Sylvie's job timetabled their lives. Their week was made of good days — Mondays, because they had the morning off and because the cinemas changed their films; Wednesdays, because they had a free afternoon; and Fridays, because they had the whole day off and, once again, the films changed - and bad days: all the rest. Sunday was an intermediate day, pleasant in the morning (they would stay in bed, the Paris weeklies would come), boring in the afternoon, gloomy in the evening unless, by chance, there was a film to attract them, but it was not often that two notable or even just watchable films were put on in the same half-week. And so the weeks passed. They followed each other with mechanical regularity: four weeks to a month, more or less; the months were all the same. The days, after getting shorter and shorter, began to get longer and longer. The winter was wet, almost cold. Their lives were dripping away.
II
They were absolutely alone.
Sfax was an inscrutable city. They felt, on occasions, that no-one would ever find out how to pierce its mystery. Its doors would never open. There were people in the street, in the evenings, in self-contained crowds, people coming and going, an almost continuous tide of them under the awnings of Avenue Hedi-Chaker, in front of the Mabrouk Hotel, the Destour Information Office, the Hillal cinema, the cake-shop called Les Délices; there were public places - cafés, restaurants, cinemas - almost crammed with people; and faces which, now and again, might almost seem familiar. But all around, on the quayside, on the ramparts, as soon as you got away from the centre, it was a void, it was dead: the huge sand-strewn esplanade in front of Sfax's hideous cathedral encircled by dwarf palms, Boulevard de Picville, lined by waste plots and two-storey maisonettes, Rue Mangolte, Rue Fezzani, Rue Abd-el-Kader Zghal were bare, straight and sand-swept. Sickly palm-trees swayed before the wind; from their trunks erupting in woody bracts barely a handful of fronds emerged. A multitude of cats prowled amongst the dustbins. A yellow-coated dog sometimes scuttled past with its tail between its legs.
Not a soul stirring. Behind ever-bolted doors, only bare passageways, stone stairs, windowless courtyards. Streets upon streets set at right angles to each other, metal roller-blinds, high wooden fences, a world of squares that were not squares, of non-streets, of phantom avenues. They would walk, not speaking, disoriented; and sometimes it seemed that everything was but an illusion, that Sfax did not exist, did not breathe. They sought signs of complicity all around. Nothing answered their call. They felt isolated in a way that was almost painful. They had been dispossessed, the world was no longer for swimming in, no longer in their arms, and never would be. It was as if, long ago and once and for all, an order had been made, a strict rule had been established to cut them out: they would be free to wander where they willed without let or hindrance, without anyone speaking to them. They would be for ever incognito, for ever strangers in the land. The Italians, the Maltese and the Greeks in the port would watch them go by and stay silent. Olive-oil entrepreneurs in their all-white garb and gold-rimmed glasses, passing slowly by on Rue du Bey with a beadle in their train, would walk straight past without seeing them.
Sylvie's colleagues at work provided only distant and often stand-offish relationships. French teachers with permanent posts did not seem to have unalloyed esteem for temporary staff. Even those who were not bothered by this distinction found it hard to forgive Sylvie for not being made in their own image. She should have been a teacher's wife as well as a career teacher herself, and a regular small-town, middle-class housewife, and have some dignity, deportment, culture. Not let the old country down, don't you know. And though there were in a sense two classes of expatriates - teachers at the start of their careers, eager to grab a suburban semi as fast as they could in Angoulême, Béziers or Tarbes, and the cohort of conscientious objectors or disciplinary cases who did not get the colonial service bonus in their pay but could afford to despise the first group (but the latter were a dying breed: most objectors had been pardoned; others were leaving to settle in Algeria or French Guinea) - neither class was prepared, apparently, to concede that you could sit in the cinema in the front row, next to native ragamuffins, or saunter unshaven, unbuttoned, in the street, in clogs, like a ne'er-do-well. A few books were swapped, and a few records; there was the odd discussion at La Régence; and that was that. No warm hospitality, no keen friendship. That wasn't a plant that grew in Sfax. People turned in on themselves, in their houses that were too big for them.
