The Last Life (43 page)

Eventually, and early, there was a wife, children. The pieces had fallen into their immutable places: this was his life. And perhaps, just possibly, when my own father's car broke down on the outskirts of Lyons, on its family way to a long weekend in Paris, the green-eyed Algerian who slid, belly-up on a stained dolly, beneath it, was my uncle. They might have met and never have known. I, a child of eight, may have been sulking in the back seat, sticky-fingered, with a comic book, Etienne strapped in tight beside me, dozing, and may barely have noticed the coveralled mechanic, eagle-browed and tough, wiping his hands on a rag while speaking to my father about fan belts and radiators.

Or maybe it was not at all like that. Maybe Khalida kept her boy at home—when her brother offered to take him to France she said, after long deliberation, "No," unable to envisage a life worth living without Hamed, her little protector, the only relative who had never cursed her, standing sternly at her side. He, rambunctious like all children, played truant, and fell in with the groups of restless ululating urchins on the edges of the FLN, making a local name for himself as a rabble-rouser, anti-French. In consequence of which, targetted for his green eyes and his cockiness, he fell to an OAS bullet in the madness of early '62, while a passing car beat its horn in the tattoo of "
Al-gé-rie fran-çaise
" and the Europeans in the afternoon street looked away, witnessed nothing, as his lithe little body, on the cusp of puberty, crumpled in the gutter, his cheek bruised against the curb and his green eyes wide open, as his blood, in a viscous stream, puddled beneath his frame and dribbled into the roadway, attracting the attention, primarily, of a band of lazy horseflies. It would have been hours before Khalida came home to find him missing, and hours again before she discovered him, untouched, his limbs stiff and his clothes crisp with dried blood, in the purple dusk, as the headlights of cars passed over him and continued on their way.

Or maybe he stayed home and was lucky. Perhaps his family forgave his mother's sin made flesh, and rallied around her, around him. Perhaps, with his mother's guiding hand, Hamed navigated the turbulent years and attended the Lycée Bugeaud after all, once its name had been changed, dogged only by taunts about his green eyes and insufficient Africanness, for which he compensated by hard work and a gentle disposition, a quiet boy trotting along to the mosque with his uncles, his kinky hair flattened with water and the soles of his feet brown and hard as leather. Perhaps, then, he went on to university, as his mother wished, and shone there, a disciplined mind, trained in secular intellectualism, and emerged in Algiers as an academic or journalist, proud emblem of his new country, with an eye on the future and the sheen of hope around him like a halo. In which case the moment of decision came later, at around the time of his unknown brother's death, when, on account of his life's work, Hamed awoke to find a price on his head (because this is what happened, in riven Algeria, at the turn of the century's final decade), facing the choice between flight and terror just as he had as a child, at the hands of the French. And if he stayed, and lived, then for how long? Sooner or later the masked men would have found him, in his car on his way to the university, or in his office, or at home, in bed, while the sun struggled to rise over the white city and the bay; and we would have read of his death in the newspaper, one among so many, overshadowed by the assassinations of Europeans, and would never have known that we had lost a relative; would never have mourned.

In flight, perhaps, if he had been willing to sacrifice his homeland for his life, to choose the suitcase over the coffin, as the rest of the LaBasses did, then he may have turned, as I have done, to the New World, gathered up his wife and sons and daughter and flown, while there was still time, to Washington or New York, where he sought work worthy of his training and former eminence while driving an unsprung, clattering taxi through the city streets to pay the rent. In which case I may lately have peered at his nape through the milky screen, from the back seat, and glanced at his license with its mug shot, the name typed in capitals, wondering at the green eyes, muttering under my breath about his slowness with my change. If he was listening to the French radio station, then we may even have conversed—as I have been known to do—about America, in French, about how he finds it and whether his children are thriving, about how he misses home, the casbah with its stairwells and alleys, the countryside of his distant school holidays, the groves of citrus trees and even the rare swarms of locusts that descended to gorge on his grandparents' farm when he was a boy. The French language would have been a bond, then, rather than a division. And still, in our meeting, we would never have known that we were bound by blood, that we were family; and had either of us been aware, with the choices made for us so long before, we might not have acknowledged our communion, deeming the gulf too great, the mistrust too profound. There would not be words for what links us and separates us at one and the same time.

