Page 22 of The First Man


  "It was because of that," the bewildered Jacques suddenly said.

  "Why because of that?"

  "Because we're poor"; then he was silent, and it was the manager who went on after looking at him: ". . . that you did that, that you made up that story?" Jacques, teeth clenched, stared at his feet. The silence was interminable. Then the manager took the envelope from the table and held it out: "Take your money. Get out," he said harshly.

  "No," said Jacques.

  The manager stuffed the envelope into Jacques's pocket: "Get out." In the street Jacques was running, and now he was crying and gripping his collar with both hands to avoid touching the money that was burning in his pocket.

  To lie for the right to have no vacation, to work far from the summer sky and the sea he so loved, and to lie

  again for the right to return to his work at the lycée— this injustice made him desperately unhappy. For the worst of it was not the lies that after all he was unable to utter, ready as he always was to lie for pleasure but incapable of doing so out of necessity, the worst of it was the delights he had lost, the season's light and the time off that had been taken away from him, and now the year consisted of nothing but a series of hasty awakenings and hurried dismal days. He had to lose what was royal in his life of poverty, the irreplaceable riches that he so greatly and gluttonously enjoyed, to earn a little bit of money that would not buy one-millionth of those treasures. And yet he understood that he had to do it, and there was even something in him that, at the very time he was most rebellious, was proud of having done it. For he had found the sole compensation for those summers sacrificed to the misery of the lie on his first payday when—entering the dining room where his grandmother was peeling potatoes that she then tossed in a basin of water; Uncle Ernest, seated, was picking fleas off the patient Brillant whom he held between his legs; and his mother, who had just arrived, was at the buffet opening a small bundle of dirty laundry she had been given to wash—Jacques had stepped forward and, without a word, placed on the table the 100-franc bill and the large coins he had been clutching in his hand all the way home. Without a word, the grandmother pushed a 20-franc piece back toward him and picked up the rest. With her hand she touched Catherine Cormery on the side to get her attention and showed her the money: "That's your son."

  "Yes," his mother said, and her sorrowful eyes briefly caressed the child.

  The uncle nodded while holding on to Brillant, who had thought his ordeal was over. "Good, good," he said. "You a man."

  Yes, he was a man, he had paid a bit of what he owed, and the idea of having diminished the poverty of this household by a little filled him with that almost wicked pride that comes to men when they begin to feel themselves free and subject to nothing. And in fact, when he entered the fifth-year courtyard at the start of the next school year, he was no longer the disoriented child who four years earlier had left Belcourt in the early morning—unsteady on his studded shoes, anxious at the thought of the strange world awaiting him—and his expression as he looked at his classmates had lost some of its innocence. Besides, by that time many things were beginning to pull him away from the child he had been. And if one day he who till then had patiently accepted being beaten by his grandmother as if it were one of the inevitable obligations of childhood, if he tore the leather whip out of her hands, suddenly crazed, in a furious rage, so determined to strike that white head whose bright cold eyes were driving him out of his mind that the grandmother understood him—she recoiled and went to close herself in her room, sobbing certainly over the misfortune of having raised unnatural children but already knowing she would never beat Jacques again, and in fact never again did she beat him—it was because the child had indeed died in this thin muscular adolescent, with his brush-cut

  hair and his fiery expression, this youth who had worked all summer to bring home wages, who had just been named first-string goalie on the lycée team, and who, three days earlier, had had his first faltering taste of a girl's lips.

  2 : A Mystery to Himself

  Oh yes, that was how it was, the life of this child was like that: that was how life was in the neighborhood's island of poverty, bound together by stark necessity, in an ignorant and handicapped family, with his youthful blood boiling, a ravenous appetite for life, an untamed and hungry intellect, and all the while an ecstasy of joy punctuated by the sudden counterpunches inflicted by a world unknown to him, leaving him abashed at the time, but he would quickly recover, trying to understand, to learn, to assimilate this world he did not know, and he did assimilate it, because he seized upon it so avidly, not trying to worm his way in; he was willing to go along but would not abase himself, and finally he was never without a sure confidence, yes a certainty, since he was guaranteed that he would achieve everything he desired and nothing would ever be impossible for him, nothing that is of this world and only of this world; he was preparing himself (and was prepared also by the bareness of his childhood) to find his place anywhere, because there was no position he wanted, but only joy,

  and free spirits, and energy, and all that life has that is good, that is mysterious, that is not and never will be for sale. Preparing himself even by dint of poverty to be able one day to receive money without ever seeking it or submitting to it, to be as he was now—he, Jacques, at age forty, holding sway over so much and yet so certain that he was less than the least of people, and nothing in any case next to his mother. Yes, that was how he lived, in those games by the sea, in the wind, in the street, under the weight of summer and the heavy rains of the brief winter, with no father, with no heritage handed down, but finding a father for a year, just when he needed him, and learning through the people and the things of [ ],1 through the knowledge that revealed itself to him to fashion something that resembled a style of behavior (sufficient at the time for his circumstances, insufficient later on when confronting the cancer of the world) and to create his own heritage.