With other groups — with the French staff at the Sfax-Gafsa Company or the Compagnie des Pétroles, with Muslims, with Jews, with pieds-noirs settlers - it was even worse: no contact at all was possible. Sometimes they would go for a whole week without speaking to anyone.
It soon occurred to them that they were going to stop living altogether. Time passed and stood still. There was no longer anything to keep them in touch with the world, apart from eternally out-of-date newspapers which they began to suspect were well-meaning fabrications, or the memories of anterior life, shadows of another world. They had always lived in Sfax, they would always live there. They had lost all their plans, all their impatience. They looked forward to nothing, not even to holidays too far over the horizon, not even to returning to France.
They felt neither joy, nor sadness, nor even boredom, but they did wonder sometimes if they still existed, if they really existed. They drew no special satisfaction from asking this deceptive question, beyond this: on occasions, it seemed to them, in a muddled and murky way, that the life they were leading was appropriate, adequate and, paradoxically, necessary. They were in the centre of a vacuum, they had settled into a no man's land of parallel streets, yellow sand, inlets and dusty palm-trees, a world they did not understand, that they did not seek to understand, because, in their past lives, they had never equipped themselves to have to adapt, one day, to change, to mould themselves to a different kind of scenery, or climate, or style of living. Sylvie did not resemble even for an instant the teacher she was supposed to be, and Jérôme, as he traipsed down the street, could easily seem to have brought his homeland, or rather his quartier, his ghetto, his stamping-ground, with him on the soles of his English shoes. But Rue Larbi-Zarouk, where they had built their nest, did not even have the mosque which ennobles Rue de Quatrefages, and as for the rest, despite their occasionally strenuous efforts to summon it all up in their imagination, Sfax simply did not have a MacMahon, or a Harry's Bar, or a Balzar, or a Contrescarpe, or a Salle Pleyel, or Berges de la Seine une nuit de juin. In such a vacuum, precisely because of this vacuum, because of the absence of all things, because of such a fundamental vacuity, such a blank zone, a tabula rasa, they felt as if they were being cleansed, returning to a greater simplicity, to true modesty. And in a place as poor as Tunisia, to tell the truth, their own financial straits, the petty poverty of civilised people accustomed to showers, cars and cold drinks, did not mean very much.
Sylvie took her classes, tested her pupils, marked her scripts. Jérôme went to the City Library, read books at random: Borges, Troyat, Zeraffa. They ate in a little restaurant, almost always at the same table. Tuna salad, veal cutlet, or a kebab, or lemon sole, fruit. They went to La Régence for an espresso served with a glass of cold water. They read heaps of newspapers, saw films, loitered in the streets.
Their life was like an unrelinquished habit, an almost unruffled tedium: a life sans everything.
III
From April, they began to travel a little. On occasions when they had three or four days free and were not too short of money, they hired a car and drove towards the South. Alternatively, on Saturdays at six in the evening, a taxi-bus would take them off to Susa or Tunis until Monday at noon.
They tried to get away from Sfax, from its dreary streets and emptiness, so as to find vistas, sights and ruins which perhaps would dazzle or bowl them over, some glowing marvel which would even the score. The remains of a palace, or a temple, or an amphitheatre, a verdant oasis seen from a peak near Kairouan, a long strip of fine sand forming a curved beach as
far as the eye could see, sometimes rewarded their search. But more often they escaped from Sfax only to find, a few dozen or a few hundred miles further on, identically dreary streets, identically incomprehensible and bustling bazaars, identical inlets and ugly palms, an identical desert.
They saw Gabes, Tuzer, Nefta, Gafsa and Metlaoui; the ruins of Sbeitla, Kasserine and Thelepte; they passed through dead towns with names which had previously sounded to their ears like magic: Mahares, Moulares, Matmata, Medenin; they pushed on to the Libyan border.
