But it was too hot on the deck; after lunch, passengers besotted with food had collapsed in the deck chairs on the covered deck or had fled down the passageways belowdecks at siesta time. Jacques did not like to take a siesta. “A benidor,” he thought bitterly: that was the bizarre expression his grandmother used when he was a child in Algiers and she was making him join her for the siesta. The three rooms of the small apartment in an Algiers neighborhood were enveloped in the striped shade of the carefully closed shutters.a Outside, the heat was baking the dry dusty streets, and, in the half-light of the rooms, one or two big energetic flies were buzzing around like airplanes as they searched tirelessly for a way out.
It was too hot to read Pardaillan or L’Intrépide.b On rare occasions when his grandmother wasn’t home or was chatting with the neighbor, the child would poke his nose through the shutters in the living room that faced the street. The street was deserted. The red and yellow canvas shades had been pulled down in front of the shoe and notions stores across the street, a curtain of multicolored beads masked the entrance to the tobacco shop, and Jean’s café was empty except for the cat lying on the sill between the sawdust-covered floor and the dusty sidewalk, and sleeping as if it were dead.
The child then turned back to the sparse whitewashed room, furnished with a square table in the middle, and, against the walls, a sideboard, a small desk that was scarred and spotted with ink, and, on the floor, a small mattress covered with a blanket where, after nightfall, his half-mute uncle slept; and five chairs.c In a corner, on a mantelpiece of which only the shelf was made of marble, stood a small flowered vase with slender neck, of the kind one finds at a fair.
The child, caught between the two deserts of sunlight and shade, started circling the table at a hurried pace, repeating like a litany: “I’m bored! I’m bored!” He was bored, yet in that boredom was a game, a delight, a kind of excitement, for rage would seize him as he heard his grandmother calling a benidor when at last she came home. But his protests were in vain. The grandmother had raised nine children in the bush, and she had her own ideas on upbringing. With a single shove she pushed him into the bedroom. It was one of two rooms that looked out onto the yard.
The other had two beds, his mother’s and the one he shared with his brother. His grandmother was entitled to a room of her own. But she would take the child in her big high wooden bed, often for the night and always for the siesta. He would take off his sandals and lift himself onto the bed. He had to take his place at the back, against the wall, ever since the day he slipped to the floor while his grandmother was sleeping, to resume circling around the table and reciting his litany.
Once in his place, he would watch his grandmother take off her dress and drop her coarse linen shift, fastened at the top by a drawstring with a ribbon that she would undo. Then she in turn got up on the bed, and the child smelled beside him the odor of elderly flesh while he stared at the big blue veins and old-age spots that marred his grandmother’s feet. “Go on,” she would say. “A benidor.” She went to sleep very quickly, while the child, his eyes open, followed the comings and goings of the tireless flies.
Yes, he had hated that for years; and even later, as a grown man, and until he had been gravely ill, he could not bring himself to stretch out after lunch during the hot season. If he happened nonetheless to fall asleep, he would awaken nauseous and ill at ease. Only recently, since he had been suffering from insomnia, could he sleep for half an hour during the day and awaken fresh and alert. A benidor …
The wind must have dropped, flattened by the sun. The ship had stopped its gentle rolling and now seemed to be proceeding in a straight line, the engines at full speed, the propeller boring directly through the depths of the water, and the sound of the pistons so steady that it could no longer be distinguished from the soft ceaseless murmur of the sunlight on the sea. Jacques was half asleep, and he was filled with a kind of happy anxiety at the prospect of returning to Algiers and the small poor home in the old neighborhood. So it was every time he left Paris for Africa, his heart swelling with a secret exultation, with the satisfaction of one who has made good his escape and is laughing at the thought of the look on the guards’ faces. Just as, each time he returned to Paris, whether by road or by train, his heart would sink when he arrived, without quite knowing how, at those first houses of the outskirts, lacking any frontier of trees or water and which, like an ill-fated cancer, reached out its ganglions of poverty and ugliness to absorb this foreign body and take him to the center of the city, where a splendid stage set would sometimes make him forget the forest of concrete and steel that imprisoned him day and night and invaded even his insomnia.
But he had escaped, he could breathe, on the giant back of the sea he was breathing in waves, rocked by the great sun, at last he could sleep and he could come back to the childhood from which he had never recovered, to the secret of the light, of the warm poverty that had enabled him to survive and to overcome everything.
That fragmented reflection on the copper of the porthole, now almost motionless, came from the same sun that pressed with all its weight on the shutters of the dark room where the grandmother was sleeping and plunged a very slender sword into the darkness through the one opening that a sprung knot had left in the butt-strap of the shutters. The flies were missing, it was not they who were peopling and nourishing his reverie; there are no flies at sea, and besides they were dead, those flies the child had loved because they were noisy, the only living beings in that world chloroformed by the heat, and all the men and animals were lying inert on their flanks—except himself, it’s true; he was turning over on the bed in the narrow space left to him between the wall and his grandmother, and he wanted also to live, and it seemed to him that the time for sleep was being subtracted from his time for living and playing. His playmates were waiting for him, that was certain, in rue Prévost-Paradol, with its small gardens that in the evening smelled of damp from their watering and of the honeysuckle that grew everywhere, whether or not it was watered.
As soon as his grandmother awakened, he would dash out, down to the rue de Lyon, still deserted under its ficus trees, run as far as the fountain at the corner of Prévost-Paradol, quickly turn the cast-iron crank at the top of the fountain, putting his head under the faucet to receive the gushing stream that would fill his nostrils and his ears, run down the open neck of his shirt to his belly and down his legs under his shorts to his sandals. Then, happily feeling the water foam between his feet and the leather of the soles, he would run breathlessly to join Pierred and the others who were sitting at the hall entrance of the only two-story house on the street, sharpening the cigar-shaped piece of wood they would soon be using to play canette vinga1 with the blue wooden racquet.
As soon as they were all there, they went off, scraping the racquet along the rusty garden fences in front of the houses, which made enough noise to awaken the neighborhood and make the cats jump out of their sleep under the dusty wisteria. They ran, crossing the street, trying to catch each other, already covered with sweat, but always in the same direction, toward the “green field” not far from their school, four or five blocks away. But there was an obligatory stop at what was known as the waterspout, an enormous round fountain on two levels in a rather large square, where the water never ran, but the basin, long since clogged up, would on occasion be filled to the brim by the country’s torrential rains.
Then the water, covered with old moss, melon rinds, orange peels, and all sorts of refuse, would stagnate until the sun sucked it up or the municipal authorities roused themselves and decided to pump it out, and a filthy dry cracking sludge remained for a long time at the bottom of the basin, waiting till the sun, pursuing its efforts, reduced it to dust and the wind or the brooms of the street sweepers blew it onto the shiny leaves of the ficus that surrounded the square. In summer, at any rate, the basin was dry, and its broad edge of shiny dark stone, made slippery by thousands of hands and trouser bottoms, was available to Jacques, Pierre, and the others to play at jousting, swiveling in their seats until the inevitable
