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  Remembering

  When my father goes away on assignment for several weeks, we’re left alone with my mother in our apartment; I listen to Joe Dassin’s ‘L’été indien’, his voice is soothing.

  I’m scared of the wind in the trees, of the shadows on the walls of my room, of the visions I conjure in my mind: images that spring up unbidden, of monsters or souls in torment. I’m afraid my mother will suffocate while she sleeps and neither my sister nor I will be able to revive her, I’m afraid the man-beast will come back to harm her.

  I feel guilty but I don’t know how I’ve sinned.

  Becoming

  I become part of a group, Ely’s group, and my nights are transformed. To gain acceptance, I play the part of the writer, slightly disdainful.

  Ely is blonde with short hair, she wears Chanel suits, strings of pearls and Hermès scarves, and she won’t dance to anything but Bibi Flash or Chagrin d’amour songs.

  Ely drinks whisky, vodka, rum – anything to get drunk fast – she can’t afford to waste time. She’s bored; nothing really engages her, or very little, nothing surprises her any more; she sees into people’s hearts and minds, she knows all about life and, at the age of twenty-five, she’s already come to terms with death. She sometimes threatens to kill herself if she hasn’t found true love by the end of the year. But love is something she doesn’t believe in.

  I feel comfortable around Ely, crazy as she is. Her voice stands out, it guides me towards her as I thread my way through the night, through the forest of women.

  Remembering

  My sister and I record our voices on cassette tapes. We note the contents on every tape. Impressions: Dalida, Sylvie Vartan, Marie Myriam at Eurovision. Serials: ‘The Adventures of Colonel Irbicht’, ‘Parents Divorcing’, ‘Night of the Living Dead’. Goosebumps: wind in the trees, neighbours rowing. Nothing: us breathing.

  We invent a life inspired by our own and act it out. As the younger sister, I play the minor characters, but my voice drowns out my sister’s, flooding the soundtrack with its croaky timbre, damaged from too much shouting.

  Our cassettes go missing one day, even though we keep them in a special box. I picture the person finding them, imagine them trying to guess who we are from our far-fetched stories, our voices singing above the records playing on the chrome Hitachi turntable.

  The seventies are a world apart, much more than just an era. The seventies are another country, a place of no return.

  Remembering

  The place our mother calls our ‘spot’ in the Algerian countryside, the hidden footpaths, the haunted forest we venture deep into, songs of the djinns weaving through the trees, the forest from which I think we’ll never return, or only come back changed, the dry riverbed, bosom of nature, where we eat our picnics, wary of approaching storms that could cause the waters to rise in an instant and drown us all.

  My Algeria is a place of poetry, beyond reality. I’ve never been able to write about the massacres. I’m not entitled to, I can’t, I’m the Frenchwoman’s daughter. Ana khayif – I’m scared.

  Becoming

  Can women catch AIDS from each other, I wonder, is it transmitted by the hands, by saliva, or does it die quickly in contact with the air? No one talks about it, out of fear, ignorance, embarrassment. I keep it at the back of my mind as a threat, an imagining, something else to worry about.

  I use a torch and a magnifying mirror to inspect the inside of my mouth, my skin and mucous membranes, looking for a sore, a mark; I feel my armpits, my throat.

  I hunt down information on how it’s transmitted, I read everything I can about it, hungrily.

  In the gay community (I like these two words, they don’t so much belong to me as own me) only men are affected, decimated; apart from a couple of junkies there have been no cases of gay women afflicted by this disease they call the ‘gay plague’.

  The truth is that women are afraid to speak out.

  Knowing

  My Algerian grandmother used to call my mother the ‘Swede’, on account of her blonde hair, her fair skin and blue eyes.

  The first time she met her, she hugged her close, belly to belly, chest to chest, kissed her as she would her daughter. She stroked her face, her shoulders, her skin, told her she was beautiful, very beautiful, and what’s more, she had soft skin, so important in a woman; then she asked her not to wear a bikini any more when she went to the beach with men – it wasn’t done in Algeria, there are rules to be respected, relations between men and women follow strict guidelines.

  My father’s female cousins, seeing their hopes dashed, would happily have chopped my mother to pieces and eaten her, seasoned with salt and pepper.

  When packages arrived in the post – offerings of grapes, strawberries, pastries, cut flowers – my father threw them out, to protect against evil spells. He said there were women who could place curses on people by rolling couscous grains in a dead man’s hand and making gifts of the couscous.

  He tore up the letters too, for other people’s words are known to bring bad luck.

  Becoming

  I can’t separate the Kat from my first urge to write, as if the body’s yearnings, fulfilled or unfulfilled, provided a pathway to the world of the imagination, as if accepting and exploring a sexuality outside of the norm, discovering a new world, were a conduit to books, to words.

  I construct a bridge between two worlds, the world of Rue du Vieux Colombier and the world of pens, paper, typewriters. I go back and forth ceaselessly between the two, sinking and breaking free.

  I don’t know which holds more danger for me, the life I’m building or the life recreated, written about, altered sometimes, improved upon.

