The First Man

  Then the water from the cataracts of the sky would roughly scrub the summer's dust off the trees, the roofs, the walls, and the streets. The muddy water quickly filled the gutters, gurgled fiercely in the drains, would in most years burst the sewer lines themselves and flood the streets, spraying out before cars and trolleys like two very streamlined yellow fins. The sea itself

  would turn muddy on the beach and in the port. The first sun after that would make steam rise from the buildings and the streets, from the whole city. The heat might return, but it no longer ruled; the sky was more open, it was easier to breathe, and, through the depth of the sun, a vibration in the air, a promise of water heralded autumn and the start of the school year.a "Summer's too long," said the grandmother; she welcomed with the same sigh of relief the autumn rain and the departure of Jacques, whose bored stamping around the shuttered rooms during the torrid days only added to her exasperation.

  Besides, she did not understand why a part of the year should be specially set aside for doing nothing. "As for me, I never had any vacation," she would say, and it was true, she had never known either school or leisure time; she had worked as a child, and worked without respite. She could accept that her grandson would not bring home any money for a few years in return for a greater gain. But from the first day, she had been brooding over those three lost months, and when Jacques was going into his fourth year, she judged that it was time to put his vacation to use. "You're going to work this summer," she told him at the end of the school year, "and bring home some money. You can't just stay here doing nothing."13 Actually, Jacques thought he had a lot

  a. in the lycée—subscription card—renew monthly—the exhilaration of answering: "Subscriber" and the triumphant verification.

  b. the mother speaks up—He'll be tired.

  to do, what with going swimming, the expeditions to Kouba, sports, roaming the streets of Belcourt, reading illustrated stories, popular novels, the Vermot almanac, and the Saint-Etienne company's inexhaustible catalogue.a Not including errands for the household and small tasks imposed on him by his grandmother. But, to her, all that amounted to doing nothing at all, since the child was not bringing home any money nor was he working as he did during the school year, and in her eyes this free ride was as glaring as the fires of hell. The simplest thing to do was to find him a job.

  In truth it was not so simple. Of course you could find help-wanted listings for junior clerks or errand boys in the classified ads in the newspapers. And Mme. Bertaut, the dairywoman whose shop alongside the barbershop smelled of butter (unusual to these noses and palates accustomed to oil), would read the ads to the grandmother. But the employers always required applicants to be at least fifteen years old, and it would take audacity to lie about Jacques's age, for he was not very big for thirteen. Furthermore, the employers always hoped for employees who would make their career with them. The first ones to whom the grandmother (rigged out as she was for major outings, including the infamous mantilla) offered Jacques found him too young or else flatly refused to hire an employee for two months.

  "You'll just have to say you'll stay," the grandmother said.

  a. His reading earlier? the upper neighborhoods?

  "But that's not true." "It doesn't matter. They'll believe you." That was not what Jacques meant, and actually he did not worry about whether he would be believed. But it seemed to him that this sort of lie would stick in his throat. Of course he had often lied at home, to avoid punishment, to keep a two-franc coin, and far more often for the pleasure of talking or bragging. But if to lie to his family seemed a venial sin, with strangers it seemed mortal. In an obscure way he felt that you do not lie on essentials to those you love, because then you could no longer live with them or love them. All the employers could learn of him was what he told them, and so they would not know him, the lie would be absolute. "Let's go," said the grandmother, knotting her mantilla, one day when Mme. Ber-taut told her a big hardware store in the Agha district wanted a young filing clerk. The hardware store was on one of the slopes that led up to the central districts; the mid-July sun was roasting the street and intensifying the smells of urine and asphalt that rose from its surface. There was a narrow but very deep store at street level, divided the long way by a counter displaying samples of iron parts and latches; the walls were largely occupied by drawers bearing mysterious labels. To the right of the entrance, a wrought-iron grille had been installed above the counter with a window for the cashier. The soft, day-dreaming lady behind the grille asked the grandmother to go up to the office, on the second floor. A wooden stairway, at the end of the store, did in fact lead to a big office laid out and oriented in

  similar fashion to the store, where five or six employees, men and women, were seated at a big table in the middle. A door on one side led to the manager's office.