  But was that all there was: that style, those games, that daring, that ardor, the family, the kerosene lamp and the dark stairs, the palms in the wind, birth and baptism in the sea, and finally those gloomy laborious summers? There was that, oh yes, that is how it was, but there was also the secret part of his being, something in him that through all those years had been blindly stirring like those measureless waters under the earth which from the depths of rocky labyrinths have never seen the light of day and yet dimly reflect a light, come from

  1. An illegible word.

  who knows where, drawn perhaps from the glowing center of the earth through stone capillaries to the black air of those buried caverns in which glutinous and [compacted] plants find food enough to live where any life seems impossible. And this blind stirring in him, which had never ceased, which he still felt now, a dark fire buried in him like one of those peat fires, gone out at the surface but still burning inside, making the outer fissures of the peat move in rough eddies of vegetation, so that the muddy surface moves in the same rhythm as the peat of the bog, and these dense imperceptible waves would cause, day after day, the most violent and the most terrible of his desires, as well as his most barren anxieties, his most fruitful nostalgia, his sudden need for bareness and sobriety, his yearning also to be nobody— yes this mysterious stirring through all those years was well matched to this immense country around him; as a small child he had felt its weight and that of the immense sea before him, and behind him the endless expanse of mountains, plains, and desert called the interior, and between the two the constant danger no one spoke of because it seemed natural; but Jacques sensed it in Birmandreis, in the little farmhouse with arched ceilings and whitewashed walls, when his aunt went around the bedrooms at bedtime to make sure the huge bolts on the thick, solid wooden shutters had been properly closed, this was the very country into which he felt he had been tossed, as if he were the first inhabitant, or the first conqueror, landing where the law of the jungle still prevailed, where justice was intended to punish without mercy what custom had failed to prevent??
?

  around him these people, alluring yet disturbing, near and separate, you were around them all day long, and sometimes friendship was born, or camaraderie, and at evening they still withdrew to their closed houses, where you never entered, barricaded also with their women you never saw, or if you saw them on the street you did not know who they were, with faces half veiled and their beautiful eyes sensual and soft above the white cloth, and they were so numerous in the neighborhoods where they were concentrated, so many of them that by their sheer numbers, even though exhausted and submissive, they caused an invisible menace that you could feel in the air some evenings on the streets when a fight would break out between a Frenchman and an Arab, just as it might have broken out between two Frenchmen or two Arabs, but it was not viewed the same way; and the Arabs of the neighborhood, wearing their faded blue overalls or their wretched cloaks, would slowly approach, coming from all directions in a continuous movement, until this steadily agglutinating mass by the mere action of its coalescing would without violence eject the few Frenchmen attracted by witnesses to the fight, and the Frenchman who was fighting would in backing up find himself suddenly confronting both his antagonist and a crowd of somber impenetrable faces, which would have deprived him of what courage he possessed had he not been raised in this country and therefore knew that only with courage could you live here; and so he would face up to the threatening crowd that nonetheless was making no threat except by its presence and by the movement it could not help mak-

  ing, and most often it was they who took hold of the Arab fighting in a transport of rage to make him leave before the arrival of the police, who were quickly informed and quick to come, and who without debate would take away the fighters, manhandling them as they passed by Jacques's windows on the way to the police station. "Poor fellows," his mother would say, seeing the two men firmly held and shoved along by their shoulders, and after they were gone, violence, fear, and menace prowled the street in the child's mind, and a nameless dread made his mouth go dry. This night inside him, yes these tangled hidden roots that bound him to this magnificent and frightening land, as much to its scorching days as to its heartbreakingly rapid twilights, and that was like a second life, truer perhaps than the everyday surface of his outward life; its history would be told as a series of obscure yearnings and powerful indescribable sensations, the odor of the schools, of the neighborhood stables, of laundry on his mother's hands, of jasmine and honeysuckle in the upper neighborhoods, of the pages of the dictionary and the books he devoured, and the sour smell of the toilets at home and at the hardware store, the smell of the big cold classrooms where he would sometimes go alone before or after class, the warmth of his favorite classmates, the odor of warm wool and feces that Didier carried around with him, of the cologne big Marconi's mother doused him with so profusely that Jacques, sitting on the bench in class, wanted to move still closer to his friend; the scent of the lipstick Pierre swiped from one of his aunts and that several of them sniffed together, excited and

  uneasy, like dogs that enter a house where there has been a female in heat, imagining that this was what a woman was, this sweet-smelling chunk of bergamot and cosmetic cream that, in their rough world of shouting, sweating, and dust, revealed to them a world refineda and delicate and inexpressibly seductive, from which even the foul language they were mouthing all together over the lipstick could not succeed in protecting them; and, since earliest childhood, his love of bodies, of their beauty, which made him laugh with bliss on the beaches, of their warmth that never stopped attracting him, with nothing particular in mind, like an animal—it was not to possess them, which he did not know how to do, but just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend's with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman's hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him, which was what he without knowing it hoped for from his mother; he did not get it and perhaps did not dare to get it, but he found it with the dog Bril-lant when he stretched out alongside him and breathed his strong smell of fur, or in the strongest and most animal-like odors where the marvelous heat of life was somehow preserved for him who could not do without it.

