Then there was laughter, and stories about their jobs, and jokes, but Jacques, who was dirty and worn out, his mouth and hands sticky, was barely listening because he was falling asleep. But, in fact, all of them were sleepy, and for some time they drowsed, gazing vacantly at the distant plain under its haze of heat, or else, like Ernest, they went sound asleep, each with a handkerchief covering his face. However, at four o’clock they had to start down to catch the train, which would come at half past five. Now they were in their compartment, crammed together in fatigue, the worn-out dogs under the seats or between the men’s legs, bloodthirsty dreams running through their heavy sleep. The day was beginning to fade at the edges of the plain; then it was the brief African twilight, and the night, always disturbing on those wide-open spaces, would fall without transition.
Later on, in the station, they were in a hurry to get home to eat and go to bed early for the next day’s work, so they parted quickly in the dark, almost without words but with great friendly backslapping. Jacques heard them moving away, he listened to their warm rough voices, he loved them. Then he fell in step with Ernest, whose pace was still spirited, while his own feet were dragging. Near their home, Ernest turned to him in the dark street: “You happy?” Jacques did not answer. Ernest laughed and whistled to his dog. But, a few steps farther, the child slipped his small hand in the hard calloused hand of his uncle, who squeezed it very hard. And so they went home in silence.
i j Ernest was, however, subject to an anger as immediate and wholehearted as his pleasures. The impossibility of reasoning or even talking with him made his rages seem like a natural phenomenon. You see a storm gathering, you wait for it to break. Nothing else to do. Like many deaf people, Ernest had a very well-developed sense of smell (except when it concerned his dog). This privileged condition brought him great delights, as when he inhaled the odor of split-pea soup or those dishes he loved above all others, squid in its ink, sausage omelet, or the stew of innards made with beef heart and lung, the bourguignon of the poor, which was the grandmother’s great success, and often appeared on their table because it was cheap; or on Sundays when he would sprinkle himself with cheap eau de cologne or the lotion known as [Pompero] (that Jacques’s mother also used), its mild and lemony bergamot-based scent always lingered in the dining room and in Ernest’s hair, and he would sniff deeply at the bottle with an air of rapture …
But his sensitivity in this regard also caused him trouble. He would not tolerate certain odors that could not be detected by the normal nose. For example, he had gotten in the habit of sniffing his plate before beginning his meal, and he would turn red with anger when he discovered what he claimed was the smell of egg. The grandmother would then take the suspect plate, sniff it, declare that she smelled nothing there, and hand it to her daughter for her opinion. Catherine Cormery would pass her delicate nose over the porcelain, and, without even sniffing, say softly that no, it didn’t smell.
They sniffed the other plates in order better to form a definitive judgment, except those of the children, who ate from iron dishes. (The reasons for that matter were a mystery, lack of china perhaps, or, as the grandmother once stated, to save breakage, though neither he nor his brother was clumsy with his hands. But family traditions are often no more soundly based, and ethnologists certainly make me laugh when they seek the reasons for so many mysterious rituals. The real mystery, in many cases, is that there is no reason at all.) Then the grandmother would pronounce the verdict: it did not smell. In truth she never would have decided otherwise, especially if it was she who did the dishes the night before. She would not have given an inch on her honor as a housekeeper.
But that was when Ernest’s real anger exploded, and all the more so because he could not find the words to express his conviction.k One had to let the tempest run its course, whether he sulked instead of eating, or picked with a disgusted air at his plate, though the grandmother had changed it, or even left the table and stormed out declaring that he was going to a restaurant; in fact he had never set foot in that kind of place, nor had anyone in their home, although when any dissatisfaction was expressed at the table, the grandmother would never fail to pronounce the fateful line: “Go to a restaurant.” From that time on the restaurant appeared to all to be one of those sinful and falsely alluring places where everything seems easy provided you can afford it, but where the very first guilty delights it dispenses will one day or another be dearly paid for by your stomach.
In any event the grandmother never responded to her youngest child’s anger. On the one hand because she knew it was useless, on the other because she had always had an odd weakness for him, which Jacques, once he had done some reading, attributed to the fact that Ernest was handicapped (though we have so many examples of parents who, despite our preconceptions, will turn away from the handicapped child), and which he better understood one day much later when, catching a tenderness he had never seen in his grandmother’s usually hard eyes, he turned to see his uncle putting on the jacket of his Sunday outfit.
The dark cloth made him look even more slender, his features were delicate and youthful, he was freshly shaved and his hair carefully combed, and for once he was wearing a fresh collar and a tie—he had the look of a Greek shepherd in holiday dress—and Jacques saw his uncle as he really was, which was very handsome. And then he understood that his grandmother’s love for her son was physical, that, like everyone, she was in love with the grace and strength of Ernest, and her weakness for him that had seemed unusual was after all very common; it softens us all more or less, and delightfully so besides, and helps make the world bearable—it is our weakness for beauty.
Jacques also remembered another of Uncle Ernest’s rages, this one more serious since it almost ended in a fistfight with Uncle Josephin, the one who worked for the railroad. Josephin did not sleep at his mother’s home (and indeed where would he have slept?). He had a room in the neighborhood (where he had never actually invited any of the family and which Jacques, for example, had never seen) and took his meals with his mother, to whom he paid a small amount for his board. Josephin was as different from his brother as he could be.
Ten years older, with a short moustache and a crew cut, he was also more stolid, more reserved, and especially more calculating. Ernest often accused him of avarice.
Actually he expressed it more simply: “He Mzabite.” To him the Mzabites were the neighborhood grocers; they did in fact come from Mzab, and for many years they would live behind their shops, which smelled of oil and cinnamon, living without wives on next to nothing in order to support their families in the five towns of Mzab, out in the desert, where this tribe of heretics, puritans of Islam, persecuted unto death by the orthodox, had landed centuries ago, in a place they had chosen because they were quite sure no one would fight them for it, there being nothing there but stone—it was as far from the half-civilized world of the coast as a lifeless cratered planet might be from the earth; there they did in fact settle and build five towns around stingy waterholes, and conceived this strange ascetic life of sending their able-bodied men to the coast to engage in business in order to support this creation of the spirit and the spirit alone, until those men could be replaced by others and return to their earth-and-mud-fortified towns to enjoy the kingdom they had at last won for their faith.
Thus the sparse lives and the avarice of these Mzabites could only be judged in the light of their profound aims.
But the working-class people of the neighborhood, who knew nothing of Islam and its heresies, saw only the surface. And for Ernest, or anyone else, to call his brother a Mzabite was the same as comparing him to Harpagon.2 Josephin was in fact pretty close with his money, in contrast to Ernest, who, according to the grandmother, was “openhanded.” (It is true that when she was in a fury with him, she would accuse him of letting money run through the fingers of that same hand.) But beyond