  The manager, in his sweltering office, was in shirtsleeves with his collar loosened.a A small window at his back opened on to a yard where the sun did not reach, though it was two o'clock in the afternoon. He was short and fat, he hitched his thumbs in his wide sky-blue suspenders, and he was short of breath. You could not clearly see the face, from which came a low breathless voice inviting the grandmother to be seated. Jacques inhaled the odor of iron that permeated the whole building. It seemed to Jacques that the manager's motionless stance meant he was suspicious, and he felt his legs tremble at the thought of the lies they would tell this powerful, fearsome man. As for the grandmother, she did not tremble. Jacques was going to be fifteen, he had to find a position and start without delay. According to the manager, he didn't look fifteen, but if he was intelligent . . . and by the way, did he have his certificat d'etudes? No, he had a scholarship. What scholarship? For the lycée. So he was going to the lycée? What class? Fourth year? And he was leaving the lycée? The manager was even more still, his face could be seen better now, and his round milky eyes shifted from the grandmother to the child. Jacques quaked under that gaze. "Yes," said the grandmother. "We're too poor." The manager relaxed imperceptibly. "That's too

  a. collar button, detachable collar.

  bad," he said, "because he was gifted. But there are good positions to be achieved in business also." The good position started modestly, it is true. Jacques would earn 150 francs a month for being present eight hours a day. He could start the next day.

  "You see," said the grandmother. "He believed us."

  "But how will I explain it to him when I leave?"

  "Leave that to me."

  "All right," the child said submissively. He looked up at the summer sky over their heads and thought of the smell of iron, the office full of shadows, that he would have to get up early tomorrow, and that his vacation was over when it had barely begun.

  For two years Jacques worked during the summer. First in the hardware store, then for a ship broker. Each time he feared the approach of September 15th, the date he had to give notice.1

  It was really over, even though the summer was the same as before, with its heat, its boredom. But summer had lost what used to transfigure it, its sky, its open spaces, its clamor. Jacques no longer spent his days in the untamed poverty of his neighborhood, but downtown where the cement of the rich replaced the rough casting of the poor, giving the houses a more distinguished and sadder tone of gray. At eight o'clock, when Jacques entered the store that smelled of iron and shade, a light in him went out, the sky had vanished. He greeted the cashier and climbed up to the big poorly lit

  1. Passage circled by the author.

  office on the second floor. There was no room for him at the main table. The old bookkeeper, his moustache stained yellow by the hand-rolled cigarettes he sucked on all day long; the assistant bookkeeper, a half-bald man of about thirty with a bull-like face and chest; two younger clerks, one of whom, thin, brown-haired, muscular, with a handsome straight profile, always arrived with his shirt wet and sticking to his body, and gave off a good smell of the sea because he went swimming from the pier every morning before burying
himself in the office for the day, and the other, fat and laughing, who could not restrain his jovial vitality; and lastly Mme. Raslin, the manager's secretary, a bit horsey but quite pleasant to look at in her linen or duckcloth dresses, always pink, but who gazed on the world with a stern eye—these were enough to fill up the table with their files, their account books, and their machine. So Jacques was stationed on a chair to the right of the manager's door, waiting to be given some work to do, which usually consisted of filing invoices or business correspondence in the card-index file on either side of the window—where at first he liked to pull out the sliding drawers, handle the cards, and sniff them, until the smell of paper and glue, at first exquisite, finally became the very odor of boredom for him; or else he was asked to go over a lengthy addition once more, and he did it in his lap, sitting on his chair; or else the assistant bookkeeper would ask Jacques to "collate" a series of numbers with him and, always standing, he would carefully check the numbers that the assistant read off, in a doleful low voice so as not to disturb his colleagues. From