  Writing is an elixir – the act of writing soothes me, brings me happiness.

  Knowing

  When my mother met my father, the young French Muslim – as Algerians were referred to before 1962 – studying law and economics at the University of Rennes, she was dubbed ‘Khadija, the Arab’ by the other students.

  When she told her parents about him, she was suddenly cast as the interloper and ordered to leave the family home beside the Thabor gardens in Rennes.

  When she left with her suitcases, her father said on the doorstep: ‘You’re doing this to spite me.’

  When she arrived in Algeria after independence, she was blinded by the beauty all around her. She had to cover her eyes with a scarf after crossing the gorge at Palestro, where wild flowers had reclaimed what had once been a battleground.

  When she moved in to their small fifth-floor apartment in Algiers in 1963, the neighbour across the landing saw her with my sister in her arms and said: ‘I don’t wish to alarm you, Madame, I merely want to warn you. I see you have a baby. You should keep a close eye on your child. I’m a gynaecologist, you can’t imagine the things I see, the damage I have to repair.’

  Remembering

  In Rue Saint-Charles I lose my Algerian accent. I don’t want to draw attention to myself at school, among my classmates, I’ve already missed the beginning of term.

  By the end of October, my transformation is complete. I speak ‘normally’, I tie my hair back, I dress in blouses and tight velour trousers, black cycling shoes with leather laces, just like all the other girls in my year. I don’t answer any of the letters my friends in Algiers write to me, I’ll never see them again. I tear up the photos of our last school trip to the Roman ruins in Tipasa, then I tear up the pictures of my last summer at the Club des Pins, at Moretti Beach, Algiers Beach.

  I won’t let myself be held back by unhappiness. I’m fourteen years old and I’m erasing my past.

  Becoming

  Ely’s group accepts me straight away. I feel safer now that I meet up with the girls before we go out to the Kat. I’ve been followed twice recently, the same man both times, in a coat, with a hat. The walls of the city press down on me.

  I read about men and women who become ill from repressing their homosexual needs. Suppressing your urges is dangerou
s. It can lead to madness or violence of some kind. Like forcing blood to flow backwards through the body.

  I think about my French great-uncle who kept his lovers hidden throughout his short life, his affairs with sailors in the port city where he lived with his wife and children. I refuse to be like him. Secrets always come back to haunt you in the end.

  Ely invites us to her place in the 13th Arrondissement, an apartment she’s just bought with money from an inheritance. Her mother died. She drinks to forget what she calls her ‘personal tragedy’. We feel at home in her flat. Some of the girls stay the night, sleeping on the couch, on the floor.

  Ely has to have the lights on at night, with music playing, she’s afraid of the dark, afraid of being sucked in by the blackness and never coming back.

  Remembering

  In Algeria, I often fantasize about disappearing: in the field of daisies that grow to my childish height and clasp at me like carnivorous plants when I plunge into their midst; at our ‘spot’ in the countryside where, long after it became our favourite haunt, we found a well one day, hidden beneath the long grass.

  As we drive up to the ravine of the Femme Sauvage, I lean out of the window of my father’s black Renault 16 so I can take the wild woman of the legend by surprise as she kneels unseen on the rocks or clings to the tree roots. One day I think I catch a glimpse of her, her long hair covering her breasts. I dream of burying my head in her bosom, of disappearing inside her.

  In our apartment, my sister and I create a space from library to living room by leaving open the folding doors that divide the rooms; we spend our time there, playing ghosts.

  Real life frightens us more than the supernatural.

  Becoming

  Ely can’t cope with reality; that’s why she drinks.

  We’re walking to the Kat along Boulevard du Montparnasse and she starts thumbing a lift. She’s drunk. A police van pulls up but I refuse to get in, I carry on walking. I spend the whole night waiting for her to show up, worrying about her. Back at my flat, I’m convinced she’s been raped by the police and locked up in one of their cells. She doesn’t answer her phone.

  The next day, she calls me, offers no apologies: ‘I went to a bar with the cops, I lost track of time. You know the Tropicana? I’ll have to take you there.’

  Remembering

  My mother is driving her blue Citroën GS one day when she’s stopped by a gang of boys. They’ve stretched a wire across the road, she has to get out of the car. One of them beats her with a stick. As if on cue, the others all drop their trousers and taunt her with cries of ‘Filthy French bitch!’

  We’re at Le Français, the cinema on Rue Didouche-Mourad, watching Dance of the Vampires. Halfway through the film we have to get up and leave. A boy has put his arm round my shoulder, grabbed me by the neck and licked my ear.

  We come out of the cinema and my mother takes me to the Drugstore, a shop that’s just opened in the centre of Algiers, to buy me a toy by way of consolation.

  I choose a miniature skeleton.

  In the El Fellah bazaar, a man puts his hand on my mother’s crotch. She doesn’t react. She walks over to the supermarket shelves as if nothing has happened; maybe she’s ashamed, she knows I saw.

  At the till, she says: ‘I’ve learned how to ignore things for which there are no words. Without a name, nothing can exist. Do you understand?’