For miles and miles, the land was stony, dusty, uninhabitable. Nothing grew, bar a few clumps of almost yellow, razor-sharp grass. It felt as if they had been driving for hours on end in a pall of dust, along a road marked out only by old ruts or faded tyre-tracks, into a horizon of nothing but dumpy, dun-coloured hills, without coming across anything at all apart from a dead donkey, a rusted jerry can, a half-collapsed pile of stones which had perhaps been a house.
Or else they would follow a signposted but pot-holed and occasionally almost dangerous road across enormous shatts, and, on every side, as far as the eye could see, there would be nothing but a whitish crust glaring in the sun and throwing up on the horizon sudden flashes which, now and then, seemed almost like mirages, the sea breaking, battlements. They would stop the car and walk a few steps. Beneath the crust of salt, lumps of dry and fissured light brown clay would sometimes collapse and expose blacker areas of compressed and spongy mud which you risked sinking into, almost.
Mangy camels entangled on their tethers as they ripped leaves off an oddly twisted tree with violent swipes of their heads and then jutted their stupid blubber lips out at the road; distempered dogs, half wild, running round in circles; shattered dry-stone walls; black long-haired goats; low tents made of patchworks of pieces of blanket: these were the signs of an approaching village or town, consisting of a long line of rectangular, single-storey houses with dirty white walls, a square minaret and a domed shrine. They overtook a peasant jogging alongside his donkey, and stopped at the sole hotel.
Three men squatting with their backs to the wall were eating bread dipped in oil. Children were running. A woman entirely draped in a black or purple veil which covered her eyes as well would sometimes be seen slipping from one house to another. The terraces of the two cafés spilled out a long way into the street. A tannoy broadcast Arab music, grating melodies played on rasping zithers, jangling timbrels, a flute playing a piercing dirge, refrains which were modulated, reprised, then done in unison, da capo, a hundred times over. Men, sitting in the shade, drinking tea in small glasses, played dominoes.
They went past huge water tanks, along a poorly-made track, and came upon the ruins: four pillars twenty feet tall with nothing to support any more, wrecked buildings whose ground plan had been preserved by the imprints in the earth of the floor-tiling in each room, by isolated steps, cellars, paved streets, remnants of sewers. And people claiming to be guides offered to sell them little silver fish, shiny coins, terracotta figurines.
Then, before leaving, they would go to the market, into the bazaar. They would get lost in the labyrinth of arcades, dead ends, and passageways. A barber would be shaving someone in the open, beside a huge heap of gugglets. A donkey would be burdened with two conical hampers of plaited rope brim-full of ground pimento. In the jewellers' souk, in the textile souk, tradesmen sitting cross-legged, unshod, on a pile of blankets, would roll out piled carpets and fustian in front of them, offer them red woollen burnouses, haicks of wool and silk, leather saddles embroidered with silver thread, beaten brass trays, fretwork boxes, guns, musical instruments, small jewels, scarves with gold thread drawn through, and parchments adorned with bold arabesques.
They bought nothing. Obviously, to some degree, because they did not know how to buy and were worried about having to haggle, but above all because they did not feel drawn to these things. None of them, however lavish they could occasionally be, gave them a feeling of wealth. They moved on, amused or indifferent, but all they saw remained foreign, belonged to another world, did not concern them. And from these trips they brought back only images of emptiness and drought: desolate heaths, tundra, sea inlets, a mineral world where nothing grows: their own world of loneliness, their own dry desert.
It was in Tunisia, all the same, that one day they saw the house of their dreams, the most beautiful dwelling imaginable. It was the house, at Hammamet, of an ageing English couple who divided their time between Tunisia and Florence and for whom hospitality seemed to have become their only recourse against dying from mutual boredom. There were at least a dozen other house guests at the same time as Jérôme and Sylvie. The atmosphere was one of futility, often to the point of exasperation: parlour games, bridge and canasta took turns in between somewhat snooty conversations in which not entirely outdated gossip coming direct from the capitals of Europe gave rise to informed and often firm-minded judgments (I like the man very much and what he's doing is quite right. . . ).
