All Men Want to Know Read online

  I come down with unexplained fevers a couple of times a year: fevers of a mind running amok.

  At the primary school in Hydra, I overhear two playground supervisors talking about me: ‘The worst of it is that the parents know and do nothing about it.’

  Remembering

  My father finds a painting in an antique shop, a portrait of a shepherdess on a piece of card so battered the artist’s signature can’t be made out. My mother has it framed, convinced she has the work of an orientalist painter in her possession.

  The little shepherd girl is wearing a traditional Kabyle dress with blue and red patterns, she has bracelets on both wrists, curly hair; the look in her eyes is so sweet it can move you to tears. Eyes that draw you into the depths of her soul.

  ‘I bought it because she looks so fragile,’ my father says, ‘just like you.’

  Knowing

  When my parents first met in Rennes, my French grandfather, who was friends with the police commissioner, asked for my father to be investigated.

  A plain-clothes police officer followed my father in the morning as he left his student accommodation and in the evening when he went back home from the library or the university campus.

  My grandfather wanted to know if my father was a political activist, if he was indoctrinating my mother. He found nothing, but he still went to see the dean with a request for the young man to be sent back to where he came from.

  They asked my grandfather to please leave the premises or they’d call a security guard and have him forcibly removed.

  Remembering

  My mother: ‘I didn’t say anything to my parents about our wedding. We were married in the Mairie in Rennes, I was pregnant with your sister. We went to a restaurant to celebrate afterwards; I think I look sad in the photographs, it’s mostly men round the table and no one’s drinking wine. Some of those Algerian students changed once they went back to Algeria: they treated their wives differently, wouldn’t let them leave the house. Your father was never like that, quite the opposite, I had to persuade him to spend more time with us at home – like a bird of passage.’

  Becoming

  Parties at Ely’s place are preludes to our nights at the Kat. Her flat is where we get ready to go out; we drink to steel ourselves for the waiting, the fake merriment, the disappointment and craziness of the night, for the harsh reality of the morning, when we’ll have no choice but to say ‘who are we kidding, let’s go home’, tired and worn out from all the drinking.

  We pass round a bottle of poppers, the quickest way to fry your brain cells according to Ely. There’s a man who sometimes meets us at Ely’s, a man in his fifties, we call him the Antique Dealer. I don’t think that’s what he really is, I don’t ask – he looks a bit like a pimp. Night is a time for masquerades.

  We arrive at the Kat and I look for Julia, the girl I’ve only seen once. I lie in wait for her, hour after hour, I focus on her, like a picture, a dream. She’s not real anyway, she doesn’t know who I am, what I want from her.

  As the night goes on, Julia’s image coalesces, merging with the faces of all the women at the Kat, taking something from each woman, her complexion, her colouring, the texture of her skin, creating the ideal face, the face of my fantasy.

  I go home disappointed that I haven’t seen her, almost resenting her.

  I have her address, Ely gave it to me: 54 Rue de la Roquette. My head spins at the prospect of making my way over to the other side of the river; from a mere nothing, I’m conjuring an affair.

  Remembering

  Baya, the painter, is a friend of my mother’s. She’s tall, very skinny, with hands as fine as the paintbrushes she wields to create her women, women with zithers, birds, fish, their flower-print dresses billowing up on the wind I imagine whipping through the patio of her house in Blida, where we go to visit her once a month.

  She squeezes lemons in her kitchen while we wait in the living room for her to reveal her latest paintings to us.

  In my mind’s eye, I see her adding a few drops of her own blood to my juice, to infect me with her talent.

  Remembering

  ‘The chamber of the winds’, as my sister and I call it, in the apartment in Algiers, harbours countless secrets. Light and air filter in through latticework screens. Sheets hanging on the line smell of laundry soap and Ourdhia’s perfume. Ourdhia looks after us. She coats herself with musk after bathing, squatting on her haunches in the washroom. She undoes her braid, lets her hennaed hair fall down her back. When I walk in on her and find her naked, she pinches the skin around her hips, on her belly, looks at me and laughs as she says: ‘Look at these breasts of mine, nothing but scraps.’

  Becoming

  There’s an odd couple in Ely’s group: Lizz and Laurence. They live together in a tower block in the Chinese quarter, they never kiss in public, they’re discreet, embarrassed by what they are, by what they represent – strength and fragility.

  They watch from inside their bubble, listening in silence to the others; they get up from the table to dance to Prince’s ‘Kiss’.

  On the dance floor, their bodies seem broken.

  Laurence has a lost look. Her gaze never lingers on the girls in the Kat, nor on the male guests when we stay late at Ely’s. She takes no pleasure in her own beauty, never ceases to abuse it, never grants any respite to her ravishing body.

  She leans on Lizz, who steers their relationship recklessly, uncaringly – or so rumour has it. Laurence does speed, Es, coke, downers, uppers – you’d think she was a dealer from the way she talks, a dealer or a pharmacist.

  Remembering

  My mother and I can’t help but become like a married couple in Rue Saint-Charles; I need to break away.

