t want to venture at night. To the west, the neighbourhood of Eckmühl descended as far as the ravine of Ras el-Aïn with its garland of market gardens, its tiered houses, its shaded alleys and its thrilling bullrings. The majority of the inhabitants were Spaniards, mostly humble people and settled gypsies who somehow eked out a living, always hoping for something like a miracle to get them through their rough patch. Their women, among them many fortune tellers, went from door to door selling faded lace or reading unlikely futures in the occupants’ palms. They had a gift for spotting a sucker from a long way away; when a customer hesitated, they would end up telling them all kinds of nonsense, but never letting go. Amazing, combative women, who didn’t take no for an answer and could smooth-talk even the devil. To the north-east of Medina Jedida, below Magenta, you came to the Derb, a Sephardic quarter where men in black skullcaps bustled about their shops, making sure their women were securely behind locked doors. Just like us. Apart from little girls with plaited hair playing jacks with little boys on the pavement, there were no young people to enliven the streets. It was a poor neighbourhood, although it refused to admit it. And in the evening, to prove that there was some joy, the cafés filled the streets with music in a fusion of styles which made the virgins sigh behind their shutters …

  It was the same everywhere.

  Each community had nothing but its own talent to survive the ups and downs of life. A matter of self-respect and survival. Music was a weapon, an absolute refusal to surrender. In Médioni and Delmonte and Saint-Eugène, from the pine grove of Les Planteurs to the heights of Santa Cruz, people sang in order not to disappear. The Bedouin flute gave the cue to the tambourine and, when the accordion breathed its last in some hidden courtyard, the gypsy guitar took over. It was important for the inhabitants never to stop hearing the sound of their own lives. In Oran, poverty was a state of mind, not a condition. I saw people bundled up in clothes that had been mended a hundred times, shuffling along in old shoes that gaped open, but walking with their heads held high. In Oran, you could tolerate being at the bottom of the ladder, but never at someone else’s feet. From Chollet to Ras el-Aïn, where I would watch the washerwomen wringing out their washing on the bank of the oued, from La Scalera, shared by Spaniards and Muslims worn out by three hundred years of wars and reprisals, to Victor-Hugo, where the inexorable spread of the shanty town was forcing the kitchen gardens to recede, each area had its own character, and each group jealously guarded its own honour. Of course, I would sometimes turn a corner and be waylaid by packs of kids anxious to defend their fiefdom and punish intruders, but there was invariably a grown-up around to bring them to heel.

  Oran also had its seedy spots where it grew dark early, slums haunted by pimps and other shady characters, brothels that smelt of the clap and stairwells where people fornicated in a rush, standing up. The inhabitants of Oran denied any knowledge of these places of ill repute; everyone acted as if they didn’t exist. Anyone who had been spotted there once was shamed for life. The only people you saw there were strangers to the city, randy soldiers and boatmen from distant horizons.

  Coming back up from the Casbah, you came out onto Place d’Armes, surrounded by centuries-old trees as big as baobabs: this was the exact spot where the different communities met without really meeting, tacitly divided by a virtual line of demarcation. It was a beautiful square radiant with sunlight, with its tram station, its cafés and terraces, its hurrying women and its pomaded pick-up artists, its flashy automobiles overtaking the carriages just to impress them, flanked to the south by the city hall with its two bronze lions guarding the entrance, to the west by the theatre and to the north by the Military Club. Then, all at once, looking down on the upper part of Boulevard Seguin, there was the plateau of Karguentah! Another world, stretching as far as Miramar, beautiful, sumptuous and self-centred. This was the other side of the mirror, where ethereal souls faded away of their own accord in order not to blight the scenery; the exclusive world of the rich, those who had the right to believe and to possess, to reign and to endure, for whom the sun rose purely to salute them and night only veiled its face to protect them from the evil eye: the famous European city with its pavements adorned with street lamps, its gleaming shop windows, its neon signs, its Haussmann-style apartment buildings bedecked with statues that seemed to rise from the walls, its verdant parks, its wrought-iron benches and its marbled lobbies where people in white suits and dark glasses resisted the good humour so dear to the southern districts and were deeply hostile to beggars and street vendors; taciturn, arrogant people, so sophisticated that they all reminded me of that fat pig who had beaten me in Sidi Bel Abbès over a tiny spot of polish on his sock.

