When evening came, I could no longer see her body pressed tight to her partner, but against the sky whirled alternating spots of white jasmine and black hair, and when she would throw back her swelling breast I would hear her laugh and see her partner’s profile suddenly plunge forward. I owe to such evenings the idea I have of innocence. In any case, I learn not to separate these creatures bursting with violent energy from the sky where their desires whirl.
In the neighborhood movies in Algiers peppermint lozenges are sometimes sold with, stamped in red, all that is necessary to the awakening of love: (1) questions: “When will you marry me?” “Do you love me?” and (2) replies: “Madly,” “Next spring.” After having prepared the way, you pass them to your neighbor, who answers likewise or else turns a deaf ear. At Belcourt marriages have been arranged this way and whole lives been pledged by the mere exchange of peppermint lozenges. And this really depicts the childlike people of this region.
The distinguishing mark of youth is perhaps a magnificent vocation for facile joys. But, above all, it is a haste to live that borders on waste. At Belcourt, as at Bab-el-Oued, people get married young. They go to work early and in ten years exhaust the experience of a lifetime.
A thirty-year-old workman has already played all the cards in his hand. He awaits the end between his wife and his children. His joys have been sudden and merciless, as has been his life. One realizes that he is born of this country where everything is given to be taken away.
In that plenty and profusion life follows the sweep of great passions, sudden, exacting, and generous. It is not to be built up, but to be burned up. Stopping to think and becoming better are out of the question. The notion of hell, for instance, is merely a funny joke here. Such imaginings are allowed only to the very virtuous.
And I really think that virtue is a meaningless word in all Algeria. Not that these men lack principles. They have their code, and a very special one. You are not disrespectful to your mother. You see that your wife is respected in the street. You show consideration for a pregnant woman.
You don’t double up on an adversary, because “that looks bad.” Whoever does not observe these elementary commandments “is not a man,” and the question is decided. This strikes me as fair and strong. There are still many of us who automatically observe this code of the street, the only disinterested one I know. But at the same time the shopkeeper’s ethics are unknown. I have always seen faces around me filled with pity at the sight of a man between two policemen. And before knowing whether the man had stolen, killed his father, or was merely a nonconformist, they would say: “The poor fellow,” or else, with a hint of admiration: “He’s a pirate, all right.”
There are races born for pride and life. They are the ones that nourish the strangest vocation for boredom. It is also among them that the attitude toward death is the most repulsive. Aside from sensual pleasure, the amusements of this race are among the silliest. A society of bowlers and association banquets, the three-franc movies and parish feasts have for years provided the recreation of those over thirty. Algiers Sundays are among the most sinister.
How, then, could this race devoid of spirituality clothe in myths the profound horror of its life? Everything related to death is either ridiculous or hateful here. This populace without religion and without idols dies alone after having lived in a crowd. I know no more hideous spot than the cemetery on Boulevard Bru, opposite one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.
An accumulation of bad taste among the black fencings allows a dreadful melancholy to rise from this spot where death shows her true likeness. “Everything fades,” say the heart-shaped ex-votos, “except memory.” And all insist on that paltry eternity provided us cheaply by the hearts of those who loved us. The same words fit all despairs. Addressed to the dead man, they speak to him in the second person (our memory will never forsake you); lugubrious pretense which attributes a body and desires to what is at best a black liquid. Elsewhere, amid a deadly profusion of marble flowers and birds, this bold assertion: “Never will your grave be without flowers.”
But never fear: the inscription surrounds a gilded stucco bouquet, very time-saving for the living (like those immortelles which owe their pompous name to the gratitude of those who still jump onto moving buses). Inasmuch as it is essential to keep up with the times, the classic warbler is sometimes replaced by an astounding pearl airplane piloted by a silly angel who, without regard for logic, is provided with an impressive pair of wings.
Yet how to bring out that these images of death are never separated from life? Here the values are closely linked. The favorite joke of Algerian undertakers, when driving an empty hearse, is to shout: “Want a ride, sister?” to any pretty girls they meet on the way. There is no objection to seeing a symbol in this, even if somewhat untoward. It may seem blasphemous, likewise, to reply to the announcement of a death while winking one’s left eye: “Poor fellow, he’ll never sing again,” or, like that woman of Oran who bad never loved her husband: “God gave him to me and God has taken him from me.”
But, all in all, I see nothing sacred in death and am well aware, on the other hand, of the distance there is between fear and respect. Everything here suggests the horror of dying in a country that invites one to live. And yet it is under the very walls of this cemetery that the young of Belcourt have their assignations and that the girls offer themselves to kisses and caresses.
I am well aware that such a race cannot be accepted by all. Here intelligence has no place as in Italy. This race is indifferent to the mind. It has a cult for and admiration of the body. Whence its strength, its innocent cynicism, and a puerile vanity which explains why it is so severely judged. It is commonly blamed for its “mentality”—that is, a way of seeing and of living. And it is true that a certain intensity of life is inseparable from injustice.
Yet here is a rate without past, without tradition, and yet not without poetry—but a poetry whose quality I know well, harsh, carnal, far from tenderness, that of their very sky, the only one in truth to move me and bring me inner peace. The contrary of a civilized nation is a creative nation. I have the mad hope that, without knowing it perhaps, these barbarians lounging on beaches are actually modeling the image of a culture in which the greatness of man will at last find its true likeness.
This race, wholly cast into its present, lives without myths, without solace. It has put all its possessions on this earth and therefore remains without defense against death. All the gifts of physical beauty have been lavished on it. And with them, the strange avidity that always accompanies that wealth without future. Everything that is done here shows a horror of stability and a disregard for the future.
People are in haste to live, and if an art were to be born here it would obey that hatred of permanence that made the Dorians fashion their first column in wood. And yet, yes, one can find measure as well as excess in the violent and keen face of this race, in this summer sky with nothing tender in it, before which all truths can be uttered and on which no deceptive divinity has traced the signs of hope or of redemption. Between this sky and these faces turned toward it, nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion, but stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch.
To feel one’s attachment to a certain region, one’s love for a certain group of men, to know that there is always a spot where one’s heart will feel at peace these are many certainties for a single human life. And yet this is not enough. But at certain moments everything yearns for that spiritual home. “Yes, we must go back there—there, indeed.” Is there anything odd in finding on earth that union that Plotinus longed for? Unity is expressed here in terms of sun and sea. The heart is sensitive to it through a certain savor of flesh which constitutes its bitterness and its grandeur. I learn that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside the sweep of days. These paltry and essential belongings, these relative truths are the only ones to stir me. As for the others, the “ideal” truths, I have not enough soul to understand them. Not that one must be an animal, but I find no meaning in the happiness of angels.
I know simply that this sky will last longer than I. And what shall I call eternity except what will continue after my death? I am
