The Last Life (38 page)

My father returned from Paris exuberant. A dalliance, I assumed, had buoyed his spirits, although he raved instead about the productivity of the conference, about his conversations with the élite travel agents ("only the most upscale—the Bellevue is upscale, I told them. We'll soon have that fourth star"), and of the prominence of his hostelry among the competition ("Bertrand was there, from Carqueiranne, and positively green with envy, the way the guys were flocking—but
flocking
to me"), and he brushed aside my mother's concern that his father was much depleted.

"Nonsense," he said. "Isn't a man allowed to feel weary? Think of the emotion of it—very taxing. He'll be himself in no time. It's just a little readjustment, that's all. Did he comment on the hotel, on how it was looking? We're already full, in early July—that's good. That's better than last year."

"I don't recall him saying anything," said my mother. "But we didn't really take the time—he didn't stop by the office or anything."

"No." My father pursed his lips. "Of course not. Well, lucky fellow, it's not his worry anymore. But I think he'll be pleased—especially given the way the economy's going. It's a bad time, you know. Pariseau, over near Cassis, is shutting up shop, he says. Thinks this time the recession will last forever. But he's no businessman, that's the trouble. A businessman can't afford to be a pessimist."

My mother gave my father a look. "Quite," she said.

My father was, to a degree, right about my grandfather. More of him—of what we thought of as him—came back with time. He grilled my father about the state of the Bellevue finances; he grew cantankerous with, rather than indifferent to, his wife and servant. He remarked upon and questioned and criticized even minute changes to the hotel that my father had made in his absence. If I had expected him to display a particular concern for my welfare, however, I was mistaken: he seemed to drift between a world of his own imagining and the business world of figures, peddling managerial advice to his son, keeping an eagle eye on market trends, but unable to notice the simplest domestic movements around him, the lacquer bowl of anemones on the dining table, or Etienne's extra inches, or my new haircut. (As soon as school was out, I had my hair lopped to my chin, as a testament to my unhappiness and in a vain hope that it would relieve the problems on my back.) He manifested interest, unsurprisingly, in my report card, which my father took to him like a small trophy, as if it were proof of my father's diligence, rather than my own.

"You can do better," my grandfather told me that evening, in our garden, clutching my hand as he had the night of his return. "You are improving—a mind like mine, underneath it all. But still, yes, you can do better. Each generation should do better. That's how it ought to be." He looked me fully in the eye, and I thought I saw him there, for the first time, again, beneath his creped lizard lids. And then he let go, and gazed out at the bushes and the paling sky, through which a lone firefly made wavering progress, emitting its Morse code, and he lapsed into silence, apparently oblivious to the adult conversation around him.

I watched him for a time, his motionlessness, his vague and false benignity, as of a statesman or a prophet—or a broken man. I thought he must be pondering his sin, the gunshot and all that it had visited upon us: I projected remorse, and a quiet tide of grief, a recognition that, Kronos-like, he had been engaged heretofore in the voracious consumption of his children, rather than in their nurturing. I projected—not suspecting that it might be otherwise—a new and generous leaf, a silvery flip in his soul that would lead him at once to liberate and to support us: I willed him to be the man I wanted him to be. When he smiled, a subtle curling of his crusty hp, a wrinkling in the round cheek, I was so convinced of the Tightness of my apprehension that I asked him: "What are you thinking about, Papi?"

"Ah," he said, without turning to look at me, "I was just remembering."

"What's that, what were you remembering?"

One evening, in the summer of 1955, shortly after his promotion to deputy manager at the St. Joseph on the clifftop in Algiers, as he sat perusing papers at his fine ebony inlaid desk, in his new private office, his new personal secretary, Madame Barre, knocked on his door. She was a very proper young lady, the wife of a military man posted in the city, and she wore, beneath her carefully combed coiffure, an expression of alarm.

"There's a fellow out here," she said, "a peasant. Who claims to be your cousin. I—I've told him you won't be free at all, to call for an appointment, but he refuses—he won't go away. He rather frightens me."

My grandfather was surprised—baffled, indeed—as to the possible identity of this visitor, and, he confessed to me, not a little embarrassed that such a man should come calling in such a hotel—embarrassed before Madame Barre, whom he knew to be, by birth, his social superior, a knowledge he had contrived, up to that point, to keep hidden.

