He didn’t give a damn about Spain or that war everybody kept going on about. He wished it had never taken place. Moreover, he never wanted to learn the language, and that would drive his father crazy. But for fuck’s sake, he was sick and tired of this condition they were dragging around like some glory: the splendid losers, living with history constantly in your face. Sick and tired of his grandfather and his dream of freedom dying under Franco’s bullets. The stories about refugees in the concentration camp in Argèles. Shit! Nobody gave a damn about the war in Spain, especially not him. The others would pack girls onto gleaming scooters; even Patrick had got one for his fourteenth birthday, whereas he’d had to do up his dad’s old moped, a wreck. He hated the residue of a Spanish accent in his voice even though he lived in France, and which would still tug at the end of his sentences, like a family song. And the revolutionary songs hollered on the way back from demonstrations. Sick and tired of being the grandson of a foreigner, and poor. And obliged to be proud of it. It was especially that which drove him crazy.

Still, at the Bastille Day dance, in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, he managed to seduce Séverine. And managed to keep her, which was even harder. He was eighteen. Eighteen and his first apprentice wage in his pocket. His hair skilfully ruffled with gel – he wasn’t shaving his head yet – and his arms already tanned from the building-site sun. Exit Spain, his father’s trade union, the crappy apartment on the outskirts of Cavaillon. Exit the grandson of a refugee. Séverine was offering him her lips, and her breasts would be gently crushed against his chest as the Scorpions yelled I’m still loving you. He, too, would have his slice of the cake.

Manuel lifts his head and looks at the walls. His walls. Up to his neck in debt but the owner of his pasteboard house, his pink plaster house in the social-housing development built in the 1980s by a vaguely socialist town council. Except that he still owes his father-in-law so much cash that it doesn’t really feel like it belongs to him. More like the house is his wife’s. If he thinks about it a bit too much, he feels as though his balls have been cut off with a sickle. And now his daughter, as though he wasn’t capable of taking care of her. He didn’t write the rules of the game of life, either. The problem is that he used to think the opposite.

The Branches of the Paulownia

In the Arab living room, Céline is lying on the benches against the wall, like a recumbent effigy. Kadija speaks to her gently, offers her some tea. But she would have to sit up for that. “What did your mother say?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Nothing at all. She just wants to know who it is.”