  From the darkness within him sprang that famished

  a. add to the list

  ardor, that mad passion for living which had always been part of him and even today was still unchanged, making still more bitter—in the midst of the family he had rediscovered and facing the images of his childhood—the sudden terrible feeling that the time of his youth was slipping away, like the woman he had loved, oh yes, he had loved her with a great love, with all his heart and his body too, yes, with her it was a fervent desire, and when he withdrew from her with a great silent cry at the moment of orgasm he was in passionate harmony with his world, and he had loved her for her beauty and for the openhearted and despairing passion for life that was hers, and that made her deny, deny that time could pass, though she knew it was passing at that very moment, not wanting people to be able one day to say she was still young, but rather to stay young, always young; she burst into sobs one day when, laughing, he told her youth was passing and the days were waning: "Oh no, oh no," she said through her tears, "I'm so in love with love," and, intelligent and outstanding in so many ways, perhaps just because she truly was intelligent and outstanding, she rejected the world as it was. As it had been those days when, returning after a brief stay in the foreign country where she was born—those funereal visits, those aunts about whom she was told: "It's the last time you'll see them," and actually see their faces, their bodies, their ruins, and she wanted to go out screaming; or else those family dinners on a tablecloth embroidered by a great-grandmother who was long since dead and whom no one thought about, except she who was thinking about her great-grandmother

  when she was young, about her pleasures, about her appetite for living, like herself, marvelously beautiful in the bloom of her youth, and everyone at the table was paying her compliments, and on the wall around the table were hanging portraits of beautiful young women who were the ones who were complimenting her now and who were all decrepit and worn out. Then, her blood on fire, she wanted to flee, flee to a country where no one would grow old or die, where beauty was imperishable, where life would always be wild and radiant, and that did not exist; she wept in his arms when she returned, and he loved her desperately.

  And he too, perhaps more than she, since he had been born in a land without forefathers and without memory, where the annihilation of those who preceded him was still more final and where old age finds none of the solace in melancholy that it does in civilized lands [ ],1 he, like a solitary and ever-shining blade of a sword, was destined to be shattered with a single blow and forever, an unalloyed passion for life confronting utter death; today he felt life, youth, people slipping away from him, without being able to hold on to any of them, left with the blind hope that this obscure force that for so many years had raised him above the daily routine, nourished him unstintingly, and been equal to the most difficult circumstances—that, as it had with endless generosity given him reason to live, it would also give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion.

  1. An illegible word.

  Interleaves

  SHEET I

  (4) On the ship. Siesta with child + war of 14.

  (5) At his mother's—the bombing.

  (6) Journey to Mondovi—siesta—the settlement.

  (7) At his mother's. Childhood continued—he recaptures childhood and not his father. He learns he is the first man. Madame Leca.

  "When, having kissed him two or three times with all her strength, holding him tight against her, and after letting him go, she looked at him and took him in her arms again to kiss him once more, as if, having measured her affection to its fullness (which she had just done), she had decided that one measure was still missing and.1 And then, right afterwar
ds, turned away, she seemed no longer to be thinking of him nor

  1. The sentence ends there.

  for that matter of anything, and even sometimes looked at him with a strange expression as if now he were in the way, disturbing the empty, closed, confined universe where she circled."

  SHEET II

  A settler wrote to a lawyer in 1869:

  "For Algeria to survive her doctors' treatments she has to be hard to kill."

  Villages surrounded by moats or walls (and turrets at the 4 corners).

  Of 600 settlers sent in 1831, 150 died in the tents. Hence the great number of orphanages in Algeria.

  In Boufarik, they plow with a gun on their shoulder and quinine in their pocket. "He looks like Boufarik." 19% died in 1839. Quinine is sold as a drink in the cafes.

  Bugeaud marries off his soldier settlers in Toulon after having written the mayor of Toulon to select 20 energetic fiancees. These were "shotgun weddings." But, once confronted with it, they exchange mates as best they can. It's the birth of Fouka.

  Communal work at the beginning. These are military collective farms.

  Settling "by region." Cheragas was settled by 66 families of horticulturists from Grasse.

  In most cases the town halls of Algeria have no archives.

  The people from Mahon landed in small bands with a trunk and their children. Their word is their bond. Never hire a Spaniard. They created the wealth of the Algeria seaboard.