The string bag filled with provisions bought in very small quantities (a half-pound of sugar, a quarter-pound of butter, twenty-five centimes’ worth of grated cheese, etc.) did not weigh heavily in the crook of his right arm and Jacques sniffed the good smell of potatoes and cheese as he made his way nimbly through the working-class crowd that at this hour was milling around on the sidewalks of the neighborhood. At that moment a two-franc piece slipped through a hole in his pocket and fell clinking on the sidewalk. Jacques picked it up, counted his change, which was all there, and put it in his other pocket. “I could have lost it,” he thought suddenly. And the next day’s match, which till then he had banished from his thoughts, now returned to his mind.
No one had actually taught the child what was right and what was wrong. Some things were forbidden and any infraction was severely punished. Others were not. Only his teachers would sometimes talk about morality, when the curriculum left them the time, but there again the prohibitions were more explicit than the reasons for them. All that Jacques had been able to see and experience concerning morality was daily life in a working-class family where it was evident no one had ever thought there was any way other than the hardest kind of labor to acquire the money necessary to their survival. But that was a lesson in courage, not morals.
Nonetheless, Jacques knew it was wrong to hide those two francs. And he didn’t want to do it. And he would not do it; maybe he could do what he’d done before, squeeze between two boards to get in the old stadium at the parade grounds and see the match free. That was why he himself did not understand why he did not immediately give back the change, and why, a little later, he came from the toilet and declared that a two-franc piece had fallen in the hole when he dropped his pants. Even “toilet” was too exalted a term for the small space that had been improvised in the masonry of the landing of the one upper floor. A Turkish-style hole had been drilled in a mid-size pedestal jammed between the door and the back wall.
The place was without air, without electric light, without faucet, and they had to pour jerry cans of water in the hole after each use. But nothing could keep the stink from overflowing into the stairs. Jacques’s explanation was plausible.e It saved him from being sent back out on the street to look for the lost coin, and it cut short any further action. Yet Jacques felt a pang as he announced his bad news. His grandmother was in the kitchen chopping garlic and parsley on an old board that was green and pitted with use. She stopped and looked at Jacques, who was waiting for her to explode. But she remained silent and studied him with her icy-clear eyes. “You’re sure?” she said at last.
“Yes, I felt it drop.”
She was still studying him. “Very well,” she said. “We shall see.”
And Jacques, horrified, saw her roll up her right sleeve, baring her knotty white arm, and go out on the landing. He dashed into the dining room, on the verge of throwing up. When she summoned him, he found her at the washbasin. Her arm was covered with gray soap, which she was rinsing off in a gush of water. “There was nothing there,” she said. “You’re a liar.”
He stammered: “But it could have been washed down.”
She hesitated. “Maybe. But if you’re lying, it’ll be your tough luck.”
Yes, it was his tough luck, for in that instant he understood it was not avarice that caused his grandmother to grope around in the excrement, but the terrible need that made two francs a significant amount in this home. He understood it, and now he clearly saw, with a spasm of shame, that he had stolen those two francs from his family’s labor. Even today, watching his mother at the window, Jacques could not explain how he could have failed to return those two francs and yet have enjoyed going to the match the next day.
His grandmother was also linked with other shameful memories for which there was less legitimate cause. She had wanted Henri, his older brother, to have violin lessons. Jacques had dodged this by claiming he could not continue to do so well in school with this extra work. So his brother had learned to scrape a few horrible sounds from a frigid violin, he could play popular songs with a few false notes. For fun, Jacques, whose voice was quite true, had learned the same songs, without any idea of the calamitous consequences of this innocent pastime.
Sure enough, on Sunday, when his grandmother’s married daughters,f two of whom were war widows, would call on her, or her sister, who still lived on a farm in the Sahel and spoke the Mahon dialect more readily than Spanish, would come to visit, after she had served big bowls of black coffee on the oilcloth-covered table, his grandmother summoned her grandchildren to give an impromptu concert. The dismayed boys brought the metal music stand and the two-page scores of well-known tunes. They had to perform. Jacques followed the zigzags of Henri’s violin as best he could, singing “Ramona,” “I had a wonderful dream, Ramona, we’d gone away just you and I,” or “Dance, O my Djalmé, this night it’s you I want to love,” or else, staying in the Orient, “Nights of China, nights of caresses, night of love, night of ecstasy, of tenderness …” On other occasions the grandmother would make a special request for more true-to-life songs.
So Jacques would sing: “Is it really you my man, you whom I so loved, you who vowed, God knows you did, never to make me cry.” As it happened, this was the only song Jacques could sing with real feeling, for at the end its heroine repeats its touching refrain in the middle of a crowd watching the execution of her wayward lover. But the grandmother’s favorite song was one she no doubt loved for its melancholy and tenderness, which one would seek in vain in her own nature. It was Toselli’s “Serenade,” which Henri and Jacques brought out with quite a bit of brio, although the Algerian accent was not really suited to the enchanted hour evoked by the song.
On a sunny afternoon, four or five women dressed in black, all of whom except the grandmother had put aside the black mantillas that Spanish women wear, were seated in a row around the poorly furnished room with its rough-cast white walls, and were nodding gently in approval of the outpouring of the music and the lyrics—until the grandmother, who had never been able to tell a do from a si, and for that matter did not even know the names of the notes of the scale, would break the spell with a curt “You made a mistake,” which took the wind out of the performers’ sails. We were there, the grandmother would say when the thorny passage had been gotten through in a way satisfying to her taste; once again the women would rock in time to the music, and at the end they applauded the two virtuosi, who hastily packed up their equipment and went out to join their comrades in the street.
Only Catherine Cormery had remained silent in a corner. And Jacques still remembered that Sunday afternoon when, as he was about to leave with his music, his mother had said, in reply to one of the aunts who complimented her about him, “Yes, that was good. He’s intelligent,” as if there were any connection between the two statements. But when he had looked back, he understood the connection. Her face was quivering, her gentle eyes feverish, and she gazed at him with an expression that made him recoil, hesitate, then flee. “She loves me, then she loves me,” he said to himself in the staircase, and at the same time he realized how desperately he loved her, that he had craved her love with all his heart, and that until that moment he had always doubted whether she loved him.
Performances at the movies held other pleasures in store for the child … The ritual took place on Sunday afternoon and sometimes on Thursday. The neighborhood movie house was just down the street from their building and bore the name of a Romantic poet, as did the street alongside it. Before going in, you had to pass an obstacle course of Arab peddlers’ stands bearing helter-skelter displays of peanuts, dried salted chick-peas, lupine seeds, barley sugar coated in loud colors, and sticky sourballs. Others sold gaudy pastries, among them a pyramid of creamy swirls sprinkled with pink sugar, and still others displayed Arab fritters dripping with oil and honey.
A swarm of flies and children, both attracted by the same sweets, buzzed and shouted as they chased each other around the stands amidst the curses of
