i. La Mort en Algérie.
j. See catechism
k. check scholarship program.
7: Mondovi: The Settlement and the Father
a.Now he was grown up … On the road from Bône to Mondovi the car that J. Cormery was in passed slow-moving jeeps bristling with guns …
“M. Veillard?”
“Yes.”
Framed in the doorway of his small farmhouse, the man gazing at Jacques Cormery was short but stocky, with rounded shoulders. With his left hand he held the door open, with his right he firmly gripped the jamb, so that while opening the way to his house he was at the same time barring the way. He must have been about forty, judging by the sparse graying hair that gave him a Roman look. But his tanned face with its regular features and bright eyes, his legs in khaki pants, a bit stiff but without fat or belly, his sandals and blue shirt with pockets made him seem much younger. He stood still listening to Jacques’s explanation. Then: “Come in,” he said, and stepped aside. As Jacques went along the small whitewashed hallway, furnished with only a brown chest and a curved wooden umbrella stand, he heard the farmer laugh behind him. “So it’s a pilgrimage! Well, frankly, you’re just in time.”
“Why?” asked Jacques.
“Come into the dining room,” the farmer answered. “It’s the coolest room.”
The dining room was half veranda, with blinds of pliable straw, all but one of them lowered. Except for the table and buffet, both of blond wood and modern in style, the room was furnished with rattan chairs and deck chairs. When he turned around, Jacques saw that he was alone. He went to the veranda, and, through the space between the blinds, he saw a yard planted with ornamental peppertrees among which glittered two bright-red tractors. Beyond that, under a sun that at eleven was still bearable, began the rows of the vineyard. A moment later the farmer returned with a tray on which he had lined up a bottle of anisette, glasses, and a bottle of ice water.
The farmer raised his glass of milky liquid. “If you’d waited any longer, you might have found nothing here. And in any case not a single Frenchman to tell you about it.”
“It’s the old doctor who told me your farm is the one where I was born.”
“Yes, it was part of the Saint-Apôtre property, but my parents bought it after the war.” Jacques looked around. “You were certainly not born here,” Veillard said. “My parents rebuilt everything.”
“Did they know my father before the war?”
“I don’t believe so. They had settled right by the Tunisian border, then they wanted to move closer to civilization. For them Solférino was civilization.”
“They didn’t hear about the former manager?”
“No. Since you’re from here, you know how it is. We don’t preserve anything here. We tear down and we rebuild. We think about the future and forget the rest.”
“Well,” said Jacques, “I took your time for nothing.”
“No,” the other man said, “it’s a pleasure.” And he smiled at him.
Jacques finished his drink. “Did your parents remain near the border?”
“No, it’s the forbidden zone. Near the dam. And it’s obvious you don’t know my father.” He too swallowed the rest of his drink, and, as if he found an extra stimulus in it, he burst out laughing: “He’s a real settler. Of the old school. You know, the ones they’re bad-mouthing in Paris. And it’s true he’s always been a hard man. Sixty years old. But long and thin like a puritan with his [horse’s] head. A kind of patriarch, you see. He sweated his Arab workers, and, in all fairness, his sons also. Then, last year, when they had to evacuate, it was a real free-for-all. Life in that region had become intolerable. You had to sleep with a gun. When the Raskil farm was attacked, you remember?”
“No,” said Jacques.
“Yes, the father and his two sons had their throats cut, the mother and daughter raped over and over, then killed … In short … The prefect was unfortunate enough to tell a meeting of farmers that they would have to reconsider [colonial] issues, how they treated the Arabs, and that now a new day had come. Then he had to listen to the old man tell him no one on earth was going to lay down the law about his property. But from that day on he didn’t open his mouth. Sometimes at night he would get up and go out. My mother would watch him through the blinds and she’d see him walking around his land. When the order to evacuate came, he said nothing.
His grape harvest was over, his wine was in the vats. He opened the vats, and he went to a spring of brackish water that he’d diverted long ago, and he turned it back to run into his fields, and he equipped a tractor with a trench plow. For three days, at the wheel, bareheaded, saying not a word, he uprooted the vines all over his property.