  the window you could see the street and the buildings across it, but never the sky. Sometimes, but not often, Jacques was sent on an errand, to get office supplies from the nearby stationery store or to the post office to send an urgent money order. The central post office was located two hundred meters away, on a broad boulevard that led from the port up to the summits of the hills on which the city was built. Jacques would rediscover space and light on this boulevard. The post office itself, in an immense rotunda, was lit by three large doors and light trickling through a huge cupola.a But more often, unfortunately, Jacques was made to post the mail at the end of the day, after leaving the office, and then it was just more drudgery, for he had to run, at the time when the day was beginning to fade, to a post office besieged by a crowd of customers, get in line at the windows, and the wait made his workday still longer. The long summer was practically used up for Jacques in dark days without sparkle and in trivial occupations. "You can't go on without doing anything," his grandmother said. But it was precisely in the office that Jacques felt he wasn't doing anything. He was not unwilling to work, though for him nothing could take the place of the sea or the games of Kouba. But to him real work consisted of what was done at the cooperage, for example—a lengthy physical effort, a series of skillful, precise actions by hard, quick-moving hands—and you saw the result of your labor take shape: a new barrel, well fin-

  a. postal transactions?

  ished, without a crack, something the worker could contemplate.

  But this office work came from nowhere and led nowhere. Selling and buying, everything turned on these ordinary, petty actions. Although he had lived till then in poverty, it was in this office that Jacques discovered the mundane, and he wept for the light he had lost. His co-workers were not the cause of the feeling that he was being smothered. They were nice to him, they never rudely ordered him around, and even the stern Mme. Raslin sometimes smiled at him. Among themselves they spoke little, with that mix of jovial heartiness and indifference characteristic of Algerians. When the manager arrived, a quarter-hour after them, or when he emerged from his office to give an order or check an invoice (for serious matters, he would summon the old bookkeeper or the employee involved to his office), they would better reveal their characters, as if these men and this woman could not express themselves except in their relations with authority—the old bookkeeper discourteous and independent, Mme. Raslin lost in some austere daydream, and the assistant bookkeeper, by contrast, utterly servile. But, for the rest of the day, they would retreat into their shells, and Jacques sat on his chair waiting for the order that would cause him to do some absurd hurrying about—what his grandmother called "work."a

  a. Summer lessons after the baccalaureate—the stupefied head in front of him.

  When he could stand it no longer, when he was literally boiling over on his chair, he would go down to the yard behind the store and hide between the cement walls of the poorly lit Turkish toilet, with its sour pervading odor of urine. In this dark place he would close his eyes, and, breathing the familiar smell, he would dream. Something obscure was stirring in him, something irrational, something in his blood and in his nature. At times he would recall the sight of Mme. Raslin's legs that day when, having knocked over a box of pins in front of her, he knelt to pick them up and, raising his head, saw her parted knees under her skirt and her thighs in lace underwear. Till then he had never seen what a woman wore under her skirts, and this sudden vision made his mouth dry and caused him to tremble almost uncontrollably. A mystery was being revealed to him that, despite his many experiences, he would never resolve.

  Twice a day, at noon and at six o'clock, Jacques would dash outside, run down the sloping street, and jump onto a packed trolley, lined with clusters of passengers on every running board, which was taking workers [back] to their neighborhoods. Squeezed against each other in the heavy heat, they were silent, the adults and the child, looking toward the home that was expecting them—quiet, perspiring, resigned to this existence divided among a soulless job, long trips coming and going in an uncomfortable trolley, and at the end an abrupt sleep. On some evenings it would sadden Jacques to look at them. Until then he had only known the riches and the joys of poverty. But now heat and

  boredom and fatigue were showing him their curse, the curse of work so stupid you could weep and so interminably monotonous that it made the days too long and, at the same time, life too short.

