The Last Life (29 page)

Both stood fast, shouted louder against it than almost any others, surely because its siren song played so loudly, so buoyantly, in their ears. It plays in my own. It played louder still in the ears of my father, born with Africa in his blood from both sides, and left to live, without revolt, in a dispassionate and alien border. And if Augustine and Camus, with their different signs as weapons, could stand fast against the lure, it was because they confronted it, looked straight into its sweet face, and spat. My father did not acknowledge the music, until doubtless he did not know even that he heard it. Eyes shut, he sang along: "By pining, we are already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on that coast. I sing of somewhere else, not of here: for I sing with my heart, not my flesh."

My parents met in April 1971, at a crowded table at the Café Les Deux Garçons on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence, on an evening of unfurling leaves when the light fell dappled through the plane trees. My mother, shy Carol, wore a crimson cashmere twinset that set off her clear, freckled skin, and the dark lustre of her hair distinguished her from the other girls, three fellow American students, blondes, Amazonian by local proportions, with fine little noses and large teeth. My father, the friend of Guy, a boyfriend of one of these girls, Lili—both girl and boy now lost and all but faceless in our familial lore—was the interloper, a day-tripper from real life along the coast, arrived in a car of his own, who had apparently merely stumbled upon the collegiate grouping as upon fairies in their bower. His dun mackintosh was British, the collar upturned; his shoes gleamed. His chin, at the end of the day, sprouted a shiny stubble that only enhanced his Latin charm. My young parents-to-be did not look—but for the brevity of my mothers tartan skirt, at which she tugged periodically, although seated, for modesty's sake—of their era. They were untouched by the revolutionary, unbuttoned spirit of that moment, a bond each recognized in the other.

"I thought you must be French," was the first full sentence my father uttered to my mother, a compliment, as she took it, after months of attempting that very deception, which caused her to smirk and glance coyly at the ground.

She had been in Aix since September, on a nominal, overpriced program sponsored by her Catholic women's college, and, although enamored of all things Gallic (upon her return home, according to Eleanor, young Carol insisted on slurping her coffee—with hot milk, if you please—from a cereal bowl, in the absence of an oversized
tasse),
she had spent most of her days in the company of her compatriots, cushioned by gaggles of girls from other American institutions, many wealthier and almost all worldlier than she.

Carol was the quiet girl, the confidante of her intrepid fellows; the others—girls with names like Coco and Sally and Lili—re-counted their exploits to her, congratulating her even as they did for being unshockable, although they knew that she was, silently, aghast, and in this lay at least part of their pleasure. "Pillow talk," Coco or Sally or Lili would say, "is the best way to learn a language." My mother would smile. "You should try it, Carol," they would add; and she would blush. She was, by her own account, a diligent student, but unremarkable. She considered herself plain, and fat, because her station in the sorority's hierarchy seemed to demand it. In fact, she was neither. She just felt safer classified that way.

Invisibility has always been vital to my mother; it is her cloak, her security. Was it Flaubert who said that "Not to be like one's neighbor—that is everything," but for Carol the inverse was true. I'm sure that part of my father's appeal—so darkly handsome, such lovely, liquid eyes, not a hint of the stoutness to follow—was the quintessential Frenchness of his demeanor: the way he moved his hands, the confidence with which he flicked his lighter for her friends; the fact that he carried a lighter at all, although he did not smoke.

Carol, in an instant, was smitten. Being Carol, she did not think to probe her friend, or Guy, the now-lost boyfriend, too deeply about Alexandre LaBasse's present, let alone his past. Instead, she fretted over what he thought of her. A relendess and familiar litany, traded countless times by nightgowned near-adolescents in the dormitory past midnight, it was now at last hers to utter, and her turn to be reassured. "Did you think he noticed me? Really? I thought, maybe, when he made that joke? He's single, you're quite sure? And how old? Gosh. What does Guy say about him? Maybe he prefers blondes? Did I look fat? Are you sure? My rear end, in that skirt—if I'd known I'd meet him I would never have worn it. Do you think I stand a chance?" She failed, then and later, to ask "Who is he?", thinking simply, and wrongly, that he was France incarnate, a sort of male Marianne. But who would have been able to tell her otherwise?

