Cormery looked at his wife. But her face was still tilted back. Her hands, lying relaxed on the coarse blanket, were all there was to remind him of the smile that a while ago had filled and transfigured that wretched room. He put on his helmet and headed toward the door.
“What are you going to name him?” the owner of the canteen called out.
“I don’t know, we haven’t thought about it.” He looked at her. “Since you were here, we’ll call him Jacques.”
The woman burst out laughing and Cormery went out. The Arab, his head still covered with the sack, was waiting under the vine. He looked at Cormery, who said nothing to him. “Here,” said the Arab, and held out an end of the sack.
Cormery took shelter. He could feel the shoulder of the old Arab against him, and he smelled the smoke given off by his clothes; he felt the rain falling on the sack over their two heads. “It’s a boy,” he said without looking at his companion.
“God be praised,” answered the Arab. “You are a chief.” The water that had come from thousands of kilometers away went on falling before them, on the cinders and the many puddles that pitted them, on the vineyards farther distant, and the trellis wires still gleamed under the raindrops. It would never get to the sea to the East, and now it was going to drench the whole country, the marshy land by the river and the mountains around them, the immense almost uninhabited territory whose powerful odor reached the two men huddled under the one sack, while behind them a feeble cry resumed from time to time.
Late in the night, Cormery was lying stretched out, in long drawers and undershirt, on a second mattress by his wife, watching the flames dance on the ceiling. The room was now pretty well tidied. On the other side of his wife, in a laundry basket, the infant slept in silence except for an occasional weak gurgle. His wife was also sleeping, her face turned toward him, her mouth partly open. The rain had stopped. Tomorrow he would have to start work. Near him, his wife’s hand, already so worn it almost seemed made of wood, also reminded him of work. He reached out his own hand, placed it gently on hers, and, laying his head back, closed his eyes.
a. (add geological anonymity. Land and sea)
b. Solférino.
- split from wear and tear
c. or a kind of derby?
d. wearing heavy boots.
e. The little boy. [In the course of this chapter, the author variously places the boy in the wagon (p. 5) or in Algiers (p. 14)—Trans.]
f. Is it night?
g. I fought against the Moroccans (with a cryptic look) Moroccans, they’re no good.
h. like that of certain cells under the microscope.
Saint-Brieuc
aForty years later a man standing in the corridor of the Saint-Brieuc train was watching with an air of disapproval as the villages and ugly houses of the flat cramped countryside that stretches from Paris to the Channel marched past under the pale sun of an afternoon in spring. The meadows and fields of a land that for centuries had been cultivated to the last square meter passed, in turn, before him. With bare head and hair cut short, long face and delicate features, a direct gaze in his blue eyes, the man was of medium height, and despite his forty years he still looked slender in his raincoat. He stood with his hands firmly placed on the railing; leaning his weight on one hip, his torso at ease, he gave the impression of competence and vigor.
Then the train slowed and finally stopped in a small shabby station. A moment later a rather elegant young woman passed by the window where the man was standing. She stopped to shift her suitcase from one hand to the other, and just then she noticed the traveler. He looked at her smiling, and she could not help smiling also. The man lowered the window, but the train was already leaving. “Too bad,” he said. The young woman was still smiling at him.
The traveler went to sit down in his third-class compartment, where he had a seat by the window. A man with sparse plastered hair—not as old as his swollen, blotchy face suggested—was sitting huddled across from him; his eyes were closed and he was breathing hard, obviously disturbed by his labored digestion. He cast an occasional quick* glance at the traveler. On the same seat, by the corridor, a peasant woman in her Sunday best, crowned by a peculiar hat adorned with a bunch of wax grapes, was blowing the nose of a redheaded child whose face looked dim and faded. The traveler’s smile disappeared. He took a magazine from his pocket and absently read an article that made him yawn.
A bit later the train stopped, and a small placard announcing “Saint-Brieuc” moved slowly into the frame of the window. The traveler immediately stood up, effortlessly lifted his suitcase with its expanding sides from the overhead rack, and, after nodding to his fellow travelers, who responded with seeming surprise, he left rapidly and hurried down the three steps of the car. On the platform, he looked at his left hand, dirty from the soot that had accumulated on the railing he had just been holding, took out a handkerchief and carefully wiped it off.
Then he headed toward the exit, where he was gradually joined by a group of somberly dressed travelers with blotchy faces. Under the shelter with its small posts he patiently waited his turn to hand over his ticket, waited again till the taciturn clerk returned it to him, crossed a waiting room with bare dirty walls, decorated only with old posters in which even the Riviera had taken on the colors of soot, and, striding at a lively pace through the slanting afternoon light, he went down the street that led from the station to the town.
At the hotel he asked for the room he had reserved, refused the help of the potato-faced chambermaid who wanted to carry his bag, and, after she had shown him to his room, gave her nonetheless a tip that surprised her and brought a friendly look to her features. Then he washed his hands again, and went back downstairs, still at a lively pace, without locking his door. He found the chambermaid in the lobby, asked her where the cemetery was, was given too much explanation, listened amiably, then set out in the direction she had indicated. Now he was walking down streets that were narrow and depressing, bordered by commonplace houses with ugly red tiles. Here and there he could see the crooked slates of an old half-timbered house.
The few passersby did not even stop before the shopwindows that displayed the glass products, the masterpieces in plastic and nylon, the wretched ceramics that are found in every town in the contemporary Western world. Only the food shops showed any opulence. High forbidding walls surrounded the cemetery. Near its gate, meager displays of flowers and marble-cutters’ shops.
The traveler stopped in front of one of these shops to watch a bright-looking child in a corner who was doing his homework on a marble slab that had yet to be inscribed. Then he entered the cemetery and went to the caretaker’s house. The caretaker was not there. The traveler waited in the barely furnished little office, then noticed a map, which he was studying when the caretaker entered. He was a tall gnarled man, with a big nose, who smelled of the sweat under his thick high-necked jacket. The traveler asked for the location of those who died in the war of 1914.
“Yes,” the caretaker said. “That’s called the square of French Remembrance. What name are you looking for?”
“Henri Cormery,” said the traveler.
The caretaker opened a large book bound in wrapping paper and went down a list of names with his dirty finger. His finger came to a stop. “Cormery Henri,” he said, “fatally wounded at the Battle of the Marne, died at Saint-Brieuc October 11, 1914.”
“That’s it,” said the traveler.
The caretaker closed the book. “Come,” he said. And he led the way to the first row of gravestones, some of them simple, others ugly and pretentious, all covered with that bead and marble bric-a-brac that would disgrace anyplace on earth. “Was he related to you?” he asked absently.
“He was my father.”
“That’s rough,” the other man said.
“No, it isn’t. I was less than a year old when he died. So, you see.”
“Yes,” said the caretaker, “but even so. Too many died.”
Jacques Cormery did not answer. Surely, too many had died, but, as to his father, he could not muster a filial devotion he did not feel. For all these years he had been living in France, he had promised himself to do what his mother, who stayed in Algeria, what she1 for such a long time had been asking him to do: visit the grave of his father that she herself had never seen. He thought this visit made no sense, first of all for himself, who had never known his father, who knew next to nothing of what he had been, and who loathed conventional gestures and behavior; and then for his mother, who never spoke of the dead man and could picture nothing of what he was going to see. But since his old mentor had retired to Saint-Brieuc and so he would have an opportunity to see him again, Cormery had made up his mind to go visit this dead stranger, and had even insisted on doing
