The Heart of the Leopard Children (7 page)

It was a game for Mireille, Drissa, and I to steal in the supermarkets, a way for us to experience fear. Given the means we had, it was just another way to use our overactive imagination. Our real country was the eternal love we had for our mothers, fixtures behind the hearth-burning fires. They were experts at negotiating in the markets. Those who had mastered French helped those who needed help. In time, they had basically reinvented the French language. I would spy on them from a distance, sitting on their bright colored mats, right by the sign that read: “Walking on the grass is prohibited.” Aside from the everyday challenges they faced, they openly confided to each other about their husbands, the father of their children, the men with whom they shared an apartment. They all came from countries where a marriage based on love was an unnecessary and dangerous luxury. In the bedroom, it was next to impossible to make the difference between tenderness and procreation. Romantic love was a puerile and embarrassing idea. We grew up far away from kind words and tender hugs. We were used to major confrontations and even sometimes to physical violence, to the coldness of the cement floor and ice-cold looks.

Sadly, we often overheard these domestic fights, the screams of desperate wives, the insults of frustrated husbands, and the deafening blows. In the days that followed, the wife wouldn't show herself in public. Broken ribs hurt but heal, marks on the face fade overtime.

They talked, complained and laughed a lot, in a kind of melody that married Andalusian with Wolof, Arabic with Kikongo, intonations from the Far East blending with the seasonal sounds of the neighborhood. Even today, they have their own version of French. Integration, beware! They had been married long before they were eighteen years old and had already had several children. Not one of them really knew how to read but surprisingly they all learned pretty quickly how to count.

It's for you, and really only for you, that I am truly sorry, mother. For all those mothers who have been forgotten by history and in the news reports on the radio and television. I'm afraid to see the
tears from your suffering. It's really because of you, mother, that I'm so deeply ashamed of my chains. For you and all those women, so patient and loving and who are of so little interest to anyone. In the news, only their tears make the headline, after the fact.

Mireille's parents, who are
pieds-noirs
, would have gladly eaten Arab cuisine from the neighborhood and anywhere else as a matter of fact, even three times a day, no problem. And yet they were so discreet and courteous, and worked a lot to make sure that their only child had a bright future that the Algerian War had robbed them of at her birth. They barely spoke of their past to Mireille; the topic was off limits. Her father's parents owned a café in a big city, a bomb had exploded and the younger sister, still a baby at the time had had both arms ripped apart, her face burnt, atrocious suffering, unbearable agony that had lasted for weeks. Right after her death, the rest of the family had left everything behind and gone into exile to the mother country. Mireille's grandmother had completely lost her mind. In the course of her ten years in exile, she must have said two lines. For Mireille's mother, exile had been considerably less dramatic than the emotional wound she had suffered. Her permanent discomfort had slowly gnawed away at her zest for life. In truth, her personal destruction dated much further back. It had begun on her eleventh birthday, when her father, a member of a small group ready to kill and die for French Algeria, had started to visit her bedroom regularly and force her to accept a cruel expression of love in the form of incest.

She met her husband in a repatriation camp in the South of France. He was drawn to her reserved and submissive demeanor. Their mutual sadness was shared in silence and great restraint. He was a hardworking workaholic; she was serious and self-effacing. Even with little dialogue, they had managed to live pretty well. He had found the ideal job for his silence and misanthropy as a truck driver, gone for weeks at a time with nothing but the monotonous hum of the engine for company. To make ends meet, his wife became a cleaning lady, ironing, and at times helping families who could afford
hired help with childcare. In spite of herself, she had found a way to move on discreetly and with great humility. This was basically how they had provided a decent childhood for their daughter. Every three years, Mireille had spent a month-long holiday in a camp, in the same place on the Mediterranean side. The family tragedies had taught them to save and always be prepared for hard times. That is why Mireille had grown up in an apartment with very little light and life, no music, no books, leaving aside the television programs, some advertisements and a few fashion magazines. It was only after she had left her home and living in university housing that her mother, in a convulsive state of panic, had finally relieved herself of the weight of her past by evoking some of the episodes that had completely turned her life upside down. She had become a virtuoso in the art of waiting around in silence.

For Mireille, her father was a strange body who happened to share the same home in which she lived. His sentences were almost inaudible, and the ideas he had about people dated back to the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that this is precisely what had encouraged her to create the imaginary world she was so excited to share with Drissa and me. This also explained her incredible admiration for the extravagant stories the ancestor told and the ramblings from Drissa's uncle.

Mireille's parents sincerely liked Black people. They are kind and harmless, her father would say, when we were children. Even to this day, her mother is very polite with my mother. I want to believe that over the years they have come to share a kind of mutual affection even if it has never prompted them to confide in each other. There is something still that keeps them apart. I always had the feeling that Mireille's mother had guessed very early on that there was something between her daughter and me. A mother can sense these things. But she had never spoken up about it. Maybe she took pleasure in imagining that her daughter allowed herself to be happy, allowed herself a little bit of fantasy. She and her husband had tolerated our friendship
while we were kids, but once we became adults and they saw signs of us getting serious, they worked to slowly undermine our relationship and in the end they succeeded.

