Sila's Fortune (2 page)

He woke, shivering, in the darkness. He had no difficulty finding his way. The Uncle said he could see in the dark like an animal. And it was true that his step, lithe, nimble, unvarying in its rhythm, was like that of an animal. An hour later, having wolfed down some of the Uncle's gruel, Sila rolled himself in a blanket and continued his night.

It was brief. His cousin Falba woke him before dawn with an affectionate prod. Sila groaned, but a few seconds later he was up and rekindling the fire. They gulped down their gruel, then, without a word, they headed for the ocean. They padded across the sandy beach. They pushed the boat out. All along the water's edge others were pushing, other bodies stretching and shoving. The first boats were already passing the wall of waves, the white wall of breakers that marked the end of the shallows. Beyond was freedom, the open sea.

Sila's belly quivered at the contact with the cold water. Then he leapt into the boat and began to row, as Falba was already doing, paddling with surprising power and pace given his slight frame. The waves propelled the boat back towards the beach;
to make headway they had to make the most of the ebbtide.

‘Now!' shouted Falba.

This was the signal. Sila heaved on the oar with all his strength. The dark skiff plunged into the streaming white foam, faltered for a moment, seemed to slip back, until, with a powerful stroke of the oars, the boat reached the peak, quivered for a moment on the crest of the huge wave, then tumbled back onto the glassy expanse of ocean. They headed out towards the open sea, paying out the nets, heading for those places where fish were plentiful. Falba constantly bemoaned the fact that there were fewer fish now than when he was young. When he was a boy, he would say, there were so many fish they would leap into the boat. Now the shoals had thinned, and catches were smaller. Falba believed that, scared away by the war, the fish had sought refuge in some secret kingdom in the heart of the ocean.

‘It's the noise of the bombs that scares them away,' he would say.

The Uncle always looked pained when Falba said such things.

‘Fish are deaf. They don't have ears, they have gills.'

‘In that case how do you explain the fact that they've disappeared?' Falba would say, his hands on his hips. ‘You remember what the catches used to be like …'

But today, the catch was good. Swimming along the seabed like a broadnose shark, merging with the rocks and the algae, Sila managed to gather three big lobsters, which he brandished triumphantly as he broke the surface.

They got an excellent price for them at market. A slim young girl approached. She was holding out her hand to take the lobsters
when, honking its horn, the ramshackle Mercedes belonging to the Commander made its habitual entrance, driving at great speed and ploughing into the sand in order to stop since it had no brakes. The Commander, in full uniform, climbed out and, with military bearing, strode over. Every week, he bought their finest fish and he paid handsomely, never haggling too much.

‘Would you like some lobsters, Commander?' Falba called to him.

The young woman turned towards the Commander without a word.

‘I'll take them all,' said the Commander, ‘I adore lobster.'

‘They're already taken,' Sila whispered to his cousin. ‘This girl was here …'

‘The Commander comes first,' snapped Falba.

Sila got to his feet.

‘We'd love to sell you all of them, Commander, but this young woman was here before you. You'll have to share.'

The Commander shuddered. Sila handed him two lobsters, keeping one back for the girl. His honour was safe: two lobsters, that might be enough. Nonetheless, to make clear his displeasure, the Commander tossed the coins on the ground, stalked off without a word, climbed into the car and roared off, the horn blaring.

‘Thank you,' said the young woman.

Sila nodded.

‘Are you out of your mind,' Falba fumed as soon as she had left, ‘refusing to sell the Commander the lobsters?'

‘I didn't refuse, the girl was here first. Anyway, he got his two lobsters.'

‘He wanted all of them. He's our best customer and he's a commander.'

‘The war's over. There's nothing for him to command any more.'

‘But he won't come back. Besides, once a commander, always a commander.'

At the end of the morning, as Sila looked at the coins and banknotes in his hand, the proceeds of the whole day's catch, he realised it would take hundreds of thousands of years of catches as good as today's for them to earn as much as the American. And once again he was overcome by a disagreeable feeling, a feeling he could not put a name to, which was neither envy nor hatred but a sort of vague disapproval.

