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(HANDS OF TOIL)
I wept
I couldn’t help but weep when we arrived and saw the land that would need working
holy Mary mother of God
days and days of travel, along the Seine and the Saône, and then the Rhône on boats flat as the palm of your hand and drawn by horses that took their sweet time, believe you me, while at every lock the men raced to the inns to gorge themselves on food and wine as we poor women used the pause to wash the linens not to mention the children, days and days I’m telling you, until at last we could make out the sea, the sea and its dazzling light that beckoned like a beacon over the port of Marseille
holy Mary mother of God
then they crammed us and all the other wide-eyed migrants in a lazaretto, we were a good five hundred in there, five hundred with eyes peeled for the frigate Labrador, which wasn’t in port and wouldn’t be for a good week, five hundred quelling our impatience by strolling the city streets, five hundred seated on café terraces with the mistral at our backs or pressing our noses against novelty shop windows, until it was announced that the boat had arrived and we could board with our trunks and hodgepodge of furniture and household necessities
holy Mary mother of God
days and nights on that Labrador pitching like a cockleshell as we clutched our stomachs and emptied our guts before finally setting two feet on Algerian soil and listening to an army commander’s fine words
“Rest assured, all you brave men and women gathered here, that the government of the Republic of France will watch over you like a father over his children. Day and night, on any occasion, we will be here to give you a hand. Whatever may come, never lose faith in your government, in your republic. Our eyes are wide open and our ears are pricked for any grievance you may voice. We will do everything in our power—everything, mind you!—to ensure that your hands of toil are fairly compensated. For you are the strength and intelligence France requires in these barbaric lands, you are its new bubbling blood. And nothing could be more precious”
fine, moving words duly followed by drumrolls and applause
“Vive la France! Vive la France!”
before being split into two groups and swiftly dispatched to two agricultural colonies that had been blindly mapped out by a few wretched bureaucrats, finally leaving Bône in the beds of army gun carriages, jolted along a road, what am I saying!, along a vague trail through fields and over rocky terrain before the nasty stares of filthy children and women wearing garish rags to hide their base instincts
“Don’t look at them, Caro”
and I covered my children’s eyes with my hands for fear that one of those harpies would cast a spell on them
“But, Mama, we want to see”
“You’ll have plenty of time”
as skin-and-bone dogs bristled with what little hair remained on their backs and bared their rotten teeth and barked as they sniffed the soldiers’ vinegary smell
and on it went all day long until our captain, perched on his horse, raised his arm and ordered
“Halt!”
it was evening, the silence of the sky casting a wide gloom, and behind our column the horizon was black with overlapping clouds jostling each other to get a better look at all these people who’d shown up with no warning, it was evening yet still light and in that dying light we saw rows of military tents, at least five or six, and we understood that beneath those folds of military canvas was where we would have to live
but for how long? holy mother of God, how long? and shelter from the sun and rain and savage wind roaring in rage, and not beneath the reassuring roofs of the houses promised us by the Republic of France, which would be built one day, not to worry, they said, one day soon, but what did that mean, one day soon? truly, what did it mean? didn’t we realize that time is different on that cursed African continent, that days and weeks and months don’t mean anything at all?
we were obliged to share a tent with a family from Aubervilliers every bit as bone-tired as ours was, Henri and I and our three children, and my sister Rosette and her husband, Louis, who never stopped coughing owing to his fragile lungs, the dust from the trip hadn’t done him any good
fires had been lit around the camp and together we ate rations distributed by the soldiers, several of whom were to keep watch until dawn, pistols ready, the captain had promised
“What is there to fear, captain?”
“Everything, my friends, everything that prowls, creeps, and snarls, there are bands of pillagers and horned vipers, and of course the desert lions roaming these parts”
night came on faster than it does in France, it fell in one swoop and spread like a puddle of black ink, troubled and teeming with noises that frightened the children, above all Caroline, who cowered, trembling, against my stomach, while my two boys lying head to tail on a blanket kept sitting up to ask
“Mama, is Papa asleep?”
“I don’t know”
but I knew perfectly well that Henri wasn’t asleep, I imagined his eyes were as wide open as mine and that he was beginning to ask himself the same questions I had asked countless times before we left, questions he didn’t listen to at the time, questions that he brushed away with a flick of his hand because to him they were women’s questions and hell’s bells! we won’t get very far asking women’s questions, he would shout, smoothing his mustache, which he kept thick but not always neat
the heaven on earth promised us by the Republic of France was far and we certainly wouldn’t be reaching it anytime soon, crammed as we were into army tents in the middle of some godforsaken hole the brass dared call an “agricultural colony,” no we wouldn’t be reaching the heaven on everyone’s lips anytime soon, maybe we never would, maybe we would never reach it because it didn’t exist, it never had and never would exist, at least not for people like us
in spite of myself I felt a pang in my heart and my chest swell with the despair suddenly pouring over me, I clenched my fists to hold back the sobs rattling in my throat, though why bother? the gathering tears needed to come out, to fall, to run down my naked cheeks
so I wept, face buried in the silence of a pillow that still smelled of the Labrador, stricken by a solitude that was too great, too heavy, too painful for me to bear, I wept every tear I had inside my body
holy Mary mother of God.