The Last Life (3 page)

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?"

"I think I'd stick to buying fish."

That evening we went to my grandparents' apartment for supper. It was always a production to take Etienne there, because the Bellevue, and in particular its staff block, had not been designed with wheelchairs in mind. No matter which path one took—whether around the main drive, past the main hotel and the pool, in a wide loop, or straight up from the gate to the back parking lot and the staff building beyond—there were steps. My mother and I together could lift Etienne in his chair, but the effort made both of us bead with sweat, and soiled our hands and rumpled our blouses, and my grandmother would silently frown upon us. Carting Etienne was much easier when it was my father and me—or better yet, my father and one of the gardeners, or Zohra, my grandparents' maid.

That day, however, my father had gone straight from his office in the hotel to the apartment, so my mother and I panted and struggled while Etienne, drooling onto his fine white shirt, bucked and crowed and tried to reach for our hair or our arms or our shiny necklaces, and we all arrived at my grandparents' door flushed and dishevelled.

"Come in,
chéris,
" urged my grandmother from within her cloud of Guerlain (a particular perfume concocted, appropriately enough, for the empress Eugénie). Even though we were the only supper guests, an evening
en famille,
she had powdered and rouged, had draped her neck with jewels and her body in flowered silks. "The men are just sorting out the drinks."

Apéritif was ritual at these family gatherings: even Etienne had his cup of orange juice, a special red plastic cup that had a lid with a straw in it, so that his dribbling could be more or less controlled.

I hadn't seen my grandfather since before the swimming pool incident, although my grandmother had roundly chastised me on his behalf the following day. I wasn't certain whether to apologize directly, to clear the air but possibly to elicit an indignant tirade, or to pretend nothing had happened and hope for the best.

In the living room, my father and my grandfather stood side by side watching a fleet of little sailboats tack across the vista, back towards the port, as the early evening colors, soft and roseate, fell like dust over the receding rocky headlands and the great bowl of the sky. Both men held their hands clasped behind their backs; both allowed their lower lips to ride up slightly over their top ones, in a vaguely smug expression, as if the splendid view were of their making, the bonny white blips of sail a diversion solely for their pleasure.

There the resemblance faltered. My grandfather stood a head shorter than his son, a dapper man in an old-fashioned suit with a blue handkerchief at the pocket. His frame was slight and his face, animate, almost ugly, seemed too big for his body. His nose loomed imposing and bulbous above his broad mouth. His ears, too, were large and fleshy, their pink lobes disproportionately pendulous. He was fairskinned, greyed, his tonsured locks cropped close. My father, swart, bulky and hairy beside him, emanated excess. Formerly muscled, he was now merely fleshy in the shoulders and neck, with a second chin sagging, incipient, below the first. Dark curls crept down his nape and under his collar, from beneath his cuffs along the backs of his hands—like a werewolf, I had teased him when I was younger, until my mother told me he was ashamed of his hairiness. My father's eyes were large and profusely lashed, but these were his only outsized feature: his nose was fine and straight and of medium length (his mother's nose); his mouth was a sensuous but restrained bow; and his ears—he was proud of his ears—lay small and flat, as if asleep, along the outline of his skull. The two men looked at once utterly different and the same, in their attitude before the ocean.

"Surveyors of the beyond?" inquired my grandmother with a brittle hoot, jangling her bangles. "Will neither of my men pour us a tiny little glass of port? We're parched!"

We assembled in our specific places around the coffee table, my father and grandfather in facing armchairs, my mother and I on the sofa—which was particularly high, or deep, so that we both had to choose between dangling our feet above the ground and perching at the front of the slippery cushions: I always chose the former and she the latter—and my grandmother, with Etienne parked at her side, closed the circle, in a tapestry chair with carved legs and futile little armrests: a lady's chair.

Before sitting, I kissed my grandfather hello. He seemed preoccupied, and registered no displeasure. Indeed, he seemed barely to register who I was. But then, when drinks had been poured and I was quietly crunching potato chips from a blue bowl, I caught him frowning at me, his eyebrows, ever exuberant (their hairs were very long), working, as if the sight of me in the middle distance had provoked an aggravating memory.

My grandmother was telling a story about an aging Italian opera singer who had visited the hotel every year for a decade—a woman we all knew, who wore grand, flowing tunics and who annually pinched my cheeks between her curiously strong fingers—when my grandfather interrupted her.

"Our country, in this time, has a problem of manners," he began. "It is not a uniquely French problem—indeed it stems, in part, I, like many, would contend, from the influence of your country"—he nodded at my mother—"although not, naturally, from your own gracious influence. What preoccupies me, however, as a nationalist—and I'm not afraid to say it, implying thereby only a love and a reverence for my nation, culture and history above all other nations, cultures and histories, which is perfectly natural and in no way implies disrespect for those others—anyway, as a nationalist and a Frenchman, I am concerned with the manners and mores of this country, and of our people. And it seems to me—" here his roving, appropriative gaze, which had been sliding like oil around the assembly, and beyond, to the Provençal plates on the wall and the darkening corner of sea he could distinguish from his chair, came to rest upon me—"that the loss of certain basic courtesies among our citizens, and among our youngest citizens above all, does not, of itself, comprise the fairly innocent informality that well-intentioned liberals would have us believe. No. It is, I am convinced, a symptom of a far-reaching and truly distressing cultural collapse, one in which the individual places his own will and desire above the common good in ways we, who are now aging, would have considered unthinkable. Rudeness is, I argue, a symptom of the profound anarchy that our culture currently faces but refuses to acknowledge, a chaos in which everyone has lost sight of his place in a natural—or rather, civilized, which is far greater a compliment than the natural, civilization being what distinguishes us from mere beasts—hierarchy. What motivates good behavior—" He paused and sipped his scotch, with a slurp rendered louder by our silence; even Etienne, whose eyes rolled to the ceiling and whose feet twitched, sensed that our grandfather's discourses demanded attention. "What motivates good behavior and what motivates excellence are the same thing: fear. Fear of God, fear of the rod, fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of pain. And that is a fact. And in our society, today, nobody is afraid of anything. Shame, rebuke, imprisonment—none of it means anything to anyone. Kids need to be taught," he said, looking now at my father, who managed to meet his gaze without apparently seeing him, "that their actions have repercussions, real ones. Kids should be a lot more afraid than they are."

"Not just kids," I said, nodding and licking the salt from my lips.