As for my father, he appears on that mote- and blossom-streaked boulevard, at Guy's shoulder, running his hand through his hair and smiling his sleepy half-smile, blocking the girls' view of the street and the evening light with it, a mystery
contre-jour
—and I cannot say, to this day, how he comes to be there.

As a child, one accepts one's parents' stories as the truth, each a gleaming bead nestled, in an unbroken strand, between the others: their meeting, their courtship, their marriage are all but a hasty prelude to the crucial event of one's own birth. Their lives exist only as a tidying explanation of one's own. It does not seem possible, certainly not plausible, that I was myself unimagined, or that their existences held any meaning independent of one another, or of their future offspring. I have marvelled that Carol or Alexandre could ever have believed themselves the protagonists in any narrative, when their manifest destinies were but supporting roles in my own. Not till later does it dawn that the anecdotes and their rhythms, familiar as any bedtime story and as unreal, are a careful condensation of years, of morning after morning in which they awoke, separately and then together, into days as freighted with anticipation or wonder or despair as my own. Once they exist, even as a wish, these days, so unknowable, beckon, and with them comes the knowledge that they can only ever be glimpsed obliquely, inaccurately (although I know that the Deux Garçons remained "their" café and the sauntering prima donna with her poodle their private joke): that they belong to others—to Carol, to Alexandre—and will never be mine. Yet they are my stories too, my blood, and their weight, known or unknown, is my burden.

So, my father, on the boulevard, beloved already of the shy American whom, he will say, he claimed in his heart from the first (theirs, in spite of all that followed, was a fiction of love at first sight; and he, more than she, for whom it was quite possibly true, would insist upon it): he was twenty-six, nearing twenty-seven, old beside the American girls, old as a rock in the coursing river of undergraduates that flowed in the streets of Aix. He had a car—a sputtering Renault 4, and secondhand, but a car—and a job of exaggerable importance in his father's hotel.

After university he had started, sober-suited, at the reception desk, so that Jacques could see his son duly humiliated, or so that Alexandre would know the business inside out—depending on whether you listened to my mother or my grandmother—and, with the interruption of his unremarkable military service, had proceeded to a desk in a glass-enclosed enclave of the hotel's management office, where he shared with several others Mademoiselle Marceau, the secretary who then, in the days of my parents' meeting, must have been attractive in a rounded way, but who by the time I knew her had grown owlish and feather-fat, always apparently scowling beneath the angry shelf of her brow.

In the beginning, my father was not an ideal employee: he felt entitled to respect, as his father's son, and grew peevish that it was not granted. He read the newspapers in the morning, and shirked in the afternoons. There were young ladies to dine with, with whom to picnic inland in the spring breezes, or to whisk along the coast roads to restaurants by the sea. The outing to Aix must have been such a truancy and, as love bloomed, his absences can only have grown more frequent and more apparent to his obsessive father. During that period, it was his mother (not yet fully imposing then, a woman still handsome and slender, without the permanent crevice of displeasure between her brows that so frightened me as a little girl) who stood in his defense. Only her interventions kept Jacques from supplanting his heir and replacing him with some avid young turk.

My father, having defied his own father as a boy in his wish to remain Algerian, and lost, did not defy him again, or not openly. It must have seemed important to follow a path that looked, to the world, like a choice; but in my grandfather's dominion there was no such thing. Jacques had built the Bellevue for a dynasty; in retrospect, it must have seemed that he had fathered his unruly son for the same purpose. My aunt, "La Bête," had no head for business, only a fine Catholic desire for family and a fear of her father's mercurial temper (this although she was his pet, and could do no wrong in his eyes). At nineteen, she married, followed her
bon bourgeois
husband to Geneva, and there sank into a bliss or a misery of which her own relations remained cheerfully ignorant. This, too, was the fate my grandfather had envisaged for his daughter: she was dealt with, her house was large and pleasantly appointed, her sons healthy and her husband profitably employed.