  I go skating at Trocadéro, Montparnasse, the Main Jaune, Porte de Champerret. Moments to myself, carved out from my mother’s time – apartment, breakfast, lunch, dinner, chatting in the living room, going to sleep, waking up, sharing the household tasks, the drudgery, shopping in Monoprix, outings to the movies, going for walks – stolen time, a way out of childhood.

  I set myself free, take risks. I fracture my collarbone on the railing at the skating rink. Alone on the bus back to Rue Saint-Charles, I sit clutching my dislocated arm like one of those dolls you take apart and put away in the cupboard when they’ve served their purpose.

  I’m punishing myself for deserting my mother.

  Remembering

  Towards the end of 1979 a rumour spreads in Algiers: there’s a gang on the lookout for people celebrating Christmas, they have names, denunciations have been made. When Christmas is over people hide their trees in their car boots and dispose of them out of town, like corpses in detective films.

  On the streets of Algiers there are more and more women wearing hijab – Iranians, we call them. Older women stick to the traditional white veil that flies up in the wind, revealing skin, flesh, beauty.

  Ourdhia doesn’t cover herself in the street, she refuses to give in; she’s not afraid of the gibes, the insults.

  She takes me in her arms and I burrow into her shoulder as she kisses my eyelids, ‘Ya waladi, ya waladi’ (oh my child, my child). Ourdhia reassures me. She has the strength of a woman who’s not afraid of men’s violence.

  She lives alone with her son, something that’s frowned upon in her neighbourhood. She says her husband has joined the army, his unit is planting trees on the edge of the Sahel to hold back the desert. She’s made this story up for her son, I know what really happened: she ran away from Sétif where they lived. He used to beat her.

  Ourdhia is a believer. She says she doesn’t need to hide her skin, her hair, to be a virtuous woman, that’s not what religion is about, there’s more to it than that – religion is kindness and forgiveness, these are the things that matter most. And morality too: no stealing or killing; lying is allowed, just a little, especially for children, so long as they apologize afterwards.

  I watch unseen as she prays, kneeling on her prayer carpet, hands raise
d. Her fervour is palpable and I’m envious of it. She’s part of a world I don’t know, a world that seems kinder than mine.

  I’m searching for a direction, one that’s not mapped out for me. My mother talks about death, she says it’s a release – after death, there’s nothing.

  Becoming

  I come back from the Kat at night and write. I write to absolve myself of my homosexuality. I write to be loved.

  I dream of being recognized, of books as bulwarks.

  It will be years before I can rid myself of the fantasy that words can protect, mend what is broken, make everything better.

  Remembering

  Our grandparents in Rennes are dentists, they give us ‘check-ups’ when we go and stay with them; my grandfather looks after my ‘baby teeth’, my grandmother takes charge of my sister’s, whose case she considers more complicated: ‘Such lovely teeth, so badly treated over there.’ By ‘over there’, she means: that uncivilized, distant place, those backward, inferior, foreign people – our country, us.

  Almond trees in bloom, bouquets of mimosa, the creeks and inlets of Cherchell Beach and Bérard, the Atlas Mountains, the sea of dunes on the road to Timimoun, the dense, impenetrable, eternal beauty of ‘over there’. What does my grandmother know of all this? Nothing, she knows nothing. She’s lying.

  We have blood tests, urine tests, our reflexes are checked, we’re weighed, measured, examined, felt; they’re determined to find something wrong, they must find something.

  I’m paraded naked before a doctor: he checks my back to make sure my spine is erect and correctly aligned, my knees functioning as they should, my arches supple – a colt being vetted.

  Becoming

  Ely wants to write. She’s decided on the title of her book: Confessions of an Alcoholic Woman. She always rings me in the early afternoon, when she’s on her own; she hates silence, she needs to talk. I let her speak uninterrupted.

  She misses her mother, she wishes she’d kissed her when she was dying, but she was afraid she’d wake up and kiss her back – the Devil’s kiss. ‘Now that I have a roof over my head, I’m drinking away my inheritance. I’ll drink it down to the last drop, I’ll get rid of all my fears and anxieties, once and for all.’

  She isn’t enrolled at the university, she doesn’t work. I’m afraid her idleness will infect me. I ease my conscience when I skip my classes at Assas by telling myself: I have a novel to write, I need time to get my life in order, my new gay life (this is the label I give it, to help me accept myself, affirm who I am); I make promises to myself to move ahead, to experience life.

  I try to work out the best way to approach Julia if I see her, I act out the scene in front of my bathroom mirror, knowing that my shyness will destroy any plan I make. I picture myself writing her a letter, I have her address after all, then I change my mind, terrified that she might reply, that someone might open my mail while I’m out, the postman, a neighbour, the concierge.

  When Ely invites me to her place for tea, I say no, I don’t want to get any closer to her, she scares me, her lack of self-control; I have limits she’ll never be able to respect. Ely has a bad reputation and I don’t want her ruining mine, even though I’m still a complete unknown, a hanger-on, a part-time member of the group – when there’s one fight too many I disappear for days on end.

