The Last Life Read online

  For my parents, this was the clanging of their prison door. But for me, two years old when they came home with him, my path was already chosen. We were the same, I decided, cooing over the silent bassinet and I, at least, would not abandon him. If he could not learn to speak, we would share what words I possessed. I would move for him, too, and bring home to him the smells of the park, the beach, the schoolyard. We would be fine. And from that moment, too, I despised him as much as I loved him: he was—he is—my limitation.

  My parents rose to their fate with Catholic dignity, against the advice of many—including, I was eventually to learn, their priest. We kept him and loved him, or tried to; and having chosen his name beforehand—now so inappropriate as to be laughable—they stuck with it, which is how my brother came to be called Etienne Parfait. To me, and when I spoke to him, he was phis-que-parfait, more than perfect, pluperfect, an irretrievable tense in the language he would never speak.

  5

  To interrupt my mother's lecture, I asked, knowing full well the answer, where he was.

  "Your brother is asleep," she said. "Of course."

  "And Papa?"

  "Your father had to go out."

  I nodded. I was tired, and so was she.

  "Listen, Sagesse," she ventured, in conciliatory French, her hand reaching to smooth my crumpled hair. "Don't do it again. Tell the others not to. I assure you, your grandfather ... it's not the best time. He's not ... Your father says things at the hotel are worse. Not business-wise, just ... Your grandfather is under a lot of strain. He's being difficult. For everyone?"

  "I understand."

  I didn't really understand. How could I, when all my days were ordered only by the weary pursuit of pleasure? I went up and kissed Etienne as he slept, the rasping suction of his breath a distraction from the irritation I felt with my parents. I cocooned his narrow, tousled head in the draped net of my hair and breathed in time with him, his smell of glycerine soap and faintly, too, of urine, mingling with my own of chlorine and sweat. I put my mother's warning away in the padlocked box in my head where I stored such information. That is to say, I forgot about it.

  6

  I had good cause to forget. In the days that followed I, my mother and father, the Bellevue crowd, the entire town—we were all distracted by a local event of sudden national importance. Our town, long waning in significance, ugly duckling of the Mediterranean coast, did not often merit mention in the faraway Parisian newspapers. Accustomed to provinciality, we went about our business as if we were invisible, occasionally puffed with resentment at the metropolitans, but blithely unaware that our own scrabbling tensions might have resonance beyond themselves. In this instance—in this summer bombing, or, more accurately, in this failure to bomb—we brought upon ourselves a scrutiny neither anticipated nor welcome.

  The morning after our unpopular swim, I trailed downstairs near nine to find my father still at home, eating his breakfast in a fan of sunbeams, the Figaro, zebra-striped by the light, held close in front of his shiny, new-shaven face.

  Slit-eyed with sleep, dressing-gowned, illicitly barefoot (shoes were a rule in our house, if only espadrilles), I muttered a greeting and drifted past him to the kitchen, where the tiles were cool on my soles. There, arms akimbo, my mother stood eyeing the toaster, in which her preferred—her American—pain de mie was audibly crisping.

  "Why's he still here?" I asked, filling a pot with water. "You want more coffee?"

  "He got in very late. I was asleep myself. Paperwork, something."

  I raised an eyebrow.

  "And then this tragedy..."

  "What tragedy? Not another heart attack?" The previous year a Bellevue guest had succumbed, in his bathroom, in an inelegant posture, to fatal angina.

  "The bombing. There's been a bombing."

  "Where?"

  "Here. In town. It's incredible. Right here."

  "Gosh." I tightened the belt of my dressing gown.

  "Just like Algiers, when he was a boy—it's the first thing he said."

  "What happened?"

  "It's in the papers. They're not entirely sure, but they think they know..."

