Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

The story of Bourg had impressed me so much that I had asked Gino to teach me to read and write, just as Rémi and Lucette, Xavier’s children, had once taught me arithmetic … And then there had been that one mistake and everything had come crashing down. Since my stupid question , I didn’t know what to do with my evenings. Sometimes, without realising it, I caught myself walking up and down Boulevard Mascara. I would see the light on in Gino’s room and wonder if he too was thinking of me, if he missed me as much as I missed him. Sometimes, driven by an irresistible urge, I would stop outside the door of his house, on the verge of knocking on it, but didn’t dare go further. I was afraid he would close his heart to me once and for all.

Pierre could see how unhappy I was. To keep my mind off Gino, he undertook to wear me out with jobs as exhausting as they were badly paid. In the next few months, he made me do all kinds of things. I was in turn a shop assistant, a stable boy, an upholsterer, a wafer seller, a delivery boy and a coalman. I never did the same job two weeks in a row. Pierre would negotiate my wages without any concern for the trials he was inflicting on me. He would pick me up from my home, leave me at work, pick me up at the end of the day and relieve me of half my pay. When he had nothing for me, he would abandon me. I could knock at his door but he wouldn’t open. If I insisted, he would come out onto the balcony and yell at me. After quarrelling with Gino, I hated him for treating me like that. My pride was hurt, and I decided I wouldn’t take the bait any more. After a few instances of ‘insubordination’, he was the one who started running after me. Now I didn’t open my door to him. I’d look at him from the balcony and ignore his efforts to tempt me. He’d scratch his head, pretending to think, then offer me all kinds of benefits. He’d promise me the moon, but I’d just shake my head.

‘Be reasonable, Turambo. I’m your lucky star. Without me, you won’t go far. I know it’s hard, but we have to stick together. One day, thanks to me, you’ll stand on your own two feet.’

‘I can already stand, thank you.’

‘No, really, what is it you want from me?’

‘A real job. I don’t care what it is as long as it’s steady,’ I said in a firm tone. ‘I’m tired of going all over town for peanuts.’

He shook his head, unable to think of any more interesting propositions. ‘Can we still share everything fifty-fifty?’

‘That depends.’

*

Pierre introduced me to Toto La Goinche, who owned a shabby café nestling at the foot of Santa Cruz, below an old Spanish fortification. Toto was an unassuming man in his forties. When we arrived, he was carving up a pig in the courtyard of his establishment, a butcher’s apron over his naked chest. He asked me if I knew how to keep a register and I told him I didn’t. He asked me if I could hold my tongue and I told him I could. Those were the right answers.

He agreed to give me a week’s trial, without pay.

Then a second week to make sure he hadn’t backed the wrong horse; still without pay.

At last, he welcomed me into his fraternity.

In truth, the café wasn’t really a café, the kind you found dozens of on the outskirts of the city, but a clandestine brothel, a seedy inn stinking of adulterated hooch where elephantine whores lured sailors with strange accents and skilfully fleeced them after a botched attempt at lovemaking.

The first few days, the place gave me the shivers. It was in a dead-end alley overflowing with rubbish where, miraculously, cats and dogs amicably shared the contents of the dustbins and drunks got into fights over nothing. The owner, who believed in a certain decorum, wouldn’t stand for arguments under his roof, but was happy for disputes to be settled behind the courtyard, on a strip of earth leading to a precipice. Whenever things looked like ending in bloodshed, Toto would call on the services of Babaye, a huge ex-convict from the Sahara, a man so black you could barely make out the tattoos on his body. Babaye didn’t have an ounce of patience and didn’t bother to reason with the warring parties, who’d be yelling at each other and brandishing their knives; he would grab them both by the scruff of the neck, knock their heads together and dump them on the ground, certain they wouldn’t be heard from again before daybreak.

It wasn’t the fights that bothered me — I’d seen enough of them in Graba. The urban animals I feared were the women who worked there, like crocodiles in troubled waters; they were terrifying with their hair in curlers, their faces marked by degradation, dripping with cheap make-up, their eyes black with bad kohl and their mouths so red they might have been dipped in a bowl of fresh blood. They were strange, disturbing, syphilitic creatures, with their bare breasts and their hemstitched basques pulled up over their buttocks; they smoked like chimneys and belched and farted constantly; they were fierce and vulgar, misshapen by the age of thirty but still reigning supreme over the bestial desires of men. They smelt of rancid butter by day and cold sweat as soon as night fell. When they weren’t pleased, they would hit out at random, even throwing their clients out of the window and then drawing the curtains without a second thought.

I was determined not to go anywhere near them.

I slogged away in the basement while they were hard at work upstairs, and that was fine by me.

My work consisted of clearing the tables, emptying the chamber pots, washing the dishes, taking out the dustbins and holding my tongue — because strange things went on in that place. It wasn’t just girls in distress who were picked up in doorways, dying of hunger, and brought to the brothel: there were boys too.

At first, I didn’t pay any attention to what went on in slow motion in the damp and the dark. While the staff were busy assessing the vulnerability of the fools they were about to fleece, I would shut myself away in the basement among the bowls and the wine racks to avoid seeing anything. I was isolated and ignored, and I was starting to get bored repeating the same actions and tramping the same stretch of floor. Even Babaye only appeared occasionally. He must have hidden in a cupboard like a jinn, only emerging when his master blew the whistle. Then, little by little, I started to realise just how far into the mire Pierre had got me. That café wasn’t for me. I wanted only one thing: to take my wages, get out of that part of the city as quickly as possible and never see it again. Toto pointed out that a contract was a contract, even if nothing had been signed; I would only get what was due to me at the end of the month. So, in addition to the two weeks’ trial, I had to endure four more weeks, holding my breath, rinsing the glasses and turning a blind eye to the horrors around me.

One night, a dishevelled sailor came down to my hideout. He was holding a bottle of red wine in his hand and swaying all over the place. He was in tears. ‘I could walk on water and no priest would notice,’ he moaned to himself. ‘I could spend my life doing good and nobody would take me seriously. Because nobody ever takes me seriously. “If you went to sea, you’d find it had run dry” — that was what my saintly mother, who I loved so much, said to me once.’ When he saw me bent over the glasses in a corner, he tumbled down the few steps that separated us and, still swaying, took a wad of banknotes from his pocket and stuffed them under my sweater. ‘Fat Bertha, who claims the wart under her nose is a beauty spot, turned it down. She told me she didn’t want my money, I might as well wipe my arse with it … Can you imagine? Even when you earn money by the sweat of your brow, you can’t get laid these days … Do you want it? Well, I’m giving it to you. Gladly. I don’t want it any more. I have bundles of it at home. I make mattresses with it. You need it. It’s written all over your face. You must have a sick relative. Think of my money as a gift from heaven. I’m a good Christian, I am. I may not be taken seriously, but I’m a generous person.’ He fiddled with his flies and tried to stroke my cheek …