Catherine Cormery listened without hearing, but with no sign of impatience or weariness. The grandmother could hear, but did not understand very much. “He speaks well,” she said to her daughter, who assented with conviction. This encouraged the grandmother to turn and smile at her neighbor to the left, confirming with a nod of her head the opinion she had just expressed. The first year, Jacques noticed that his grandmother was the only person wearing the old Spanish woman’s black mantilla, and he was embarrassed by it.
To tell the truth, this false sense of shame had never left him; he just decided he could do nothing about it after he timidly ventured to mention a hat to his grandmother and she answered that she had no money to waste and besides the mantilla kept her ears warm. But when his grandmother spoke to her neighbors during the awards ceremony, he felt himself meanly blushing. After the official personage, the youngest teacher rose to speak; he was usually newly arrived that year from France and was traditionally entrusted with delivering the formal address. The speech could last from half an hour to an hour, and the young academician never failed to stuff it with cultural allusions and humanist subtleties that made it utterly unintelligible to this Algerian audience.
With the help of the heat, attention flagged, and the fans waved faster. Even the grandmother showed her lassitude by glancing around. Only Catherine Cormery, attentive, received without blinking the rain of erudition and wisdom that was falling on† her without interruption. As to Jacques, he was squirming; he looked around for Pierre and his other friends, signaled discreetly to them, and began a long conversation that consisted of making faces. At last, vigorous applause thanked the orator for being kind enough to conclude, and the announcement of the awards began. First came the upper classes, and, in the early years, the two women spent the entire afternoon sitting and waiting for them to come to Jacques’s class.
The awards for excellence were the only ones to be saluted with a fanfare of invisible music. The winners, who became younger and younger, rose, walked the side of the courtyard, went up on the platform, received a handshake sprinkled with fine words from the official personage, then from the headmaster, who presented each with his bundle of books (after getting it from an attendant, who preceded the award-winner to the platform, at the foot of which rolling carts full of books had been stationed).
Then, in the midst of music and applause, the award-winner came back down, his books under his arm, radiant and looking around for his happy relatives, who were wiping away their tears. The sky became a little less blue, losing some of its heat through an invisible cleft somewhere over the sea. The prizewinners went up and returned, one fanfare followed another, the courtyard gradually emptying out, while the sky began now to turn a greenish hue, and they came to Jacques’s class. As soon as his class was announced, he stopped fooling around and became serious. At the sound of his name, he rose, his head buzzing. Behind he could barely hear his mother, who had not heard, saying: “Did he say Cormery?”
“Yes,” said the grandmother, her face flushed with excitement. The cement path he walked along, the platform, the official’s vest with his watch chain, the headmaster’s good smile, sometimes a friendly look from one of his teachers in the crowd on the platform; then returning accompanied by the music to the two women who were already standing in the aisle, his mother gazing at him with a sort of astonished joy, and he gave her the thick list of awards to keep, his grandmother with a look calling her neighbors to witness—it all happened too fast after the interminable afternoon, and Jacques was in a hurry to go home and look at the books he had been given.n
They usually went home with Pierre and his mother,o the grandmother silently comparing the height of the two stacks of books. At home, Jacques took the award list, and, at his grandmother’s request, turned down the corners of the pages where his name appeared, so she could show them to the neighbors and family. Then he made an inventory of his treasures. He had not finished when he saw his mother come back—already having removed her dress—in slippers, buttoning her linen blouse, and drawing her chair toward the window. She smiled at him. “You did good work,” she said, and she shook her head as she gazed at him. He returned her gaze; he was waiting, for what he did not know, and she turned to the street, in the posture that was familiar to him, far away now from the lycée she would not see for another year, while shadows invaded the room and the first lights came on above the street,‡ where no one was passing by but faceless pedestrians.
But if his mother was leaving forever that lycée she had hardly glimpsed, Jacques found himself suddenly back for good in the midst of his family and his neighborhood.
Vacations also returned Jacques to his family, at least in the first years. No one in his home had a vacation; the men worked the year round without respite. Only an accident at work, when they were employed by firms that had insured them against such risks, could give them any time off, and their vacation came by way of the hospital or the doctor. For example, Uncle Ernest, one time when he felt worn out, had “put himself on insurance,” as he said, by deliberately shaving a thick slice of meat off his palm with a plane. As for the wives, and Catherine Cormery, they worked without a break for the good reason that a rest meant poorer meals for all of them.
Unemployment, for which there was no insurance at all, was the calamity they most dreaded. That explained why these workers, in Pierre’s home as in Jacques’s, who in their daily lives were the most tolerant of men, were always xenophobes on labor issues, accusing in turn the Italians, the Spaniards, the Jews, the Arabs, and finally the whole world of stealing their work—an attitude that is certainly disconcerting to those intellectuals who theorize about the proletariat, and yet very human and surely excusable. It was not for mastery of the earth or the privileges of wealth and leisure that these unexpected nationalists were contending against other nationalities; it was for the privilege of servitude. Work in this neighborhood was not a virtue but a necessity that, in order to survive, led to death.
In any case, and no matter how hard the Algerian summer was, while overloaded boats took bureaucrats and well-off people to recuperate in the good “French air” (and those who returned brought back fabulous and unbelievable descriptions of lush fields where the water was flowing right in the middle of August), nothing at all changed in the lives of the poor neighborhoods, and, far from being half emptied, as were the downtown districts, their population seemed to increase because of the great numbers of children pouring out into the streets.p
For Pierre and Jacques, wandering in the dry streets, wearing espadrilles with holes, cheap pants, and skimpy undershirts with round necks, vacation meant above all the hot season.
The last rains fell in April, or May at the latest. Over the weeks and the months, the sun, more and more intense, hotter and hotter, had dried, then dried out, then roasted the walls, had ground plaster, stone, and tile into a fine dust that, blown at random by the wind, would cover the streets, the store windows, and the leaves of all the trees. In July the entire neighborhood became a sort of gray-and-yellowq labyrinth, deserted during the day, all the shutters of all the houses carefully closed, ruled by the ferocious sun, felling dogs and cats on the doorsteps of buildings, forcing living beings to hug the walls to stay out of its reach. In August the sun disappeared behind the thick oakum of a sky that was gray with heat, heavy and humid, shedding a diffuse, whitish light, tiring to the eyes, which erased the last traces of color from the streets.
In the coopers’ workshops, the sound of the hammers slackened, and the workers stopped occasionally to put their sweaty heads and chests under the cool stream of water from the pump.r In the apartments, the bottles of water and, less often, wine were swaddled in damp cloth. Jacques’s grandmother moved around the shady rooms barefooted, wearing a plain shift, mechanically shaking her straw fan, working in the morning, dragging Jacques to bed for the siesta, then waiting for the first cool of the evening to go back to work. Thus for weeks the summer and those subject to it would crawl along under the heavy, sweaty, and roasting sky, until even the memory of winter’s cool and its waters§ was lost, as if the earth had never known the wind, nor the snow, nor light waters, and from the Creation to this day in September nothing had existed but this enormous desiccated mineral structure tunneled with overheated corridors where sweating and dust-covered beings, a bit haggard, eyes staring, were slowly moving about.
And then, all at once, the sky contracted until it broke open under the stress. The first rain of September, violent and abundant, flooded the city. All the streets of the neighborhood began to gleam, along with the shiny leaves of the ficus trees, the overhead