  What they thought they knew at the start, which they eventually decided was fact, amounted to this: two young men and a young woman, locals, dirt ordinary, none of them over twenty, and the girl just eighteen, had built a pipe bomb in the basement of the home of one of the boys. The bomb had been intended, it appeared, for a nightclub much frequented by Arabs in the old quarter near the port. There was no doubt—given the young men's activities in the preceding months, including their disruptive attendance at a National Front rally and, more troubling still, their arrest for the random beating of a young Frenchman of Moroccan descent—what they were after. The girl, it was thought, was merely a girlfriend: her commitment to the nationalist cause was undocumented.

  In any event, the trio had paid for their malice with their lives. Whether the timer had been ineptly set, or whether the bomb had been too sensitively wired, tripped by a pothole or a sudden braking, they had exploded only themselves and their black Fiat Uno just outside the downtown shopping center at 1:12 a.m., as indicated by the frozen watchface belonging to one of the young men. The agitators were in pieces, as was their vehicle, and the road that had been beneath it, cratered like a small quarry.

  The mother of the dead girl, a leathery creature ravaged by smoke and drink, her hair in lank, bleached strings around her bony face, would inform the local paper—from which I gathered my information—that her daughter had never been in any kind of trouble, had had a sweet and gentle disposition, and had been—perhaps her greatest flaw—something of a follower. "She knew right from wrong," said her mother, "but she trusted people. She believed what she was told." She had been working for two solid years at the checkout of the central supermarket, where she was affectionately thought of by her colleagues of all races. This tragedy came as a terrible shock to her mother.

  On the very morning, it was also, clearly, a terrible shock to my father. When I jested, bringing my bowl of coffee to rest with both my hands, that there was slight cause for mourning—"The bad guys did themselves in, right? So, big deal"—my father looked at me over his newspaper with an unreadable expression, his eyes wide and sombre, his flesh scrubbed to gleaming, and rasped, "Don't talk about things you know nothing about."

  "Ex-cuse me." I rolled my eyes at my mother, who busied herself with the crumbs around her plate.

  "If you had seen what I've seen—" my father said. I knew, even at my tender age—even Etienne most probably knew, had he but been able to say so—that my father almost never referred to his youth, especially not to those dark years at its end, before he left Algeria for France, or certainly not in front of his children; and I thought, even hoped, that he might now say more. But he lapsed back into silence, his conditional clause hovering, tantalizing, in the air, then withdrew momentarily behind his newspaper, only to snap its pages into ragged folds and pull back from the table, sloshing the milk in its jug and causing a precariously balanced jam spoon to clatter stickily from its jar.

  "I'm late," he said. "I'll probably be late again tonight. Tomorrow's the Joxe dinner. And remember, the day after we're at Maman's."

  "How could I forget?" said my mother, who had licked the jammy spoon and stowed it on her plate.

  He kissed us, dry, perfunctory kisses. His face at rest bore—was it a tint, an angle, a shadow?—an indefinable mask of sorrow.

  My mother waited until she heard the engine of his black BMW, the crunch of the tires on the gravel drive, before she sprang up and proceeded to clear the table at great speed.

  "No time to waste. Etienne must be done with his bath. Magda will have him dressed soon. Chop chop!"

  "Where are you going?"

  "He's got his checkup at ten thirty, and then I thought he might like a walk along the promenade. You know how he loves the gulls. Want to come?"

  I shook my head.

  "Not much, eh? Y
ou used to dote on your brother."

  "I still do. For God's sake, stop picking on me. Is it a crime to want my own life?"

  "There's no need to use that tone with me."

  I sighed. She sighed.

  "I'm meeting Marie-Jo a bit later. I promised."

  "Lunch at your grandmother's, then?"

  "I told her yesterday."

  "Save Friday for me."

  "Okay. How come?"

  "Market downtown. I thought we might stop by the parjumerie and pick out a couple of lipsticks, one each, for the season."

  7

  On Friday I washed my hair for the outing, and braided it wet, knowing that at bedtime, unfastened, it would ripple down my back in rare wavelets, still damp.

