Maman’s Christianity at the end of her life. The poor, unfortunate, ignorant woman []2 show her sputnik? May the cross sustain her!
In 72, when the paternal branch settled, it was following:
—the Commune,
—the Arab uprising of 71 (the first one killed in Mitidja was a teacher).
The Alsatians occupied the land of the insurgents.
The measure of the era
The mother’s ignorance in countermelody to all the []1 of history and the world.
Bir Hakeim: “it’s far” or “over there.”
Her religion is visual. She knows what she has seen without being able to interpret it. Jesus is suffering, he dies, etc.
Woman warrior.
Write one’s []2 in order to find the truth.
1ST PART: THE NOMADS
(1) Birth during the move. 6 months after the war.a The child. Algiers, the father in Zouave uniform wearing a straw hat going over the top.
(2) 40 years later. The son facing the father in the Saint-Brieuc cemetery. He returns to Algeria.
(3) Arrival in Algeria in time for the “events.” Look up.
Trip to Mondovi. He finds childhood and not the father.
He learns he is the first man.b
2ND PART: THE FIRST MAN
Adolescence: The punch
Sports and morality
The Man: (Political activity [Algeria], the Resistance)
3RD PART: THE MOTHER
Loves
The kingdom: the old playmate, the old friend, Pierre, the old teacher, and the story of his two enlistments
The mother1
In the last part, Jacques explains to his mother the Arab question, Creole civilization, the fate of the West. “Yes,” she says, “yes.” Then full confession and the end.
There was a mystery about this man, and a mystery he wanted to clear up.
But at the end there was nothing but the mystery of poverty that creates people without a name and without a past.
Youth at the beaches. After days full of shouting, of sunlight, of strenuous activity, of dull or intense desire. Night falls on the sea. A swift cries high in the sky. And anguish seizes his heart.
Finally he takes Empedocles as his model. The []2 philosopher who lives alone.
I want to write the story of a pair joined by the same blood and every kind of difference. She similar to the best this world has, and he quietly abominable. He thrown into all the follies of our time; she passing through the same history as if it were that of any time. She silent most of the time, with only a few words at her disposal to express herself; he constantly talking and unable to find in thousands of words what she could say with a single one of her silences … Mother and son.
Freedom to use any style.
Jacques, who until then had felt himself at one with all victims, now recognizes that he is at one with the executioners. His sorrow. Definition.
You would have to live as an onlooker to your own life. To add to it the dream that would complete it. But we live, and others dream your life.
He looked at her. Everything had come to a standstill, and time passed with a sputter. As at the movies when, the picture having vanished through some malfunction, you hear nothing in the darkness of the hall except the sound of the machinery going on … with an empty screen.
The jasmine necklaces sold by the Arabs. The scented string of yellow and white flowers [].1 The necklaces quickly fade
[]1 the flowers turn yellow []2 but the odor lingers, in the poor room.
Paris days in May when the white pods of the chestnut flowers are floating everywhere in the air.
He had loved his mother and his child, everything that it was not up to him to choose. And after all he, who had challenged everything, questioned everything, he had never loved anything except what was inevitable. The people fate had imposed on him, the world as it appeared to him, everything in his life he had not been able to avoid, his illness, his vocation, fame or poverty—in a word, his star. For the rest, for everything he had to choose, he had made himself love, which is not the same thing. No doubt he had known the feeling of wonderment, passion, and even moments of tenderness. But each moment had sent him on to other moments, each person to others, and he had loved nothing he had chosen, except what was little by little imposed on him by circumstance, had lasted as much by accident as by intention, and finally became necessary: Jessica. The heart, the heart above all is not free. It is inevitability and the recognition of the inevitable. And he, in truth, had never wholeheartedly loved other than the inevitable. All that was left for him was to love his own death.
a Tomorrow, six million yellow people, billions of yellow, black, and dark-skinned people will pour onto the shore of Europe … and at best would [convert her]. Then everything that had been taught, to him and to those like him, also everything he had learned, on that day the men of his race, all the values he lived for, would die of uselessness. Then what will still be worthwhile? His mother’s silence. He laid down his arms before her.