But if I reach back further, and ask not what may have been, but instead what might have been, had choices not been made as they were, before my father and my almost-uncle were conscious of such a thing as choice, I can imagine Khalida still under my grandparents' roof and Hamed—hardly younger than my aunt—playing with Alexandre and Marie in the echoing, ill-paved courtyard of the apartment building, three solid little children squealing over soccer, or cops and robbers, the boys joined in a hunt for beetles to drop down Marie's dress; and on weekends slipping together to the saltwater swimming baths, Hamed my father's protégé and boon companion. And later, at school and at the lycée, even, the two of them, their satchels strung on their backs, racing side by side among the sedate grown-ups to the candy store and wandering the alleys idly, arms linked, in the waning afternoons, each reluctant to break away and head for home, engaging in the time-tried rituals of boyhood friendship, becoming blood brothers (as they already were, without perhaps knowing it, living as if they were what they actually truly were) by their pricked thumbs and the mingling of the ensuing wet beads; fighting each other with sticks for swords; pilfering fruit from the market to share in the Jardin Marengo, beneath the leafy trees, and dragging back home to hide their juice-stained tongues from their respective, stern-faced mothers.

And when the trouble came, in their intimacy they might have resisted it. Or they might not, but each would have been forced to see his shattered world differently, through the eyes of his dearest and oldest friend, and that would have shifted, however minutely, the temper of the era. And if, a thousand or a million times, such alternatives had been chosen, by my grandparents' peers, and by their grandparents, and by their grandparents in turn, perhaps the troubles would not have come as they did, or when they did. Camus's dream—the city of white stone flashing in the sunshine while its life, a fully lived, multichromatic life providing common succor to every shade and faith and diverse history of the Mediterranean basin—might then have been possible.

After all, Saint Augustine was a half-caste, fourth-century son of a Berber and a Roman; and Camus himself, although French, was a Spaniard by descent; and my grandfather's own mother, originally Italian, had a sister who married a Maltese. And myth, or perhaps fact, would have it that at the turn of the nineteenth century a ship carrying nuns to the Antilles foundered at Ténès, on the coast of Algeria, just west of Algiers. Ravaged by illness, the small town where the nuns found refuge had few living women left; and at the orders of their Mother Superior, these sisters followed God's calling out of celibacy and into Muslim wedlock. They settled and propagated, uniting their European, Christian blood and culture with that of their husbands and hosts; and their Superior, the town's savior, was revered for her actions as a marabout, under the name of Lalla Mériem Binett. If two hundred years ago this was possible, it should have been so a century later, and even now, in Africa as it is in France, or in America.

In truth, I know better. My French ancestors, as far back as Tata Christine, landed on blood-soaked soil, and nothing could undo that beginning. But Tata Christine's isolate path, against the temper of her times, led her into the mountains, where she may, indeed, have delivered Khalida's mother or father into this world. The turning away from Utopia—the turning from a city of God on earth—was made time and again, in gestures of all magnitudes, some so slight as not to seem like decisions at all, just as my brother's lingering in the womb, by the measure of the clock, was so slight a matter; and by his fate in the world, so great. Hamed, I imagine, is the key to my father's heart that was never presented to him, the possibility of a different life. It might have altered nothing for them to have known and loved one another as brothers; but I doubt it. I live as if this might-have-been existed, shimmering in the imaginary; and if it is but an "as if," I have learned, then it is none the less real for that.

The casket, at the funeral, had to be closed; upon it rested a photograph of my father squinting and grinning, as if, instead of fragments, that grinning figure lay within. Why my father shot himself, we cannot know. He had not gambled the Bellevue, for all my grandparents hoped it—as a punishment, perhaps, for the blame they felt they bore; if so, they never conceded blame. The hotel, it was true, had fallen on lean times; but so had most others in the region. Alexandre had not secretly been diagnosed with cancer. No lover came forward to press her claim, no unheralded LaBasse children were found squalling at his graveside, their palms out for money. He and my mother had not argued; nor had my grandfather tyrannized his boy any more directly than was usual. Nothing among his papers shed light on his plans, no scribbled memos or bank transfers indicated the careful premeditation that might, even partially, have explained his act. He left no note.

