Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

Filippi didn’t look happy driving in the heat, sweating profusely in his chauffeur’s tunic. The summer was surpassing itself that late July of 1934. When we lowered the windows, the air burnt our faces; when we put them up, the car turned into an oven. In front of us, the road broke up into an endless chain of mirages. Not a bird ventured into the white-hot sky, not a leaf moved in the trees.

In the seat next to Filippi, Frédéric Pau sat brooding over old resentments. From time to time, he would make an exasperated gesture with his hand. Four of us watched him from the back seat: Gino, Salvo, De Stefano and me.

‘The Duke’s been giving him a hard time,’ Gino whispered in my ear.

On either side of the road, farms were bleached by the mother-of-pearl glare of the afternoon. The fields and orchards were deserted. Only a donkey with its forelegs tied was sliding down a steep path beneath its burden.

Frédéric at last stopped muttering to himself. He pointed to a fruit seller’s hut at the end of the road and asked Filippi to take the path just after it.

‘We can’t go to a person’s house empty-handed,’ I said.

We pulled up on the roadside next to the hut. The fruit seller was sleeping the sleep of the just, surrounded by piles of melons. He jumped up when he heard us slamming the doors, wound a moth-eaten turban round his head and apologised for having dozed off.

‘What’s your name?’ Frédéric asked.

‘Larbi, Monsieur.’

‘Another one!’ Frédéric cried, thinking of Madame Camélia’s servant. ‘Why do you all give yourselves the same name? Are you afraid you’ll be confused with the Turks or the Saracens?’

De Stefano didn’t greatly appreciate Frédéric’s rudeness. He gave me a meaningful look; I shrugged, immune to that kind of insult. The fruit seller was confused, unsure if the Frenchman was teasing him or scolding him. He cleared his throat and tugged at his collar. He was a short, emaciated man with a greyish-brown complexion, wearing a tattered sweater and mud-encrusted trousers. He had a Berber tattoo on the back of his hand and almost no teeth showed when he gave his embarrassed smile. We chose two huge watermelons, three melons and a basket of figs from Bousfer, got back in the car and climbed the path that wound between the arid hills. A few miles further on, we glimpsed a large stone house flanked by an outhouse and a stable. The car went through a gate, passed a trough and stopped at the foot of a tree. A pregnant woman ran to inform the master of the house of our arrival.

A plump man in his fifties came out in a wheelchair.

Frédéric took off his hat to greet him. ‘Pleased to see you again, Monsieur Ventabren. You know De Stefano …’

‘Of course, who doesn’t know De Stefano?’

‘The egghead next to him is Salvo, our second. At night, he turns into a ferret, and if you don’t have a padlock on your pantry, you won’t have a pantry left in the morning.’

Salvo attempted an ingratiating smile.

‘This handsome young man in shirt and tie is our accountant Gino. And last but not least, Turambo, a walking legend.’

‘And I’m Filippi!’ cried the Corsican, who was still in the car.

‘Well, gentlemen, you’ve arrived just in time for an aperitif,’ the man in the wheelchair said.

‘In this heat? Cold water would suffice.’

‘Fatma has made lemonade. Please come in.’

It felt good inside. We entered a drawing room furnished with a rustic table, a very old sideboard and a padded bench seat. On a badly proportioned mantelpiece, framed photographs showed a young boxer posing for posterity.

‘The good old days,’ our host sighed.

He invited us to sit down at the table. Fatma, the pregnant woman, served us glasses of lemonade and withdrew. Ventabren let us quench our thirst before announcing that his daughter would be there soon and that she would be in charge of showing us our ‘quarters’.

Frédéric noticed some paintings stacked in a corner. He stood up to examine them closely.

‘I paint in my spare time,’ Ventabren said, coming up behind Frédéric in his wheelchair.

‘You have talent,’ Frédéric admitted after glancing at the canvases.

‘One has to earn a living. My hands dream of brushes but my fists demand gloves. The defeated warrior who wants to eat his fill, even if he has the soul of an artist, chooses to be a brigand.’

‘You’re not a brigand, Monsieur Ventabren. You have a way of capturing the sea that absol—’

‘It isn’t the sea, it’s the sky,’ came a woman’s voice from behind us. ‘You’re holding the canvas upside down.’

A young woman was standing in the entrance hall. She was wearing a red scarf around her neck, a shirt with a low neckline, riding trousers that emphasised the curve of her hips and knee-length boots. In her hand she held a plaited riding crop.

‘If you’re interested in the painting, we can give you a good price,’ she went on.

‘It’s just …’ Frédéric stammered, taken aback, ‘… Monsieur Bollocq likes this kind of painting.’

‘It’s called a gouache.’

‘Of course, a gouache. I’m convinced Monsieur Bollocq will love it.’

‘I don’t suppose he’s very knowledgeable.’

‘But he has good taste, I assure you.’

‘In that case, it’s sold. His price will be ours.’

The young woman gave off a strong sense of authority that immediately intimidated us. She didn’t so much speak as machine-gun the words out of her mouth. Every time her remarks hit home, she would flick her thigh with her riding crop and raise her voice even more as if she were trying to drive Frédéric into a corner. His growing embarrassment inspired in her an arrogance that verged on aggressiveness. But my God, how beautiful she was, with a rebellious, almost wild beauty, with her black hair gathered in a ponytail and her piercing eyes.

At a loss, Frédéric didn’t know whether to put the painting down or hold in to it.

Ventabren came to his rescue. ‘Gentlemen, this charming young lady is my daughter Irène. She has no fear of lightning or sunstroke. At an hour when not even a lizard would venture outside, she rides all over the estate on her horse.’

‘My mare, Papa … I’ll change and then I’m all yours,’ she said to us as she went upstairs.

Alarcon Ventabren watched us out of the corner of his eye, flattered by our heavy silence. De Stefano leant over to me and asked me in a whisper if I remembered the girl galloping flat out over the hill on the morning of my very first fight at Aïn Témouchent. I didn’t reply, my eyes fixed on the place where the young woman had been standing a few moments earlier. In reality, I wasn’t seeing the hall, but that white dawn stretched like a screen across which a beautiful horsewoman had ridden to seize the day.

She joined us in the drawing room. She had freshened up, changed her shirt and replaced her boots with hemp-soled sandals. Although she was young, she seemed so mature that it was hard to estimate her age. In her hardened gaze, which kept everything it touched at a distance, you sensed an inflexible strength of character. She wasn’t the kind of woman to blush at flattery or overlook an inappropriate remark. I was impressed.

She led us to the outhouse, where there were tidy bunk beds for four people. The sheets were new and the pillows covered in embroidered percale. There was a table with an indigo tablecloth on it, four wooden chairs, a jug on an enamelled tray, a basket of fruit, and a rug on the floor. A crude painting of a boxing match occupied much of one of the walls; it was signed A. Ventabren . Two oil lamps hung from the ceiling beams, their glass clean and the wicks new.

After the ‘dormitory’, Irène showed us into a large adjoining room equipped with a punch bag, a punching ball, wall bars and other bodybuilding tools.