Think of it, that skinny old man bouncing around on his tractor, pushing the accelerator lever when the plow wasn’t getting a vine that was bigger than the others, not stopping even to eat, my mother bringing him bread, cheese, and [sobrasada], which he ate calmly, the way he had done everything, throwing away the last chunk of bread and accelerating some more, all this from sunrise to sunset, without even looking at the mountains on the horizon, nor at the Arabs who’d soon found out and were watching him from a distance—they weren’t saying anything either.
And when a young captain, informed by who knows who, arrived and demanded an explanation, he said to him, ‘Young man, since what we made here is a crime, it has to be wiped out.’ When it was all finished, he headed toward the farmhouse, crossed the yard that was soaked with wine pouring out of the vats, and began to pack his bags. The Arab workers were waiting for him in the yard. (There was also a patrol the captain had sent, no one knew just why, with a nice lieutenant who was waiting for orders.)
“ ‘Boss, what are we going to do?’ ”
“ ‘If I were in your shoes,’ the old man said, ‘I’d go join the guerrillas. They’re going to win. There’re no men left in France.’ ”
The farmer laughed: “That was blunt, eh?”
“Are they with you?”
“No, he didn’t want to hear a word about Algeria. He’s in Marseilles, in a modern apartment … Maman writes me that he walks around his room in circles.”
“And you?”
“Oh, me, I’m staying, and to the end. Whatever happens, I’m staying. I’ve sent my family to Algiers, and I’ll croak here. They don’t understand that in Paris. Besides us, you know who’re the only ones who can understand it?”
“The Arabs.”
“Exactly. We were made to understand each other. Fools and brutes like us, but with the same blood of men. We’ll kill each other for a little longer, cut off each other’s balls and torture each other a bit. And then we’ll go back to living as men together. The country wants it that way. An anisette?”
“Light,” said Jacques.
A little later they went out. Jacques had asked if there was anyone left in the area who might have known his parents. No, said Veillard; besides the old doctor who had brought him into the world and who had retired right there in Solférino, there was no one. The Saint-Apôtre property had changed hands twice, many of the Arab workers had died in the two wars, many others had been born. “Everything changes here,” Veillard kept saying. “It happens fast, very fast, and people forget.” But maybe old Tamzal … He was caretaker for one of the Saint-Apôtre farms. In 1913 he must have been around twenty. In any case, Jacques would see the place where he was born.
Except to the north, the country was surrounded by distant mountains, their outlines fuzzy in the noonday heat, like enormous blocks of stone and luminous fog, with the once-swampy Seybouse plain extending between them north to the sea under a sky white with heat, its vineyards in straight lines, the leaves bluish from copper sulfate and the grapes already dark, interrupted occasionally by a row of cypresses or clumps of eucalyptus trees sheltering houses with their shade. They were following a farm path where each of their steps kicked up red dust. Ahead of them, all the way to the mountains, the air was quivering and the sunlight was throbbing. By the time they arrived at a small house behind a cluster of plane trees, they were dripping sweat. An unseen dog greeted them with angry barking.
The mulberry-wood door of the rather dilapidated house was carefully closed. Veillard knocked. The dog barked twice as hard. The sound seemed to come from a small enclosed yard on the other side of the house. But no one stirred. “See how trusting we all are,” the farmer said. “They’re there. But they’re waiting.
“Tamzal!” he shouted. “It’s Veillard.
“Six months ago they came to get his son-in-law, they wanted to know if he was supplying the guerrillas. They never heard another word about him. A month ago they told Tamzal that probably he’d been killed trying to escape.”
“Ah,” said Jacques. “And was he supplying the guerrillas?”
“Maybe yes, maybe not. What can you expect, it’s war. But it explains why doors are slow to open in this land of hospitality.”
Just then the door opened. Tamzal, small, with []1 hair, a wide-brimmed straw hat on