The local newspapers nonetheless had their day: above a picture in which, black-clad and sombre-faced, we stood assembled on the church steps (but for Etienne, in motion as the shutter snapped, a smirking blur), they ran the headline "
A
Family Doomed to Disaster." Inevitably, they recounted the trial, and elaborated on my brother's disability; and they did their best to imply a sinister mob-link to my father's death. My mother, stocking-footed, fell tiny and sobbing into my arms at the sight of the article, while my grandmother shook her head and grimaced, whether at the press or at my mother's weakness she did not say. My aunt Marie, lately arrived, stood by blinking and bovine.

"We'll prove them wrong," my grandmother assured the rest of us, her cheek ticking in annoyance and her hands atremble, "and we'll do it by raising the hotel to new glory, and by sticking together. That's what the LaBasses do."

My grandfather shifted on his feet, and sighed.

"Such filth is like water off a duck's back," my grandmother continued, "unless we give in to it."

My mother struggled to right herself and to restrain her tears. "We'll see," she said. "We'll go on, to be sure. It's just a matter of how."

"We'll go on as if this hadn't destroyed us," my grandmother said.

My grandfather coughed, a dry, old-man's cough. Aunt Mane blinked furiously and turned to the window.

"I'm not sure that's possible," my mother replied, her hand in the small of my back, where my father's had been when we had danced, months before. "What's best for the children is what matters."

"Quite," said my grandfather at last, but vaguely, as though he had not heard my mother's words and wanted only to be on his way, out of his son's tainted living room and back within the safe gates of the Bellevue. "My retirement, it seems, was short-lived. I haven't been to the office for two days. I think, perhaps, I must—"

"Of course." My grandmother reached in her purse for the car keys. "I think—will you be all right?" She turned again to my mother, who glanced at me, and nodded.

"We'll be fine. You'll come for supper?"

"Naturally."

I remember those days as a grainy flickenng of curiosities: my aunt twisting her high heel in the mud at the cemetery and emitting an inappropriate yelp; Marie-Jo's voice on the telephone, which I recognized at once and pretended not to, saying of myself, "She's not here right now, but I'll have her call you back," before hastily hanging up; the twins stopping by with a casserole from their mother and all the notes from the classes I had missed copied out in their neat hands, doubtless in front of the television in the evening; the radiant sun rising day after day as if nothing had happened, the breeze kissing our cheeks and forearms in supreme indifference to our fate. One afternoon I hid in my father's closet, hunched on his shoes, wrapped my head in his suits, smelling him, the traitor cologne that I had taken for so long as proof of his adultery, now all that remained. One night I climbed into bed alongside Etienne and stretched my body out against his, curling my feet beneath his feet as if we were lovers, while he bucked, a little, and snorted in his sleep. And again, in bed, with my mother, at her request, aware that my back lay in the shallow left by my father's.

It was springtime. The first tourists were arriving, cheerfully oblivious. The water sparkled. The traffic on the main road whooshed and grunted as it always had. Daily I scanned the horizon for rising submarines, and saw none, and wondered if their absence was a sign. At my own wish, I returned to school after a week, surrounding myself with Aline and Ariane as if they were bodyguards, flinching so visibly at voices of sympathy that my fellows backed away. Instead of home, I haunted the twins' grim little house, putting off, and off, the return to our villa, where my mother, wan and frail, excelled as the widow.

She and I spoke a great deal, in the evenings. In honor of my father, she played his music on the stereo and sat, hollow-eyed, in her armchair, with her hands folded in her lap. We did not speak about him, although he was always with us, and although each of us struggled mightily with our guilt (Had we so hated him, then, and had he known it? What would it have meant to have loved him as we ought, not to have counted the cost of his sins and wished, so many times, that he would go?), we dwelt instead on the minutiae of our days, living as best we could as my parents together had lived, pretending. It was posed in this way, me on the sofa, but straight-backed, my feet firm on the floor like a soldier's, my mother opposite in her nacreous austerity, that the prospect of departure was first mooted.