They went home and gave the money to the Uncle. Then Sila went back to his wandering around the city. He was kept busy playing football for a while. He ran, defended, scored two goals, shouted. The bundle of paper and plastic which the players tried as best they could to fashion into a football finally burst and the match had to be abandoned. The boys gradually drifted off in groups, commenting on their exploits, and by the time he came to the outskirts of the city Sila found himself alone. The wind was blowing. Ruins rose up against the desert, abandoned strongholds. Vestiges of the destruction. In a few years more the sand would cover them, swallowing a little more of the ghostly city. The Uncle often said they were all on borrowed time. That they were not living but surviving, like the nomads of the sands, and that even their survival was the product of memory: they existed so they might remember the war. And
as that memory slipped into oblivion, they too slipped slowly into the shifting African sands.

A city of old men and children. A city whose women had disappeared, been raped, kidnapped, murdered; whose men had been tortured, slaughtered, imprisoned. The children had grown, become adolescents, their lives would pass as in a dream. A breath of wind shifting the sands.

A hundred metres farther on, Sila thought he saw the looming form of a giraffe lumbering slowly behind the houses, moving with the curious, easy indifference of wild animals. And then the vision disappeared. The City of Dreams. The City of Nowhere. A white world choked with sand and forgetfulness in which men moved as in a slow, repetitive dream, where forms gradually faded.

As he neared home, Falba, who was waiting for him in the next street, grabbed his arm.

‘You can't go home,' he said. ‘The Commander's men are looking for you. They're going to kill you. They say you humiliated him. You have to leave.'

In the City of Nowhere, life had no meaning. Bodies moved like deep underwater algae carried by ocean currents.

The alga that was Sila broke free. He stowed away on a cargo ship – one of those improbable hulks of rusted steel powered only by a miracle – without knowing where it was headed. There were one or two like this every week. No one really knew what cargo they carried. What was there for them to find in the City of Nowhere? Yet they existed, their sirens blared as they arrived and again as they weighed anchor. One more piece of cargo, Sila stowed away in the hold for a whole night and a
whole day, but at the end of his first day he was discovered by a sailor. He was brought up on deck. The captain told him he would be thrown overboard. Sila knew the rules. Stowaways were shark food. Everyone knew the rules. He did not protest.

The cook intervened. He needed a ship's boy and the lad was too young to die. His childhood had already been a living hell, surely now he had a chance to escape, they could hardly toss him into the deep.

‘If we let a stowaway live, it sends the wrong message to the others,' said the captain.

‘There aren't any others. He's alone. I'll take care of him.'

The cook's name was Fos. Before now, he had been neither good nor evil. This was the day he earned his stripes as a good man. He probably did need a ship's boy, he was probably tired of working alone in the galley, but the fact remains he saved Sila's life, and to show his gratitude the boy worked as hard as he could. Never had the galley been so clean, never had the meals been served with such care. Remembering his Uncle, Sila wore white gloves to serve the captain – though it took a little imagination to think them really white. One evening, the captain admitted: ‘We did well to spare your life.'

Sila supplemented their everyday fare by fishing. Sometimes, he wanted to dive into the shimmering water. He longed for the light. To dive into the light. Into the sun reflected in the ocean. But the cargo ship was moving too quickly, the deck was too high, he would never catch it up.

Fos was a chatterbox. He talked endlessly to Sila, asked him about his life. Sila was reluctant to answer. He came from the City of Nowhere, from the city engulfed by sand. Perhaps it no
longer existed now, perhaps it had vanished as the ship pulled away, breaking the spell.

‘Of course it doesn't exist any more,' said Fos during one of their talks, ‘in fact, it never existed, you'd do well to forget it. You're a different man now, you're no longer in that city out of time. The war is over.'

The cook asked who had raised him all these years. Sila told him about his cousin, about the Uncle.

‘What about your parents? Your mother, your father?'

‘They're not there any more.'

The cook nodded.

‘They say the rebels killed half the population.'

Sila spent his free time aboard reading the only two books on the ship: an atlas and a cookery book. This is how he discovered the twin pillars of his destiny: cooking and travel.

