At eight o’clock, when Jacques entered the store that smelled of iron and shade, a light in him went out, the sky had vanished. He greeted the cashier and climbed up to the big poorly lit office on the second floor.
There was no room for him at the main table. The old bookkeeper, his moustache stained yellow by the hand-rolled cigarettes he sucked on all day long; the assistant bookkeeper, a half-bald man of about thirty with a bull-like face and chest; two younger clerks, one of whom, thin, brown-haired, muscular, with a handsome straight profile, always arrived with his shirt wet and sticking to his body, and gave off a good smell of the sea because he went swimming from the pier every morning before burying himself in the office for the day, and the other, fat and laughing, who could not restrain his jovial vitality; and lastly Mme. Raslin, the manager’s secretary, a bit horsey but quite pleasant to look at in her linen or duckcloth dresses, always pink, but who gazed on the world with a stern eye—these were enough to fill up the table with their files, their account books, and their machine.
So Jacques was stationed on a chair to the right of the manager’s door, waiting to be given some work to do, which usually consisted of filing invoices or business correspondence in the card-index file on either side of the window—where at first he liked to pull out the sliding drawers, handle the cards, and sniff them, until the smell of paper and glue, at first exquisite, finally became the very odor of boredom for him; or else he was asked to go over a lengthy addition once more, and he did it in his lap, sitting on his chair; or else the assistant bookkeeper would ask Jacques to “collate” a series of numbers with him and, always standing, he would carefully check the numbers that the assistant read off, in a doleful low voice so as not to disturb his colleagues. From the window you could see the street and the buildings across it, but never the sky.
Sometimes, but not often, Jacques was sent on an errand, to get office supplies from the nearby stationery store or to the post office to send an urgent money order. The central post office was located two hundred meters away, on a broad boulevard that led from the port up to the summits of the hills on which the city was built. Jacques would rediscover space and light on this boulevard. The post office itself, in an immense rotunda, was lit by three large doors and light trickling through a huge cupola.w But more often, unfortunately, Jacques was made to post the mail at the end of the day, after leaving the office, and then it was just more drudgery, for he had to run, at the time when the day was beginning to fade, to a post office besieged by a crowd of customers, get in line at the windows, and the wait made his workday still longer.
The long summer was practically used up for Jacques in dark days without sparkle and in trivial occupations. “You can’t go on without doing anything,” his grandmother said. But it was precisely in the office that Jacques felt he wasn’t doing anything. He was not unwilling to work, though for him nothing could take the place of the sea or the games of Kouba. But to him real work consisted of what was done at the cooperage, for example—a lengthy physical effort, a series of skillful, precise actions by hard, quick-moving hands—and you saw the result of your labor take shape: a new barrel, well finished, without a crack, something the worker could contemplate.
But this office work came from nowhere and led nowhere. Selling and buying, everything turned on these ordinary, petty actions. Although he had lived till then in poverty, it was in this office that Jacques discovered the mundane, and he wept for the light he had lost. His co-workers were not the cause of the feeling that he was being smothered. They were nice to him, they never rudely ordered him around, and even the stern Mme. Raslin sometimes smiled at him.
Among themselves they spoke little, with that mix of jovial heartiness and indifference characteristic of Algerians. When the manager arrived, a quarter-hour after them, or when he emerged from his office to give an order or check an invoice (for serious matters, he would summon the old bookkeeper or the employee involved to his office), they would better reveal their characters, as if these men and this Woman could not express themselves except in their relations with authority—the old bookkeeper discourteous and independent, Mme. Raslin lost in some austere daydream, and the assistant bookkeeper, by contrast, utterly servile. But, for the rest of the day, they would retreat into their shells, and Jacques sat on his chair waiting for the order that would cause him to do some absurd hurrying about—what his grandmother called “work.”x
When he could stand it no longer, when he was literally boiling over on his chair, he would go down to the yard behind the store and hide between the cement walls of the poorly lit Turkish toilet, with its sour pervading odor of urine. In this dark place he would close his eyes, and, breathing the familiar smell, he would dream. Something obscure was stirring in him, something irrational, something in his blood and in his nature. At times he would recall the sight of Mme. Raslin’s legs that day when, having knocked over a box of pins in front of her, he knelt to pick them up and, raising his head, saw her parted knees under her skirt and her thighs in lace underwear. Till then he had never seen what a woman wore under her skirts, and this sudden vision made his mouth dry and caused him to tremble almost uncontrollably. A mystery was being revealed to him that, despite his many experiences, he would never resolve.
Twice a day, at noon and at six o’clock, Jacques would dash outside, run down the sloping street, and jump onto a packed trolley, lined with clusters of passengers on every running board, which was taking workers [back] to their neighborhoods. Squeezed against each other in the heavy heat, they were silent, the adults and the child, looking toward the home that was expecting them—quiet, perspiring, resigned to this existence divided among a soulless job, long trips coming and going in an uncomfortable trolley, and at the end an abrupt sleep. On some evenings it would sadden Jacques to look at them. Until then he had only known the riches and the joys of poverty. But now heat and boredom and fatigue were showing him their curse, the curse of work so stupid you could weep and so interminably monotonous that it made the days too long and, at the same time, life too short.
At the ship broker’s, summer was more pleasant because the office looked out on boulevard Front-de-Mer and especially because some of his work was at the port. Jacques actually had to go on board the ships of all nationalities that put in at Algiers and that the broker, a handsome pink-cheeked old man with curly hair, represented to the various government offices. Jacques brought the ship’s papers to the office, where they were translated, and, after a week, he himself was assigned to translating lists of supplies and certain bills of lading when they were written in English and addressed to the customs authorities or the big import companies that took delivery of merchandise. So Jacques had regularly to go to the Agha commercial port to get those papers. The heat ravaged the streets leading down to the port.
The heavy cast-iron ramps alongside them were so burning hot that you could not touch them with your hand. The sun created a void on the huge piers, except around the ships that had just moored, side against the pier, where the longshoremen were busying themselves—men dressed in blue pants rolled to mid-calf, with bare bronzed torsos, and on their heads a cloth that covered their shoulders and back to the waist, on which they loaded sacks of cement or coal or sharp-edged packages. They came and went on the gangplank that sloped down from the deck to the pier, or else they entered straight into the belly of the freighter by the wide open door of the hold, walking rapidly across a beam laid between the hold and the pier.
Beyond the smell of sun and dust rising from the piers and that of the overheated decks where the tar was melting and all the fixtures were roasting, Jacques could recognize the particular odor of each freighter. Those from Norway smelled of wood, those from Dakar or the Brazilian ships brought with them the scent of coffee and spices, the Germans smelled of oil, the English of iron. Jacques would climb up the gangplank, show the broker’s card to a sailor, who did not understand it.
Then he was led through passageways where even the shade was hot to the cabin of an officer or sometimes the captain.y Along