But of my father, Alexandre: when I was small, the scanty facts that followed his sea crossing seemed sufficient to me: university, the military, the Bellevue, formed a clear, inevitable line that easily bulked to fill the nine years before which, in the amorous halo of my imagining, he became relevant again to my story. They seemed, or must have been, sufficient to Carol as well, because she never wondered at his decisions, at the clamp that kept her love, then her lover, then her spouse, in his glass office in the Bellevue on the clifftop overlooking the Mediterranean. In subsequent years she learned to rail against Jacques LaBasse, but always with the grimace with which one rails against Fate, or God, the immovable. For all her complaints, she never truly believed they would leave—for somewhere, or something else. And then, with my birth, and more absolutely with Etienne's, the argument became pure sham.

My father, and his parents, had their reasons. My grandmother, initially, could not see the point of Carol, although she was thankful, at least, for my mother's religion. But Alexandre, when he stood before the table of Amazons and plucked my diminutive mother from among them, may at first have seen the grand challenge of seduction, a lure already long familiar to him: he would have known that Carol, quietly preening and hoping, had none of her friends' wiles; in Becky's terms, my mother "screamed virgin": even I can detect it, in her glance, in the pictures of the time. It might, knowing young men, have begun as a wager between Guy and his friend: "Can you bed the unbeddable, wear down her resistance? Even you, seasoned as you are, can't crack this one!" And my father, sure of this as of nothing else: "Watch me."

To be fair, I will concede that theirs may have been a more innocent coming-together, that my father, jaded as he was, may have faltered at the charm of wary young Carol, and strained to find an unexpected future in her hesitant smiles. Regardless of his initial impulses, he swiftly determined—perhaps the first time they sat together over
diabolo menthe,
watching the passers-by, their poodle lady among them; or the afternoon he drove her to Marseilles for her first bouillabaisse, and she ended up buying a pair of frivolous, shell-covered sandals that tinkled when she walked; and certainly by the time he brought her to the Bellevue for Sunday lunch, and they spent the afternoon wandering the
chemins de la plage,
redolent of cedar and dust and the sea, that later, always, I would consider my own—that she was his salvation. She was, to him, all that America was to me before I went there: a shining idea, without history, without context. She did not, like all the girls along the local corniche, know of his dalliances and suspect his easy smile. More importandy, she had no interest in politics; she appeared only dimly aware of her homeland's then-current controversy, and voiced only pity for both the young draftees to Vietnam and their rebellious counterparts at home—"It all just seems so sad," she would say, with great earnestness, a soft, dark lock falling over her welling eye. As for Algeria, and the scars it had scored across France, she was as unversed as if the conflict had been buried for centuries. She not only did not take sides, she did not know what the sides had been; as a consequence of which, by the time she married my father, her side (like mine, later) was chosen for her. When, back in Boston, she heard Eleanor screech at the mention of "that filthy war of torture," Carol was affianced, and indifferent. Alexandre was French, Eleanor was not: Carol announced to her sister, as Lahou had to me, "You don't know the first thing about it."

My mother was not so much incurious as naive: what my father chose to tell her, she believed. It was always enough; it had no reason to be untrue. His mother, and even his father—who seemed, if tyrannical, at least straightforward—lent credence to Alexandre's autobiography. Carol was far more concerned about making herself—not French enough, not able to cook and with, her future mother-in-law informed her, no sense of style—acceptable to her prospective family. They were haughty about all things American (even her Catholicism was deemed low and lax); she would never have dared to question their world, and its infallible rhythms.

My grandmother explained, simply, after it was all over, that my mother had never been told because she had never asked.

"My dear girl," she said to Carol, in front of me, "it just never seemed relevant. It was in the past. Alexandre had 'turned the page'; we were all turning pages then. By the time you appeared on the scene, it was so long ago." She went on. "Your parents, you see, we might have expected them to inquire. But they never did."