Actually the only choice was between these “reserved” seats, uncomfortable folding chairs that opened noisily, and the benches toward which the children surged at the last moment, bickering over their places, when a side door was opened for them. At each end of the benches was stationed an usher, armed with a leather whip, who was responsible for keeping order, and it was not unusual to see him expel an overly boisterous child or adult. In those days the theatre showed silent films, the newsreel first, then a short comedy, the main feature, and finally a serial shown at the rate of one episode per week. The grandmother particularly liked these serials, where each episode ended in suspense. For example, the muscular hero carrying the wounded blond girl in his arms would start out on a vine bridge over a canyon torrent.
And the last frame of the weekly episode would show a tattooed hand severing the vines of the bridge with a crude knife. The hero would continue proudly on his way despite the warnings shouted by the spectators in the benches.g The question then was not whether the couple would escape—no doubt on that score being permitted—but only how they would extricate themselves, which explains why so many spectators, both Arab and French, would come back the next week to see the lovers stopped in their mortal plunge by a providential tree.
The show was accompanied throughout on the piano by an old maiden lady, who met the jeers of the benches with the calm stillness of her thin back shaped like a bottle of mineral water capped with a lace collar. At the time, Jacques thought it a mark of distinction that this impressive lady wore her fingerless gloves during the most torrid hot spells. Nor was her job as easy as one might have thought.
Providing musical commentary to the news, in particular, required her to change melodies according to the nature of the events being shown on the screen. She would go without transition from a lively quadrille accompanying the spring fashion shows to Chopin’s Funeral March for a flood in China or the funeral of a personage important on the national or international scene. Whatever the piece, it was always imperturbably performed, as if ten little mechanical instruments were executing precise maneuvers on the old yellowed keyboard that had been ordained once and for all by clockwork.
In that hall with bare walls, its floor littered with peanut shells, the smell of cresyl mingled with a strong odor of humanity. It was the pianist, in any case, who silenced the deafening racket by launching with full pedal into the prelude that was supposed to set the mood for the matinée show. A great throbbing sound announced that the projector was starting, and that was when Jacques’s ordeal began.
Since they were silent, the films would project a certain amount of written text intended to clarify the plot. As his grandmother was illiterate, it was Jacques’s job to read these texts to her. Despite her age, his grandmother was not at all hard of hearing. But first of all he had to make himself heard over the sound of the piano and that of the audience, whose vocal responses were plentiful. Furthermore, though the texts were extremely simple, his grandmother was not very familiar with some words and others were completely unknown to her.
Jacques, for his part, did not want to disturb their neighbors and was especially anxious not to tell the entire hall that his grandmother did not know how to read (sometimes she herself would be embarrassed enough to say, raising her voice, at the beginning of the show: “You’ll have to read to me, I forgot my glasses”), so he would not read the text as loudly as he might have.
The result was that the grandmother only half understood, and would insist that he read it again and louder. Jacques would try to raise his voice, the shushes would plunge him into a vile shame, he stammered, the grandmother scolded him, and soon another text appeared, all the more mysterious to the poor old woman because she had not understood the preceding one. Confusion would only compound until Jacques found enough presence of mind to sum up in a few words a crucial moment in, for example, The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. “The villain wants to take the girl away from him,” Jacques would firmly articulate, taking advantage of a pause in the sound of the piano or the audience.
It all became clear, the film went on, and the child could breathe easier. Usually that was the extent of his worries. But some films on the order of Les Deux Orphelines were really too complicated, and, caught between his grandmother’s demands and the ever-angrier reprimands of their neighbors, Jacques would end by remaining completely silent. He still remembered one of these performances when the grandmother, beside herself, had finally walked out, while he followed her in tears, distressed at the thought that he had spoiled one of the poor woman’s rare pleasures and that it had been paid for out of their meager funds.h
As for his mother, she never came to these performances. She could not read either, and she was half deaf besides. Beyond that, her vocabulary was even more limited than her mother’s. Even today, her life was without distractions. In forty years she had been to the movies two or three times, had understood nothing, and it was only in order not to displease those who invited her that she would say the dresses were pretty or that the one with the moustache looked like a very bad man. Nor could she listen to the radio. And as to the newspapers, sometimes she would leaf through those that were illustrated, would get her sons or granddaughters to explain the pictures, would decide that the Queen of England seemed sad, and close the pages to gaze once more out the same window and watch the activity on the same street that she had been contemplating through half her lifetime.i
a. She never used a subjunctive.
b. Relations with brother Henri: the fights.
c. what they ate: stew of innards, codfish stew, chick-peas, etc.
d. Transition.
- On page 8 Jacques Cormery’s mother is given the name Lucie. From here on, she is named Catherine.
- where shame and disgust mingle
e. No. It was because he had already claimed to have lost the coin in the street that he had to find another explanation.
f. Her nieces.
g. Riveccio.
h. add symptoms of poverty—unemployment—holiday camp summer in Miliana—blowing the bugle—expelled—Doesn’t dare tell her. Speak up: well we’ll drink coffee tonight. From time to time it changes. He looks at her. He’s often read stories of poverty where the woman is valiant. She didn’t smile. She left to go in the kitchen, valiant—Not resigned.
i. Bring on Uncle Ernest old, before—his portrait in the room where Jacques and his mother were. Or have him come after.
Étienne
In a sense, she was less involved in life than her brother Ernest,1 who lived with them; he was stone deaf, and he expressed himself as much by onomatopoeic sounds and gestures as with the hundred-odd words at his disposal. But Ernest, who could not be put out to work when he was young, had haphazardly attended school and learned to make out the letters of the alphabet. He did go to the movies sometimes, and he would come home with an account of the film that astounded those who had already seen it, as the wealth of his imagination would make up for what he had missed. Moreover, he was shrewd and crafty, and a sort of native intelligence enabled him to make his way in a world and among people who nonetheless remained obdurately silent to him. Thanks to that same intelligence, he would bury himself every day in the newspaper, where he could make out the headlines and so have at least a nodding acquaintance with world affairs. “Hitler,” he would say, for example, to Jacques when he had come of age, “no good, eh.”
“No, that wasn’t good.”
“The Huns, always the same,” the uncle added.
“No, it wasn’t that.”
“Yes, there’re some good ones,” his uncle acknowledged. “But Hitler that’s no good,” and right after, his love of a joke gaining the upper hand: “Levy” (that was the mercer across the street) “he’s scared.” And he guffawed. Jacques would try to explain. His uncle would become serious again: “Yes. Why he wants to hurt the Jews? They’re like other people.”
He always loved Jacques, in his fashion. He admired his success in school. He would rub the child’s skull with his hard hand on which tools and manual labor had left a hornlike callus. “Got a good head, this one. Hard”—and he tapped his own head with his big fist—“but good.” Sometimes he added: “Like his father.”
One day Jacques took the opportunity to ask if his father had been intelligent.
“Your father, hard head. Did what he
