The Last Life (2 page)

I could have begun with my brother, as easily as I could with the night when the sharp reports of my grandfather's rifle sundered the family (although they did this not immediately: rather, they established the hairline cracks that worked more insidiously and perhaps more lastingly than would a neater, more decisive action). For that matter, I could have begun with my parents, with their meeting, in a café in Aix-en-Provence one April afternoon, when the sun was sinking and the parade of eccentrics, in imitation of the metropolis, marched the boulevard like puppets in a theater for the sole benefit of this eager young American, on a year's release from her women's college where the turbulence of the decade had failed to stretch its tentacles, and of the handsome (so he was, she tells me), gallant young Frenchman who leaned forward to watch the delight in my mother's eyes. They were particularly entranced by the septuagenarian with platinum curls who made her daily way along the sidewalk, on tiptoe, swinging pink ballet slippers over one shoulder and clutching a miniature poodle, whose curls matched her own, to her breast.

Or, indeed, I could have begun with the squalling of my own birth, which occurred at the time of the fall of Saigon, a matter of record for each of my parents in their different ways. For my father because his colonial blood led him to grieve at the ultimate loss of another former outpost of French glory, when the final anguished battles of his own vanished Algeria were little more than ten years past. Whereas my mother—whose interest in and grasp of the political were always vague at best—saw the moment in a rush of nostalgia for America, that vast and only intermittently familiar territory, in pain and internally divided as she, in exile, was herself. She hailed, after all, from the rolling comfort of rural Massachusetts, and had never expected, just as America had not, to find herself so confused: in short, she identified. And yet somehow I, slippery and screaming, would grow up believing that none of it—not war, not America, not the old woman swinging her ballet shoes with such false carelessness—had anything to do with me. Stories are made up, after all, as much of what is left out.

Why was my brother's birth the more significant, when I already crawled in my playpen, my parents' grave error made flesh? Because some things are truer than others, more inescapable, less dependent on the mad or imagined confluences of the mind. And what happened at my brother's birth was one of these inescapable things. Those precious minutes between the first wrenching push that propels the infant's head downwards, out of the womb, and its arrival into the brutal fluorescence that marks the beginning of its life—in my brother's case, those precious minutes bled and fed into another, longer, more terrifying gap, in which the doctor and the midwife panicked, and presumably my gasping brother also, trying as hard as they could, all of them, my mother too, desperate but unknowing, to drag him into the world. Perhaps he himself hesitated, sensing the agonies before him, feeling that he would not, could not, go ahead with life. He cannot tell us. Deprived too long of oxygen, his tiny limbs, blued, curled in upon his torso, his waving baby's neck slackened, and his mind ... who knows where his mind went, or where it is, or whether it rages still behind his grinning eyes? He relinquished in those precious moments all possibility of language: nobody will ever know what Etienne may think, as he hunches, strapped at the waist and again at the chest, convulsing cheerfully in his wheelchair, a thin, glistening trail of spit always reaching like a wet spider's web towards the ground. The doctors, almost immediately, pronounced him incapable of motor coordination and severely mentally retarded: little more than a vegetable, by the reckoning of the world.

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.

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.

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? You 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."

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.