But they never knew what had happened. Apparently the execution had taken place without incident. But Jacques’s father was livid when he came home; he went to bed, then got up several times to vomit, and went back to bed. He never wanted to talk about what he had seen. And on the night he heard the story, Jacques himself, when he was lying huddled on the side of the bed to avoid touching his brother, with whom he slept, choked back his nausea and his horror as he relived the details he had heard and those he imagined. And throughout his life those images had followed him even into his sleep when now and then, but regularly, a recurrent nightmare would haunt him, taking many forms, but always having the one theme: they were coming to take him, Jacques, to be executed.
And for a long time when he awakened he would shake off his fear and anguish and return to that soothing reality where there was absolutely no chance that he would be executed. Then, by the time he had come of age, world events around him were such that his execution was no longer so unlikely a possibility, and reality no longer assuaged his dreams, but on the contrary was fed during a very [precise] number of years by the same dread that so distressed his father and that he had left to his son as his only clear and certain legacy. But it was a mysterious bond that connected him to the dead stranger of Saint-Brieuc (who, after all, had not thought he would die a violent death either), a bond beyond the reach of his mother, who had known that story, had seen his vomiting, and had forgotten that morning, just as she had not realized later on that times had changed. For her the times were always the same: disaster could emerge at any moment without calling out a warning.
His grandmother,d on the other hand, had a more accurate picture of things. “You’ll end up on the gallows,” she would often tell Jacques. Why not? It was no longer unusual. She did not know that but, being the person she was, nothing would have surprised her. Erect in her long black robe of a prophetess, uninformed and stubborn, she at least had never known resignation. And she more than anyone else had dominated Jacques’s childhood. Raised by her parents from Mahon on a small farm in the Sahel, she was very young when she married a slender and delicate man, also of Mahon origin, whose brothers had already settled in Algeria by 1848, after the tragic death of the paternal grandfather, a sometime poet who composed his verses mounted on a donkey and riding around the island between stone walls that bordered vegetable gardens.
It was during the course of one of these outings that a scorned husband shot poetry in the back, in the belief that he was punishing a lover but misled by the silhouette and the broad-brimmed black hat, thus killing a model of familial virtue, who, however, left nothing to his children. The eventual result of this tragic misunderstanding in which a poet found his death was the settling on the Algerian shore of a nest of illiterates who multiplied, far from any school, harnessed to a life of exhausting labor under a ferocious sun. But the husband of Jacques’s grandmother, judging by his photos, had kept something of his poet grandfather’s inspiration, and his thin face with its clear-cut features under a lofty brow, and his dreamer’s expression, did not suggest that he could hold his own against his young, beautiful, and vigorous spouse.
She gave him nine children, of whom two died in infancy, another was saved only at the price of being handicapped, and the last was born deaf and partly mute. She raised her brood on that somber little farm while doing her share of their hard common labor; she sat at the end of the table with a long stick at hand that spared her any superfluous speech, the guilty one being immediately hit over the head. She held sway, demanding respect for herself and her husband, whom the children had to address in the polite form of speech, according to Spanish practice. Her husband would not long enjoy this respect: he died prematurely, worn out by sun and labor, and perhaps by his marriage, without Jacques ever being able to discover what disease he died of. Left alone, the grandmother disposed of the little farm and went to live in Algiers with her younger children, the others having been sent out to work as soon as they were old enough to be apprenticed.
When Jacques had grown up enough to observe her, she was impaired by neither poverty nor adversity. Only three children were still with her. Catherine,1 Who did housework for others; the youngest, the handicapped one, who had become an energetic cooper; and Joseph, who had not married and who worked for the railroad. All three earned paltry wages that, combined, had to support a family of five. His grandmother managed the household’s money, and that is why the first thing that struck Jacques about her was her penny-pinching—not that she was a miser except in the sense that we are miserly with the air we breathe that keeps us alive.
It was she who bought the children’s clothes. Jacques’s mother came home late in the day, and was satisfied to watch and listen to what was said, overwhelmed by the energy of the grandmother, to whom she relinquished everything. Thus it was that Jacques, throughout his life as a child, had to wear raincoats that were too long, for his grandmother bought them to last and counted on nature for the child’s size to catch up with that of the clothing. But Jacques grew slowly, not really deciding to sprout till he was fifteen, and his raincoat would wear out before he grew into it.
Another would be bought on the same thrifty principle, and Jacques, whose classmates mocked his dress, had no recourse but to puff out his raincoat at the waist in order to make what was ridiculous look original. Anyway, these brief episodes of shame were quickly forgotten in the classroom, where Jacques regained the upper hand, and on the playground, where soccer was his kingdom. But that kingdom was prohibited, because the playground was made of cement and soles would be worn out so quickly that his grandmother had forbidden Jacques to play soccer during recess.
She herself bought her grandsons thick solid boots that she hoped would prove immortal. In order to stretch out their longevity, she would also have the soles studded with enormous cone-shaped nails, which were doubly useful: you had to wear out the studs before wearing out the sole, and they enabled her to detect infractions of the ban on playing soccer. Running on the cement yard did in fact quickly wear down the studs and give them a shine that betrayed the guilty one. Every day when he got home, Jacques had to report to the kitchen, where Cassandra presided over the black pots, and, with knee bent and sole facing up, in the posture of a horse being shod, he would have to show her his soles.
Of course he could not resist the call of his friends and the lure of his favorite sport, and he would apply himself not to attempting an impossible virtue but to disguising the resulting sin. So on leaving school, and later the lycée, he would spend a good deal of time rubbing his soles in damp earth. Sometimes this ruse was successful. But the time would come when the wear on the studs was glaringly obvious, or sometimes the sole itself would be damaged, or—the worst of catastrophes—the upper sole would be detached from the lower by an awkward kick against the ground or the grille that protected the trees, and Jacques would come home with a string tied around his shoe to hold it together.
Those were nights for the leather whip. The only consolation his mother offered the weeping Jacques was: “You know they’re expensive. Why can’t you be more careful?” But she herself never laid a hand on her children. The next day, they put Jacques in espadrilles and took his shoes to the shoemaker. Two or three days later he would get them back dotted with new studs, and once more he would have to learn to keep his balance on his slippery unstable soles.
The grandmother was capable of going still further, and even after so many years Jacques could not recall this story without a shiver of shame and disgust.* He and his brother were given no pocket money, except occasionally when they would agree to go visit a shopkeeper uncle or an aunt who had married well. It was easy in the case of the uncle because they liked him. But the aunt had a way of rubbing in her comparative wealth, and, rather than feel humiliated, the two children preferred to go without money and the pleasures it would procure them. In any event, and although the pleasures of the sea, the sun, and the neighborhood games were free, fries, caramels, Arab pastries, and in Jacques’s case certain soccer matches required a little money, at least a few centimes.
One evening Jacques was coming home after doing errands, holding at arm’s length the dish of potatoes and cheese that he had taken to the neighborhood baker to be