So when the young man was shown in—his sturdy boots clomping upon the Beluch oriental, his dusty hat in hand, reminding my grandfather, just slightly, of a particular moment in his own youth, at once delicious and painful, in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in Paris—my grandfather raised an eyebrow, and glared.

"Do I know you?" he thundered, skepticism in his tone, loudly enough for Madame Barre to hear as she shut the door behind the visitor.

"Serge LaBasse." The younger man feinted a bow, wriggled his broad shoulders as if an eel were down his shirt. "I'm your cousin. Or technically, I suppose, we're half-cousins. We've never met, but our fathers—our grandfather—"

My grandfather tapped his pen on the table. "You must be one of Georges's boys?"

"That's right. The elder." The young man, whose hair was matted and streaked with gold, whose lopsided pugilist's face was lined and stained beyond its years, whose large, spatulate fingers turned the straw hat in nervous circles, looked relieved.

"You've taken on the farm, then? Your father died, what, three years ago?" My grandfather adjusted his tie pin, his cuffs. Georges had been his father's half-brother, the late son of Auguste's second marriage, one of a long-forgotten brood.

"Six."

"As long as that?"

Serge shrugged. "May I?" He indicated a reproduction Second Empire chair, scroll-backed, upholstered in mauve silk. My grandfather sniffed, appraising the soot and dust on the younger man's apparel, then nodded. Serge sat.

"Have you a family of your own, then?"

"A wife. Twin daughters, seven. A baby boy."

"Well, that's well done for the family name." My grandfather said to me that he could picture them, pin-limbed, jaundiced, in rags. His kin. He focused on the desk, rearranged the floating papers. "And what brings you to Algiers—trade of some kind?" My grandfather couldn't stop fidgeting because he knew—had known from the moment Serge crossed his threshold—that he had come to importune my grandfather for money.

"Have you been following what happens, in the country, now?" asked the visitor, leaning forward so that his hands, too, with their roped muscles and cracked nails, lay like foreign implements on my grandfather's desk.

"By which you mean...?"

"Since last year. Since the uprising."

"Terrible stuff. Yes, as you can imagine, we worry about such things in the hotel business—it wreaks havoc on our bookings. Or has the potential to."

"I'm sure."

"Are you much affected, out where you are? I thought the trouble was down in the Aurès, and over near Constantine."

The young man looked annoyed, his nose more evidently, and literally, out of joint. "The trouble, sir, is in the country. Like a cancer that has meta—meta—"

"Metastasized?"

"Exactly. The cities, like anything else, are organs in the nation's body. They, too, will be affected."

"Come now, Serge. No need to dramatize. For this there is the military. Keep in mind that we're in France, as much as if we were in Bordeaux, or Tours."

Serge averted his gaze and glowered instead at the items on my grandfather's desk. His eyes rested at length on a jade and silver letter opener, my grandfather's recent promotion gift to himself. Serge seemed to be holding his breath.

"So, you are my cousin, and you are here. We may not know each other, but we are blood brothers, truly." Even as he said this, my grandfather silently enumerated their vast differences, grateful that no external eye could draw a connection; save, now, for Madame Barre. "And you must tell me why you've come to me. It can hardly be simply to say hello, seeing as we've never met. Seeing as our fathers barely knew each other..."

"Your father was a baker," said Serge, accusingly.

"He was. He died when I was very young. You probably weren't yet born."

There fell, again, a silence, during which both men listened to Madame Barre opening and shutting drawers outside. She knocked, put her head—now prettily hatted—around the door: "If you don't need anything further?"

"No. Of course not. Good night."

The silence fell more deeply when they knew that she was gone. Young Serge, a strapping specimen, unlike Jacques, seemed to struggle physically to form words. When finally they rushed forth, they did so in little jets, as if from a disused faucet.

"The farm is—was—the farm was never big. Never much. But enough. My father, Georges, built it up—from our grandfather—a little. He built a new house. Two floors, gabled. A porch. The barn is—the barn was—fine. I grew up there, you understand, and my brother and sisters. I'm the oldest. You know that?"