  For my part, I was only myself and proud to be so in Medina Jedida, my home port, my refuge, my country. I never tired of breathing it in, taking its pulse, being aware of its slightest spasm. Medina Jedida had an air of endurance and survival. The aroma of spices competed with incense and the stench of the tanneries, mingled with the smells of the bazaars, caught the fragrance of mint from the Moorish cafés and the scent of the kebabs being braised outside them, and all these odours merged in an alchemy that compacted the air and held the dust in suspense. The lights of the day bounced off the walls and the horse-drawn carriages in a succession of dazzling flashes, searing the eyes like razor blades. Rascally kids with their heads shaven Zouave-fashion, ran barefoot, overturning stalls in their flight, mimicking the vendors; it was pointless yelling at them – neither threats nor thrashings could calm
them. The streets swarmed with a disparate and feverish collection of people, their heads covered with fezzes, chechias, turbans and sometimes even colonial helmets. The booming cries of the merchants were enough to give the crowds a splitting headache. With the garish colours and the deliciously absurd atmosphere, it was like being at a fair. I loved Medina Jedida from the moment I looked at its people – my people, but so different from those of Graba. In Medina Jedida, there was still poverty, but it had a certain reserve. Cripples didn’t cling to the coat-tails of passers-by and beggars restrained their whining. The natives, mostly Araberbers,1 burnouses over their shoulders and canes in their hands, were as dignified as in the days when their ancestors could look at the ground without lowering their heads. Here, there were no curses, no obscene remarks; politeness was all. Old men wore their white beards with nobility. They didn’t sit on the ground, but on padded stools or small wicker chairs or in groups on rattan benches, telling their prayer beads with translucent hands and offering the young their skulls to kiss. In the crowded cafés, where nasal phonographs endlessly played Egyptian music, the waiters in spotless aprons weaved in and out among the tables, bearing teapots on trays. It wasn’t unusual to see women turn up in their flouncy veils, and out of politeness the men would turn away as they passed. And in the evening, when the heat at last consented to die down, crowds would gather on the beaten-earth esplanade to be treated to all kinds of entertainments. The lalaoui dancers would take out their tambourines and sticks; snake charmers would lift the lids of their baskets and cast their lascivious vipers at the feet of horrified children; other men held the crowd spellbound with virtuoso displays of fighting with clubs. Further on, a troubadour enchanted the spectators with far-fetched stories interspersed with tear-jerking songs he seemed to have made up on the spot, while a monkey trainer clearly took himself for a magician. The folklore of Medina Jedida conjured all demons away.

  This was my world finding its bearings again, my people as they were before misfortune threw them off track. After so many exiles, so many shipwrecks, I was back in my element.

  I was moved, reinvigorated and relieved, convinced that I could now grow up normally, safe from the Zanes and the perversity of the shanty towns, even though I was still hungry and had no nice clothes to wear.

  1 Word coined by the author to indicate the unity of the Arab and Berber peoples.

  5

  In spite of Mekki’s disapproval, my mother had found a job. She had seen how the flats of the old Turkish woman and the Kabyle family were furnished and she too wanted mattresses, low tables for eating on, tableware, woollen blankets, eiderdowns, even a sideboard with a huge mirror in the middle. My uncle earned just enough to provide food and pay the rent. My mother was ambitious. She wanted a decent house where she could receive her neighbours without making them feel uncomfortable, a bed for her elder sister, whose health was deteriorating, and nice dresses for Nora, who was growing up. Yes, Nora had grown quickly, her features had become more defined and she was blossoming as her big black eyes opened to the world. I didn’t have the courage to admit it, but Nora had been occupying my thoughts a lot since I had caught her washing herself. Her adolescent body was starting to take shape and her white breasts adorned her chest like two twin suns. I had certainly seen her naked before, without it having much effect on me, but, since this last time, she’d just had to look at me to arouse me, and I was always the one who turned my head away first.

  My mother did the cleaning and other housework for a widow who lived on Boulevard Mascara, not far from our house. I had to walk her there in the morning and bring her back in the evening because she got the houses and streets muddled up and was incapable of finding her way back once she had crossed the road. I would lead her to the door in question, knock and leave when the door was opened. Towards the end of the afternoon, I would pick her up from the same place. The day she got her wages, we would do the rounds of the bazaars and return home laden with iron buckets, funnels, samovars, braziers with bellows and all kinds of other items, sometimes of little use.

  I was waiting for her on Boulevard Mascara when a fair-haired boy my age, neat and tidy without being dapper, stopped in front of me.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked me in Arabic.

  There was no aggressiveness in his blue eyes. He seemed friendly, but the only memory I had of young Roumis was of that boy who had burst my dream like an abscess by pointing me out to the policeman in Sidi Bel Abbès. Instinctively, I checked to see if there was any uniform in the vicinity.