With his finger, he travelled the world, stopping on every continent. Here were strange and fabulous names, some of which evoked vague memories. The Uncle had spoken of these continents – Europe, America – as magical places flowing with milk and gold.

One evening, Sila took from his pocket the scrap of newspaper he had kept.

‘This man is from America,' he said.

Fos read the article, then opened the corresponding page of the atlas.

‘He lives in the United States, a country in North America. He lives in a city called New York.'

He pointed to a large red dot on the map.

‘A city by the sea, just like mine.'

Fos laughed.

‘That's right, just like yours. You want to go to the United States? I should warn you we're heading for Morocco and on from there to France, to Marseilles.'

France. The touchstone. The country whose language people spoke in the City of Nowhere.

‘It's smaller than the United States,' Fos added, ‘but it's bigger than your city.'

Thanks to the recipe book, astonishing names tripped from Sila's lips: eggs
fino de Boffet
, painter's palette, sand roses, poached chicken with creamed lentils, spider crab
Atlantide
, rice pudding with kumquats,
tournedos Rossini
. The recipes all began the same way: Cooking Time, Ingredients. Then came elegant, carefully chosen words: ‘Remove the peduncle and blanch thoroughly.' ‘Singe and draw the chicken, and cut it into eight pieces.' ‘Finely chop the shallots and sweat them in butter.' ‘Blanch the spinach, refresh in cold water and squeeze to remove the excess.' Can you imagine the poetry of such words to a boy from the City of Nowhere? ‘In a heavy-bottomed pan sweat the
mirepoix
of carrots and onions over a low flame. Add the fresh tomatoes and the tomato concentrate, the celery stick, parsley stalks and the
fond brun
.'

‘I read the words but I never see the dish,' Sila protested one day. ‘It's annoying.'

‘You hardly think I'm going to cook things like that on a ship?'

At fifty-one, Fos was one of those unfinished creatures who have accumulated lives: a down-and-out in Liberia, he had been an artist in Paris, a student and an unemployed person in Germany, a construction worker in Brazil and a cook in a
school cafeteria in the United States before taking a job on this freighter. He spoke several languages badly, knew everything and nothing, had walked the length and breadth of every major city in the world.

He loved Sila like a son because he found the boy mysterious. The boy's silence, a sort of perpetual remoteness, made him a creature apart. And the young man's beauty filled Fos with pride as though he were the cause. Sila's face radiated a strength and vitality, his eyes had an astonishing darkness, his joyful smile was infectious. As for his body, it was absolutely unique: though not as broad as a grown man, Sila was slim and muscular, sculpted like a statue. That such grace existed was thanks to him, Fos, who had saved the young man's life.

The freighter docked in Morocco. It stayed barely a day, just long enough to unload its wares and load others. The sailors worked tirelessly with the help of a few porters chosen from the crowd that thronged around the port looking for any work on offer. One of these day labourers had such astonishing strength that the others said he was a werewolf. When the moon was full, he slit the throats of women and children. Sila thought him rather a nice fellow for a werewolf.

Then the freighter set off again.

Fos had bought some spices in a Moroccan market to satisfy the captain. And so Sila became a commis chef. To monkfish, which he carefully cut into medallions and cooked for ten minutes under Fos's watchful eye, he added a coconut coulis that would for ever be remembered on this rusty, rotting hulk. The monkfish was served, needless to say, with white gloves.

Finally, the boat reached its destination.

One was called Simon Judal, which meant he was sometimes called Jude or Judas, a nickname that could hardly have been more ill-suited; the other had been christened Matthieu Brunel but had no intention of remaining so: the surname was much too common. These were the two young men who had reacted so differently at the restaurant.

Now they were walking down a side street off the Champs-Élysées, buoyed up by a sort of elation attributable to the meal, to the lightness of Simon's wallet, having treated his best friend to celebrate his new job, to their youth and to the warm June evening. The air-conditioning in the restaurant had been a little chilly and they were glad to stroll in the warm night. The world was their oyster.