My grandfather waved with his ringed hand, wanting Serge to get on with it.

"And the workers, the villagers—the Arabs—their fathers worked for our grandfather and they worked for my father and for the last six years they've worked for me—but all my life, they've known me. Always. I've dug alongside them since forever, and hoed, and harvested, and—"

"And now?"

"Was it they? I don't know. I saw no faces. We weren't there, thank the merciful God. One, Larbi, gave a warning. A man of sixty, at least, a gentle fellow. He used to dandle the girls on his knee. At dusk, a warning. And the way things are going, the way things are, we heeded it. We took the truck and fled. Spent the night at the neighbors'—we managed to take—hardly anything. A few, small, irreplaceable things. The ladle our grandfather brought from France—but not the wedding dress. Not the silver platter."

"Against what did you remove these valuables?"

"But I'm telling you. They razed it. Everything. The house, the barn. The livestock inside. That's the worst of it—the animals burned alive. And they'd rather that than steal them. That's how much they hate us—hate me. Hate our innocent babies. And they've known me all my life. You see?"

"But what had you done to them?"

"Nothing. That's my point. That's what I'm telling you. And when I said to Larbi, 'But why my farm?' he replied, 'The buildings may be yours but the land upon which they stand is ours. Since forever.' The country's going mad. I'm ruined. I have nothing left. But knowing what has happened in other places, we're lucky to have our lives. There are many who've paid with their lives."

"Paid for what, exactly?"

"I don't know. I don't know." Serge looked at the letter opener, at his own hands, grimy on the polished wood, at the imitation Watteau on the wall behind my grandfather. Anywhere but at my grandfather.

"And I?" said Jacques LaBasse. "You come to me ... why? Because you think I can rebuild your farm?" He was less stern now, knowing that Madame Barre had departed. He did not know his cousin; young Serge had been, perhaps, a brutal employer. But it was true that what was happening in the countryside seemed not to need reasons, nor to respond to them. "I'm sorry, I have no money. Only a decent job. And a wife and two children to support." He was thinking, he said to me, how grateful he was for his mother's little pretensions, for her insistence on his education, for his own natural gifts and the rallying of his teachers, for the progress from generation to generation without which he might, so easily, have been sullying the mauve silk chair and seeping rank anxiety into the perfumed air, burdened with this tale of woe. "Why me?" he asked Serge again. "Why do you come to me?"

Serge stared at his cousin. "Where would you have me go?" He clenched his fists. "My brother, my sisters, have so little more than nothing, although my eldest sister has housed and fed us for two weeks already. We need—I need—to find work. I'm not begging for money, you know. I'm strong, and young still."

"I don't know any farmers," said my grandfather. "Are you willing to move to the city?"

"If I have to. If that's where there's work."

"I'll see what I can do, Serge." My grandfather stood at last. "I'll do my best. Come back in three days."

My grandfather had been smiling to himself, staring off into the bushes, because he had done, by his lights, the right thing: he had found a job for his cousin.

"What did you get him?" I asked.

"He was essentially illiterate, poor guy—as I suspected, as was evident from his demeanor. He could read and write, but so poorly ... there weren't too many options. He was strong. I found him work as a bellboy. It was a start. Not at the St. Joseph—that would've been intolerable for all concerned. But at a perfectly respectable hotel, down on the waterfront."

I pictured the strapping Serge, sun-lined, his farmer's biceps and solid thighs squeezed into a crimson suit knobbled with brass buttons and braided epaulettes, a pillbox rakish on his gold-streaked curls, elastic under his chin.

"He was back to working with the
indigènes,
of course. There wasn't much I could do about that. Not with his level of education."

"What happened to him?"

My grandfather waved his ringed hand, wrinkled now, its veins blue mole trails pushing up the skin. "I wish I knew. He'd moved on from that job before the worst of the trouble came. We had nothing in common, and he wasn't the sort to write letters. I imagine he's somewhere in France, or his children are. I heard he lost the job because he fought. With a Muslim colleague, a respected young concierge at the hotel. He didn't want to take orders from an Arab, or some such nonsense. You do what you can for people, but that's all you can do."