  ‘I didn’t ask you for anything,’ I grunted.

  ‘You’re sitting in our doorway,’ he said calmly.

  ‘I’m waiting for my mother. She’s cleaning in there.’

  ‘Do you want me to go up and see how far she’s got?’

  His kindness made me uncomfortable. Was he softening me up before kicking me in the face?

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said cautiously. ‘I’m starting to get a headache because of the sun.’

  The boy stepped over me, ran up a staircase and returned after a few minutes.

  ‘She’ll be another hour or so.’

  ‘What’s she doing in there? Redecorating the house or what?’

  ‘My name’s Gino, Gino Ramoun,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘My mother has a lot of good things to say about yours. It’s the first time she’s got along with a cleaner. We’ve had lots. Some cheated us and others stole things, not just food.’

  ‘We’re respectable people. Just because my mother works for yours doesn’t mean —’

  ‘No, no, I wasn’t implying anything like that. We’re not rich. My mother’s disabled. She never leaves her bed. She needs help, that’s all.’

  I waved away his apologies.

  He sat down next to me on the doorstep. I could see he was trying to redeem himself, but I didn’t encourage him. I’d had enough of polishing my backside on the step and watching others go about their business.

  ‘I’m a bit peckish,’ the Roumi said. ‘How about going for a bite to eat?’

  I didn’t reply. I was broke.

  ‘It’s on me,’ he insisted. ‘Come on. If your mother can be friends with mine, why can’t we?’

  I don’t know if it was out of boredom or hunger, but I accepted the invitation.

  ‘Do you like boiled chickpeas with cumin?’

  ‘Anything’s fine when you’re hungry.’

  ‘Well, then, what are we waiting for?’

  Gino was a straightforward, uncomplicated, guileless boy. He seemed awkward and my company was a comfort to him. He didn’t mix with the other boys in the neighbourhood; they scared him. I got used to him, and within a few weeks we were as thick as thieves. There was something reassuring about him. His voice was soft and his eyes clear and wholesome. He worked in a garage on Place Sébastopol. We would meet up in the evenings on Boulevard Mascara. Sometimes, he’d walk with us to our house and, after dropping my mother off, we’d go and eat doughnuts in the Arab market or test our teeth on the torraicos that the Spaniards sold us in paper cones.

  One day, he invited me to his home. He was determined to give me something. Gino’s flat was above a haberdasher’s. You reached it by a steep staircase that went straight up to the first floor. We climbed the stairs to a short L-shaped corridor that led to two large rooms on the right and a courtyard on the left. As we reached the hall, a voice cried out, ‘Open the windows. I’m melting.’

  The voice had come in a weary breath from the bedroom. I looked in, but couldn’t see anything. Then something moved on the bed. Squinting, I made out a red-faced mass beneath a white sheet transparent with sweat. Actually, it wasn’t a sheet, but a huge blouse designed to look smart in spite of its size, with embroidery along the bottom and flowered braid on the collar. There was a blonde head on the pillow with a beautiful face trapped in a crimson mass of flesh too large to be considered a neck, above a body made up of disjointed slabs furrowed with deep, winding folds. The sight took my breath a
way. It took me a while to distinguish breasts of supernatural volume from arms so heavy they could barely move. Her stomach undulated with rolls of fat cascading onto her sides, and her elephantine legs rested on cushions like two marble columns. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that human bodies of that size could exist. It wasn’t so much a woman’s body as a phenomenal heap of flesh that covered almost the entire mattress, a mass of flabbiness scarlet with the heat, threatening to spread through the room in a gelatinous stream.

  This was Gino’s mother, so monumentally obese, so suffocated by her own weight that she had difficulty breathing.

  ‘Sei Gino?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘Dove eri finito, angelo mio?’

  ‘You know perfectly well, Mother. I was at the garage.’

  ‘Hai mangiato?’

  ‘Yes, Mother, I’ve eaten.’

  A silence, then his mother’s voice returned, calm now. ‘Chi è il ragazzo con te?’

  ‘This is Turambo, the son of Taos … of Madame Taos.’

  She tried to turn towards us, but succeeded only in setting in motion an avalanche of shudders that went through her body like wavelets on the surface of a pond.

  ‘Digli di avvicinarsi, così posso vederlo più da vicino.’

  Gino pushed me towards the bed.

  His mother stared at me with her blue eyes. She had lovely dimples on her cheeks, and her smile was touchingly gentle. ‘Come a little closer.’