Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

The Duke had chosen the right place for me to recharge my batteries. What a joy it was to wake up in the morning far from the din of the souks and the fish markets! No dumping carts, no motor horns, no iron shutters being raised with a terrifying racket. The calm of the countryside was so perfect that the dream continued long after I got out of bed. I washed my face in the trough, breathed in the smells of the uncultivated fields and the orchards that reached us from the bottom of the plain, put my hands on my hips and let my gaze become one with the landscape. Emerging out of nowhere, the braying of a donkey gave me back the authenticity of the world, while the sight of a shrew running wildly in the dry grass aroused in me a sublime sense of simplicity. It was magical. I saw myself as a child standing on a large rock, wondering what there was behind the horizon. I wanted to stay there for all eternity, my peasant streak awakening in me.

We had been at the farm for a week. At dawn, De Stefano, Salvo and I would set off to conquer the ridges, not to return until lunchtime, sweating, tongues hanging out, but happy. Once we had eaten, we resumed training. After working on the punch bag and practising my feints and dodges, I’d give myself over to Salvo’s restorative massage. In the evening, we joined Ventabren under a tree and drifted through more of his inexhaustible supply of stories. Apart from the spluttering van of the milkman, who appeared every day at nine, we might have been cut off from civilisation.

Whenever the milkman showed up, he shattered the peace of the countryside. He was a man in his early fifties who didn’t look anyone in the face, but was useful for passing on the juicy gossip he had picked up in the surrounding villages. I didn’t pay much attention to his indiscretions. I’d go so far as to say I didn’t like him. He was a strange, shady character, furtive and lecherous, with crafty eyes, and he was also a pervert — I had surprised him with his nose pressed to the window, spying on Fatma in the kitchen and masturbating. He really disgusted me. Seeing him jumping into his van and leaving the farm was, for me, a moment of deliverance, like the sudden disappearance of a splitting headache.

De Stefano, Salvo and I enjoyed ourselves a lot. One morning, we set off to see the sea. We hoisted bags filled with food and drink on our shoulders and climbed the mountain. It took us four hours to reach the dome of a saint’s tomb at the summit. There, we halted and gazed at the sea until we felt as if we were drowning in it.

Irène seldom had lunch with us. I had the impression she didn’t feel comfortable at the farm. Her relationship with her father left a lot to be desired. They hardly spoke to each other. Whenever Alarcon Ventabren started to talk about his life as a champion, Irène would ostentatiously slip away. Something wasn’t right between father and daughter. They lived together as if bound by a moral contract — he clinging to his bygone exploits, she glued to her saddle — but showed no real affection for each other.

Salvo asked if Ventabren was a widower or divorced, but Ventabren preferred to talk about his father. ‘I don’t miss him,’ he told me one evening between two glasses of Phénix anisette. ‘My old man was always either hanging around the seedy parts of town or in prison. When he was young, fascinated by easy money and the shenanigans that go with it, his ambition was to become a gang boss, except that he really wasn’t cut out for it. He hoped to pimp a herd of prostitutes, surround himself with a gang of crooks with scarred faces and live on his income until a rival unseated him. Having fleeced a few lonely old biddies and extorted money from one or two small shopkeepers, he could already see himself swaggering down the boulevards, a beret pulled down low, his fingers covered in huge rings. He’d get into fights at the drop of a hat, in the hope of creating a legend for himself, and never stopped getting his face smashed in by lowlifes on every street corner. The fact was, nobody took him seriously. They all knew he was a loudmouth, full of hot air, and they knew he’d never amount to anything. Coming out of a long stay in prison, my father dreamt of settling down, except that he wasn’t cut out for starting a family either. He lived like an animal, with no presence of mind and no sense of responsibility. He married my mother for her jewellery. Having stripped her of her last centime and gnawed her to the bone, he kept her for practical purposes — at least, that way, he could use our house as a hideout when he had thugs after him. He never took me in his arms. People in the street might ruffle my hair, but not him. Just once, when he’d come home to choose a piece of furniture to sell off, he found me sitting in the doorway of our house and called me by the wrong name. That was the day I realised how much of a stranger he was to me. Then overnight, he vanished into thin air. Some say he stowed away on a liner leaving for the Americas, others that he’d got himself killed in Marseilles. In the 1880s, a man’s life could just go up in smoke and leave no trace. No point searching for him. There were more urgent things to deal with, and not enough time.’

I couldn’t help thinking about my own father every time Ventabren dug up the ghost of his. I saw the Jewish cemetery again, that ragged man closing the gate as if closing the door on a chapter of my life, and a sense of grief again took root in me.

Irène loathed her father’s stories. She’d stay as far away from us as possible in order not to hear a word. Ventabren couldn’t tell a story without turning a party into a wake. He was perfectly well aware of it, but couldn’t help it.

We had dinner later and later to allow our host to make the most of our presence. He was pleased to have us with him, and doubly so when he realised how receptive we were. At the age of fifty-five, Ventabren’s eyes were turned to the past; ahead of him, there was nothing but a terrible blank.

Every night, when we switched off the light in the outhouse to sleep, I would look through my skylight at the lighted window on the first floor of the main house and wait to see Irène’s silhouette. When it appeared on the curtain, I’d watch, unable to take my eyes off it, until the darkness stole it from me; and if it didn’t appear, the shadows would creep over even my most private thoughts and I would get no sleep.

My first face-to-face encounter with Irène was a disaster. I was sitting on the edge of the well. Irène appeared with a rubber bucket, attached it to the pulley rope and flung it into the hole. I took hold of the rope to help her raise the bucket back up. Instead of thanking me, she told me to mind my own business.

‘I was only trying to help, Madame.’

‘I have a servant for that!’ she retorted, grabbing the rope from me.

The next day, as I was finishing my morning cross-country run, our paths crossed again. There was a spring in the hollow of a talweg a few miles from the farm. I liked to dip my feet in it after a last sprint. The water was as cold as if it had come from a block of ice. That morning, Irène had got there ahead of me. She was squatting on a mound of earth, watching her mare drink. I turned back so as not to have to say anything to her. She rode after me and caught up with me on the hillside.

‘Nobody owns that spring,’ she said. ‘You can use it.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘I don’t know what was the matter with me yesterday.’

‘It’s not important.’

‘Are you angry with me?’

‘It’s all forgotten.’

‘Really?’

‘…’

She dismounted and walked beside me. Her perfume wafted around her. She had tied her shirt around her waist, uncovering her flat belly. Her luxuriant breasts jiggled at each step, barely contained by the shirt.