Things and A Man Asleep (11 page)

Sylvie emerged with her timetable in her hand. They carried on walking. They drank a can of beer and ate olives and salted almonds. Barkers were selling the day before yesterday's
Figaro.
They had arrived.

The next day Sylvie made the acquaintance of some of her new colleagues, who helped them find a flat. It consisted of three huge rooms with high ceilings and was absolutely bare: a long passageway led to a small square room from which five doors opened, three of them to the bedrooms, one to a bathroom and one to a vast kitchen. Two balconies looked out onto a small fishing harbour, south channel A dock, which offered some resemblance to Saint-Tropez, and onto a foul-smelling lagoon. They took their first steps in the Arab quarter, bought a metal bedstead, a horse-hair mattress, two cane chairs, four rope stools, two tables, a thick yellow raffia mat with sparse decorations in red.

Then Sylvie began teaching. Day by day they settled in. Their trunks, which had been shipped as freight, arrived. They unpacked books, records, the record-player, the trinkets. With large sheets of red, grey and green blotting paper they made lampshades. They bought long planks of barely planed wood and twelve-hole bricks, and they covered two-thirds of the walls with bookshelves. On all the walls they stuck dozens of reproductions and on a prominently-positioned wallboard they pinned photographs of all their friends.

It was a cold and dismal dwelling. With its too-high walls painted with a brownish sort of yellow distemper which kept flaking off in large pieces, with its large, uniform, colourless tiles on all the floors, with its unusable volume, the flat was altogether too big and too bare for them to be able to live in it. There would have had to be five or six of them, a group of good friends drinking, eating, talking. But they were on their own, and lost. The living room, containing the camp bed on which they had put a small mattress and a colourful bedspread, the thick raffia mat strewn with a few cushions, and, above all, the books (the row of collected works in the Pléiade editions, the run of periodicals, the four Tisné volumes), the trinkets, the records, the large mariner's chart,
The Great Parade
, all the things which not so long ago had constituted the decor of their other life, all the things which took them back from this universe of sand and stone to Rue de Quatrefages, to the tree that stayed green for so long, to the little gardens - the living room, at least, still exuded a little warmth. Lying flat on the mat, with a tiny cup of Turkish coffee at their sides, they would listen to the
Kreutzer
Sonata
, the
Archduke
,
Death and the Maiden
, and it was as though the music (which in this large and sparsely furnished room, almost as large as a hall, acquired stunning acoustics) came to inhabit it, and all of a sudden transformed it: like a guest, a very dear friend who had been lost sight of and found again by chance, coming to share their meal, talking to them of Paris. On a cool November evening, in this foreign city where nothing was theirs, where they were ill at ease, music took them backwards, allowed them to recover an almost forgotten feeling of complicity and shared living, as if, inside a tiny island - within the boundaries of the mat, the two sets of shelving, the record-player, the circle of light confined by the cylindrical lampshade - they had managed to establish and to preserve a protected area which time and space could not touch. But outside, all around, was exile and the unknown: the long passageway where footsteps echoed too loudly, the vast, icy, hostile bedroom with only a wide, too-hard bed smelling of straw for furniture and an unstable lamp on an old tea-chest which did as a bedside table, a wicker trunk full of dirty washing, a stool littered with clothes; and the third room, not used, where they never went. Then the stone staircase, the main foyer perpetually threatened by the sand; the street: three two-storey blocks of flats, a shed where sponges were dried, a plot of waste ground; the town around.

In Sfax they spent what were probably the queerest eight months of their lives.

The port and the European quarter of Sfax had been destroyed during the war, and the city now consisted of about thirty streets set at right angles to each other. The two main streets were Avenue Bourguiba, running from the station to the Central Market, near where they lived, and Avenue Hedi-Chaker, which ran from the port to the Arab quarter. The city centre was the intersection of these two streets: that was where the town hall was to be found, with two of its ground-floor rooms containing a few ancient ceramics and half a dozen mosaics, as well as the statue and tomb of Hedi Chaker, murdered by the Main Rouge terrorists shortly before independence, the
Café de
Tunis
, frequented by Arabs and the
Café de la Régence,
frequented by Europeans, a little flowerbed, a news-stand and a tobacconist's.