  At the ship broker's, summer was more pleasant because the office looked out on boulevard Front-de-Mer and especially because some of his work was at the port. Jacques actually had to go on board the ships of all nationalities that put in at Algiers and that the broker, a handsome pink-cheeked old man with curly hair, represented to the various government offices. Jacques brought the ship's papers to the office, where they were translated, and, after a week, he himself was assigned to translating lists of supplies and certain bills of lading when they were written in English and addressed to the customs authorities or the big import companies that took delivery of merchandise. So Jacques had regularly to go to the Agha commercial port to get those papers. The heat ravaged the streets leading down to the port. The heavy cast-iron ramps alongside them were so burning hot that you could not touch them with your hand. The sun created a void on the huge piers, except around the ships that had just moored, side against the pier, where the longshoremen were busying themselves—men dressed in blue pants rolled to mid-calf, with bare bronzed torsos, and on their heads a cloth that covered their shoulders and back to the waist, on which they loaded sacks of cement or coal or sharp-edged packages. They came and went on the gangplank that sloped down from the deck to the pier, or else they entered straight into the belly of the freighter by the wide

  open door of the hold, walking rapidly across a beam laid between the hold and the pier. Beyond the smell of sun and dust rising from the piers and that of the overheated decks where the tar was melting and all the fixtures were roasting, Jacques could recognize the particular odor of each freighter. Those from Norway smelled of wood, those from Dakar or the Brazilian ships brought with them the scent of coffee and spices, the Germans smelled of oil, the English of iron. Jacques would climb up the gangplank, show the broker's card to a sailor, who did not understand it. Then he was led through passageways where even the shade was hot to the cabin of an officer or sometimes the captain.a Along the way he would cast covetous glances at those narrow bare cabins where the essence of masculine life was concentrated, and that he was coming to prefer that to the most luxurious of quarters. They greeted him kindly because he himself smiled pleasantly, and he liked these men's rough faces, the appearance that a certain kind of solitary life gave them all, and he let them see his liking for them. Sometimes one of them spoke a little French and would question him. Then, in good spirits, he went back to the flaming pier, the burning ramps, and work in the office. It was just that running these errands in the heat exhaust
ed him; he slept heavily, and September found him thinner and fidgety.

  He was relieved at the approach of the days when he would spend twelve hours at the lycée, at the same time

  a. The longshoreman's accident? See diary.

  that he was increasingly embarrassed at having to inform the office that he was leaving. The hardware store was the hardest. He would cravenly have preferred that he not go to the office and that his grandmother go and give whatever explanation. But the grandmother thought it was easy enough to skip the formalities: all he had to do was collect his pay and never go back, with no further explanation. Jacques, who would have found it quite natural to send his grandmother to endure the manager's thunder—and in a sense it is true she was responsible for the situation and the lie it entailed—was nonetheless indignant at the idea of this evasion, without being able to explain why; in addition, he found the clinching argument: "But the boss will send someone here."

  "That's true," the grandmother said. "Well then, you'll just have to tell him you're going to work at your uncle's." Jacques was already leaving with damnation in his heart when his grandmother told him: "And above all collect your pay first. Then talk to him."

  That evening the manager called each employee to his lair to give him his pay. "Here, kid," he said to Jacques, offering him his envelope. Jacques was reaching out a hesitant hand when the manager smiled at him. "You're doing very well, you know. You can tell your parents that." Jacques was already speaking, saying he would not be coming back. The manager looked at him, amazed, his hand still outstretched to him. "Why?" He had to lie, and the lie would not come out. Jacques remained silent, and with so woeful an air that the manager understood. "You're going back to the lycée?"

  "Yes," said Jacques, and in the midst of his fear and distress a sudden feeling of relief brought tears to his eyes. Furious, the manager got to his feet. "And you knew it when you came here. And your grandmother knew it too." Jacques could only say yes with a nod. Vocal thunderclaps filled the room: they were dishonest, and he, the manager, hated dishonesty. Did he know that he had the right not to pay him, and he'd be pretty foolish, no he wouldn't pay him, let his grandmother come, she'd get a warm reception all right, if they'd told him the truth, he might have hired him anyway, but oh! that lie—"he can't stay at the lycée, we're too poor"— and he'd let himself be had.