Today, above all else, Mireille considers herself Jewish. Cut out your childish nonsense, she would say in her facial expression, falcons are domesticated worse than dogs in the Saudi Arabian desert. There are all these incredible things happening to our planet and you don't even realize it. It's in danger. What state are we going to leave it in for our children? Be serious. All you ever think about is fucking. Stop feeling me up all the time. It's annoying. Stop being so superficial. Grow up. We have to get informed, get involved in the fight. Cowing down in my chair, I beg her to spare me her political combat, her student activism. Do I drive you crazy with all those African issues,
AIDS
, civil wars, the systematic raping of men and women, from the Atlantic all the way up to the Great Lakes? Genocides and mountains of hands without bodies in Sierra Leone? You don't even bother to stop by and check in on your friends in the neighborhood who are having a really hard time, and now you're going on about saving the planet. You hardly ever smile and your caresses are basically hard labor for you. She explained how it made her sad to see how much we had strayed away from our beautiful younger years. She was concerned for Drissa and me, especially Drissa, who wasn't doing so well, had a pretty screwed up vision about things if not to say horrific, drinking alcohol and getting wasted all the time, his speech, basically incomprehensive. . . . She couldn't stand him anymore. I made her uncomfortable. More and more, she wanted to be alone and then one day she just took off.

Drissa didn't get his high school diploma. A few weeks before the exam, he decided not to get out of bed. When the body is so heavy and numb, the outside world feels really threatening. When you have taken in so much, at some point you can't be bothered to fight anymore. And under the covers, it's warm and cozy. He created his very own sweet and safe alcove, listened to the radio while he caressed
himself gently beneath the warm covers. I should have seen right then and there that he was falling apart.

So he didn't join us when we went on to study in Paris. I only bumped into him on the weekends from time to time. The only time we ever met up was in Paris, and I rarely saw Mireille in the neighborhood. Most people didn't even recognize her anymore. Who do you think you are? So you think you're better than us because you go to college in Paris? She was always strutting around with books by illustrious authors, banging on about all the great boulevards in the capital. Why didn't you come to Kamel's party the other night, you snubbing us now?

Poor Mireille, what were we really berating her for, wanting to live differently somewhere else, for trying to leave behind the trajectory of those who are always coming in last, who finish somewhere in the background? Eternal spectators, who give in to the will of others, with their envious gazes, insults ready at hand to be spouted out at those who do differently, hands tightly fisted and ready to hit someone. Those who, hesitate and doubt themselves for so long, they wind up stuck in fear and boredom. Mireille wants to live a full and colorful life far from the shit between the national highway, the ugly buildings and the supermarket. She wants to get as far away as possible from all the gray, from the dilapidated human cages, from the spit and the smell of urine in the stairwells, where everything is dirty and half broken. Mireille just wants to experience life more fully, in her entire being, and not glued before a television screen looking on at it and dreaming about it from the outside. She wanted to be smack in the middle of life while it's happening. She wanted to meet people who were doing extraordinary things with their lives, like in those stories you hear about, hanging on practically to every word, hungry to discover what happens next in their remarkable lives. Mireille had to really have the courage of her convictions because we don't care much for those who have visions of a better life, who want to live differently
from the rest of us. We'd prefer they stayed close, no matter how painful it may be, rather than have to watch them all happy, having realized great achievements and living far away from us!

In my dreams and my brief intense romance, Mireille is elegant and full of life. Flying above cities and then sadly her feet suddenly become heavy. She struggles to stay air-borne and then thousands of hands with sharp nails try to hold her back and prevent the slightest movement on her part, halt her desire to defy the angels. Then, a loud noise, the sound of thunder, and when I wake up, I'm mad at myself for failing to understand her. I had to go through steel and subject my body, my mind, and my spirit to complete failure. Freedom Mireille, the world has opened its arms to you. Mireille dared to go beyond her doubts, make that great leap and outsmart her fears and anxieties. I hope she celebrates her courage day and night, and that she will flourish in life.

On Sunday nights, once back at the university dormitory, Mireille would soak in a warm, disinfectant bath, scrub herself intensely to remove the smells, the noise, the words, and the faces of what used to be her home. Most likely she would have disowned me if she had heard about my downfall, sitting here in a dark cell.

Bad luck is an infectious malady. It has a tenacious odor that can easily take up residence in the soul. She would have said to herself, look at what I might have become, ashamed and beaten. I wouldn't have known what to say, I would have simply lowered my head and my eyes, swallowed my pain in a sigh. Suck it up, the world is yours for the taking!

Mireille and I wanted to keep our promise no matter what, so after high school we had decided to travel all over Europe together for four weeks. Out of respect, we hadn't said anything to Drissa, who, in any event, had all sorts of excuses to avoid us. I was lucky enough to land a job with a businessman who was a friend of Kamel's and so I was able to earn some money for our trip. After three years spent in prison
and added time for getting involved in some serious drug trafficking, Kamel, formerly known as Dinosaur, was now proud to play big brother according to the strict precepts of the Islamic faith. He'd been sentenced after getting involved in some pretty serious armed robbery stuff involving hostages, and so his police friends, who had otherwise covered him with the drug trafficking crimes, could only get his sentence reduced. Now I've known Kamel since we were kids and so I could tell from the look on his face and by the way he carried himself that he was really making an effort to show everyone that he was a changed man. He worked really hard, and played mediator in all kinds of disputes among the youth in the neighborhood. For Kamel, respect was key. He was ready to fight long and hard to make people forget his past.