“He said he was made foreman at his last building site.” The old man’s face wrinkles in a smile. There’s a beautiful light in his dying eyes. “I’m proud of him.”

“Did you tell him?”

He doesn’t answer and suddenly starts looking around the wheelchair for an invisible object. His eyes grow hollow and he suddenly seems lost.

“What’s happened to your grandmother? She said she’d be back straight away.”

Jo bites at a fingernail. She feels like crying.

“Why isn’t she back, Jojo? She said she wouldn’t be long.”

The girl stands up. “She has to talk to Papa, don’t worry. I’ll go and tell her to come here.”

“Thank you, gatito. Besame.”

Jo rummages through her bag, pulls out a copy of L’Humanité and puts it down next to the bed, then bends over the old man and kisses his wrinkles. She didn’t like to when she was a child. Ever since he’s been declining, she always tells herself that perhaps this is the last time she’ll kiss him. By extension, she tells herself this about many other things, even the ones she does for the first time. It’s a bit morbid, but deserves consideration.

Summer Rain

Summer Rain

At fifteen, you’re not supposed to skip school to go and pick grapes – but after that summer, nobody’s thought of imposing anything at all on Jo. So she joins the farmworkers for a back-breaking job over the vines. Because that’s where she feels like being, and the lycée can wait a week. She has to put aside some cash now she has a project; the harvest provides life-saving physical exhaustion, the enjoyment of gestures repeated ad infinitum. There isn’t much hand-harvesting in the area any more, but her grandparents have preserved the habit. A billhook in hand, she cuts and progresses along every row with the energy of an escape, and fills her bucket. She feels a peaceful satisfaction. Every so often she looks up and leans back, hands on her lower back. At the ten o’clock break, she curls her fingers, sticky from grape juice, around a cup of coffee, her back already cracking from all the bending, like the others. She likes these rituals, the eye contact with the other pickers, the complicity with those who get exhausted together and drink from the same feeding bottle.

As for Céline, she carts her big belly between the workers and their grandparents’ kitchen. She looks like she’s been doing this all her life.

The afternoon isn’t over but large, dark clouds gather over the hill: the impending thunderstorm has apocalyptic colours. It’s still hot when the first drops, sonorous and fat, start falling on the leaves, the soil and the pickers’ backs.

“Let’s take shelter!” the old Kabylian shouts, followed by the rest of the group.