  I loved our trips to the outdoor market. Usually my mother made hasty forays to its smaller sibling near the beach, a few umbrella-shaded stands in a parking lot, with only one or two of everything—one florist, one dairy stand, a single woman selling discount sheets and towels. It was handier for my mother when she had Etienne in the car: she could park, and leave him, and see him even as she filled her baskets. To go into town she had to leave Etienne with Magda, his nurse. It was an expedition, a treat, and she preferred to go with me.

  The town market stretched the length of a narrow street in the old quarter, running downhill from a small fountain near the shopping center to the plaza opposite the edge of the quay. The stands lined the asphalt on either side, and behind the stands, forgotten, lay the stores that remained even when there was no market, dusty, odd caverns selling Chinese herbal remedies, or curtain rods and broomsticks, or plate glass and mirrors cut to size.

  The visiting hawkers arranged themselves in front of these sleepy shopfronts in an implacable order prescribed by long tradition, mysterious to the uninitiated. There were vegetable men and fruit women and stalls selling both, blushing mounds of peaches alongside plump and purple eggplants, exuberant fronded skirts of frisée salads cozying next to succulent crimson cherries, pale, splayed organs of fennel pressing their ridged tubes and feathered ends up against the sugar-speckled, wrinkled carcasses of North African dates. There were florists whose misted anemones and roses glistened as if it were dawn, and the cheese vendors' ripe piles, wares which, from behind glass, leaked their fetid and enticing stinks out into the crowd. There were olive men and herb men, buckets of pungent rosemary and spiky bay leaves, cheesecloth sachets of lavender, blue bottles of rose and orange water, and teas for every ailment—for tension and bad skin and insomnia and constipation. There were tables of candlesticks and salad servers and pickle tongs; there were great strings of garlic and waxy pyramids of lemons. At the bottom, near the quay, the fishmongers sold their bullet-eyed, silver-skinned, slippery catch, blood-streaked fillets and orbed, scored steaks, milky scallops and encrusted oysters, all laid out on trays of ice in the morning sun, their rank fishiness rising in the air with the day's temperature; while opposite them, in their own corner, a family of young brothers hawked cheap women's clothes and glittering baubles, shiny earrings and gilded anklets, leopard-print leggings and lurid synthetic T-shirts with sequin lionesses, or fringed white vinyl jerkins with matching cowboy boots, all manner of sartorial novelties whose rampant success could be gauged from the ensembles of the women out shopping.

  We liked to start at the top of the street and walk down slowly, sniffing and pressing and sampling and chatting in the gentle current of fellow housewives, the odd runty husband or wizened grandfather as notable as the yapping dogs among us. It was, above all, a parade of women: young Arab mothers with kohl-lined eyes, their toddlers clutching at their knees; bosomy Mediterranean peasant matriarchs in tight nylon dresses, women as wide as they were tall, their bare arms hefty and marbled like prime cuts of pork; elegant African women in vibrant tunics, their hair elaborately turbaned, with enviably glossy skin and haughty almond eyes; gaggles of girls my own age, limning adulthood, feet squeezed into spike-heeled pumps, budding breasts outlined beneath scanty tops, mouths ageless slashes of wet color, more often than not twisting and grimacing to accommodate cigarettes or chewing gum or both at once. Whereas alone I might have smiled at such groups, begging tolerance if not approval, on my mother's arm I frowned, slightly, in their direction, as an oblique reassurance to her that I had no truck with such slatterns.

  We had not reckoned, that morning, on the bombers' funerals. We hadn't thought twice about it. Not that the funerals were to take place downtown, or anywhere near the market; but the nightclub, the avowed target (notebooks discovered at the bomb builder's home confirmed it), was only a few blocks from the stalls. There was, in the town, much sentiment and much of it divided on the matter of the bombing. In addition to the regular gamut of French citizenry, there were many, like our family, white refugees from Algeria, some of whom sympathized passionately with the bombers; and many harkis, who feared the rekindling of old tensions; and many more recent North African immigrants, suddenly terrorized and enraged. As if to set fire to this dry tinder, the National Front (how like my mother, I note in retrospect, not even to have been aware of it!) had dispatched representatives to the funerals, a delegation from out of town to march in solidarity with the girl's mother and the other grieving parents. They weren't quite calling the dead youths heroes, but the phrase "Marts pour la France" had been bandied about and indeed was already, as we would have seen had we but wandered the alleys behind the market, spray-painted, along with swastikas, on the brickwork and stucco throughout the predominantly Muslim neighborhood.

