Well, it was not so badly thought out. With the heat those good people sweated out everything they had, and the epidemic stopped. “It’s an idea to explore.” Yes, it was an idea. In the hot humid night—between the huts where the sick were sleeping, the violinist sitting on a crate, a lantern by him with mosquitoes and insects buzzing around it—the conquerors in long dresses and wearing sheets would dance, sedately sweating around a big fire of branches, while at the four corners of the encampment sentinels were on watch to defend the besieged people against black-maned lions, cattle thieves, Arab bands, and sometimes also raids by other French settlers who were in need of distraction or supplies.
Later on, they finally gave them land, scattered plots far from the shantytown. Later on, they built the village with earthen walls. But two-thirds of the emigrants were dead, there as everywhere in Algeria, without having laid hands on a spade or a plow. The others remained Parisian in the fields, plowing in top hats, gun on the shoulder, a pipe between their teeth—and only pipes with covers were allowed, never cigarettes, because of fires—and quinine in their pockets, quinine sold in the cafés in Bône and in the canteen in Mondovi as an ordinary drink, to your health, accompanied by their wives in silk dresses.
But always the gun and the soldiers around, and even to do the laundry in the Seybouse an escort was needed for those who in the old days would hold a peaceful salon while working at the washhouse in the rue des Archives; and the village itself was often attacked at night, as in ’51 during one of the uprisings when hundreds of cavalrymen in burnooses circling the walls fled seeing the stovepipes the besieged people aimed at them to simulate cannons, building and working in an enemy land that refused to be occupied and took its revenge on whatever it found, and why was Jacques thinking about his mother while the plane rose and now was coming down? Picturing that wagon bogged down on the road from Bône, where the settlers had left a pregnant woman to go for help and found her with her belly slit and her breasts cut off.
“It was war,” said Veillard.
“Let’s be fair,” added the old doctor. “We shut them up in caves with their whole brood, yes indeed, yes indeed, and they cut the balls off the first Berbers, who themselves … and so on all the way back to the first criminal—you know, his name was Cain—and since then it’s been war; men are abominable, especially under a ferocious sun.”
And after lunch they had walked through the village, similar to hundreds of other villages all over the country, a few hundred small houses in the simple style of the end of the nineteenth century, laid out on several streets that met at right angles where the larger buildings were—the cooperative, the farm bank, the recreation hall—and everything led to the metal-framed bandstand, looking like a carousel or a large Métro entrance, where for years the village men’s choir or the military band had given concerts on holidays, while couples in their Sunday best strolled around it, in the heat and the dust, shelling peanuts.
Today was also a Sunday, but the army’s psychological warfare branch had installed loudspeakers in the bandstand, the crowd was mostly Arab, and they were not strolling around the square; they were standing still and listening to the Arab music that alternated with speeches, and the French people lost in the crowd all had the same look, somber and turned to the future, like those who long ago had come here on the Labrador, or those who landed other places in the same circumstances, with the same suffering, fleeing poverty or persecution, finding sorrow and stone.
Such were the Spaniards of Mahon, ancestors of Jacques’s mother, or those Alsatians who in ’71 had rejected German rule and chosen France, and they were given the land of the Arab rebels of ’71, who were dead or imprisoned—dissidents taking the places kept warm by insurgents, persecuted-persecutors from whom his father descended, who, forty years later, arrived in this place, with the same somber and determined manner, his thoughts only on the future, like those who have no love for their past and renounce it; an emigrant himself like those who lived and had lived on this land without leaving a trace except on the worn and greened-over slabs in the small settler cemeteries such as the one Jacques had visited with the old doctor at the end of the day after Veillard had left.
On one side, hideous new construction in the latest funerary fashion, embellished by the cheap religious art on which contemporary piety is expended. On the other, under the old cypresses, between paths covered with pine needles and cypress cones, or else by damp walls with the oxalis and its yellow flowers growing at their feet, old tombstones, hardly distinguishable from the earth, that had become illegible.
Whole mobs had been coming here for more than a century, had plowed, dug furrows, deeper and deeper in some places, shakier and shakier in others, until the dusty earth covered them over and the place went back to its wild vegetation; and they had procreated, then disappeared. And so it was with their sons. And the sons and grandsons of these found themselves on this land as he himself had, with no past, without ethics, without guidance, without religion, but glad to be so and to be in the light, fearful in the face of night and death.
All those generations, all those men come from so many nations, under this magnificent sky where the first portent of twilight was already rising, had disappeared without a trace, locked within themselves. An enormous oblivion spread over them, and actually that was what this land gave out, what fell from the sky with the night over the three men returning to the village, their hearts made anxious by the approach of night, filled with that dread† that seizes all men in Africa when the sudden evening descends on the sea, on the rough mountains and the high plateaus, the same holy dread that has the same effect on the slopes of Delphi’s mountain, where it makes temples and altars emerge. But on the land of Africa the temples have been destroyed, and all that is left is this soft unbearable burden on the heart.
Yes, how they died! How they were still dying! In silence and away from everything, as his father had died in an incomprehensible tragedy far from his native land, after a life without a single free choice—from the orphanage to the hospital, the inevitable marriage along the way, a life that grew around him, in spite of him; until the war killed and buried him; from then and forever unknown to his people and his son, he too was returned to that immense oblivion that was the ultimate homeland of the men of his people, the final destination of a life that began without roots—and so many reports in the libraries of the time about the use of foundlings for this country’s settlement, yes, all these found and lost children who built transient towns in order to die forever in themselves and in others.
As if the history of men, that history that kept on plodding across one of its oldest territories while leaving so few traces on it, was evaporating under the constant sun with the memory of those who made it, reduced to paroxysms of violence and murder, to blazes of hatred, to torrents of blood, quickly swollen and quickly dried up, like the seasonal streams of the country. Now the night was rising from the land itself and began to engulf everything, the dead and the living, under the marvelous and ever-present sky.
No, he would never know his father, who would continue to sleep over there, his face forever lost in the ashes. There was a mystery about that man, a mystery he had wanted to penetrate. But after all there was only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed forever. For it was just that that his father had in common with the men of the Labrador. The Mahon people of the Sahel, the Alsatians on the high plateaus, with this immense island between sand and sea, which the enormous silence was now beginning to envelop: the silence of anonymity; it enveloped blood and courage and work and instinct, it was at once cruel and compassionate.
And he who had wanted to escape from the country without name, from the crowd and from a family without name, but in whom something had gone on craving darkness and anonymity—he too was a member of the tribe, marching blindly into the night near the old doctor who was panting at his right, listening to the gusts of music coming from the square, seeing once more the hard inscrutable faces of the Arabs around the bandstands, Veillard’s laughter and his stubborn face—also seeing with a sweetness and a