Just over fifteen minutes was enough to go right round the European quarter. From the building they lived in, the Technical College was three minutes' walk away, the market was two minutes away, the restaurant where they ate all their meals was five minutes away and the
Café de la Régence
took six minutes to reach, as did the bank, the municipal library and six of the city's seven cinemas. The post office, the station and the hire point for cars to Tunis and Gabès were less than ten minutes' walk and constituted the outer limits of sufficient knowledge for living in Sfax.

The Arab quarter, an ancient, beautiful, fortified city, displayed grey-brown walls and gates which were justifiably considered admirable. They often entered the Arab quarter, made it almost the only goal of all their walks, but because they were indeed only walking through, they remained for ever strangers in it. They did not understand its basic mechanisms, all they could see was a labyrinth of alleys. Raising their eyes, they might admire a wrought- iron balcony, a painted beam-end, the pure ogive arch of a window, the subtle play of light and shade, an extremely narrow staircase - but their walks had no aim. They turned around on themselves, always afraid of getting lost, tiring easily. In the end there was nothing to attract them in this sequence of poverty-stricken stalls, of almost identical shops, of cramped bazaars, in this incomprehensible alternation of crowded and deserted streets, in this throng which did not seem to be going anywhere at all.

Such feelings of foreignness grew all the more marked, became almost oppressive when, faced with long empty afternoons and desperate Sundays, they crossed right through the Arab quarter and, beyond Bab Djebli, got as far as the endless suburbs of Sfax. Stretching out for miles were tiny garden plots, hedges of prickly pear, wattle-and- daub houses, huts made of corrugated iron and cardboard boxes; and then huge abandoned and rotting pools, and, far away, at the vanishing point of the horizon, the first olive groves. They would loiter for hours on end; they would wander past barracks, cross waste ground and derelict quagmires.

And when they returned to the European quarter, when they passed in front of the Hillal or the Nour cinema, when they sat down at the
Régence
and clapped their hands to call the waiter, ordered a Coca-Cola or a can of beer, bought the latest issue of
Le
Monde
, whistled for the hawker, dressed as always in his long, dirty, white smock and his canvas skullcap, to buy a few twists of peanuts, grilled almonds, pistachios and pine-nuts, only then did they know that melancholy feeling that this was their home.

They would walk beside palm trees grey with dust; they would pass along in front of the neo-Moorish façades of Avenue Bourguiba; they would cast vague glances at hideous window-displays: flimsy furniture, wrought-iron standard lamps, electric blankets, school exercise books, evening dress, ladies' shoes, bottled gas canisters. It was the only world they had, their real world. They dragged their feet on the way back; Jérôme would make coffee in
zazouas
made in Czechoslovakia; Sylvie corrected a pile of homework.

To begin with Jérôme had tried to find work. He went to Tunis several times and, thanks to some letters of introduction he had had written before leaving France and to the contacts of his Tunisian friends, he met some functionaries at the Ministry of Information, in broadcasting, in tourism and in the Education Service. It was a waste of time. Market research did not exist in Tunisia, nor did part-time jobs, and the few sinecures that existed were fully occupied. He had no qualifications. He was neither an engineer, nor an accountant, nor a draughtsman, nor a doctor. He was again offered a teaching job; he wasn't keen; very soon he gave up all hope. Sylvie's salary allowed them to live modestly; in Sfax that was the commonest kind of living.

Sylvie wore herself out trying to instill, as the syllabus required, the hidden beauties of Malherbe and Racine in pupils who were older than she was and didn't know how to write. Jérôme wasted his time. He started off on various projects - taking a diploma in sociology, sorting out his ideas about film - which he couldn't keep up. He wandered around the streets in his Weston shoes, strolled up and down the port, sauntered through the market. He went to the museum, exchanged a few words with the duty guard, spent a few minutes looking at an ancient amphora, a funeral inscription or a mosaic: Daniel in the Lions' Den, Amphitrite astride a dolphin. He went to watch a tennis match on the courts laid out beneath the ramparts, he walked through the Arab quarter, loitered in the bazaars, weighing up fabrics, copperware, saddles. He bought all the newspapers, did the crosswords, borrowed books from the library, wrote rather dismal letters to his friends, who often did not reply.