  I don’t belong to anyone.

  Remembering

  In the gardens of our apartment block in Algiers, there’s an electricity substation hidden away at the entrance to a dirt road that leads to a platform we call ‘the terrace’, a square of smooth stone exposed to the sun, encircled by greenery.

  Boys and girls gather there, lying on top of one another like crocodiles, soaking up the energy of the sun, the warmth of the stone.

  People say there are cables running beneath the terrace that send out electrical impulses; they don’t hurt but you can feel their vibrations. They fortify the blood, transform it.

  I catch my sister there.

  Concealed in the bushes, I watch as she is transformed before my eyes, set free from our childhood. How I envy her.

  Remembering

  Everything in Algeria seems strange, because of the war, because of the blood spilled on the land, in the fields, beneath the arches of the Roman ruins high on the cliffs above the sea. Violence is etched into the land, unending violence.

  My mother says Algeria is an accursed land, that’s why she loathes it as much as she loves it.

  She’s found a way to go on loving Algeria and still feel safe there: she escapes from the city. She claims the people from the south are kinder, that we have much to learn from the Tuaregs.

  She organizes our trips, decides where she wants us to stay; my father phones the mayor of every wilaya, every district on our route. He tries to talk her out of taking the Citroën GS, he says we should fly.

  We set off, my mother, my sister and I, with friends, the same ones usually: Henri, the cultural attaché at the French Centre, his Italian wife, Paola, and their son, Giovanni. Ali and his mother come too.

  Ali and I have been friends since primary school, he lives in a house down the road from us. We’re two of a kind, doubles almost – it upsets us that we aren’t perfect doubles. We have a tendency to fuse together into one person, which worries his mother: she’s afraid Ali will turn gay from associating with me.

  My father oversees our preparations, and then flies off to North America and Venezuela. We don’t know where he’s staying nor when he’ll come back – this is how my parents work as a couple: by retaining an element of mystery.

  Remembering

  ‘We’ll never know what the ingredients of love are, how people are put together,’ my mother says when I ask her what happiness means to her. ‘The truth is that you can never really know another person, there are always surprises, both good and bad: reality sets in, stronger than the relationship itself, stronger than desire, the spell of being in love wears off. You have to be able to accept it: life isn’t a dream, we aren’t here on this earth for a life of constant pleasure; it’s the difficult times that matter, much more than the lighter moments.’

  Remembering

  I open the mailbox and recognize my French grandmother’s writing on the envelope. She always writes in the same blue ink, indigo, I see it on the cheques she sends us for the birthdays and Christmases we don’t spend in France.

  My mother reads the letter aloud.

  My grandmother writes about her new holiday home, the spring and autumn tides, walks by the sea with her dachshund, the cliffs at La Varde, her days at work that she’s finding more and more tiring; she wants to retire, her legs hurt, her knees, her wrists; staring inside other people’s mouths all day is no way to live.

  Sometimes she slips a hundred-franc note in the envelope, even though she knows it can’t be converted to dinars.

  My grandmother loves my mother in her own way, like a child one no longer understands and keeps at arm’s length. She says she’ll help her daughter as soon as our mother decides she’s had enough of this country; my grandmother is convinced it’s making her unhappy.

  My grandmother has never accepted my father. She doesn’t give her reasons, the real reason, she just doesn’t accept him; it’s a physical thing, and cultural too – ‘Why couldn’t you have married a boy from here?’ Algiers is too far away for her liking. On the rare occasions she does come and visit she feels out of place, as a woman, a Frenchwoman. ‘The poverty here is not pretty,’ she says.

  She fears for us, her two granddaughters, she’s sure our growth is affected by the heat, by our diet.

  I have difficulty drawing up a family tree, a ‘tree of love’ as some call it. The branches of my tree don’t flower, or if they do, the blossoms appear on the wrong branches, as if they’ve migrated, bloomed from the soil or on a branch not meant to bear flowers.

  This is how I feel about my French family, it doesn’t work, it never will; it makes me uncomfortable, as if I’m outside my real self
, as if I’ve failed to love my whole self.

  I feel the same with my Algerian family. I hardly know them. They live four hundred kilometres from Algiers, you have to drive along the coast road towards Petite Kabylia, in the east. My Algerian grandmother doesn’t speak French, I don’t speak Arabic, our only link is her tenderness, her hands in mine, in my hair, on my shoulders, her kisses on my forehead, her smiles; but this gentleness is beyond me, I don’t know what it means, I don’t know if it’s an expression of love or a way of apologizing for being so unlike us, for not wanting to be like us.

  We are so very different.

  Becoming

  I go over to Julia’s neighbourhood, Bastille. In the metro I look around, in search of a girl or a boy like me; I don’t see any.

  I’ll have to get used to this new form of isolation: to being unlike other people. I don’t know if I’ll be able to bear having to hide, to lie, the fragility this engenders. It can drive you mad – living a double life.