  We had not thought of it, and did not think of it, but as we ambled into the fray at the top of the market street we could detect, in the air, something askew. The shoppers leaned in to one another in their discrete groupings, with a corresponding edging away—so very slight—from those who were different. Some stallholders held hissed conversations; some pointedly ignored their neighbors. Even the market's children seemed knowingly subdued.

  My mother, in her careful attire, her Vuitton bag on her arm, her chignon tight, did not resemble many of the other market-goers. It was not that, on that day, her un-Frenchness showed; rather, it was a matter of too successful an emulation of a certain type of Frenchwoman. We detected, in our slow and cheery perusal of the tables, a certain frost from their attendants, but attributed it to the fact that we looked too long and bought too little.

  It was the olive woman halfway down on the right who surprised us: the olive woman next to the stall selling only Spanish melons. We lingered in front of her display, eyeing and sniffing the briny, garlicky, slick smell of the olives. She had fat green ones speckled with red chilis, and tight oval kalamatas, and little withered oil-cured black ones like oversized raisins, and tiny, slivery brown ones that looked more like pips than olives, and great bowls of tapenade, both green and black, and bowls, too, of anchoiade, pure salt, which I loved. My mother and I debated, sotto voce, which treats to carry home. My mother wanted to taste one type of olive she did not know—spherical, large and almost red—but the olive woman's evil glare dissuaded her.

  The olive woman was vast, her shelf of bosom quivering beneath a fading black T-shirt, her moon-pale, dimpled arms crossed over her belly. Her black hair was hacked around her puffed cheeks, and her chin, a great bony jut in her flesh, resisted gravity's pull into the billowing cushion of her neck. Above her lip quivered a dark caterpillar of moustache, which rendered her more, rather than less, frightening. Her eyes, shiny as her blackest olives, glittered hostility.

  My mother, all grace, asked merely how long the reddish olives might keep in the refrigerator.

  To which the woman, summoning her bulk, replied, "You're not from here, are you?"

  My mother shook slightly as she insisted, "Yes, I am."

  "No you're not. I've not seen you here before."

  "I shop at the other one, the little market, by the beach."

  The olive woman snorted. "If you live here, where do you live?"

  "Up the corniche. On the hill."

/>   "Oh yeah? What street? Name it. I bet you can't. Name it."

  My mother, who had been in retreat from the outset, stopped. "I don't think that's any of your business."

  "Maybe not. All right. It's how you're dressed." The olive woman's mouth was set in a grim little gape. She did not have all her teeth. "I thought you were with them. Flown in to make trouble."

  "With 'them'?" repeated my mother, mystified.

  "With the National Front. The way you're dressed. Here for that funeral. Are you sure you're not with the National Front?"

  My mother shook her head in sharp, insistent little shakes as she backed away from the olive woman and her wares. It seemed to me that the people around us were cocking their ears, listening without wishing to appear that they were, guarding their opinions but preparing, if necessary, for a fight. As my mother retreated, and I with her, sinking into a hole made for us by the crowd, the olive woman glared, and raised phlegm, with a harsh ratcheting, in her throat. She spat vigorously onto the mucky pavement. "That's what I think of the National Front," she called after us.

  My mother trembled; she was almost teary.

  "Don't let it bother you," I assured her, tucking my arm in the crook of hers as we resumed our downhill course. "She was a crazy lady."

  "It's her intensity that surprised me," my mother said. "She was so angry, but why?"

  "Because you're dressed nicely, that's all. Let it go, Mom. What are you going to do, buy your clothes here in the market just to please her?"

  My mother brightened at the notion. "A red sequin mini-skirt and go-go boots—what do you think?"