Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

‘Where are the toilets?’ Salvo asked.

‘We say lavatories, Monsieur,’ the young woman shouted at him. ‘They’re outside, behind the carob tree. As for the bath, we don’t have running water, but we do have a well.’

Frédéric asked me if that was all right with me and I said it was.

Alarcon Ventabren insisted that we stay for dinner. Oran being only some twenty-five miles away, we accepted the invitation. While waiting for night to fall, he showed us around the property. Apart from mastic trees, nothing grew in that stony earth stripped bare by the winds from the sea. Ventabren told us that he had chosen to settle here for only one reason: he loved listening to the wind whistle past his window at night. Above all, he had a stunning view over the plain; from the top of his hill, he was ‘closer to God than men’. He told us he had never wanted to become a farmer. He didn’t care for it and certainly had no vocation. After his career as a boxer had ended, he had come here for a well-earned rest. In order to make ends meet, he had built a little gym where a few stars of the ring came to train. The purity of the air, the isolation of the farm and the surrounding calm, he insisted, ensured that a fighter could prepare mentally and physically in the best possible conditions.

The sun was going down. Gino, Filippi and Frédéric stood round the former champion at the foot of a tree; Salvo was tormenting a Barbary fig in search of a ripe fruit. Below the hill, Fatma was going back to her douar, astride a donkey, escorted by a little boy. As for Irène, she had left after showing us our quarters.

I sat on the edge of the well, savouring the shade the setting sun had brought to a countryside severely afflicted by the heatwave. A breeze came up from the coast, as light and gentle as a caress. From my makeshift observation post, I could see everything, capture everything, even the creaking of the stones imploring the evening to relieve them of their burns. Screwing up my eyes, I could make out the steeple of a church in the heart of a little town fading into the twilight. You could sense the sea just behind the mountains, mocking the heat now struggling for breath. I had the impression I was leaving the hullabaloo of the city and its pollution far behind and recovering my senses, now wiped clean of their detritus and totally calm.

Dinner was served in the main hall. As the maid had gone home, Irène took over. She came and went from the kitchen to the table, her arms laden with trays, carafes and baskets of fruit, paying no attention to our chatter. Her father told us about his various fights in Algeria, France and elsewhere, praising some of his opponents, cursing others. Carried away, he would almost rise in his chair, shadow-box and dodge imaginary attacks to show us that he was still skilful and flexible. He was a fascinating character: he would describe the fights as if we were watching them live, which was incredibly exciting. He was so amazingly vivacious, we wouldn’t have noticed if he’d got up and started walking. I found it hard to accept that such a strong man could ever resign himself to being trapped in a wheelchair.

‘I’ve been told you lost the use of your legs in the ring, Monsieur,’ I said.

Irène stiffened at the end of the table. For a fraction of a second, there was a kind of flicker in her impassive eyes. ‘My father doesn’t like to talk about that,’ she said, glaring at me and gathering up the soup tureen.

‘I don’t mind, sweetheart.’

‘But I do.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said to avoid any further upset.

‘Our guest is a boxer,’ Ventabren said in a placatory tone. ‘He has to know these things so as to watch out for them.’

Irène turned and stormed out.

‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Ventabren,’ I said, no longer knowing what to do with my spoon.

‘It’s all right. Irène is still upset about the whole thing. That’s how women are. As far as they’re concerned, no wound ever heals completely.’

He poured himself a drink.

‘It did happen in a ring,’ he went on. ‘In Minneapolis, on 17 April 1916. I was almost thirty-five and I wanted to retire in style. I was twice North African champion, French champion and ranked second in the whole world. A friend of mine, an influential English businessman, suggested I end on a high note with a gala match. I was booked to meet James Eastwalker, a black American, a former light heavyweight who’d become a wrestler. Not knowing the man, I thought I was being offered a chance for a last stand. It wasn’t like that at all. I was being put on display like a circus animal. I was so disappointed, I refused to get in the ring. Then someone said I was chickening out and my Algerian blood was roused. It was a real bloodbath. The black man punched like a blacksmith. And me like Vulcan. It was obvious that one of us would not make it out of there. But I lost my temper and, in a match between two madmen, losing your temper is unforgivable. I tell you that because you have to get it into your head. When you lose your temper, you don’t think. You hit out and you lose sight of the basics. I don’t know how I left my sides unprotected. An anvil came down on my pelvis, compressing my stomach. I fell to one knee just as the bell rang, but the black man pretended not to have heard, and his other fist, the stronger one, smashed into my chin while I was trying to recover my senses and get my breath back. I went over the ropes and fell on the corner of the judges’ table. I heard my back crack and I blacked out.’

‘What happened then?’

‘In boxing, son, it’s when you think you’ve made it that everything goes wrong. I’d gone to America in triumph and I came back home in a wheelchair.’

After dinner, Frédéric and Gino got in the car and begged Filippi to drive them back to Oran. De Stefano, Salvo and I continued talking to Ventabren late into the night, sitting on the porch round a lantern bombarded by insects. It felt good. An invigorating coolness bathed the countryside. From time to time, you could hear the howl of a jackal, immediately answered by stray dogs in the darkness.

Ventabren talked a lot. It was as if he was sweeping away the cobwebs from a century of silence. He could talk for hours on end without letting anyone else get a word in edgeways. He was aware of it, but how to stop? Confined to his chair, he spent most of his time gazing out at the plain and confronting his memories. His nearest neighbour was miles away, below the hills, too busy taking care of his vines to pay him a visit.

De Stefano was getting bored. However many times he took out his pocket watch to indicate to our host that it was getting late, it was impossible to stop the flow of words. It was Salvo who put an end to Ventabren’s chatter. He told our host that if we wanted to get up at dawn and take full advantage of the time for training, we should go to bed now. Even then, Ventabren felt he had to tell us one last anecdote before letting us go.

We lit the two oil lamps in the outhouse. De Stefano undressed in front of us; he took off his pants without any embarrassment and lay down on the sheets. He was hairy from head to foot, with clumps of thick hair on his shoulders and a horrible curly fleece on his chest. Salvo thought his backside was like an orang-utan’s and advised him to ‘give his left posterior a trim’ if he didn’t want a colony of creepy-crawlies to invade it. ‘I’d happily offer you my right posterior so that you can show me the extent of your expertise,’ De Stefano retorted. We laughed a lot before turning out the lights.

Through the skylight next to my bunk, I could see the upstairs window of the main house. The light was on and it cast Irène’s silhouette on the red curtain as she undressed. She too went to bed in the nude. When she switched off the light, the night was at last able to reclaim the whole of the countryside.