M. at 19. He was 30 then, and they did not know each other. He realizes we cannot set the clock back, prevent the loved one from having been, and done, and experienced, we possess nothing of what we choose. For we would have to choose with the first cry at birth, and we are born apart—except from the mother. We possess only what is inevitable, and we must return to it and (see preceding note) submit to it. And yet, what nostalgia and what regrets!
One must relinquish. No, learn to love what is imperfect.
To conclude, he asks his mother’s forgiveness—Why you’ve been a good son—But it is because of all the rest she cannot know or even imagine []1 that she is the only one who can forgive (?)
Since I’ve inverted it, show Jessica old before showing her young.
He marries M. because she has never known a man and he is fascinated by that. In short, he marries for what is wanting in himself. Then he will learn to love women who have been used—that is—to love the awful necessity of life.
A chapter on the war of 14. Incubator of our era. As seen by the mother? Who knows neither France, nor Europe, nor the world. Who thinks shells explode of their own volition, etc.
Alternate chapters would give the mother’s voice. Commenting on the same events but with her vocabulary of 400 words.
In short, I wanted to speak of those I loved. And of that only. Intense joy.
a Saddok:
(1) “But why get married that way, Saddok?”
“Should I marry the French way?”
“The French or any other way! Why subject yourself to a tradition you believe is foolish and cruel?”b
“Because my people are identified with this tradition, they have nothing else, they stopped there, and to part with that tradition is to part with them. That is why I will go into that room tomorrow, and I will strip a stranger of her clothes, and I will rape her to the sound of gunshots.”
“All right. In the meantime, let’s go swimming.”
(2) “So what?”
“They say that for the time being the anti-Fascist front must be consolidated, that France and Russia must join in self-defense.”
“Can’t they defend themselves and at the same time establish justice at home?”
“They say that will come later, that we have to wait for that.”
“Justice can’t be delayed here, and you well know it.”
“They say if you don’t wait, objectively you’ll be aiding Fascism.”
“And that’s why prison is the right place for your former comrades.”
“They say it’s too bad, but they can’t do otherwise.”
“They say, they say. And you say nothing.”
“I say nothing.”
He looked at him. It was beginning to get hot.
“So, you’re betraying me?”
He had not said: “you’re betraying us” because betrayal concerns the flesh, the single individual, etc …
“No. I’m leaving the Party today …”
(3) “Remember 1936.”
“I’m not a terrorist for the Communists. I’m one against the French.”
“I’m French. She is too.”
“I know. Too bad for you.”
“So you are betraying me.”
Saddok’s eyes shone with a kind of fever.
If I finally choose chronological order, Madame Jacques or the doctor will be descendants of the first settlers in Mondovi.
Let’s not feel sorry for ourselves, said the doctor, just imagine our first ancestors here, etc …
(4)—And Jacques’s father killed at the Marne. What remains of that obscure life? Nothing, an impalpable memory—the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire.
…
The two Algerian nationalisms. Algeria 39 and 54 (rebellion). What becomes of French values in an Algerian sensibility, that of the first man. The account of the two generations explains the present tragedy.
The holiday camp at Miliana, the barracks’ trumpets morning and evening.
Loves: he would have wanted them all virgin, with no past and no men. And the only one he ever met who actually was, he vowed his life to her but could not himself be faithful. So he wanted women to be what he himself was not. And what he was sent him back to women who were like him and whom he loved and possessed with anger and passion.
Adolescence. His drive to live, his faith in life. But he is spitting blood. So that is what life will be, a hospital, death, solitude, this absurdity. Hence the parting. And in his very depths: no, no, life is something else.
Inspiration on the road from Cannes to Grasse …
And he knew that even if he had to go back to that barren cold where he had always lived, he would dedicate his life, his heart, the gratitude of his entire being, which
