With all that, if a civil burial was mentioned in the family, it was not unusual for his grandmother or even his uncle paradoxically to deplore the absence of a priest: “like a dog,” they would say. This because for them, as for most Algerians, religion was part of their civic life and that alone. They were Catholic as they were French; it entailed a certain number of rituals. Actually those rituals numbered exactly four: baptism, First Communion, marriage (if they were married), and funeral rites. Between these ceremonies, which necessarily were far apart in time, they were occupied with other things, and most of all with surviving.
So it was taken for granted that Jacques would make his First Communion like Henri, who had kept a most unpleasant memory not of the ceremony itself but of its social consequences and especially the visits he was obliged to make over several days, the armband on his arm, to friends and relatives, who had to present him with a small amount of cash, which the child was embarrassed to take; the grandmother would then appropriate the entire sum, returning only a very small proportion to Henri, because Communion “cost good money.” But this ceremony did not take place until around the child’s twelfth year, after he had spent two years being taught the catechism.
So Jacques would not have to make his First Communion until his second or third year at the lycée. But it was that prospect that caused the grandmother to give a start. She had a dark and somewhat frightening picture of the lycée as a place where you had to work ten times as much as at the neighborhood school, because these studies led to better jobs and because, to her way of thinking, no improvement in material circumstances could be gotten except by more work. She wished for Jacques to succeed with all her heart on account of the sacrifices she had just agreed to in advance, and she calculated that the time taken by catechism would be subtracted from the time for work. “No,” she said, “you can’t be in the lycée and at catechism at the same time.”
“Fine. I won’t make my First Communion,” said Jacques, who was hoping above all to escape the ordeal of the visits and what for him was the unbearable humiliation of accepting money.
The grandmother stared at him. “Why? It can be arranged. Get dressed. We’re going to see the priest.” She stood up and went with a resolute air into her bedroom. When she returned, she had taken off her camisole and her work skirt, had put on her one going-out dress []11 buttoned to the neck, and she had knotted her black silk scarf around her head. The strands of white hair at the edge of her scarf, her sharp eyes and firm mouth made her the very picture of determination.
At the sacristy of the church of Saint-Charles, a dreadful pile of modern Gothic, she seated herself, holding Jacques’s hand while he stood beside her, before the parish priest, a fat sixty-year-old with a round, rather soft face, a big nose, and a good smile on his thick lips, under a crown of silvery hair; he was clasping his hands on his robe stretched by his parted knees. “I want this child to make his First Communion,” said the grandmother.
“Very well, Madame, we’ll make a good Christian of him. How old is he?”
“Nine.”
“You’re right to have him start the catechism very early. In three years he’ll be perfectly prepared for the big day.”
“No,” the grandmother said curtly. “He must do it right away.”
“Right away? But the Communions will be a month from now, and he can only approach the altar after at least two years of catechism.”
The grandmother explained their situation. But the priest was not at all convinced that it was impossible to take religious instruction while doing secondary-school studies. With patience and kindness, he cited his own experience, gave examples … The grandmother stood up. “In that case he won’t make his First Communion. Come, Jacques,” and she pulled the child toward the exit.
But the priest hurried after them. “Wait, Madame, wait.” He led her gently back to her seat, tried to reason with her.
But the grandmother shook her head like a stubborn old mule. “It’s right away or he’ll do without it.”
At last the priest gave in. It was agreed that Jacques would make his First Communion in one month after an accelerated course of religious instruction. And the priest, shaking his head, accompanied them to the door, where he patted the child’s cheek. “Listen carefully to what you’re told,” he said. And he looked at him with a sort of sadness.
So Jacques added the catechism classes on Thursdays and Saturday afternoons to his supplementary lessons with M. Bernard. The examination for the scholarship and the First Communion were both drawing near, and his days were overloaded, leaving no time for play, even and especially on Sundays, when, if he could put down his notebooks, his grandmother would impose domestic tasks and errands on him, citing the future sacrifices the family had agreed to for his education and the many years thereafter when he would no longer do anything for the household.
“But,” said Jacques, “I might fail. The exam is hard.” And in a certain sense he sometimes would wish for just that, finding that his young pride could not bear the weight of the sacrifices they were always talking to him about.
His grandmother looked at him in astonishment. She had never thought of that possibility. Then she shrugged and, not worrying about the contradiction, “Go ahead and fail,” she said. “And I’ll warm your ass for you.” The catechism course was given by the second priest of the parish: tall, almost endlessly so in his black robe, thin, with hollow cheeks and a nose like an eagle’s beak, as hard as the old priest was gentle and good. His method of teaching was recitation, and, though it was primitive, it was perhaps the only method suited to the rough, obdurate children to whom it was his mission to give their spiritual training. They had to learn the questions and responses: “Who is God?”j … These words meant absolutely nothing to the young catechumens, and Jacques, who had an excellent memory, recited them imperturbably without ever understanding them. When another child was reciting, he would let his thoughts wander, daydream, or make faces with the others.
One day the tall priest caught him making one of those faces, and, believing the grimace was aimed at him, thought it right to enforce respect for the sacred character of his office; he called Jacques up before the whole assembly of children, and there, with his long bony hand, without further explanation, he hit him with all his strength. Jacques almost fell under the force of the blow. “Now go back to your place,” the priest said. The child stared at him, without a tear (and for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution), and returned to his bench. The left side of his face was smarting, the taste of blood was in his mouth. With the tip of his tongue, he discovered the inside of his cheek was cut by the blow and was bleeding. He swallowed his blood.
Throughout the rest of the sacramental preparation, his mind was elsewhere, and he was looking quietly at the priest, without reproach as without friendship when he spoke to him, flawlessly reciting the questions and responses about the divine nature and sacrifice of Christ; and, a hundred leagues away from the place where he was reciting, he was dreaming of that double examination that now had come to seem a single one.
Immersed in his work as he was in that persisting dream, he was moved only, and in an obscure way, by the evening Masses, more and more of them in that dreadful cold church, but the organ made him listen to a music he was hearing for the first time, having until then heard nothing but stupid tunes; dreaming richer, deeper dreams featuring sacerdotal objects and vestments glistening in the semi-darkness, to meet at last the mystery, but it was a nameless mystery where the divine personages named and rigorously defined in the catechism played no role at all, they were simply an extension of the bare world where he lived; but the warm, inward, and ambiguous mystery that now bathed him only deepened the everyday
