Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

My mother tried to reason with me. Love is the privilege of the rich, she said. The poor don’t have access to it. Their world is too wretched to accommodate a dream; their romance is a sham.

I didn’t agree. I refused to admit that everything could be bought and sold, including one’s own offspring. As far as I was concerned, Nora had been sold. To an old country bumpkin from Frenda, rich enough to afford a houri, but too miserly and obtuse to offer her paradise. Nora would be nothing but a kind of odalisque trapped in a hostile harem. The others would resent her for being the youngest, the most idolised by the master, and they would plot against her until she ended up as less than a shadow. Then the master would find himself a new virgin, and Nora would be relegated to the rank of occasional concubine …

At night, I would lie on the balcony, unable to get to sleep. On my back, my hands behind my neck, I would look up at the sky as if it were some undesirable I was looking up and down. I would imagine Nora in the arms of her repulsive ogre, who probably smelt of mouldy hay beneath his satin robe; it was as if a machine had got out of control and was crushing me. It was no longer Nora suffering the advances of her lover, but me. I clearly felt that bastard’s sticky hands soil my flesh, his rutting animal breath on my face, and my lungs filled with his fetid exhalations.

Never had fate seemed so unjust as it did on those nights.

I had loved in silence a cousin of my own rank and blood, and an ageing stranger had appeared from nowhere to steal her from me like a big arm taking from a child the only dream that would console him for everything he would never possess!

‘Can I ask you a question?’ I said to Gino.

‘Of course.’

‘And will you answer me honestly?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Am I cursed?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then why do bad things always happen to me?’

‘What’s happening to you, Turambo, is something everyone goes through. You’re no more to be pitied than a workman who falls off a ladder. That’s what happens in life. With a bit of patience, this bad patch will be nothing but a vague memory.’

‘You think so?’

‘Don’t you?’

I waited for the bad patch to turn into a vague memory, but every morning, when I awoke, there it was, omnipresent, stinking up the air I breathed and contaminating my thoughts.

I could no longer sleep.

By day, I would keep close to the walls like a crab. Oran had become a circus of horrors. I was a curious beast on display for the neighbours to mock. None of them had ever dared look up at Nora when she hung the washing out on the balcony. They knew she was mine, and they were jealous. Some were delighted at my disappointment now and made little attempt to hide it. Others had no qualms about making hurtful insinuations. Even when I responded with my fists, they continued to make fun of me … To escape these unpleasant remarks, which often led to nasty fights, I would retreat to the Cueva del Agua, a cliff to the east of the city, far from the bustle and the misunderstandings. It was a sinister spot where a few ragged fishermen would pretend to be watching their lines while getting blind drunk and having arguments. Looking at them, I felt like getting drunk too, as if there was no tomorrow, so drunk I would take a wave for a flood. I felt like proclaiming my sorrow in order to drown out the noise of the waves, insulting all the patron saints of the city one by one, cursing the rich and the poor until I’d got rid of all of them.

What difference would it have made?

I contented myself with gazing at the sea. I would sit down on a big rock, put my chin on my knees, wrap my arms round my legs to warm them and stare at the horizon. The ships in the harbour proved to me that there were other places to go, other shores, where you could have fabulous chance encounters, meet people who spoke strange languages. I dreamt of jumping on a boat and setting sail for some mirage. With Nora gone, I had lost my moorings. I was unhappy every time a voice, a figure, a rustle brought her memory back to me. Leave her to her destiny, my mother had said, and try to find one for yourself … How could I imagine a whole destiny when a mere blow of fate was enough to disqualify me?

I spent hours questioning the sea, feeling the breeze swell my shirt without soothing my soul. I longed to become a bubble of air, to fly above the storms and the malice of men, to put myself out of reach of my grief. I felt confined in my body, disorientated in my own mind, as empty of interest as of meaning.

I saw Nora again six months after she got married. She had come back to see her mother.

I returned one day from my wanderings and there she was, in shimmering silk, like a young princess, more beautiful than ever. The sight took my breath away. But she wasn’t alone. Two sisters-in-law and a reptilian maid watched over her; she was the apple of their eye and they wouldn’t let her out of their sight. As soon as they heard my footsteps in the corridor leading to the inner courtyard, they hurriedly lowered the curtain in the doorway to shelter their protégée. For three days, I tried to approach Nora, but in vain. I kept clearing my throat and coughing into my fist to let her know that I was in the next room, waiting for her, but Nora didn’t appear. On the fourth day, I managed to outwit her guards. Nora almost fainted when she saw me looming over her. She wouldn’t have been so scared if she’d seen a ghost. Are you mad? she choked, turning pale. What is it you want? To ruin me? I’m married now. Please go.

She pushed me unceremoniously out of the room, out of her sight, out of her life …

I meant nothing to her any more, except perhaps a potential source of scandal.

That was when I remembered De Stefano’s offer, and I found myself knocking at the door of his gym in Rue Wagram.

If you wanted to beat yourself up, there was no better place to do it than in a boxing ring.

Rue Wagram echoed to the yells of kids kicking a rag ball. It was one in the afternoon and the sun was beating down. De Stefano’s gym was below street level, facing Porte du Ravin, with the date 1847 — the year it was built — above the door. It was a huge, ugly building, its walls full of cracks, and had once been a stable for thoroughbred horses before being transformed into a makhzan towards the end of the last century. Threatened by a landslide, it was evacuated by the military, padlocked and abandoned to the ravages of time and rats before being taken over in the 1910s by lovers of boxing. The area smelt of horseshit and of the drains that ran off into the wild grass of the gully.

Overcome by the heat, a wafer vendor was dozing in the shade of a basket shaped like an African drum. Facing him, two scrawny brats sat on the pavement, swathed in moth-eaten rags, their eyes as empty as their bellies, like two puppies staring at a piece of sugar. Not far off, a housewife was emptying dishwater outside her front door, her dress pulled up above her knees. Further down, a gang of urchins were harassing an alley cat while an amused old drunk looked on impassively.

The wafer vendor woke when he heard me approach and immediately became defensive. I gestured to him to calm down.

The doors of the gym were open. I walked into a large, depressing-looking sports hall. Light filtered in through the holes in the roof and the shutterless windows and bounced off the filthy tiled floor. To the right of the door stood a small table littered with the remains of food, a dirty glass and a Paloma bottle filled with water. To the left were a few crinkled posters of boxers on the walls. An old boxing ring was just about holding up on a platform, its ropes hanging loose. Behind, a shapeless punch bag hung from its gallows. At the far end, a dilapidated cubicle could be made out through the gloom. I could hear two men arguing, one angry, the other conciliatory.