But the house was paradise on earth. Set in the midst of a great park sloping gently down to a fine sandy beach, it was an old building in the local idiom, not particularly large, all on one level, which had grown year by year and become the sun of a whole constellation of pavilions of all sizes, of arbours, shrines, bungalows with verandas on all four sides, dotted around the estate and connected to each other by lattice-walled walkways. There was an octagonal room with no openings other than a small door and two narrow slit windows, with its thick walls entirely lined with books, which was as shady and cool as a tomb; there were tiny rooms, whitewashed like monastic cells, with only two Saharan armchairs and a low table to furnish them; other rooms were long, low and narrow, with walls hung with thick mats, and yet others furnished in English country style, with inglenooks and massive fireplaces flanked by a pair of settees facing each other. In the grounds, white marble-paved paths meandered amongst the lemon trees, the orange trees and the almonds, lined with fragments of antique pillars. There were brooks and waterfalls, grottos and ponds covered with large white water-lilies between which you could sometimes see the silvery streak of fish. Peacocks paraded, uncaged, just as they had dreamed. Bowers overgrown with roses led to lush hideaways.
But it was probably too late. The three days they spent at Hammamet did not shake off their torpor. For them, it was as if all this luxury and comfort, this profusion of things offered with their immediately obvious beauty concerned them no longer. In times past they would have gone to hell to have the hand-painted tiles they saw in the bathroom, for the fountains in the grounds, for the tartan carpet in the main hall, for the library's oak panelling, for the china, the vases, the rugs. They acknowledged them as memories; they had not become insensitive to them, but they no longer understood them; all their landmarks were missing. That was certainly the Tunisia they would have found it easiest to settle in, cosmopolitan Tunisia with its remnants of prestige, pleasant climate and its colourful and picturesque life. That was certainly the kind of life they had first dreamed of: but they had turned into Sfaxians, provincials, exiles.
A world without memories, without memory. More time passed, days and weeks of desert waste, which did not count. They had stopped wanting. An indifferent world. Trains came, ships docked, unloaded machine-tools, medicines, ball-bearings, took on phosphates and olive-oil. Lorries loaded with straw crossed the town on their way to the South, where there was famine. Their life went on identically: teaching, espressos at La Régence, old films in the evening, newspapers, crosswords. They were walking in their sleep. They no longer knew what they wanted. They were dispossessed.
It now seemed to them that before - and each day, that before receded further into the past, as if their anterior life was falling slowly into the domain of legend, of the unreal, or of the shapeless - before, they had had at least a passion for possessing. Often it was wanting that had been all their existence. They had felt drawn towards the future, impatient, consumed with desire.
And then what? What had they done?
What had happened?
Something resembling a quiet and very gentle tragedy was entering the heart of their decelerating lives. They were adrift in the rubble of a very ancient dream, lost amidst unrecognisable ruins.
There was nothing left. They were at the finishing line, at the terminus of the doubtful trajectory which had been their life for six years, at the end of that uncertain quest which had taken them nowhere, which had taught them nothing.
Epilogue
Things could have carried on in the same way. They could have stayed like that all their lives. Jérôme would have got a job for himself. They would not have been short of money. They would have got transferred to Tunis eventually. They would have made new friends. They would have bought themselves a car. At La Marsa, or Sidibou Said, or El Manza, they would have had a fine detached house, a big garden.
But it will not be easy for them to escape from their own story. Time once again will work in their stead. The school year will come to an end. It will turn deliriously hot. Jérôme will spend his days on the beach and Sylvie will come to join him when her classes are over. There will be the last scripts to mark. They will feel holidays coming on. They will pine for Paris, for spring on the banks of the Seine, for their tree all in flower, for the Champs-Elysées, for Place des Vosges. Their eyes will water as they reminisce over their dearly-cherished freedom, their lazy mornings, their candle-lit dinners. And friends will send them their holiday plans: a big house in Touraine, good food, outings in the country: "What if... we went back?" one of them will say.