On another occasion, when he was asked his religion, he answered: “Catholic.” Asked if he should be enrolled in the course in religious instruction, and remembering his grandmother’s fears, he said no. “In short,” the monitor said deadpan, “you are a non-practicing Catholic.” Jacques could explain nothing of what went on in his home, nor could he say the bizarre way his people dealt with religion. So he firmly answered, “Yes,” which made people laugh and won him a reputation for stubbornness at the very moment he felt himself most at sea.
Another day, the literature teacher, having handed out to the students a form concerning some internal matter, asked them to bring it back signed by their parents. The form, which enumerated the things students were forbidden to bring to school, from weapons to magazines and including playing cards, was written in such choice language that Jacques had to summarize it in simple terms for his mother and grandmother.
His mother was the only one able to put a crude signature at the bottom of the form.c Because, after her husband’s death, she received* her war widow’s pension every quarter, and because the government, in this case the Treasury—but Catherine Cormery just said she was going to the treasure, for to her it was just a name, void of any meaning; to the children, on the other hand, it suggested a mythic place with limitless resources where their mother was admitted from time to time to draw small amounts of money—asked for her signature each time, after the first time when she had problems, a neighbor (?) had taught her to copy a sample of the signature “Widow Camus.”1 and she managed to do this more or less well, but anyway it was always accepted. However, the next morning Jacques discovered that his mother, who left long before him to clean a store that opened early, had forgotten to sign the form. His grandmother did not know how to sign.
She managed to keep her accounts with a system of circles that, according to whether they were crossed once or twice, represented ones, tens, and hundreds. Jacques had to return the form unsigned, saying that his mother had forgotten, was asked if no one in his home could sign, answered no, and discovered from the teacher’s surprised look that this circumstance was more unusual than he had believed.
He was even more disconcerted by the French boys brought to Algiers by the vagaries of their father’s careers. The one who gave him the most to think about was Georges Didier;d their common liking for French classes and reading drew them into a very close friendship, of which Pierre moreover was jealous. Didier was the son of a very devout Catholic. His mother “made music,” his sister (whom Jacques never saw, but he dreamed delightfully about her) did embroidery, and Didier, according to what he said, intended to enter the priesthood.
Extremely intelligent, he was uncompromising on questions of faith and of morals, where his convictions were dogmatic. He was never heard to utter a dirty word, nor to refer, as other children did with endless self-satisfaction, to the body’s natural functions or to those of reproduction, which in any case were not as clear in their minds as they liked to say. The first thing he sought from Jacques, once their friendship was established, was that he give up dirty words. Jacques had no difficulty giving them up with him. But with others those words would easily slip back into his conversation.
(Already taking shape in him was the many-faceted nature that would make so many things easy for him, would make him adept at talking anyone’s language, at getting along in any surroundings, at playing any role, except …) With Didier, Jacques understood what it was to be a middle-class French family. His friend had a family home in France where he went on vacations; he was forever talking or writing to Jacques about it, that house with an attic full of old trunks, where they saved the family’s letters, souvenirs, photos. He knew the history of his grandparents and his great-grandparents, also an ancestor who was a sailor at Trafalgar, and this long history, vivid in his imagination, also provided him with examples and precepts for everyday behavior. “My grandfather would say … Papa thinks that …” and in that way he would justify his sternness, his imperious purity.
When he spoke of France, he would say “our country” and he accepted in advance the sacrifices that country might demand (“your father died for our country,” he would say to Jacques …), whereas this notion of country had no meaning to Jacques, who knew he was French, and that this entailed a certain number of duties, but for whom France was an abstraction that people called upon and that sometimes laid claim to you, a bit like that God he had heard about outside his home, who evidently was the sovereign dispenser of good things and bad, who could not be influenced, but who on the other hand could do anything with the people’s destiny. And this impression of his was even stronger among the women who lived with him. “Maman, what is our country?”e he asked one day.
She looked frightened as she did each time she did not understand. “I don’t know,” she said. “No.”
“It’s France.”
“Oh, yes.” And she seemed relieved.
Whereas Didier did know what it was; the family through its generations was a potent presence to him, and the country where he was born through its history—he called Joan of Arc by her first name—and so were good and evil defined for him as was his present and future destiny. Jacques, and Pierre also, though to a lesser degree, felt themselves to be of another species, with no past, no family home, no attic full of letters and photos, citizens in theory of a nebulous nation where snow covered the roofs while they themselves grew up under an eternal and savage sun, equipped with a most elementary morality that, for example, forbade them to steal, enjoined them to protect their mothers and women, but was silent on a great number of questions concerning women, and relations with their superiors … (etc.)—children, in short, unknown to and ignorant of God, unable to imagine a future life when this life seemed so inexhaustible each day under the protection of the indifferent deities of sun, of sea, or of poverty.
And in truth, if Jacques was so devoted to Didier, no doubt it was because of the boy’s heart that was so smitten with the absolute, so utterly loyal to his passions (the first time Jacques heard the word “loyalty,” which he had read a hundred times, was from Didier) and capable of a charming tenderness, but it was also because he was so different, in Jacques’s eyes, his charm being truly exotic, and attracting him all the more, just as Jacques later on, when he was grown, would feel himself irresistibly drawn to foreign women. The child of the family, of tradition, and of religion had the allure for Jacques of some tanned adventurers who return from the tropics guarding a strange and incomprehensible secret.
But the Kabyle shepherd who, on his mountain that the sun has scaled and eroded, watches the storks go by while dreaming of the North from which they came after a long voyage—he may dream all day long, in the evening he still goes back to the dish of mastic leaves, to the family in long robes, to the wretched hut where he has his roots. In the same way, while Jacques might be intoxicated with the foreign potions of bourgeois (?) tradition, he remained devoted to the one who was most like him, and that was Pierre.
Every morning at quarter after six (except Sunday and Thursday), Jacques would go down the stairs of his building four at a time, running in the mugginess of the hot season or the violent rain of winter that made his short cape swell up like a sponge; then at the fountain he would turn in to Pierre’s street, and, still on the run, climb the two stories to knock softly at the door. Pierre’s mother, a handsome woman with an ample build, would open the door that led directly to the sparsely furnished dining room. At the other end of the dining room a door on either side led to a bedroom.
One was Pierre’s, which he shared with his mother, the other was his two uncles’, rough railroad men who smiled a lot and said little. As you entered the dining room, to the right was a room without air or light that served as both kitchen and bathroom. Pierre was chronically late. He would be sitting at the table with its oilcloth cover, the kerosene lamp lit if it was winter, holding a big brown bowl of glazed clay in both hands, and trying to swallow the scorching coffee his mother had just poured him without burning himself.
“Blow on it,” she would say. He blew on it, he sucked it in and smacked his lips, and Jacques shifted his weight from foot to foot while he watched him.f When Pierre had finished, he still had to go to the candlelit kitchen, where, at the zinc sink, a glass of water awaited him and, lying across it, a toothbrush spread with a thick ribbon of a special kind of toothpaste, for he suffered from pyorrhea. He slipped on his short cape, his cap, and his satchel, and, all rigged out, gave his teeth