  Becoming

  It’s Tuesday evening, I’m at the bar in the Kat. I see her sitting at a table close to the dance floor. There’s a falling away – a falling away of space, light, music, the women around her. She draws everything in, or rather her body draws everything to her. It happens in an instant. I want her to be my first, like the opening scene in a film; her skin, her kisses will bring me good luck, she will be my talisman.

  She doesn’t stay. I feel bereft.

  Her name is Julia. That’s all I know.

  Remembering

  In Rue Saint-Charles, we go to the cinema with my mother three or four times a week. She says film is more powerful than real life, film takes life as its inspiration and transcends it. I have no idea what this means, I think it might be something to do with going into a trance.

  The careers adviser at Keller School gives us a form to fill in. To the question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I answer: ‘Film director.’ She glances through my file and, seeing my last name, she asks me: ‘Do you speak French at home?’

  Rue Saint-Charles doesn’t feel to me like exile. I need to become French again, as if I’d neglected my Frenchness in Algeria; there, nature was my world, nature was where I grew up, sleeping in poppy fields, feasting on flowers. I put all my faith in treetops, in the light glancing off the Mediterranean.

  France is an outfit I wear; Algeria is my skin, exposed to sun and storms.

  Remembering

  My mother says of Algeria, ‘I’m finished with this country,’ as if she were talking about the end of an affair, the fading of desire.

  The wind slams the doors and windows shut, bends the eucalyptus trees in the forest of the French Embassy whose gardens we share. My mother is standing outside beneath the awning: ‘I’ll be blown off my feet,’ she says. In my mind she’s telling us what she wants to do – to take to the skies and leave us behind.

  I place a bedside lamp on my desk, with a ream of paper, pencils and pens; I put on a white shirt and one of my father’s ties. He lets me pick one out when he’s home at the weekend, on Saturday evenings – Thursday evenings after the country adopts the Muslim calendar.

  I line up the words, one after another, and I play at being a writer, a male writer. It’s always a man I see.

  Becoming

  Ely never asks me to kiss her, she doesn’t find me attractive. ‘I’m not into Arabs. I know some people are crazy about them, not my thing though. I mean your skin’s nice and tanned in the summer, but it’s a bit sallow in the winter, know what I mean?’

  Ely knows all the girls. You only have to ask her for a name, first or last, an address, and she comes up with it on the spot. When she can’t actually remember something, she manages to get the information she needs from asking her ‘informers’ – no one can say no to her.

  Her friends divide into two categories: the girls she’s spent at least one night with and the ones she’s had a fight with; some girls belong to both groups.

  I don’t have to push Ely to give me Julia’s address. She warns me to be on my guard: ‘She’s not right for you.’

  Remembering

  I spy on my mother.

  I sometimes think of her life as a mystery I have to solve in order to throw some light on my own life, to help me to make more sense of it.

  The apartment in Algiers has several red-tiled balconies, the largest of them leading from our parents’ bedroom; a row of reeds protects it from view, but my mother never sunbathes naked out there, nor even in a swimming costume. She reads her books fully dressed, out of respect.

  She clutches her novels to her breast, she mustn’t be disturbed. She closes her eyes, and I have the feeling she and her books go to sleep together, skin to skin, as if the books were alive.

  She reads Yves Navarre, Jean-Louis Bory, Wilhelm Reich. She folds down the corners of the pages, underlines passages, breaks the spines of her books, opens them out as if they were bodies, spreading their limbs. She takes possession of them, rereads them, quotes them from memory, collects them.

  They devour every inch of space in the apartment, in the library, the bedroom, sometimes the kitchen. She thinks about them all the time. She doesn’t lend them, she gives them away, handling them as if they were her own skin and bone.

  From time to time, her friend Andréa comes over with a bottle of wine. They smoke, Dunhill or Kool menthol depending on what’s available, and listen to Joan Baez. Andréa has a secret we must never divulge: she’s a Black Panther. I think it’s probably illegal.

  The men – my father and Andréa’s husband – join them later in the
evening, when the sun has gone down and the wind is coiling itself around the eucalyptus trees.

  The men’s voices mingle with the tones of the two revolutionaries. I’m sure there’s a plot being hatched, we’re in danger, I’m an American in a film.

  Remembering

  There is such a thing as a gay childhood. My childhood. No excuses are needed. There’s no explanation. It simply is.

  There is a history to homosexuality, a story with roots and a territory of its own. Being gay isn’t a question of choice or preference, it simply is, just as blood has a type, skin has its colour, the body its dimensions, hair its texture. I see it as organic. The gay child is not lacking, she is different, outside of the norm, inside a normality of her own; not until later will she come to understand that her normality marks her out from others, condemns her to secrecy and shame.

  I have a special place in my family: I am the one who must not be deflected from the path I’ve chosen, I am the artist, I’m entitled to wear disguises, to dress as a boy, to cast aside my frocks, to skip meals, to dive into the waves when the sea is rough, to threaten to jump off the balcony when I feel I’ve been wronged – mostly by my father’s stern demands.