Sylvie's job timetabled their lives. Their week was made of good days — Mondays, because they had the morning off and because the cinemas changed their films; Wednesdays, because they had a free afternoon; and Fridays, because they had the whole day off and, once again, the films changed - and bad days: all the rest. Sunday was an intermediate day, pleasant in the morning (they would stay in bed, the Paris weeklies would come), boring in the afternoon, gloomy in the evening unless, by chance, there was a film to attract them, but it was not often that two notable or even just watchable films were put on in the same half-week. And so the weeks passed. They followed each other with mechanical regularity: four weeks to a month, more or less; the months were all the same. The

days, after getting shorter and shorter, began to get longer and longer. The winter was wet, almost cold. Their lives were dripping away.

II

They were absolutely alone.

Sfax was an inscrutable city. They felt, on occasions, that no-one would ever find out how to pierce its mystery. Its doors would never open. There were people in the street, in the evenings, in self-contained crowds, people coming and going, an almost continuous tide of them under the awnings of Avenue Hedi-Chaker, in front of the
Mabrouk Hotel
, the Destour Information Office, the Hillal cinema, the cake-shop called
Les Délices
; there were public places - cafés, restaurants, cinemas - almost crammed with people; and faces which, now and again, might almost seem familiar. But all around, on the quayside, on the ramparts, as soon as you got away from the centre, it was a void, it was dead: the huge sand-strewn esplanade in front of Sfax's hideous cathedral encircled by dwarf palms, Boulevard de Picville, lined by waste plots and two-storey maisonettes, Rue Mangolte, Rue Fezzani, Rue Abd-el-Kader Zghal were bare, straight and sand-swept. Sickly palm-trees swayed before the wind; from their trunks erupting in woody bracts barely a handful of fronds emerged. A multitude of cats prowled amongst the dustbins. A yellow-coated dog sometimes scuttled past with its tail between its legs.

Not a soul stirring. Behind ever-bolted doors, only bare passageways, stone stairs, windowless courtyards. Streets upon streets set at right angles to each other, metal roller- blinds, high wooden fences, a world of squares that were

not squares, of non-streets, of phantom avenues. They would walk, not speaking, disoriented; and sometimes it seemed that everything was but an illusion, that Sfax did not exist, did not breathe. They sought signs of complicity all around. Nothing answered their call. They felt isolated in a way that was almost painful. They had been dispossessed, the world was no longer for swimming in, no longer in their arms, and never would be. It was as if, long ago and once and for all, an order had been made, a strict rule had been established to cut them out: they would be free to wander where they willed without let or hindrance, without anyone speaking to them. They would be for ever incognito, for ever strangers in the land. The Italians, the Maltese and the Greeks in the port would watch them go by and stay silent. Olive-oil entrepreneurs in their all-white garb and gold-rimmed glasses, passing slowly by on Rue du Bey with a beadle in their train, would walk straight past without seeing them.

Sylvie's colleagues at work provided only distant and often stand-offish relationships. French teachers with permanent posts did not seem to have unalloyed esteem for temporary staff. Even those who were not bothered by this distinction found it hard to forgive Sylvie for not being made in their own image. She should have been a teacher's wife as well as a career teacher herself, and a regular small-town, middle-class housewife, and have some dignity, deportment, culture. Not let the old country down, don't you know. And though there were in a sense two classes of expatriates - teachers at the start of their careers, eager to grab a suburban semi as fast as they could in Angoulême, Béziers or Tarbes, and the cohort of conscientious objectors or disciplinary cases who did not get the colonial service bonus in their pay but could afford to despise the first group (but the latter were a dying breed: most objectors had been pardoned; others were leaving to

settle in Algeria or French Guinea) - neither class was prepared, apparently, to concede that you could sit in the cinema in the front row, next to native ragamuffins, or saunter unshaven, unbuttoned, in the street, in clogs, like a ne'er-do-well. A few books were swapped, and a few records; there was the odd discussion at
La Régence
; and that was that. No warm hospitality, no keen friendship. That wasn't a plant that grew in Sfax. People turned in on themselves, in their houses that were too big for them.